The first was to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. This initiated me into a lifetime of grief that utterly refuted the utilitarian assumption that our nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. They say it’s the hope that kills you, but I never got that far. Spurs offer me an unmediated Proustian route back to my nine-year-old self. Staring stupefied at the telly, Arsenal scoring, watching their fans celebrating, hearing the commentator say “that was against the run of play”, followed by a sensation of mouth-drying bereft sickness that flows from the heart, and then makes its way like mercury through my veins and culminates in a paralyzed nausea that is my intimation of eternity. Come on you Spurs!

The second object of unquestioned fealty was to the Jewish God and people. Christmas is not really the time to describe what this has been like. All I can say is that it is the very opposite of the American Constitution; the “pursuit of happiness” does not describe the experience at all.

And then there is Labour.

It is important to note that the party used to be a source of happiness to me. I was 13 in 1974, when it felt like we won the Double, winning two elections in a year. I was a supporter. “There’s only one Harold Wilson”, and “Barbara Castle, Barbara Castle, we’ll support you ever more”, was about my level. As with Spurs and Jews, I thought that we were good and the others were bad and that was all there was to it.

And then Margaret Thatcher won the election of 1979, and it felt like the end of the world. There is a Jewish fast called Tisha Bov, where we read the Book of Lamentations and remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the expulsion from Spain, Kristallnacht. They all happened on the same day — and that is what the 3 May 1979 felt like to me. And it seemed to go on forever. It was like watching Arsenal win the Double for 18 consecutive seasons. And I couldn’t avoid watching it on the telly, on repeat, all the time. All our industries were transferred to the care of the Chinese Communist Party, the French controlled our nuclear power plants, and my beloved working class were sent to work as Ronald McDonald or consigned to call centers. “Everything holy is profaned and all that is solid melts into air”. That’s the only sentence from Marx I can really get behind. And that’s how it felt to me. The Ayatollah Khomeini said, also in 1979, that “everywhere was Karbala and every day was Ashura.” Well, at least we had that in common.

And then New Labour came along to intensify the work of Thatcher. “Things can only get better.” No. There was nothing true about that statement. At any level, as we now know.

I studied history at university, and the history of the labor movement became my Mastermind area of expertise. I made it my calling to understand what had gone so badly wrong. The deeper I went into the archives, the more clear it became to me that the labor movement and party, uniquely in Europe, were not a social-democratic secular party but a genuine broad church of previously estranged Christian traditions. It is often said that Labour was more Methodist than Marxist, but it cannot be stressed enough that it was also more Catholic than Communist.

The fundamental basis of the original Labour credo was that the free market did not create the world. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” is the first sentence of the Holy Scripture. Without following Aquinas too closely, we can define Creation as “human beings” and “nature”. The definition of capitalism is the commodification of both. It is the exploitation of human beings and nature in order to turn them into commodities of fluctuating price in competitive markets in order to generate quick and maximum profit. That is the definition of capitalism. Pope Leo XIII called this a system of “modern slavery” and Saint John Paul II wrote of a “structure of sin”. It desecrates the human status of the person and most particularly the worker. The highest return at the greatest speed is its objective. The status of a worker as more than a commodity blocks that return. Capitalism is like diarrhea: it liquidates solidarity.

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The second truth is that the state did not create the world either. The preservation of the sacred status of human beings and nature is the primary role of politics. Subsidiarity is the best way to temper the Pharaonic tendency of centralized state power. Sovereignty is necessary to resist the domination of capital, subsidiarity is required to resist the tyranny of the state, and all this is predicated on democratic solidarity as the fundamental ethic of society. Cain made a very big mistake. He was his brother’s keeper; we all are. This is the political position of Blue Labour in British politics, and it is based entirely on Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus.

The fundamental teaching of Catholic social thought is that tyranny is a real threat in the economy and the state, and that only a democracy founded upon solidarity, the sharing of the burdens of this hard and merciless life, can generate a virtuous politics. It does so through domesticating the demonic energy of the market and the state. Solidarity, status, subsidiarity and stewardship are the four legs of this table of wisdom.

It is far too rarely acknowledged that, alone in Europe, Labour succeeded in generating a workers’ movement that was not divided between Catholic and Protestant, or between secularists and believers. Instead, the movement itself provided the common life within which these potentially antagonistic forces could combine in pursuit of a common good. In cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, as well as London and Birmingham, this was an extraordinary feat.

“Common good” politics served the movement, and the country, very well. This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Labour tradition, as opposed to social democracy in Europe, which was far more explicitly secularist in form. The non-established churches, for reasons of historical self-interest, were committed to freedom of association and expression.

The churches that nurtured the labour movement were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not defined by money or power alone. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the Protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands. The currents came together in the labour movement. They also provided a national connection, that has proved durable, until now, within the labour movements in Scotland and Wales.

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Blue Labour has come too late

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The London dock strike of 1889 is a classic expression of the labour movement in action. The docks were a crucial part of the functioning of the British Empire, and they were staffed by 100,000 poorly-paid and often hungry dockers. Many of the dockers were Irish and many of them local, but an alliance was brokered by the Catholic and dissenting churches. The dockers coordinated themselves through labour representation committees, new institutions within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned.

On 14 August that year, the strikes began. The courage of the strikers was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious, for the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub. As such, the Government threatened the strikers with not only the police, but the force of the navy and army. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, were held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. But it was difficult for the dockers’ employers to depict the strikers, who were dignified and disciplined, as an undisciplined rabble. It helped that Cardinal Manning, accompanied by the Salvation Army band, led them on their march. The dockers, in the end, were victorious. They had built a successful political coalition on the basis of stable employment and wages: a great founding achievement of labour politics.

But chaos was still to come: the sheer ferocity of the market storm within which the Labour Party was born in 1900; the scale of the dispossession, of property, status and assets, generated by the creation of the first-ever free market in labor and land; the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands; the scrapping of apprenticeship; and the eviction and proletarianization of the peasantry. All this meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other.

In the burials given by co-operative societies, we find another example of the importance of the labour movement: dignity in death underwritten by solidarity in life. The pauper’s grave was one of the most fearful fates of dispossession. But co-operative societies provided a solution that enabled the deceased, poor though they were, to be buried respectably. The solution was subscription-paying membership, co-operation with chapels and churches, and the practices of mutuality and reciprocity. Altogether, these co-operative burials showed reverence for life as well as dignity in death. They were drawn not from a secular or modernist ethic, but from traditional assumptions and practices. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. Workers called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.

Jesus said that many are called, but few are chosen. With those words in mind, it is sometimes quipped that many are cold, but few are frozen. But such a state of affairs cannot be Labour’s ultimate goal. The desiccated utilitarian administration of gradated levels of pain was always the enemy. In contrast, the original credo was that Christ is King. Incarnated mercy and grace, kindness and truth. It is better to give than to receive. Fellowship is life. Love thy neighbor. Labour was once a biblical party, and must become one once more if it is to avoid a progressive death. I am my brother’s keeper. We all are.

In order to be truly radical, Labour must recognize its debt to Jesus Christ. In this bleak midwinter, we must give him our heart.

I knew his voice, I’d heard his sermons over many years, but I didn’t know him. A bit like Jonathan Sacks. And I thought that death had brought comfort to him, that the proximity of death had elevated him, and when it came, he was blessed.

There were five Jewish singer-songwriters who clouded my consciousness when I was growing up. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow. (Marc Bolan didn’t really count.) Dylan was like an itinerant Protestant preacher from Minnesota, searching for a home he could never find. Tangled up in blue. Leonard, from Montreal, was the Catholic Priest burdened by original sin, and then adding a few more of his own. Ain’t no cure for love. Paul Simon ran the gospel choir, like a bridge over troubled water. Neil Diamond ran the summer camp. Sweet Caroline raised spirits round the fire. Barry Manilow was the only one who actually showed up at weddings and Bar-Mitzvahs and I can tell you, Copa Cabana and Could it be Magic were the only songs by this crew that my Mum really liked.

I thought that the five of them should get together and form a band called the Sanhedrin, but then again the only song that Cohen and Dylan recorded together, with Allen Ginsberg, was called ‘Don’t go home with your hard on’. Phil Spector was the producer. I let the idea go.

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It was Dylan who towered over them all but then Cohen made a late bid for glory. The closer to death, the greater the work. The Future, released in 1992, bore the hallmark of prophesy and foreboding.

“It’s coming from the sorrow on the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin
that goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.”

His voice, his songs, and even his music became stronger in his sixties and seventies, full of wisdom and compassion. ‘Anyhow’, ‘Come Healing’ and ‘Amen’ are unique and profound songs and ‘Lullaby’ is the only song I know that directly speaks to insomnia. “If your heart is torn, I don’t wonder why, if the night is long, here’s my lullaby.” It is beautiful.

They are all from the album Old Ideas that was released when he was 78. Bob Dylan could barely talk, Neil Diamond could barely walk but Leonard Cohen, the firstborn, was still throwing lightning bolts of prayer and repentance until his death. In ‘Steer your Way’ from his final album the perfect diction of his prophetic heart was still beating:

“Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women that you bought
Year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.  
They whisper still the ancient stones
The blunted mountains weep
As he died to make us holy
Let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you probably forgot
Year by Year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.”

And yet we didn’t. The greatness of his work is his ease with the ancient stones, the dry bones and the mountain tops of the Bible. Abraham and King David live again. The Psalms frame and animate his writing; Hallelujah. Jesus is a constant presence from first to last. Whether he was a sailor, who walked upon the water, or the spirit who will re-animate love, the holy spirit hovers over his work:

“It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay
From the brave the bold the battered heart of Chevrolet
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

No wonder the election of Donald Trump was the final nail in his coffin.

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His decades-long devotion to Zen Buddhism was also part of the story. He spent years in a Buddhist monastery in California, learning from Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who, it turned out, molested and abused hundreds of women in his role as head of the order. He claimed that sexual contact with a Zen Master would help women attain “new levels of non-attachment”. Who’d have thought?

And for all the drawing on the Kabbalah, in which sexual union is the most sublime expression of divine love, there is no mention of faithfulness, of marriage, of the fidelity to a woman and to God that is the basis of that teaching. Throughout his work, eros is disconnected from devotion. It is an escape, a healing, a triumph; but it is not bound by covenant or love. 

“And like a blessing come from heaven
for something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease”.

The Sixties, when Leonard Cohen abandoned the idea of being a novelist and a poet and moved to New York to be a singer-songwriter, was a cauldron of sexual liberation and enslavement. The over-the-counter-culture intensified the commodification of sex, the dissolution of its relational essence accompanied by celebrity endorsement. The idea that sex was sacred was profaned. It was a time full of sex cults, and the emergence of Kabbalah as part of an occult sexology was part of that story. And Leonard Cohen, who initially saw himself as a prophet of a new religion, was one of the high priests of that movement.

“It’s coming from the women and the men
Ah baby we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
that rivers gonna weep
And the mountains gonna shout Amen.
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious, in amorous array
Democracy is coming, to the USA.”

It’s hard to load the dishwasher after that. It is the lack of relationality in regard to sex that is remarkable. He would have benefited from a conversation with Mary Harrington. Love and eros were divorced and it is notable that in his final recording, having elevated sex to the sublime life force of creation throughout his work, he writes: “I don’t want a lover, no, no, the wretched beast is tame.” The body and the soul could not find reconciliation.

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There was more than a dose of the biblical prophet in Leonard, and more than a dose of the new age cultist. His defrauding by his manager and ex-lover make sense within this story. The ‘wretched beast’, ‘my crazy’, and his adventures on ‘Boogie Street’ could not be constrained by his merger of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism. They could not be bound; they could not be consecrated and so ‘love itself, love itself was gone’.

He was like Noah, a great man of his time, but unlike Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Imam Hussein, he could not make the sacrifice required for redemption. He was enslaved by sex. There was no liberation there. And unlike King David, the Kingdom was merely his own.

In 1992, Cohen promised: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The crack in the wall that creates a space for democracy and a cold and very broken hallelujah. In the end, however, the birth was betrayed and the marriage spent. He refused to be bound by his understanding, that the forgiveness of others is far more important that forgiving yourself. He had a messianic vocation but he could not fulfil it. He wanted it darker. And he blew out the flame.

The team turned away from glory. They retreated from a dazed Italian team. They could not tap into the wave of demonic national energy and were thus consumed by it. Sending out two players who had not kicked the ball in open play and a 19-year-old to take penalties was a cruelty that none of them deserved. Gareth Southgate builds his philosophy around bravery, kindness and ambition and none of those virtues was present in the last 75 minutes of the game. The final was not a new beginning but another chapter in a long story which might also be called a chronicle of a death foretold. That foreboding of heartbreak to come and an unrealised beauty.

My first memories of a confused sense of weirdness and impending heartbreak are tied up with football, and particularly England playing Germany. I can still see through my five-year-old eyes the fuzzy screen of our big fat black and white telly in the lounge with its dodgy aerial. The only clarity was an intense white dot when you turned it off. My brother insisted that I lay completely still on the floor while we played so that I wouldn’t disturb the picture. I remember the blurred insanity of the ball bouncing down off the crossbar and my overexcited confusion as the players ran in dreamtime. I lay on the floor crying, lying completely still. It was all too much. Apparently my Mum took me to bed with a fever. It’s coming home.

It was also my first experience of heresy. There was the shock of hearing German Jewish relatives say it wasn’t a goal, that the ball did not cross the line. That sent me into a spin from which I’ve never really recovered. What did they mean, Russian linesman? And then there was the lingering heartbreak of Jimmy Greaves. I was as sure as you could be sure of anything that he was the greatest striker in England and he was dropped from the team in favour of a West Ham player. He said that when the final whistle blew he felt like the loneliest man in the world and that he was never the same again. Well, that made two of us. It was the beginning of a lifelong argument with the FA management that defined the outcome of this tournament. A reluctance to trust the wild brilliance of English football. Brian Clough. The demons that have beset the soul of the England team were fully present in 1966.

I was a far more mature nine in 1970, and armed with a full Esso collection of world cup player coins in my album. It took me ages to get Paul Reaney, and he broke his leg and couldn’t even go to Mexico. I would stare for hours at the profile of Frances Lee and Colin Bell, Terry Cooper and Peter Bonetti. And all the feelings of heartbreak and weirdness that found first expression in 1966 returned. Bobby Moore getting arrested and jailed for four days for stealing a bracelet in a Bogota hotel. What was that all about? Fifty years later I still can’t get to the bottom of it. Bobby Moore remains an elusive character in a way that Bobby Charlton does not. And then there was the shock of the eternal figure of Gordon Banks going down with “Montezuma’s revenge”, whatever that was, just before the Germany game. And then the ecstasy of going two goals up. Back Home, we were really behind them when they were far away. And then it all fell apart. The numb awfulness of Germany equalising and then scoring the winner in extra time. I felt like I’d jumped off a mountain and was falling through space. Something inside of me died and I couldn’t really engage for two decades after that. That feeling that something was going wrong and no one was doing anything about it.

I began to believe that winning the World Cup with Geoff Hurst had put our football back 20 years. We couldn’t even qualify for the World Cup in the Seventies and our cameo appearances in the European Championship were fleeting. It seemed we were playing football in a parallel universe. The big number nine, the concrete feet. We were simultaneously brutal and naïve. It was something unique and completely dissatisfying. Don Revie disappearing in a puff of Saudi smoke. Tony Curry. And even when we finally qualified in 1982 we wouldn’t play Glen Hoddle. It seemed to me that English Football did not trust English footballers who were touched with the gift of passing. Nor the dribblers. Blame the management not the workers. In the Eighties it felt like there was a systematic loathing of working-class culture in our politics, economy and football. I clocked on for ‘86 and witnessed the two faces of Maradona but never felt that we were any more than a walk on part in his apotheosis.

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And then came Italia 90 and Paul Gascoigne. I was living in Italy and watched the semi-final in a bar full of Germans and all the old childhood feelings were back. That sickening sense of loss, the rage in the night. I stared at the figure of Peter Shilton and I could have sworn he was in my 1970 coin collection. How was he going to save German penalties. It looked to me that he was out of breath changing ends. In Paul Gascoigne however there was finally an expression of the wild brilliance of English football, of the intuitive stillness in the wind and rain.

I think it means so much to me because football is one of those rare parts of our society where the working class is its public face. Our politics is still public school, as is rugby, cricket and tennis. Our music has bursts of working-class mayhem but the spirit of Genesis and Pink Floyd is always lurking. It was not only football, we also gave progressive rock to the world and I am not sure what we can do to erase that shame. And yet football remains, for all the corporate commodification, a working-class sport and our football expresses that. The Wimbledon gasp is not something you hear at a football ground. The almost inaudible hum of the Wimbledon final on the Sunday afternoon before the game indicates where it stands in the national affections.

There is a demented kind of glory that is everywhere to be seen in English football and never expressed in the national team. Glen Hoddle turned against himself as a manager and David Batty represented his failure of courage. There was no real difference between Graham Taylor and his team. I remember Ossie Ardiles commenting that Carlton Palmer’s first touch was longer than he could kick the ball and the hype of the golden generation left me cold.

Neither Sven Goran Eriksson nor Fabio Capello had any feeling for English football and all the fizz was expressed in a unsatisfying burp. Roy Hodgson was more reminiscent of Montezuma’s revenge.

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Which brings us to now. To this team, to Gareth Southgate and the first ever England appearance in the final of a European Championship, the second final in our history. Back at Wembley.

We have beaten Germany, and with very little anxiety. Whatever the American origins of taking the knee it has been assimilated into English football as part of a long-standing campaign against racism that has nobility. I was at Wembley when Viv Anderson made his debut for England, the first ever black player, and I remember the boos as well as the applause. As a game played by working-class people there is an intense relationship between footballers of different backgrounds. Football is a rare case of something that brings races, and places together. A patchwork of England flags with the names of small towns on them, Kiddeminster, Grimsby and Yeovil were draped all around me when I watched the qualifying game against Scotland.

But the old anxieties still linger. Why didn’t we play Grealish from the start? Why do we still mistrust the players who play? There is great potential in this England team but it will not be realised until their soul is set free. It’s the same old story. This was not a perfect Italian team. They lacked two essential features, a sublime 10 — like Pirlo, Antognoni or a Baggio — and a merciless 9 — like Rossi, Inzaghi or Mancini. What they had was great passers in Jorginho and Veratti, a magnificent defence and wingers who were prepared to run. If the game was contained, then they would win. It would have taken a wild kind of courage to defeat them and we had it, then we lost it.

Don’t blame the players, blame the management.

I have met men who still long for their wives, when the separation has been longer than the marriage. I have met old Bolsheviks who kept rehearsing Trotsky’s actions after Stalin’s death, believing the Soviet Union would still be with us, and thriving if only he had returned two days earlier to Moscow. I have even met New Labour believers who think that if David Miliband had defeated his brother, then Brexit would never have happened and Labour would be in power, at the vanguard of a renewed EU.

When I listen to such claims, an old Yiddish phrase comes to mind, which is translated as: “If Grandma had wheels she’d be a trolly”. The conversation always ends in a kind of faraway silence. I find it hard to know what to say, while the person thinks about what to do next; whether to send a birthday card, write a letter to the Morning Star, renew their efforts to support Keir Starmer.

Sometimes the ship has sailed and it is never coming back to port. It has a new crew and a new cargo, a new trading route and a new flag. Yet they still believe that, someday, their ship will return; they stand at the dock, staring out to sea but always walk back home alone.

Sometimes things change, an era changes, and there is no going back. For institutions, for nations, as well as for people, this is hard to accept. For Britain and the United States, the Iranian Revolution is such a phenomenon. It was all going so well, and it is hard to accept that it will never go well again.

Muhammad Ali said that the first rule of boxing is that you never get knocked out by a punch you see coming. It is also the first rule of politics. And no-one predicted the form of the the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Both London and Washington did predict an imminent threat to the rule of the Shah, but from the Left, through a coalition between disaffected workers and intellectuals supported by the Soviet Union and led, within Iran, by the Tudeh Party. That is not what happened.

The spectre of Mohammad Mossadegh and the 1953 coup, orchestrated by the CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, held them in its thrall. Mossadegh was an aristocratic liberal nationalist who wanted to nationalise Iranian oil. At the time, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of BP, held a monopoly of oil production in Iran and signed a deal which only gave 19% to Iranians. It was effectively a nationalised industry and the profits were vital to post-war reconstruction. The NHS was founded on the assumption of continued revenue streams from Iran.

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The Labour Government of 1945 was extremely opposed to to Iranian nationalisation, while pursuing it vigorously at home. Colonial double standards. Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Clement Attlee all took a hostile view of Mossadegh and supported the Shah as the instrument of maintaining the status quo. Eisenhower agreed and Kermit and his muppet show was unleashed; Mossadegh was deposed and condemned to a life of internal exile.

That is the lost moment of Iranian history, the great “what if?” What if we had supported Mossadegh rather than depose him? What if Iran had grown into a liberal democracy?

This is the question that haunts the minds of our diplomats because what happened was completely different: an Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the imposition of an eternal form of clerical domination, “the rule of the jurists” — and there’s no way out.

The coming Iranian presidential elections on Friday indicate and express the doomed eternity of stasis that the revolution created. The inevitable winner will be Ebrahim Raisi, a mass-murdering apparatchik who was part of the four-man team responsible for the public executions of up to 30,000 Leftists in a few months in 1988 for the crimes of atheism and apostasy.

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Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glasman

He will be elected on a turnout of less than 30%. Most Iranians understand that the power lies not with the President, but in the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which controls the Revolutionary Guard, the media channels, the clerics and foreign policy.

In other words, there is a double system. These elections are for a government that will pretend to govern while the real power lies elsewhere. Just look at the country’s vaccine programme, which has inoculated only 2% of the population. The Health Ministry fully participated in Covax to receive vaccines, and yet Khamenei announced a ban on both British and American jabs on the grounds that they were “likely designed to contaminate foreign nations”, leaving the Chinese vaccine and Sputnik as the only options. One is useless and the other is scarce.

The office of the Supreme Leader also vets who can stand for office, and they rejected all candidates from outside the revolutionary vanguard. The former reforming President, Mohammad Khatami, set up an “Association of Combatant Clerics” and put forward fourteen candidates, but each was rejected.

Iranian foreign policy is based on building proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen. And it’s the same at home. These elections are just proxy politics, the candidates represent the regime, not the people.

I sat through the first three-hour debate between the approved candidates. They were not allowed to discuss Covid, vaccines, sanctions, power cuts, sinking ships or burning factories. It reminded me of Brezhnev-era Soviet plenaries, where all the candidates agreed that the achievements of the Revolution were eternal, but the enemies of socialism were still sabotaging the project, particularly the Government.

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This time, it’s the unprecedented form of Shia theocracy invented by Khomeini that must be preserved. When I was in Najaf in 2018, the historic home of Shia religious authority, I met with two senior ayatollahs and many clerics, all of whom rejected the Iranian system as hostile to the teaching and practices of the Shia Muslim faith. In Iraq, a year later, I witnessed the assassinations of protestors by Iranian-backed militias. Tens of thousands of Shia protestors in Baghdad sang “Iran Iran, go away” every night. They are still there; still shooting them.

At that time in November 2019 demonstrations against the regime exploded all over Iran, so the Government turned off the internet and shot the protestors. Any remaining political prisoners were recently transferred to the violent offenders section of the prison. They won’t last long.

And yet Western diplomats still believe that it is possible to negotiate with the government, to normalise relationships, to go back to 1953 and do the right thing this time. The first foreign policy act of the Biden Presidency was to re-engage with Iran and revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, lifting sanctions on proxies and renewing the distinction between hardliners and “moderates”. This is not a distinction that is believed in by the Iranian people as reflected in the overwhelming majority who will boycott the election. The Biden approach still assumes that they are negotiating with Mossadegh when the truth is otherwise.

The Iranian Left have been utterly routed and the middle class lurk in North Tehran, playing cat and mouse with the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, over how much hair women can show in public. And yet the yearning of Iranians for something better and different cannot be stilled. It remains a crime in Iran to speak to others about Jesus or to claim that you have a relationship with him. And yet, the number of Christians there is now estimated to be close to a million.

There is a network of underground churches. Bibles are smuggled in and passed from hand to hand. The numbers continue to grow. It seems that for thousands of Iranians the only way to get rid of this regime is to change your religion. That is the long story in Iran. The desert church is lighting its candles for the prince of light once more.

Through it the nameless suburbs found form and attachment, the beautiful game rooted in every working-class community. Much has been made of its religious form; the real physical presence, the holy grail, the communal singing but for the churches in slum areas their interests were more prosaic. It was a form for resisting the demonic temptations of the new order; drink, avarice and sloth, praising instead fitness, teamwork and skill. It was a form of virtue to take on vice.

In Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester and Liverpool, football was also an expression of the sectarian divisions that characterised those cities, expressing, in England at least, an almost forgotten part of our Christian heritage. In Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds the cities found an expression of civic loyalty and pride through a club that expressed their character. It was a distinctive addition to the civic ecology, an institution rooted in place and carrying its name.

Football allowed all that was denied by the routinisation of life and work. It allowed for love and hate, for a wordless beauty, the longing for glory, the shared witness of a momentary miracle, communal celebration and shared grief. When I was growing up, the contempt for people who left early, when we were losing was striking. And through that, my grasp of the English language expanded. A single shot could slay Goliath. Swindon could beat Arsenal. Don Rodgers, frozen in eternity. Once established, the football club became a permanent part of the urban firmament. Its status was always threatened by competition but supported by association. Love and hate.

In a deindustrialised and desecrated society, football clubs recognised that the bonds of affection and attachment that lurked around in the lives of their supporters could be easily financialised. For those exiled from their homes, with loyalty passed down through families, the sense of attachment became even more intense.

And this is a capitalist story of commodification: the transformation of something that wasn’t produced for sale — human beings, nature, or, it turned out a football club — into something available for sale on the open market. The European Super League was a logical development of that. The clubs who signed up to it are no longer owned by their members but by hedge funds, oligarchs and despots, the relationship with community and place replaced by television rights and branded shirt sales. And the move was logical because the logic of capital is that of both commodification and of oligarchy, towards the elimination of competition and the securing of permanent revenue streams in order to reduce risk. Towards concentration not competition, which explains the oligarchs.

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Roger Scruton still gives me strength

By Maurice Glassman

The maximisation of returns and the minimisation of risk is the core strategy of any established corporation. By freezing a hierarchy at a particular moment, by banning relegation, the Super League took the classic form of cartelisation.

In many ways, it is a consolidation of a long-term trend towards a disembedded and disembodied spectacle, mediated by television. The terrible reality of lockdown is that it dispelled the idea that the presence of fans was required in order to secure viewers. The script has been developed for a while. The Champions League need not be won by champions, but those who finish in the top four. Blowing the group phase need not eliminate the cash flow of European competition, just entry into the Europa League.

The thrill of games between European teams with their own traditions and styles was homogenised into clashes between large corporations drawing from the same managerial and player pool. Commodification is the process from virtue to the virtual. VAR was part of this trend, as the power was no longer in the ground, but removed to somewhere else. The crowd was silenced in two ways. The joy of scoring was tempered by the arbitrary judgement of Stockley Park, a secluded judgement from afar decides your fate. From within the ground came the verdict, “It’s not football any more”. And then the fans were gone.

I’ve been Spurs since before I can remember, it is a covenantal commitment. It links me to the dead, players and fans, Danny Blanchflower, my Uncle Sid and Peter Cook, as well as to those yet to be born in a community of fate, bound by shared memory and the eternal desire for glory. Like all clubs, we have our saints, Steve Perryman and Bill Nicholson, and our sinners, Sol Campbell and Terry Neil.

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Football and the decline of Englishness

By Dominic Sandbrook

By signing up to a cartel, we did not even deserve to be part of, Spurs broke a covenantal promise. Our objection to Arsenal is not only that they are from Woolwich but that they cheated us of a deserved promotion by rigging the composition of the new First Division in 1918.  And now Spurs wanted to be part of a rigged system that abolished relegation.  “we’re not Tottenham any more”.

I was born in the year that Spurs reached its perfect platonic form, the double winning team of 1960-61. A team born of the epiphany that Bill Nicholson experienced when watching the Hungarian national team beat England 6-3 in 1953. It was a full religious experience, he couldn’t sleep for three days and nights while he pondered over what he had seen and over the next eight years he worked on building that at Spurs. I never saw that team, but its memory permeated my childhood. The sacking of Jose Mourinho does not diminish his hostility to that tradition, his desecration of it. For all its history, Spurs were a distinctive member of the football family. Vulnerable, flaky, yet capable of glory. Blanchflower, Hoddle, Ardiles, Gascoigne, Dembele, Ndombele. Whatever the number they wore, the number 8 was the distinction, the midfield maestro. And Harry Winks can’t carry that cross. We have betrayed others, but also ourselves.

Love is a sublime faithful relationship with another person. It is a strange emotion to feel towards an institution that is committed to securitised income. I have tried to subject my love for Spurs to some kind of critical scrutiny; when we floated on the stock exchange, when the Premier League was founded. But I could not break the bond, and still it remains. What does astonish me is that I am not alone in this, that despite Marx’s teaching that under capitalism “all that is solid melts into air and everything holy is profaned”, the sense of association, of tradition, of belonging still endures.

Ten years ago, I worked with Jon Cruddas and Clive Efford in developing a Labour policy for supporter representation on the boards of clubs. There was a strong sense of dispossession felt by football fans, particularly intense in the Premier League among supporters of Manchester United, Liverpool and Newcastle. From shirt and ticket prices, to the selling off of training grounds, to the emergence of foreign oligarchs who skewed the market. In the lower leagues, the feeling was more intense, that their civic inheritance was being plundered by a very dirty capitalism. The story of Wigan Athletic is a case study in the pathologies of globalisation and the Pharaonic nature of the pyramid. We developed this along with supporters groups and adopted the German model so that they would have a veto on pricing in terms of merchandising and kit, as well as the first option to buy if the club was sold. It was an attempt to re-embed the clubs in their place and with their support. It was also an attempt to limit the domination of money in the decisions of an institution that was not simply a commodity.

If globalisation is understood as the process through which finance capital escapes the bonds of domestic constraints in order to maximise returns, then the establishment of the Premier League created globalisation in one country. The response of the Premier League to our proposals was hostile and aggressive. They were proud of the model they had developed in which minimal regulation led to increasing global market share. By attracting foreign investment, the brand and the revenue grew. To have fans on the board was seen as nostalgic and an impediment to growth. We were accused of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, and they were offended by the suggestion that they were fouling their own nest.

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America is destroying the beautiful game

By Paul Marshall

Andrea Agnelli who, along with Florentino Perez, was the chief instigator of the Super League, was sure it was compliant with EU Law — but hadn’t noticed that the political era had changed from the heady days of uncontested globalisation. The Premier League had grown its market share with a new kind of owner in Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, who had secured their income streams through oil or gas, and were more interested in their reputation and power. PSG are also in that mode.

Agnelli and Perez knew that unless they securitised their income stream, the domination of their national leagues and European competition would be jeopardised by investors who were not concerned with money, but with power. One of the most widely quoted sayings in Italy is from Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard in which Tancredi says that “for things to stay the same everything must change”. Without the eternal backing that only states can bring, and with lockdown strangling match day revenue and sales, they made their move. But it relied on the English clubs to buy into it, and it is significant that Manchester City and Chelsea, the clubs least dependent on market share, were the first to withdraw. They recognised that the political consensus had shifted.

Boris Johnson hadn’t led a referendum on the basis of take back control and transformed the class basis of the Conservative Party in order to bow to the inevitable logic of globalisation. The new consensus is based on a greater economic role for the nation state, an increased importance of working-class voters and the places where they live. He immediately threatened to drop a “legislative bomb”, the call went through to the UAE to back off the proposal.

The threat of expulsion from the Premiership, withdrawal of police support on match days and the refusal to approve work permits were brought into play. By last Tuesday night all six English clubs had withdrawn their support leaving Agnelli and Perez stranded in the breach with nothing but their debts for company. It’s no wonder they blame Brexit.

There was no political response from the governments of Italy and Spain, no sustained opposition from their fans. But here it was different. It seems that the owners of the clubs only spoke to each other and shared nothing of their plans with the management or players, let alone the fans. There is now a consensus that this was a travesty that could repeat again unless changes are made.

The European Super League expressed the ultimate consequence of the domination of the financial interest alone, towards oligarchy and commodification and the elimination of competition and association. It is only through the transformation of governance through the equal representation on fans on boards that the broken covenant can be salvaged. Central to that is the notion that a football club is not simply a commodity, but an inheritance that cannot be trusted to the owners. They have acted in bad faith and are in breach of trust.

Without constraints, capitalism will eat itself, it will steal what it did not create and then destroy it. It is the fans who carry the tradition and must be trusted to save football from its owners by being given a golden share on strategic issues. In order to stay the same everything must change. La lotta continua.

I railed against it, as I looked up at his wife and two children, saying when we parted that we would meet again in the new year. He contacted me in early January inviting me to visit him in hospital, that he had “something important” he wanted to talk about, but I will never know what it was. He died before I could visit, a year ago today.

Over the past year, as the pandemic took hold and politics fell apart, my thoughts have returned again and again to Roger, imagining what he would have made of lockdown, of the rise of China, of the Brexit deal and the squalid disintegration of the Trump Presidency. He was a gentle and curious man and I would have enjoyed his observations.

He was interested in many things, but he was also a curiosity in our intellectual culture; a conservative. He was viewed by the Left, as at best a nostalgic irrelevance, at worst a nasty reactionary. There was no place for the conservative philosopher in our universities, and yet I viewed him as an ally. I was always struck by his generosity and his appreciation of the conservative tradition within Labour. He truly understood the importance of loss and grief; the loss of a home and a community is vital to any comprehension of our present politics, but it is hard to grasp if you think that things can only get better.

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Jeremy Corbyn's Labour would crush civil society

By Roger Scruton

Roger gave expression to the new era that is now emerging in which the nation state, democracy, a sense of place and the working class are not doomed remnants of a previous epoch, but the primary materials through which the effects of globalisation are mediated politically. He was a modernist in literature and style, but it was a modernity tempered by tradition and this was expressed in his view of people as longing for meaning, for attachment, for love and for beauty, who flourish in a society characterised by healthy relationships, a sense of being part of a “we”.

His conservatism, in which association, friendship, institutions and ultimately politics would encourage a shared responsibility for each other in a shared home, “an island of me in a sea of we”, is central to his thought. That theme of home, or oikophilia, was one of his great contributions to modern philosophy. It required a sense of solidarity, of sharing a fate with others.

Roger’s politics was local, conservationist and loosely sociable; he was far too much of a loner, though, to subscribe to a communitarian or collectivist anthropology. He thought that the Ancient Constitution, based upon the balance of interests rather than the separation of the powers was the system best suited to our country. He was enamoured of the Common Law as the defender of our liberties, and our environment. His book, Green Philosophy is a very significant contribution to this. His love of Kant and appreciation of secularism set him apart from reactionary thinkers.

His understanding of Christianity, meanwhile, and its relationship to the nation was understood in terms of civility and temper and not as the foundation of political authority. He thought that in England, following the civil war, there was an appreciation of pluralism and a suspicion of religious enthusiasm. The origins of authority remained political and revisable. It was the lack of that understanding that concerned him about Islam.

His final book, Where We Are, is a profound reflection on the basic assumption of national sovereignty. He evokes a “we” that provides the democratic authority of the nation state, which far from evaporating in the swirl of globalisation, retains the legitimacy to preserve meaning and attachment in people’s lives. He articulated the possibilities that leaving the European Union opened for renewing our civic and democratic institutions.

Further reading

How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

When I pointed out to him that the most significant consequence of slipping the constraints of the Lisbon Treaty would be for the Left to be able to actively challenge the destructive power of capitalism to commodify human beings and nature, he replied that Labour seemed more interested in hating Tories than in appealing to a broad range of people who might agree with that, and support it.

I enjoyed many evenings in his garret in Albany going through the papers, discussing our politics: the Left, community land trusts, American misunderstanding of conservatism. Those discussions echo still, and I see three areas where Scruton’s work can continue to be a source of vitality.

The first is his work on aesthetics and beauty, in which human scale and form take a central place within a tradition characterised by the sacred and the sensual, which he considered the basis of love. For him, sex was sacred. During this lockdown period, when we have inhabited a parallel world of no physical presence, in which the laughter of strangers has become a distant memory and when there is so little intimacy, Roger’s emphasis on sociability, conviviality and relationships has taken on a more intense prescience. His interest in what we have lost gives me strength.

The second concerns the meaning of a home. For Roger the primary story of humanity was that of exile and return, this was as true for the Odyssey as for the prodigal son. The sociable nature of the person required a form of settled community, a home to return to. In this, self-governing civic institutions play a central role, expressing the particular nature of particular people in particular places. He viewed the Left as increasingly embracing the renunciation and denunciation of any notion of a home, of attachment, preferring instead an emphasis on false consciousness and domination. His book, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, is worth reading right now. It was Roger who pointed out to me that the meaning of nostalgia is a longing for home and that is not to be despised.

Further reading

How I overcame my class stigma

By Roger Scruton

The third area relates to housing and architecture. He railed against a dehumanised modernity, in which the greed of the market worked with the instrumentalism of the state and professional indifference to build homogenised and degraded houses in disconnected spaces that sapped culture of its form and meaning. His heart was grieved by what had happened to Birmingham and Manchester. The city centre of his local town, Swindon, was a source of sorrow beyond words. He loved the terraced housing which was demolished as slum clearance and replaced by something inhumane, rather than restored. For him this was where the coalition between the rich and the educated generated the greatest damage. It bears reflection still.

A very belated recognition came to him when he was chosen to chair the Government commission on “Building better, building beautiful”. It was an attempt to defy the developers and the professional architects so that people could participate in building and designing the new homes relying on local labour and materials.

His chairmanship came to a terrible end, in a storm of Twitter hate, generated by a false account of an interview with the New Statesman. The words I read at that time, full of demonisation, bore no relation to my gently stubborn friend, who argued that what matters is love, truth, beauty, friendship and meaning. Those are the concepts and categories through which we should judge our lives and our politics.

His life was characterised by courage, civility and curiosity. He had the courage to be a conservative when the intellectual world was moving against conservatism, and to be true to his tradition in the face of distortion and demonisation. I think it killed him in the end, but he lived it and engaged with civility when confronted with the hate.

He told me that his politics “if I have any, are probably Blue Labour”, and I asked him to keep quiet about that. That was cowardly of me, and a year following his death, there is a deathly silence in our national conversation where his voice once was.

Virtu, for Machiavelli, was the political skill to turn circumstances that you did not choose and events that you could not predict to your advantage. Fortuna is a condition of politics, there are always things happening which you cannot control, and without virtu you can never escape its constraints.

And this Government has experience of riding the waves of fortuna to reach the shores of glory and power. It understood that the long-term disaffection of Labour’s heartland voters with globalisation and abandonment combined with the short-term incoherence of Jeremy Corbyn offered a moment to transform the class basis of English politics, with Brexit serving as the perfect proxy through which these could be aligned. The Labour heartlands vote was a covenantal bond that endured through generations, and it was broken last December.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

In his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway’s character Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. He replies, “Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” That was Labour’s story last December. The ties that bound had been loosening for decades and were then broken. The Conservative lead among C2 voters was almost 20%, and the scale of the carnage would have been worse were it not for the presence of the Brexit Party in Labour-held seats.

And Brexit held out the promise of a Covenantal renewal based on the restoration of democracy, of Parliament, of the Common Law and sovereignty. By embodying that, Boris Johnson achieved the class realignment of the political parties, with the Conservatives overwhelmingly dominant outside the big cities and university towns.

They could speak for England in a way that Labour could 80 years previously. The Conservatives broke with Thatcherism with their talk of levelling up and a regionally-targeted Keynesian industrial policy. They grasped the framework of a new era in which there was a more constructive role for the state in the organisation of the economy, a significant role for the working class and for the places where they lived — which had been desecrated and neglected for half a century while the Conservative Party was committed to the City of London, the primacy of finance and the magic of the market.

Fortuna had opened up the space and, with Dominic Cummings by his side, Boris Johnson had the virtu to seize the moment. All Hail Good King Boris as he flew off to the West Indies last Christmas with a decade of uncontested dominium before him.

And this is when the face of fortuna turned and a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appeared over Wuhan, a faraway place that no-one had ever heard of. And, in the storm that followed it was revealed, with the clarity of a lightning bolt, the underlying conditions of our polity, and the lack of strategic clarity of the new Government. Events, dear boy, events.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

First there was the unresolved incoherence, framed as the economy versus human life. An emergency was declared in which the liberties were pitted against public health.

Then came a state characterised by debt and the NHS: local initiatives were overridden by centralised directives. Local authorities were ignored, and the full scale of our industrial palsy was revealed. In a perverse homage to the model that had created the conditions for their political success, state centralisation was combined with crony capitalism.

It was recognised that our economy had no capacity to produce face masks or dressing gowns, let alone ventilators or aspirin. Some £1.5 billion pounds went to companies linked to the Government, mainly to facilitate emergency imports. Another £479 million was spent on consultants in order to by-pass the civil servants. Many millions of the face masks were faulty.

The state of emergency rendered procurement procedures redundant, and it turned out that the main source of supply was also the source of the virus — China. Britain had contracted out its industrial capacity and no aspect of the response addressed the underlying problem.

While it is true to say that no Labour politician other than Keir Starmer made any impression, it is equally true to say that whenever a cabinet minister emerged into public view they were revealed as either inept or corrupt. Robert Jenrick and Gavin Williamson spring to mind.

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Keir Starmer, a true conservative

By Maurice Glasman

The furlough scheme made no distinctions between sectors that would provide the growth of the future economy, no incentives to reduce extended supply chains in agriculture, medicine or PPE. There was no attempt to strengthen regional resilience, to level up.

They did not have the virtu to withstand the change of fortune. None of the responses to Covid gave any indication that there was either an industrial policy or an institutional strategy that could serve as a basis for consolidation of the class coalition they had created last December. While Danny Kruger outlined a strategy of a new social covenant that would strengthen place and society, no other aspect of public policy was aligned with that. The late Sir Roger Scruton was given a knighthood for his work on developing a housing strategy based on place, local building and beauty, and when he died in January the only Government response was a further deregulation of planning laws.

The underlying conditions that Covid preys upon and intensifies are geographical inequality exacerbated by lack of assets, the weakness of productive capacity and the primacy of finance and debt. The polity is threatened by Scottish secession and a strategy of centralisation. Super Hospitals and Super Labs denuded local places of capacity, track and trace as well as testing failed to establish themselves.

What is required is the establishment of local banks and vocational colleges to generate value, but the Treasury took control and small to medium sized businesses, particularly in the catering and entertainment sector, have amassed a debt that will require relief and sustained partnership.

A programme combining debt relief with institutional renewal is required to resurrect local businesses and there was nothing in the Covid response that would lead to that. It was sporadic and intense, indicating crisis management rather than strategic statecraft. There has been talk of infrastructure, but not in institutions such as British Rail and the Post Office that could be shared with Scotland and strengthen the institutions of the Union.

The Conservative victory in December was based upon an understanding of the importance of three things that were denied in the previous era. The first was a recognition of the important role of the state as an economic actor, and not simply an external regulator. The kind of economic intervention envisaged by the Government would have violated EU rules relating to competition law and state aid. That was how they could present Brexit as a moment of national renewal.

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Why Boris is still beating Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

The second was the political importance of the working class, which was previously considered an anachronistic irrelevance. Their vote decided the referendum and the election of the Government. The third was the importance of place, and the distinction between the hubs and the heartlands. Not only were local authorities and initiatives discarded in favour of central control but there have been no steps towards the integration of the state, place and work into a form of statecraft appropriate to the scale of renewal.

The inability to react strategically to events means that you become their prey, and the removal of Dominic Cummings has only intensified the strategic void. He understood that the Government’s programme could only be delivered outside regulatory convergence and an active role for the state was required. We will find out in the next few days whether there is any understanding of that remaining within the Government. It is not fishing and transport but state aid that really matters; if they fold on that then there will be no possibility of achieving their political goals.

Fortuna could yet save the Government. The inability of Labour to renew itself as an object of affection for the working class or articulate a plausible economic plan for national renewal may allow the Government to limp along. They wish to give a Christmas present of a vaccine and a deal and start the new year as if this one never happened. Yet a year after their triumph they have no strategy, no narrative and very little energy. And they know that next year could be worse.

Only six months ago, they were basking in the sunshine while staring at an entirely benign political landscape. Labour had been ransacked in their heartlands, and the Conservatives had created a new class coalition, transforming the basis of our politics. They knew that had the Brexit Party not saved up to 40 Labour seats, the victory would have been far bigger. There was room to grow and Brexit was their guiding light and lodestar which would not stop giving, dominating the political scene for the next year.

Brexit was the fault-line that destroyed the Left and created a one-nation Conservatism that would push Labour back to its progressive comfort zone in the big cities, sealing it off from the small towns and working class heartlands forever. The Conservatives would be in power for a generation and when Keir Starmer was elected leader, it sealed the deal. A Remainian lawyer could never heal the wounds.

In the boundless glow of uncontested rule, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand appeared over Wuhan, but the Tories paid it scant attention. It was of no concern to a distant island like ours. It would blow over. The decimation of Bergamo didn’t have much effect either — though the EU seemed to fall apart immediately, re-asserting borders, suspending free movement and breaking all the rules on state aid.

But, then, the hard rain that Dominic Cummings prophesied falling on the Civil Service started to fall on the Government instead. It was not only the chlorinated chickens that were coming home to roost. Their casual contempt for experts morphed into a meek acquiescence to scientific advice, even when it was contested. Our industrial capacity to produce medicines, or even facemasks, had been transferred to China long ago. We could build hospitals, but they never saw a patient. Testing, tracing — no capacity for that. The rain started before the honeymoon was over; it hasn’t stopped falling since.

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How patriotic Labour could crush Boris

By Tim Bale

And the landscape became muddy, miserable and murky. And the man in the mask sitting alone on the frontbench opposite, the man who they thought would be defined forever by leading the Labour resistance to Brexit, and gifting them the election: that man was slowly coming into focus.

But such was their contempt, and their grief, that they couldn’t really see him. They didn’t notice when he said that the issue of Brexit had been resolved and Labour supported leaving the EU by the end of the year. The biggest issue in British politics had dissolved into a previous era and the Covid response was centre stage. They didn’t notice when Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked and all links with the Corbyn camp were severed. They didn’t notice the hundreds of letters of suspension that went out to people who had said strange things about Jews. They didn’t notice that he was writing articles on VE day in the Telegraph, on Memorial Sunday in the Mail and whenever he liked in the Sun — an act considered treachery by Labour leaders for more than a decade. They didn’t notice that he was tapping into a form of modest Labour patriotism that once had deep roots in the Party, and still does in the country.

Keir Starmer did all this while his party membership, the rest of the party leadership, even, was stuck on Zoom. There were no constituency Labour Party meetings, no public assemblies, no Parliament. There was no public discussion about whether to pursue a progressive coalition with the SNP, the Greens and the Lib Dems. Instead, Starmer quietly set his sights on the Red Wall seats that Labour had lost. That was where the war was to be fought but as Leonard Cohen might have said of the Government, it “didn’t even know there was a war”.

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Can Keir Starmer rescue Labour?

By David Kogan

Tuesday’s speech was the first time that Starmer could speak directly to the nation about who he was and what he stood for.  Labour is under no pressure to develop a manifesto, it needed a general direction of travel, a sense of mission and of vision. A sense of the temper of the man who was leading it. And he seized the opportunity to express the ethics of a profoundly conservative person in a way that no member of the Conservative front bench possibly could.

His credo was that “the greatest contribution we can make is to care for one another”. This puts relationships at the centre of it, and to emphasise that, he followed it up with the wish to live in “a country in which we put family first”. He actually used the word joy and family in the same sentence — I can’t remember any other Labour leader doing so. He spoke about Grandparents, and sacrifice, care workers, cleaners, shop workers, life savers.

He spoke about trust being lost and concentrating on security, jobs and community. He concluded with the thought that “the conservatives don’t conserve very much”. Which has the virtue of truth.

He did talk of a plan. It was related to the economy and skills. He spoke about a partnership between businesses and trade unions in a clean economy that “didn’t force people to move hundreds of miles to find a decent job”. The idea of regional economic renewal based upon a partnership between business, workers and the state was precisely the ‘plan’ the Government was elected on. Starmer’s stress on the “everyday economy” gives a clue to its future development. And if Labour has a plan, it is already ahead of the Government.

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The Tories are facing a new revolt on the Right

By Matthew Goodwin

The Government broke with the previous 40 years of globalisation by insisting there was a bigger role for the nation state in the economy, by recognising the political importance of the working class and the places they lived. It seems that Labour too has accepted the change and is beginning to explore the possibilities.

Keir Starmer is not the first Labour leader to engage with this language and politics, but each of them dissolved back into a default globalisation and none could halt the long term decline of Labour in its heartlands. What Starmer’s speech did do was to dispel the idea that Labour will only fight on the issue of competence. In defining the party in terms of patriotism,”the country I love”, in terms of the ethics of care, for people and for nature, in terms of family, sacrifice and community, Starmer has given an intimation that his ‘plan’ goes much deeper than that.

For the Government, the days are getting shorter and the long night of winter already feels cold. They can no longer draw comfort from the quiet man who sits alone before them.

He would not have been out of place in Frankfurt or Berlin in the 1850s, where the great rabbis of German Jewry, of whom Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was the exemplar, reconciled modernity and Orthodoxy. They built new Jewish Communities in which tradition and citizenship, Kant and Moses were brought together, under the slogan Torah im Derech Eretz — Jewish teaching and respect for the way of the land. It is to the great credit of Rabbi Sacks and Anglo-Jewry that he held the office of Chief Rabbi for 22 years and resurrected that tradition in Britain, so that the voice of the dead could be heard once more.

In the book, Rabbi Sacks defines us as “meaning-seeking beings” for whom relationships are central, and he reveals an Aristotelian turn in seeing happiness as the “expression of the soul in accordance with virtue”. He laments the passing of a ‘Common Good’ in favour of twitter echo chambers, the hateful denunciation of those who disagree, and the apotheosis of self-definition rather than recognising that other people have something to say about whether you are a good person or not.

His statement that “love is the supreme redemption of solitude” is worth repeating. The chapter on self-help being no help at all is instructive, and his critique of multiculturalism and safe spaces is a reasoned refuge from a demented kind of liberalism.

His central thesis is that while there has been a parallel growth in the power and scope of both the state and the market, there has been a simultaneous disintegration of civil society, which is the source of relationships, ethics and happiness. We have never had more things or more rights; and we have never been so unhappy. This paradox is the driving force of the book. It is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

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All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

In lamenting the disintegration of a shared public culture, Sacks develops certain dualities, between selfishness and altruism, power and morality, contract and covenant — in which the first term has become dominant when the second term should prevail. He particularly identifies politics as “about power and the distribution of resources”, and morality with “civil society”. The problem is that the examples he gives of a covenant are profoundly political, citing the American Revolution and the Burkean Covenant between the generations.

But the American Revolution was constitutively political, and it embodied a certain form of ethics; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enshrined the separation of the powers and the primacy of rights. In the case of Burke, it refers to Parliament, the Monarchy, the Church and the body politic as embodied in the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution.

Brexit is a sublime example of this ambiguous duality. The Remain side accepted Sacks’s view of politics, and fought the battle on the terrain of policy and prosperity, emphasising the threats to our livelihood imminent in rejecting the sovereignty of the European Court of Justice, the Customs Union and the Single Market.

In contrast, the Leave side drew on the idea of the renewal of a covenant between the generations, of keeping an ancient promise, the restoration of Sovereignty through the reclamation of the inheritance of Parliament, the common law and our tradition of combining democracy and liberty.

“Take back control” is not best understood as a policy decision. Brexit was political but it was also moral in its assertion of the primacy of democracy as the ultimate decision-making process. That is what made it so alarming and threatening.

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Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

As a result, Sacks’s narrow view of an instrumental and utilitarian politics, a desacralised politics, gives the book a whiff of a lament for the era that has passed — of the Third Way, of Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, in which the nation state was a regional administrator of a global system of capitalism and individual rights. There is no recognition here of the power of democracy to resist the domination of capitalism, of the primacy of people over things. This was the crux of the issue in Brexit and is absent from the conception of the Common Good developed by Sacks.

Left to itself, capitalism pursues the highest rate of return on its investment at the greatest speed. Invariably this involves the attempt to turn human beings and nature into commodities organised in labour, land and food markets. In other words, in a language familiar to Rabbi Sacks, capitalism wishes to commodify creation itself. This is unsustainable to life, community, society and ethics, and is at the heart of the inequality he dislikes and the ill-defined ‘populism’ he fears, which is mentioned eight times in two pages in the chapter entitled “Democracy in Danger”.

The problem, as mentioned, is that in denying the ethical content of the resistance to globalisation, the move is reduced to “populism”. But the demonic energy of capitalism needs to be constrained, and democratic politics is the traditional way of doing so.

Perhaps there are two reasons why Sacks relegates politics and democracy in this way. The first is a lack of a mediating principle between selfishness and altruism, which would be that of mutuality and reciprocity, of self-interest broadly conceived as a political concept embodied in shared institutions. Civic peace, mutual security and a reciprocal welfare system are political as well as civic achievements.

At one point Sacks refers to “reciprocal altruism”, but this phrase indicates that what binds us in political community is mutually beneficial and not altruistic at all. Sacks argues that both Darwin and De Tocqueville conclude that both co-operation and competition are necessary for a good society, despite their different disciplines and objects of observation. But this is not developed politically.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

The second problem with the book is its lack of recognition of the power of capitalism as an incentive system. Sacks uses the phrase “structure of grace” to describe the well-ordered relationship between market, state and civil society. It echoes that used by Pope John Paul II in describing capitalism as having a “structure of sin”, in incentivising vice in the form of greed, selfishness and unconstrained desires.

Catholic Social Thought, though, does not turn to the state as the exclusive refuge and remedy, but to decentralised institutions, worker representation on boards, regional banks that can only lend in the areas in which they work, and the upholding of vocation and status in the form of apprenticeships as a necessary condition of labour market entry. These are civic institutions but they are not voluntary: the state underwrites the strengthening of society and constraints on capital by embedding mediating institutions within the economy.

Catholic Social Thought recognises the need for ethical constraints within a competitive market which preserves a sense of relational accountability. It also stresses the need for limits on interest rates and for a living wage in response to inequality and the dehumanisation of people as mere commodities. But despite the lauding of civil society in this book, it does not present any institutions through which the market and the state could be constrained or held to account.

The final problem in a book subtitled “Restoring the Common Good in divided times” is that the Common Good, as a tradition of thought and practice, has always been political and participative in both its secular and religious forms. It is rooted in the governance of cities with a recognition of estranged interests and the necessity of their reconciliation within the polity.

In other words, the Common Good requires an active citizenry engaged in democracy which respects the dignity of difference and the mutual interests that bind them. It is an ancient tradition of immediate contemporary relevance. And while Jonathan Sacks deserves great credit in restoring it to our national conversation, he does not quite recognise the radical consequences of its restoration for the redistribution of power and the renewal of our democracy.

You can't have morality without politics

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The protests started over corruption, the uselessness of public services, the fact that there is no electricity for half the day and the water runs a sandy brown from the taps in Basra. There were no jobs in a country where 60% of the country is under 25. All this in the fifth largest oil producer in the world. The slogan was formed; “We want a country.” But, then, the protesters shifted their focus to sovereignty, as it became increasingly obvious that their politicians were not representing them and they were living in an occupied country.

Back in 2018, Qasem Soleimani, while denouncing Trump as a gambler and a barman, claimed Iran to be the nation of Imam Huseyn — the grandson of Mohamad, who was killed at Karbala by the wicked Calif Yazid in 680. But Iran is not the nation of Imam Huseyn. Iraq is. The Prophet Mohamad, and his family, whom the Shia revere, were obviously Arab. Karbala, where Imam Huseyn was killed, and Najaf, where Imam Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, is buried and the supreme Shia religious authority is based, are in Iraq.

Iraqis view the Iranians as newcomers, who don’t quite get it. Every year, around 15 million Iraqis — about half the country — walk to Karbala to pay their respects to Imam Huseyn. They are hosted and fed along the way in a pilgrimage known as the Arbaeen.

The protesters see themselves, and their nation, Iraq, as the embodiment of Huseyn; Soleimani and Iran, however, are deemed Yazid. In October, the protesters called a two-week break to go on the pilgrimage, and when they regrouped, the protests had grown to four times the size and spread to all the major Southern cities of Iraq. Tehran was confronting a sustained challenge to its domination and Soleimani had an insurrection on his hands. He had lost control of the Shia narrative. Since then, more than 600 protesters have been killed and 20,000 wounded.

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How Britain created the Middle East crisis

By James Barr

As the demonstrations rolled on and the Iraqi prime minister, Adi Abdul-Mahdi, resigned, yet stayed in his job; and the president, Barham Salih, resigned, and yet carried on working as normal; and the government insisted it had given no orders to shoot, and yet protesters died daily, it became obvious that Tehran was ruling Baghdad.

“Iran Iran Out, Out, and Baghdad will be free!” was a chant I heard constantly when I was there for the Arbaeen. If the message of Imam Huseyn is that it is right to stand up to tyranny, corruption, hypocrisy and violence, then the problem for Soleimani was that the Shia of Iraq viewed the Iranian system of government as representing all those things.

By November, the protests had spread to Iran, where the internet was closed down for five days, during which time, at least 300 were killed and thousands imprisoned. The dead bodies were dumped, by night, outside their family homes. Soleimani was not, at that point, the embodiment of Shia ethics. On the contrary.

When I was in Baghdad, photos of Khamenei were being placed in the holes of the squatting toilets of Tahrir Square and the people gleefully shat into the hole of his mouth. When Iraq beat Iran in Qualifying for the Asian Championships, the Iraqi fans chanted, “Are you watching Soleimani?” The protesters beat his image with their shoes in town squares throughout the Shia south. They held him responsible for the hundreds of demonstrators who were killed, many shot in the head with tear gas canisters.

In Karbala, a holy city with a long and intense relationship with Iran, they torched the Iranian Consulate twice in one week. The protests were not going well for Iran and they were not going away. Each day the protesters sang of how they were willing to die for their country, and they did, and they kept coming back for more.

Soleimani took on a more public role. He was popping in and out of Baghdad regularly, brokering support for the government, propping up the prime minister, organising the militias, enforcing the crackdown. He chaired meetings of the security council in place of the prime minister. He was held responsible for the militia shootings of the protesters. He told the Iraqi government that, in Iran they had ways of “dealing with these things”. In Najaf, Ayatollah Sistani, head of the Religious Authority, supported the protesters, in opposition to Khamenei in Iran, and upheld a secular constitution for Iraq. The Iranian model was now being challenged by the people and clergy of Iraq.

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Have we forgotten Syria?

By Ian Birrell

In Baghdad, meanwhile, the protesters built a self-governing commune in Tahrir Square, they renovated and then slept in abandoned buildings, they repainted the road signs, the local population cooked them food. They built a cinema, established libraries and art exhibitions. Women took a leading role, with and without their headscarves. The Iraqi national anthem was played from rooftops on electric guitars and violins. The crowds were enormous and returned every night. They wanted a clean administration, the end of religious quotas and the militias. They called it a ‘normal country’. The rebellion of the Shia youth against Shia rule was unprecedented. Khamanei and Soleimani were daily defied and ridiculed.

But what had been forgotten by the protesters, as well as by the United States, was that Soleimani and Abu Mahdi Muhandis, deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Units  — a parallel army composed of various militias — who was also killed in the car with the general, had played a key part in the defeat of ISIS. In perhaps the dirtiest war since Stalingrad, they had fought their way through Anbar Province up to Mosul and forged a trust with each other and with the Iraqi people there who were grateful for their courage.

They were called heroes for a good reason. Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards fought with the Iraqi Shia at the hour of their greatest peril. ISIS were unconscionably brutal and the PMU, with Iranian help and US air cover, fought them village by village, street by street. I was told terrible stories, when I was there, of beheadings, booby traps and child bombers. And yet they prevailed and ISIS was beaten.

The PMU was created by Ayatollah Sistani in 2014, when ISIS came within 10 miles of Baghdad, and he issued a Fatwa calling for action to protect the holy shrines. Millions of Iraqi Shia responded. It is these units, made up of poor Iraqis, that owe their allegiance to Solemeini. He led them in battle. These militias consider the demonstrators to be ungrateful — both to them and to Iran.

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What if the US President went mad?

By Sam Leith

The Iranian Revolution, built around the rule of the Jurist, is now 40 years old with an established doctrine and followers. Their fundamental view is that only a strong Iran can save the Shia from oppression and all their history stands as testament to that. This mission of the Iranian State is only safe in the hands of the Shia clergy which has ultimate power. For them, this is an eternally true proposition. Khamenei is the expression of this, and in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen they have saved poor Shia communities from Sunni domination, which took on a demonic form with ISIS. The United States has proved itself to be reckless and fickle, at best. Trump’s unilateral abandonment of the Syrian Kurds to the mercy of Putin and Erdogan last October shocked a cynical region.

The United States under-estimated the loyalty of poor, non-urban Iraqis to the guidance and protection of the Iranian Revolution, and their militias, which persecute the middle-class but is faithful to the rural poor, and whose militias are of them. Qasem Soleimani was the boss of all that, the capo dei tutti capi of the Shia Militias, which he called the Axis of Resistance. His problem, though, was how to change the political dynamic in Iraq from the demonisation of Iran to that of the United States.

One of the fundamental rules of ‘Community Organising’, according to Saul Alinsky, is that “the action is in the reaction”. So, to change the dynamics of a situation, you pick a fight and then “personalise and polarise” around it. It’s what Trump did to “crooked Hilary”.

As the protesters in Iraq were polarising against Iran and Soleimani, they were the proximate source of domination. The attempts to shift that focus were getting nowhere. So Soleimani picked a real fight with the Americans, relying on the impetuosity of Donald Trump. Late last year, missiles were directed at an American airbase in Kirkuk, where ISIS are still active. These killed an American contractor. The US responded with a missile attack that killed a pro-Iranian militia leader.

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By Giles Fraser

On New Year’s Eve, the Iranian proxies responded with a re-enactment of the 1979 Teheran US embassy siege in Baghdad. They ransacked the building and sprayed pro-Soleimani and Khamenei slogans on its office walls. It had the desired effect. If there is one thing Trump knows, it is not to look like Jimmy Carter in election year. He was triggered and was trigger happy.

The final act of Qasem Soleimani was to succeed, through the sacrifice of his life, in polarising the Iraqi Shia against America, rather than Iran, and in consolidating support for the Iranian regime across Iraq. It was a sacrifice worth making. The young protesters are now isolated in their expression of anti-Iranian sentiment.

The Iraqis are now leading mass protests and mourning marches for Soleimani and Muhandis with their distinctive flags and rituals. Karbala and Najaf are no longer owned by the protesters but by the militias. And now, Muqtada Al-Sadr’s crew is burning down tents, fighting for control of Tahrir Square.

And behind them is something worse. Badr, Amiri, the Revolutionary Guard… Flags and songs are no real resistance to the bullets and knives wielded by these people born of violence and terror who know of no other way. The protesters had previously been shot with tear gas canisters, now live ammunition is used against those refusing to participate in the mock funeral of Muhandis held in Nasiriyah. They have real reason to be scared, for the Iraq government is now squarely aligned with the militias. Another triumph for Soleimani in his death. For the first time for three months, the crowds in Tahrir Square are meagre and the mood apprehensive.

The action is in the reaction. By polarising against America, Soleimani has also delivered a newly compliant government that will act against the US with renewed legitimacy and the Iraqi parliament has called for the removal of all American forces. The legacy of his death will be the expulsion of the American military from Iraq and a generalised threat to their presence across the region. In dying he has secured his ultimate goal and ensured that his reputation grows.

The antipathy to Iran is deeply held and long-standing in the Iraqi Shia. They do not want their system or to be ruled by them. This was finding an intelligent and sustained expression throughout the three months of the protests that were present each day in all the major cities of Shia Iraq. That momentum has now been halted by the sickening thud of a car accident.

The fundamental teaching of Imam Huseyn is that sacrifice is eternal. In dying at the hand of Yazid, a corrupt hypocritical tyrant, Imam Huseyn achieved immortality and the accolade of the ‘Prince of Martyrs’. That is now a status he shares with Qasem Soleimani.

But the real heroes were the protesters, the real martyrs those 600 or more young people who were killed on his orders. With one act, Trump has ceded victory to his enemy, glory to his foes and martyrdom to murderers. It is a remarkable achievement.

How Trump handed victory to Qasem Soleimani

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Although the Conservatives led across every social class, their lead in the skilled and unskilled working class was particularly emphatic. Boris has no equal in cabinet. There is no coherent opposition, his majority is impregnable and all his MPs have signed up to his agenda. Hail Caesar. Meet the new King of Merry England. Good King Boris.

His goal is to make his domination hegemonic through two measures. The first is to identify the Tories with the working class and the country towns and distance them from London and finance. Putney went Labour and Bolsover went Tory. Look up the difference in house prices between the two. It is a class polarisation against the ruling financial and cultural elite.

Ministers have been banned from going to Davos. The Conservative vote went down across the home counties, and especially those areas nearest London. That was the logic behind proroguing Parliament and the expulsion of the remain rebels from the Party. The Conservatives were happy for them to vote Lib-Dem and Labour. Instead the party concentrated entirely on the towns and villages of the North and the South, the country shires and the post-industrial working class, the basis of the Brexit coalition. “Fuck business.” The Conservatives will be more northern and proletarian and Boris will drink beer with his new MPs in the many bars in Parliament. The Cavaliers will lord it over the Puritans.

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How cavalier is Boris?

By Giles Fraser

The second step was to break from fiscal orthodoxy and embrace the activist state. Expect to see a thousand Boris busses bombing around the country lanes of England in partnership with local government. Expect a house building boom. The PM will violate EU rules on state aid and competition law with relish, while Labour will cleave to the constraints of the single market and the rulings of the ECJ.

During the election campaign, the Conservatives pledged state aid to small regional businesses while not pointing out that half of Labour’s manifesto would have been illegal under EU Law. They quietly renounced Thatcherism. Boris will be the heir to Keynes while Labour will uphold the rectitude of Hayek forever enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty and its sovereignty over the single market and customs union. While Boris will point out the distinction between free trade and free movement, Labour won’t know the difference between the two. The interregnum has been broken, and as in 1979 its broken to the right.

Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly.

Brexit is a sign of the times, a glimpse of the future but the progressive mind can only see it as reactionary, nostalgic and backward looking. The decisive role of the working class in asserting national sovereignty through its democratic vote in order to renew the ancient institutions of Parliament and the common law is incomprehensible to the left. The new era is a foreign country for those who thought the arc of history was with them.

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By David Goodhart

The scale of Labour’s defeat last Thursday is hard for the progressive mind to comprehend. Like the death of a loved one, who has survived terrible illness before, it is both shocking and predictable. The responses of blame, avoidance, denial, anger, displacement and depression from the Labour family are also shocking and predictable. Labour is like a family from hell. Full of hate and blame and unable to understand how it got here. Labour is no longer a tribe and has lost its homeland. It’s gonna be lonely this Christmas.

This is because Labour is out of relationship with its history, traditions and the communities that created and cherished it. So out of touch that it couldn’t see the rejection coming. It now shares the entropic fate of the French, Italian, German, Belgian and Dutch Labour Parties, who have shrunk progressively into irrelevance, replaced by nationalist and Green Parties on the whole. Drained of their national purpose by the constraints of the European Union, social democracy has no conception of the social, or of democracy. Labour now shares their fate which means irrelevance and endless meetings that go nowhere. Just a slow and inexorable decline. It marks the end of British exceptionalism on the Left, just as we leave the EU.

It could have been so different. In 2017, when Labour said it respected the result of the referendum, it surged through the final two weeks of the campaign. The Conservatives, running on the policy of ‘lose your mind, lose your home’, turned a Brexit election into a discussion of the financial consequences of dementia.

There were indications of disaffection as Mansfield and North Derby turned blue; but the heartlands believed that Corbyn was a faithful son of Tony Benn and he had spent a lifetime denouncing the EU as a capitalist club where no-one was accountable. Against the current of continental Europe, Labour alone was a vital and renewed social-democratic party committed to nationalisation and the redistribution of wealth. Brexit was a source of socialist renewal and democracy was re-affirmed as the means of resisting the domination of the rich and their decades of relentless plundering. But, then, Corbyn’s Labour renounced Brexit.

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One of the reasons why the election result seemed so shocking was that the working class were supposed to be on the wrong side of history, to not really matter anymore. Despite the result of the Brexit referendum, it was assumed that the task for Labour was to build a coalition of ‘progressive’ voters around a second referendum which they called a ‘people’s vote’. The difference between 2017 and 2019 was that the working class noted that Labour was blocking Brexit and denying the legitimacy of their vote. Corbyn’s Labour sided with global capitalism. It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

The deep complicity between New Labour and the Corbyn Project was shown here. The progressive certainty that history was going in one direction, towards the free movement of people and things, that technology would dissolve place and borders in an undifferentiated swirl in which only the individual and Treaty law mattered.

That the future was based on globalisation was unquestioned between them, as was the idea that the nation state and democracy no longer really mattered. This Whig theory of history is as untrue now as it ever was. The working class, the Nation-State and democracy are key features of the new era. Far from being losers, the post-industrial working class has decided the two most significant votes of our time.

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By James Bloodworth

And the Left was the loser. The progressive illness has dissolved the ties that bind because it has no concept of society, of the social, of belonging and inheritance. Trapped in an endless now, it lost the future. The coalition of Peter Mandelson and John McDonnell that tied Labour to a second referendum is the key to understanding the catastrophic defeat because it finally ruptured the connection between the working class and Labour. It said, you didn’t know what you were doing. It said that democracy does not decide issues in our society. It said that it had no faith in our country to decide its future through democratic politics but that it had to be contracted out to an unaccountable system of directives and laws.

By embracing a second referendum, Labour crossed a line. It no longer supported workers who trusted democracy more than the European Court of Justice when it came to their rights. Labour thought that the consequences would be catastrophic and displayed no confidence that our country could flourish outside frictionless capitalism. The Left suddenly became experts in just-in-time supply chains as if capitalism, the most adaptable economic system ever devised, would not be able to cope. They were not faithful to the marriage and it is now over. There is no evidence that there will be a reconciliation.

At the last election, Labour lost Mansfield by a thousand votes. Now the majority is more than 16,000. The Scottish working-class have not returned to Labour, but moved to a nationalist party and show no sign of remorse. Once rejected, they move on and don’t look back. In Michael Lind’s recent book, the New Class War, he makes the connection between class and geography, between hubs and heartlands. Labour is the party of the hubs, but the Conservatives now lay claim to the heartlands.

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By Maurice Glasman

And beyond the immediate devastation of defeat, is the existential horror of what it means. The severing of the long-term marriage with the working class that created the Labour Party in the first place. It opens the space for the emergence of a genuinely nasty right-wing populist Party as an alternative to Labour and the Conservatives. The Brexit Party is merely a mild taster of what the future portends. The Conservative vote only rose a few percent overall, many former Labour voters went for the Brexit Party. What was clear is that the Labour vote collapsed in the heartlands and the Brexit Party saved more Labour seats than it lost.

The glory of Labour was its ability to express the Labour interest within the framework of the inherited Parliamentary and legal institutions asserting democratic politics as an alternative to violence. While the rest of Europe did polarise and went Fascist or Communist, Labour retained the affections of the working-class and engaged in the politics of war and peace. Defeating the Nazis in the War Coalition and then creating the National Health Service, nationalising steel, coal and the railways, creating the National Trust and the Green Belt.

The virtues of civility, generosity, and kindness in the public square are easily dismissed and hard to retain. Labour was the source of that politics and with its departure from the working-class communities it used to represent, a sullen resentful politics looms. Something closer to the Front National or the Afd in Germany.

The new Government needs to offer something more than electoral success and some infrastructure projects; it needs to build on the politics of earning and belonging, of contribution and civic renewal. Over the past 40 years, the counties and towns of our country have been denuded of its assets and inheritance. None of the building societies that were demutualised in the last 40 years exist any longer as local institutions. The endowment of regional banks so that there is access to capital once more is an essential part of that. The recognition of vocation is also essential and the establishment of vocational colleges for building, maintenance, social care and taxi driving with apprenticeship laws that regulate labour market entry would address the skills required for building homes, caring for the elderly and the 85% of the economy that functions outside globalisation.

The dignity of labour is the foundation of this. It should be the basis of Labour’s alternative. The central question for the next ten years is whether the Conservatives can recognise that their future now lies with labour.

All hail Good King Boris

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1. Use 10% of the bailout to endow regional banks

The bailout of the banks in 2008-9 was the biggest transfer of assets from poor to rich since the Norman Conquest.[1.   The first act of William the Conqueror, in 1067, was to declare that every acre of land in England now belonged to the monarch.] The nation’s wealth, centralised in the City of London, had been sprayed around in a frenzy of cheating, stealing and exaggeration – and the taxpayer was left to foot the bill. The National Audit Office claim the final cost was £1.162 trillion.

Meanwhile, de-industrialised areas of Britain were left asset-poor and suffering from institutional malnutrition. Local banks have closed down, to be replaced by payday loaners: the poor borrow at 5,000%, while the banks borrow at 3%.

The Government should spend a mere 10% of the total cost of the bailout on endowments for local banks that cannot lend beyond their area, to restore assets and economic growth to the regions.

2. Let communities own the land they’re built on

Ever since enclosure, which caused the eviction and dispossession of thousands, British people have longed to regain a sense of home. One of the marvels of the emerging Labour Movement was the creation of building societies, in which assets were pooled and a sense of home restored.

But none of these demutualised building societies now exists as an autonomous institution. Northern Rock is a case in point. Founded in the 1840s as ‘The Northern Counties Permanent Building Society’, it served the North East for more than 150 years as a trusted financial institution. It was demutualised in 1997; eleven years later, it was bankrupt.

It is time we tried something different. Through the establishment of Community Land Trusts, the freehold of some of the land owned by overmighty landowners and the state would be transferred to communities, who could then design and build their homes by reconstituting their own building societies. The endowment of the freehold would cut the price of property in half.

3. Promote vocational colleges and apprenticeships

We should close half the universities and turn them into vocational colleges – and have apprenticeship as a condition of labour market entry.

The contempt for manual work has a long history, but it needs to end. The distinction made in the 1830s between a profession and a vocation was decisive in the degradation of vocation as a practice. Professions required an extensive apprenticeship combined with control over labour market entry. Medicine, law, dentistry and even accountancy were elevated in their status through legal recognition. This was the not the fate of skilled manual labour whose status was abolished and whose conditions were deregulated.

After Brexit, we will need to rely more on our skilled neighbours and less on importing people to do the work. The constitution of a decentralised national apprenticeship system is vital to restore a sense of earning and belonging after the ravages of unmediated globalisation.

4. Give London control over the City

The Corporation of the City of London is as invisible as its earnings. As well as being the most ancient continuously democratic city in the world, it is also the richest. We do not know how rich, because as a city from ‘time immemorial’ – and not having been in debt – it has never had to declare its assets. The Mayor of London holds no sway in the City of London itself, which remains a rare example of a medieval commune that makes its own laws. Even the Queen has to surrender her sword when she enters the City.

The City has refused to extend its borders over its thousand years of history – and was never subordinated to either Crown or Parliament. It’s time for a change. Our capital city should represent the interests of its people and not of capital alone. The Mayor of a unified London would live in Mansion House, London would elect its Parliament to the Guildhall and the assets of the Corporation would be the civic inheritance of all Londoners.

5. Legalise Marijuana

There is a lot of talk of a green economy but very little of how that translates into high value-added exports aligned to a rising internal market. In Canada, they have transformed de-commissioned mines into underground marijuana farms, with great benefits. Perhaps we should recognise that a spliff at the end of a day is beginning to rival a nice cold beer as a way to take the edge off. There are concerns, naturally, but the industry and the product would be organic, green and chemical-free.

We are accustomed to such exotic names as Acapulco Gold and Afghan Black, but how about ‘Orgreave Green’ and ‘Mansfield Mauve’. We could lead the continent in production and distribution, opening up Europe for a ‘deal’ while trumping the EU as a promoter of European peace.

Let’s not be naïve about the risks. There is already a huge problem in our country with legal drugs, particularly opiates and anti-depressants, as well as illegal hard ones. And there’s concern about rogue marijuana batches. But if we were to legalise the drug, its strength could be regulated and its effects on young brains mitigated. Let’s take the lead in Europe and get behind Black Country Chronic.

Ditch the City, enrich the nation

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