That was the undiplomatic choice of words attributed to Boris Johnson, the minister who oversees Her Majesty’s diplomatic service. The appropriateness – or otherwise – of the two-word assault on a Brexit-sceptical manufacturer has been pontificated upon enough already.

I’m still reeling from the claims of a large number of Conservative big wigs that any slapdown of the merchant class by their party was somehow akin to a bishop abandoning the Bible, or a Labour leader attacking the NHS.

It’s one thing for the Left to to paint the Right as nothing more than the political wing of the accountancy trade. It’s much worse when the home team is reinforcing the view that centre-right political movements are, like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, conscious of the price of nearly everything but blind to the value of anything that is truly important.

One person who needed no encouragement to direct Johnsonian-type anger at business was Adam Smith. If the Scottish philosopher (and note that I didn’t write ‘economist’) were around today, I have no doubt he’d authoritatively be issuing his erudite equivalent of “f**k Lehmans and other banks for their recklessness that helped cause the 2008 crash!” He’d need little persuasion to add a “F**k VW!” for the way the German car giant cheated environmental standards’ or a “F**k property developers!” for the ways they conspire to keep house prices at levels suited to their profitability than to homebuyers’ means.

We can be confident of such robustness because, throughout his writings Smith adopted uncompromising language about the tendency of traders and merchants to behave badly. “Clamour and sophistry”, “impertinent jealousy”, “mean rapacity”, “mean and malignant expedients”, “sneaking arts” and inclinations to “interested falsehood”, aren’t from a book by Marx or Engels or Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders. They’re from the 18th-century’s Mr Smith.

John Maynard Keynes (the runner-up to Smith as most notable economist to have emerged from Britain) warned that the theories of ancient scribblers or long dead economists tend to hold too much power over people of the current day. If, despite Keynes’ disappointment at us, we are to have a reverence for seminal writers and books from a long gone era, we should at least make an effort to ensure we have understood them correctly.

Further reading

Ida Tarbell - the crusading journalist who humbled Big Oil

By Liam Halligan

And that is the importance of the, sadly very necessary, reintroduction to Adam Smith that has been written by Jesse Norman, a serving Conservative MP and a transport minister.

Adam Smith – What He Thought and Why It Matters is part a work of economic philosophy; part a manifesto for a decade after the crash; and part a biography of the ‘father of modern economics’, who neither married nor had children of his own. But it’s wholly a 308-page rescue job. Norman directs readers to the fullness of Smith’s writings, rather than the misrepresentations of them by certain contemporary think tanks and pundits who have adopted his intellectual works with a standard of care that would embarrass certain Dickensian workhouses.

In addition to an acute awareness of business malpractice, Smith, Norman’s readers learn, advocated important roles for government in curbing market excesses, undertaking public works and didn’t just worry about absolute poverty but inequality, too. Pretty relevant, eh? And contrary to the regularly posed ‘Adam Smith problem’ the two key books he wrote – The Wealth of Nations and the earlier, lesser honoured Theory of Moral Sentiments – are not difficult to reconcile but wholly complementary.

Just as Smith was a friend and admirer of his contemporary Edmund Burke (a hero of more conservative types and the subject of a previous biography by Norman), Smith’s own writings were complementary too. “In contrast to modern practice, Smith did not compartmentalise politics and economics”, writes Norman within a particularly important section. I introduced Smith as a philosopher. But Norman notes a “science of man” throughout Smith’s writings, of a wide-ranging character. Scotland’s son understood that explanations of key economic or other phenomena, writes Norman, could only be partial if cut “away from politics, from psychology and sociology, and from ethics”.

Holistic thinkers like Smith are badly needed today. At a time when changes in technology, the nature of capitalism, democratic organisation, family structure and journalism are happening simultaneously and interactively, at the top of our societies we have tech giants who turn blind eyes to immoral uses of their products, economists who only count what is statistically counted, and journalists for ‘national’ newspapers who rarely leave London or Washington or Brussels. It’s not that surprising that these bunkered elites keep getting surprised by the world around them.

I suspect Smith would have scoffed at the attack on Norman from the London-based Adam Smith Institute. ‘With Jesse Norman as a Tory MP, why bother having a Labour Party’ was the title of a blog by Tim Worstall that accused him of being “drippingly wet”.

Norman’s crime was to question the ways in which global tech firms avoid making serious contributions to the tax takes of countries they operate in. The ASI’s Tim Worstall insists that businesses should do as Milton Friedman advised and focus solely on maximising profit and shareholder returns.

This clean, simplistic, unworldly idea is a good example of why libertarians are essential components of centre-right parties throughout the world (reminding more State-friendly conservative types to avoid over-regulation and over-taxation) but would be terrible leaders of any electoral enterprise. As Smith understood, there are cultural and patriotic understandings that business organisations neglect at their peril. If people of commerce don’t attempt to act as good citizens they will enjoy levels of public suspicion that make them vulnerable to politicians who’ll regulate them excessively.

Smith’s evocative “invisible hand” phrase – coupled with his dictum that we should not expect our dinner from the baker, brewer and butcher because of their benevolence but because of their self-interest – helped people understand how self-serving behaviours can enrich the general population more effectively than centrally-planned and managed systems. But it was possibly too evocative. The temptation is focus on that aspect of his work, much like a preacher who has a few favourite Bible verses and neglects study of the longer Old and New Testament books which can appear too much like hard work or too uncomfortable to embrace. But there’s so much more to Smith than markets good, governments bad, baa, baa, baa.

While Smith was a man of the Enlightenment he also had drunk deeply of the Judaeo-Christian account of human nature and of our capacity to do both bad, ‘Fallen’ things as well as to ‘Create’ and accomplish. This takes us back to where we started. Smith opened the eyes of the world to the ways in which free markets were much more effective creators and distributors of wealth than any of the alternatives that ‘planned’ to do so.

But this didn’t make him an apologist for the men and women of business who he knew were as capable of sin and selfishness as any other human being or human enterprise. Checks on the tendencies of business, politicians, theocrats or any other entity that amasses power to abuse those powers should not be after thoughts in the formulation of public policy but central to them.

Or, as a Boris Johnson-Adam Smith hybrid might say: “F**k monopoly power!”, F**k cosy relations between big donors and politicians!”; “F**k tech giants who don’t clean up their own messes!”; F**k economists and academics and policymakers who know nothing outside of their area of partial expertise!”.

Oh, and f**k think tanks that claim to represent great thinkers but haven’t, seemingly, read the full works of those thinkers. A charge that could not begin to be levelled at Jesse Norman.

Further reading

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

“It’s Hard to Find God on the Front Page”.

That was the headline of a comment piece from last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, which was complaining about American journalism’s retreat from covering religious faith. Its author, Julia Duin of GetReligion.org, noted that “never-ending layoffs, firings and closings left religion among the most decimated of the specialty beats”. She continued:

“Whole regions of the western US and Canada have no staff reporter covering religion… The Dallas Morning News closed its six-page religion section in 2007. The Vancouver Sun reconfigured the beat of its award-winning religion reporter into a “spirituality and diversity” column, while the Seattle Times’s religion writer was reassigned to the Microsoft beat. In 2014 the Boston Globe started a specialty site, Crux, to cover the Catholic Church. They let it go after 18 months, and now the Knights of Columbus sponsors the site.”

If Ms Duin was correct to note the decline of religious journalism, she didn’t help her case by making the much larger number of sports reporters a central part of her complaint. Yes, as she stated, religious giving is much greater than the revenues of America’s major sports, and many more Americans do go to church than attend baseball, football or basketball matches.

But sport will always be more interesting than religion to a newspaper or TV station for the simple reason that we don’t know at the beginning of the weekend if the Dallas Cowboys or Miami Dolphins will win their games or not. We do know that Father Jones is going to talk about Jesus and neighbourliness and prayer. Only if he announces that he is becoming a woman or a Muslim is the press likely to be interested and, given recent history, that’s publicity the Church could do without. If all your core beliefs were announced to the world 2,000 years ago, and are all contained in the best-read and best-selling book of all time, you have a problem appealing to an industry that is called ‘News’.

If religious people have to be realistic about the level of resource that media companies will devote to issues of religion, there does have to be a greater awareness of what is lost when there’s little investment in understanding of faith or faith communities. For example:

• In the wake of 2016’s surprise presidential result, The New York Times admitted that it might have been less surprised if it had been better connected with the country’s Bible Belt. As Katie Harrison’s “Believers in Trump” documentary explains, white evangelicals may not have approved of his personal morality but the Republican nominee’s commitment to put a judge on the US Supreme Court – who would most probably return abortion laws to individual states – was enough to give him 80% of their votes.
• Even in increasingly secular countries like Britain, the Church of England has, through its parish system, a truly nationwide presence. Unlike the Conservative Party, it’s in every inner city. Unlike Labour, it’s in every rural community. And as events such as the Grenfell Tower inferno demonstrated, the church, mosque and synagogue are there 24/7 when their “fourth emergency services” are required. They are still there when most local government caseworkers have gone home. And often much more ethnically diverse and far more varied in wealth and circumstance than, for example, the media. It’s no accident that it’s faith communities who again and again are aware of injustices such as food poverty before most others. They live at the frontline and with frontline people.
• And I hardly need to spell out the third argument for better religious literacy within newsrooms. The fact that, in 2015, people spent more time reading Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS Really Wants” (sub-heading: “The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it”) from The Atlantic than any other article on the internet wasn’t just a reminder to the very secular media class that there might be an appetite for religiously-informed subject matter, it reminds all of us that the most unstable region in the world – the Middle East, if you hadn’t already guessed – cannot be properly understood if we lack a basic grasp of the religious teachings (and the perversions of those teachings) that motivate its peoples.

Religion is not the only subject area that – because of the news industry’s economic challenges – is receiving less journalistic resource. With foreign coverage particularly expensive, events in unfashionable parts of the world are in greater darkness, too.

The centralisation of news gathering in major cities has meant there was not just shock, but incomprehension within the newsrooms of London and Brussels and New York at the angry mood in the ‘flyover’ places and their votes for Brexit, Trump, Orban, Grillo and the like. With much less journalistic infantry to deploy, there are quite simply more gaps in the scrutiny of what takes place in local courts and national parliaments.

The economic realities cannot be wished away, but the best media operations will reflect on what they could do to minimise the impact of them. That thinking could begin by appointing people with more diverse hinterlands. The candidate from Tyneside for the consumer affairs reporting role may have to be based in London but at least they would not be yet another employee from the home counties. That pictures editor who chairs the school attached to her synagogue might ensure that next time faith schools are discussed at news conference there might be at least one voice who doesn’t want them all shut down.

When religion is sidelined from the media and from the public square we don’t just lose an opportunity to reflect on how Catholic Social Teaching might help us to recognise the communitarianism missing from the individualistic and materialist outlooks that dominate both the modern Left and Right. We don’t just miss warnings from clerics that, as religion retreats, the danger is that it is nationalism rather than liberalism that fills the space it once occupied.

When religion is sidelined we are not just sidelining the inheritance of believers – we are sidelining an inheritance that is everybody’s. Throughout the dark ages, the church and monastery were refuges for thoughtful people from all walks of life. When the church was too close to the state and much richer than it should have been, it was able to afford to be the greatest of patrons. When we marginalise religion we are marginalising all of that. We are marginalising the wisdom of the ages.

Also on this topic...

Newspapers are losing their religion – but the internet still has faith

By Melanie McDonagh

US Attorney General John Sessions declared: “If you try to deceive the United States, then you will pay a heavy price. The indictment unsealed today alleges that Volkswagen’s scheme to cheat its legal requirements went all the way to the top of the company. These are serious allegations, and we will prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law.”

Over the weekend, the former top dogs at VW were probably comforting themselves with the thought that, even if found guilty, they’d never face practical consequences as – quite unbelievably – Germany does not have an extradition agreement with the country that for 70 years has both underwritten its defence and, more generally, the world trading system of which it has been such a disproportionate beneficiary. But I’m digressing.

Today, they may feel less comfy. For yesterday we learnt that VW itself may well sue its former top employees in an attempt to exact punishment for the estimated $25 billion cost of the compensation and other bills that the scandal led to. Call me cynical, but I wonder if there’s more than a trace of PR in this. It is, after all, in VW’s interest to present itself as a victim of a few bad apples and that its corporate culture and its commercial closeness to the German government have also been full contributors to the rot.

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CEOs are getting 120 times as much income as workers

By Ian Birrell

As Jack Ewing – European economics journalist for The New York Times and author of a book on the scandal – told UnHerd last year, there was an unhealthiness to the depth, breadth and length of Berlin’s support for VW’s targets to lead the world in volume of car production. “If you look back at the last couple of decades,” he told Harriet Maltby, “time and again the German government went to bat for the German car industry and that led to this very weak regulatory structure.”

I’m pleased at the potential double action for two reasons. One is that it’s helpful in addressing widespread suspicion among voters that the wealthy and well-connected do not play by the same rules as them. The Transatlantic YouGov poll with which UnHerd launched last July confirmed the electoral toxicity of bad behaviour from big business. Our surveys found that only “one in twenty Britons thinks the level of punishment [for those responsible for the crash of 2008] has been appropriate, while it’s just over one in ten among Americans”. When banks failed – hurting taxpayers, shareholders and generating austerity and unemployment – too many CEOs landed far too softly.

But there’s an even more fundamental reason why it matters that bad practice should be seen to carry consequences. Consequences are, after all, at the heart of why competitive free markets are so innovative. And consequential losses at least as much as consequential profits. Like a mild heart attack, dropping into the red is a flashing light on the dashboard – a warning that a change of course is necessary or the next bank statement or next coronary could be fatal.

The contrasting reactions of business people to a project veering off track (especially those running start-ups and with their personal finances at stake) compared with the reactions of politicians is why market economies are usually superior to politician-driven economies. Democratically-elected leaders and ministers are intensely aware that abandoning a project – perhaps promised at an election – after “wasting” taxpayers’ money can carry a significant political price. Operating in the lopsided media culture in which successful initiatives get little or no attention from journalists, there is every incentive for sloppily-designed or even fundamentally misconceived projects to be given life beyond their sell-by date and for good money to be thrown after bad.

When fear of loss is diminished, market economies risk losing their dynamism. While some worthwhile innovations do get grants, it’s also an environment in which bad practice, poor management and even cavalier deployment of scarce resources go unpunished.

Also in UnHerd...

Ctrl + Alt + Del. Conservatives must reboot capitalism

By Ruth Davidson

And if you are looking for business folk who are among the most insulated from the ‘loss motive’, I’d nominate top CEOs (and – as we’ve painfully learnt – the too-big-to-fail bankers whose actions are underwritten by the public purse). For most CEOs they are playing a game that is not snakes and ladders. Their win-win game is ladders and ladders.

Time and again we see that if a CEO does hit targets, the telephone number packages are delivered as promised. If, however, the choices end in disaster or even illegality, the termination arrangements tend to resemble welfare safety-nets, not market-signalling-snakes.

Golden goodbyes defy all historical precedents, economic rationales and popular moral norms. But they make it easier for the board members who authorise them to look their dispensed-with chums in the eye when they see them at the opera or the tennis.

What we have seen here, with the treatment of the most senior former managers at VW, are steps being taken towards tackling those cosy cultures within boardrooms and between big companies and big government which have disconnected CEOs from any negative consequences of decisions they take. The steps are small but vital ingredients for the effectiveness and popular legitimacy of free market capitalism.

When Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 Barack Obama had the opportunity to replace one of the most conservative members of the nine person US Supreme Court with a liberal. If his nomination of Merrick Garland hadn’t been controversially thwarted by the Republican leader of the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, America’s Supreme Court would have become solidly liberal by a five-to-four votes at minimum and probably by six-to-three. And so here’s my question: did it even cross Barack Obama’s mind that he might have some kind of responsibility to ensure that his country’s ultimate enforcer and interpreter of the founders’ Constitution and of all the laws passed since should ideally command broad support across the US population? I doubt it. Uppermost in his mind would have been the pro-abortion, pro-gun control etc concerns of his own party’s base and their hunger for an anti-Scalia to replace Scalia.

I’m not (for once) making an anti-Obama or anti-Democrat point here. If the position had been reversed and a Republican President had had the opportunity to install a conservative judge likely to overturn Roe Vs Wade or to enhance the Second Amendment rights championed most vociferously by the National Rifle Association, he or she would almost certainly have done so. Anything less than the nomination of a full-throated ‘one-of-us’ would have meant a serious challenge for the party’s re-nomination in the case of a first-term president. And we had proof of the desire for a winner-takes-all politics last week when Donald Trump expressed a desire to scrap the rights of the Senate minority to filibuster the federal budget. Although he didn’t actually win a plurality of votes cast in his contest with Hillary Clinton he clearly wants to take all powers of scrutiny from the representatives of those with different views to his.

We see the desire for total victory in British politics, too.

Two recent examples stand out:

• There’s the case of the former leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats Tim Farron. It wasn’t enough for this evangelical Christian to accept UK laws on access to abortion and gay equality. Opponents and journalists attempted to make windows into his soul and demanded to know if his faith led nonetheless led him to disapprove of the termination of a pregnancy or of two people of the same sex getting married. Incidentally, a good number of left-leaning parties have elevated the abortion issue into litmus test status. Anyone who opposes abortion rights can’t be a candidate for Canada’s Liberals, for example. That pro-life/antiu-abortion person may be left-leaning, green and Justin-Trudeauesque in all other taxing, regulating etc respects but – even though the country’s abortion laws are under no threat whatsoever – they aren’t welcome in the governing not-s0-‘Liberal’ party (or in Canada’s even more ‘progressive’ NDP).
• After the Tories won Britain’s 2015 general election with 36.9% of the popular vote they proposed slashing (by 19%) the funding enjoyed by opposition parties to hold the government to account. Simultaneously, they proposed a substantially larger taxpayer-funded budget for their own political operations. A few wise Conservatives, who understood the importance of a properly-resourced opposition to functioning law-making, helped to veto the idea (perhaps also fearing that such hyper-partisanship would only invite Labour to take their revenge once they were back in charge).

This demand for total victory is not just evident in politics. A particularly ugly example of the zero tolerance of diverse views in higher education came at the turn of the year when academics at one of the world’s most prestigious universities turned on Professor Nigel Biggar after he had said that the British Empire had been “morally mixed” in its implications. The director of Oxford University’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life hadn’t in any way minimised the darker elements of what had been committed in the many parts of the world once coloured British imperial pink. He’d simply argued that a fair assessment couldn’t be one-sided. ‘Oh yes it must be’ was the effective shout back from 58 academics – followed by even uglier student voices who accused Professor Biggar of being a “bigot”.

The economic historian Niall Ferguson reflected on absolutism in his interview for UnHerd last year. While globalisation might be in the overall long-term interest of almost everyone on the planet (especially the poorest of the poor) it had produced many casualties amongst the less skilled in the developed world and the Davos crowd might have avoided much of the populist democratic insurgencies of recent times if more time had been given so that welfare and education provision could have kept pace with fast-moving trade and immigration revolutions. But that time wasn’t given. Politicians like Tony Blair gave speeches extolling globalisation and castigating anyone or any group who attempted to raise concerns at the impact of change on the beneficiaries of the old era.

There are many reasons for this hegemonic insistence on total victory and the thirst to not just win office or ascendancy but to flatten and marginalise opponents. There’s the rise of activist classes within political parties and of ‘narrowcast’ media platforms that thrive by playing to narrow ideological or social groups. There’s just rudeness, too. Reflecting on the increasingly sour nature of Britain’s public square, Chris Rumfitt recently noted how…

“Remainers are remoaners who are plotting to subvert the democratic will of the people. Leavers, meanwhile, are xenophobes wanting to turn their back on the world. Tories are “scum” who hate the poor. And Corbynites? They love terrorists while hating Britain.”

And don’t think it’s just tabloids that are guilty of this. Matthew Parris may be softly-spoken, use long words, write (brilliant) columns for The Times and present high-brow programmes for BBC Radio 4 but his characterisation of people with a different view to him can be as ugly as anything produced within much larger circulation titles. Deep down Brexiteers are just racists. Apparently. And the average Tory activist?  “Spittle-flecked, obsessively anti-European, immigrant-hating social and [a] cultural reactionary.” He was at it again last Saturday, painting EU referendum opponents in the least flattering possible light.

Can we turn the tide against this problem of hegemonia (or do I mean hegemania?).

Can we recognise that attempting to call any and all opponents racists, fascists and bigots – without good cause – is not just offensive but electorally incendiary? (Hopefully you might have read Paul Embery yesterday).

And can we be patriotic enough to yearn for minorities to feel that their country’s institutions (whether the US Supreme Court or the BBC or universities) are not closed to them?

And can we have the humility to know that victory and vindication are not 100% bedfellows. That political and other opponents who may have lost votes or circulations or professional prestige may still hold useful, insightful opinions and, occasionally, there might be some merit in listening to ‘the defeated’ a bit more carefully – and sometimes changing course as a result.

Let me end with one practical (and even a little sacrificial) implication of my deep worry at the balkanisation of politics being produced by hegemania. No vote in post-war British history has given me more delight or pride than that of the outcome of June 2016’s EU referendum. And I’m pretty convinced that a full implementation of the majority’s desire to leave the EU means we can’t be half-in and half-out. We should be leaving the single market and customs union if we’re to be fully free of the EU octopus – and especially its expansionary, judicially activist courts. But there wasn’t a 66-34 victory on 23rd June 2016 – the victory was 52-48. Nearly two years after the vote (partly because of Theresa May’s failure to deliver change on three key fronts (as I previously set out)) the poison in the national conversation shows no sign of dissipating. For the sake of the temper and popular authority of our national democracy I think it’s time to make a concession or two to the other side and that concession might be continued membership of the customs union. This doesn’t have to be forever. It could be reviewed within five or ten years – when the potential of trade pacts with the fast-growing parts of the non-EU world has (or has not) been established.

More generally – in combatting hegemonia – we need to work harder at understanding opponents.

Is it really sensible to vow never to be friends with parliamentarians from another party?

Are sometimes-annoying filibuster powers enjoyed by minorities really anachronistic or, actually, sensible brakes on what might be rushed thinking?

Should more comment pages be more like those of The (London) Times and less like echo chambers?

I’d love your thoughts. Please use the Have Your Say button at the top of this page to tell me what you think. It’s thoroughly depressing that the populist insurgencies of 2016 (and since – see Italy!) have largely produced deeper trenches rather than bridge-building. Hegemonia isn’t the only explanation for the deepening divisions (I’ll be exploring others in coming days) but it’s an important one.

The biggest changes were made 36 hours ago – to our homepage designs. They delivered a much simpler format on mobile (which allows readers to see much more content quickly) and a new nine-part header on the desktop (which ensures most recent content is listed for longer).

I’m really pleased with the new formats but am less sure about adding the approximate reading times to the title section of each blog. The aim is to give readers a quick indication of which pieces can be read quickly and those which need more time.

Please use the HAVE YOUR SAY button above to let us know what you think about any of the changes – and of changes you’d like us to make.

I set out that hope as someone who nonetheless sees much good from his tenure[1.  I should probably explain more but, just for the moment, I’ll highlight the advantage of America’s Supreme Court remaining more or less evenly-divided rather than becoming a 6-3 liberal court – effectively run by judicial activists who are too ready to over-rule democratic and minority views.] and was proud, last week, to publish the atheist Justin Webb’s sympathetic explanation for Bible-believing America’s overwhelming support for Trump. It was a piece of journalism rooted in old-style reporting and immersion in US culture (from when Justin was the BBC’s North America Editor – and to a significant degree since). It was part of the insightful and not-yet-complete ‘Believers in Trump’ series put together by Katie Harrison.

Justin’s piece sought to dig down into why Trump’s core supporters voted as they did – rather than lazily and uncomprehendingly condemning and misrepresenting them. Nonetheless, while we should seek to understand and even sympathise, I’ve long believed that it’s the character question which made the unrepentant Trump such an inappropriate head of the American state. The US President is, after all, much more than a head of government (Obama was a superb HoS, not such a good HoG). The Clinton campaign commercial – below – encapsulated the argument I attempted in Standpoint magazine nearly two years ago.

It shouldn’t just be Trump who gets his just rewards. His apologists in the Republican party and broader conservative movement should, too. Last night in a special (by-)election in Pennsylvania we saw a sign of the big-league shellacking that could be heading his way and, in this November’s mid-terms, the way of the Never-er-um-oh-go-on-then-Trumpified-GOP.

It was only ten days ago that the Wall Street Journal declared the President’s steel tariffs were a winner – in that same state. Hmmm. The Journal has had to report this morning that the Congressional district which voted yesterday and which Mr Trump carried by 20% a year ago – and, given its economic make-up, should have been receptive to his protectionism for the steel industry – may well have been lost to the Democrats.

This must be perplexing for the journalistas who argued that last year’s Republican tax cut package (a bonanza for GOP donors – coincidentally, the newspaper’s readers and advertisers) would reap such dividends on Main Street. Choosing positions that maintain a circulation of two million turns out be easier than finding the components of an electoral pitch that can mobilise tens of millions of people.

But can Trump be defeated by a reformed Democratic Party? Or will the party’s strategists return to their demographic tables – showing rising cohorts of left-leaning, non-white, university-educated, unmarried, secular, and largely urban populations – and conclude there really is no need to reach out to the “deplorables”. Reasoning that the three million lead that Hillary Clinton enjoyed in the popular vote will be automatically five or six or seven million tall in 2020 and will overwhelm any uneven voting patterns in the electoral college. Yes, that might be a recipe for electoral victory (although Dems shouldn’t underestimate new tech’s impact on their own (more clean finger-nailed) voters’ welfare) but it’s not patriotic. It’s not auspicious for good, one nation government.

Whatever one may think of Mr Trump’s steel tariffs (and I love how our English-speaking friends pronounce “aluminium”), it’s the first time many feel someone is trying to do something. The Left’s loss of the working-class vote is no accident. Former industrial era workforces know the people running today’s parties of ‘labour’ are more comfortable discussing transgender rights and university tuition than the price of energy or the level of immigration.

So what does a non-world-and-progress-go-away but pro-worker agenda look like? Three alternatives stand out to me.

(1) Don’t subsidise the better-off

One approach was set out by UnHerd’s own Henry Olsen in an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal this week (perhaps I’ve been too harsh on it?). In it, Henry, the Editor of our Flyover Country work (please see its spring-cleaned homepage), set out a range of measures on vocational training, a stronger safety-net and devolution of policy-making so solutions better fit with an area’s industrial heritage.

At the end of last year David Brooks listed other measures being proposed by reformist Republicans to address very real blue-collar anxieties. None of these ideas (which included faster forgiveness of bad credit and even of criminal histories) is an intellectual new-born, but they could be brought alive by canny political strategists.

In the UK, for example, a pledge by the Tories to oppose (most of) Labour’s tuition fees policy (and its subsidy of better-off university graduates[2.  Do read James Kirkup’s piece for UnHerd from last September for chapter and verse: “What is certain is that there’s a gap in the political market for someone to offer the poorest workers a better deal and better representation. Could the Conservative Party find a way to offer those workers something Labour and the trade unions don’t seem able or willing to give? That is, at the very least, something that Tories pondering the future should think about. Mr Corbyn appears to think he doesn’t need to do or say much for benefits claimants and the working poor, because his followers will take him on trust and his opponents will never dare to challenge him on that battlefield.”]) and instead pour the money saved into the kind of ideas identified by Brooks and Olsen would clearly communicate which party is on the side of those most hurt by disruptive technologies and emerging economies.

(2) It’s not Canada. It’s not Australia. Or other “allies”. The problem is China and it should face Trump’s wrath

The threat of those emerging economies and of one, in particular, is on Senator Marco Rubio’s mind. The Florida Republican refuses to defend Mr Trump’s blunt weapon that will hurt many other economies (once known by more internationalist, Pax Americana presidents as “allies”) when the villain is China.

Writing in the New York Times Senator Rubio spotlights Beijing’s currency manipulation, its use of industrial espionage in joint ventures with US companies and an unpunished tolerance by Beijing of intellectual property theft. The seasoned rulers of China are playing a long game and are willing to pay short-term prices (which many free trade absolutists refuse to tolerate or even recognise) if their dumping of excess production on world steel markets clears the way for strategic dominance and the long-term gains it would produce. Suggesting that 2.4 million US jobs have been lost to the communist state since China’s 1999 entry to the global trading system, Rubio calls for punitive duties on Chinese enterprises that behave uncompetitively or illegally.

(3) Why the rush?

And idea three is more philosophical than wonkish. Give up ‘free trade absolutism’ and most other kinds of absolutism. As much was recommended by Professor Niall Ferguson when he spoke to UnHerd last year. Yes, we can nearly all agree that – ultimately – free trade is better for all of us than protectionism. Almost always. In the long-term. That immigration – especially when controlled and targeted – can be of great economic, social and cultural benefit. Usually. We can also agree that technologies can’t be disinvented and most deserve to breathe. Innovation has brought huge gains – notably to women who, liberated from once back-breaking tasks by household appliances – are finally closing in on some degree of equality.

But let’s not rush. Let’s not be intellectually purist, assured that all will work well when the economic and social histories are written and that, in the meantime, we can afford to be careless, even mindless, about the transitional costs for those at the economic sharp ends. Governments are not as nimble as the innovators of Silicon Valley or the exporters of Mumbai. Giving extra time to evolve to arrangements that revolve clinically in economic textbooks may frustrate the Zuckerbergs or Davoskind but it’ll mean more support is in place – and trialled and tested by public servants – to ease the transition.

Tony Blair’s refusal to have transitional controls on immigration to Britain from the much poorer countries of central and eastern Europe was the best and ultimately self-defeating example of the absolutism of the brave new worlders. Let’s stop being labs for this kind of borderless utopianism.

Why did 80% of these defenders of biblical values vote for a man whose treatment of women, in particular, was similar to that of President Bill Clinton, of whom the same churchgoers – just one generation ago – had been so critical?

Katie Harrison went to the US in search of answers – from both critics and supporters. In her conversations with the latter, she found no attempts to excuse or defend the character flaws of the man that the Bible Belt has put in their country’s highest office. Instead, she saw an overriding determination – 40 years after the US Supreme Court made its infamous Roe Vs Wade ruling – to overturn the judgment that women have a constitutional right to abortion.

Abortion is not the only factor motivating white US evangelicals. The documentary itself, and companion pieces in the series, explore other motivations, as well as considering why almost no black churchgoers backed Mr Trump.

“Believers in Trump” is UnHerd’s seventh documentary. Listen to our five other audio docs here; below is Liam Halligan’s film profiling a transformational but largely unsung anti-monopolies campaigner of late 19th century America – Ida Tarbell. Sean Glynn produced them all.

An inspiration to challenge the monopolies of the 21st century

The unheard story of Ida Tarbell. Our video about the journalist who tamed the big businesses of her time

By Liam Halligan

The period after Britain voted for Brexit could have been a great opportunity for the Conservatives. The party had been given the chance to respond to a  a clear vote for change from the nation’s more disadvantaged communities – communities that turned out in numbers not seen in modern times. From her speech on the steps of Downing Street, on becoming Prime Minister, Mrs May appeared to ‘get it’. But the appointment of the ultra-cautious Philip Hammond as her Chancellor served as a better indication of her government’s trajectory. The policies that she inherited from David Cameron and George Osborne – overwhelmingly geared to the middle classes – continued.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY TWO: TAKING CONTROL

This could have been the moment at which Britain began to set out exciting plans to make use of the post-EU freedoms that its people had voted for. If, over the past 18 months, the British government had focused on crafting an intelligent immigration policy that would deliver control as well as the skilled labour that the economy needs… if it had taken advantage of low interest rates to build much-needed homes in the South and better infrastructure in the North… if it had drawn up a regulatory system to supercharge the competitiveness of the high-tech, life sciences and other industries of the future… if it had done even half of this, we wouldn’t look like such an enfeebled nation, obsessed with the terms of exit that the EU might give us. But Theresa May spent all of her political time on negotiations that are largely beyond her control, while failing to develop the policy freedoms that would have amounted to “taking back control”.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY THREE: HONOURING THE SPIRIT OF THE LEAVE CAMPAIGN 

Those mass and vindictive sackings of talented people during her first 24 hours as PM were another indication that she had no intention of building a government of the talents to guide the country through the tricky time ahead. Her lack of respect for her new colleagues was never more obvious than in the process that produced the 2016 Tory election manifesto. Ministers weren’t even consulted on the draft policies affecting their own departments. The result was a succession of screw-ups, such as the rushed-then-aborted plan for long-term care, and a host of own goals on vote-determining issues such as animal welfare. But it was through her dismissal of the issues used by the Vote Leave campaign to win that 52% of the vote that the May administration’s arrogance would be most costly. She decided she had no loyalty to the Brexit pledges made by Boris Johnson and others – pledges which led to the biggest ever vote in the country’s history. Her subsequent actions have not only given rise to the idea that Leave was secured on something of a false mandate, eroding its legitimacy in some eyes, but they have failed to incite much enthusiasm for Brexit beyond harder core sovereignty-driven supporters. By failing to talk about how Brexit would deliver extra cash for the NHS (if not the £350 million on the infamous bus) or, for example, the abolition of VAT on fuel, the Government has nothing to tout beyond changes to the colour of British passports as one of very few retail policy benefits from leaving the EU. But, then, the May operation always seemed much more interested in ensuring that Boris Johnson could not emerge as a leadership rival, than honouring at least some of the pledges which Vote Leave had employed to make Brexit more than just a eurosceptic enterprise.

And, so, we arrive at today: 26 February 2018.

For nearly all of the 614 days between 23rd June 2016 and today, news bulletins and newspapers have been full of Brexit coverage but it has mostly been of a speculative nature. This, in large part, is because Theresa May’s “Brexit means Brexit” soundbite was not a device to bridge the moment between her unexpected appointment as PM and the articulation of a concrete plan for Britain’s post-EU identity. It was an early-warning sign of the vacuous premiership to come, along with more empty slogans. More alarming was her promise of a “red, white and blue Brexit”: while vacuous, it also suggested that Mrs May was, at heart, a Remainer trying to be a Leaver – but wasn’t really getting it.

Today, however, is not another day of yet more speculation. The well-trailed news is of a concrete nature. But it’s provided by Her Majesty’s Opposition, rather than HMG. Despite having Eurosceptic voting credentials to match those of Bill Cash, Bernard Jenkin, Iain Duncan Smith and all those other Tory MPs they walked through the Commons voting lobbies with for all those years, Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, have been won over by their Brexit spokesman’s tenacious campaign to move Labour policy towards a softer or (Eurosceptics would argue) dirtier, less clinical Brexit. Sir Keir Starmer has, in the process, emerged as a hugely significant figure in his party and can claim that his willingness to serve on Mr Corbyn’s frontbencher has been vindicated. His decision – and that of Emily Thornberry – was taken a long time before the 2016 election result and the similar willingness to be accommodating that winning votes elicited from the once staunch but now silent rows of anti-Corbynistas on the Labour benches.

But Labour’s decision to support membership of a permanent customs union isn’t merely an interesting sign of what might happen if Labour were to win power. It’s very possible that Mr Corbyn’s new policy will become the nation’s. For while Tory MPs such as Anna Soubry and Dominic Grieve suggested a loyalty to their PM’s Lancaster House speech and its approach to Brexit before the election, they’ve been attempting to sabotage it since their return to parliament. By defying three-line whips and defeating the government in votes on Brexit strategy, they have shot through May’s negotiating authority. Her parliamentary weakness has given Brussels the upper hand in talks where they were already holding the best cards.

It’s clearly time to conclude that the gamble by Eurosceptic MPs, made in the days after the shock of the Tories’ general election result, has failed. They calculated that ousting Mrs May might produce a leader less committed to Brexit, or without the mandate that she could claim from her vote haul. While the risk they took was understandable, it ignored all of the evidence that Mrs May simply wasn’t up to the job. She had lost the unlosable election – throwing away the majority that, only two years earlier, David Cameron had secured in the unwinnable election. She had promised big on social justice but had delivered almost nothing. And no one should have been surprised. The shambolic Child Abuse Inquiry that she launched as Home Secretary wasn’t an aberration but too typical of her time in that ministry.

• Mrs May has not launched any major resets of tax, welfare, housing or infrastructure policies. In her tin-eared reaction to the Grenfell fire tragedy, she demonstrated that any sort of meaningful response was always going to be beyond her – even when the tragedy was impossibly stark.
• There’s scant evidence of policy change on the other side of the Atlantic either. Mr Trump’s recent tax cuts went largely to the wealthy and to the donor class interests. The swamp hasn’t been drained, but has proved its sticky hold on the politicians that it feeds.
• Neither May nor Trump has done what was promised on immigration; neither has a plan for the tech changes that are the primary cause of blue collar unemployment; nor has either shown any inclination to reverse the community breakdown that is atomising life for the old working classes.
• Nations such Greece may vote for change, but change doesn’t come. Europe is enjoying a recovery at the moment but the social damage caused by the extreme austerity and unemployment that disfigured the EU’s southern periphery for a decade will not be easily repaired. The quantitative easing deployed by the European Central Bank is exacerbating wealth inequalities in the long-run as the price for its short-tern benefits.
• The media, driven by commercial instincts, is getting worse. Pro-EU newspapers that didn’t see phenomena such Brexit or Trump coming have not reset their journalism to better understand the countries they report upon. Instead, they are telling their Remainer or anti-Trump readerships what they want to hear because, from the FT, to CNN, to the New York Times, there is commercial advantage to be gained on that path. But in pursing profit and running OpEd pages where, invariably, only one view is heard, the divisions that the democratic uprisings have underlined, have been intensified rather than healed.
• Intolerance of others seems to be greatest in those institutions that should be most open-minded – notably in academia.

Central bank policy has continued on the same dangerous path since 2016...

Blame central bankers and their easy money for our troubled economic times

By Douglas Carswell

As a result, the anger of voters isn’t abating. Look at Germany. Or Austria. Or most of central Europe. And, as a result, we have the Sanders and Corbyn phenomena. Stagnant wages for those at the bottom; the realisation that middle-class jobs – as well as working-class ones – are going to be disrupted by automation; the increasing power of the tech giants; monopolisation in energy, banking, supermarket and other key economic sectors. All these concerns are powering the resurgence of the left-Wing politics that Thatcher, Reagan and their followers assumed had been buried.

Since 2016 key newspapers have become more committed to their ideology - rather than more open

The world's two biggest business newspapers are not so different - and neither has learnt much from the votes for Brexit or Trump

By Tim Montgomerie

Within Britain, the Tory response cannot just be to put forward a different PM or a better EU negotiations strategy (after all, it might now be too late). No, there has to be dramatic policy change from whoever is No 10’s next resident. They could, by way of example:

• Build on the credibility of seven years of deficit reduction and borrow for major infrastructure investments in northern and poorer parts of the country
• Invest in the roads and broadband that are high return investments; scrapping projects, such as HS2 and Hinkley Point, that are products of powerful business lobbies rather than sound economics.
• Scrap the tax cuts for the middle classes and redirect them to the poor.
• Change the compulsory purchase laws so the nation, rather than landowners, gets most of the billions of pounds of windfall from planning permissions.
• Don’t match Labour’s tuition fees policy – that helps the already comfortable – but promise to prioritise vocational education and the early intervention schemes that really determine children’s life chances.

Eurosceptics will complain about Labour’s policy shift today, but by backing a leader who did nothing to build a broad case for Brexit and who failed to build an inclusive agenda that might have produced more goodwill to the government from Remainers, they have only themselves to blame.

Until there is a sense of national reset, the Government will continue to struggle. The weakness of its Brexit strategy is, ultimately, rooted in its failure to make a difference. Eurosceptics are losing because nothing has changed and they won’t be the only ones to lose if that continues to be the case.

***

In coming weeks UnHerd will be taking an in-depth look at the key factors that are preventing politicians, government machines, central bankers, media organisations and other influencers from delivering the resets that critical numbers within advanced democracies are seeking.

The practical difficulties of implementing the principle are wide-ranging, but with a quarter of Chinese citizens set to be aged 60 or over within little more than a decade, the care of the elderly is a big public policy issue – and not one the Chinese state has only just stumbled upon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, “the Confucian principle of filial piety – 孝 or xiào – is even enshrined into the nation’s constitution. Children who neglect their parents face up to five years in prison”.

The rise and rise of loneliness in the western world – the subject of one of Giles Fraser’s recent columns – is one manifestation of the inter-generational breakdown we are beginning to experience. “Beginning” probably isn’t the correct word – because at the other end of the age spectrum the effects are already advanced…

Source: NPR.

Putnam isn’t alone in coming to the conclusion that the collapse of the real social networks that surround, educate, civilise, motivate and safeguard children (or which – because they’re missing or have been emasculated – don’t) amounts to a big deal.

• Charles Murray, from the other side of the American political divide, reached similar conclusions in Coming Apart. In a book subtitled The State of White America 1960-2010, Murray examines the “erosions of family and community life” that are overwhelmingly evident within, and disproportionately affecting poorer communities (partly I’d argue because of economic change) and, he concludes, “that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness”. Those erosions have exploded into full public view in recent times – with the opioid crisis, the reversal of the “unstoppable” rise in US life expectancy and in the election of a certain hotelier to the highest of offices.
• David Brooks in his book The Road to Character challenged his readers to build lives that are characterised by deeds, values and networks that might be most likely to be celebrated in a eulogy rather than what would look good on a CV.
• In Steve Hilton’s More Human, the former advisor to David Cameron concludes “that we now know that the quality and style of parenting received by a child is a better predictor of success than anything else – including the economic circumstances of the family”. And, appropriately enough, those words and his exploration of the the importance of the family come in a chapter billed as all about inequality. “Appropriately”, because the beginnings of economic poverty lie in relational poverty.

These themes have fascinated me for nearly three decades. While I was at Exeter University (probably around 1989) I spent a summer in Cambridge for a week of teachings hosted by the Jubilee Centre. At the time, Church of England thinking (and, repeating a theme, “thinking” probably isn’t the right word) was summed up in the Faith in the City report.

FitC lacked philosophical distinctiveness. Much of it was simply a call for even more of the kind of government interventionism that produced the Brixtons and Toxteths of the Britain of then or, for that matter, the Detroit-ian Gothams of today. It reinforced the idea that voters had to choose between the Left’s (and Anglicanism’s) bigger state and the Right’s invisible hand.

The Jubilee Centre and its leader – Michal Schluter – offered something different. Something that found comprehensive expression in the book he co-wrote with David Lee in 1993: “The R Factor“. Inspired by the Bible, Schluter found evidence for private enterprise (in God as Creator and man made in his image) and for state action (the rendering to Caesar) but – most of all – he found evidence for a philosophy of valuing relationships. Noting, for example, the Bible’s repeated calls to care for the widow, the orphan and the alien (migrant), his “Relationships Foundation” recommended what it called a “triple test” for all of public policy:

“We want all parties to subscribe to this basic premise: that policy development, proposals for legislation, and government action should all be subject to a triple test – economic, environmental and social. The economic test has long dominated political debate. Recently, however, policymakers have begun to move towards a second test by recognising the importance of the environment and seeking the tools necessary to address that vital sphere of life in their assessments. We now need to go further and add to this double test the neglected third element – the social test… The social aspect of ‘The Triple Test’ is fundamentally about relationships… Public policy is never neutral and we believe that policy makers and implementers should always test their proposals not only to ensure, as far as is possible, that these do not damage existing relational links, but also to see if ways can be found to encourage people increasingly to connect with each other in the public sphere. Strong communities and extended families can build financial and social capital, increasing wellbeing and reducing long-term pressures on public spending.”

I can’t do justice to the wealth of research and policy tools that Michael Schluter and his institutional creations have produced over the years (and wouldn’t defend or subscribe to all of them either)… but in projects such as its “index” measuring the cost of family breakdown; the family test; Keep Time for Children; promotion of relational justice; and the promotion of better relationships in the workplace, Schluter has stood apart from the almost absolute materialism that has not only dominated the political Left and Right but which has too often captured the church and other institutions that should have known (and should know) better.

I’m not sure there’s much evidence yet from the public policy world that Schluter-ian relationism is on the rise (as is the case with another of my intellectual heroes Michael Novak). But free minds are still free minds even if they’re not victorious in what they argue for. And in Putnam, Murray, Brooks, Hilton and others – his ideas’ time may be finally edging closer, at least in the intellectual arena. I hope so.

Part one of UnHerd's 'Free Minds' series

Free minds: Sherry Turkle - humanity's advocate against the machine

By Nigel Cameron

They are the two giants of the global financial press.

One, acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 2007, is clearly of the Right. The Wall Street Journal has been a champion of the Republican tax cuts package that Donald Trump signed into law at the end of last year.

But if the WSJ can see no wrong in the signature project of the American Right, we need only cross the Atlantic where, in the outlook of the FT, we find a business newspaper that sees no good in the flagship enterprise of Britain’s Right – Brexit.

I exaggerate a little in saying “no wrong” and “no good” but only a little. Crucially, it’s the one-eyed character of both platforms on such consequential questions that is so striking and depressing.

First, America. The US Right and the Journal have signed up to an economic theory of tax cuts that has a status only one step higher than “written on the back of a cigarette paper”. The Laffer curve, infamously scrawled on to a bar napkin in 1974, purported to show that government revenues actually increased when certain tax rates were reduced – because of the turbo charge that they gave to the encouragement of initiative, overtime and other economy-expanding activities. But despite the four decades of evidence which suggest few tax cuts ever come close to financing themselves, the Republican Party has fallen irrationally in love with a theory that says there need be no conflict between an aspiration to be a tax-cutting conservative and a fiscal conservative. And it’s a deep love. Not one Republican law-maker in Washington has voted to raise tax in any meaningful vote since 1991.

As for team FT, they may have been a model of prudence when compared to the Journalistas on the topic of tax, but they can’t claim to be less ideologically rigid on the issue where their own journalistic qualities are being most tested. When it comes to understanding why more British citizens voted for Brexit than have ever voted for any other cause, party or candidate in the nation’s history, you might be interested to know that not one regular FT columnist is a Brexiteer. However, when he was interviewed for Radio 4’s Media Show, the newspaper’s Editor, Lionel Barber, insisted the FT mind was not a closed one. To prove this openness he named three pro-Leave writers who graced his OpEd pages but oh dear – it wasn’t much of a proof. For a start he named me – even though I’ve never written on the subject for them. Second was Iain Martin – who has been an exclusive columnist for The Times for 12 months. And, third, Jacob Rees-Mogg – but who doesn’t publish the Moggster these days?

We got closer to the FT‘s true attitude to the oh-so scandalous project of giving Britain the same self-determination that the vast majority of countries in the world enjoy (and most would never consider giving up) when a former Editor of The Economist wrote to the FT, saluting it for performing its “duty” of pouring scorn on the Brexit project. Bill Emmott’s dismissive was Tweeted as “letter of the day” by Mr Barber.

Curiously, we pay huge attention to the role of Fox News in corrupting American conservatism, and of the allegedly corrosive impact of the Daily Mail on British political discourse, but seem to have forgotten that the deadliest rot within movements and systems of thinking starts from the head. It’s not hard to discern whiffs of decay from within both the Journal and pink ‘un.

Surely any media organisations that failed to anticipate 2016’s unexpected shocks to the system, and which had been leading proponents of the policies that had helped to drive the political revolts, would be expected to have subsequently undertaken extensive soul-searching? But there have been few signs of it from either publication. If anything, they hold even more firmly to their former beliefs.

From a commercial point of view, neither the Journal or FT has much incentive to, for example, revisit immigration policies that provide rich readers and big company advertisers with cheap labour. Nor to question the property and monetary policies that have put rocket-boosters underneath the market wealth of the kind of people who buy jewelled Cartier collars for their dogs and splash out on the many other varieties of luxury goods sold from the pages of both papers’ glossy lifestyle supplements. For certain high-ups at the FT, 2016 will live long in the memory for a 65% jump in digital revenues from the paper’s How to Spend It magazine. What’s not to like about a year, and an economy, that delivers such largesse for the bottom line – directly from the 1%’s platinum cards?

Putting aside the commercial factors that inhibit honest rethinking, though, the key intellectual weakness that the FT and Journal share for the task of understanding our changing and anti-capitalist times is a lack of interest in the “unmeasured”. Just as tax relief for the family makes no sense to the Journal’s GDP-number-crunching-podcasters, so the behaviour of Brexit’s voters seems illogical to groupthinkers at the FT who, living in a world of day-to-day press deadlines and quarterly company results, can’t see much beyond the short-term economic costs associated with the uncertainty of transitioning from the stability of EU membership to a new, as yet unknown, arrangement.

Average citizens – and this is borne out by fascinating opinion polling – are less focused on the near-future. They, perhaps, can see the likelihood of an EU emerging that will make the weakness and drift of today’s Theresa May government seem trivial in comparison. They’ve made the simple but wise long-term bet that a 27-member organisation operating on 27 different electoral cycles will probably struggle to agree on anything much at all – especially anything important.

A greater degree of long-termism might not be the only thing Brexit voters could teach people who are willing to buy $67,000 necklaces. Three drivers of the votes of 2016 may be particularly deserving of more reflection.

Changes to family structure.

Family networks are fracturing. In part because rising house prices mean that many young families can’t afford to live near their parents. And what has been the consequences for this fracturing for the care of children and the elderly? Could it be that in wanting to put some limit on immigration and its effect on house prices – or at least by ensuring inflows become predictable – voters wanted to defend something that the FT and the economics profession never worries about in any meaningful way? What’s the economic value of your child’s gran being within walking distance? What has been the economic cost and implications for inequality of the wastelanding of so many working class family structures? And, fundamentally, what’s wrong with a society and an economics journalism that doesn’t seriously try to design housing or immigration policies that protect such relationships?

Security.

This may be the first and last time I ever quote Ted Cruz approvingly but I’d like to think the campaign commercial from his 2016 run (above) might have caused a few financial journalists to shift uneasily in their seats. Globalisation, immigration and sometimes doctrinaire free market trade policies have created huge amounts of insecurity for many poorer citizens of advanced nations. It’s easy for people unaffected (so far) by competition from Chinese manufacturers or Indian call centres to say insecurity is a price worth paying for cheaper consumer goods and services – when they are not paying that price.

The UK’s Vote Leave campaign “got it” in 2016 when it chose Take Control as its rallying call to people who felt increasingly “done to”. And another person who has “got it” is the economic historian Niall Ferguson. Talking to UnHerd, he argued that there had been inadequate political management of the pace of globalisation. While we might want to eventually end up in the same freely trading world that we are already largely immersed in, it might have been more judicious to have approached the destination more slowly and had the time to help victims of it to adjust more smoothly to competition.

And then there’s the nation itself.

The FT has its headquarters in London but most of its readers are international. They may appreciate their own territorial identities but probably not as much as the people that David Goodhart described as “Somewheres” – more rooted in their communities and with less wherewithal or interest to jet regularly to other places.

One of the greatest examples of national solidarity in modern times came when the Berlin Wall fell and the people of West Germany accepted a large tax hike to help pay for their fellow countrymen and women of East Germany to be fast-tracked through 40 years of economic falling behind.

When the people of Greece suffered austerity of a catastrophic kind from the euro crisis, did Germany offer similar solidarity or anything like it? No, despite the many ways in which the configuration of the single currency area has super-charged its manufacturing exporters. Exiting an artificial supranation in favour of something with so much more shared history, so many more shared institutions, and knitted together through familial interconnectedness wasn’t so dumb after all. This might well be proved during adversities in the years ahead – when Britain and/or the EU are called upon to make the kind of neighbour-respecting self-sacrifices that polities may depend upon to survive.

Adam Smith would not have made the same mistakes. He – through his own Moral Sentiments book and the overlaps of his thinking with that of Edmund ‘small platoons’ Burke – understood the importance of the non-material ties that bind.

But when the leading two newspapers of the business world are so indifferent to the social soils in which markets grow, it is no wonder that markets, market players and policy-makers can also become nine parts materialistic and only one part relational. They are obsessed with what the US commentator David Brooks has called resume values – values and decisions designed to power success in careers – rather than eulogy values – values and life choices of the kind honoured at a person’s funeral and in the remembering of the big, non-workplace choices they made for their families, neighbours and beliefs.

There is plenty that’s still brilliant in both of these newspaper titles. Unlike my colleague Douglas Murray, I wholly applaud the FT’s takedown of the President’s Club, for example. Saturday’s FT Magazine nearly always challenges and educates more than its rivals. Saturday is also the day when the WSJ shines. The Review section edited by Gary Rosen displays the intellectual curiosity that the daily comment pages no longer evidence very often. And, personally, I’ll never stop reading a paper which has the great Peggy Noonan on its books.

But, overall, mirroring the economics profession which has lost the humanitarianism of Adam Smith, the  footloose multinational firms that have no community roots, the tech firms which see childhoods as easy routes to greater market penetration, and the executive company boards under pressure to hit quarterly performance numbers, there is little commitment within the pillars of the capitalist system to the people-sized institutions which civilise, educate and care, or to the national identities which people are likeliest to make sacrifices for.

It’s a shame that the newspapers that should be so well placed to challenge rootlessness within capitalism are actually so very far away from even reporting the necessity of doing so.

THIS SERIES CONTINUES TOMORROW.

Yesterday evening's introduction to this series

I can’t believe I fancied David Walliams

By Tim Montgomerie

In this final instalment of our interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg it was to this subject area – of technology and the power of the giant tech firms that we (briefly) turned.

If Messrs Bezos, Cook and Zuckerberg etc are interested in the Moggster’s opinions we have one piece of good news and one piece of bad news:

• Answering Charlotte Pickles’ questions he showed no interest in action to cut the market share of any of these big firms.
• The bad news for them is he wants to end their special status. They must all bear the same legal responsibilities as, eg, other cab companies if (yes, we’re looking at you Uber) if they organise journeys for people from A to B. Equally online publishers, says JRM, shouldn’t escape the regime that newspapers must abide by, if online tech companies do publish (or ‘platform’) stories (after this week it’s no longer quite clear what, eg, Facebook’s plan is re news).

The two previous instalments of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s interview with UnHerd – covering our core themes – can be read by clicking on the links below. And if you want to really get to grips with the huge year that 2017 was for the California-headquarted economic and technological super companies do read a 15 point briefing from our tech editor, Nigel Cameron. “Big tech’s tipping point year” was published yesterday.

PART 1 OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH JACOB REES-MOGG

MPs should not vote against the party manifesto, says Jacob Rees-Mogg: I vote for foreign aid budget even though it's "idiotic"

By Jacob Rees-Mogg

PART 2 OF OUR INTERVIEW WITH JACOB REES-MOGG

Jacob Rees-Mogg backs Trump's tax cuts but warns him against protectionism

By Jacob Rees-Mogg

Yesterday he was backing workers rights and today we learn that – like most of us – the Conservative MP for North East Somerset is not prepared to defend the telephone number salaries of so many CEOs of big businesses. JRM notes that the vast majority of business chiefs aren’t even risking their own capital and whenever things do go wrong in their companies – as Harriet Maltby has fumed – there’s often no or little downside for executive managers. It’s extraordinary, Rees-Mogg tells our interviewer Charlotte Pickles, that shareholders don’t already have the powers they should automatically possess to ensure sense is restored to boardroom pay.

JRM backed Trump’s controversial tax cuts package which many (including UnHerd’s Liam Halligan) have warned will largely benefit the rich and worsen the USA’s already large federal deficit. Mr Rees-Mogg’s response to those criticisms? ‘You don’t make the poor richer by making the rich poorer’ and that tax cuts can pay for themselves because – as the economist Arthur Laffer famously argued – they unleash greater risk-taking and make work more attractive. It is true that most reductions in the tax burden do increase positive economic incentives. The evidence, however, is that most tax cuts fall well short of financing themselves.

If Jacob backed the Trump White House’s tax policy he warned that the President’s protectionist instincts risked creating higher prices for American consumers and a general down-turn in world trade  which could jeopardise the last 25 years of historic progress in reducing global poverty. He said we needed to do more for the casualties of globalisation and of economic change but closing our markets to the world wouldn’t help anyone. The White House is expected to make a decision on trade relations with China very soon and because the US President’s core voters believe the companies they work for don’t enjoy a fair fight with many overseas companies, there may well be political trouble for him in not acting. Henry Olsen blogged the polling numbers yesterday.

Tomorrow in the final clip of our interview, the subject will be policy towards the tech giants and how governments should ensure that the likes of Facebook and Google are our servants and not our masters.

The title of this article summarises one of the observations that Jacob Rees-Mogg MP made within an extended Q&A that he conducted with UnHerd last week. He said that MPs could rebel against the party whip on matters of permanent constitutional impact or on questions of personal morality – but in all other circumstances they should work with ministers to implement the manifesto upon which they were elected – even if it did include “idiotic” policies such as the Tory pledge to spend 0.7% of national income on overseas aid.

He also said that Tories needed to bring coherence to their policy agenda and at the last election the manifesto was an unconnected set of policies that failed to match the clear programme offered by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Talking to our capitalism editor, Charlotte Pickles, he also warned against any post-Brexit cutting back of British workers’ rights in any industry where labour has little power relative to employers. He added that Conservatives should be proud of their role in acting against the awful factory conditions of the early period of the industrial revolution when, inspired by Shaftesbury, the party fulfilled its obligations to the less fortunate.

The video at the top of the page covers the handful of political questions we asked him, and the video at the bottom captures a couple of religious issues.

Mr Rees-Mogg, a committed Roman Catholic, said he’d definitely prefer to be the Pope than Prime Minister – laughing that he’d then be “infallible”!

He described Christianity as “true”, defended the established church, and said religious belief should largely be private.

There are three more short videos from our time with the “Moggster” and they will be published tomorrow and Friday. Follow us on Twitter to ensure you don’t miss them.

Remembering Ronald Reagan, Henry Olsen – author of a new book on the former president’s philosophy – struck a similar note. While Mrs Thatcher’s transatlantic soulmate during the 1980s wanted to advance economic freedom and did, he repeatedly talked of social obligations, too – but is overwhelmingly remembered for the former rather than the latter. This is unfortunate because he worked with Democrats across the political aisle to build a consensus on key entitlement programmes and had, on occasion, to fight fellow conservatives who disagreed with his support for the tax rises necessary to sustain those programmes.

In the fourth clip of this interview, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss the gaps in the thinking of Thatcher and Reagan – especially in terms of relevance to the challenges of globalisation that we face today.

For all clips in the series click here.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

Today, the two biographers talk about how both reached out to poorer Britons and Americans. Thatcher won the support of fabled “Essex man” and there were “Reagan Democrats” in the USA. Every successful conservative leader of modern times has depended on such outreach for their majorities – John Howard had his “battlers” for example and Stephen Harper his “Tim Hortons voters”.

In remarks that are very relevant to today, Charles Moore explains that Mrs Thatcher was as interested in spreading ownership (and, therefore, wealth) as well as income. Sadly, because her government and subsequent governments did not build enough new houses the great rise in home ownership that she engineered with her flagship council homes policy has been completely reversed when measured as a percentage of the British population.

In the third clip of the interview, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss how the modern day disciples of Thatcher and Reagan misremember their heroes.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

If Tories and Republicans are to look to these two leaders from the 1980s it’s probably useful for them to be properly understood. Unfortunately, I’ve long believed many Right-wingers misremember Thatcher and Reagan, almost as much as those on the Left do. In particular, they remember the times when they were boldly ideological – against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union or in tackling striking air traffic controllers or coalminers. They forget how they declined to cut welfare or health provision in any significant ways and the times they occasionally raised taxes. Reagan would not be on the ‘right’ side of the tax pledge introduced by Grover Norquist and which helps explain why no Washington Republican has a voted for any tax increase since 1990.

Over the next six days, therefore, we’ll be running clips from an interview UnHerd conducted with Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph columnist and official biographer of Margaret Thatcher and Henry Olsen, Editor of our Flyover country theme and who, last year, published a new book on Reagan that attempted to argue that he was not the economic libertarian that some claim he was.

We begin with Charles Moore explaining what Mrs Thatcher meant by her controversial “there is no such thing as society” quote and Henry Olsen putting Reagan’s “government is the problem, not the solution” in context. And, wow, what a context. Reagan added, critically, “in this present crisis” to those words and the rest of his first inaugural included important promises to safeguard a wide range of government provisions. He was, as Henry’s book contends, a “New Deal” Republican – preferring to save rather than dismantle the systems of social protection that were often built by Democratic Party opponents.

In the second clip of this series, to be published tomorrow, the two authors will discuss how Thatcher and Reagan reached out to low income workers.

Buy a copy of Charles Moore’s book(s) via this link and Henry’s “The Working Class Republican” via this one. Other booksellers are available!

Additionally, the video below providers a three minute summary of the key arguments in Henry’s book.

Some of you might be scratching your head at the title of this entry to UnHerd’s under-reported series. Wasn’t our argument that blanket coverage of these two events had driven other stories, events and trends to the margin of news bulletins and newspapers? I can’t deny it. It was and is. But, as the contribution from Gisela Stuart (below) sets out, quantity doesn’t always mean quality. The huge media coverage of both Britain’s vote to leave the EU and of America’s most controversial president of modern times has been partial in key respects.

Let’s start with Gisela Stuart’s argument – which is focused on Brexit:

“If you are nurturing ambitions to win a gold medal in the 100m sprint, then don’t waste your money on a book which claims to tell you how to win a gold medal. Wrong question! Go for one which tells you how to run faster than anyone else – because, if you do, you will win that gold medal.

Asking the wrong question, or putting answers into the wrong context has been a feature of most of post-Brexit referendum reporting. It’s all been about what will happen if we don’t do this or that. Looming gloom and disaster is prefixed as simply not yet having come to pass. Good news is framed as being an act of Brexit defiance.

This is our chance of national renewal and rewriting rules in peace time conditions. Some things we have not addressed because we could overcome structural difficulties with short-term fixes e.g. our skills shortage and lack of productivity. Others, we had subcontracted much of the legislation and the debate to EU level e.g. worker’s rights, agriculture & fisheries, animal welfare, regional policy.

Our newspapers should be overflowing with reports on how this massive return of power should not just happen at Westminster, but be devolved to our cities and regions. That it is not, is a reflection of an amazingly illiberal liberal elite, which dismisses everything that does not fit into its preconceived mindset as being simply “delusional”.”

I can’t speak for Gisela but at least for me – and her text doesn’t contradict my analysis – the bias in Brexit coverage is not necessarily ideological (although it’s contributory). The biases are of the kind emphasised within the audio documentary on media short-termism that I presented in UnHerd’s first week. I argued then that a news industry that is hooked on Twitter, on serving rolling 24/7 news channels and beating daily newspaper rivals to scoops should not be allowed to allowed to set a nation’s agenda. Yes, accountability through the fourth estate is central in a functioning democracy but it shouldn’t become too powerful and so end up discouraging long-term planning by politicians, business people and even football managers. Interestingly, Justin Webb of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme appeared to sympathise when I interviewed the interviewer for the audiodoc. He half-joked that once Cabinet ministers and other politicians had appeared in the hot seat opposite him or his early morning co-interrogators, they should switch off TV/ radio/ social media feeds for the rest of the day and concentrate single-mindedly on the hard grind of making the government machine function.

In the coverage of Brexit across written and broadcast media, three of the biases that are effectively hardwired into nearly every branch of today’s current affairs industry are particularly evident (and exist almost regardless of any political disposition):

• There’s the short-termism, exacerbated by the introduction of numerous intra-day deadlines in bids to stay ahead in the hyper-competitive internet culture;
• There’s negativity because – as encapsulated in the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ maxim – shock and anxiety (often sourced from quotable and not especially authoritative contacts) will always shift more copies or attract more eyeballs than nuance or balance;
• And constant speculation because ‘scoop’ remains an average journalist’s favourite word – partly because more careers take off or become remembered for exclusives than because of thorough briefing-style reporting.

If you don’t believe my ‘tomorrow’s fish’n’chip paper’ assessment, I recommend you go back – randomly – to a podcast, newspaper front page or, eg, Channel 4 package from almost any time in the last few months and a high proportion of the revisited output is now largely or completely irrelevant – overtaken by real events within the UK-EU divorce process. I’m reminded of Lionel Shriver’s words within her confession of her very serious news addiction: “All the time and energy we squander on transitory, trivial shifts in governmental power, strategy, and policy might be devoted to learning about other places and other spheres.” Allan Mallinson suggested a lot more reading of history.

Fortunately the public hasn’t entirely succumbed to the media’s time frame for making pre-judgements. In one of the more interesting survey results from the last year…

• Ipsos-MORI found that nearly twice as many Brits thought Brexit would be bad for the economy over the next five years as expected it to be good.
• Over a longer time frame, however, of a decade or two there was a small lead for believing Britain would end up being better off.

While many in the media might give the impression that quarterly economic data or a run of clever parliamentary performances matter enormously, a large proportion of too-busy-just-managing-to-worry-about-every-twist-and-turn audiences are focused on the horizon. This must partly explain the relative stability seen in the regular revisiting of the Leave or Remain question by opinion poll companies.

‘Fake news is an exaggerated problem’ is the argument made in this short UnHerd video. The bigger problem is the excessive short-termism, negativity, hunger for controversy and over-focus on politics (rather than technology, culture, religion and other upstream powers) that arises when democracies, markets and societies become excessively fascinated by news and end up serving its neophilia.

If coverage of Brexit has been lop-sided, failing to serve what Gisela believes is “our chance of national renewal and rewriting rules in peace time conditions” (a chance which helps to explain why so many non-voters actually went to the polls in June 2016), there is also a case to made that the media’s approach to Trump has also been fundamentally unsatisfactory. Again (although in his piece for UnHerd today, Senator Tom Cotton enjoys a dig at the difficult-to-contest biases of his country’s rich, coastal media elites), let’s put aside questions of political bias for today and examine biases in underlying methods of the trade – biases worsened by the way new tech has joined previously isolated and therefore more independent-minded reporters together, encouraging herd-like thinking (as persuasively argued by Jonathan Dimbleby). An intervention by Niall Ferguson in September was especially insightful. In remarks to Mark Mardell on The World This Weekend, the historian noted disproportionate attention to what America’s current president says rather than what his administration does. While his Tweets are often repellent and invariably hard to completely ignore, they often don’t lead to any action. A focus on what Mr Trump says with his 280 character platform comes at the expense of what he is doing (or not doing) through his administration’s control of Washington machine. And it’s not irrelevant that hiring pundits to talk about Tweets is much cheaper than employing notebook-and-pen, hard-yards beat/ overseas/ specialist portfolio reporters.

The recording of Professor Ferguson is reproduced below.

Last year I gave up Newsnight. The PM programme was jettisoned as a new year resolution twelve months ago. In the second half of this year I’ve largely given up Marr. I no longer rush to read papers but wait instead for Tweeters I respect to recommend OpEds, features, investigations. It’s an application of the Sopranos approach to time management. I’ve never bought DVD box-sets until consensual reviews are in. It means I’m often late to fashions but I’m increasing the amount of time I can give to books, research, conversation and – I should acknowledge – podcasts. I hope this broader immersion allows me to see the faults of the news industry and makes me a more informed, balanced citizen. There are some very good things happening in journalism and I’m publishing a short guide to them later in the week. But it’s also a worrying time. Trump is attacking the media because he knows its unpopular and, almost uniquely, not much more trusted than him. Even Britain’s BBC could only muster trust from 45% of voters in its reporting of 2017’s general election.

One of the most extraordinary features of the post-Brexit and post-Trump world is how little the media has changed the way it operates (although some are definitely trying). The FT and WSJ are two of the worst offenders in this regard – and I’ll be writing more about both on Wednesday as this under-reported series continues.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

Equality and social justice

• Victoria Bateman: Society’s failure to protect the growing number of sex workers
• Shelagh Fogarty: The uphill struggle facing families with special educational needs
• Jenny McCartney: Women who live in terror of potentially deadly domestic violence
• Nicola Sturgeon MSP: Period poverty
• Henry Olsen: Rising suicides among young Americans
• Julia Unwin: The issue that terrifies politicians and affects every household – social care

Social attitudes

• Gavin Esler and Ben Page: The good news about our world
• Andrew Hawkins on intergenerational polling: “The most significant shift in values in living memory“
• Jason Turner: The normalisation of (very potent forms of) marijuana across the USA

Politics

• Senator Tom Cotton: Obamacare’s central feature has been repealed
• Deborah Mattinson: That thing that used to determine British election results – the economy
• Ramesh Ponnuru: How American liberals are prising the character issue from US Republicans

Economics

• Charlotte Pickles: The hundreds of thousands of doctors taking money from opioid-promoting drug companies
• Shanker Singham: Leaving the EU gains all the headlines, embracing the world gains none

Technology

• Graeme Archer: The increasing power of computer programs to determine how we live (and die)
• Emily Thornberry MP: The now proven ability of AI technology to outwit us

Global risk and stability

• Bernie Ayreetey: The battle against malaria – one of the world’s best good news stories in jeopardy
• Brendan Cox: The rise of authoritarian regimes within the EU
• Nus Ghani MP: Change in Saudi Arabia
• Julie Lenarz: The West’s failure to stand with its Kurdish allies
• Douglas Murray: Pakistan
• Ewelina Ochab: The UK’s failure to prevent and punish the crime of genocide
• Laura Taylor: 13 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo who are in need of emergency assistance
• Karin von Hippel: Syria’s peace process and the West’s absence
• Rasna Warah: The UN’s unethical Ethics Office

Defence and security

• Via Michael Burleigh: Nuclear terrorism (and its simpler bedfellows)
• Nile Gardiner: The free world’s turning of the tide against Islamic militantism
• Lieutenant-General (Retd) Sir John Kiszely MC: Successive defence cuts aren’t just endangering the UK military’s frontline
• Tim Montgomerie: Efforts by China (more than by Russia) to undermine Western democracy
• Rear-Admiral (Retired) Chris Parry: New naval technologies that will determine who rules the waves
• Robert Rosenkranz: The development of hyper-sonic missiles that could transform warfare and the balance of global power

Environment

• Ruth Valerio: Plastic waste

Media

• Sezin Oney: The mass jailing of journalists in Turkey
• Tim Montgomerie and Gisela Stuart: Brexit and Trump. (Yes, seriously).

Religion

• Giles Fraser: The growth of Christianity in China
• Geoff Heath-Taylor: The plight of Nigeria’s persecuted Christians

In each and every year some stories get a lot more coverage than others. Events where TV cameras are present – notably in America – will get more coverage than happenings in parts of the world, especially in the southern hemisphere, where journalists are absent. Stories which fit a political narrative will get hyped while ones that don’t will get ignored. Newsrooms that are short of people with scientific training or religious literacy will ignore issues they find ‘hard-to-understand’.

2017 has been a year in which the problem of the under-reported has probably been greater than in previous years. While Brexit in Britain and Trump (worldwide) have gobbled up newspaper splashes, online inches and broadcast hours, other issues have struggled to get the attention they deserve.

We’ll be doing our small bit to put that right from when we return on 28th December. A host of guest writers will be spotlighting issues that they believe deserve more attention. Emily Thornberry, for example, will be focusing on AI. Lieutenant-General (Retd) Sir John Kiszely on military funding. Nicola Sturgeon on period poverty. Brendan Cox on democratic retreat in eastern Europe. Douglas Murray on turmoil in Pakistan. Nus Ghani on events in Saudi Arabia. Giles Fraser on the growth of the church in China. From across the Atlantic we’re looking forward to contributions from Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton.

In the meantime – a very Happy Christmas to readers all over the world.

***

The brilliant illustration above was drawn by the award-winning Ben Jennings.

“We will also engage with and publish voices from the right. In an age of tumultuous change, nobody has a monopoly on good ideas.” Indeed, and what do Left and Right even mean today?

“We will get out of the big cities and the big institutions.” Because the economics, cultures and politics of medium-sized towns really aren’t the same as in international urban capitals.

And we will “stay with stories for the long-term.” Because what persists is more important than anything that hits the headlines today but is often, justifiably, forgotten within days.

Those four quotes don’t come from UnHerd’s launch day and our critique of a media class that is ideologically too uniform, remote from the values of ‘flyover country’ and biased towards what’s happening now, rather than what’s heading at us from upstream – but they could have done.

They actually come from Kath Viner, Editor of The Guardian. They were part of a ‘long read’, that she wrote in the middle of last month; “A mission for journalism in an age of crisis” and which, two days ago, was published as a podcast. Although the woman who had previously been her paper’s US editor did tell her morning editorial conference that she thought Trump would win, it’s good to see a newspaper recognising that newspaper cultures aren’t currently as connected to all communities as they should be.

Recollecting how her two-centuries-old publication has consistently seen opportunity for progressive reform in challenging moments in history (notably for the betterment of working class conditions in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre) she argues that The Guardian can use the current crisis to challenge the economic order ushered in by Margaret Thatcher. And she certainly does think our times demand serious change. She talks of the internet having been taken over by bullies, racists and mysogynists; of sky-rocketing inequality; of ballooning depression and mental illness; an “epidemic” of loneliness; and of the disappearance of public amenities like libraries and parks. She sounds like one of the 67% of people who think the world is getting worse (a finding analysed by Douglas Murray last Friday).

Her commitment to reorientate her journalism will be helped by the improvement in The Guardian’s finances. A series of Osborne-ian austerity measures (it practises what it doesn’t preach) have cut the paper’s losses in half and are on course to be eliminated in the next 12 months. And with an inherited billion pounds in the bank The Guardian is well-placed to continue to compete with the New York Times to be the global Left’s newspaper of choice.

With ad revenues collapsing because of the way Facebook and Google are able to offer superior targeting to advertisers, Kath Viner is pleased that the paper’s pursuit of voluntary gifts has been successful enough to avoid a compulsory paywall. In her essay she acknowledges periods in The Guardian’s history when advertisers have influenced editorial. Let’s not believe, however, that it’s as simple as devilish commercial advertisers versus angelic paying readers.

Will The Guardian embrace positions that it concludes are necessary to heal broken Britain if they risk upsetting their supporters? The danger in this era of dwindling sales with newspapers becoming more sectional than truly national is that they come to depend upon unrepresentative groups. When titles are fighting for their survival and cannot afford to lose readers at a faster rate than demography is already causing, it becomes tricky for The Times, for example, to do anything other than back Remain when that was the view of about three-quarters of your readers. When Guardian readers and supporters are enthusiastic about Jeremy Corbyn it’s commercially dangerous to suggest his Left-wingery could be a bit too Left-wing.

In my own dealings with Kath Viner I’ve found her to be interested in ideas from outside the ‘progressive wing’. We’ve spoken on a number of occasions, for example, about what a compassionate conservatism might look like. If her new approach to journalism leads her to believe that the welfare state was reckless to shun William Beveridge’s warnings about doing nothing to damage the relational institutions at the heart of community, will she be willing to argue that progressivism needs to be more Methodist than Marxist?

Time will tell but it was disappointing to learn at the weekend that Giles Fraser would no longer be gracing the newspaper’s pages when it’s relaunched as a tabloid in the middle of next month. It would be unfair to read too much into one change in personnel but I’m just a little bit suspicious that the religious Brexiteerism of the “Loose Cannon” was, perhaps, a little too religious and Brexity for a secular, Remainy subscription base.

But, just for the moment, Brexit is doing what membership of the European Union also did and is complicating lines of accountability for politicians. Most recently the government’s social justice agenda (or lack thereof) has been blamed on the time, energy and brainpower that the divorce from Brussels is eating up.

Alan Milburn cited Brexit when, last week, he resigned from the government’s social mobility commission.

Nicky Morgan, the staunch Remainer who now chairs the Treasury Select Committee, never misses an opportunity to undermine Brexit and told ConservativeHome readers that social reform had been sidelined because the government’s best brains were fixated on getting a good deal from Brussels.

And an opinion poll for today’s Independent finds the public in agreement with this ‘blame Brexit’ argument. 60% say important domestic issues are being neglected as a result of Britain’s most important post-war negotiations.

Sorry folks but it’s too easy to blame Brexit for this government’s general inertia and, with respect to the urgent need to address the acute social problems facing advanced western nations, it’s wholly unacceptable. It’s not acceptable because the whole ‘blame Brexit’ argument rests on the false assumption that a lot of effort would be needed to move one nation policy ideas from the drawing board to the take-off stage. Many are already on the runway and could be quickly airborne if there was the will.

Here are five policies that could be implemented by any one of the 95% of ministers who aren’t involved in the Brexit process…

1. Cancellation of middle class tax cuts[1. See David Laws’ recent UnHerd column for why increases to income tax thresholds now largely benefit better-off, two-earner couples.] and diversion of the money saved to improve the incentive structures within Universal Credit or to ease the council tax burden that disproportionately hits poorer families.
2. A green light for – as Sajid Javid, the freelancing Communities Secretary, had proposed – greater capital borrowing while maintaining tight control of day-to-day (or current) spending. This could help finance the houses that the south needs and the infrastructure that the northern and rural economy lacks (if you’ll forgive the slight over-simplification).
3. Reform the 1961 Land Compensation Act (as Nick Boles recommends in his ‘Square Deal for Housing’ manifesto) so that the surge in land value when planning permission is granted is shared more fairly between the private landowner and the taxpayer. Many Tory MPs would not like this proposal (because of the way it retrospectively changes the terms under which some investors decided to use their money) but it would almost certainly be supported by enough opposition MPs to become law and would release billions for investment in affordable homes and the infrastructure that is needed to support them.
4. Implement the manifesto to strengthen families put together by Tory MP Fiona Bruce and Tory peer Lord Farmer. Its eighteen simple and cheap policies would start to address the government’s current lack of interest in supporting the institution that the Pope has correctly described as the best educator, hospital and welfare provider.
5. And, finally, how about rehiring the welfare advisers to David Cameron who were summarily dismissed when Theresa May became PM? They had been working on a ‘life chances’ agenda and were ready to launch policies to address the paths to poverty caused by addiction, debt and mental illness. Their work was unforgivably binned when nearly all advisers to the outgoing PM were axed in an unnecessarily bloody clear-out.

In each of these cases the reason for inactivity is not Brexit…

In the case of policy one, it’s inadequate recognition that the benefit freeze that Philip Hammond left in place was proposed at a time when the rate of inflation was much lower. The freeze is causing real misery for many Britons who have to count every penny.

In the case of two it’s Mrs May’s unwillingness to sack her excessively cautious Chancellor and his support for the Treasury short-termist approach to the public finances. The failure to borrow now in order to increase the housing stock will only lead to higher housing benefit bills in the future but Britain’s finance ministry is too rigid in instinctively opposing preventive interventions of this kind.

In the case of three it’s fear of giving Jeremy Corbyn any kind of victory but if Mrs May is serious about housing being her number one priority she has a choice: reach across the aisle and deliver this grand reform or continue to promise big but deliver small.

In the case of four it’s simple lack of interest – throughout the Tory party – in family policy. At this year’s Tory conference in Manchester, for example, there was just one fringe meeting on the family (hosted by the Centre for Social Justice). If that meeting hadn’t have been held there wouldn’t have been anything at all on this most vital of social institutions at the conference.

Any why isn’t policy set five happening? The explanation is a deliberate political shift to woo a certain kind of voter. Mrs May made it clear, on becoming PM, that her focus would be the ‘just about managing’ class and, very regrettably, she shelved what might have been a great and honourable Tory focus on the helping the people at the very bottom, who are aren’t managing at all, or are hardly managing.

***

Post-the-Brexit-referendum when so many people who don’t normally vote went to polling stations in the hope for change… Post-the-general-election when the commanding Tory lead in opinion polls evaporated as voters signaled they did not want ‘stable’ but change… Post-the-Grenfell-tragedy when it was impossible to remain ignorant of the inadequate housing standards that so many have to endure…. Post these things it was and is vital that the party of Wilberforce, Disraeli and Macmillan rose/rises to the occasion. While it hasn’t enacted anything quite so regressive as its centre-right sister party on the other side of the Atlantic seems set to, the British Conservative Party has not yet come close to fulfilling the aspirations Mrs May set out on her first day in the nation’s top job. Most ministers are not involved in Brexit. Many complain at the control freakery of the Number 10 operation that stops them pursuing policies they’d like to. That desire by Mrs May to run the Whitehall machine as tightly as she used to run the Home Office is at least as much of an explanation for paralysis in government than Brexit. There are plenty of policies that could build the hope that is so absent at the moment – especially in the hardest-pressed corners of the country. And let’s not pretend that Brexit is the main reason that they’re gathering dust on Whitehall’s shelves.

Presented by Douglas Murray and produced by Sean Glynn – and which you can listen to, via Soundcloud, below –  examines our failure to remember the victims of communism, in the way that we, rightly, remember the victims of Nazi-ism.

Within this 35 minute production, Douglas travels to Budapest and to that city’s House of Terror museum. It is actually the location in the heart of the Hungarian capital where, first, the country’s fascists tortured and imprisoned their opponents and, later, using similar techniques and often against  the very same people, communists sought to neutralise their opponents. Very unusually the museum, open since 2002, records the horrors of the two periods in Hungarian history, by the two sets of totalitarian ideologies, with equal prominence. Having travelled to Budapest myself, a couple of years ago, I can testify to what Douglas recounts in the documentary – it’s a harrowing experience  to witness the parallel barbarities under the roof where they were carried out.

Talking to a wide range of people including David Aaronovitch, Anne Applebaum, Janos Horvath, David Pryce Jones and Giles Udy, Douglas explores why the communist ideology that killed many more people than Nazi Germany – and in many more parts of the world, from Russia to China and to Cambodia – is so poorly remembered in art, education or in public monuments and museums. He begins by noting that young people in Britain might overwhelmingly and correctly identify Adolf Hitler as a source of evil. Most, tragically, don’t even know who Lenin or Mao or Pol Pot are.

In modern day Russia, “comrade Stalin” is almost hero worshipped with 38% believing that the former leader of the Soviet Union was and is the most outstanding person of history. Douglas and his guests attempt to understand why communist leaders, at least as soaked in human blood as Adolf Hitler, have got away with their crimes. The common explanation is that, unlike Nazism, the communist goal of equality excuses those who allegedly sought it and helps explain why communism remains attractive to so many young people who wear ‘CCCP’ on their t-shirts or to British Labour Party leaders who attend communist-sympathising May Day gatherings. In reality, the pursuit of that goal makes communism more dangerous. It gives the thugs that inevitably lead red-starred regimes to have the ends-justifying-means excuses to kill, starve, torture and imprison anyone who gets in their way.

I also believe that there is a reluctance among some western governments to build museums to communism’s victims when, for example, they are trying to kow tow to what is still a communist regime in Beijing.

Tomorrow, Douglas will use his regular Friday slot to write about his documentary. Then, throughout next week, we’ll publish other features on this topic. We will, for example, note the unique nature of the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews and will also explore the appropriateness of attempts by the likes of James Bartholomew to establish a Museum of Communist Terror in London.

Other UnHerd documentaries

This is the fourth of UnHerd’s audio documentaries – all produced for us by Sean Glynn.

• The first examined whether a rolling, 24/7 news culture is damaging western democracies.
• The second – presented by Juliet Samuel – assessed the health of our capitalist economic system ten years after the crash.
• The third – presented by our technology editor, Nigel Cameron – looked at the case for (and against) Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg becoming the next US President.

You might also be interested in the short film we made about the pioneering anti-monopolies journalist – Ida Tarbell.

Please go to our podcasts and videos page for more – or follow us on Twitter to ensure you learn quickly about all of UnHerd’s podcasts, articles and events.

The six articles in this special series:

Peter Franklin: Why the price of oil has been so hard to predict – and why that might change;

Michael Burleigh: Wars and words: a crude history of oil prices

Michael Liebrich: $10 a barrel for oil? The age of the electric car is closer than you think

Charlotte Pickles: Soaring oil prices broke the economy, collapsing prices won’t have such a dramatic effect

Sean Oliver-Dee: Shi’a-Sunni relations are already volatile. $10 oil could make it even worse

Liam Halligan: Sound as a barrel: Russia is surprisingly insulated from the effects of bottom-dollar oil

• Could Mark Zuckerberg win the White House?
• And would he use Facebook’s huge presence in so many Americans’ lives to help him win?
• Would he run as a socially-liberal, pro-immigration Democrat? Or, like key directors he’s appointed to his company, would he more likely be a Republican offering low taxes and less red tape? Or would he run as an independent?
• With both of the main two parties experiencing challenging times (some would say decline, others would say stagnation or even breakdown), does America need a young leader like the 33-year-old Zuckerberg[1.  By the time of the next presidential election he’ll have passed 35; the minimum age requirement for this highest of the USA’s democratically-elected offices.], rooted in the transformational technologies of our time, to take it forward?
• Or would he choose to use the White House to stop Washington’s politicians from forcing the tech giants of Silicon Valley to surrender some of their huge market power?

While the documentary, presented by our technology editor Nigel Cameron, is framed around Mr Zuckerberg’s increasingly discussed exploration of a presidential bid, it is first and foremost an illuminating overview of how the hugely powerful founder of Facebook thinks – and also of the looming battle between Apple, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, Facebook etc – and the growing number of politicians on both sides of the aisle who feel the tech companies need to be cut down to size.

https://soundcloud.com/user-350933778/is-mark-zuckerberg-running-for-president

UNHERD’S ‘ZUCKERBERG FOR PRESIDENT?’ SERIES…

This audio is part of a  still unfolding series of articles examining the obstacles between Mr Zuckerberg becoming the second successive US President to have leapt directly from business and into politics with no experience of either electioneering or law-making.

The articles are all gathered here.

OTHER UNHERD PODCASTS

This is the third of UnHerd’s audio documentaries – all produced for us by Sean Glynn.

• The first examined whether a rolling, 24/7 news culture is damaging western democracies.
• The second – presented by Juliet Samuel – assessed the health of our capitalist economic system ten years after the crash.

Next week we’ll publish the fourth. Presented by UnHerd columnist Douglas Murray, it will ask why the advanced democracies do so little to remember the victims of communism – and if that failure is of consequence.

Please go to our podcasts and videos page for more – or follow us on Twitter to ensure you learn quickly about all of UnHerd’s podcasts, articles and events.

Journalism faces a twin crisis. Its economic problems are well known. The young person who is happy to spend £2 for a Caffe Americano from Starbucks or even £3.40 for a Strawberries and Cream Frapuccino Blended Crème will, alongside the paper cup bearing their scribbled name and the green Mermaid logo, also clutch a free-sheet like the Metro – if they clutch any newspaper at all. While they may be willing to pay for quality coffee they’re unwilling to invest in quality journalism.

This makes it harder for newspapers like The Times to invest in the campaigning journalism that saw Andrew Norfolk expose Rotherham’s child sex scandal. The economic weakness, accelerated by Facebook and Google’s hoovering up of advertising revenues, reinforces the other big weakness – a herd-like remoteness from how many people now struggle through their lives.

Headquartered in big cities like London, New York and Los Angeles the average newsroom has always reflected the values of metropolitan areas. Journalists are invariably better off, more secular, liberal and left-wing. But, as the last eighteen months have demonstrated, when few in the media anticipated – or even felt equipped to explain – the votes for Brexit, Trump and then (in huge numbers) for Corbyn, the gap between the reporters and the reported upon has become a yawning one.

Media outlets that are rightly so careful to properly promote more women and ethnic minorities have been largely blind to absences of deeper forms of diversity and therefore capacities for understanding in their teams. I recently asked a BBC editor if any of the people working on his flagship current affairs show had backed Brexit. He thought not. The New York Times admitted its failure to understand its country’s election partly reflected a lack of journalists with religious knowledge. In one of the most religiously observant nations on earth where evangelicals and Catholics can decide presidential fortunes that’s not an insignificant failure.

The gap has many explanations. There are fewer local and regional reporters. Media models that are working commercially are specialising. That includes high-end financial titles like the FT and Wall Street Journal or controversial, ideological platforms like Fox News – where anchors earn as much as CEOs. Neither connect or unite.

Talking to UnHerd.com, the new media platform I’m editing, the BBC’s Jonathan Dimbleby pointed to the contribution of technology. Journalists were traditionally isolated from their HQs and, without mobile phones, filed by primitive methods of communication. Today, with Twitter, every hack knows what other hacks have instantly concluded about a topic. Independent thinking isn’t impossible – but it’s harder. Dimbleby also points to a celebrity factor. He notes how top BBC talents are omnipresent:

“They have to keep talking. They’re wanted on television, on radio, online. How they have time to think for themselves – to have those background conversations with people who give them a unique insight – I do not know. I fear looking and listening, they don’t have enough time.”

It is regrettable that the BBC isn’t different enough from other players – its unique funding system should mean public service can trump ratings. It should be the ways in which a 24/7 rolling news culture encourages short-termism in western societies – where politicians are judged on latest polling ratings and businesses on quarterly returns. Because, rather than endlessly debated biases to left or right, the most damaging biases of ‘fast news’ are to the new over the important; to the negative over the positive; to the controversial over the consensual; to celebrity over the learned; and to politics over the cultural, technological and other upstream influences on our times (watch video).

I suspect that an unwillingness to examine the weaknesses of ‘fast news’ led outlets like CNN to encourage a shifting of blame to ‘fake news’. While there is much that is untrustworthy on the wild-world-web it was CNN and other supposed media grown-ups that gave Trump $5.6 billion of free coverage. They gave him that coverage because more people stopped channel hopping when his orange visage was on screen than when Hillary Clinton or any of his rivals for the Republican nomination were ‘live’.

We’ll make mistakes at UnHerd and having put our heads above the parapet I know those mistakes will be seized upon. But when even the BBC’s general election coverage was trusted by less than half of Britons, experiments in journalism may be risky but are vital. Our aim to master a few topics and by publishing diverse ideological perspectives we hope to gain audience trust. By doing less politics and more history we hope to provide more context. We’re looking forward to debating our approach and learning from an industry which still employs some of the most talented and public-spirited of truth-seekers. Hopefully, ventures like UnHerd, will encourage the industry to bring out the best in those talents.

***

(1) The most important things aren’t in the news. If they were, there’s no way Jeremy Corbyn would have come close to power in June or that Donald Trump would have been elected. Both were propelled to the margins of power or to power itself by forces that were barely or inadequately covered by the mainstream media. Like Trump, himself – as the video below argues – nearly all of us spend too much time consuming the output of an industry that is obsessed with the latest things rather than the most important things (with controversy over enlightenment, with negative over positive, and with the political over the technological and cultural). As well as reading the likes of The Spectator and Wall Street Journal, politicians with an eye to the future need to be immersed in Wired, Scientific American, history books and, of course, UnHerd’s “UnPacked” column and the deeper, broader trends Peter Franklin brings to our attention via it, each and every weekday.

(2) The scale of disruptive automation heading our way. A report by PwC estimated that 30% of current UK jobs, 35% of those in Germany, 38% in America (and 21% in Japan) are vulnerable to automation from AI and robotics by the early 2030s. New jobs might be created in time and/or huge new leisure opportunities opened up but how bumpy will the transition be? Nigel Cameron’s book on robots explores these challenges and our preparedness for them.

(3) The rise of China. Just because we’re familiar with it, we need reminding of China’s onwards march – upskilling its labour force, its infrastructure, its technologies and its military. Its latest big step forward is its One Belt, One Road project, investing over $1 trillion in 65 countries. Michael Burleigh wrote about the scale of Beijing’s ambitions here.

(4) Capitalism’s unpopularity (and the right way to meet that unpopularity). Data from Legatum Institute last week found that those favouring public ownership of UK’s water industry were 83%, of electricity 77%, gas 77% and railway 76%. Socialism was more favoured than capitalism. That taxes should rise to fund the NHS. But we can draw the wrong lessons from this? As I argue on The Feed; capitalism wasn’t that popular in Thatcher’s time either. The sensible way forward isn’t rhetorical defences of the free market system but policies that unleash its creative power and eliminate market distortions.

(5) Concentration of market power. Four airlines control 80% of US domestic market. Three drug stores account for 97% of drug stores. Walmart delivers 30% to 50% of all products Americans consume. Google and Facebook are winning 98% of all growth in digital advertising. Nearly $1 in every $2 Americans spend online is spent with Amazon. Despite what some ‘free market’ think tanks in receipt of big money from big business might have you believe, this reduction in competition is dangerous.

(6) Disincentives to work. For a long time during the 2010-2015 Coalition government, Conservatives worried a great deal about the disincentive effects of the 50% income tax rate facing higher earners, left behind by the outgoing Labour government, but under the Universal Credit benefit, claimants face a withdrawal rate of 63% as they move from unemployment to work and up the income scale. One rule for the rich and another for…?

(7) Property inequality. The London Evening Standard reported the chilling numbers. By the middle of last year, “private-sector rent has rocketed up from 49% of average pre-tax income to 62% since 2010.” Or another way of looking at it: “Six years ago, tenants spent more than half their income on putting a roof over their heads in only five London boroughs. That figure has now increased to 20 out of 32 in the capital.”

(8) The North-South infrastructure gap. The figures are disputed by Chris Grayling, Britain’s Transport Secretary, but IPPR North allege a north-south spending gap whereby there’s £1,900 of government spending per head in London compared with £400 per head in the North. Serious policymaking also requires looking at unfairnesses between cities and rural areas and politically-championed places like Scotland versus politically-neglected areas like Lincolnshire.

(9) The loss of ideas-generating institutions to the Left. 68% of teachers told the Times Educational Supplement they expected to vote Labour, 10% backed the Liberal Democrats, and only 8% chose the Conservatives. It’s not that different among other ideas class leaders. On the other side of the Atlantic, for example, 80% of political donations from ‘newtech’ goes to the Democrats. The Left is close to completing its march through the institutions – hence the importance of initiatives like George Freeman MP’s ideas festival.

(10) The American people elected Donald Trump to the presidency. We live in a time when anything is possible and when volatility in democracy – because of tired, sleepy political and media establishments – might be a bigger factor than any shift in any particular ideological direction.

***

The last two points – the idea of a leftwards lurch in ideas-generating institutions and volatility in democracies were both discussed by UnHerd’s political jury.

A kid on a bike throws a brick through your car window – you could phone the police but they won’t come.

But the police would appear if you tried to punish the kid yourself in any way – you mustn’t ‘touch’ kids.

You could go to see the parents but they might well be on drugs or drunk.

And if you do react in some way, you can expect a gang of kids to come after you – and, this time, the bricks will be aimed at you and your house.

Your car has had a brick through its window and what do you do? You do nothing.

I paraphrase (and do so below, too) but that was “Greg” talking about the breakdown of law and order in his neighbourhood in Manchester Wythenshawe.

And then there was “Chris” – a “land pirate”, who with other homeless folk had become squatters in a disused cinema in Manchester’s city centre:

What’s not to like compared to living in a door way?

Here, I’ve got four walls. The front door closes. The door locks. The duvet doesn’t get pissed on by passers-by. You’re safe from the rain. The running water in the squat is hot. There’s light. There’s electricity.

Wouldn’t you? Or would you wait, in your cold, wet, windswept doorway, for the government to finally realise that the tens of billions of taxpayers’ money it gives to private landlords would be much better spent – upstream – building affordable houses? And wait, too, for Theresa May to deliver on immigration control? Currently 7 years late (which is a lot of nights of rough-sleeping).

And what’s your message to the gang in the subway who voted for Brexit?

We thought things would change.

F**k all has changed.

We thought the Polish who work cheap and take our jobs would be kicked out because this is our estate – not theirs.

[Laughing] Get here now Trump!

These stories from the frontline are featured in “Britain’s Forgotten Men” – four short films made for BBC3 by independent film-maker Dan Murdoch. If you have access to the iPlayer, do please watch them. They’re barely an hour long in total. Some will see the documentary as left-wing – and it does constantly mention/blame public spending and welfare cuts. But this four-parter could also reinforce a conservative’s worldview – because it reminds us that government isn’t good at much. Not good at neighbourhood policing, controlling immigration, building affordable homes, looking after children. The political conclusions are not really the point, however. “BFM’ is a portrait of people who – they complain – are worse off than other social groups with recognised status. Their lives are very tough and they see little evidence that they matter to anyone with economic or political power.

Look above you…

– says “Greg” near the end of film four –

There’s a crack in the ceiling. It’s getting bigger. It’s only going to get much worse until someone does something.

That’s Greg’s way of saying what Matthew Parris has written (within a different context):  “the political undergrowth is tinder-dry”.

From the Right we have recruited two of the most potent campaigners and strategists to have emerged from Canada and Australia:

• Patrick Muttart; a former strategist for Canada’s Conservative Party and as key to Stephen Harper’s early victories. He has worked as a corporate affairs consultant and executive in the United States, Hong Kong and Australia.
• And Peta Credlin; Chief of Staff to former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and now an anchor for Sky News Australia and political columnist for the Sunday Sun-Herald, Sunday Telegraph and Queensland’s Sunday Mail.

And from the Left, we have two very thoughtful Brits:

• Sunder Katwala; the director of British Future, a non-partisan think-tank focused on integration and immigration as well as identity and opportunity. Sunder was previously General Secretary of the Fabian Society from 2003 to 2011 and a journalist with The Observer.
• Steve Richards; a distinguished political commentator, now a lead presenter for BBC Radio’s Week in Westminster. He also hosts a one man political show, Rock’n’Roll Politics.

Ever so often we’ll ask each of them to answer a handful of big questions. The first three are:

• Are advanced nations at a political turning point, with public moods favouring bigger state, bigger spending, more economically interventionist policies?
• Is the advance of left-wing politicians like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders down to economic issues or are we seeing the long-term fruits of a gradual left-liberal ascendancy in education, arts and entertainment?
• Is voter volatility, reflecting general dissatisfaction with the way politics has long been conducted, more significant than a shift to left, right or any other ideological direction?

We’ll post the answers on a daily basis, beginning today with their contrasting answers to question one, on whether the rise of the Left is a turning point. Click here to read them. [Update: answers to question two on the culture wars].

Brits and Americans are united on one thing – 80% of respondents on both sides of the Atlantic agreed that terrorists were among the most dangerous people in the world today. No surprise there. But after that? ComRes presented a list of other possible ‘baddies’. The full list was…

• Big businesses… or High-taxing governments;
• Capitalists… or Communists;
• Fake news;
• Left-wing unions, politicians and campaigners… or right-wing pundits, politicians and donors;
• Military leaders;
• Religious leaders;
• And then Terrorists.

The main reason for our asking was to establish the popularity/unpopularity of left-wing versus right-wing flag-wavers. The overall totals suggest little difference in either suspicion of the two ideological camps or, indeed, between the two countries. 20% of Americans saw right-wingers as dangerous and, very nearly the same, 18% saw left-wingers as dangerous. The numbers in Britain were 17% and 16% respectively. As with the data we published last week, however, the totals hide a significant generation gap…

• Within Britain, 27% of those aged 65+ see left-of-centre unions, politicians and campaigners as most dangerous – but only 10% of 18 to 24 year-olds say the same. All of the Tory efforts in the recent general election – focusing, for example, on Jeremy Corbyn’s historical links with IRA paramilitaries – did, indeed, fall on stony ground.
• In contrast 24% of young Brits saw right-wingers as “most dangerous” and only 11% of older Britons agreed.

The numbers from America were, perhaps, more surprising…

• Older Americans are significantly more likely than younger Americans to consider political ideology dangerous: 34% of those aged 65+ say that right-wing pundits, politicians and donors are dangerous in the world today compared to only 14% of 18-24 year olds.
• On left-wing unions, politicians and campaigners, 22% of those aged 65+ say they are dangerous in the world today, compared to 12% of 18-24 year olds.

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ComRes interviewed 2,059 UK adults on 7th and 8th August. 1,011 US adults were interviewed between 7th and 9th August. Both surveys were conducted online.