At the time, the British Isles were occupied by multiple, sometimes warring tribes, and it wasn’t unusual for someone to try and kill you just for being on their territory. By contrast, today, the governing assumption for modern Western regimes is that no such rivalry is ever legitimate.

We got to this point via several centuries of tribalism-lite, in the form of nation-state patriotism, which climaxed in two disastrous world wars. After that, a consensus formed, with some justification, that even this much in-group preference was too dangerous. Instead, leaders dreamed that we might one day make separate nations obsolete, end all tribalism, and treat every human on the planet as, at least potentially, a member of the same tribe as ourselves.

But one of the most ironic consequences of this approach has been to set Britain on a retrograde path, not to the patriotic recent past, but to something akin to the Britain of St Wilfrid. More plainly: after half a millennium of growing ever more egalitarian and individualistic, Western nations are becoming more tribal — including some among ethnic majorities. And though opponents confuse this with nationalism, tribalism is harder, fiercer, and potentially much more violent.

By global standards, British culture has long been highly individualistic. Though this hasn’t historically always ruled out excluding someone on some ground or other, most ordinary Brits would shake their heads at (for example) preferring someone less qualified for a job purely on the basis of ethnic solidarity. But this may be changing. Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League was the first warning: more recently, phenomena such as Raise the Flags, and the Patriot Platform protest in Portsmouth last week, suggest English in-group ethnic preference is on the rise.

If the administrative class is spooked, it should be: this may point to a future in which they, not nation-states, are obsolete. For such a world would be governed not by managers, procedures, or “rule of law” — that is, by the current administrative class — but by warlords.

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How Britain became Zombieland

By Mary Harrington

According to the movement’s leader, Daniel Thomas, the catalyst for “Patriot Platform” has been the years-long refusal by those committed to internationalist governance to control Britain’s sea borders — and the increased threat posed by an influx of unvetted men to British women and children. But if this has been the most recent spark, the fading of nation-states long precedes the small boats crisis. It was a governing theme of the Brexit debate, and has, in fact, been a policy objective (at least for some) ever since the Second World War if not longer.

In this utopian vision, we’d all join John Lennon in imagining there’s no countries. In the place of these racist, bellicose entities, we’d have an architecture of international governance that would bring about world peace by removing any need for nationalism and letting us all live as one, free from petty tribalism.

But if today this vision is bitterly contested, the irony is that both sides in this clash mistake the terms of the contest. For the internationalists, the villain to be defeated is still nationalism, identified (not unfairly) with a racially inflected model of nation-state rivalry that, historically, did cause two global wars. Those on the other side, meanwhile, long to return to nation-state patriotism. This, too, is understandable: for centuries this was the normative, unremarkable foundation of policy, governance, and national identity as such.

But what’s actually happening is far stranger than a battle between globalists and nationalists. The globalists already won the battle, comprehensively, and nation states really are obsolete. But their victory comes with an un-anticipated sting in the tail. For in the aftermath, what we’re seeing is not the utopia envisaged by John Lennon, but rather a return to something more like the hyper-local tribalism of Dark Ages England.

Perhaps the single most catalytic new factor, across the board, is the digital revolution. Smartphones make migration — both legal and illegal — easier and more appealing, while translation apps and long-distance calling make integration less necessary. The writer Fred Sculthorp has described the effect of the resulting transformation in areas such as Dagenham, where formerly homogeneous working-class polities have become dizzyingly pluralistic and at times alienated patchworks.

Then, too, as minorities cluster, the resulting enclaves may extend in-group preference beyond specialist groceries or religious centers, to alternative economies or disciplinary systems — sometimes in contravention of local law. There is, for example, some evidence that the so-called “grooming gangs” are one manifestation of an ethnic mafia, analogous to the Sicilian one, whose bedrock is Pakistani-heritage clan-based networks. Another notable such mafia is Albanian, while cash-in-hand car washes that fall foul of modern slavery laws tend to be Romanian-controlled, and people-smuggling into the UK is controlled by Kurdish networks.

This isn’t to imply that there is something uniquely innocent and blameless about Brits by comparison. This country has its share of home-grown organized crime “firms”: think of the Krays. It’s more to contrast both the legal and criminal versions of such ethnic in-group preference with the normative view across ordinary Brits and the government alike; namely, that ethnic nepotism is at best low-status, if not outright immoral.

The sociologist Eric Kaufmann has critiqued the official version of this as “asymmetric multiculturalism”. But a less grievance-y term might be “de-tribalization”. This isn’t just a British cultural trait, but a key element of being “Western” as such: a greater than usual willingness to take any individual on their own terms, rather than simply as a representative of their group or tribe.

This works well enough, as long as most of your citizens are similarly detribalized. If they are, you can perhaps aspire to what the Marxist philosopher David Graeber called a “utopia of rules”: a system of neutral procedures that frees all of us from messy partiality and decision-making (even if it also causes stagnation). In rather less critical terms, this neutral realm of procedure is what New Labour’s famous “British Values” image refers to as “the rule of law”.

But what if you share your utopia of rules with large minorities who still adhere to in-group preference? Then, instead of working neutrally for everyone, your rules risk degrading to a thin veneer over a morass of competing tribal interests. The former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew stated this problem starkly, when he rejected British-style democracy as unsuited to Singapore. “In multiracial societies,” Yew said, “you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

Until recently, with a few widely-condemned exceptions, the British ethnic majority has largely clung to de-tribalized legal and cultural norms despite a rapid uptick in the country’s ethnic pluralism. But this is clearly no longer the case. Again, the internet plays a part: whatever your heritage, all the incentives of clickbait tend not towards broad common culture, but away from it, into sometimes-adversarial in-group identities. These are then consolidated on the most reductive possible lines, and intensified by selective sharing of rage-bait stories.

The result has been a rapid propagation of tribalistic identities, including among previously individualistic normie Brits. Patriot Platform and Raise the Flags likely see themselves as restoring historic nation-state norms. But in practice they’re roaring back past patriotism, becoming a vehicle for in-group mobilization, among working-class men who feel their government now treats them as just one tribe among many, in a place that used to be “theirs”.

This emerging landscape has been acknowledged for some time, by British policing in practice. Last election’s “Gaza Independent” agitators and political actors, such as the wheeler-dealer Akhmed Yakoob, hint at the shape of things to come. Similarly, the decision last year to block a Ukip march through Muslim-majority Tower Hamlets was criticized as “two-tier”, but was clearly a pragmatic effort to keep one tribe from infringing the territory of another, hostile one. The same logic likely informed officials’ decision last year to block a notoriously tribalistic group of Israeli football fans from attending a match in a Muslim-dominated area of Birmingham known for strong views on Gaza.

The efforts by Birmingham Council to impose heavy penalties for “flagging” have likewise been denounced as un-patriotic. But in a place such as Birmingham, where less than half the population is white British and districts tend to self-segregate, suppressing this practice reads less as anti-government, than as a last-ditch attempt to slow the Ulsterization of a major city.

Daniel Thomas, meanwhile, seems out to accelerate the Ulster dynamic: Patriot Platform is reportedly inspired by tactics Thomas witnessed in Belfast. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. If this gyre continues to widen, we’ll be looking forward to a new kind of localism: not the plethora of mayors Andy Burnham seems to want, but something (at best) more like the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages, with territory controlled by whoever can command enough loyalty from fellow-tribesmen to hold it. And this is a starkly different personality profile from what we tend to think of as an ideal modern leader. A world of warring tribes is probably less destructive in absolute terms than rivalrous nuclear-armed nation-states, but it doesn’t run according to the same calculus as a de-tribalized, peaceful one.

Notably, fitness to be a tribal leader is very different to fitness for de-tribalized governance. Guardian columnists can express puzzlement at the idea that men might have domestic violence convictions, and also answer (in Tommo’s formulation) a call to “Protect our country! And more importantly our women and children!”. But, from a tribalistic perspective, there’s no conflict between protecting in-group women from rival men, and (perhaps) abusing those women. Much has also been made of Thomas’ conviction for attempted kidnapping, which is obviously bad from a de-tribalized perspective. But a tribal leader’s task is to mobilize in-group men to protect the tribe, and, in that context, a capacity for strategic violence is not automatically a demerit.

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By Wessie du Toit

Whatever you think of his project, footage of Thomas makes clear that he is a natural leader, on a template that would once have found an easy home in the military. The discipline shown by his group so far suggests he inspires loyalty. If the practices he is now modeling spread among white Englishmen, it’s not unthinkable that the country of the future really could look more like that of the past. Not, that is, precisely the “civil war” some predict, but a place fractured even more dramatically than envisaged by the nationalist leaders of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Perhaps, we might speculate, along lines more closely resembling the Heptarchy, or still more minutely into fiefdoms controlled by leaders on the Daniel Thomas or Akhmed Yakoob template.

In fairness to Thomas, he’s insisted his end objective is to “restore order” and to bring his followers to the voting booth. But his critics aren’t wrong to sense that, against this, the sheer intimidating number of black-clad men he can mobilize evokes a more pre-modern kind of power. Officials and civic nationalists are right to be frightened. A country where re-tribalized working-class men are turning out in large numbers, at the bidding of a telegenic leader with no loyalty to the regime, is one in which the universal, neutral “rule of law” is on borrowed time.

And the infuriating thing is that none of this has to happen. Our political class can choose to stop playing John Lennon Pretend at any moment, and take pragmatic Lee Kuan Yew-type action to restore order. My sense is that “Danny Tommo” would probably consider this acceptable. As a woman, and a mother, I would too. It’s my desperate hope that our country manages to shed its ideologues, and change course in such a direction, before we find ourselves back in St Wilfrid’s world.

Some of these spectators give the players and their team manager some really bad advice. They cheered Team EU when they were battling Donald Trump over his trade tariffs. I will never forget the headline in The Economist the week after Trump imposed his tariffs in April last year. Under the tag “Trade Fight Club”, the headline read: “The EU’s response to Donald Trump’s tariffs seems to work.”

What actually happened is that the EU, wisely, chose not to fight. Ursula von der Leyen famously caved in when she signed a humiliating trade deal after making a pilgrimage to the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland three months later. The occasion was cringeworthy from start to end, including the obligatory thumbs-up group photo with Trump. But the EU delegation had no choice.

Six months later, the European Parliament briefly contemplated an insurrection, but stopped when it peeked over the cliff. In January, after Trump threatened to invade Greenland, and when the US Supreme Court declared Trump’s tariffs to be illegal, Brussels suspended the ratification of the EU-US trade deal. But after Trump threatened the German car industry with even higher tariffs, the MEPs, too, caved. Last week, they voted it through.

Right now, the EU trying to play a similar game with China, and is getting similarly bad advice.

The Europeans are angry about how China plays. Sabine Weyand, the EU’s outgoing director general for trade, compared the Chinese strategy to putting a stinking fish on the negotiating table. She was referring to new Chinese threats, like export controls on rare earths, or a ban of the sale of semiconductors to the EU. The EU is dependent on both. Whenever the EU tries to impose some retaliatory tariffs on China, that stinking fish returns to the table.

The EU has a point here. China’s economic policies are the biggest source of global economic imbalance right now. China’s exports are booming, but China represses domestic consumption. You can see this in EU-China trade data over recent years. Chinese exports to the EU have been going up, and Chinese imports from the EU are actually falling. And this year, it has all got dramatically worse. From January to April, China’s trade surplus with the EU went up by 26% compared to the same period in 2025. What happened is that US tariffs led China to divert some of its exports from the US to Europe.

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China’s currency, the yuan, does not float freely like the dollar, the euro or the pound. China keeps it steady against the dollar. When the dollar weakened against the euro after Trump came to office, so did the yuan. That means Chinese products are even cheaper than they were before. And European goods are even more expensive.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s often-undiplomatic chief diplomat, likened Europe’s situation with China to that of a patient battling cancer. “If you have a very difficult disease, if you have a cancer, you have two choices. Either increase the morphine or you start chemotherapy.”

Europeans should be careful not to be too sanctimonious. This is essentially a barfight between two mercantilists. The EU has been playing the same game. During the euro crises of the last decade, the EU, too, devalued its currency and started to run large trade surpluses against the rest of the world. The EU’s lament has a certain “I stole it first” quality.

Right now, China is winning this trade war, just as Trump won his own trade war against the EU. The reason is the same in both cases. The EU is too dependent on both of them — on the US for defense, and on China for critical imports. The EU is not in a position to retaliate. This is not due to a lack of policy instruments. Some have never been used, like the “Anti-Coercion Instrument”, which would give the EU discretionary powers to retaliate against China without bureaucratic obstacles.

The reason the EU cannot do this is not just a matter of political division, or weakness, but because of economic dependencies. We caught a glimpse last week, when the EU did the very opposite of what its cheerleaders demanded. Rather than imposing new tariffs on China, it lifted them. As Bloomberg reported, the EU had previously imposed sanctions against Yangzhou Yangjie Electronic Technology, a semiconductor company, but decided to lift them after German car makers warned about supply chain chaos.

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Welcome to the age of uncertainty

By Wolfgang Munchau

This pattern keeps repeating itself. The Europeans really wanted to stick it to Trump. And to the Chinese too. But they could not do it, because the European car industry employs a reported 13.2 million people in the EU, according to data collected in 2022.

The seeds of this dependence were sown in the 2000s and 2010s. The European car industry, aiming to optimize its supply chains, committed the critical error of making itself reliant on China. As so often, Europe chose short-term gain over long-term resilience.

The first signs of stress became apparent during the pandemic, when the German car industry suffered an acute shortage of semiconductors from China. At the time, everybody was talking about supply chain diversification, but nothing much has happened. After the pandemic, industry returned to business as usual.

China has several other strangleholds in this sector. Car batteries are one example. This is a technology in which China is years ahead of the Europeans. China has an almost total monopoly for rare earth magnets, which are critical ingredients for all electric engines. Your windshield wipers would not work without them, nor would your F-35 fighter plane. Solar panels are another market that China has cornered.

The way many people think about globalization is antiquated. We no longer live in a world of factories that build goods from scratch, and from local products. Rather, modern trading relationships are a complex network. European-made cars are full of Chinese components. The bilateral trade balance that everybody gets so upset about does not tell you what you need to know. They do not capture these network effects and all their inter-dependencies. The important question is not how much China sells us, but how many Chinese imports are used in our exports to the rest of the world, and whether we have alternative suppliers. Measuring network effects is a technically complex task, as electrical engineers know only too well. The global economy is no less complicated than an electric network, and yet we are measuring it with the equivalent of an abacus.

Even Trump had to compromise over his tariffs against China, for the US was dependent on China for rare earths. Thanks to outsourcing, the US has a much smaller share of industry in its the economy than the EU does. Its industry is also less dependent on China for inputs, but its defense industries need rare earth products from the People’s Republic. The dependency goes both ways. China, too, is dependent on Western markets, of which the US and the EU are the largest.

The EU differs from the US only in that its inter-connection with other economies is stronger, and the cohesiveness among EU countries is weaker. You can have as many international trade economists, think-tankers, and journalists supporting Team EU as you wish. If Friedrich Merz and Giorgia Meloni turn up to a key summit and say no to tariffs, the game is over before it even started.  This is not a matter of political will, but one of economic reality; Merz or Meloni have no other choice.

Instead of hyperventilating about China or Trump, then, the EU would be better off solving its underlying problems of supply-chain dependence. Japan managed to reduce its dependence on China for rare earth, after Beijing imposed an export ban following a 2010 dispute over islands in the East China Sea. Instead of pondering yet another discriminatory trade instrument the EU will never use, why not chart out a binding 10-year plan to reduce supply dependencies?

The EU thought about this too, and came up with the Critical Raw Materials Act in 2024. In a report published last month, the European Court of Auditors said the regulation is well intended, but the implementation is lacking. Its devastating verdict was: “The targets established in the Act set the course for member states and for industry, but are non-binding, only cover strategic raw materials and lack justification.”

My advice would be to solve the problem, adopt strategic patience and ignore the hyperventilating fans. The football equivalent of a trade war for which you haven’t prepared is an offside trap gone wrong: all the players push forward, except for one who has second thoughts and suddenly stops.

Some people like to think that in football, the best team wins. We all know this not to be true. The winning team, rather, is the one that keeps their nerve under pressure.

As the architect of New Labour’s campaigning focus on Tory sleaze, warned his readers: the British voter’s faith in politics is squandered “when those who are elected to serve the public interest see nothing wrong in helping themselves to their own share of the consequent commercial rewards in directorships and consultancies. The idea that there is nothing objectionable about a public figure pursuing a dubious private commercial interest as long as it is declared is one of the most corrupting principles in public life today. As far as the electorate is concerned, many think we have a government that consists of business back-scratchers and a Parliament made up of politicians on the make.”

That two years later Mandelson was forced to resign for an undeclared loan from a parliamentary colleague, whose entanglement with the late press baron Robert Maxwell’s estate it was Mandelson’s remit, as trade and industry minister, to investigate, is more than just a piquant historical irony. After all, to have been once forced from office for perceived corruption and undue coziness with the interests of the super-rich may just be bad luck. By the third instance, the blame surely falls to the employer: the character of the person involved is all too well-known, and the pattern long-entrenched. As Le Monde, freed from English niceties, characterizes New Labour’s Third Man, he is “the evil genius of the British Labour Party”, a “tactician fascinated by fame and money” who “showed contempt for morality and common social rules.” The scorpion stings because that is its nature; the blinking protestations of the frog, clinging to the wreckage of his premiership, that such an outcome could not be anticipated are too absurd to be entertained.

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Instead, the greatest, most ironic contrast that strikes today’s reader is not that between the younger Mandelson’s reformist, moralizing tone and the well-established tenor of his political career, but rather the yawning gulf between his domestic reputation and the raw facts of wealth and power unveiled by the ongoing Epstein revelations. The notorious “Prince of Darkness”, the fearsome and powerful intriguer at the heart of British governance, stands revealed in his email correspondence as more Widmerpool than Machiavelli. Westminster’s ruthless operator, the terror of lobby journalism, comes across as a needy, social climbing arriviste, a grasping provincial striver dazzled by the opulent consumption of his rich friends and desperate to grab a slice for himself. So desperate, indeed, that his mentor Epstein even once rebukes him for his constant demands for favors. His New Labour memoir, The Third Man, sent to Epstein for writing advice, is, the two friends discuss, merely a CV for a role at Deutsche Bank. Epstein dangles other glittering prizes before his friend. Would Mandelson like to sell an Israeli oil field for Ehud Barak, Epstein enquires. Why not? Would Mandelson like to involve himself in post-Tahrir Square Egypt, Epstein wonders? Why not? The affairs of nations, once the engine of history, had at the End of History become mere business opportunities: it must have seemed, back in the 2000s, as if the party would never end.

The glittering, amoral world of Epstein and his associates, of the Russian oligarchs and Arab potentates and financiers who flit across the correspondence, is simply the end product of the world of globalization, and of America’s unipolar imperial moment, without which the New Labour project is incomprehensible. When we read Epstein and Ehud Barak venomously gossiping over the extravagant income Tony Blair has amassed as the consigliere of Central Asian dictators, we are granted a glimpse of the true architecture of the world New Labour sold us as unstoppable progress. “We live in the new global economy, and that there is no alternative to that,” the Mandelson of 1996 advised his readers, and this is the result. Just like Blair, whose planned post-premiership career of resolving the Palestine conflict while accumulating wealth was rather more successful at the latter than the former, it was fortunate for him that this brave new world would transpire to be so personally rewarding. Epstein was nothing more or less than a vampiric aristocrat of American empire, extracting whatever he desired from its outer reaches. Mandelson his eager courtier, risen from that same empire’s provincial backwaters. How meager and parochial British politics must seem from this exalted vantage point: it must have been hard to remember that the needs and desires of British voters ever mattered at all.

The age when a former prime minister could retire to obscurity in a quiet cathedral close ended with New Labour. Today, their second acts revolve around the imperial center. As the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck observes in How Will Capitalism End?, corruption, broadly defined, is simply a symptom of financialized capitalism in a globalized world, and the decaying social fabric of its host countries the result of a world in which “the rich may rightly consider their fate and that of their families to have become independent from the fates of the societies from which they extract their wealth.” If British industry did not notably prosper from Mandelson’s time overseeing it, smoothing its wholesale transfer into the portfolios of the globalized oligarchy, so be it. If the MP for Hartlepool more rapidly and dramatically prospered from New Labour’s time in office than did the people of Hartlepool, that is the nature of things. For all that Mandelson can proclaim that the business dealings with Epstein, for which the police are currently investigating him, were in “the national interest”, the governance of Britain does not figure in this worldview as anything other than a career first act, the highest offices of the British state merely a provincial dry run for advancement in the higher world, among the richer people, who actually matter. When even the former Prince Andrew inserts himself in Epstein’s court, seeking rest and relaxation from the onerous privileges of his sinecure, we see, if not the secret harmonies of the world, then its true architecture, beneath the Westminster state’s ornately crumbling facade.

As for the little people, the truculent and aggrieved British voters whose anger was to be assuaged by the scraps from the big table, redistributed as a consolation prize for the loss of their industries and the wholesale recomposition of their cozily insular society, if their time has not yet come, Mandelson’s third downfall is the harbinger of when it will. It is ironic to recall, now that the near-revolutionary tumult of British politics is waved away by the Government’s dwindling band of supporters as a false consciousness imparted by hostile Right-wing agitators, that the younger Mandelson once spun visions of Britain’s near future as dark as anything now found on Twitter.

Imagining the future world of 2005, in which the public had failed to vote a reforming Labour government into office, Mandelson in The Blair Revolution conjured dark prophecies of the forthcoming “millennium riots”, in which “the army had been brought in” and his fictional upwardly mobile family had witnessed “their neighbors running screaming along the road”, their Georgian townhouses set ablaze. As a result, “there had been a middle-class exodus from London to the Home Counties, into hastily built private estates with perimeter fences and private security.” In the real world of 1996, the “breakdown of society in Britain”, typified by “a crime wave [that] was dismissed as exaggerated tabloid scare-mongering”, derived from the simple fact that “the nation has been in relative decline for a century”, and was baldly “a declining, post-imperial, economically second-rank nation, which is also increasingly divided and unequal”.

In his introduction to the 2004 reissue of The Blair Revolution, Mandelson lamented Britain’s “bleak ghettos depressing the spirits of all who live in them, dominated by the fear of crime and racial tension, too often becoming centers of danger and desperation”, language now anathema to his ideological heirs. The British public had begun to despise its political class, he warned: “New Labour’s task now is to ensure that public opinion does not slip back into this sullen mood — or, at least, not permanently — and that a deeper, lasting connection is made between government and governed.” Does Mandelson feel New Labour achieved this, we wonder? Does he believe his wavering place at globalization’s most-luxurious table is justified by the transformations his faction wrought? Mandelson termed his mission a “permanent revolution,” creating “a long-term transformation of Britain” in which New Labour’s ideology “embeds itself in the fabric and social architecture” so that “our changes can be entrenched”. Indeed, he notes, “We want to create institutions across British society that people can point to in twenty and thirty years’ time and recognize as distinctly New Labour landmarks.”

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Indeed we can: New Labour’s monuments are all around us. The tragedy of modern Britain is that Mandelson and his clique succeeded. The wreckage of our society is a testament to the success of their project, a series of time bombs buried within Britain’s social and economic architecture. The Britain of 1996, the dismal object of Mandelson’s declinist rhetoric, now looks like a vanished golden age: an even partial return to it is the highest aspiration of Right-wing populism. The current prime minister’s project of governing Britain as if it were still 1997, taking off where his ideological forebears were so rudely interrupted by the British voter, was doomed from the start, because Starmer is fated to rule the volatile and rebellious country that New Labour created. The least popular prime minister since polling began is now condemned to eke out his mandate without power, at the helm of a fractious and moribund party that despises him, lurching from crisis to crisis, until the electorate’s final sentence of execution rescues him from his purgatorial reign.

A badly run country has become an ungovernable one, ill at ease with itself and looking inward for enemies. Lord Mandelson’s one, unintentional gift to Britain is in hastening the collapse of the rotten and crumbling superstructure of the politics he helped construct. The reams of internal correspondence soon to be released will provide Reform, the de facto party of opposition, with ammunition in its mission to undo the Blair Revolution Mandelson once flaunted. As the director of Labour Growth, Mark McVitie, rightly observes, the scandal is “the latest and most grotesque signifier of a political culture that cannot carry on in its current form”, and “what is undoubtedly worth saving in the liberal democratic settlement will not be saved by the people who have presided over its decay”. But the domestic tragedy of British dysfunction is inseparable from the country’s willed transformation into the fawning servitor of a corrupt transnational order. That it takes an American scandal to demolish the Government’s last lingering traces of legitimacy, our peripheral backwater administration haunted by the nefarious pleasures of its metropole, is only fitting. In his career’s final act Mandelson has become, just as Le Carré perceived, the squalid archetype for the British state itself.

It didn’t matter, in the end, that the buyout was secured with a loan that was secured against the club, and that the club would pay the interest. Glazer made no public remarks, but his money did the talking. The following month, he bought the club’s remaining stock. Further protesting would be futile.

We are now 20 years into the Glazer ownership. Malcolm died in 2014, but his sons Bryan, Avram and Joel took over as co-chairmen. And, if cash returns is your metric, the family’s two-decade reign has been a triumph. Turnover, which was £221 million when Malcolm bought out the racing tycoons, is now £662m. In buying the club, Glazer correctly called the rise of sporting globalization, rode the tiger of potentially ruinous loans, and gambled successfully on the club’s untapped commercial potential.

As a result, he has made billionaires of his progeny. Last year, Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought a 27% stake last year, with each Glazer sibling pocketing, on average, £125m. Ratcliffe’s purchase valued the club at £4.6 billion — a near-sixfold increase on the £790 million at which it was valued when Glazer bought it in 2005.

On the downside, United were once perennial Premier League champions but haven’t won that trophy since 2013. Since reaching the final of the Champions League, football’s top club tournament, in 2011, they have featured only intermittently in the competition and never as serious contenders. This season they have reached a further nadir: 15th in the Premier League, three-quarters of the way down a league they used to dominate.

Were it not for those pesky league tables, the Glazers could claim this as one of the great leveraged buyouts of the century. The roots of that financial instrument whereby you purchase a company not with your own money but by borrowing on the value of the acquired asset, go back to the 1950s, but its popularity soared in the roaring Eighties. It was back in fashion again in the loose-lending 2000s, prior to the financial crash, which is precisely when the Glazers exploited United’s vulnerability.

Malcolm Glazer, famously, publicly uttered a mere 39 words about his ownership of that cultural institution, and only when he was doorstepped by a reporter. McManus, one of the two horseracing tycoons beaten to the club’s ownership, was a little more voluble.

“Why are you so interested?” Jim O’Neill, then a United board member and Goldman Sachs man, asked McManus.

“It’s just so cash-rich with no debt! It’s unbelievable!” replied McManus.

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To run a publicly-owned company as though it were a sensible social enterprise was like trailing a bloodied corpse behind your yacht in the Gulf of Mexico. It was shark bait.

O’Neill tried to persuade the United board to launch their own leveraged buyout, just with a different end purpose but in vain because the Glazers had a head start.

The real asset for them was not the club’s bricks-and-mortar. Even the combined powers of the club’s legendary manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, and his charges, such as Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, were not what made United so desired by the Glazers. What was really valuable was the club’s fans. Some might call them stakeholders; others would regard them as willing dupes, easily monetized.

When you buy, as Glazer did, something that other people consider priceless, you are buying the ability to print money. A chronicler of the Glazer ownership, Chris Blackhurst, pointedly called his book The World’s Biggest Cash Machine. That’s a good approximation for the Glazers’ treatment of United. Since 2012, they have extracted £969m from the club in order to pay the interest on that initial loan. They have also taken £167 million in dividends.

Meanwhile, the Glazers have invested none of their own money. When the sun shone, and United’s revenues were the biggest in the league, they did not fix the roof. Now the Old Trafford roof is in such a poor state that match-goers have been drenched by cascades of rain. That £969 million could have paid for a whole new stadium.

Yet the fans will keep coming. United games might not sell out so easily, but the club remains, to millions of its fans, irreplaceable. To the Glazers, though, these fans are fungible economic units. And in this respect, the purchase of the club seems a product of its era. The mid-Noughties were a simpler period in modern age of globalization, one where markets were opening up and popular dissent was not yet made manifest at the ballot box. Those who worked in manufacturing, though, were finding that their labor could be undercut. The markets, and their countries, had deemed them replaceable.

United’s fans were to make a similar discovery. Older fans would have recalled the 1958 Munich air disaster, which claimed the lives of 23, including eight players. The fans who attended the annual memorial ceremony might quite reasonably have felt their relationship to the club to be more than transactional. So might the fans who simply supported the club through the trauma and cheered the success that followed. But they, too, were replaceable, of no more value to the Glazers than were replica shirt buyers in Malaysia. It took 16 years for a Glazer to meet a fan group, and this took place only when the political winds had changed. The owners of the top English football clubs became so greedy they attempted to join a European Super League, which gave founder clubs like United guaranteed access. The founding Super League documents made it clear they were less bothered about what they dismissively deemed “legacy fans” and much keener on “fans of the future”: by which they meant malleable, younger, less revolting global followers on social media.

Given United’s patchy record in qualifying on merit for the Champions League, the Super League might have been an elegant move, were it not for the unexpected backlash from fans and then Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Glazers had manifestly failed to read the room, not understanding that, whatever assurances they thought they had, a populist, Brexit-empowered PM was no longer guaranteed to side with global finance.

Economic globalization was no longer seen as an unalloyed good, as President Trump’s administration has now made clear, even if he persistently comes up with the wrong answers to the right questions. Tariffs are catnip for a despairing industrial working class but factories in the USA and UK aren’t going to be reopened. And United will never have the same relationship with its supporters. Even now the Glazers have turned over the running of the club to Sir Jim Ratcliffe, it has only deepened the gulf between legacy fans and management. Season ticket concessions for pensioners and kids have been removed and ticket price increased,

The left-behind fans, the “little people” of Stretford and Salford, who cherish their club and enjoyed watching it succeed, might drown their sorrows with Boddingtons Bitter. But even then, they are no longer sharing in a local institution. In 2004, Strangeways Brewery, which produced the beer, was acquired by AB InBev, owned by Belgian families and Brazilian private equity; in 2005, the year that the Glazers bought United, the brewery was closed.

Still, somewhere in Tampa or Palm Beach, Florida, where Avram Glazer, Joel and their siblings Darcie, Kevin, Bryan and Edward have their homes, they will surely be raising a toast to their stunning success. It doesn’t matter that they and their placemen still have no idea how to run a football club. Once Sir Alex and his sidekick David Gill left, in 2013, things fell apart. The club became the epitome of what European clubs call “stupid English money.” Since 2013, without Sir Alex’s guiding hand, they have spent $1.5 billion net on player transfers, considerably more than any other Premier League club, and registered only one decent signing in that time: Bruno Fernandes.

As a result of this poor sporting performance, the club’s on-field losses have turned into financial losses. A club whose revenues were by far the largest in the Premier League now risks breaking financial sustainability rules.

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All this is a far cry from the way the club was run before Malcolm Glazer arrived. The old board had to provide shareholders a return and was never loved by fans but they had invested in assets such as the stadium, built bridges with the community, and saved up financial reserves for difficult days ahead. The club was, self-consciously, a legacy business, looking to hand over a cultural institution to the next generation.

Jim O’Neill, the erstwhile board member and now Baron O’Neill of Gatley, campaigns for “profit with a purpose” in the global economy these days and invests in tech and science start-ups in the North of England. United, in contrast, have become a totem of what we could term “purposeless profit”: a cash machine rather than a community institution.

The inexorable pull of commerce has engulfed the club and hollowed it out, just as it has to so many other once-singular organizations. Thames Water customers will be familiar with this story, as will consumers of Cadbury’s chocolate, another victim of the dreaded leveraged buyout. Cadbury’s was acquired by US confectionery conglomerate Kraft in 2010, which promised not to close down the company’s Bristol factory, before promptly doing just that and moving production to Poland. The 19th-century founders of Cadbury’s were Quaker capitalists who would have intuitively understood O’Neill’s notion of “profit with a purpose”. They got rich, but they also built the village of Bournville, outside of Birmingham, to “alleviate the evils of modern cramped living conditions” so that their employees had decent homes, good education and green space in which to thrive.

In the era of globalization, those acts of corporate kindness would have put the company at a serious disadvantage. It is an age in which we have been encouraged to trade our local or national identity in exchange for rising living standards. It shouldn’t be a shock to politicians that once the trade-off failed to deliver, people hankered after old tribal loyalties in order to make more sense of life. The dislocation of capital to far-off lands means that the have-yachts can toast their profits while factory workers lose their jobs, water companies flood their customers with effluent, and loyal football supporters are treated like cash machines. That would have been anathema to the likes of Cadbury. Ungodly, even. Though you can almost hear today’s billionaires snigger at their naïveté.

The historian Linda Colley explained in her 1992 book, Britons, how our globe-spanning rivalry with the neighboring French Other, and commitment to a shared project of imperial expansion, forged a new British identity: centered on Westminster it was forged from the disparate nations of mainland Britain. Three hundred years on, the Reform Party’s electoral conquest of the British heartland shows the same process of nation-building turned inward, or inverted — the globalized Other is now within the nation’s borders, while Westminster, still clinging desperately to one form or another of Global Britain, is the target of provincial rebellion.

As Philip Cunliffe observes in The National Interest: Politics After Globalization, “the government’s vision of ‘Global Britain’ […] was explicitly devised to neutralize the risk that Brexit Britain might develop a national interest distinct from corporate globalism.” That Global Britain’s architect, the cosmopolitan former mayor of a global city, was also the failed champion of Brexit, emphasizes the ironies inherent in Britain disentangling itself from the world economy built around America’s brief imperial moment. But, unlike the last century, Cunliffe points out we no longer have “the civic nor political infrastructure nor the economic dynamism to absorb or reconstitute the societies they have inherited from the twentieth century”.

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The most vociferous opponents of Brexit were, as Cunliffe notes with anthropological detachment, the white-collar “clerisy” of globalization, who in fear of the changing world around them would cling to their privilege. They exist, as they do in every country within America’s imperial reach, detached from the countries that host them: the consumers of globalized liberalism approaching a separate transnational identity of their own. Actual or aspiring provincial administrators of someone else’s empire, spiritual Americans, their world has ended, as abruptly and totally as that of the middleman minorities of the age of British imperial globalization. Yet what, and who will replace them?

Each writing from a broadly equivalent perch on the anti-imperialist Left, Cunliffe and Milanovic differ in their visions of the world to come. For Cunliffe, a “Brexit Bolshevik”, the break-up of the globalized world-system leads to the revival of the nation-state, if not a return to the nation as once was. For the dismantling of Britain’s national economy from Thatcher onwards to enable neoliberal globalization has made the old structures impossible to reconfigure. The British bull has been slaughtered, its meat long consumed, its fat rendered away: the skeleton cannot be reassembled. Nation-building is then, for Cunliffe, a project far beyond sprinkling policy documents with references to industrial policy and state capacity. “New reserves of political authority are needed… This is a project that requires a new political form with a new political legitimacy and representation.” It is, in short, a nation-building project for a new nation, as different to what came before it as Colley’s new imperial Britain was from the Early Modern kingdoms which preceded it.

For Cunliffe, “The construction of new nations in the member states of crumbling globalization involves deepening and broadening mass politics and democratic self-government” — which is undeniably what Reform’s victory now represents, to the horror of Britain’s political class. In failing to build a new political form centered around mass democracy and the nation state, he warns, “Brazilianization” is the risk. That is, “societies with no industrial base to guarantee their independence, ramshackle state machines whose lack of capacity is compensated for by authoritarianism”. It is the encroaching petty anarcho-tyranny of the vestigial Westminster state. Just as the Risorgimento required the leaders of the new kingdom, having made Italy, to then make Italians, “we too”, at the tail-end of globalization “have formally constituted legal states; we do not have nations”.

The task ahead is clear, and daunting: it is a project as risky as any of the great nation-building efforts of history. And yet, like the failed champion of Brexit, who British history will remember primarily for the migratory wave named after him, Nigel Farage is a man ideologically and temperamentally unsuited to the historical moment thrust on him. Politically, loitering around the gilded corridors of Trumpism, vowing a DOGE for every British council, he is no less a spiritual American than any of the relics of globalization he has come to replace. The Reform Party’s napkin-sketch policy statements are so vague as to be meaningless — what does it mean to say, as Farage has, that Reform will bring back British manufacturing?

It is true to say, as Cunliffe does, that “Thatcher herself had dismantled the national economy that had been built up over the post-war years — an economy organized around national policies and priorities”, so that “the results of her effort to extend the market was to dissolve the nation and with it, the very patriotism that she had appealed to”. Uneasily straddling two distinct and opposing political constituencies — the Thatcherite middle class of southern and eastern England and their economic casualties in the post-industrial north — as an increasingly likely future prime minister, Farage must find a way to appease both rival grievances if he, too, is not to be spat out by the volatile electorate.

A serial beneficiary of protest votes, Farage is, for now, triumphantly riding anger with the economic worldview he supports as much as he is coasting on opposition to the mass immigration it entailed. Just as the British-led period of globalization shuffled peoples around the world for short-term advantage, whatever the feelings of their new hosts, so did the American moment. The increasingly contested Britain of 2025 is its result. Johnson transmuted a national revolt into a vastly accelerated Global Britain, a full break-neck thrust on the joystick just before the crash. And just like Johnson, Farage is an uneasy figurehead for an inward-looking project of national revival.

Like Cunliffe, Milanović traces the angry populism of the hour to the simple fact that the losers in Globalization 2.0 were the middle classes of the Western world, squeezed between the growing wealth of their financial overlords at home and the newly affluent workers of Asia. Yet unlike Cunliffe, Milanović sees little prospect of a better settlement for Western voters in revolt. The emerging tariff regime may indeed spell the end of globalization, ushering in “a new world of nation- and region-specific trade and foreign economic policies, moving away from universalism and internationalism and into neo-mercantilism.” Yet at the same time, for Milanović, “the domestic part of the standard neoliberal package will, if anything, only be reinforced under Trump”, slashing state spending and services at home while dismantling the structures of the Washington Consensus abroad, like a retreating army burning whatever its opponent may find useful. Whether it can hold together the Red Wall and Reform’s North Sea beachhead is yet to be seen.

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In all this, the years-long, furious debates about the economic effects of Brexit seem absurd: the impacts so far are a mere rounding error compared to the convulsions ahead, as America rejects the world it created. The present moment is one of the rare historical turning points that shapes the world’s future course. The loss of Britain’s American colonies helped forge a British political consciousness, as Colley shows, and a turn to global empire as London instead set its sights on the riches of Asia. Britain’s imperial dominance brought about the first wave of globalization, enabling America’s rise, safe from European meddling behind the Royal Navy’s ships and its own tariff walls. As Britain’s empire collapsed, happily dismantled by its American supplanter, the United States then repeated the cycle with China as the new beneficiary. That cycle, too, has now come to an end, and we have entered a new era. And the challenges ahead are greater for Britain than America, which remains a vast continental empire — and perhaps, acquisitively eyeing Canada and Greenland, a still-expanding one. History may yet grant the American empire, as it once did Britain’s, a glorious second act. Yet Britain itself, having reordered its economy as a parasite on the City, and the City as a parasite on America’s imperial order, is left with an unenviable hand to play.

Political change, in Britain, now comes from the provincial fringes, while Westminster tries to hold on to its role as enthusiastic middle-managers for a now vanished order. The British people were an early adopter of the populist revolt against neoliberal globalization, and the revolt continues to this day, council seat by council seat. The restructuring of British society to fit the neoliberal vision, a process tempered by the Cold War and brought to ruinous success by America’s unexpected victory, brought with it, as Cunliffe observes, Westminster’s self-destruction as either a wielder of meaningful power or as a source of political legitimacy, opening up “‘the void’ between rulers and ruled” that it will soon be Farage’s role to fill. Britain entered the era of globalization as an empire-turned-nation-state: it leaves it as something less, and worse.

It is a narrative of absurdity as much as it is of tragedy: the world-historical drama of the rise and fall of empires, and the reordering of the world economy, leads, via the provincial byways of British politics, to Darren Grimes winning a seat on Durham council. Whether or not this is progress is a question for the beholder: it is change, at any rate. Politically, economically, the current interregnum cannot long continue without ensuring system failure. Like a dying star, Global Britain has collapsed inward: the Westminster press now roams around provincial England, reading the shuttered shops, the newly-raised flags and refuse-strewn streets like ominous entrails. Whether Reform can fulfill its name is increasingly an existential question.

On Liberation Day, international macroeconomists were busy digging out the Project Fear models with which they spectacularly misdiagnosed the economic consequences of both Brexit and the sanctions against Russia. But, really, tariffs are better viewed in terms of longer cycles, as is the case in politics. In the very short run, they constitute a price and output shock, with some characteristics of the economic impact of Covid. The tariffs will raise substantial revenues for the US government this year and next, with industrial relocation playing a progressively more important role in the following two years.

When Tesla invested in Germany, there were two years between the announcement and production actually beginning. But the initial announcement was preceded by a year of evaluation and negotiations. Companies with existing plants are best placed to expand production quickly. Taking stock after three or four years is the preferable way to judge this, and the obsession with year-one effects is the reason why people are misjudging trade-related policy decisions.

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Will Trump get what he wants? In terms of reshoring manufacturing, the answer is probably yes. For the largest trading partners, such as China and Germany, this will be a massive shock because of what it implies for the sustainability of the current economic models. Contrary to predictions, there has not been a compensating dollar revaluation, which open macro models would predict as a market response to tariffs. The unwinding of the globalization Ponzi scheme, which brought increasing capital flows into the US markets, is now clearly the bigger factor.

Politically, these tariffs will work for Trump. Foreign manufacturers are already declaring that they will step up investments in the US. The old manufacturing jobs won’t come back, but new ones will be created. There is, though, a serious risk of a US recession this year if Trump fails to get his tax policies through Congress. The Republicans may lose the midterm elections. But if the goal is to raise external revenues, reduce the budget deficit, and reshore manufacturing, those tariffs will work — so long as one remembers that they cannot do everything at the same time.

Europeans in particular should be wary of wishful thinking. There were plenty of gleeful projections of a more severe impact for the US than for Europe. In the short term, there will be a negative effect on the American economy, as the tariffs are a huge tax on US consumers.

It’s a struggle, though, to see what the EU can do in return. The bloc ran a trade surplus of $230bn last year and the current account surplus against the rest of the world is rising again, back towards the pre-Covid levels, when the euro area adjusted to the sovereign debt crisis by depressing consumption and investment. This is the unsustainable element of the post-Cold War international economic model, along with China’s financial repression. The EU could promise to import more US defense goods, but this would run counter to its strategy of making itself more independent from the US, which should be a more important strategic goal than tariff-avoidance. Nor can the EU simply decide to not buy more LNG from the US. In any case, even if the EU were to make such a promise, the tariffs would only be lifted afterwards.

The EU could decide to reduce its own tariffs, remove quotas, and non-tariff barriers. One example of a non-tariff barrier is the lack of a German highway speed limit. This necessitates a disproportionately high safety standard for cars — a protectionist measure designed to protect the European car industry from imports of cars that cost half as much elsewhere. If the EU were to reduce the direct and indirect tariffs and the quotas on US agricultural products, then we could see a pathway for negotiations. But the US is not going to lift its tariffs in anticipation of future EU action. Those times are over.

What, though, if the EU were to impose a tariff on US services? This is the closest the bloc has to a bazooka — it has a services deficit with the US of roughly half the size as its goods surplus. But a tariff on services is difficult because suppliers can easily evade them, by relocating out of the EU and citizens would push back since there are often no alternatives.

In any case, one of the reasons it would be unwise to predict the economic consequences of yesterday’s decision, is that so much depends on how others react. China, for example, could respond by diverting trade to the EU, and we could end up with a EU-China trade war. Ursula von der Leyen has already ominously said: “We will also be watching closely what indirect effects these tariffs could have, because we cannot absorb global overcapacity nor will we accept dumping on our market.”

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So rather than coordinating our retaliation against the US along with those east Asian countries most seriously hit by the tariffs, such as China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Vietnam, we will probably go away and fight our own separate trade wars, allowing America to play us off against each other.

If, though, we were to cooperate and attempt to find an alternative to the US financial architecture, security guarantees or the dollar, that would be a genuine problem for Trump. But it’s doubtful that will happen. Instead, the EU finds itself in a position where it is fighting trade wars against both of its trading partners: retaliating against the US — which will inevitably backfire — while also trying to stem Chinese imports.

The EU tariffs on China are, of course, quite different in intention, form, and content from the US ones. But the net effect is a worsening diplomatic relationship with China, and an irreconcilable trade balance. And, so, Europe finds itself between a rock and a hard place. China, and the other countries hit hard by these tariffs, are both necessary partners in organizing a response, and a threat to European industry. Unless a degree of rebalancing is accepted — losing the trade battle to win the trade war — it’s hard to see a way out.

France has come late to the party. Until about 15 years ago, the world economy had for decades been steadily liberalising as a so-called Washington Consensus encouraged countries across the world to open their borders to trade, investment and labour migration. As a result, throughout the neoliberal age, which peaked with China’s re-entry to the global trading system after the death of Mao Zedong, trade rose even faster than global GDP and drove economic growth everywhere. Meanwhile, the ageing of Western countries made immigrants ever more vital to Western labour markets.

This all came to a halt with the 2008 financial crisis. While the leaders of Western countries initially tried to restore the primacy of neoliberal globalisation, a growing populist revolt against it had begun. The twin shocks of the 2016 Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election appeared to symbolise the start of a great reversal.

In the face of this onslaught, Emmanuel Macron launched a rearguard attack in France’s 2017 presidential election, beating the National Front’s Marine Le Pen with an unabashedly liberal and pro-European agenda. Yet his triumph would prove short-lived. Along with growing anxiety about immigration, public sentiment continued to turn against economic liberalism, multilateralism, open borders and, in Europe, continental integration. Today, France joins a lengthening list of European countries where Right-wing populists, some with roots in fascist-era movements, are in power or steadily rising. The far-Right is already in government in Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia, while it is still rising in France, Germany, Austria, Belgium and the UK, where Nigel Farage’s Reform Party finally secured a toehold in parliament from which he aims to take over the British Right.

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This mood-swing has drifted far beyond Europe. Throughout the West, the open door for trade, investment and immigration is narrowing. While America has not gone so far as to pay neighbouring countries to apprehend migrants, as is the case in Europe, the Biden administration has recognised how potent an issue the border has become in a volatile election year, and has been cutting back sharply on the numbers allowed to enter. In Canada, traditionally a country friendly to newcomers, the government has been pressured to respond to a housing shortage by temporarily capping immigration.

Meanwhile, President Biden has taken to imposing tariffs on imports of Chinese products, and has been casting a more wary eye on investment in industries he considers strategic. Similar protectionist tactics are emerging elsewhere: between 2018 and 2022, the number of restrictive measures across the world increased sixfold. Furthermore, de-risking and friend-shoring became all the rage in the wake of the Covid pandemic, which exposed the fragility of global supply chains. As a result, the common indicators of globalisation have now reversed themselves: after decades of growing faster than the world economy, international trade and foreign direct investment are both now in relative retreat.

Obituaries for the era of neoliberal globalisation are now pretty common. The basic problem neoliberal globalisation always had was that even though it undeniably raised the incomes of Western countries, those gains were unequally spread. Urban professionals gained a lot, whereas unskilled workers were hammered, their industrial towns often turning into wastelands of boarded-up shops and abandoned mills. Meanwhile the urban booms drove up property prices and enriched owners, sucking more and more money out of the pockets of working folk, forcing many to move far out of town where they often suffered from inadequate services. One of the most reliable predictors of support for France’s National Rally is the distance one lives from a train station: the further away, the more likely a vote for the RN.

In the short term, de-globalisation seems full of promise. Cutting immigration and making it harder for firms to out-source production will provide relief to the hard-hit workers who have borne the brunt of globalisation’s costs. As we began to see during the Trump presidency, reducing immigration appears to boost the wages of unskilled workers. Yet such policies will further hinder the long-term economic growth of Western countries, already slowing to a crawl. If they curtail immigration, Western countries will soon be unable to keep their ageing population — particularly their retired citizens or those needing health care — in the style to which they’ve grown accustomed. Meanwhile, higher import costs due to the fragmentation of supply chains and rising tariffs will further entrench inflation, which will keep interest rates elevated and crimp investment. Short-term gain will eventually cause long-term pain.

More significantly, these developments will further accelerate the relative decline of the West. That’s because the de-globalisation wave is largely confined to developed countries; in much of the developing world, globalisation remains alive and well. Most notably, China is using its Belt and Road Initiative to deepen its links across the global south, exploiting the gaps left by the retrenchment in Western aid and diplomacy to widen its economic and political space. And whereas Europe is moving towards increasing fragmentation, Africa’s continental free trade agreement is finally finding its feet and boosting trade within the continent, which is expected to raise incomes there.

That said, we are still in the very early stages of this transformation, and the turn against globalisation across the West may yet get reversed. So far, global trade has recovered from the pandemic and doesn’t yet show signs of a sharp reversal. Yet the West’s policy changes will probably start to bite before too long. Already, the trends in foreign direct investment are suggestive of a confident and rising erstwhile periphery: while Western countries are pulling back as a source of outward investment, China is rising.

In fact, Chinese businesses have found a way to get around the walls being thrown up in Western countries. They simply out-source production to countries such as Mexico and Hungary, which enjoy freer access to the markets they wish to penetrate. This can also reduce China’s labour costs since Chinese wages have risen so fast. The impact of China’s mercantilism on the developing world is not yet clear. On one hand, by exporting its industrial capacity, China may snuff out industrial development in recipient societies that are trying to develop their own manufacturing industries. This explains why some developing countries, including Indonesia, Brazil and India, have imposed trade restrictions on China. On the other hand, the scale of Chinese investment is also raising incomes and creating jobs in some countries, which would ultimately expand the market for Chinese exports.

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It may be that China’s form of globalisation is a classic imperialist strategy that will enrich the Chinese core at the expense of its new periphery in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Yet it could also be that the Belt and Road Initiative turns into a Chinese version of the Marshall Plan — the post-war American strategy to build a cohesive Western empire by ensuring the recovery and subsequent enrichment of all its closest partners. While China rankles Western countries for running large trade surpluses with them, it notably tends to run deficits with developing countries, meaning that it buys more from them than it sells.

It shouldn’t surprise us if globalisation proves more popular in the developed world. Not only were the benefits of globalisation unevenly spread in Western countries, they were also unevenly spread between developed and developing countries. While Western countries were admittedly the biggest absolute gainers from globalisation, measured in increased income, in relative terms developing countries saw their incomes rise more. So while Western citizens would have probably ended up worse off without globalisation, they wouldn’t have known this; the annual rate of growth they experienced in their incomes didn’t exceed that of the previous decades, and was lower than the “golden age” that followed the Second World War. By contrast, citizens in the developing world, especially in Asia, experienced noticeable improvements to their standards of living.

Now, the West runs the risk of falling further behind in relative terms, and being alienated from a new age of globalisation that will undergird the growing power of China, India and other emerging powers of the former global periphery. Time may reveal that the failure of Western elites to engineer a globalisation that benefited everyone, rather than disproportionately themselves, ultimately ensured the decline of the Western age.

In the darkness, you can’t quite make out the titans of Wall Street, the Chinese billionaires, the European ministers and asset managers, or the Russian diplomats with their flag friendship pins. But you can feel them and the new world order that MBS is trying to build — centred around Saudi and him. The Kingdom, flush from the energy war between Russia and the West, has never had so much money to spend. Nor has it ever been such a hub of diplomacy as Russia, China and America court it for their superpower ends. As a result, you might catch sight of the New York billionaire Stephen Schwarzman in a suit and trainers, or a tired looking Jared Kushner; perhaps you’ll see the former French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian off to the booth of his Saudi project, or George Osborne could give you a long suspicious look across the room.

Launched in 2017 to promote the Kingdom to the world, the Financial Investment Initiative Summit, or FII, became infamous a year later after the murder of Jamal Khassogi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post contributor, at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the CIA says on the orders of the Crown Prince. In the fallout, scores of billionaires, tech companies, media giants, super corporations and Western officials pulled out. But “Davos in the Desert” is the perfect yardstick to see how little this murder really mattered for the West. Now it seems everyone is back at an event that is bigger than ever. In a tense air of unreality.

The Who’s Who of the speakers is a testament to the emptiness of Joe Biden’s pledge after Khassogi to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state”. The power surge of money and influence towards the Kingdom had made Riyadh indispensable. Not only for US diplomats struggling with Gaza, Ukraine and a combative China. But for Western companies for whom the flush Gulf has become a critical source of capital. Even Net Zero is helping MBS — at first that is — as oil gets more expensive to extract the share of it being produced in the countries that can do it cheapest will soar. With this backdrop, the TED-style talk by Jacques Attali, a French socialist politico turned global rolodex consultant — “Is Democracy In Peril?” — felt a bit too on the nose.

FII is a showcase for the Saudi surge. But the first thing that strikes you about Riyadh when you arrive, is how little it looks like the global megapolis that MBS wants it to be. Instead, driving out of the desert, into this seven-million-strong city that feels in so many ways it shouldn’t be here — you see miles and miles of scruffy square houses, the colour of sand, crammed close together with tiny windows. A city dissected by eight-lane freeways lined with squat, unimpressive blocks. It looks nothing like Dubai. The professional expats compare it to Abu Dhabi 20 years ago. And if you arrived clueless and somebody told you this was by some metrics the capital of the most cash rich society that had ever existed, you would struggle to believe them.

You can spend a week here and still fail to find your bearings at night, in this low-rise world glowing orange from the street lamps. Then you notice the construction sites: miles and miles of hoardings, blocking off mega sites announcing giga projects about to transform it. There’s King Salman Park, which when it is finished will be seven times bigger than Hyde Park. Then there’s the Mukaab, the square shaped skyscraper, the height and width of 20 Empire State Buildings. Neither exists yet — apart from in the futurist dreams and commands of MBS. Both projects, along with Neom and the Line, the 110 km long linear city crossing the desert for nine million people, and the skyscrapers of New Muraaba all have their stalls at “Davos in the Desert”.

Everyone’s feeds are full of charred Israeli babies, exploding homes in Gaza or the tieless Iranian foreign minister threatening America with hell. But in the King Abdul Aziz International Conference Center — which is like what AI might generate if you asked for Versailles but make it a little Arab — the panels are very much “don’t mention the war”. Things looked so different four days before Hamas attacked. Not only was an Israeli minister seen publicly in Riyadh for the first time ever, he also joined a Jewish prayer service with a new Torah scroll dedicated to the Saudi King. This was widely interpreted as a key step towards an almost inevitable normalisation between the two countries. A stunning development in and of itself for a country that until recently banned Judaism from being practised, and in 1973 led an Arab oil embargo on Israel’s Western allies to punish them for supporting the Jewish state.

But money isn’t security. You have to leave Riyadh to see how vulnerable it really is: the pipelines bringing desalinated water from the coast, which could so easily be knocked out, or the oil infrastructure, which was partially disabled by Iranian proxy drones in 2019. This is why behind the PowerPoints and the panels MBS has been telephoning everyone he can to try to stop the Israel-Hamas war from spreading into what could easily become a full-blown war between Iran and the United States fought right over the Gulf. You can keep the war out of the convention centre, but you can’t keep Saudi Arabia out of the Middle East. And nobody knows this better than MBS.

Saudi Arabia has always been an ideological state. Its very beginnings are in a pact between the Al Sauds and the puritanical Wahhabi movement, whose strict vision of Islam has for generations been what people associate with the Kingdom. But under MBS it has suddenly pivoted. Pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism are the old politics of failure for the Crown Prince. This, he thinks, has left Saudi 20 development years behind the Emirates. And this is why he is forcing his Kingdom into a phase of nationalism and neoliberalism. Those for MBS are the new politics of success. Not only the path to Saudi survival after oil — but into turning Riyadh into a super Dubai and the Kingdom into a Saudi superpower.

MBS wants a modern economy as quickly as possible. This is why he wanted normalisation with Israel and has normalised with Iran: because there is no chance of economic success in a Middle East mired in constant war. The plan is Vision 2030 and the FII summit, just over the road from the Ritz-Carlton where MBS imprisoned half the ruling class at the start of his rule, is what he wants it to look like. Music, previously banned, is softly playing. Women, previously segregated and forced to be fully covered are everywhere — working — with very few face veils and many without a headscarf at all. The light glints off glamorous designer sequinned abayas by the coffee. Princesses used to Knightsbridge are finally doing business at home. This is Saudi Arabia seven years after MBS castrated the morality police. But make no mistake: this is still a country where you can be beheaded for a tweet. The paradox is his Kingdom has never been more liberal or more dictatorial.

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To understand MBS, you need to understand his childhood. This is what unlocked a will to power that saw him, improbably, steer himself and then his father into the line of succession. Saudi rulers are not hereditary, they emerge from the clan, which makes his rise less like King Charles assuming power, and more like Cromwell seizing it.

Nothing much was expected of the seventh son of Salman, the 25th son of Ibn Saud. Obsessed by fast food and computer games, he was a typical lethargic princeling until he was handed a horrifying revelation at the age of 15: his father, despite being the governor of Riyadh, had not build a serious fortune and was perilously indebted to businessmen. Instead of making billions like their cousins, the family was living off a gigantic welfare check from the Saudi treasury — which often came too late — leaving the servants unpaid for months at a time.

Panicking at the implications of this — of drifting further and further from the centre of power and into princely poverty — he amassed cash, by selling gold coins he was given by King Fahd.  He then started trading, became obsessed with stocks and swiftly went broke. Only then did he work out that, with his name, he could simply phone up people and demand money before trying to build his own businesses. Staying in Saudi, unlike his Westernised cousins, he rose like this in Riyadh.

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This, writ large, is also the state of the Kingdom. MBS’s family has failed to invest the greatest fortune in human history. So, using Saudi Arabia’s giant sovereign wealth fund, which is behind FII, he is trying to do at enormous scale what he did with King Fahd’s coins: buying up, through stakes in foreign companies, the profits of the world and investing them in what he thinks is a new economy.

There is a saying in the Middle East: seize opportunities for they pass like clouds. And MBS knows as electric cars and batteries take off he is running out of time.

He is desperate for a new Kingdom. Social reforms, such as finally letting women drive or travel alone without a male guardian are real and, for millennials who make up the majority of his subjects, he is not only genuinely popular but has made their lives freer. One of the world’s great liberalisations is being led by one of its greatest autocrats.An impetuous 38-year-old determined to govern alone — with all the risks that entails.

This is the discussion you end up having, discreetly that is, over and over again in the Kingdom. Who is MBS? For the optimists, he is a Saudi Atatürk or Peter the Great, the latest Arabian incarnation of the Westernising dictator. For the pessimists, they see the smile of Saddam Hussein — pointing to the dismemberment of Jamal Khassogi and his strange facial tics. Few at FII seemed to believe that the linear city in Neom would ever actually exist. What the critics see is not a new economy — but building-crazed megalomania that will leave only ruins.

Billions and billions can silence these questions. Because being in Saudi Arabia feels like being on another planet, where the normal rules of politics are suspended by oil. A futuristic but also medieval world with no need for democracy. Even in Russia, or China, there is a system, a bureaucracy, and institutions, however frightful, that matters in politics. Here there really is a royal court, an absolute monarchy and one family — the richest ever to exist — that owns the country.

And what is happening now is the result of long running fights within that family over whether the Kingdom should choose Islamism or nationalism. Whether or not it should change or stay the same. And, fundamentally, should it be open or closed? The construction pits and the PowerPoints are the decisive victory of one side. The panic in the pace is that, as the world decarbonises, it has started too late: Saudi only has a few decades of oil wealth left until this planet is pulled back to earth. But will it crash or land safely? Will there be splendour or ruins in Riyadh? The answer now hangs on who MBS really is. Because he has ensured nobody else will have a say.

I feel obliged to say that South Africa is a wonderful country, and a resilient one. For every horror story you see in the media — most recently the tragic blaze in Johannesburg — there are many things worthy of love. Nonetheless, three decades after the end of apartheid, it is obvious that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has failed in its historic mission: to spread the living standards formerly enjoyed by the white minority to the broad mass of the population. It has, if anything, achieved the opposite, overseeing the dereliction of the infrastructure and human potential on which any such improvement would depend.

Metaphors for this failure are everywhere. Railways that took my parents to their summer holidays as children now lie rusting and abandoned. Supermarkets sell asphalt for drivers to fill in potholes for themselves (the product is marketed as gatvol, which means both “hole-full” and “fed-up”). Criminal gangs, their numbers buoyed by an unemployment rate above 30%, cut down traffic lights for scrap, steal transformers from power stations and collapse roads with illegal mining operations. Eskom, the national power monopoly, is so ravaged by corruption that daily blackouts now last as long as nine hours.

Especially since the reign of former president Jacob Zuma, politics has descended into a looting operation that extends from multinational businesses down to local mafias, even as the impoverished majority finds its taps running dry and its sewage systems spilling over. Anger is quelled with promises to expropriate farmland and wealth from white citizens. Crime is rampant and the police are widely regarded as useless. As I say, Brits are far removed from this. They were heavily involved in Southern Africa during the 19th and early-20th centuries, sending settlers, redcoats, and gold and diamond prospectors, but today they mainly send nervous tourists. The pathologies of South African society seem as exotic as the hot, dry climate and the wild animals on the veld.

But are they really? Lately I’ve been questioning if the gulf separating the two countries is as vast as I assumed. At first it was just small things, sotto voce echoes of South Africa protruding into British life. A man begging from cars stopped at the traffic lights. An epidemic of urban homelessness. Universities renaming buildings to repudiate links with the past. A steady trickle of stories about police no longer bothering to investigate crimes. Now, a prison escape in the capital and parents scared to send their children to crumbling schools. Once I started paying attention, though, the resonances grew ever deeper. The media loves to measure Britain against the GDP of American states, European healthcare and Australian quality of life. This is supposed to be self-deprecating, but maybe it is more flattering than we care to admit. Analogies to South Africa can expose things that comparisons with rich countries leave obscured.

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Consider the cloud of scandal and dysfunction which has settled over the UK’s privatised utilities, namely water, energy and railways. These services have increasingly been marked by cronyism, private gain, mismanagement and underinvestment, all familiar symptoms of corruption in South Africa. For years the water companies have been paying out huge dividends to shareholders, while racking up vast debt piles and spilling sewage on a daily basis. Last year, Govia Thameslink Railway was awarded a lucrative new contract, despite one of its subsidiaries, Southeastern, being caught defrauding the public purse of millions. Then again, bad trains may end up being the least of our problems, for the National Grid has warned that the UK may face power cuts in the coming winter, and is urging businesses to reduce their electricity use. There is a growing realisation that Britain does not have the grid capacity needed for the government’s decarbonisation plans.

It is becoming clear, in other words, that Britain’s post-Eighties regime of privatisation has led to a subtle form of the South African disease. The state fails to maintain and improve infrastructure, while allowing the asset-stripping of national wealth by private interests. Who needs criminal syndicates when you have hedge funds and private equity firms? There was something especially South African in ministers’ claims that Thames Water cannot be renationalised, despite its severe debt crisis, because doing so would scare away the foreign investors who prop up the UK’s economy.

Meanwhile, the Tory party does an increasingly passable impression of the ANC. Apparently convinced it will be in power forever, it has become little more than a vehicle for personal advancement and influence peddling, disguising its aimlessness with an occasional bout of populist rhetoric. This was especially evident during the Covid pandemic, when the genteel traditions of British corruption — peerages in exchange for political and financial support — gave way to the handing out of state contracts worth billions to politically connected companies, often lacking relevant experience.

The South African comparison also casts a revealing light on Britain’s social cleavages, though I am not talking about the kinds of ethnic tensions for which South Africa is infamous. It is true that the UK economy’s voracious appetite for immigration, an easy source of cheap labour and consumers, resembles South Africa’s habit of exploiting migrants from elsewhere in Africa. But one only has to look at the frequent anti-immigrant pogroms in South African townships to see that, for all the anxieties over integration, British society remains a relative picture of harmony.

The real issue is class. Brits often express shock that extreme inequality appears so normalised in South Africa, but an outsider to the UK could make a similar charge. In post-industrial Britain, working classes of all ethnicities are consigned to poverty wages in jobs such as cleaning, shelf-stacking and delivery driving, if they have not dropped out of the workforce altogether. London and its surrounding counties have become, like South Africa’s Western Cape, the luxurious facade Britain shows to the world; but other parts of the country are faring much worse, with healthy life expectancy trailing significantly in parts of Northern England, Scotland and Wales. Countless towns have fallen into abject poverty, regarded by polite society with little more concern than South African townships, their inhabitants ruled unfit for anything better by the very fact of remaining there. Social mobility, we are told this week, is at its worst in more than 50 years.

This wasted potential is tragic on its own terms, but it has wider ramifications, too. In South Africa, where 29 million people receive state welfare grants and only 7.4 million pay tax, the state is trapped in a doom-loop, with spending on social programmes hampering investment that could benefit the economy. But to look at projections for the British state’s ever-growing benefits, health care and social care bills, it seems we may be heading for a similar scenario. These parallels will doubtless seem absurd to many Brits, and doubly so to South Africans. Earlier this year, when I mentioned to some friends over there that the UK has its own problems with government incompetence, they literally laughed in my face.

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After the Cold War, the rubric of “developed” and “developing” countries implied that the Western model was the endpoint of economic progress across the world. Three decades later, the distinctive features of that model — nation-states with strong civic cultures, meaningful democratic conflict, economic growth and a commitment to broad-based prosperity — have themselves been eroded by globalisation. Hence developing countries provide an increasingly plausible model for the future of developed ones, rather than vice-versa. In this sense, at least, Britain remains at the vanguard of global capitalism. And making this explicit ought to help in countering complacency. For all their gallows humour, the British are used to counting themselves among the world’s most advanced and admired nations, and so struggle to grasp the possibility that, in 50 years’ time, this may no longer be the case. Which brings me to the most disturbing echo of South Africa I’ve noticed in recent years.

This is something more amorphous: a matter of mood and mentality. South Africans have come to regard their chaotic and inept state with a weary resignation that borders on ridicule. It is a burden to be negotiated when necessary, and fended off where possible. For some time now, Britain’s attitude to its own governing class has been moving in the same direction. New Labour alienated large parts of the traditional Left, and now Tory incompetence has led to similar cynicism among conservatives. With each perceived betrayal, more people enter the reservoir of citizens who have given up believing that Westminster can do anything remotely useful.

These feelings have real consequences for a country’s prospects. Why do so many people stubbornly resist house-building and planning reform? Why do they see it as common sense to reject society’s claims on their resources? Part of the reason is surely that, once we lose faith in the nation’s political authorities, appeals to compromise for the greater good ring hollow. Or to put it in terms a South African would understand: the British are gatvol.

In Faroese, bottlenose whales (Hyperoodon ampullatus) are called døglingur. Apart from their stubby beaks they look very similar to pilot whales, the species most often seen here, in pods numbering several hundred. Faroese people flock to see the pilot whales, too — but usually when they are being driven ashore to be slaughtered in a riot of spume and spray, men hauling on ropes to drag them onto the sand while their blood turns the sea crimson.

The killing of the pilot whales is called grindadráp, a gory tradition in these north Atlantic islands, just 200 miles northwest of Shetland. Two weeks ago, I was in Tórshavn when a friend texted me to say there was a grindadráp on the small beach just outside the city centre. Having seen the slaughter up close several times, I did not linger, but as I drove past the beach, I could see the crowds of men with knives. Anyone who helps gets a free share of the meat, which is always communally distributed.

That day, 78 pilot whales were taken, arousing a slew of online campaigners to once again condemn the Faroese for their “barbarity” and “cruelty”. Online there are numerous pressure groups, including Sea Shepherd’s UK-based “Stop the Grind” and the Blue Planet Society. The environmental campaigner, Dominic Dyer, is calling for the UK to suspend trade with Faroes over the grindadráp. Anonymous supporters of such campaigns often describe the Faroese as “psychopaths” and “murderers”.

As an autonomous territory of the Danish Kingdom, the Faroes lie outside the EU. They are therefore exempt from its adherence to the International Commission on Whaling’s 1986 moratorium on all whaling, apart from aboriginal subsistence catches. (Grindadráp is a form of indigenous whaling similar to that legally practised in Greenland and Nunavut.) Japan, Iceland and Norway have chosen not to abide by the moratorium either, but report their catches to the ICW in the interests of science. In these countries, unlike Faroes, whale meat is sold in supermarkets and offered in restaurants, often to tourists. 

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Faroes’ own whaling regulations date back half a millennium: every catch made since the 16th century has been recorded by length and weight. The current whaling laws specify a limited number of beaches onto which the animals may be herded. If a community has recently killed whales, the local sheriff may refuse permission on the grounds that the meat is not needed. Only long-finned pilot whales, Atlantic white-sided dolphins and common bottlenose dolphins may be driven ashore. The long-finned pilot whale population is estimated to be around 700,000, and the Faroese catch — at the very most 2,000 annually but usually about half that — doesn’t make a dent. Faroese fishermen never go out in search of the animals, only beaching them if they are spotted by chance, and if there are enough people ready to kill them properly. The prescribed method of killing is not (as in Japan, Norway and Iceland) by explosive harpoon, but by a specially-designed spinal lance which ensures almost instantaneous brain death.

As a passionate marine conservationist, I find this all disturbing. I have swum with many species of whales, and they seem indisputably sentient. They look back at us with clear curiosity. And yet, cows also have the ability to recognise individual human faces, and we do not label British beef farmers “murderers” and “monsters”. Fond of whales as I may be, I am equally disturbed by the willingness of outsiders to condemn the Faroese. Those shouting loudest have no understanding of Faroese culture — of how the islanders have had to rely almost entirely on their natural surroundings for survival.

When inexpert outsiders, like me, ask how the Faroese can bear to kill pilot whales — animals we see as intelligent, magical visitors from another realm — they are often bewildered. “It’s meat,” they answer. “Do you cry when you eat a steak or a piece of bacon?” Others might remind us: “The pilot whales aren’t endangered: if they were, we would not kill them. We are fond of our sheep, but when it’s time to eat them, we kill them too.” When campaigners decry the pilot-whale slaughter, the Faroese reaction is that these emotions are a symptom of living in a “Disneyfied world” divorced from the reality of survival.

The Faroes have been settled for more than 1,000 years, but until the 20th century, this wet, windy, storm-tossed archipelago was largely cut off from the rest of the world by inclement weather and a lack of long-range sailing vessels. Able to grow only very few crops, the Faroese survived on fish and sheep. The Lutheran forebears of today’s islanders called the occasional catch of pilot whales “a gift from God”, and after a harsh winter they often made the difference between life and death.

Arguably, the Faroese don’t actually need whale meat to survive now, and many no longer eat it, due to heavy metal pollutants in the carcases. Creatures at the top of the marine food chain are always more polluted than those at the bottom, because the former consume the latter in vast quantities, multiplying the toxins. The Faroese health authorities have alerted the population to this danger. Because of this, some islanders argue that the number of pilot whales caught each year should be rationed.

Other islanders, however, believe that the grindadráp is symbolic of something much bigger. It’s a demonstration of independence, of an unwillingness to follow rules imposed by outsiders. The Faroese are often resistant to the idea of adopting a globalised way of life, whereby all meat is presented wrapped in plastic, and shipped-in from overseas. During the Covid pandemic, I often thought of my Faroese friends, who would manage even if global supply chains collapsed.

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This tiny nation is aware of its vulnerability to outsiders. They trace their independent thinking all the way back to the conflict between Faroese chieftain Sigmundur Brestissson, who was tasked with converting the islands to Christianity by their Norwegian overlords in 1005, and another chieftain, Tróndur of Gøta, who retained his pagan beliefs. The latter is seen as a hero here.

The Faroes have no army. In the Second World War, they were occupied by the British. The writer Eric Linklater wrote in praise of the Faroese at the time: “Native hardihood and energy have conquered a hostile environment, and given to it gentility and grace; they have retained a primitive virtue … and appear to have escaped the vulgarity and inertia of civilisation”. We, in Britain, have forgotten that during the war as much as a fifth of our fish supplies came from Faroese trawlers which braved the U-Boats to sail the North Atlantic. As a nation, they lost one of the highest percentages of their menfolk to German attacks, prompting Churchill to thank them for their steadfastness and bravery. But now, we see not the valour in these tough, pragmatic islands but only barbarity.

A few days after the whales arrived at Kaldbaksfjorður, a Faroese friend was fretting about what would happen to them if they left the fjord, and the tide swept them onto the southerly island of Suðuroy. These whales occasionally strand themselves there, and in the settlement of Hvalba people are allowed to humanely dispatch the beached creatures, and eat the meat. I called my friend to discuss it. “It would be very sad,” he mused. “Having said that, I had some døglingur in the freezer and finished it last winter. So much tastier than pilot-whale.”

In a story that is all too familiar in the fossil fuel age, this heritage now faces ruin; it is sitting on a wealth of natural resources, needed to fuel the modern world from which it stands so proudly aloof. Except this is not a story about fossil fuels at all. The mining company that Covas do Barroso is struggling to keep at bay is there to extract lithium, the key element in electric vehicle batteries.

This is not a battle the villagers are likely to win. The EU wants to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035, and the emerging green economy will require lithium batteries for a host of other purposes. To make matters worse, global lithium production is expected to fall short of demand by 2030, and China controls almost two-thirds of the supply.

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Yet all of this requires us to ignore the obvious fact that we are not in control of the material basis of our world. Before there is agency, there must be shelves that are stocked, medicine that is available, and technology that works. Perversely, the same global division of labour that has given us these goods and services in such profusion has also encouraged us to take them for granted, by moving their production to other parts of the world. This is what Conway calls the “quid pro quo of modern capitalism”, namely: “you can get anything you want from anywhere in the world for a bargain price, but don’t whatever you do expect to understand how it was made or how it got to you.”

Today we are increasingly finding that, like those farmers in the Barroso region of Portugal, our autonomy is not as secure as we thought. Eruptions of plague and war have exposed the fragility of the material world. In 2021 we learned that we cannot make cars without semiconductors made in Taiwanese factories, and the following year, that we cannot make semiconductors without neon, a gas produced by the now-devastated Azovstal steel plant in Ukraine. We learned that Britain needs affordable natural gas to supply itself with ammonia, and it needs ammonia, among other things, to produce carbon dioxide for preserving food and stunning livestock before slaughter.

More profoundly though, our detachment has been shattered by an awareness that our material systems are degrading the planet and contaminating our bodies. It is now difficult to escape information about vanishing polar ice, polluted groundwater, and microplastics circulating in our blood. Having been raised in the belief that anything is possible with enough willpower and imagination, we find ourselves implicated in a disaster of impersonal proportions.

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The question that will define the coming decades is how our societies will respond to this staggering loss of agency. What we have seen so far are in large part coping mechanisms. An obsessive focus on carbon emissions, though it has caused a great deal of anxiety, has also helped to make our impact on the natural world seem like something that can be addressed through better consumer choices and activism.

No doubt environmentalism as a moral crusade can help at the margin; our use of resources remains heinously wasteful. But it can also be counter-productive. If people believe they can make a difference by resisting any industry that harms the planet, how will we actually get the materials we need for a new energy infrastructure? Renewables are generally much less energy dense than fossil fuels, and so must be built in huge numbers. A single natural gas processing facility, Ras Laffan in Qatar, produces more energy than all the world’s solar panels and wind turbines combined.

As Material World makes clear, we have become so dependent on harvesting the earth’s resources at enormous scale, the most important changes now will be industrial and technological. In particular, they will come from more efficient ways of extracting, processing, and recycling materials. It may seem absurd to rely on mining companies and oil refineries to save our disintegrating world, especially when so many of the hoped-for technical breakthroughs are still pipe dreams. But the tragedy of our situation is that there is no longer any route back to a more modest existence of the kind embodied by Covas do Barroso.

If we don’t produce concrete and steel, we can’t build hospitals and schools. If we don’t keep converting petrochemicals into nitrates for fertiliser, people will starve. If we don’t mine copper, we cannot have electricity. That’s just how things go in the material world.

But Fry was undoubtedly a devout Christian of the Quaker variety, as were the other two of the big three British chocolatiers, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, all of whom were directed towards manufacturing through being barred from most professions. They were drawn to chocolate in particular because they regarded it as a more moral treat, and that was how it was widely perceived: an innocent indulgence, supplied by men whose Quaker conscience dictated that they combine its manufacture with good works. In a wider sense, we might see that Fry’s egg as symbolising a strain of particularly moral — indeed, overtly Christian — capitalism, operating paternalistically both in its own workplaces and the surrounding community. The story of these eggs, and the companies that made them, therefore forms a simulacrum for the narrative of Britain since the Industrial Revolution, and the transition from local, civic-minded commerce toward globalised, faceless big business.   

I grew up in Seventies York, upon which the Rowntrees had been showering gifts for nearly a century. The primary benefactor had been Joseph Rowntree II, heir to the first Joseph Rowntree, who’d established the business in 1822. In 1893, JR II established Rowntree’s garden factory in York, whose 4,000 employees benefited from a female welfare worker, a doctor’s surgery, sick and provident funds, savings and pensions schemes. Nearby was — and is — New Earwsick, a model village for employees with pretty Arts and Crafts houses, each with a fruit tree in the front garden, and no two successive trees bore the same fruit, to promote crop-swapping and neighbourliness. There was a toytown air about the signs indicating “Butcher”, “Greengrocer”, ”Chemist”. No sign indicated “pub” of course.

Several members of my extended family worked for Rowntree’s, and they were entitled to heavily discounted chocolate, some of which came my way, and my mother always included a Kit-Kat in my packed lunch, a token of love from her, and (it seemed) the Rowntrees themselves. One could still almost believe that their primary concern was philanthropy and the creation of charitable trusts, while they left the chocolate making to secular subordinates.

I benefited in many ways from Rowntree largesse, playing tennis and swimming in Rowntree Park, acting in plays at the Joseph Rowntree Theatre and swotting for exams in York Library, which they’d funded. I never went inside the factory but did once visit its equivalent in the Midlands: Cadbury’s Bournville complex. This too is a garden factory, with a similarly relaxed spaciousness between the buildings, like pieces on a chess board towards the end of a game. I recall seeing, among many other tokens of paternalism, the factory dentist’s surgery, indicated by a sign in Cadbury’s purple. At the time (early 2000s) Cadbury’s seemed to have retained the “purity” (a word much employed in their advertising) we appeared to have lost in York.

Rowntree’s was acquired by Nestlé in 1988, and I remember being shocked at seeing the Swiss flag flying from the factory roof. Nestlé have since invested heavily in the York factory, but they admit that they don’t continue the Rowntree tradition of York benefactions, and the extent of their wider philanthropy is mysterious to me. A spokesperson for the firm said: “We don’t necessarily PR our charitable work.”

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In 2010, Cadbury’s, which does still support the charitable Cadbury Foundation, was sold to the America-based multinational, Kraft, and is now owned by Mondelez, a company hived off from Kraft in 2012. In York, we knew all about Kraft. It had acquired the other York chocolatier, Terry’s, who were not Quakers, but whose factory — closed by Kraft in 1993 — nonetheless had a fishpond, bowling green and sports fields, and whose female hockey team played in the colours of one of their best-known brands: All Gold.

But even before British Big Chocolate entered a world you’d need a degree in business studies to comprehend, the companies had not been averse to capitalistic chess playing. In 1919, Cadbury’s had (gently and politely) acquired Fry’s, and in 1969, Cadbury’s merged with Schweppes, despite Schweppes mixers being used in alcoholic drinks. In his history of 20th-century confectionery, Sweet Talk, Nicholas Whittaker refutes the sentimental version of the Rowntree’s takeover, whereby Nestlé was seen as a bully spoiling for a fight: “Who should it be? Cadbury’s looked a bit too muscular, and that Mars was a Yankee smartarse. How about that Rowntree’s wimp in the corner, happily counting his Smarties? He’d do.” On the contrary, as Whittaker writes, it was “all about percentages, shareholdings and wheeler-dealing”.

The Quakers had also been worldly enough to embrace advertising even though, as Deborah Cadbury writes in her 2010 book, Chocolate Wars: “Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself; abhorrent to a man of God.” The heyday of chocolate advertising was in the Sixties and Seventies, and some of it was particularly un-Quaker like (the way those fashion models ate a Cadbury’s Flake, for instance). And whereas Cadbury and Rowntree’s benignity on the home front was unquestionable, they took their eye off the ball when it came to the cocoa-producing regions.

In 2021, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Barrow Cadbury Trust — created in 1920, and now an independent charitable trust “inspired by Quaker beliefs” — apologised for the fact that their endowment was “not free from labour exploitation”. In the early 19th Century, Cadbury’s had acquired cocoa from plantations where slave labour had been used. The company eventually organised a boycott of those plantations by British cocoa manufacturers, but they had benefited from slave labour for eight years. Also in 2021, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust — established in 1904, and now “an independent Quaker charitable trust” — apologised for the “Rowntree company having purchased cocoa and other goods produced by enslaved people”.

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Cocoa production is still bedevilled by labour exploitation, which is one reason why the Fairtrade label (imprimatur of the Fairtrade movement) was established in 1997. It is applied to goods produced ethically, for which a fair price had been paid. Neither Mondelez nor Nestlé are currently signed up to Fairtrade, although both have their own schemes of certification: Cocoa Life and Rainforest Alliance respectively. Cocoa Life operates in partnership with Fairtrade but neither it nor Rainforest Alliance guarantees a minimum price to cocoa farmers, which Fairtrade does. In 2009, Nestle’s Kit-Kat did become Fairtrade-registered, a momentous event, given the scale of Kit-Kat sales, but in 2020, Nestlé moved Kit-Kat into its Rainforest Alliance scheme. (Nestlé insisted this was about unifying all their products under one umbrella and not a moneysaving measure. But Joanna Pollard, a co-ordinator of Fairtrade Yorkshire contended that cocoa farmers would lose out heavily, and she presented a petition of protest with 300,000 signatures at their York factory.)

It tends to be only the smaller players who can now claim the moral high ground, a reversal of the previous situation. Tony’s Chocolonely (“crazy about chocolate, serious about people”) was founded in 2005 by a Dutch TV producer, Tuen van de Keuken, whose chocolate bars have irregular divisions, like crazy paving, to reflect the inequalities of the chocolate industry. The “lonely” tag is because van de Keuken felt as if he alone were addressing exploitation in chocolate farming, but the company’s moral claims go only so far. Chocolonely has never claimed there is no child labour in its supply chain, which is just as well, since, in 2022, the company reported that 1,701 instances of it had been found in the previous year — a situation it has undertaken to correct.

So there remains a moral dimension to the chocolate industry, albeit now a globalised one, and there is a new moral fraughtness, concerning our view of both its past and its social effects today. To the question of modern slavery, we might add the British obesity crisis that has come along to embarrass the chocolatiers. And in the modern age, there is even an anxiety about the nomenclature of their seasonal eggs. In one sense the creation of the chocolate egg pushed Easter in the child-oriented, secularised direction that Christmas had already begun to take in the Victorian period. (Decorated hard-boiled eggs had previously been given to the local poor rather than one’s own offspring.) While the Easter chocolate can be viewed as a Christian symbol, it is increasingly not so perceived.

In 2010, David Marshall crowdfunded the launch of the Meaningful Chocolate Company, having been given an Easter egg whose packaging proclaimed, “Easter is the festival of chocolate and loveliness.” Surveying the 80 million eggs on sale, he concluded that not a single manufacturer mentioned the religious aspect of the festival, hence his “Real Easter Egg”, which comes with a copy of the Easter story, is Fairtrade certified, and from the profits of which a donation is made to charity. By Easter 2023, 1.8 million of these eggs will have been sold, and without the aid of the supermarkets, who won’t stock an explicitly religious egg. Having spoken to Mr Marshall, I visited my local Sainsbury’s. About half the chocolate eggs on display were described as “Easter eggs”, but the E-word tended to be on the back of the package in small print rather than blazoned the front.

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Capitalist radicals will shatter the world

By Quinn Slobodian

The Quaker capitalism behind Fry’s Easter egg has become shareholder capitalism. In a globalised world, the chocolate industry grew too big for a connection to any one place or system of belief, unless it be the belief in profit. In decades past, guided tours of the Rowntree factory were regularly offered to the general public. But, a few years ago, when I applied to Nestlé for a tour, they turned me down on the grounds that if they let me in, they’d be overwhelmed with other applicants.

And Quakerism itself is a faith in decline. As Deborah Cadbury writes “there was a time when one in 10 people in Britain were Quakers”, but when she visited Quaker HQ, the Society of Friends on Euston Road, she discovered that membership was down to 15,000. As Quakerism and Christianity has faded from the world of British chocolate, a very familiar modern landscape has replaced it: a transition from the solidity and faith of the past towards a liquid, rootless, profit-maximising present.

I was once one of those people. I’m a lower-middle class, suburban British bloke from Generation X, who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best, though sometimes the wrong people got in; the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and paid your taxes, then society would reward you for it.

Of course, this was a partial story, as all stories are. Plenty of people would have cackled cynically at it from the start, while others, including me, disabused themselves of it by degrees. I spent 30 years writing about the degradation of nature and culture by the state-capitalist technocracy that governs us, so I imagined I was a hard-bitten realist. But the last few years taught me that I was still too naive about the mythic “social contract” with the state that I apparently entered into at birth, despite having never signed a thing.

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years has been radical. When, I wonder, did that contract expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the Iraq war was launched were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or maybe later, in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European “populism” happened, and suddenly any opposition to liberal globalism became fascism or bigotry or the work of Russian bots.

But it was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. What the Covid regime brought home to me was that I had not, despite what I believed, really understood the real nature of power until I saw it exercised in its raw form over my life. Specifically, I had not understood the power of the state.

Nothing has the power or reach of a modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history, and that power only grows and deepens. The momentum of a state is always towards the centre, always towards the agglomeration of more power. A state is like a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. Democracy, liberty and progress are some of the more recent banners beneath which state power has gathered, but there have been others: racial or ethnic homogeneity, human equality, religious purity. All of these stories have the potential to unite a people around a state core.

More from this author

Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? This has been the story of the world since 1945, and the result is the world’s first truly global system. The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling.

Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control, is the inevitable result, and the pandemic overreach will not be the last example. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and the reach of the state? Avoid it? Hide from it? Confront it? Ignore it? All of these? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how?

Jacques Ellul, the great theorist of technocracy, had his own answer to these questions: “The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilisation is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society.” Ellul, I think, was right. The state is the chief enemy of human freedom. It cannot be conquered or replaced. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, it can be evaded.

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott offers up some historical examples. Scott’s aim is twofold: firstly, to lay out the history of a vast upland region he calls “Zomia”, straddling territories from India to Malaysia, which has managed over centuries to avoid assimilation by encroaching states. And secondly, to rewrite the standard story of historical progress as it applies to the region. The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend.

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The state, says Scott, is fundamentally a colonial entity. In its youthful vigour, it will institute a process of “internal colonisation”, creating a homogenised “national identity” from the various cultures it governs, flattening language and dialect and telling a story in which loyalty to community or place becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. Later that colonisation process may move beyond its borders, as the state projects its power onto more distant peoples, assimilating them too. This is enclosure at work, and it is never voluntary. Like laissez-faire capitalism, or aristocracy, the state — which has only existed for the last 1% of human history — did not simply “evolve” as some logical phase of human “development”. It was created, by the use of raw power, through land seizures, slavery, enforced labour and taxation.

For this reason, escaping from state power and creating different ways of living in the “shatter zones” was an attractive option. Those zones were usually to be found in hard-to-reach places; in Southeast Asia, this meant the hills and mountains. Their peoples — the “tribals” or “Adivasi” or “savages” — would not, in most cases, be entirely cut off from lowland life; they would often trade with urban centres, for example, and some would raid them, too, if they got the chance. But they would keep their distance, wary of being corralled by the state machinery.

The Asian states, as they expanded, sought to impose the religious, cultural and economic practices of the dominant ethnic group — be it Thai, Burman, Han or Kinh — onto disparate peoples. When European colonists arrived in Asia, they simply continued the process, with a new cultural flavour. The official religion now might be Christianity rather than Buddhism, and “civilisation” might mean British rather than Han manners, but to the peripheral peoples the result was little different. British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, when he wrote of Sumatra:

“Here I am the advocate of despotism … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.”

But such localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer. In the 1890s, the British found the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung hill peoples in Zomia almost impossible. Because they had “never submitted to any central control”, complained the chief commissioner responsible for the process, they had to be attacked “hill by hill” to ensure their submission. The historian Malcom Yapp invented a wonderful term for this kind of dispersed culture of refusal: jellyfish tribes. In Scott’s words, jellyfish tribalism is “a process of defending cultural and economic autonomy by scattering” to “make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation”. The Berbers of North Africa, faced with colonisation by the Arabs, had their own way of putting this: divide that ye be not ruled. Lois Beck, who studied tribal culture in Iran, pointed to the same tactic in use there: “Large tribal groups divided into smaller groups to be less visible to the state and escaped its reach.”

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The danger of safetyism

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All of this points to some potential ways forward for those who fear the continued expansion of the increasingly globalised, technocratic state today. The challenge, it seems to me, is to move beyond pat political formulations of “resistance”, and begin to think instead like the hill tribes of Zomia. To think about becoming barbarians by choice. To begin to build parallel systems — economies and cultures — which are hard to assimilate, and have a robustness to them which can last. To construct “cultures of refusal”.

But how could this actually be done? The modern West is not like Zomia — indeed, as Scott himself points out, modern Zomia is not like Zomia used to be either, with many of its stateless people now being rapidly absorbed into state systems, which new technologies have made more powerful and far-reaching than ever. What hope of any kind of alternative life in a hyper-connected, monitored, digital age? Even if we wanted to retreat to the margins to build our own community, how many of us could do it? And what would make that community more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of “intentional communities”, which sprang up after the Sixties, and failed to create utopia?

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail — but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal; survival in order to uphold the values of a true human life. There is no easy or standardised way to emulate what Scott calls the “state-repelling characteristics” of the Zomians, but there is one question it might be useful for anyone who seeks to evade Leviathan to ask themselves: what kind of barbarian do I want to be?

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A 12th-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the “cooked Li” as those who have submitted to state authority and the “raw Li” as those who “live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or do not supply labour”. But while the raw Li were clearly enemies of the state, the cooked Li were not exactly friends either. State officials “suspected them of outward conformity while slyly co-operating with the raw Li”. The raw barbarians lived outside the walls and the cooked lived within, but neither were really to be trusted.

What we see here, then, is two potential escape routes: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose people know exactly where they stand: outside the state, the better to see God and experience creation. Such places are the work of the raw barbarians, and we need more of them.

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But most people are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.

What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is eternal and never-ending. Throughout history there has been an ongoing flow of assimilation and breakout, consolidation and collapse. There has never been any system as large, as overwhelming, as inhuman, as all-seeing, as technological modernity, and yet Rome and Babylon and Han China operated on the same principles. The shatter zones that rise in response are sometimes geographical, sometimes psychological and spiritual, and often all of these at once. Today, some of those shatter zones are at least partly online; and despite my own instinctive Luddism, I have to accept that such spaces are meeting points for state-repelling people who might never meet in real life. I have to accept, too, that using technology to resist technocracy can be of benefit, even though it can also be a trap.

In the age of Starlink, eyeball scans, AI bots and digital passports, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere to hide. But humans are creative. There are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. I am a writer, for instance, who is currently watching the publishing industry being taken over by political puritans who are purging incorrect thoughts from the shelves, while rooting around in the past for baddies to cancel. I can whine about this, or I can support or start new publishers on the margins who do things differently. The same might be true for music, art, academia, food-growing. Everything is compromised; nothing is easy. But building anew, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and establishing your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?

Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.

*

A longer version of this essay was first published at the Abbey of Misrule.

But there were signs of an alternative timeline if you looked closely, one marked by fragmentation as much as unity. Cultural events rippled in the consciousness; there were traces of the possibility that the apparent age of integration might actually be one of fracture.

The two Germanys unified in 1991 but the Soviet Union dissolved the same year. Mikhail Gorbachev was dubbed a “hero of deconstruction”. Yugoslavia began its disintegration shortly afterwards. In late 1991, the Somali state descended into a civil war and would have no central state for over a decade. The Swiss People’s Party racked up supporters as it drafted people against membership in the UN. The Freedom Party in Austria sought to revive nationalism along with the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, and the National Front in France. In Italy, the Northern League called for the secession of Lombardy. Many of the mainstream press’s post-2016 “populist” villains appeared on the stage in the early Nineties.

Pundits were hard on the trail of this alternative plot. In The Atlantic in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan warned of “the coming anarchy”. “Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change,” he wrote, “but it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.” Kaplan foresaw “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged glass pattern of city-states, shanty states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms”.

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How to envision this world? Francis Fukuyama had borrowed “the Last Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche. Kaplan proposed a “Last Map”, three-dimensional and holographic:

“In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional colour markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centres’ of power, as in the Middle Ages.”

“This future map,” he concluded, “will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.” Of course, the goal of Kaplan’s map, appearing in the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, was to contain and control the chaos. It recalled the oversized maps of Cold War thrillers from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983). Bruce Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net (1988) also featured a global simulation called Worldrun, used “as a forecasting tool for development agencies” and also as a game. In the interface, “long strips of the Earth’s surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption.”

The Last Map’s vision of anarchy was dystopian — a future to be avoided at any cost. This is the dominant perspective one gets from the airport bookshelves and magazine racks: the anxieties of those who perceive themselves to have access to the levers of power, the mapmakers, those who need to figure out how the dials can be tweaked to return order from disorder. Implicitly and often explicitly, this is a story about the reassertion of American overseas power. In a phrase he would repeat variations of for decades, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1988 that “the only alternative to America is anarchy”.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

But there were others who saw the crack-up coming and cheered it on. After the Cold War’s end, they surveyed the globe and thought: now that capitalism had won, why not go all the way? Fragmentation, they believed, was the new frontier of liberty. Paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and conservatives like Charles Murray and Paul Craig Roberts opposed the moves to greater integration that marked the Nineties, cheered the hardening of borders and called for the revision of immigration laws to discriminate against people from blacker and browner countries, revived race science to support their claims. Some dug deep into medieval history to claim that segregation was good and small collectives should protect their own. They promoted, in other words, many of the principles associated now with the far-Right.

Yet they all had something in common: they were market liberals and libertarians. How did people from the supposed camp of open borders become champions of higher and thicker walls? How did adherents of an ideology supposedly built around the universal figure of homo economicus embrace hoary theories of genetically determined intelligence and ignorance? When did zealous advocates of global markets turn against what one called “the beast” of the “New World Order”?

When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

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America is showing its age

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What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

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At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

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Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

This post-Cold War period was a historically sublime moment: capitalism had won but what capitalism meant was still undecided. Libertarians were among the most active in this process of re-imagination, with solutions from designing boutique polities and bespoke states to rehabbing existing zones, colonies, and city-states. For these thinkers states should dissolve into platform polities and “start-up societies” offering customised services to customers instead of securing rights for citizens.

For decades, these capitalist radicals surveyed the world for experiments in anarchocapitalism comparable to existing favourites, such as the Wild West or medieval Iceland. They started their own experiments in “micro-ordering” and sparked wide-ranging discussions about the basic requirements for building collective life and the foundational facts of human nature. When Silicon Valley prophets such as Peter Thiel said in 2009 that “if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries”, he was speaking out of this alternative zeitgeist. Anyone who thinks globalism is the only way that capitalist radicalism manifests itself should acquaint themselves with those less interested in scaling up than scaling down and opting out.

I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

 ***

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When we talk of folk tales, we are referring to the oral stories of common people. In the British Isles, a rich folkloric tradition emerged following waves of invasions by, among others, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. They are tales of dragonslayers, giants, and wizards, preserved in texts like Beowulf, Old English poetry and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But over centuries, knowledge of them faded. Numerous reasons have been suggested for this, including the rise of Christianity, the Norman Conquest, Reformation, Interregnum, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, capitalism, globalisation or merely the passage of time.

Or perhaps Britain has erased its folk tales in an attempt to forget its past. Folk law is the ethnography of peoples, holding memories of traditions, beliefs, and values whose existence may have long vanished. In Britain there appears to be some modern discomfort with folktales, tied as they often are to particular landscapes, people and nations. After the Second World War, Germanic folklore, which the Nazis had overtly employed as a tool to bolster their notion of an Aryan nation, fell out of fashion. It may be that ongoing discussions around British Empire and colonialism, and the sense that folk tales are too easily linked to a nationalistic nostalgia, have made them taboo once again. Or perhaps in a post-Brexit world, anything that sniffs of specifically British or English myths aligns too closely with a perceived backwardness, insularity, or prejudice.

But it is their very sense of place and ties to particular landscapes and peoples that ensure their continued relevance. In the face of global “McDonaldsisation” that flattens the diversity of cultural traditions into a sanitised monoculture of big brands and business suits, folk tales radically resist homogeneity. As Unesco’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage points out, globalisation gives rise to “grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction” of heritage such as folklore. Folklore is a “mainspring of cultural diversity”, and its loss is tantamount to cultural destruction. A country ripped from its roots, with no sense of self, will fracture. It will leave people unmoored in an increasingly impersonal world. Brexit has been endlessly analysed as a reaction against globalisation by those angry at how their lives and cultural identities have been disregarded. Perhaps the vote was a desperate attempt to grasp something vital they felt was being lost. Folklore is one such vital anchor, connecting us with that past and each other.

Folk tales have refused to be banished entirely. Sporadic resurgences litter the 20th and 21st centuries, from the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Alan Garner, to the folk horror movement in films such as The Wickerman and Midsommar. Today a new generation of British writers is exploring the folk tradition: Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt have reimagined the Norse myths; Max Porter’s Lanny features an incarnation of a “Green Man” or woodwose; Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent revolves around superstitions of a legendary serpent; Zoe Gilbert’s Folk interweaves folk stories with the lives of the inhabitants of a remote island. All these centuries later, artists are discovering reasons to explore these ancient stories.

But why? Perhaps the first attraction of folk tales is that they are tales of wonder and magic. Folk tales, put simply, enchant. When the philosopher Max Weber spoke of the “disenchantment of the world”, he was talking of the dominance of scientific thinking, reason, and modernisation. Everything was, in theory, knowable. Superstition and other irrationalities would be banished. But folk tales, concerned as they are with the unexplainable, are the opposite of disenchantment. In Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starveacre the corpse of a hare can regrow muscle and skin and return from the dead. In Garner’s Booker-nominated Treacle Walker the arrival of a rag and bone man brings ancient rituals and second sight — an entire book, if you will, about rubbing at our dulled, disenchanted vision and revealing magic.

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However, magic is often dismissed as a subject for children — not literary fiction. With the exception of genres such as magic realism, stories of magic are often seen as slightly shameful or embarrassing, unlike, say, a solid realist novel about contemporary issues. Today, many of the motifs and settings of folklore can be glimpsed in children’s literature: Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Perhaps no one has done more to cement the folk or fairy-tale as an art form for children than Walt Disney. But rarely has literary fiction been permitted the same licence. When authors do dabble in folklore, the response is often bafflement or snobbery. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, set in an ancient Britain of monsters and dragons, was met with general bewilderment.

Yet there is clearly desire for these kinds of tales. “The fairy-story is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists,” as Tolkien put it. There is no better example than the continuing popularity of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, inspired by Old English and Norse literature, and more recently George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. These are not niche fantasy, children’s works, or guilty secrets, but mainstream, celebrated works of art. Perhaps those who scoff at magic and folk tales have “stopped short of true maturity”, which, according to WH Auden, consists of “a recovered sense of wonder”.

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Fairy tales aren’t just about escapism, though. They can be political too. Many modern writers use folk tale characters and motifs to fight against a modernity that is destroying the planet and old ways of life. Now the forgotten figures of the past, the Green Man, giants and fairies, embodiments of the natural world, are resurrected and reimagined as defenders of the environment. In Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s state-of-the-nation play, a decaying olde England of druids and maypoles clings on even as the “civilising” modern world tries to sweep it away with clipboards and council edicts. That it has passed into near-legendary status since its premiere in 2009, with performances still selling out in 2022, is telling.

Clearly the old tales cannot be silenced. They cling on all these centuries later in new forms and new works as authors rediscover the rich traditions of this country. Perhaps one day, alongside Achilles and Hercules, Herne and Belinus and Wayland will take their rightful place in the pantheon of popular consciousness.

In his book Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good, Maurice Glasman argues that globalisation is destructive because it prioritises global market economics over democratic national sovereignty. Brexit was an important step in rebalancing this relationship; the democratic nation state reclaiming lost ground to the forces of international capital. The book ends with a clever aphorism: “Workers of the word unite, you have nothing to lose but your supply chains.”

Nowhere is this tension between globalisation and the nation state clearer than on the football pitch. Consider, for instance, the supply chains of Glasman’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur: Lloris (France), Son (South Korea), Sánchez (Colombia), Højbjerg (Denmark), Gil (Spain), Royal (Brazil), Perišić (Croatia), Romero (Argentina), Sarr (Senegal), Bissouma (Ivory Coast). Asking what encourages these men to leave their home communities is like that famous Mrs Merton question to Debbie McGee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” Son and Kane are on nearly £200,000 a week; Perišić is on £178,000. Premier League footballers may kiss their club badge when they score, but gone are the days when they would stay with one club their whole career. Now they follow the money — and the money frequently comes from the dodgiest of places: Saudi despots and Russians oligarchs. As Glasman has written: “If globalisation is understood as the process through which finance capital escapes the bonds of domestic constraints in order to maximise returns, then the establishment of the Premier League created globalisation in one country.”

Yet rejecting globalisation is not the same as shunning internationalism, a distinction Glasman makes clear. If the Premier League represents all that is bad about globalisation, the World Cup indicates something of the virtues of internationalism. Since 2007, England players have donated the relatively modest remuneration they get for playing for their country to charity. They play for the pride. Yet isn’t this precisely the sort of nationalist sentiment that many liberal globalists complain about, imagining only beer-swilling Brexit bigots with large bellies, foul mouths, and racist imaginations?

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It is the kind of worldview derided by Gordon Brown. He continues on his tirade against nationalism: “The win-win economics of mutually-beneficial commerce is being replaced by the zero-sum rivalries of ‘I win, you lose’, as movements such as ‘America first’, ‘China first’, ‘India first’, and ‘Russia first’ threaten to descend into an us versus them geopolitics of ‘my country first and only’.” In other words, leave grown-up politics to those of us economically literate enough to understand things like gilts and the exchange rate mechanism. This sense of superiority coupled with the dismissal of national pride as a form of bigotry is precisely what led to Brexit. How did the soft liberal-Left become captured by the values of the global economic order? When did it lose faith in the nation state as a fellowship of free-born subjects whose commitment to their country is a way of expressing their commitment to each other, to what Glasman rightly celebrates as “the common good”?

I hold no candle for Liz Truss. She died at the hand of the ideology she was keenest to promote. But even her most ardent critics should not have been quite so sanguine about a prime minister of this country being brought down by market forces. Yes, it’s more than a little ironic: those who live by the sword die by the sword. But surely none of us want our democratically-elected representatives having to pay fealty to the global money gods. If Corbyn had won in 2019, the Left would have gone ballistic had he been brought down by the global economic order, and rightly so. We always have a choice. Better to be poorer than live with these sorts of chains.

The nation state is the ultimate backstop to democratic virtue. That’s why democratic nationalism is an inherently good thing — which, by the way, is not the same as the poisonous philosophy of ethnic nationalism. Likewise, economic nationalism is not some sort of “me first” chauvinism to which Brown refers, it is simply the idea that the way we order our finances should be decided in Birmingham and Bradford, not in Brussels or by international money markets. Wasn’t it Brown who gave us that speech, “British jobs for British workers”? What happened to that?

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As it happens, Brown is a massive football fan. He went to his first Raith Rovers game when he was seven and soon started to sell programmes outside the ground in Kirkcaldy. He recalls questioning his father — a virtuous Church of Scotland minister — when he applauded the good play of Raith’s opponents. For all his talk of international cooperation, it seems he saw nothing wrong with a “Raith first” philosophy from the terraces of Stark’s Park. It’s an expression of solidarity not hostility to the other. And the same is true of “England first” in Qatar. Had Scotland qualified, I suspect even a determined internationalist like Brown would have felt a wave of pride. Of course he would. “Scotland first” just means: this is the team I root for — just as nationalism is about rooting for the people I live among.

There is no doubt the World Cup stinks of greed too. Qatar had almost no footballing culture when it won the bid to host it, not to mention its dodgy human rights record. But for all its many faults, what happens on the pitch during the World Cup represents a kind of nationalist fellow-feeling that is exceedingly rare in the “me first” culture of professional football. When you play for your country, you play for love. Those proud citizens of nowhere who denigrate the nation state as the crucible of so much of what is bad in our political life ought to turn on their television sets over the next few weeks. “Three lions on a shirt” is not some sort of gateway drug to fascism. On the contrary, national pride is precisely the reason that these teams come from every corner of the world to compete.

But I’ve not seen anything in our new PM’s utterances or parliamentary career to date to suggest that he will respect this post-Brexit “realignment” in British politics. Not even a homeopathic echo of it.

It’s commonplace to mutter at this point about how this proves British democracy is a sham. This isn’t true; but it is true that if you expect policies to be implemented based on how the public votes at a general election, you’re looking at “democracy” backwards.

Election manifestos and associated political programmes take shape based on the mobilisation of political influence by competing interest groups. The willingness of politicians to take any given view into account in this process is less a principled stance, than a pragmatic reflection of how much real clout interest groups are perceived to have. If the median British political standpoint isn’t well represented in our national politics, this reflects a calculation across the board that leaders don’t need to pay much attention to what the masses want — because they no longer wield enough meaningful leverage to insist on it.

Whether or not this is conclusively true, enough leaders now act on this assumption that it forms the core of running political battles across the West. And all these battles turn on an increasingly open class war between two populations with radically conflicting worldviews and interests: the reality people, and the ideas people.

The structure of this conflict is easier to understand by comparison with an earlier one: the industrial-era battle for dominance of Britain, between aristocratic landowners and an emerging mercantile and industrial elite. This battle came to a head in 1815 with the Corn Laws, a punitive tariff on imported grain intended to shield British farmers from overseas competition.

This policy had obvious benefits for the aristocrats and gentry who owned much of the land, and was perhaps the last time the old agrarian ruling class was able blatantly to use the tax code to protect their own material interests. But they had a powerful and rising coalition ranged against them. The mercantile elite, whose wealth was bound up with trade beyond Britain’s borders, objected to tariffs that cramped their business style. And they were supported, for much more pragmatic reasons, by a swelling industrial working and lower-middle class, who couldn’t grow their own food and just wanted to be able to afford a loaf of bread.

I take this detour into British political history to illustrate three points. First, that contra pop-Marxism, contests for power aren’t always between social classes arranged hierarchically — crudely, oppressors and those they oppress. They can also represent competing interests within a class.

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Second, not having a vote didn’t stop the industrial poor making their views known. There was huge grassroots opposition to the Corn Laws, which fanned demands for an extended franchise, and prompted mass protests that were sometimes brutally suppressed.

But — and third — mass mobilisation doesn’t accomplish much without leadership. And the leaders of mass movements don’t always share the masses’ motivations, a fact that also has lessons for us today. Richard Cobden, the politician most central to repeal of the Corn Laws, was a textile manufacturer and trader. Understandably given this, he was in favour of trade and hostile to aristocratic protectionism. He wrote several pamphlets on British foreign policy, in which he argued against then-settled 19th-century consensus on multipolar “balance of power”, in favour of an early vision of the modern globalist vision of growth based on free international movement of goods, money, and people.

Cobden was a brilliant organiser, and his successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws serves to illustrate the way divergent elite and mass political interests can coincide in a single issue. The 1846 repeal signalled the decisive defeat of Britain’s Old Tory agrarian order. In its place, the new dominant order became an expansionist, mercantile Whig one, dedicated to Free Trade — the worldview, ironically, now most associated with the modern Tories.

Today, though, the main contest is no longer between the landed gentry and mercantile elite. The goalposts have moved again, and the battleground is now between those whose power and material interests are grounded in the material world, and those whose wealth comes from the world of ideas. The political analyst NS Lyons characterises this as a class and culture war between “Physicals” and “Virtuals”: two outlooks that broadly correspond to the distinction David Goodhart drew between Somewheres and Anywheres in the wake of Brexit.

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What’s key is that the moral outlook is downstream of concrete material interests. Physicals work in sectors such as farming, construction, manufacturing, haulage, mining, and so on: occupations inextricable from the material world. Virtuals, on the other hand, work at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world: think finance, academia, education, media, tech, and so on.

And Virtuals dominate the elite. For as the West has de-industrialised, Western money and power have drained from Physical occupations toward Virtual ones such as finance and tech. And, as a consequence, Virtuals today hold a near-monopoly on institutional power. Westminster occupational data reflects this: barristers, teachers, solicitors, and journalists are well represented among MPs. Conversely, you can trace the waning power of the Physicals in the total number of MPs who were previously farmers, miners or manual workers. This total shrank by a factor of five between 1979 and 2015, from 142 to a scant 33.

This class-inflected contest between the virtual and the real economies is the core of the class and culture war now being fought across the West. It also helps to make sense of how apparently unrelated issues, such as trans rights and immigration, can become bitter battlefronts in the same war.

Trans rights make sense as a proxy for the Virtuals’ core moral claim: that ideas matter more than the material world. When we consider what a person is in legal terms, do we prioritise the material fact of their biological sex, or their inner, abstract idea of who they are? Understandably, the Virtuals prefer the answer that places their class of work, their worldview and by extension their political interests at the top of the moral pile.

High immigration, meanwhile, is a material positive to Virtuals: more people means more growth. This material upside is then moralised in terms of “openness”, “culture”, “freedom” and so on. For working-class Physicals, though, high immigration means stiffer competition for jobs. This, far more than racial animus, was the central driver of the working-class Brexit vote.

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The anti-Corn Law movement has further lessons for the Brexit battle between Virtuals and Physicals, in that it followed the Cobden pattern: it was a mass movement that succeeded with leadership from elites with their own reasons for pushing it. Two mutually exclusive Brexits were promised: an open and globalising one for those such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and an immigration-restrictionist one for the Red Wall. The impossibility of delivering both has paralysed the Tories ever since.

For what complicates this class war is that it’s not a simple contest between “elites” and physical-world proles. Overall, Physicals skew more working-class, and working-class Physical jobs are generally low-status and precarious. But farmers, tradesmen and oil executives can be relatively well-off while still sharing broad cultural sympathies with working-class Physicals. And yet the latter can’t always rely on Physical elites to defend their interests: on immigration restriction, for example, factory-owners and farmers will swap culture-war sides in a flash when they can’t get seasonal workers from overseas.

Still, it remains to be seen whether the Virtuals’ dominance really is as complete as it appears from their stranglehold on government and the media. At the last count, Virtuals remain materially dependent on the real economy: without farm workers, shop workers, bin men and drivers, the laptop class are as helpless and useless as a snail without its shell. This was visible in those groups for whom lockdown rules were most blithely waived: despite often-cramped living conditions, for example, even those seasonal agricultural workers coming to the UK from high-risk countries were exempted from the 14-day quarantine rule.

What happens if the Physicals start weaponising this dependence more methodically? As Lyons observes, the Vancouver truckers’ protest at the start of this year offers a glimmer of what it might look like when the simmering class conflict between Physicals and Virtuals erupts into open warfare. Arguably the Yellow Vest protests in France, and recent farmers’ protests in the Netherlands form part of the same picture. And with rising energy prices driven by US foreign policy in Ukraine pushing German manufacturers offshore or into shutdown, we may presently see more German Physicals in the dissident ranks.

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But mutinous Physicals may need to learn from the truckers: Trudeau eventually ended the protest by freezing protesters out of their own bank accounts. Even the most capable Physicals can’t easily get by in the modern world without access to Virtual finance and tech.

Another possibility is a more thoroughgoing push to turn what’s left of working-class Physicals into the “useless class“ some predict will emerge if AI and automation replace human-powered jobs. This would represent the final Virtual victory: for without even the option to withdraw their labour, it’s hard to see on what basis such a group could compel elites to consider their political interests. This condition of political weakness would be even more pronounced should UBI replace earned wages: few adolescents, however rebellious, will do more than pull faces at their parents if they’re afraid their pocket money will be stopped.

Whether or not this is the future we get, the likelihood is that we’re in for a period of class conflict on a scale not seen since the early days of trade unionism. If history is any guide, the eventual outcome will be some kind of settlement — but before we reach that point, we can expect a great deal more mobilisation by the Physicals as a class, and a great deal more moral denunciation of that class and its interests by their Virtual class enemies. And whatever the eventual settlement is, formal democracy won’t be the vehicle for bringing it about. It’ll be the rubber-stamp for an exercise of political leverage that forces Physical political interests back onto (or definitively off) the table.

To exercise such leverage, working-class Physicals will need to find allies among dissident segments of the elite, all of whom will (like Cobden) have their own motivations for the bargain. And if this seems an ugly compromise, the alternative is a political process that continues to elect Prime Ministers who ignore their interests. Simply because they can.

This order was in retreat even before the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Total international merchandise trade peaked in 2008, when it accounted for 51% of the world’s output. It plummeted during the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and has never durably recovered. The Great Recession, and the widening disparity between rich and poor that followed, shattered the belief that a global world of free trade was bringing prosperity to all.

Prior to the crash, “protectionism” had been a dirty word for 30 years. In the 2010s, however, Donald Trump and likeminded politicians elsewhere bid for power by calling on their countrymen to embrace a protectionist future. In America, Trump wanted to reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing base and multiply the number of good jobs. He also wanted to reserve such jobs for American citizens rather than offer them to foreigners, often non-whites who came, Trump alleged, from “shithole countries”.

Suspicion of foreigners facilitated Trump’s victory in 2016, as it did Brexit’s triumph. By the late 2010s, hostility to non-European peoples was on the rise even in the cosmopolitan EU, prompting Germany to pay Turkey and Greece billions to park tens of thousands of Middle Eastern and North African refugees in camps far from the European heartland.

All these forces were in motion before the twin crises of the pandemic and Ukraine struck. The pandemic froze populations in place, stalling migration as severely as world wars had once done. Meanwhile, the vast disruption of the most mundane processes of manufacturing, commerce, and transportation undermined the “just-in-time” global production and shipping regimes that had long undergirded the neoliberal economy. All kinds of essential goods (and essential workers) were suddenly scarce, the algorithms used to finely tune supply and demand now rendered useless. Corporations everywhere began to wonder whether stretching their supply chains around the world was still a good idea, especially when a little virus and a nasty regional war could stop the global mobility of goods and people cold.

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The response of Europe and America to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveals not just shock and horror at Putin’s savagery but a determination to restore a neoliberal world order that had been slipping away. Europe and America have rapidly been repairing a frayed Atlantic alliance. They have revived the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, agreed to by Roosevelt and Churchill in 1941, that called for restoring the values and principles that the Nazis were so intent upon destroying: the rule of law, respect for the territorial integrity of nations, the right of peoples to be free and self-governing, and the pursuit of economic prosperity through peace and trade rather than war and conquest.

Even Western measures against Russia are aimed at reviving the world of yesterday. The sanctions are, indeed, among the most severe and comprehensive ever imposed on a country. In the West’s most desirable scenario, Putin will be weakened to the point where he must retreat or see his regime implode. That would potentially revive Russian liberalism and put the country on a path that would culminate in its eventual reintegration into a neoliberal global community.

Will Europe and America succeed in this endeavour? One hopes so. But they may not. The circumstances that would trigger Putin’s fall or a quick end to the conflict have yet to crystallise. It seems more likely that the conflict will become a frozen war, with Ukraine becoming the new Korea — divided not between North and South but between East and West, with Ukraine pulled more and more into the “West” as South Korea once was. In this scenario, Russia, with a sliver of eastern Ukraine in its possession, would become more like North Korea: isolated, authoritarian, and poor, yet possessing a dangerous nuclear arsenal and with China as a silent but steadfast ally.

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If this darker scenario comes to pass, the world’s retreat from the neoliberal world of the early years of this century may intensify. During the golden age of neoliberalism, corporations and nations felt confident procuring raw materials and implanting production facilities anywhere, as long as resources were abundant, labour was cheap, and markets were allowed to flourish. Establishing outposts of free-market capitalism in countries such as Russia and China, it was hoped, would compel the regimes of those nations to liberalise: to institute the rule of law (if only to protect property and contracts), to embrace a free press and free elections, and maybe even to embrace democracy itself. Open markets, it was hoped, would produce open societies.

It is now clear that these hopes were misplaced. Globalisation has strengthened authoritarianism and illiberalism, not weakened them. We may be moving into a world that is not open, flat or harmonious, but fractured and divided into rival geopolitical blocs: Russia at the centre of one, China, Europe, and America at the centre of the others. Tall, jagged, and hard-to-scale walls may separate these blocs from each other. Peace would be achievable in this multipolar world, and alliances certainly would be possible — between North America and Europe, for example, or between Russia and China. But war would be a recurring threat, rendering the movement of goods, capital, and people between the various blocs far more fraught than during the neoliberal order’s heyday.

If the world continues to shift toward multipolar antagonism, geopolitics and national security will become paramount in the planning not just of nations but of private corporations. EU members are now discussing how to sustain their economies long term without access to Russian oil or gas. Multinational corporations must now grapple not simply with the cost of pulling out of Russia, which has been high, but with the possibility that a far more serious blow will befall them if China should decide to attack its own Ukraine, known to us as Taiwan. It is no longer inconceivable that international corporations will be forced to pull out of China as they’ve had to pull out of Russia. How does a corporation insulate itself against the worst consequences of that future?

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National governments thus have to think much harder about the costs, economic and political, of sustaining raw material, production, and supply chains stretched across vast territories and rival blocs. Sovereign states are compiling lists of goods, such as computer chips, deemed so essential to national security that they must be produced domestically or in a friendly neighbouring state. Though military budgets will likely balloon, a military strategy alone will not suffice. Countries will require an industrial strategy, too, which means governments will need to intervene in markets in ways considered illegitimate during the era when the neoliberal order was riding high.

These may not be the long-term results of the Ukraine crisis. Liberalism may triumph, and a neoliberal political economy may be resuscitated. But such a victory will not come easily. And even if one is achieved, the neoliberal economic order cannot successfully be restored for the long term without a serious reckoning with its flaws: a toleration of too great a level of economic and social inequality; a reluctance to recognise and assist those who have suffered economically; and a flow of political power away from national legislatures and toward international organisations, private and public. It will not be enough, in other words, simply to reanimate the ideals of the Atlantic Charter, or of the WTO. Nations and alliances need new charters for the twenty-first century, ones adequate to the challenges of our time.

What is happening to France, as sociologist Jerôme Fourquet observed, is best understood as “the Great Metamorphosis”. Nobody has done more than Fourquet to peel away the misapprehensions that surround French society, and reveal what it is now, or what it will look like in the future. He is the sociologist of France as it is, not what it once was, or how The Economist or Financial Times wishes it to be.

“The Great Metamorphosis” began, Fourquet argues in La France sous nos yeux (2021), in the Eighties. That was the decade France’s cultural core began to collapse in on itself, and the features of French society in its present form began to surface.

In 1983 strikes and violent protests by auto-workers, mostly immigrants from the Maghreb, made the Muslim minority visible to France for the first time. Images of the riots propelled the Front National to its first significant successes in the European elections of 1984. France’s agonies over migration had begun.

Then, in 2005, French voters rejected the European Constitution in a referendum — despite its backing by most of the French media and political class. Here, Fourquet believes, a new divide could be seen for the first time, one that would determine political conflict going forward: between those who benefited from globalisation, and those who did not.

Against this backdrop of intensifying political discontent, French culture was changing. Older mores were disappearing, especially Christian ones, and Catholic ones in particular. Fourquet strikingly demonstrates the disappearance of the Church’s influence on French sensibilities. In 1961, 38% of French Catholics declared that they went to Mass every Sunday. By 2012, only 7% did. This sharp decline in the number of practising Catholics was matched by a shrinking number of vocations. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the number of priests, 170,000, was almost equal to their number in 1950. By 2015, it had fallen to 51,500. If the current trend continues there won’t be a single Catholic priest left in France in 30 years.

Released from this crumbling framework, French attitudes towards marriage, homosexuality, and children born to unmarried parents changed dramatically. In the Sixties, marriage was still the dominant social norm, but today it has ceased to be so. In 1980, 11.4% of children were born out of wedlock; by 1990 it was 30% and by 2005, more than half the children were born outside of marriage. If a teacher had started his career in 1980, he would have taught a class in which almost all the children had married parents. By the time of his retirement, however, that ratio would have inverted.

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The last stand of French Catholicism came when Francois Hollande legalised gay marriage in 2013. To an extent unseen in the United Kingdom, or Germany, or Spain, French Catholics mobilised against Hollande’s decision. La Manif pour tous marches drew tens of thousands of participants who disagreed with the new law, but to no avail. Catholics finally realised they were a minority, one of the islands in the “French archipelago”, as the title of one of Fourquet’s books goes. Dechristianisation, he believed, had entered its “terminal stage”.

Nature famously abhors a vacuum. As Christianity receded other forces began to influence French society. Emancipation from tradition led to individualism. Fourquet measures this in birth names: In the early Sixties, the number of newborns with rare names — those that had been given to no more than three people so far — was less than 6,000. By 1990, it had jumped to nearly 18,000. But the real explosion came in 2016, when as many as 55,000 newborns bore rare names. And the cultural component of Catholicism was replaced by American pop culture.

Americanisation, Fourquet writes, has profoundly transformed France. Although 27% of French people have visited the US at least once, every second person among the wealthy has done so. The upper classes are fluent in English — Macron voters were the most proficient in this language, while Le Pen voters were the least — and consume mostly American media.

The less fortunate have their own cultural markers of Americanisation. Again, Fourquet analyses names. The Maries of French tradition were replaced by Kevins (after Home Alone) and Dylans (after Beverly Hills 90210). The map of these American names coincides with the places where Marine Le Pen can count on her firmest support. Many National Rally activists bear names such as Jordan Bardella, today the number two in the party, or Davy Rodriguez, who headed its youth organisation. More phenomena of this kitschy low-status Americanisation include the immense popularity of country music clubs, vintage US cars, and pole dancing across France, as well the spread of the Buffalo Grill restaurant chain in hundreds of locations.

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Both the elites and the working classes began to dream American dreams. Fourquet calls one of them the “Plaza majority” lifestyle, after the name of the celebrity real estate agent Stéphane Plaza. In his TV shows, he advertises an ideal shared across French society: a house with a garden, a desire that mimics the American suburban lifestyle. Depending on the class, this ideal assumes different forms, but it often includes a swimming pool. This vision of affluence from America captured the imagination of the French, who have built 1.3 million pools in their country. Elsewhere, Fourquet says the last common experience of the “French archipelago” is a visit, or “pilgrimage” to Disneyland — 75% of those under 35 have visited the theme park.

Americanisation was the only component of globalisation that did not bitterly divide the French. According to Fourquet the split between those for whom globalisation meant achievement and those for whom it meant dispossession, would, from 2017, become central to understanding France. As in the United States and Britain, globalisation swept the French economy. As in the United States and Britain, its impact could have perverse consequences.

At the turn of the century, the French telecommunications manufacturer Alcatel had 120 different types of plants scattered around the country. One of them was located in Lannion. This is where Minitel was created and where the first French portable phone, Bi-bop, was invented. In 2001 Alcatel’s CEO declared that in the new economy factories were not necessary. Thousands of Lannion residents lost their jobs. Between 1999 and 2004 the city lost 10% of its population — then between 2004 and 2017 it fell by another 20%.

What happened to Lannion residents? They dropped out of the middle class, which was everywhere being reshaped by “the Great Metamorphosis”. It led to a phenomenon that Fourquet calls “bipolarisation”; society begins to resemble an hourglass. The middle class disintegrates, its lower strata falling into the lower classes and its upper strata ascending into the upper classes.

This process can be seen in leisure activities. The Trente Glorieuses were a time of upward social mobility, which translated into democratisation of ski slopes. While it used to be that entire middle class families went skiing, today skiing has become an activity that only the well-off can afford. The appearance of hard discount stores represents another sign of the erosion of the middle class. Its less affluent members cannot afford to maintain their consumption habits. This also, as Fourquet points out, explains the ominous success of Dacia cars. This Romanian brand, bought out by Renault, was originally intended as a way to expand into Eastern European markets. However, Dacia has enjoyed great popularity in France, allowing those who otherwise would have to turn to a used car to buy a new one.

Dacia drivers in the new France were more likely to work in warehouses, schools, and nursing homes than factories. It was these workers who became the backbone of the Gilets Jaunes movement. The protestors were the people who Fourquet had studied for decades; “the proletariat working in logistics and services”, and those who juggled several jobs to make ends meet. Jacline Mouraud, a Gilets Jaunes in the protest delegation which met with the French government, simultaneously worked as a hypnotherapist, an accordionist, and a security guard. Fourquet sees the Gilets Jaunes as an example of the “subaltern class” once described by Gramsci. Similar to the farmers of the Italian Mezzogiorno, constantly agitated, but unable to articulate their grievances successfully.

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In Fourquet’s work we can see the patterns that have come to define modern France. The detachment of the elites from their country; the splintering of the middle-class; the collapse of centuries old traditions. His analyses clarify French politics. A Fourquet reader might have predicted Eric Zemmour’s failure to pick up the Rassemblement National vote over the weekend. The electorate of Kevins who sing country music and enjoy Buffalo Grill belongs to a different universe than the de Maistre-quoting essayist from Paris who recorded his best results in Saint-Tropez.

Without Fourquet’s writings, it can be difficult to grasp that the run-off between Macron and Le Pen is more than a political battle. It is a clash between two worlds within France, between the two halves of Fourquet’s hourglass. A confrontation, as Disraeli once wrote of a divided England, of “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

What will France be after France? Fourquet warned that the islands of the French archipelago will continue to drift apart. Stark differences in consumption, lifestyles, mobility, and wealth would only sharpen. He believed there were two ways to end this fragmentation. A new electoral system, based on proportional representation. And a final abandonment of France’s old Left-Right divide, and the acceptance of a new politics, contested on one side by the winners of globalisation, with the losers on the other side.

Proportional representation seems a distant prospect. But on Sunday, France, where politics had been structured for over half a century around two parties, changed dramatically. The socialists were irrelevant by 2017. Now Les Républicains cannot even obtain 5% of the vote. In the run-off, for the second time in a row, we will witness a showdown between the candidate of France for whom the future and globalisation mean the same thing and the candidate of France for whom globalisation means decline. French politics has finally come to represent the society described by Fourquet.

This is the nearly 400-page case Marie Favereau lays out in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World — and it’s a convincing one. A professor of history at Paris Nanterre University, Favereau’s previous published work focused on the wide-ranging geopolitical connections the Mongols made, and subtle cultural revolution that transformed them from an alien, conquering elite to deeply-rooted imperial administrators who shaped the societies they ruled. Though Favereau occasionally fixates excessively on the internecine dramas of Genghis Khan’s family, on the whole The Horde is both brisk and dense with facts and analysis about a period and people that remain unknown to most Westerners.

The Golden Horde emerged during the Pax Mongolica, when the various divisions of the Mongol Empire — Khanates —were ruled separately by the descendants of Genghis Khan, but united by treaties based on Mongol tradition. Marco Polo traversed the length of Eurasia, from Europe to China, and back, when the Mongol Empire was at its peak in the late 13th century. But the Golden Horde was the most geographically expansive of the Khanates. It stretched from modern Bulgaria and Romania in the west, to the vast Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea, and yet further eastward still to the western edge of Mongolia. Beyond it lay the Great Yuan, who ruled most of the landmass of China and Mongolia, while the modern Middle East and southern Central Asia were under the two smaller Khanates.

The high noon of the Golden Horde’s power came between 1250 and 1400 AD, when it had unquestioned hegemony over all of the Russian principalities, northern Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus (Moscow remained a nominal vassal of the Horde until 1480 AD). This was an empire at enormous scale, with a vast reach — like Augustan Rome, or Spain during el Siglo de Oro, or Victorian Britain. For centuries, the Golden Horde stood athwart the trade routes of Eurasia. It was colossal.

But before there was the Horde, there were the four sons of Genghis Khan: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei and Tolui. It was from Jochi that the Horde would come. The eldest, he had a checkered relationship with his father, and with good reason. His mother, Börte, had been kidnapped by an enemy of Genghis Khan eight months before his birth. Although a shadow was cast over Jochi’s paternity, Genghis claimed him anyway. (Favereau straightforwardly accepts that Jochi was likely not Genghis Khan’s biological son.) After a great conference of Mongol leaders in Central Asia was held to determine the succession, and passed over Jochi, he marched his forces west, pitching his tents on the far fringe of the Mongol Empire north of the Caspian Sea.

Jochi’s self-exile set in motion a long train of consequences, and the real narrative of The Horde begins with Jochi’s sons, Orda, Batu, and Berke. Their lives illustrate three principles that reoccur again and again in The Horde. First, there is the principle of consensus and coexistence. Batu ruled the western half of the Golden Horde, while Orda ruled the east. These were the Blue and White Hordes, due to the association of these colours with the west and the east, and for over a century they respected each other’s territory. Second, the ascension of the younger Batu over Orda as Khan reversed expectation and reflected pragmatism.

Rather than slavishly following rules and customs, the Golden Horde embraced flexibility in its culture and political organisation. Finally, after the death of Batu, the youngest brother, Berke, became the Khan. Berke was the son of a Muslim woman, and he eventually converted to Islam, anticipating the later wholesale conversion of the Horde’s Mongol elite. Berke’s religious choice was also reflected in his geopolitical decision-making: he had no compunction about aligning with fellow Muslims against other Mongols. But Berke was also a pragmatist, not a fanatic, and he valued Mongol legal precedent and accepted the importance of religious toleration within his empire. The Golden Horde eventually became Muslim, but the empire it dominated was never Islamic.

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One of the major themes of The Horde is that the wealth of the ruling class of the Golden Horde was uniquely fuelled by trade, and this drove much of its diplomacy and war-making. Unlike China, Europe or the Near East, the territories of the Horde were sparsely populated. The Khans of the Golden Horde could not tax vast numbers of peasants to sustain their wealth. Rather, their economic activity was geared toward exploiting natural resources, as with furs shipped to Europe via the Hanseatic League, and customs collected on overland trade passing between Europe and China, as well as exports of slaves south to Egypt via Constantinople.

Some actions of the Khans that seem ideological on their surface turn out to have straightforward material explanations. Berke’s conversion to Islam cemented an alliance with the Mamluk regime in Egypt against the Mongol Il-Khanate. The Golden Horde supplied the Egyptians with slave soldiers to battle their Il-Khanate cousins, resulting in the first major defeat of the Mongols, which stopped their military advance. But those slave soldiers were also a major economic commodity that powered the financial health of the Golden Horde. The conflict with the Il-Khanate was not just ideological or geopolitical, but driven by the reality that the Golden Horde’s trade routes were constantly threatened by enemies — in this case, other Khanates. Berke and the Khans who succeeded him were engaging in literal trade wars.

Similarly, the amity between the two major divisions with the Horde, the Blue and the White, was not just a matter of sentimental familial bonds between the descendents of the brothers Batu and Orda. It reflected business savvy. The Golden Horde invested heavily in a Silk Road route that began at ports on the Black Sea, like the Genoese colony of Kaffa. The route continued eastward, grazing the southern fringe of Siberia, and moving onward all the way to the rich lands of the Great Yuan (Mongol-ruled China).

Cooperation between the Blue and White Hordes was necessary, not simply preferred, for this Silk Road to function. Additionally, propagandists in the service of the Horde whispered in the ears of merchant houses in Europe that the southern route that snaked through the rugged lands of the Il-Khanate was more dangerous and expensive. The ruling class of the Golden Horde wanted the world to know they were “open for business,” and offered a favourable tax regime for merchants willing to traverse their peaceful and well-ordered territories.

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But trade-fuelled prosperity is subject to the vicissitudes of globalisation. The collapse of the Il-Khanate in the 1330s resulted in the northern route achieving even greater prominence, as the southern Silk Road fractured between numerous hostile states. This monopoly was short-lived. In 1368, the great engine of west-east trade was turned off; the Mongols were expelled from China, and the ascendent Ming Dynasty shut the door to the rest of the world. If agriculturally-based empires were vulnerable to weakening in times of famine, merchant prince fortunes soared at the pleasure and caprice of foreign potentates.

Additionally, the 14th century saw the lucrative global trade in furs across the lands of the Horde facilitate the spread of the Black Death to Europe and the Near East from the eastern steppe. As we keenly feel today, one downside of globalisation is that a much larger human population can be a potential host for a pandemic. More than 30% of Europe and the Near East died from the bubonic plague, and the impact was significant on the Horde itself, as some of its leaders succumbed to the disease. The paradoxes and discontents that emerge from globalisation are long-standing.

Favereau’s narrative makes much of the reality that the Golden Horde was religiously pluralistic, a phenomenon immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. This was a legacy of Genghis Khan himself, who exempted clerics from taxation and left all houses of worship intact. He believed that the sky god, Tengri, had given him the world. Genghis and his descendants looked favourably upon all religions as the expression of the same divine principle.  Most earlier Khans were not Muslim, but devotees of Tengri. Nevertheless, they patronised Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity to cultivate relationships with subject people, most of whom were Christian or Muslim, and encourage the migration of other Mongols, many of whom were Buddhist. However, 1313, the Khan of the Golden Horde declared Islam the religion of the Mongols in the Blue and White Hordes.

Even after the Khan of the Golden Horde demanded that Mongols in his domain convert to Islam, he continued to encourage Christians to practise their religion (in contrast, Buddhist Mongols were expelled and their temples torn down). The Golden Horde exempted Russian Orthodox Church lands from taxation and encouraged European Roman Catholics in the trading cities to build their own houses of worship. Even when the Mongol ruling class became thoroughly Islamicised, they accepted religious diversity for both principle and profit.

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Though the global commercial orientation and religious tolerance of the Mongols are nothing to sneeze at, perhaps the biggest direct impact of the Golden Horde was upon the nascent identities of their subjects. Almost as an aside, Favereau notes that the Mongols liberated Wallachia from its nomadic overlords, laying down the foundation for modern Romania in the 13th century. But this is nothing, compared to how the Golden Horde played inadvertent midwife to the rise of the modern Russian state. Traditional accounts date the origin of Russia to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’ under Vladimir the Great at the end of the 10th century. Though 1,000 years later this culture and society may seem exotic to us, Kievan Rus’ was oriented to the west and Europe, which explains how Anne of Kiev became queen of France in 1051. The deep separation between Russian culture and that of Western Europe only emerged during the period under the Golden Horde, as the ruling elite shifted its focus from Kiev in the west to Moscow in the east.

By the time the Mongols arrived, the Rus were ruled by a patchwork of more than a dozen principalities. Their main southern trading partner, the Byzantine Empire, was in sharp decline, and the Northern Crusades by German knights were impinging upon the prosperity of the Baltic-facing trading cities. The Mongol invasion was even more traumatic. In 1246, an envoy of the Pope traveled through Kiev and observed that “it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses.” The only major city to avoid being sacked by the Horde was Novgorod in the far north, which survived through preemptive surrender.

Modern Russia was built upon the ashes of cities the Mongols burned. The imperial Russian state of Ivan of the Terrible that rose to unprecedented power in the 16th century was not shaped by Kievan Rus. It did not face the European kingdoms to the west, but the Golden Horde to the east. Instead the rulers of Moscow were positioned between the core territories of the Rus to the west and the lands of their steppe rulers to the southeast. A perfect location to be cultural and geopolitical go-betweens.

Just as Batu had been promoted over Orda, so the Khans of the Golden Horde strategically promoted Moscow’s junior princely lineage, the Danilovich, above the others. The House of Moscow did not have the pedigree, but they got the job done, collecting revenue and suppressing revolts. In the process, Moscow accrued enormous power and influence, eventually overthrowing the “Tatar Yoke” to impose its own domination on what became imperial Russia. While 11th-century France obtained a queen from Kiev, 18th-century French asserted that if you “scratch a Russian… you find a Tartar.”

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Favereau’s contention that you cannot understand the Russian imperial order without considering the formative impact of the Golden Horde is just one aspect of her argument. A broader thesis explicit in The Horde is that the empires that arose in the last 500 years mimicked and adapted many of the features of the steppe polities they dismembered. Russian historiography speaks of the period of subordination to the Golden Horde, but the centuries of disgrace were erased only with the conquest of the lands of their erstwhile oppressors: Siberia and Central Asia.

The Russian Empire also assimilated the Horde’s ruling class. Much of the Mongol military elite became Christian and part of the Russian nobility, while Jochid princesses married into the Russian ruling houses. A tradition of autocratic rule arose that was different from the more decentralised model that had characterised Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible took the title Tsar only in 1547. Before that he had simply been a prince, a reflection of the Kievan legacy. His assertion that he was a Tsar reflected an imperial ambition more in keeping with the traditions of the steppe than the nation-states emerging in Western Europe.

Though there are occasions in Favereau’s narrative where fixation on the political and social intrigues of the Jochid lineage overshadow the broader lessons, The Horde is most deeply understood as a cultural and social history. Like many histories which centre the steppe, it attempts to roll back the erasure of nomadic empires from the genealogy of modern states and societies. This process is clearest in the case of Russia, but applies pervasively across Eurasian history.

Historians of the steppe observe that the kingdoms of Europe and the emirates of the Near East may have built vast stone cities which withstand the test of time, but the religious tolerance and the global mercantile orientation of the Mongols are much more in keeping with the values of modern cultures. Like the Horde, modern developed societies are not fundamentally agricultural.

Also like the Horde, modern developed societies tolerate a wide variety of religions, often with the unspoken understanding that this will be socially useful. And, like the Horde, modern nation-states tend to exhibit a centralising and expansive tendency, with an explicit hierarchy of administrators and decision-makers. The Horde argues that multicultural global empires have much more relevant lessons for modern nation-states than the agrarian societies which the Mongols ruled. Without recognising it, we all still travel on a path the Mongols carved out for us centuries ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No matter which university you visit, you’ll always find a research group focusing on mobility in some form or other, usually migration. It’s very rare, however, to find a team of researchers looking at immobility, even though only 3% of the world’s population is made up of immigrants. In Western Europe and the United States, those born in another country account for around 15% of the population, on average, and although it would be wrong to dismiss the changes that migration brings, clearly most people in any given country are not migrants.

This tendency to ignore the majority represents a blind spot that might almost be called a prejudice: mobility is good, immobility bad. It applies at the individual level as well as being an injunction aimed at large groups. The crossing of borders brings progress, since mixing keeps cultures alive. Who would deny that the urge to create and the exploration of boundaries go hand in hand?

And yet the number of international marriages remains limited. Few people leave their homeland to go and work in a foreign country. Few Europeans have sufficient command of another language to use it to discuss profound differences of opinion. More importantly, a sense of lifelong responsibility towards others does not travel well across borders. Despite all the stories about the virtual world we inhabit, proximity continues to matter.

Indeed, we rarely stop to think about it, but in everyday speech we use countless images that involve space: the political landscape, left and right, the opening up of a horizon, the path to the future, the centre ground. Terms like marketplace, battlefield, fault line and domain are more than merely specifications of place, and we sometimes describe grief as a journey, or troubled periods in our personal lives as an uphill struggle.

Post-1989 claims about the “end of history” — the idea that liberal democracy would inevitably win more and more terrain – were accompanied by the notion of the “end of geography”, a sense that distances would evaporate in the global village. Neither proved well-founded; democracy no longer seems inevitably universal, and we all live in worlds that are in many respects still confined.

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All the lies about Leavers

By Matthew Goodwin

Today it is no coincidence that the liberal paradigm is under pressure in the countries that most clearly embody it as a worldview: the United States and Britain. The British people’s decision to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump in that same year are often, and rightly, mentioned in the same breath. It’s precisely in countries that see themselves as the advance guard of globalisation that the call for protectionism is loudest, or at any rate louder than in continental Europe, which has always wanted to practise a more moderate form of liberalism.

Populist parties have exposed social and cultural fault lines that we need to take seriously. Such movements are usually placed under the heading of “populism”, but “protectionism” would be a rather more accurate label. This causes considerable confusion, because protectionist parties are difficult to classify as either Left or Right. After all, the Rassemblement National and the FPÖ present themselves as defenders of the welfare state and oppose, for example, raising the pension age. A new fault line has therefore emerged on the political spectrum: internationalism versus protectionism.

Not long after the European Parliamentary elections in 2014, I heard a former European commissioner at an international conference in Copenhagen say, “While 30% make the noise, 70% continue to make the laws.” In response I asked: how can we be so sure that the 30% will remain a minority? And would it not be a good idea to take those voters seriously? Have we not learnt that democracy must ensure minorities are represented?

Doing away with internal borders without putting in place effective controls at the external border is one reason why the EU has struggled to contain populism. In a speech, the president of the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy, acknowledged this deficit: “Europe, the friend of freedom and space is seen as a threat to protection and place. We need to get the balance right. It is essential for the Union to be also on the protecting side.”

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The liberal case for empire

By Ed West

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has only sharpened the tension between the removal of borders and this need for protection. Indeed, although huge progress has been made since the Second World War in conquering infectious disease, globalisation has also created the preconditions for a rapidly spreading pandemic.

In Epidemics and Society, medical historian Frank Snowden described the long history of diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, polio and tuberculosis. All these forms of pestilence stretch back centuries, but he regards the third plague pandemic, which began in 1894 in Hong Kong, as the first truly global spread of infection. Within six years the disease reached five continents, mainly through major port cities.

After decades of intense globalisation and urbanisation, our intrinsic vulnerability to infection has increased, despite better diagnosis and vaccines. “Epidemic diseases are an ineluctable part of the human condition,” Snowden writes: “and modernity, with its vast population, teeming cities, and rapid means of transport between them, guarantees that the infectious diseases that afflict one country have the potential to affect all.”

As a traditional saying from the shipping industry goes, one leak is enough to capsize an ocean steamer if no bulkheads have been built in the hold. The unlimited mobility characteristic of our era has many unintended consequences: a local infection in China can translate into a worldwide outbreak in just a few months, killing millions and throwing many more out of work. These days we should be making a thorough study of chaos theory, which tells us that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a hurricane in Texas. Sure enough, one damned bat from Wuhan brought the whole world to a standstill.

Countries have become more and more economically interlinked. It is of course a great advantage not to have to produce everything yourself, but the outbreak of coronavirus also shows the drawbacks of such dependency. A reduction in supplies from India and China can lead to a shortage of pharmaceuticals: 80% of the drugs sold worldwide come from those two countries. Would we not do better to produce essential medicines ourselves? One immediate lesson from the coronavirus pandemic is that we need to take a critical look at global dependencies.

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Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

It is not easy to navigate between a poorly understood cosmopolitanism and a new protectionism. Mobility can increase only if there are enough people who feel a bond with a place. In fluid circumstances everything dissolves — why would this not apply to freedom? The greatest challenge is to ensure that the mobility characteristic of our time can be reconciled with citizens’ rights.

In this borderless world, markets and morality reinforce each other, since borders and regulations are obstacles to both commerce and human rights. Hence businesspeople and idealists speak the same borderless language, of tearing down walls but also of tearing up the social contract, too, since it also takes shape within borders.

Italian novelist and cultural critic Alessandro Baricco nicely summed up this worldview when he said that, “Everything that has need of the steadfastness of immobility ultimately gets a twentieth-century stench and later a vaguely ominous sound as well.” Baricco’s conclusion was to “Boycott borders, tear down all walls, set up one open space in which everything must circulate. Demonize immobility.”

We often hear people expressing concern about the borders of freedom. Here I want to lay the emphasis on the freedom of the border. We need to learn to deal with the tension between openness and protection, a tension that is part and parcel of any lively democracy. An open society cannot exist if there is no middle ground.

For the average citizen, globalisation has a wide range of consequences: alongside interaction and prosperity, we see alienation and inequality. Pleas for open borders and pleas for closed borders are increasingly at odds, which does not bode well. If these fault lines become even more firmly fixed within our societies, and people feel forced to choose between two extremes, then it’s clear where most people will end up: on the side not of cosmopolitanism but of nationalism.

Freedom of the Border is published by Polity

As a child, I loved the festive ceremony of pouring brandy over the Christmas pudding, watching the blue flame lick across its surface and (usually) setting the spring of holly alight. That mixture of fire and burning foliage seems a trace of a more ancient English winter festival than the Christian one we officially celebrate in midwinter.

But I never much liked the taste of the pudding. As an adult, though, I’ve acquired a deeply nerdy obsession with the making of it.  I have scoured recipes of bygone eras, and have a growing collection of antique cookery books. It’s a very sensory kind of bookishness: flicking through recipes created for long-gone palates and lifestyles, imagining the scents, picturing the kitchens where they were prepared and wondering about the lives and dinner-tables of the people who ate them. I wonder if they, too, made their pudding on “Stir-Up Sunday”— this Sunday, the last before Advent and the traditional date for the making of the pud.

As well as those culinary traditions which have disappeared, the ones which persist are equally intriguing. They gather not just personal associations of the Proustian sort but shared ones, redolent of the culture from which they emerged.

Nothing speaks more eloquently of modern Britain’s embrace of globalisation than the cookery section in a modern bookshop. Our ever more varied national diet is a cliché oft trotted out to justify globalisation’s less charming side effects. From this vantage point, our culinary history seems a blandly beneficial flow of ideas, peoples and foodstuffs: the high-gloss, neutered ideal of international trade.

But take the lid off the pan and the scent is far stronger: a potent stew of warfare, religious violence, class conflict and political brutality. Cooking Christmas dinner for my own family as an adult, I found myself delving through old recipes for a pudding I liked — and discovered this story clearly visible, in aromatic microcosm, in the story of Christmas pudding. For like many of the things we consider “British” today, this story is both less traditional than it seems — and also more ancient and fierce.

One of my most treasured belongings is a gift from the grandmother who taught me classic English cookery: a 1784 edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. First published in 1747, it’s the first mass-market modern cookery-book, and includes a “Plum-Pudding” clearly recognisable as the Christmas pudding of modern times:

The dish described here reportedly took its place at Christmas dinner first in 1714, thanks to the Hanoverian George I. In the following century, plum-puddings became inseparable from Christmas, as captured evocatively by Charles Dickens in his 1843 A Christmas Carol, a story that’s probably done more than any other literary work to shape our modern picture of a “traditional” Christmas. But by the time Anthony Trollope made the first literary use of the phrase ‘Christmas pudding’ in Dr Thorne (1858), he was referring to a dish that had been “traditional” for barely 150 years.

Our modern monarchy seems likewise to have been in place forever: a classic, abiding symbol of traditional British identity. But like the pudding whose contemporary form George I instituted, much of that grand impression was in fact conjured after the deposition of our last absolute monarch, James II, in 1688, by a British royalty that wielded considerably less power than James did.

The German George I, who spoke no English at the time of his coronation, was leap-frogged over a queue of some 55 eligible Catholics to take the throne. He reigned against a backdrop of bitter religious power-politics, that leaked into every facet of English political life and prompted numerous violent uprisings. That his version of Christmas pudding triumphed to become the definitive “traditional” pudding today is testament not to the glory of culinary cosmopolitanism, so much as how conclusively the Hanoverians won their particular power-struggle.

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George’s plum-pudding didn’t appear in a vacuum though. A cousin of the now-traditional Georgian dish was well-established as part of the festive culinary repertoire, long before George I was imported from overseas to embody a suitably neutered and Protestant constitutional monarchy. And much like English monarchs prior to the Glorious Revolution, the pre-Hanoverian version of Christmas pudding was considerably meatier and more pungent.

Its origins lie in the mobilisation of England’s early-medieval military elite (who, to complicate matters, were Norman French) through the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th centuries to fight in the Crusades. Somewhat like a bloodier version of 1970s package holidaymakers, returning from Corfu with a Demis Roussos record and a taste for taramasalata, the crusaders returned to England from the Middle East with a taste for spiced food, and dishes that mixed meat with fruit.

It’s to the Crusaders’ medieval efforts to recreate the taste of their Holy Land adventures in the comfort of their own castles that we owe the forerunner of the Christmas pudding: “pottage”. This was a spicy, soupy mixture of meat, grains and fruit that would have been served on in large, round hollowed-out “trencher” loaves, like edible bowls. Forget benevolent cultural exchange — this ancient act of cultural appropriation evokes not Gary Lineker style liberal-internationalism so much as that worldview’s more red-blooded ancestor: evangelism at swordpoint.

By Tudor times, Christmas Day was well-established as the start of twelve days of riotous celebration, in which a central role was played by “plum porridge”. This was a stew made with slow-cooked beef shin, dried fruit and wine, thickened with bread and spiced with mace, cloves and nutmegs. It’s clearly a descendant of the crusaders’ efforts at Middle Eastern cuisine.

After the execution of Charles I, the Puritans made a concerted effort to wean the English off the plays, pub-going, dancing and general “misrule” that made for a typical Twelve Days of Christmas at the time. Cromwell’s government sought to crack down on this pagan impiety in a December 1644 ordinance that Christmas Day should be a day of fasting and humility, instead of “giving liberty to carnall and sensuall delights”. Naturally, fasting and humility meant a crackdown on the consumption of plum porridge, now deemed a “heathenish and a papistical practice”.

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By Mary Harrington

The high-mindedness didn’t last. The English yearning for strong drink and stodgy food in midwinter was not to be denied, and the Puritan ban on all things Christmas didn’t last much beyond the 1660 Restoration. In 1662 the diarist Samuel Pepys’ Christmas dinner was “a mess of brave plum porridge and a roasted pullet”.

And yet, some 50 years later, George’s dish drew a line under the wild revelry of a medieval Christmas of “misrule”. The Hanoverian update stripped the meat from the Crusader-style plum-porridge in favour of a fruit-only dessert, even as George cemented the role of English monarchs as ceremonial: an act inseparable from the inauguration of modern Britain.

So the story of plum-pudding, both ancient and modern, cuts to the dark, ambiguous heart and irrepressibly pagan edge of English winter revelry. It encompasses not just the steam of the Cratchits’ kitchen or the mawkishness of a John Lewis advert, but long ages of political and religious violence and a complex interplay between elite and popular tastes. It’s just a pudding; but it captures in miniature how national habits that seem to have existed forever in fact evolve with glacial slowness — and sometimes also with sudden, astonishing savagery.

As for “Stir-Up Sunday”, which lands this weekend, not even this name is as it seems. It refers not to the kitchen — though it’s traditional for all the family to take a turn stirring the pudding — but to the collect for the day, in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer:

Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

If you’re tempted to spend next Sunday stirring up not just the wills of God’s faithful people, but also a Christmas pudding, my personal favourite comes from another ground-breaking culinary classic, Eliza Acton’s 1845 Modern Cookery for Private Families.

Acton’s recipe is exceptionally light and unctuous, with none of the grittiness or bitter note that currants can inflict on a Christmas pudding. In homage to the Georgian name “plum-pudding” (even though the Georgian one actually contains no plums) I swap dried fruit for gin-pickled damsons, a byproduct of the infused gin we make with fruit from our garden. On Stir-Up Sunday I’ll strain a jar of this pungent pink brew, then pit the boozy damsons and use them in the pudding. It gives a soft headiness and deep, almost cherry-like aroma that’s quintessentially Christmas in our household.

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By John-Lewis Stempel

Today, there’s a tendency to think the foreign or self-conscious elements of a tradition render it meaningless. But as with the innovation of damsons in a (traditionally plum-less) “plum-pudding”, a living tradition blends foreign and domestic, violent and festive, ancient and modern into something living. Christmas pudding will no doubt go on evolving into the future. Because sneered at though they might be, the traditions of a place have a persistent life of their own — even as they change over time and under new pressures.

New elite influences may give a tradition new forms, as with the crusaders popularising Middle Eastern spices. Traditions may mellow over time, as under George I. But if there’s a silver sixpence in the pudding for today’s anti-traditionalist elite, it’s the lesson from Cromwell’s Protectorate: that a prudent ruling class seeks to shape, not to abolish, the tastes and practices of those they rule. Otherwise, they will likely find themselves outlasted by the tastes and preferences they sought to extinguish.

In the world of fine wine, the focus of these arguments often circle around the influence of the mega-star wine critic Robert Parker Jr., a man who has more influence on the taste and price of wine than anyone else has, or ever had had. Now in his seventies, Parker is retired. But back in 1975, the former lawyer, taking his lead from former presidential candidate, Ralph Nader — a consumer rights advocate — began to publish The Wine Advocate, a kind of consumer guide to fancy wine.

The world of wine had never seen anything like it. Parker was on a mission to demythologise all the snobby and obscure terminology under which fine wine was clouded and developed a simple 100 point scale on which wines could be judged.

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As his influence grew, a Parker wine score in the 90s would pretty much guarantee considerable financial success to a vineyard. Inevitably, so the argument goes, those who made wine started to adjust the taste of their product so that it would suit the arbiter’s palate.

Parker generally likes big, dark, gutsy, jammy, tannic wines that can, his critics say, be engineered to taste that way in post-production, often by use of imported yeasts or through the use of young oak barrels. It’s more about clever chemistry than the particular charisma of the local terroir. Parker’s taste favours the muscular Californian Cabernet wines and the great Château wines of Bordeaux, yet has little appreciation for the lighter, less tannic, more subtle Pinot Noirs from Burgundy or Gamays from the Loire Valley. “Bad critics look at Pinot through Cabernet-tinted spectacles and so criticise it for being something it never set out to be,” writes Clive Coates, in a not so subtle dig at Parker, in his encyclopaedic The Wines of Burgundy.

Those who bewail Parker’s phenomenal influence speak of “parkerisation” as the wine equivalent of globalisation. The New York Times wine critic Alice Feiring writes that this is how “Rioja loses its Spanish accent”: parkerisation leads to an increasingly homogenised style of wine in which the diversity of grapes and wine tastes come to be submerged under the over powerful influence of Parker’s very particular palate. Those, like her, who prefer subtlety in their wine speak dismissively of Parker’s love for “jam bombs”.

Those who defend Parker, argue that his 100 point scale works as a kind of bullshit detector. It’s cutting through all the fancy talk and obscure (often) French classifications, to focus on the taste and the taste alone.

Parker famously refuses the kind of overly generous hospitality that can influence some wine critics. He pays his own way, and takes as he finds. Reputation does not matter to him. His Nader-like political philosophy is simply to deliver value for the consumer – and he is not going to be suckered by pretentious Europeans making overly expensive wine that doesn’t actually taste all that great. It’s a noble democratic mission with an ever so slightly Puritanical, characteristically American disdain for class, high culture and over-intellectualism.

This same democratic spirit is taken to a whole new level with the advent of social media. I have the Vivino app on my phone. It enables me to take a photo of a wine label in a shop and to receive an instant crowd funded score – out of 5 — as to the wine’s aesthetic value. With a database of over 10 million wines, and now 35 million or so users, Vivino is the ultimate in wine de-mystification.

Labels are confusing. In Burgundy especially, the mind bogglingly complex classification system, built around thousands of small farms, makes Hegelian philosophy look like child’s play. But with this handy myth buster, I can reduce hundreds of years of wine growing history to a simple number. Today, my Vivino app suggests that I might like a Gran Corte (VIII) 2013 from Argentina. It gives the wine a very high 4.5 score and describes it as “a fantastic ‘Bordeaux’ from South America”. That bothers me. I want my Bordeaux to come from and to taste of, well, Bordeaux. Vivino was first developed in Denmark by techie people who freely admit they know nothing about wine. The photographs we take of the wine are uploaded onto their database by office workers in India. The headquarters of the company is now in California, where else.

Last month, the influential Decanter magazine placed Parker in their Hall of Fame. I imagine there will be readers spluttering into their glasses of Romanée-Conti all the way from Beaune to Berry Brothers. Some of this will come from a certain snobbishness, a dislike of brash American straight-talking. For others, Parker is resisted out of a desire to retain some sort of mystique for wine and not reduce the whole wine experience simply to one of mere flavour. As Andrew Jefford writes in the same issue of Decanter, some people “taste morally” – seeking authenticity. As a Loire wine grower and one of the leaders of the biodynamic wine movement, Nicholas Joly once commented: “Avant d’etre bon, un vin doit etre vrai” (before being good, a wine must be true). I have some sympathy with all of this view myself.

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Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste

By Giles Fraser

The crunch issue between wine globalists and, lets call them, wine communitarians, is probably what one makes of the French term “terroir”. Beloved of communitarian conservatives such as Roger Scruton, terroir is the name for the way in which the local environment, micro-climate, soil composition, historic farming practices, and so on come to shape the way a wine is made. It is as much a spiritual idea as an environmental one.

The political import of terroir is that every wine is a somewhere, an expression of place. Part of the reason why descriptions of French wine can be so dizzyingly complicated – especially in Burgundy – is that local appellations often develop their own systems of classification. It is against all this local arcane and highly fragmented complexity that the globalist stands with their universal system of standardised aesthetic judgment. For some, then, terroir is little more than “vinecultural voodoo” with no basis in science. For others, it is more a question of wines having a soul, and that they receive their soul from a place, and loose it when they are heavily manipulated in post-production.

Parker’s taste buds were famously insured for a million dollars. For him, it was all about the taste – a highly subjective experience that required most of all absolute honesty, a refusal to be swayed by extraneous concerns, and a laser like focus on the sheer aesthetic experience of the taste itself and nothing else. In a way, his philosophy was a highly educated way of saying “I know what I like”.

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But with the influence of the market, and now through information technology, it has become obvious that subjectivity can be schooled. We learn to like certain things. Those who grow up drinking Coca Cola have taste buds schooled to appreciate sweet and fizzy things, whereas those in, say, tea drinking cultures will generally appreciate more bitterness, like tannins in red wine. The problem with “I know what I like” is that what we like is partially learned, and is thus more changeable, and so more subject to manipulation, that we might assume. In other words, simple honesty about saying what one tastes is no prophylactic against the threat of a homogenised, global style.

In Mondovino, the issue of globalisation is seen as one of American capitalism versus the plucky French farmer. It is obviously more complicated than that. Parkerisation has inspired a whole new audience to love and appreciate the pleasures of the grape. And his scoring system has enabled a number of small boutique vineyards to compete commercially with their larger and more established competitors. To this extent, Parkerisation is not all about American capitalism flattening the little guy.

That said, the problem is not so much with Parker himself, but rather how the wine industry too often plays to his scoring system. And that creates the threat of all wine tasting more and more the same – a little too macho, too in your face, too brash. As Alice Feiring writes, what she really wishes she could say to Parker is this: “Please do not contribute to the dumbing down of the wine world. And if my Loire Valley Cabernet or Cot or Pineau d’Aunis or Gamay start tasting like Barossa Valley Shirazes, I’ll have to switch over to Calvados.” And I will be joining her.

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Let the state demolish bad new buildings

By Peter Franklin

Twenty-first century London is a jumble of oddly-shaped towers: the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Walkie-Talkie, the Shard and the Boomerang. The Gherkin was the first, completed in 2003; the Shard is the tallest; but the Razor is the most symbolic of its era.

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In 2010, the country had just emerged from what we then imagined to be a once-in-a-lifetime recession. The UK economy, with its all-important financial sector, had been especially vulnerable to the Global Financial Crisis. And London was right at the epicentre.

At the time, there were doubts as to whether our capital would ever fully recover. After all, there’s nothing inevitable about its leading position. We forget it now, but for most of the 20th century, London lagged behind Britain as a whole. It was a city in decline in a country in decline. Bombed by the Germans, scarred by post-war development, and seemingly bypassed by modernity, London was lost in the fog.

But then came the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and the Big Bang — the deregulation that would establish London as the financial capital of the global economy.

It wasn’t, of course, an end to the city’s woes. But now the poverty and decay and riots existed alongside surging prosperity. Waves of regeneration and gentrification transformed entire districts. Most dramatically, the derelict Docklands was rebuilt as a second fortress of finance. In particular, there was One Canada Square — a.k.a. ‘Canary Wharf’ — a steel-clad expression of the new London confidence. By the time it was finished (1991) so was Margaret Thatcher, but for London the good times would continue. Not even the prospect of a Labour Government was enough to dampen spirits. Indeed, during the so-called ‘Prawn Cocktail Offensive’ Labour politicians went to great lengths — or, at least, long lunches — to persuade the financiers that the City would be safe in Labour hands.

And so it proved. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had no desire to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. And so, as promised, things only got better. The London property market took off again, triggering a building boom. If Canary Wharf symbolised the Thatcher years, then the Gherkin (officially: 30 St Mary Axe) symbolised Blairism — every bit as as bold as Thatcherism, but without the sharp edges.

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In 2005, one of the Gherkin’s glass panels came loose, tumbling down to the street below. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but in retrospect it can be seen as a portent. Trouble was brewing in America’s sub-prime mortgage sector, setting off the events of the Credit Crunch and the ensuing Global Financial Crisis. The economy fell off a cliff and the property market crashed. Once busy cranes disappeared from the London skyline — but not completely. A few big projects, begun in the good times, continued through the bad — not least the Strata tower.

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Which is why, ten years ago, it symbolised hope — a fresh start for a shaken city. Certainly, there was no ignoring it. Standing almost 500 feet tall, the mostly-residential Razor dominates its neighbourhood. However, it’s influence is felt far beyond the environs of Elephant and Castle. If you look south from a suitable vantage point in the city of London, then you’ll see it looking right back. More than most buildings, the Razor has eyes. The tower is shield-shaped in section, which from the north-facing side gives it a beaky, raptor-like profile.

The fact that the upper floors are black and glassy (in contrast to the stripy cladding further down) adds to the impression that the building is staring down at you. The dramatic slant of the ‘roofline’ (if you can call it that) reinforces the effect. It’s as if some vast bird of prey — an owl, perhaps — had perched south of river, the Square Mile in its sights. For those who hope to make a killing in the City, but can’t yet afford the more exclusive neighbourhoods, it’s a convenient place to roost.

But of course its nickname is the Razor, not the Owl. And that is due to the three wind turbines built into the tower’s crest, like the circular blades of an electric shaver. Each one is 30 feet in diameter. Together they were supposed to generate 50 megawatt hours of electricity a year — which sounds a lot, but amounts to only 8% of the building’s needs. But I doubt they even achieve that.

My pre-Covid commute took me past the Strata, but in ten years I’ve never seen the turbines move. I don’t know anyone anyone who has. If, like me, you’ve had anything to do with energy policy, you’ll have heard people confidently claim that wind power “doesn’t work”. That’s demonstrably false, but the Strata hasn’t been the best advertisement.

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By Peter Franklin

Was it all a gimmick? When the building won the 2010 Carbuncle Cup, the judges’ verdict was scathing:

“…as the sole tall building in its locale, it is utterly inescapable for miles around…

“…to literally cap it all off there are the three gargantuan wind turbines at the top. The architect has trumpeted that these could supply 8% of the building’s energy requirements, which seems nothing much to shout about given the enormous expenditure in carbon that has been required to engineer such a baroque arrangement and the fact that this is a part of London that has absolutely no need for the creation of a 147m-tall tower.

“For services to greenwash, urban impropriety and sheer breakfast-extracting ugliness, we hereby award the 2010 Carbuncle Cup to the Strata tower.”

But was it really greenwash? Three thirty-foot turbines is more than a token effort. As the first skyscraper to incorporate the technology, this was a genuine attempt to break new ground.

As yet, as much as I approve of wind power, it’s best located away from human habitation. People and wind turbines just don’t mix (though, if they get too close, wind turbines could mix people). Certainly, there is noise, vibration and flicker, so not the best match for a residential development.

A few years earlier, David Cameron — then leader of the opposition — made headlines after he installed solar panels and a micro-wind turbine on his house. Embarrassingly, the latter was soon removed due to planning problems. Today, solar panels are a common sight on all sorts of buildings, but you’ll be lucky to spot a wind turbine. Fundamentally, the problem isn’t with the planning system, but the laws of physics. With this technology, size matters — the bigger the span of blades, the more efficient the turbine.

It’s a relationship that’s been exploited to drive down the costs of wind power. By getting bigger, it’s got cheap enough to out-compete other energy sources, and without subsidies. The turbines deployed in new offshore windfarms are now gargantuan — about 500 times the generating capacity of those used in the Razor. Each blade weighs in the region of 30 tonnes and is roughly 250 feet long. That means a total diameter greater than the Strata tower is tall.

In short, wind power belongs out to sea or in the middle of nowhere, not on — or in — buildings. Sadly, the Razor’s cutting-edge tech was a dead end.

*

Architecturally and economically, however, the building was a trailblazer. Over the last decade London has sprouted towers of all shapes and sizes, developers competing to build the next new landmark. In its own neighbourhood of Elephant and Castle, the Strata no longer stands alone. Our low density capital is now a city of high rises.

Far from being the biggest victim of the financial crash, London roared back to life after 2010 — leaving the rest of the county trailing in its wake. Politically, the glittering, lofty towers would highlight the growing gap between the puffed-up global city and the left-behind Britain beyond its orbit — a gap that would tear the country apart in 2016.

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Not so rosy: the legacy of the Coalition government

By Peter Franklin

So if Canary Wharf symbolises Thatcherism, and the Gherkin Blairism, then, in more ways than one, the Razor embodies the follies of Cameronism. Looking back, it’s extraordinary that anyone thought that the voters would tolerate a third blast of neoliberalism. Thatcher had the excuse that it hadn’t been tried before; Blair could imagine that his was a kinder, gentler version; but what did Cameron and Clegg hope to achieve?

Well, it’s all over now. The pandemic has cruelly exposed the vulnerabilities of the globalised economy — and the superstar, sky-scraping architecture that houses it.

Suddenly, the herding of knowledge workers into centrally-located, open-plan office blocks doesn’t seem such a good idea. The same goes for high-rise apartment blocks — a stunning view is only partial compensation when you’re locked-down in your glass bubble. Not that you’re completely sealed off. You’re breathing the same re-circulated air as your neighbours and colleagues. You’re sharing the same lifts. And, if you’re commuting, riding the same buses, trains and taxis. How will any of that work if the virus doesn’t go away?

When you build on a human scale you can do without the life support systems. You can spurn the lift and take the stairs; switch off the air-con and open a window. When people live and work within communities they can walk or cycle across, they’re not paralysed without mass transit. And when the natural connection between the metropolis and its hinterland matters more than the exclusive club of global cities, then we can face the collapse of global aviation and carry on.

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Should we let the aviation industry die?

By Peter Franklin

But we’ve built for a world without infectious disease. We’ve assumed that the plagues of the past have no future. And so, for the sake of our way of life, we must pray for an end to our present nightmare.

According to Knight Frank, 60 tall buildings were completed in London last year — a record number. Remarkably, a further 525 were at “various stages of the planning process”. I wonder how many of those are even relevant now? 

The FT reports that leasing activity has plummeted in London — with levels in March 88% down on a year ago. There’ll be a partial rebound, but can London carry on building more than 10 million square metres of new office space every year? Or is the underlying economic model permanently bust? 

I hope that’s a question that Rishi Sunak is thinking about. I know he’s got enough other things to think about right now, but when or if we emerge from the pandemic he needs to decide whether the road to recovery looks like 2010, or whether we must set out on a new path.

 The government talks about levelling-up. But what is it that he wants the North, the Midlands etc to level-up to? A globalised, glass tower economy that just doesn’t make sense anymore?

El Chapo continues to have a cult-like following in parts of Mexico because his organisation helps citizens when the Mexican government is absent or incompetent. By distributing aid boxes in the city of Guadalajara, the family business, El Chapo 701, is betting that many Mexicans will trust them more during the current crisis than President López Obrador, who is leading a nation suffering severe economic stress.

The absence of the state allowed mercenary drug militants, the mafia and gangs to thrive, long before the arrival of Covid-19, and this current pandemic has merely reinforced the ability of these groups to capitalise on a once-in-a-century emergency. Many militant groups, dismissed in the West as terrorists, are stepping up to help impoverished communities that rarely if ever see state support. Think the Taliban in Afghanistan, MS-13 in El Salvador and gangs in Rio De Janeiro’s favelas.

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Mexico's bloody drugs struggle

By Ian Birrell

In Italy, too, organised crime entities are giving out food and providing essential services to citizens. As the Italian writer Roberto Saviano recently observed:

“In Italy, criminal clans which have lost their traditional drug-dealing spots outside schools and parks have resorted to home delivery on request, adopting a method known in Anglo-Saxon countries as Dial-a-Dealer.

“But there is another door-to-door service that Italian mafia clans — and in particular the Camorra of Naples — have established: daily home deliveries of essentials. In the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of Naples, where many people had jobs in the black economy and are now out of work, it is the clans that step in to provide welfare, giving families bread, milk and other basics.

“According to Italian anti-mafia sources, the Camorra has also started providing loans — but not at its usual high interest rates — of between 50% and 70%. Demand for loans is so high in this period that it is still profitable to offer competitive rates, even lower than those offered by the banks.”

It’s easy to presume that the global drug trade will irrevocably change after the pandemic passes or eases. Pro drug-war warriors and policy optimists will tell you that it will be increasingly difficult for cartels to use the same trafficking routes as before due to uneven global lockdowns, stronger law enforcement and decreased global demand.

Believe none of it. I’ve spent the last five years investigating the global drug war for my new book, Pills, Powder and Smoke: Inside the Bloody War on Drugs, and a key component of my research is the often hidden aspects of the drug war that garner little Western media coverage. From Guinea-Bissau in West Africa — a key cocaine smuggling hub — to Honduras — where Washington’s violent drug war is fuelling rampant corruption and violence — there’s no evidence that these hidden elements will dissipate when the world overcomes Covid-19.

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What's driving so many kids to 'go country'?

By Max Daly

Western supply of illicit substances is currently reduced, and users may instead look for more dangerous alternatives, but it won’t last. If anything, when life snaps back to a form of normality, it’s likely that in many Western countries interest in procuring cocaine, heroin, psychedelics and other drugs could increase as society looks to celebrate personal freedom while coping with economic depression.

Dark web drug sales, a safe option compared to purchasing illicit substances in person with a dealer, will continue to grow. A friend who uses heroin in Australia tells me that he’s had no issues in the past few months accessing the drug, though many people he knows have now moved online to buy MDMA [ecstasy], cannabis and poppy seeds to grow opium.

This is a pandemic that isn’t distributed evenly: it disproportionally affects people of colour, and it’s likely that law enforcement will continue to police illegal drug use most severely in minority community neighbourhoods. It’s a grimly familiar tale for the most affected communities in the US, UK, Australia and Europe.

Most drug users in these countries rarely if ever think about the source of their drugs. Next time a friend wants to use cocaine, ask them if they know where it’s from and who has suffered to get the drug up their nostril. The cocaine trade is in limbo in the source countries like Colombia (although relatively healthy across Europe) but this paralysis won’t last.

Cocaine is a dirty drug that causes a horrific amount of misery (and although Western users are complicit in continuing the trade, it’s the prohibitionists who are most to blame for refusing to imagine a more ethical alternative). Read journalist Toby Muse’s new book, Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels — from the Jungles to the Streets, for brilliant and rare insights into the trade.

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The Covid-19 class war

By James Bloodworth

Nations have choices to make when deciding drug policies during a pandemic. Do they maintain the default “war on drugs” rhetoric and implementation or try something more humane and sensible? Argentina is using seized assets from drug traffickers and sending those resources to federal police. Such an idea is open to abuse — corrupt police and officials can use the assets for political influence — but in theory the initiative is a good one if the resources are redirected cleverly and morally.

In the UK, drug dealers are finding innovative ways to deliver drugs, including dressing up as nurses, delivery drivers and joggers to get heroin to those who want it. Dealers are born to be ingenious. One drug worker from Sussex told Vice: “A mini-cab driver told me he would normally be ferrying kids around on school runs, but now he’s staying busy by driving all the dealers around town.” In Berlin, dealers are still selling their goods as normal while wearing face masks and gloves.

One UK dealer told Vice that although prices for many products have increased, “markets have to innovate and diversify in response to change. So, I’m importing and selling concentrates and vape pens, called Shatterpens. They contain pure cannabis oil, extracted with C02, no solvents.” He said that domestically-grown hash and cannabis were far more in demand while the lockdown continued. Police are still targeting drug importers and yet the smell of futility hangs over these efforts.

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Is the lockdown doing more harm than good?

By Tom Chivers

Covid-19 is forcing enterprising drug cartels to adapt to radically shifting circumstances (though traffickers are likely to re-emerge with vigour once trade routes re-open and dealers and users spend more time outside their homes). Take the ingredients for fentanyl, for example, up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and a key cause of US deaths during the opioid crisis. Although Mexican cartels produced fentanyl for the US market, they used to rely on precursor ingredients including from one state-backed factory in Wuhan (the Chinese city where Covid-19 reportedly originated).

This factory has now shut down and traffickers are increasingly forced to raise the prices of whatever stocks they still have. It’s unsustainable in the long run, and fentanyl users in the US will inevitably find alternative ways to source the drug, but Mexican cartels are no less affected by the coronavirus than other profitable businesses. Some Mexican entrepreneurs are shunning cartels entirely and growing blood-free cannabis (an initiative that pre-dates the pandemic but will hopefully increase after it passes).

Covid-19 is likely to be a massive, temporary inconvenience for the global drug trade and little more. Why? Because Western demand for illicit substances has never been higher and will continue to be so (and yes, some people are still attending drug-fuelled parties during the pandemic).

One of the main takeaways from my years investigating the drug trade has been the staggering hypocrisy of those pushing a brutal “war on drugs”. There are no statistics that support its success: arrest one drug kingpin and 20 more will emerge in his place, and yet year after year governments and many in the media push for no softening of prohibition.

Although the full legalisation and regulation of all drugs is now on the agenda in the nations most directly affected by the violent status quo, there are dangers of legalising drugs without considering all the ramifications (look at California and its failure to support the African-American community after cannabis legalisation). Covid-19 has highlighted the existing racial, social and political fault-lines around drugs, and those who use and produce them; but too often the most marginalised in the West and around the world are forgotten in the rush to judgment.

In most cases ministers have no choice but to do what it takes. If they let, say, Transport for London go down the tubes, there’ll be no return to normality.

But there’s one industry where the question isn’t “how do we save it?”, but “can we save it?” and even “should we save it?”

That industry is the great enabler of the global economy: aviation.

Can we imagine a world without mass air travel? Well, you don’t have to — just look out the window. Or at one of those flight tracker websites. Even around cities like London the skies are almost clear, the airports all but deserted, airlines operating at a tiny fraction of their capacity.

But that’s temporary, right? Aviation might be one of the last industries to recover, but it’s not like the aeroplanes have all crashed. The supporting infrastructure is intact. The industry has everything it needs to get off the ground again — everything but enough money, and that’s something the state can provide.

After all, there’s more than the economy at stake here. Safe and affordable air travel is one of the great signifiers of modernity. More than any other, this is the technological advance that delineates our era from the plodding, earthbound, black-and-white world that preceded it. To turn our backs on all of that, to regress to a less advanced stage in our development, well, that’s a textbook definition of civilisational decline.

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Covid is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

By Peter Franklin

When Radio 4’s In Our Time tackled the collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, Melvyn Bragg asked his guests whether the concept of ‘decline’ was still considered valid by contemporary scholars. After some academic umming-and-ahhing, it was Professor Charlotte Roueché who got to the point: hot-and-cold running water. The Romans had it throughout their empire, and then it was lost. For centuries. That’s your decline, right there.

Can we imagine something similar happening in our own day and age — the permanent loss of a ubiquitous technology? Needless to say, we discard technologies all the time — when they’re superseded by something better (or, at least, more convenient). Take recorded music, where we went from wax cylinders to shellac records to vinyl records to CDs to streaming (plus various other steps and detours in between). But occasionally we abandon a technology for which there’s no replacement. Something we used to be able to do just stops.

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Will we ever take the Tube again?

By Michael Liebreich

Older readers may remember the shoe-fitting fluoroscope (or, to use a rather unfortunate proprietary name, the Pedoscope). It’s purpose was to take the guess work out of shoe shopping. This is always a pain — and sometimes a permanent one if the shoes that felt fine in the shop turn out to be too tight or too loose.

But what if you could literally see through the shoe leather to see how good the fit is?  What if there were some sort of X-ray device that displayed an image of the shoe around the bones of your foot? Indeed, what if you could wiggle your phalanges and view them moving around inside their new confines? Sales assistants could be trained to make an objective assessment — allowing you to purchase with confidence.

It sounds futuristic, but this technology belongs to the past. Fluoroscopes were once a common sight in our shoe shops. Thousands of the devices were installed in the mid-20th century. Until, that is, people realised that the high street isn’t the best place for a boxful of radioactive isotopes (an X-ray machine needs an X-ray source). It was decided that pinched toes were preferable to radiation burns, and so that was the end of that.

There’s another, much grander, example from the mid-20th century: manned spaceflight beyond Earth orbit. It’s now 47 years since we last visited another world. And I don’t see plans for a return to the moon being a spending priority in the post-Covid era.

So, yes, even in the modern age, we sometimes take a technological step backwards because we can’t sustain the cost of progress.

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The moral confusion of MeToo

By Peter Franklin

Could the same apply to mass air travel? Aviation has had to take a step back before. Between the wars, there was a serious attempt to deliver commercial trans-Atlantic flights by airship. Tragically, it all came to grief with the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.

Yet that was only a temporary reverse. After the Second World War, aeroplane technology would grow into the industry we know today. The world’s airlines now carry over four billion passengers every year (‘now’ meaning the last few years until 2020 happened).

That’s about eight trillion passenger-kilometers. Numbers have basically doubled over the last two decades, and are predicted to more than double again over the next twenty years. Certainly there’s plenty of potential for growth because only a fifth of the world’s population has ever flown. They seem keen to try, however. In Asia alone, it’s estimated that 100 million people fly for the first time time every year.

If you look at the modern technologies that have been set aside without replacement they are either trivial (like the Pedoscope) or experimental (like manned spaceflight). Mass air travel is clearly unlike either of those, which is why its loss seems so unimaginable.

And yet whether a technology is abandoned or not isn’t determined by the extent of its benefit, but by whether the benefits are outweighed by the costs.

Airlines have innovated to increase the affordability, if not the pleasantness, of air travel. They’ve pushed the limits of euclidean geometry (and human anatomy) to fit ever more seats into the same space. We may complain, but the industry knows we’re suckers for a cheap ride.

Covid-19 throws all of that into doubt. 

There’s no social distancing on a packed plane — not even if middle seats are left empty. With a typical seat pitch (the distance between the same point on each row) of about 75cm, keeping a two metre separation is impossible — and that’s without the sociopath in front of you reclining into your face.

The industry claims that there are other ways of keeping passengers safe. For instance, the filtration systems which continually clean the cabin air. Then again, just look at this simulation of how airborne droplets from a single sneeze spread around a plane. Grim.

No matter what adjustments are made on board, the fact is that to fly means spending several hours in a tin can with hundreds of strangers — and you don’t where they’ve been.

To persuade us of the safety of that, airlines will mainly be relying on what happens on the ground. From temperature scans to spit tests, screening procedures are a first line of defence in airports around the world. The already tiresome business of getting through an airport will get several times worse. For instance, read Laurel Chor’s account of what it takes to fly from London to Hong Kong. We’re talking about hours of extra delay — and not in a comfy airport lounge, but in some spartan, socially-distanced warehouse. And, of course, there’s always the risk that you’ll fail a check and be refused entry.

With that rigmarole in place, most trips — whether for business or pleasure — become untenable.

These controls are likely to last a lot longer than other aspects of the lockdown. In respect to international air travel, any relaxation depends on progress being made not just in the country in question, but globally.

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The moral confusion of MeToo

By Freddie Sayers

It seems likely that hopes of widespread asymptomatic infection — and thus of achieving herd immunity — have been dashed. Most countries’ strategy for getting out of lockdown will be about suppressing transmission of the disease at home. As they get closer to that goal, efforts to prevent re-infection from abroad are likely to tighten not loosen.

The British government is now introducing a quarantine period for air passengers arriving in the UK. This would require them to self-isolate at a private residence for 14 days. Obviously, that rules out most business and holiday travel. The airlines aren’t happy — and they won’t have been consoled by some recent remarks by the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock: “It’s unlikely that big, lavish international holidays are going to be possible this summer.”

Indeed, governments are unlikely to let down their guard or consumers to regain their confidence until we’ve gone through the coming winter without a serious second wave of the disease. So, the big question for the airlines is what happens next summer.

Even if lockdown is lifted and borders re-open, how many of us will have the confidence — or the money — to fly abroad on holiday again? As for business travel, will we see an explosion of pent-up demand (from, say, personnel deployed to rebuild global supply chains) or an accelerated process of deglobalisation? We don’t know yet, because none of this has happened before.

We can be certain that demand will recover, but there’s no telling how rapidly or to what extent. With airlines already fragilised by debt and months of massively reduced revenues, there is a significant chance of an industry-wide meltdown.

In which case, what should governments do about it? Presumably, they won’t allow national flag carriers to collapse, but would it be sensible to bail-out or nationalise every airline? Not in the context of dramatically reduced demand. If there is a need for a general bail-out, then it can’t happen without a restructuring of the whole industry. And by ‘restructuring’, I mean downsizing.

Whatever happens, we need to ask what purpose aviation actually serves. This is a moment in history when we’re rethinking the case for globalisation, wrestling with the challenge of climate change, and reeling from the impact of pandemic disease. The question of whether mass air travel does more harm than good is now open and urgent.

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How travel narrows the mind

By Giles Fraser

A world where we radically restrict air travel is no longer unthinkable. The downside of hyper-connectivity, of millions of people hurtling around the planet at every moment, is no longer theoretical. Aviation did not create Covid-19, but it did turn a local outbreak into a global catastrophe. Unrestricted aviation is the great multiplier of pandemic risk — and that can’t be ignored anymore.

Aviation policy cannot go on as if none of this has happened. There’s Heathrow expansion, for instance, the business case for which now lies in tatters. Though a major asset, Heathrow is also a liability, a vast generator of congestion and pollution lodged in the side of our most populous city. The idea that we’d make it bigger is not just absurd, but grotesque.

Boris was right for the wrong reason, we need to move our main airport to a coastal location — but to provide room for containment, not expansion. Protection against future pandemics depends on the ability to close our borders as and when required. Ports, airports and logistical hubs need to be designed around this objective — incorporating the facilities required for advanced border control, mass medical testing and, if necessary, the quarantine of returning travellers.

As devastating as this pandemic has been, we need to remember it could have been worse — and that there’s absolutely no guarantee that the next one won’t be. But I wonder whether we’ve really learned our lesson.

We’ve been taught to despise humility, to disregard our limits. Like Jesus tempted by Satan in the wilderness, we’ve been taken to a high place and shown “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour”. We’ve come to believe that they belong to us, that they must lie within our grasp.

But we live a different world now and for most of us that means a smaller world. Because that’s what happens when we overreach.

But will it — Covid-19 — pass? Since the “-19” refers to the form of the illness first induced by the SARS-COV2 virus in 2019, then yes, Covid-19 will pass. But Covid-20, Covid-21? I suspect that those people who hope that the virus (and the deformation of ‘normal life’ with which we’re currently wrestling) will fade away are going to be disappointed. We won’t live in social isolation for ever, but neither will we be returning to ‘normal’ anytime soon.

In any case, historically speaking, it was the relatively un-pandemicked century between Spanish flu and Covid-19 that was the statistical oddity, not living with the risks presented by a fatal infectious disease. Human beings are great hosts for fragments of RNA that just want to live, baby! We need a new-normal, not a return to the prelapsarian days of February, 2020. How long ago February seems.

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We don't deserve our wretched media class

By Graeme Archer

So much of pre-Covid-19 world was oriented for the gregarious and extrovert, and was tolerated by the rest of us (people who need solitude to maintain equilibrium) because the dominance of the herd seemed impossible to overcome. Take the world with which I’m most familiar: the office. Here, the following norms were unquestioningly accepted:

• Open-plan hot-desking (every morning, hoik a box containing your laptop cables to any flat table in the office, and set yourself up for the day) leads naturally to synergistic interactions (“Hey! Let me, like, totally interrupt what you’re doing and tell you all about my ideas right now!”) These add value to the business.
• Global teams are better, because they increase diversity, and diversity always adds value to the business.
• Anyone leading a global team needs to travel incessantly, because physical presence among team-mates increases team cohesion (which is as important as diversity), and adds value to the business.
• Serious decisions must be made face-to-face, even if half the face-to-face meeting is in one video-conference suite in Philadelphia, with the other half in another room in London.

What have five weeks (I started early) of social isolation taught me? First, that hot-desking is dead, thank God. The idea that you should be forced to spend today at the desk where yesterday Eunice from Chemistry was hacking up her lungs (“Some sort of 24 hour thing”) will be illegal by the end of next year. Everyone who was part of the “abolish private office space” movement should be forced to march through the streets — at two metres separation — with a placard round their necks saying “Sorry for our unwarranted attack on human dignity”.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

Do we need offices, at all? I’ve found it easier, not harder, to keep leading my own global team. From 1-on-1 catch-ups, to management team meetings, to seminars and town halls and performance reviews: every aspect of managing a group of globally-distributed workers has been easier to conduct from the study at home than from a hastily-booked “meeting space” cubicle at the fringes of the open-plan hell. In my (pharmaceutical) industry, the only people who actually need to be on site are the lab scientists. The rest of us can work remotely. The company works fine.

It works better than fine, in fact; better than the old-normal. Once the curve has been flattened, and isolation officially terminated, the question will loom: why leave the house at 6am to travel to Stevenage on the train every day, when the same work can be done, more comfortably, from home? Why rush back to the old-normal, the Benthamite Panopticon hell, at all?

How will HR react, I wonder, post-Covid-19, if I tell them “I’m not flying to Philadelphia for work, anymore. It’s not necessary — this we proved, in Spring and Summer 2020 — and it therefore unnecessarily raises both my susceptibility risk for infection, and that of the people with whom such travel brings me into contact?” We’ll see.

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What will you do when lockdown is lifted?

By Various contributors

That’s fine for you, Archer, middle-class manager in your Barnet semi with its nice wee garden and the impossibly patient Mr Keith as companion. What about people who live in inner city flats. With children.

I’m not proposing that social isolation should be enforced forever, merely that we stop insisting on social mixing for the sake of it. More people are like me than you suspect, if you’ve read my enjoyment of isolation with horror. Many more. And if you give us freedom to be just that little bit more physically distant from now on, well, that just leaves more space for everyone else. (Robbie Gibb tweeted a survey that shows around a fifth to a quarter of us plan to reduce social mixing in the future.)

But what about those millions on whom you depend: the health-care workers and delivery drivers and postmen and policemen and soldiers and … the backbone of the country. People who can’t work from home. What changes for them in the new-normal?

As the cheering from our doorsteps every Thursday demonstrates, the value of labour and the dignity of the labourer has — at last — been re-valorised. If we care less about what the university-educated think about Brexit or immigration or anything in the next few years, then good. Having a degree in something useless from somewhere rubbish never made your opinion more important than that of the bin man; in cost-benefit terms, each bin man is worth more than a thousand psychology graduates from North London Tech.

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The WHO has failed us again

By Ian Birrell

I’m married to an electrician. It’s Keith’s experience of globalisation that has ever shaped my politics: transcontinental supply chains (so he can’t choose to buy parts from people he knows and trusts, because his company finds cheaper alternatives from strangers he’ll never meet in countries he’ll never visit); open-doors immigration (so anyone’s qualification from any EU country had instantly the same jobs market value as his own); the downward pressure on wages — in our household, hatred of Blairite globalisation was never theoretical.

If you’re a middle- or senior-manager in a MegaCorp, you’ll know the pressure to offshore and outsource, in putatively British companies, is real. I hope that the new-normal resets this a bit. It’s too much to hope that the Labour Party (a sack of anti-Semitic rats fighting enablers of anti-Semitic rats, both of them dependent on the votes of those psychology graduates) will change. But the Conservative Party has noticed: we are kept alive by the labour of those whose opinions are despised by Labour.

Meanwhile, there has been a collapse in trust between citizen and journalist — and no wonder. The political lobby, in particular, has behaved lamentably, clinging to their dreary, invented gotchas, and indulging in preening displays of scientific ignorance, even as the old-normal paradigm shifted from under their feet. They remind me of backbench MPs at the time of the expenses scandal: in complete denial that anything needs to change. “But this is how things are done, you see,” they puff, as the sandcastle of self-belief they’ve carefully patted into proud existence is washed away by reality’s tidal wave.

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We don't need 'gotcha' journalism now

By Douglas Murray

Not only the media’s deficiencies have been on daily display. The official from WHO pretending not to hear the question about Taiwan will haunt that intergovernmental quango. I signed a petition from the sort of organisation I’d normally avoid, demanding action against “wet markets”. I don’t think animal welfare will be left to student activists anymore, not when the link between global pandemics that kill millions and the torture of sentient beings for unnecessary meat is so startingly, unavoidably visible. SARS-COV2 wasn’t the first zoonotic jump; we all know who’s responsible. I don’t think we’ll tolerate either health quangos or corporations looking the other way any longer.

Not only geopolitical outfits and MegaCorps will change in the new-normal. More parochially, perhaps we’ll weigh up the costs of devolved assemblies. An email last week from Sainsbury’s CEO told me the company is ready to match up its customer lists with the database of English citizens felt by the government to be most vulnerable and in need of food deliveries, but: “We are waiting for the databases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and will contact vulnerable customers in those areas as soon as we are able.”

In the name of God, why are there four lists to do one thing across One Nation? “To give Sturgeon material for a press conference” isn’t a good enough answer — not with national GDP likely to drop by around 35%. Like asking a gynaecologist to take time out from visiting her multiple homes to give you advice on immunology, devolution is an expense whose cost cannot easily be justified.

My 74-year old mother is in Scotland and has the sort of lung condition that would make her death from Covid-19 a near certainty should she become infected with SARS-COV2. That she could have had food delivered safely, last week, from Sainsbury’s, if only we hadn’t spent decades indulging the psychological inadequacies of Salmond and Sturgeon, feels pretty fucking unacceptable.

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Does Labour understand why it lost?

By Graeme Archer

Wishing viruses out of existence has been one of the hallmarks of my life, since HIV first reared its hideous head, but ‘wishing’ didn’t defeat HIV, any more than shouting GOTCHA! at a government press conference. Don’t die of ignorance warned Sir Norman Fowler, and while too many did, most of us didn’t, and not accidentally. Decades of pharmaceutical research and changes in (sub)cultural norms created a new-normal era that ran from the late 1990s until roughly four weeks ago.

You probably didn’t notice those changes, that coming-into-being of the new-normal, unless you’re roughly my middle-age, and gay. But the same focus on pharmaceutical research — on science, darling! — and effecting changes in cultural norms: that’s the way we’ll defeat SARS-COV2.

There’s nothing special about the virus; it just wants to live.  The universe co-inhabited by the viral and human genome couldn’t care less about the outcome, so shaking your fist in anger and insisting on the supremacy of the way we lived until February 2020 won’t, to put it mildly, be efficacious.

Instead, let’s start the conversation about what needs to change, to maximise the probability of human success. The fight for the (new) good life starts here. Don’t die of nostalgia for the old one.

The pandemic also illuminates a wider retreat from full-on free trade that has been gaining in support and legitimacy over recent years—everywhere, that is, apart from in the economics profession. Democratic politics and national social contracts are starting to assert themselves against the laws of comparative advantage — which in any case turn out not to be quite as benign as the economics professors claim. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I heard a very senior Tory say that he was, until recently, an orthodox free trader/free marketeer but now regarded himself as an economic nationalist.

He is not alone. World trade fell last year by 0.4%. There has been no multilateral trade agreement since 1993. Donald Trump wants to bring back some of the US supply chain from China. And this is not a Trumpian eccentricity, most of the US political class is behind him on this, acknowledging that allowing China entry to the global market economy in the belief that it would transform politically (and become less mercantilist economically) is a gamble that failed. There has been technological decoupling too, the world will not end up on single global platforms.

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The ascent of climate change anxieties up domestic and international agendas is also making life uncomfortable for unfettered free trade, encouraging a bias towards localism, reduced travel and a degree of self-sufficiency. China’s air quality has improved dramatically in the past few weeks as a result of measures to contain the coronavirus. And more generically, Greta is asking whether you really need strawberries in March.

The truth is that the neat theories of free trade and comparative advantage have been oversold. Free trade, as Keynes pointed out, only works if the people displaced from good jobs by imports get equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. The election of Donald Trump is one kind of proof that this has not been happening.

Hold on, say the free traders, of course there will be downward pressure on wages and job losses in the short run but, in the long run, the additional purchasing power we acquire from cheaper imports means we can buy other goods and services that will create equally good jobs elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, they say, when given the choice between protecting the Mid-West manufacturing plant and enjoying good quality, cheaper stuff in Walmart, people have voted with their wallets for the cheaper stuff.

But they have not been given a proper choice. Of course people would always prefer cheaper goods, but not at any price. If the choice was between slightly more expensive goods and services, and the preservation, or more gradual decline, of a certain agricultural or industrial way of life, they might well support such a deal. Indeed, they do so in the EU through the Common Agricultural Policy.

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According to Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky, most trade doesn’t follow any discernible pattern of comparative advantage, and Cambridge economist Graham Gudgin has shown that, for countries in North America and Western Europe, joining free trade agreements has caused slower — not faster — growth in recent decades. Unlike comparative advantage in natural resources, which is better described as absolute advantage, comparative advantage in manufacturing systems is usually quite marginal.

Much of the comparative advantage of recent decades has been achieved by simply taking advantage of lower labour costs in poorer countries. Apple makes iPhones in China, which does benefit US consumers, and to some extent Chinese workers, but the main beneficiaries are probably Apple executives and shareholders. Bringing some of that production back to the US, even at the cost of slightly higher prices, would not, I suspect, be unpopular.

The theory that free trade engenders a permanent peace has long ago been exposed as an empty dream, which is why national security and the threat of war (and pandemics) continue to provide justification for some degree of national protection. In the 19th century, Britain did completely embrace free trade. It was enormously to our advantage to do so, as the workshop of the world, and we imported most of our food by the end of the 19th century. The result was that we nearly starved in two world wars. After the Second World War, we did not make the same mistake; even with the enormous change in tastes and increase in food imports in recent decades, we still produce more than half of what we eat.

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Nobody sensible is arguing for self-sufficiency or anything like it, though it might be a good idea to retain at least some national capacity in certain strategic areas like steel or nuclear power plants or, indeed, vaccine manufacture. And, after all, isn’t the logic of comparative advantage to produce specialist monocultures in a world that values diversity in all things.

But there are some economists and political economists such as Dani Rodrik, Ha-Joon Chang, Barry Eichengreen and Robert Skidelsky who are arguing, persuasively, that we need more democratic caveats to free trade. Rodrik argues that where there is a national consensus about preserving some aspect of an economy or culture, for example French restrictions on Hollywood film imports, these should be allowed and not attract sanctions from international trade regulators.

A UK government that is serious about regional and industrial policy, and shifting more high value economic activity towards the North, is implicitly protectionist. It is not going to promote high-tech export industries in Hartlepool and then allow them to be wiped out by imports. It will protect with either subsidies or tariffs. It is true that free trade theory does allow some such protection under the title ‘infant industry protection’, which is far preferable to senile industry protection, but EU state aid policy is not friendly to either.

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The unlikely bedfellows of populism, environmentalism and technology are all pointing in the same direction — the reshoring of some forms of production, a bit more self-sufficiency, more teleconferencing with people in other countries rather than immigration, all in all a retreat from the hyper-globalisation of recent decades.

Free traders will, not unreasonably, point to the costs. It could mean a bit less growth, though neither the populists nor the greens will necessarily object. Global supply chains are, indeed, a force for peace and breaking them up could bring back inflationary pressures. It could also mean that the dramatic fall in poverty in poorer countries will slow or stop. So why not try to mitigate the costs of free trade better? Subsidise the losers more intelligently? Or, the free trade sceptic might reply, why not prevent there being so many losers in the first place?

As Barry Eichengreen says, the problem with the global economy is not a lack of openness, but a sense that “the nation state has fundamentally lost control of its destiny, surrendering to anonymous global forces”. And as Hans Kundnani put it in last week’s Observer: “it is time the UK Government adjusted its rhetoric and stopped its paeans of praise to free trade”. Part of the point of Brexit is to put politics before economics, democratic legitimacy before economic growth.

Of course, we still want lots of trade and sustainable growth but at less cost to other things that people hold dear. A new rhetoric is needed that combines an appropriate level of openness with a sense of national control. An economic nationalism that most liberals can feel comfortable with.

David Goodhart works at Policy Exchange, and is the author of The Road to Somewhere: The new Tribes Shaping British Politics.