Paul Kingsnorth writes vividly on the dark side of modernity, technology and progress. His new book, Against the Machine, is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing and is something of a spiritual manual for modernity’s dissidents.

Earlier this week, Kingsnorth visited the UnHerd Club for a wide-ranging interview with Freddie Sayers — the world first about this book, on the day of publication.

This is the full video and an edited transcript.

Freddie Sayers: Much of your writing starts with a feeling: a sense of loss, of alienation, from the modern world, a yearning to get back to something that we had before. Tell us about that feeling. Has it always been with you?

Paul Kingsnorth: Yes, I think it does start with a feeling. It’s a sense that we’re living inside something that is quite inhuman and becoming more and more inhuman. It’s a system that you can feel encroaching upon you and it becomes tighter and tighter. I begin Against the Machine with “The Purse-Seine”, a poem from the Forties by the American author Robinson Jeffers. He was sitting on a cliff in Los Angeles, watching a fishing boat drawing in a “purse seine”, a type of net that’s like a draw-string. He writes about how the fish in the net can’t feel the net being tightened and drawn, but tightens up all the time until they’re in it and they’re stuck. It feels to me like that’s where we are. Something is gathering around us.

Many writers have written about “the Machine” before me. It’s not my phrase. I consider myself, hopefully, to be writing in this tradition. This is something that has been going on for hundreds of years, at least since the Industrial Revolution. I’m very struck when I come to London, because I live in the west of Ireland and every time I come here, it becomes more machine-like. Go into a café, and there’s a little QR code on the table. You have to scan it to find out what the menu is. There are cameras everywhere. You’re constantly being monitored.

It’s become more and more impossible to survive without being hooked into this technological web that’s growing around us. But what does that take away? It gives us some good things and some bad things. But what do we lose? I think most people can feel that we’re losing something or a set of things that are quite important to what it means to be human.

FS: I remember reading Real England, an earlier book of yours, that was also infused with that same negative reaction towards modernity — the carapace of technology and concrete that was covering the authentic country of England. If someone asked you: “Do you hate modernity?” What would you reply? 

PK: Well, the easy answer is yes.

FS: It’s quite remarkable that you say that out loud.

PK: Look, what is modernity? What are we talking about here? Are we talking about a historical time period that we could date, or are we talking about a way of seeing? I prefer to see modernity as a way of seeing, which I often refer to as machine modernity. Iain McGilchrist has this great theory about the hemispheres of the brain: the left hemisphere sees the parts, and the right hemisphere sees the whole. The left is supposed to be in service to the right, but we have become deeply left-brained in the sense that we’re very good at seeing the parts, very good at making things, at going to the moon, at examining the genes of fruit flies. But have we actually lost a way of seeing that’s much more significant? That’s how I see modernity. It creates lots of things that we find good and useful, obviously. But where’s it going in the long term and what’s the price that’s being paid for it?

FS: Where do you locate the moment that it all started to go wrong? Possible candidates you mention in the book include Aquinas, Duns Scotus, the Schism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the car, and many others.

PK: You missed a bit about the Egyptian pyramids.

FS: Oh yes!

PK: Which isn’t my idea. I’m quoting Lewis Mumford, the great critic of technology, who wrote a two-volume book called The Myth of the Machine back in the late Sixties. He sees the first machine society as being Pharaonic Egypt, which he calls “the machine made of human parts”. The human parts being slaves. If you have that enormous top-down thing, you can build something incredible like a pyramid. He compares a pyramid to a space rocket. These are both technologies which, at a cost of human labour and toil, create a technology which takes the favoured few up into heaven.

You could say Egypt was a machine society. Certainly, Ancient Rome was very machine-like in its centralisation, its technocratic ability, its top-down power. What’s happened since? Let’s finger the usual suspects, and say the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution together created a revolution in human seeing in the Western world, which has since flooded out everywhere else.

This way of seeing is highly mechanistic. Through a critique of religion — which has been going on for a long time, but it really comes to the fore with the French Revolution — you create a new theology. A traditional way of understanding this is that during the modern period, we’ve moved away from religion and we’ve moved instead towards reason and science. To some degree, you can say that’s true, but what we also have is a new belief system — a thing we call progress, which is moral progress, technological progress, endless forward movement. If we look at the way that our politics is framed, if we look at the way technology is created, they are all aligned with this notion of progress with a large “P”. So we’re all progressive in that sense. It’s become the ultimate philosophy of the modern world. That’s what we do: we move forward. One of the problems we’re having in the West at the moment is that people have stopped believing in it.

FS: So is this new, or was it ever thus? Has it not always been true, throughout the ages, that there are people such as yourself who yearn for the purity of the past? Ovid was writing about the Golden Age, William Morris in News from Nowhere, and many in between. Are you simply today’s version, or do you think there is something truly specific and new about what we’re going through today?

PK: Well, I don’t mind being compared with Ovid. That’s okay.

You have to be careful: the temptation when you talk like this is to find a particular period in the past and start to romanticise that and say, well, “Everything was great then”. You won’t find a period of history in which there aren’t all the usual human problems, but they are different. In a very general sense, the modern way of seeing divorces us from things which most pre-modern ways of seeing have taken for granted.

I try to categorise this in the book in a very machine-like way. I call it “the four Ps”, which are “People”, “Place”, “Prayer”, and “the Past”. If you look at most cultures, they’re based on a combination of those four things. The modern world systematically uproots them all and replaces them with consumerism and ideologies and progressive theologies and, ultimately, technology, which is the way that we try to manifest the myth of progress. There is something revolutionary about the way we see, and it’s not normal. I think we see the world quite differently to the way most people have always seen it.

FS: We are very used to people complaining about too much screentime and the deleterious effect of apps. But you seem to see the spread of modern technology, perhaps culminating in AI, as something devilish — a kind of evil force or spirit? 

PK: If you listen to the people who are in Silicon Valley, really pushing the creation of superhuman intelligence, they all talk like prophets or priests or religious philosophers. Ray Kurzweil, who wrote a book called The Age of Spiritual Machines, is always talking about the singularity, the point at which machines become more intelligent than us and run away with themselves. He was once asked: “Does God exist?” And he answered: “Not yet.”

You have seen lots of warnings from people about how AI could become superintelligent and destroy us. Many of those warnings are coming from the people creating it. It’s not just weirdos like me. The journalist Ezra Klein went to a bunch of these people and asked why, given that they’re warning us it could destroy the world, are they creating it? And he said they couldn’t answer the question. They ended up more or less feeling that they had a responsibility to usher this new being into the world.

We’ve got superintelligent AIs being created. Nobody really knows how they work. They’re already talking to each other in ways people can’t understand. They’re already persuading teenagers to kill themselves. Something very sinister is going on. Pre-modern societies wouldn’t have had much trouble understanding it. It’s like the Book of Genesis. Why don’t you just take the fruit of knowledge of good and evil and become as the gods? If you rebel against God, you can be God. That’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to create God, make God live forever.

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FS: But is this just the excitable rhetoric of Silicon Valley technicians, or do you actually think there’s an external force of some kind that is being made manifest? 

PK: I’m a Christian, so I do believe in external forces of evil. I don’t want to get too carried away with that because it’s very easy to predict the rise of the Antichrist every five minutes.

It’s a kind of a feeling, it’s an intuition. I’m not trying to prove anything. But I think given that all these people talk in spiritual terms about this stuff, we should see it in spiritual terms.

FS: In the book you do name it the Antichrist. You say these machines are not just machines. They are something else. A body whose mind is in the process of developing; a body beginning to come to life. 

PK: I think that’s true. I’ll stand by that.

I don’t know what the mind is. I don’t know whether the mind is the Antichrist or whether it is a man, or whether it’s something demonic, or whether it’s something that humans can create. I’m not sure we’re actually capable of creating a mind, even though we think we are, but I have the strong sense that something quite dark is happening.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to put a name to it, but let’s just see what happens over the next five years, because either AI is going to be a bubble that bursts and we’ve all made a fuss about nothing. Or we’re going to be moving into very uncharted territory.

FS: Let me take you away from the perilous topic of the Antichrist towards the easy topic of the culture wars. That will be plain sailing.

PK: It’s less interesting though.

FS: You describe your reaction to the roiling culture wars as having three distinct phases. Could you describe them for us?

When I looked at the warring teams, my first reaction was to look at the mad woke Left and want to join the team against them, because some of the stuff they say is just so crazy and offensive.

And then the second reaction is: actually, no, I really don’t want to do that. I don’t want to get involved in that. I think I’d rather go and live in a forest. Or a monastery. Because that’s actually a trap. I think it is a trap.

And then the third reaction was to look at it and say: “OK, while I really don’t like what a lot of these people are saying, I can understand why they’re saying it.”

FS: These people being?

PK: The postmodern woke Left, whatever you want to call them. The culture warriors who are trying to take the culture apart. And then rising up against them you have these defenders of the West, broadly on the Right. You know, “we must defend our traditions” and all the rest of it. And when I look at that, I’m not sure what traditions we’re defending at this point?

I’m not sure what the West is, so if you’re going to defend the West or indeed attack the West, you need to think, “well, what is it then?” And if I’m talking about the Machine, I think that is what the modern West now is. It may not be what the West was in the Middle Ages, but this thing we call the West now is really a manifestation of this modern way of seeing. I actually don’t want to defend that.

So, I find myself in this kind of bind because I come from here and I’d rather that place wasn’t dismantled. I’ve got children who’ve got to grow up in it. I want to give them some values, but while I can dislike what a lot of the radical Left is doing, I can see to some degree why they’re doing it.

I’m not convinced by the uncomplicated unquestioning defenders of the West because what they often end up defending is a kind of capitalism, or a very statist version of Christianity. A Fifties-style conservatism that actually they probably don’t really want to live in themselves.

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FS: So you are ready to let the West die. I mean, there is a chapter called “The West Must Die”. You write, “maybe we need to let the West die, let it die so that we can live.”

PK: What I’m thinking is that this thing that we call the West, which has become an idol — either because the Left want to tear it down because it’s the cis-heteronormative patriarchy, or because the Right want to defend it because the Left are trying to tear it down — has become a thing which actually doesn’t have anything to do with real culture at all.

It’s almost like a trauma response. We’ve lost all of our actual, real culture. If we go back to those “four Ps” — “People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — most of us aren’t living in most of those things anymore.

So if we let go of this notion of the West, whether we’re attacking it or defending it. Maybe we can concentrate on creating human scale cultures again, which is, I think the best way to create some form of friction or resistance to this Machine way of seeing.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have big arguments at all, that none of these issues matter. They do. You have to stand up for things that are true. You have to stand up against things that are wrong or evil, but actually the real stuff is going to come from trying to recreate real culture again.

FS: That is the final part of your book, really, where you conclude by offering a suggestion of how we might live inside the Machine. What you move towards is a kind of secession from the crumbling culture around us, an acceptance that it’s dying and will not survive. Will you just talk a bit about that? How would that work for people?

PK: I think it’s already crumbled. The things that we used to believe in have pretty much already gone. That gives you the freedom to start again. Not that you’re going to start with the blank slate, but you need to draw on the best of the past. The Machine rips up everything from its roots, and that’s a kind of liberation process, but it’s also a destruction process. You need to try and build from the bottom up.

This is all very doomy. We’re talking about the Antichrist and things. But for a Christian, the coming of the Antichrist is all good, because it’s all fine after that. Everything gets sorted. So we’re waiting for that day.

Even though the world looks crazy and horrible and depressing, there’s a hope to it precisely because everything’s falling down, and you can now say: “Well, how are we going to get back to actually trying to be human again?” Once you face this kind of digital Moloch that’s around us, you actually have to ask what it means to be human.

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Coming back to the whole Antichrist question, I quote Eliezer Yudkowsky, a mad Silicon Valley eccentric, who’s very opposed to AI. He thinks AI systems will destroy us. And if anyone is developing AI in their countries, then you need to bomb the data centres of that country and destroy their electricity network. He’s a kind of Silicon Valley Ted Kaczynski.

FS: Yes, the bombing of the data centres. It’s in the book. You say: “bombing the data centres, this is the mindset of the raw ascetic.” I would say, although you’re not explicitly calling for it, you’re not not calling for it…

PK: You could bomb the data-centres, which — if they were developing superhuman AI — would be a good idea. But unless you’ve changed your way of seeing, someone’s going to build more of these things. They always get built again, which is the argument people use against Yudkowsky, because if we stopped building AI, someone else would build them.

FS: There’s the polite version of Paul Kingsnorth, and then not far beneath the surface there is the much more radical activist. You talk with great affection about the Luddites, who were smashing looms and rejecting the Industrial Revolution, and the Fen Tigers, who resisted the draining of the fens. 

PK: I’m very happy to call myself a Luddite. People always call me a Luddite. I embrace that because what the Luddites did was reject certain types of technology that were going to enslave them. You can see what these people [in Silicon Valley] are trying to build. And then you say: “What the hell are we going to do about that?” I started off when I was 21 as a road protester and I believe in non-violent direct action. I kind of still do.

FS: So you’ve come full circle? 

PK: The principle behind that is very Gandhian. Which is that if you need to destroy a technology, which is going to in itself destroy life, then it’s a justifiable thing to do if you’re not harming people. But I don’t how you would apply that to an interconnected global digital system because there is no heart.

There’s no central computer that you can just hit with a pickaxe and the whole thing shuts down. Which is why it feels more like an interconnected way of seeing the rise of some being, or just the rise of our own slightly warped way of seeing, turning into a kind of technological system, like a central nervous system. There isn’t really any way to shut that down other than seeing differently. So I do move between these poles. Do I think we should bomb data centres or do I think we should read Iain McGilchrist? Or do I think we should do both?

Probably both, but I don’t know.

You’ve got to draw your own lines, decide what you’re going to do, decide what you’re not going to allow to happen. I’m not going to ever use an AI. I think if you don’t draw lines, you’re just going to get sucked in.

FS: The other sensitive aspect of this book is how your ideas relate to the ascendant radical Right in politics.

We had that huge Tommy Robinson march last week, animated by protest against immigration and a desire to reassert the indigenous culture. It would be possible, I think, to read this book and be inspired to go on those kind of marches. You use the word indigenous a lot. When describing what you don’t like about the West, you single out “the insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties”.

What did you mean by that?

PK: This is the promotion of the global system of western capitalism around the world, which just razes all cultures and homogenises them. I’m very clear in the book repeatedly, actually, about what I’m talking about.

I don’t know what’s going on these marches in London. I don’t even read the news really, but this sort of manifestation of Christian Nationalism is balls. And I’ve spoken out about it quite clearly actually.

I gave a talk a couple years ago called “Against Christian Civilisation”, which was specifically about the manifestation of what’s basically idol worship, where you take Christianity, which is a spiritual path of renunciation and radicalism, and demands to reject wealth and reject the idols of nations, and you turn that somehow into a new crusade of waving pictures of people around and talking about muscular Christianity. It’s just the endless corruption of the Christian faith that’s been going on for 2,000 years, and it’s absolutely nonsense. And in terms of indigeneity, I would never talk about that in an uncomplicated way.

I’m actually very clear in the book when I do talk about that. And I’m also very clear about what I’m against, which is all this kind of stuff you are talking about. When you start talking about cultural purity or racial purity, at least on the hard Right, then you’ve been suckered. I start the book by talking about Simone Weil’s book, The Need for Roots, and Weil is certainly not any kind of Right-wing or far-Right character. But she writes this book during the Nazi occupation of Europe, and she’s French and she’s fighting for the Free French in London. And she says that everyone is uprooted in the modern world. And what the Nazis have done is they’ve taken that concern and they’ve turned it into this hideous, monstrous racial thing. How can we actually root ourselves again without getting sucked in by that?

So you have to be able to talk about this in an intelligent way and in a sensitive way, which I hope I’ve done in the book. I don’t think anyone could seriously read that and not be very clear about what I’m for and what I’m not.

But be careful of idol worship. Don’t worship the idols of nations or the idols of false versions of Christianity or religion. Anything that involves you raging against a bunch of people who are different to you. Whatever side you’re on, you’re in trouble. That doesn’t mean you can’t have the serious discussions about what it actually means to be rooted and what you should actually be doing politically, but I really see what’s happening in the West at the moment as a manifestation of that massive process of uprooting and just people on all sides of the spectrum.

FS: You end up by embracing a political label: reactionary radical. What does that mean?

PK: John Calhoun uses the phrase “reactionary radicals” when critiquing E.P. Thompson, the Marxist historian: he says, look, you can’t divide people at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution into the two simple categories of workers or capitalists, the working class and the bourgeoisie, because what the Luddites are doing in communities like them, is trying to resist the coming of the factory system, the coming of capitalism, because they can see it’s going to completely destroy them. It’s going to destroy their industry. It’s going to turn them into wage slaves, it’s gonna destroy their households. So they’re reactionary in that sense.

They’re reacting against that system, which is a good thing. But they’re radical as well because they don’t react against it because they want to go back to the past as if it was perfect. They want changes as well, right? They want things that will actually benefit them because the system currently does not benefit them.

He calls these people reactionary radicals. And I think if you look at tribal people in India resisting dams or the West Papuans, resisting logging firms in the Indonesian government, or the Fen Tigers or the Luddites throughout history, what you can see is reactionary radicals. You can see people fighting the Machine, but from a perspective of wanting a radically different way of living.

So it’s not a simple sort of reaction where you just go, “oh, everything was wonderful in the past. Let’s go back to that.” But neither is it an ideological radicalism like you would get with the Marxists, where you say: “we’ve got a grand utopian theory of everything and we’re just going to impose that now even if we have to kill everyone and put them into camps.”

It’s based on human scale culture. It reacts against the Machine. So I like that. I like that as a phrase. It’s the best description I’ve ever heard of what I think I believe in.

If we’re going to talk about politics as a way of seeing, you have to have a politics that is rooted in the past, that’s rooted in reality. Rooted in nature and eternal things, but that doesn’t idolise them. Or turn them into excuses to hate a bunch of people who aren’t the same as you, which is the problem that we’ve got at the moment, and that’s what the Right’s going to end up doing if it’s not very careful indeed.

“People”, “Place”, “Prayer” and “the Past” — however you want to formulate it. But it has to be against the Machine, literally, and it has to be very careful that whatever it does not become the worship of an idol and the excuse to project your anger and fear onto somebody else, which is why for me, my Christianity’s important.

Because if you’re going to try and be a Christian properly (and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it) the two great commandments are that you love God and you love your neighbour. And, by the way, Christ says: “Everyone is your neighbour.” That’s what the Good Samaritan is about.

So you actually have to try and do the thing that is possible for you to do. That is a good thing in your life at the human scale.

That, coincidentally, is the nostalgic-sounding title of Peter Laslett’s great work: The World We Have Lost, published in 1965. Nostalgic only to a point: Laslett tells us at the outset that the world we lost with the arrival of industrialization was “no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or loving kindness”. Daily life was as painful as it was tedious. The simplest things required painstaking effort: “drawing the water from the well, striking steel on flint to catch the tinder alight, cutting goose-feather quills to make a pen, they all took time, trouble and energy.” Nor did the Industrial Revolution bring with it oppression or exploitation: all that “was there already”.

The majority was illiterate, and therefore excluded from political and intellectual life. What is worse, early-modern parish records, which Laslett and others had pored over relentlessly, revealed plenty of parents who had themselves signed the marriage register, but whose children were unable to do so: there was no guarantee of linear improvement across the generations. True, pre-industrial life left a greater role for the family, but this should not elicit any pangs of nostalgia either: the family was not only a “circle of affection” but also the “scene of hatred”.

Vestiges of that world can still be found all around us. Its nastier aspects, like the dark side of family life, have been “half-remembered” in fairytales. One crucial feature of pre-industrial society, its obsession with rank, was better preserved in our country than almost anywhere else: “the British go on awarding the symbolic titles”, knighthoods, peerages, and all the rest, as much now as in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

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On publication, The World We Have Lost earned Laslett plenty of enemies. The early-modern historian Lawrence Stone called it “slipshod, muddled, pretentious, and unscholarly”. Marxists especially despised his effort to “entomb” the very idea of a 17th-century “English Revolution”: E.P. Thompson, in his affectedly parochial fashion, sneered at his interest in historical demography, the science which “has of course come from France”. The World We Have Lost was a defense of this foreign science from its many detractors, complementing its new major English center which Laslett helped found, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. 

Laslett himself seems a figure from a world we have lost. At one point, on the fraught question of whether people used to, or even could, have sex in private, he says: “those with experience of living within severe spatial restrictions, such as a man who served as I happen to have done in a grossly overmanned naval vessel, will know that privacy is not entirely a physical affair.” He had an eclectic career of the sort that feels impossible today. During the Second World War, he mastered Japanese at Soas, after which he worked at Bletchley Park, decoding Japanese intelligence. 

As with many of the great intellectuals of his generation — here, too, glimpses of a world we have lost — Laslett had one foot in academia and one in the BBC. His broadcasts on the BBC Third Programme were an important part of his academic strategy; it was there that he issued his call to arms to Britain’s antiquarians to dive into their wealth of local source material, and thereby to construct a vivid picture of the social structure of early-modern England. The French demographer Louis Henry called Laslett’s amateur army “le secret weapon anglais”. Many chapters of The World We Have Lost were initially written as radio broadcasts. Later editions are full of gratitude, and well-earned nostalgia, for the BBC at the height of its Reithian powers.

The “We” in Laslett’s title refers to the English. Although he emphasizes the contrasts between our world today and the one we have lost, he dwells on the few points of common ground. We know what a culture is by observing its habits and customs; we know what English habits and customs are by testing their consistency over time. One defining characteristic of Englishness is the small, nuclear family. This, Laslett was adamant, was not an invention of industrialization, of modernity; in fact in England “there was actually an increase in the tiny proportion of more complicated households in the period of economic transformation”.

Laslett’s later involvement in the University of the Third Age owed something to his belief in the “null hypothesis”, that family organization in England was “always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven”. He disliked the suggestion that “lonely old people” ought to be “restored to the family, where they belong”, because this was no real “restoration… in the sense of returning to the historical past”: it had never really been customary among the English for the elderly to live with their children.

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Likewise, Laslett identified a consistent English custom of marrying relatively late, in the mid-Twenties. When Shakespeare had Lord Capulet say that Juliet “hath not seen the change of fourteen years”, he was indulging in his imagination and nothing more. Laslett even broaches the possibility that late marriage proved the key to English prosperity, without which the “coming of industrialization… might never have occurred”. The book, and others like it, are therefore of much use when attempting to answer the vexed question of what it means to be English, in a historically grounded fashion.

With the rise of generative AI, one often hears that we are on the cusp of something analogous to the Industrial Revolution. As the English did, or had to do, in the Industrial Revolution, so too are we now forced to ponder what types of labor will endure, and what will fast become redundant. Since so much is downstream of labor, we must consider what changes the coming decades herald for things as basic to us as our households, our families, our social structure.

Already, even without AI, there have been some profound shifts. One of the characteristics of pre-industrial society, as Laslett says, is that the household was the primary locus of economic production; and so it was, thanks to Zoom and furlough, during the coronavirus lockdown. ChatGPT, some say, threatens literacy, or at least makes literacy less essential for social functioning, and Laslett paints a vivid picture of what the illiterate world of our past looked like. Laslett shows us just how much things can change, and how lost our lost world really is. But he also shows us those features of English life which have remained more or less constant for the last thousand years, and which we thus have reason to expect will stay with us. Nostalgia is not usually subject to reason; reading Laslett will hardly cure us of all our dreams of simple, old-fashioned living. But trying to imagine the world we have lost, as it actually was, will temper that nostalgia, and make us appreciate the world we have now. 

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

This spring saw the publication of a book by Kaczynski’s neighbour in Montana, and this summer Apple TV released a podcast on the case. He’s also been name-checked by Right-wing influencers clearly trying to keep up with the zeitgeist, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. Carlson last year praised Kaczynski’s “smart analysis” of systems and large organisations, while Masters recommended Kaczynski’s manifesto in a podcast interview in March, saying “there’s a lot of insight there.” Over 25 years after he was arrested, there is no end to our interest in the Unabomber. Why do we still find him so compelling? And why is Kaczynski cool now with very online types, from Right-wingers on 4chan to “anti-woke” leftists on Reddit?

While the recent Unabomber retrospectives mostly rehash his life and the facts of his case, the current zeitgeist revolves more around his ideology. Kaczynski’s manifesto argued that technological progress — the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences” — posed an existential threat to humankind by turning people into “engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine”. Stripped of their autonomy by a faceless, unaccountable system, humans endured psychological suffering as they were forced into “over-socialization”, Kaczynski’s term for a state of being in which the industrial society’s codes and mores have replaced a person’s innate selfhood.

Zombified in this way, people blindly applauded technological advances which spelt societal and environmental doom. There was no hope of fixing the current system. The only option remaining, in Kaczynski’s view, was to overthrow it completely through revolution — by any means necessary. Though Kaczynski repeatedly emphasises the non-political nature of his revolution, he has a lot to say about political movements, particularly Leftist ones, which he saw as cadres of over-socialised do-gooders preoccupied with irrelevant identity concerns. Conservatives weren’t much better: they were “fools” who failed to understand that technology was destroying the traditionalism they prized.

Gen Z and younger millennials see the truth in Kaczynski’s central critique of technology, and its deleterious effects on society. Surrounded by screens from early childhood, addicted to near-constant media consumption, often lacking basic in-person social skills, many sense a broader problem in their own individual capture by the tech borg. They’ve grown up in an era marked by mounting terror about climate change, and in which conventional politics seems woefully insufficient to solve any problems. So Kaczynski’s manifesto resonates.

Though he could never have imagined such horrors as TikTok in the Nineties, the society he describes — atomised and materialistic, one that has forfeited freedom in favour of technological progress we’ve been tricked into wanting — chillingly resembles our own. Sure, he cribbed a lot from French philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose book The Technological Society deeply influenced Kaczynski. But there’s a disquieting reason why Kaczynski is a household name and Ellul, outside of academic circles, is not. Fans tend to either be defiant about the terrorism itself — what better way to offend normies? — or they view it as an unfortunate side plot, perhaps not realising it’s the only reason Kaczynski’s ideas ever attracted notice. “I honestly wish Uncle Teddy wasn’t a terrorist and instead just published the manifesto and let it get popular decades later,” wrote Reddit poster “nabberstonguemyanus” earlier this year. “Then we could openly endorse it and not be called incel psychos.”

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Kaczynski’s recent popularity also corresponds with an epidemic of isolated, socially unskilled young men, many of whom appear to be living mostly online. The term “NEET” — not in education, employment or training — has spilled out from the realm of economics research into common usage. The proportion of NEETs who are young men has been increasing in both the US and the UK. Despite sterling credentials and a promising academic career, Kaczynski chose the lifestyle of what would now be called a “NEET”. In doing so, he became free to enact his revenge on a system he hated and from which he’d felt alienated even as a child. Few of today’s NEETs could, or would want to, deploy Kaczynski’s methods. But they admire his refusal to be judged by society’s standards and relate to his inability to fit in. Few have the wherewithal to leave society entirely, but many may dream of it.

Kaczynski grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, one of two boys. He was a gifted student and enrolled at Harvard at age 16. Lonely, awkward Ted struggled socially and participated in a cruel series of experiments run by a psychology professor with ties to the CIA. Kaczynski and the other participants were subjected to degrading interrogations disguised as intellectual debates and aimed at breaking their confidence. Kaczynski later called it the worst experience he’d ever had. Traumatised and increasingly paranoid, Kaczynski went on to obtain his Ph.D from the University of Michigan, then to a prestigious professorship at the University of California-Berkeley. Kaczynski’s disillusionment with society hardened at Berkeley, where he decided he could no longer countenance studying or teaching mathematics since it contributed to scientific and technological progress. He left Berkeley in 1969 and floated around for much of the Seventies, sometimes living with his parents and holding down temporary blue-collar jobs, before moving permanently into his 10×12 cabin in Montana.

Beginning in 1978, he planted or mailed 16 bombs mostly to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He sent his manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post (and Penthouse, though that always seems to get left out) promising to end the violence if they published it. With encouragement from the government, who thought publishing the document could help crack the case, the Post did so. Kaczynski’s brother David and his wife Linda recognised Ted’s writing and alerted the FBI, who arrested him at his cabin in April 1996. Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus. He spent 25 years in ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Colorado known for housing high-profile or particularly dangerous inmates, before being moved to a medical facility late last year.

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There’s a strange thrill to the story. How many of us believe so deeply in our philosophical principles that we would give up all our modern comforts? American culture is strongly influenced by the myth of the frontier loner, fiercely independent and living on his own terms. We fear this type, but we also respect him. What makes Kaczynski unique is that he had it both ways, finding freedom in seclusion while also fulfilling that other very American compulsion: to be noticed. Unlike other wilderness hermits such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Kaczynski influenced society even more by dropping out of it than he would have otherwise. McCandless’ Kerouackian journey ended grimly in a broken down bus in the Alaskan woods where he died of malnutrition. Kaczynski made himself world-famous and forced the public to reckon with his ideas. He hasn’t even seemed to mind prison, from where he has exchanged letters with supporters and even fallen in love with a female pen pal. He’s continued to influence politics; a 2018 story in New York Magazine described his dealings with a faction of radical environmentalists.

That view — of the Unabomber as a John Brown-esque maverick driven by a higher ideal — is one way to look at it. Another way is to consider Kaczynski as a deeply lonely man driven to violence as much by personal grievance as by principle. He was unable to form relationships with women, an incel in other words. Kaczynski’s bonds with his family were strained and he eventually cut his parents out of his life entirely, blaming them for pushing him to attend Harvard before he was mature enough to handle it. His brother David’s 2015 memoir is an often gut-wrenching read.

It’s hard not to feel for young Ted, so unprepared and unformed. “His confidence in his intellect was not matched by any visceral confidence in his worth as a person, and over time the divide would only grow larger,” David writes, describing Ted on his way off to Harvard. “His self-confidence became infected with doubt, recoiled, and then redoubled toward arrogance and grandiosity.” It’s poignant to read, in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation Kaczynski underwent in 1998, that as late as age 45 he still held out hope of meeting a partner and even contacted a local psychologist in Montana to help him learn to build a relationship. Apparently the bombing campaign wasn’t enough to fill a deep emotional vacuum.

Knowing this history gives a new dimension to the Ted trend. In valorising him, fans get to feel edgy and subversive for portraying him as a freedom fighter. But they can also relate to the bitter, friendless individual Kaczynski really was. Some are aware of this. “Ted Kaczynski AKA The Unabomber was one of our brethren,” wrote poster “Redpill Robert” on a large incel forum in 2020.

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It’s difficult to empathise with Kaczynski as a person, even if one were willing to set aside his murders to do so. David Kaczynski writes of Ted’s cruelty towards their parents, of hateful letters written over a period of years as he minimised contact. He didn’t attend his father’s funeral after the elder Kaczynski killed himself. Wanda Kaczynski coped by concluding that Ted had been warped by trauma stemming from a hospitalisation as an infant. Ted refused to reconcile with her even as she lay on her deathbed. His resentment towards his parents is an obvious subtext to his manifesto, in sections where he deplores modern child-rearing and schooling. “It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study,” Kaczynski complains.

Even in his journals, Kaczynski acknowledged the personal nature of his plans. “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge,” he wrote in 1971. “ I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.” He considered the possibility that his crimes would “stimulate public interest in the technology question”, but equally mused that they would “repel” most people and cause a backlash. In the end, of course, they did both. Kaczynski came across as morally repugnant and arrogant, but he succeeded in forcing his ideas into the mainstream.

There’s a mini-Ted inside all of us. Fumbling at an automated self-checkout kiosk while a computerised voice chirps at you; clicking impotently to make a YouTube ad go away; receiving an email about one’s information being compromised in a widespread data breach; being served a targeted Instagram ad moments after googling something related: we all know the kind of helpless rage these moments inspire. For members of the younger generations, whose development and social lives have been shaped to a degree unprecedented in human history by technology, Kaczynski represents a lost alternative. Most of them will never commit a violent act; Tedposting will have to do for now.

More and more, it’s becoming conventional wisdom that our constant exposure to screens and digital stimuli is bad. Efforts to do something about it crop here and there: some Silicon Valley parents forbid their children from using the very same devices that industry sells to others, and the Chinese government announced last year that it would limit children to three hours of online gaming per week. Among adults, phone addiction is so commonplace that people have begun to lock their phones in boxes to get even a small respite from them — the necessity of this an example of the kind of technological servitude Kaczynski feared. There’s an increasing sense of having lost touch with nature, a sense of the world and its societies being diseased. The Unabomber nostalgia wave is a symptom.

Goldsmith founded The Ecologist in the early Seventies to challenge the myth of Progress, which was then at its bombastic and all-conquering peak. It was the age of big dams and DDT and space programmes, and Teddy was having none of it. Inspired by his studies and experience of indigenous communities, he was contemptuous of the “development” pushed by Western governments, NGOs and transnational corporations, which to his mind was colonisation disguised as charity. He believed that modernity was destroying both culture and nature, and that we should return to the models of the past, an argument which he laid out most convincingly in his magnum opus, The Way.

But Teddy was not an easy man to work with. He was chaotic and disorganised, he delighted in controversy, and he had what I regarded back then, in my youthful arrogance, as a ridiculous resistance to actually making himself understood. He would never use a simple word when he could invent a more complicated one, and if you ever dared to use the word “accessible” in his presence, he would go red in the face under his whitening beard.

These days, under my own whitening beard, I find that I’m almost entirely on his side, but back then I thought that greater accessibility was precisely what his work, and that of the wider green movement, desperately needed. This was before anyone in the media had heard of climate change or “sustainability”. Greta Thunberg was only a glint in her father’s eye. But I wanted to save the whole world all by myself, and I knew that the first step towards doing that was to tell the whole world precisely what was wrong with it, in easy language and with big pictures attached.

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So when Teddy told me one day, with some relish, that he was writing a book called Against Progress, I found myself spitting nails. What was the silly old sod doing that for? Did he want to alienate everybody? Didn’t he realise that this was the equivalent of insulting somebody’s religion in public? Why couldn’t he at least try to reach the mainstream with his important arguments? People needed to hear them urgently, so that we could change course! Couldn’t he at least, if only in the cause of saving the planet, try to be more… accessible?

Teddy never wrote that book, but I’ve purloined the title and used it here in his honour, and in acknowledgement of my wrongness. In the quarter of a century since then, the green argument has been made so “accessible” that it has been entirely absorbed and redirected by the system it set out to challenge, something that Teddy could probably see coming even if I couldn’t. Now, in the age of vat-grown eco-food, industrialised hilltops, killer robots and emerging machine intelligence, it’s become as clear as day that Teddy was right. Standing Against Progress is no fringe luxury, or eccentric tic: it is a first principle for anyone who is paying attention.

The work of what we have come to call Progress is the work of homogenising the world. I capitalise the word because Progress is an ideology — even a metaphysics — and if we want to understand it we need to grasp its foundational assumptions. We are trained from birth to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale. Our bodies, our nations, our forests, our heritage: Progress will not stop until everything is measured, commercialised, commodified, altered at the genetic level, put up for sale, forced into “equitable” relationships with everything else, or otherwise flattened and sold.

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The religion of Progress is leading us into the flames, as Teddy saw so many decades back. Those of us who feel this way need to have the confidence to say to: to denounce the religion of the age, to dissect it, to make claims against it. Those of us who seek to resist the emerging Total System, or simply to give it the slip, need an alternative worldview: something to stand for, and stand upon. Not an ideology, mind, and certainly not a blueprint for utopia. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. No, what we need is something more old-fashioned: a stance. Even a politics. But what should it look like?

In a way, it seems like a superfluous question. After all, modernity has been the age of revolutions, and we have ideologies coming out of our ears. The last century has been an inferno of competing ideals on Left and Right and elsewhere, all offering a better world. But none of them, in my opinion, has challenged what Mary Harrington has usefully called “Progress Theology” at its root. They have just taken different paths towards it.

Various strands of socialism and communism, for example, have been pursued for nearly two centuries in the cause of abolishing or taming the monster of global capitalism. Some were beneficent, some were tyrannical, but none challenged the core values of Progress: all were centralised, statist, in love with technology’s promise and had their own idealist, rationalised notions of how humanity should remake Eden. Anarchism has lurked perpetually on the sidelines, but it’s barely been able to organise a meeting, let alone a revolution. The greens have been absorbed by the technosphere. Meanwhile fascism, National Socialism and their various cousins on the hard Right are infested with power-worship, a love of straight lines and marching columns, and an explicit call to impose the will of the strong on the unwilling bodies of the weak.

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Perhaps conservatism, then, could fit the bill? In theory, at least, it is the tradition which comes closest to offering a politics rooted in human reality. It promotes the value of tradition, centres home and family, values religious faith and refuses both the centralised state and abstract ideals of utopian justice. It embraces a society based on a notion of virtue, which itself is drawn from the cosmic realm.

But conservatism has failed as well. This is partly because it was always only, in Roger Scruton’s words, “a hesitation within liberalism”. Conservatism is a modern confection, a product of the post-1789 shift in Western consciousness (the “ism” is the giveaway). It evolved to slow the revolution, rather than turn it around — for how could it be turned around? Conservatism’s failure, in that sense, was baked in from the start, and by now, across most of the modern world, there is simply nothing left to conserve.

This in turn is partly due to conservatism’s other flaw: its love affair with private property and the sovereign individual. Both of these things can be necessary bulwarks against the top-down collectivism of the Left, but taken to extremes they lead to a top-down collectivism of another kind: oligarchic capitalism. That “conservatives” have been the foremost defenders of this monstrosity, as it strips the world of all the things which they claim to hold dear, is the greatest hole beneath their waterline. It is the reason why the political factions which bear the name are now little more than business cabals, throwing out anti-woke red meat to the proles here and there to disguise the fact that all they really want to conserve is their money.

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Yet if we look back further in history, there is a political descriptor that might, just might, apply to what I have been trying to write about here; something that we could perhaps pin to our lapels as we resist Progress Theology. I came across it in an obscure, 40-year-old history book, and a lightbulb went off somewhere in my skull. This, I thought, despite my instinctive loathing of labels and categories, might just be one that I could see myself claiming. Allow me to introduce you to the reactionary radicals.

Craig Calhoun’s drily-titled book, The Origins of Class Struggle, was published in 1982, and despite the title it is not a Marxist tome. In fact, it was written specifically to take aim at the popularity of Marx-inflected history, of the kind exemplified in E. P. Thompson’s famous work The Making of the English Working Class. Calhoun was politely critical of Thompson for imposing an anachronistic Marxist framework on the historical “struggles” of workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and particularly for labelling as “working class” people who did not fit into that category. For Calhoun, Marx’s binary portrait of a “proletariat” set against a “bourgeoisie” may have had some utility when studying the factory system of the late nineteenth century, but it didn’t apply to those artisans, farmers, small businessmen and families who resisted the rise of that system in the first place.

Those people — most famously the machine-breaking Luddites — were in Calhoun’s telling more radical than the later “proletariat” would turn out to be (despite Marx’s urging). While the industrial working class were fighting for their rights within the established factory system, the earlier rebels were striving to prevent that system’s arrival. Calhoun had a name for these people: “reactionary radicals”.

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In my work over the years, I have told the stories of some of their contemporary equivalents: Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, Mexico’s Zapatistas, West Papua’s tribal freedom movement, England’s anti-privatisation campaigners. But it was only when I read Calhoun’s book that I realised what I had been doing: tracing the thread of reactionary radicalism as it continued to resist the spread of Progress around the world. Calhoun’s framing explained my own work — and my own politics — to me in two simple words, and at the same time gave me an explanation as to why that work had sometimes been mischaracterised or misunderstood. Reactionary radicalism does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm. It is a politics from an older world.

Calhoun’s book is the story of the doomed resistance of the pre-industrial people of England to the destruction of their economies and associated ways of life. Accustomed as we are now to “work” and “home” and “consumption” and “production”, it can be hard for us to understand that for most people in pre-modern times, these amounted to the same thing. For an artisan weaver in early modern England, for example, home was where the family lived and worked, where children were born and reared and trained, where trade was carried out, where food was grown and eaten. Today all of this has been broken apart into small segments — turning the home into a dormitory, its adult inhabitants into both “workers” and “consumers” elsewhere, its children into pupils at a distant school, its parlour into a show-room for TV, tablet and gaming console, its kitchen into a store-room for shop-bought, processed “food”. What brought this about? The industrial revolution and the rise of the factory system. In a word: capitalism.

But those who resisted this process, emphasises Calhoun, did not do so for the kind of ideologically-driven reasons that a class-conscious Marxist might. What the reactionary radicals were defending above all, says Calhoun, was the “moral economy” — the polar opposite of the “free market” that was being built on the bones of old England. The free market commodified everything, from products to people, and sought to make that commodification global. The booming British empire was a scaling-up of what was already happening in England. Empire, in this sense, was never a story of “the British” imposing their ways onto “the colonies”. It was a story of factory lords, big landowners and a newly-empowered capitalist class destroying the moral economies of communities from Lancashire to the Punjab, and forcing all of their peoples into the new capitalist “workplace” — where most of us remain to this day.

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Reactionary radicalism, then as now, is a defence of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics. The attack on that system may come via gunboats or trade agreements, redcoats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or digital currencies, but it will always suck wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders, just as it will suck the power away from local people and funnel it to national or international bodies. It will always replace people with technology, and it will always make consumers of us all.

The way that reactionary radicals, in the early years of the industrial revolution, attempted to defend the moral economy was not with the thoughtless thuggery that the propaganda of the victors would later suggest, but by a reasoned series of demands. The Luddites, for example, opposed new machinery in a way that was “thoughtful, not absolute”. They also, Calhoun, points out, “campaigned for the right of craft control over trade, the right to a decent livelihood, for local autonomy… Machinery was at issue because it specifically interfered with these values.” Technology, thought the Luddites, should be applied in a way which reinforced the moral economy rather than destroyed it.

Is it possible to cleave to a reactionary radicalism today? Or is it too late? For the reality is that the reactionary radicals of pre-industrial England comprehensively lost. The moral economy was destroyed, and we live in its commercialised ruins. Not only did they lose, but the ideologies of the modern age, both Right and Left, have an interest in burying their memories. The Marx-inflected Left wants no truck with workers who resisted capitalism in order to defend traditional ways of life, because those traditional ways stink of “reaction” and what Marx himself called “the idiocy of rural life”. Meanwhile, because modern conservatism has attached itself limpet-like to capitalism, its advocates today can often be found defending the very matrix of global trade, empire and unaccountable corporate power that laid waste to the last remaining “conservative” cultures in England.

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As ever, the modern ideologies fail us. And yet, reactionary radicalism is still to be found, if we look in the right places. It is especially prevalent outside the West, in places where traditional moral economies are still at least partially intact. Every time you hear of a village in China or India resisting a giant dam, or tribal people fighting eviction from their ancestral lands, or communities resisting vast mines, you are hearing from reactionary radicals.

But what of those of us in the “developed” world, where Progress has triumphed? Well, if the moral economy has been destroyed where we live, we are just going to have to start rebuilding it. I spent years of my life investigating experiments in doing so; my ageing but perhaps-still-useful book Real England contains plenty of examples. Perhaps we live in the place our ancestors lived, or perhaps we moved to our place from another last month: either way, we are part of the place’s life now. We can help turn it into a moral economy — a foundation from which to resist the values of Progress — or we can capitulate to those values. We start small: everything starts small, and the best things remain that way. All we have is our limited power; still, it has its own impact.

Reactionary radicalism operates at the human scale, and not at the scale on which ideology operates. Ideology is the enemy of particularity, which is why every modern revolution has ended up turning on its own people. From the mass murder of peasants in the Vendee by French revolutionaries to the Bolshevik slaughter of workers in Kronstadt, ideology is always the enemy of genuine, rooted communities. Real culture — human-scale culture — is messy. It cannot be labelled. The moral economy rarely makes rational sense. But it makes human sense. And that is what matters.

The Embrace, a new statue unveiled in Boston to honour Martin Luther King, brought exactly this to mind.

The 20-foot bronze is intended to depict the moment King learned he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s inspired by a photograph of him embracing his wife, Coretta Scott King. But it doesn’t depict the pair enjoying a hug. It’s just the arms, joined by immense, amorphous, organic-looking tubes that evoke tentacles, raw sausage, or perhaps a length of colon. Even, as many suggested (including one of Coretta Scott King’s descendants), a giant penis.

Nor was the derision solely from conservative quarters, for all that it was louder there. Even Karen Attiah of the Washington Post fretted at these two important figures in the civil rights movement “reduced to body parts”, denouncing it as a “dismembered” and “de-racialised” symbol of anodyne “love”, shorn of King’s true radicalism. But this is, in fact, precisely the point. The Embrace captures a peculiar dilemma of the emerging post-human political order. How do you wield the power of public art as a way of signalling shared meanings, when your claim to rightful rule is based on the idea that all shared meaning is by definition oppressive?

It has always been the prerogative of ruling elites to determine the nature, placement and aesthetic of public monuments. From ancient Rome to the British Empire, or indeed the Soviet Union and beyond, one may infer a great deal about ruling moral and political priors from what gets a big statue. In 2020, for example, the president of Turkmenistan unveiled a surreal 19ft gilded statue of an Asian shepherd dog, symbolising the country’s heritage. Other monumental works of the last half-century or so may be religious, such as Japan’s 120m Ushiku Daibutsu Buddha statue, completed in 1993. Or, often, they are nationalistic, such as Russia’s 85m The Motherland Calls, completed in 1967, or the 182m statue of Vallabhbhai Patel unveiled in 2018 in Gujarat, as a symbol of Indian unity and independence.

And as one power falls and another rises, so too the older monuments will be at risk: images of Saddam’s giant statue toppling in 2003 are an iconic part of the Iraq war, while (on a smaller scale) the fall of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour was a similarly iconic moment in the modern statue wars.

And even if fallen statues are preserved, it matters a great deal where. A giant gilded dog on an important thoroughfare in Ashgabat is infinitely more honoured than the likenesses of Stalin that now dot Grūtas Park in Lithuania, informally known as Stalin World. Here, tourists may view a huge collection of toppled Soviet-era monuments, the lack of reverence in their placement underlined by juxtaposition with a children’s playground and mini-zoo.

But what the statue defenders perhaps don’t realise is that we all already live in Grūtas Park: a semi-ironic display of relics from a civilisation and political order that died in the 20th century. For it is not a coincidence that every instance of large, figurative monumental art of the kind described above is located in a non-Western country. In Western Europe, that style was largely abandoned after 1945: too many blamed the high culture of the 19^th century, including its Christian faith, for the horrors that killed millions. In response, tastemakers turned away from figurative works – and as for heroic idealisations of the human form, forget it: just a bit too Nazi.

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Instead, postwar art mavens embraced abstraction, clean lines and planes, exemplified by the “modern, forward-looking and contemporary” Festival of Britain. Sculptors such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth reflect that commitment to a world stripped bare of anything too heroic, figurative, or ideological: one that had shed its dangerous fixation with the past, and pointed only toward a clean, innovative, universalist tomorrow. Public art was best when it didn’t really say anything. Traces of the older order, meanwhile, were for the most part politely ignored, or (increasingly) treated as relics.

But that intermezzo is over. As the End of History has come to an end, public art has once again become a site of explicit moral statement: not spaces filled with abstractions where no one mentions the war, but increasingly the battlefield itself. Gone are the carefully neutral, antiseptic abstracts. Now, public art must have a message.

But what should it say? The old order knew what it drew on: broadly speaking, in the contest over what we memorialise, one side stands for the long, messy history of the West – including the Christian humanist vision of human nature and dignity, and the common good, that Martin Luther King, a preacher, drew upon for his civil rights activism. But as far as the West’s cultural elites are concerned, that order died and was buried by 1945, along with that vision of what humans are, and the idea of nations as such.

And yet what’s replacing it is also, in a sense, dead. The old regime is denounced for being inadequately concerned with the suffering of victims – such as in Afua Hirsch’s call for Nelson’s Column to be pulled down, on the grounds that Nelson “was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist”. But when the time comes to fill those plinths with positive representations of its own sacred values, a new regime whose only sacred value is individual autonomy finds that representation runs the risk of excluding someone.

So any sculptor tempted to make something beautiful is on shaky ground. As the Nazis knew all too well, an idealised human form implies a hierarchy of values. This is dangerously exclusionary. Thus, inasmuch as heroic figurative works are still permitted, these are almost always what the sociologist Philip Rieff called “deathworks”: anti-monuments whose aim is principally not to uphold but negate sacred values. The prewar figurative register for public art still exists – but only in subjects that invert or negate a trope from the old order: Medusa holding the severed head of Perseus, for example, or a dreadlocked man in a hoodie astride a prancing horse.

In other words: it’s not that we no longer have skilled artists making beautiful, proportionate, figurative work. It’s just that, the class with its hands on the purse-strings doesn’t care. For what this class seeks to represent — the class that dominates media, NGOs, universities and the like — is its own form of power: one which I have elsewhere called swarmism.

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Swarmism is power without a head, which is to say without accountability. It operates instead via “overlapping partnerships and networks”, as the foundation which funded The Embrace describes itself. And it is power without a heart: in place of fallible, capricious human feeling, including human mercy or relationships, it offers bureaucratic compassion via algorithmic taxonomies of “intersecting” victimhood.

For the swarmist vision of human flourishing has no shared meanings. Instead, all we really have in common is individual freedom, our technologies, and our physical bodies. And if this is true, and if it is also true that all hierarchies of values are exclusionary, there is nothing to aspire to beyond this life. There is nothing admirable about humans. The best we can aspire to is probably to re-engineer ourselves into something superior.

This bleak vision, combined with the most vigorous possible negation of Christian humanism, overlaid with anxious posturing about “marginalised groups”, forms the backbone of the swarmist aesthetic — and nothing could be more swarmist than the unaccountable committees who now commission public art. The Embrace, for example, was commissioned by a nonprofit (one swarm) with support from a foundation (another swarm). It is indeed fitting that Martin Luther King, a man fired by a Christian belief in universal human dignity, should have his legacy reworked for the headless, heartless, swarmist order, by representing his moment of triumph in an embrace without either a head, or a heart.

After close to a century of careful, antiseptic abstraction, then, the swarmist monumental style has arrived. It memorialises its moral taxonomies in deliberately beautiful deathworks, and deliberately ugly, posthuman artworks. In sculptural form, it produces something akin to a deification of nihilism, that alternates between feasting on the carcass of the previous regime and creating swarm-approved monuments to a posthuman future. It is a queasy mix of genuflection to any visual tradition save the Western one, combined with a Cylon-laboratory celebration of distorted, protean flesh.

We get the high culture we deserve. Our journey to this point didn’t begin with the two world wars, but rather completed its trajectory there. Now, after a mid-century intermezzo of abstraction, we appear to have accepted that the Christian age is over, as too is industrial one, and our period of mourning for its demise. And as the WEF’s grandees meet in Davos to discuss how best to embrace the Fourth Industrial Revolution that will transform us into cyborgs, the culture swarm has settled on a style of monumental art to suit. Welcome to the flesh factories.

But there’s a school of thought that its authors were doomed from the start. If you believe that geography is destiny then the North-South divide can’t be fixed. At best, the government can redistribute resources as a kind of consolation prize. Or, as Victoria Wood’s snooty continuity announcer once put it: “We’d like to apologise to our viewers in the North — it must be awful for them.” 

Except that the lesson of history is that geography is not destiny. Time and again, we see examples in which the relative fortunes of different regions draw level, or even reverse altogether. Take Belgium, whose Northern and Southern halves are distinguished by language as well as location. 

For many years, Flemish-speaking Flanders was poorer and less powerful than French-speaking Wallonia. Following Great Britain, Belgium was the second country in the world to industrialise — but because the coal deposits were concentrated in Wallonia, it was a lopsided revolution. The Walloons weren’t just part of a larger linguistic zone — they dominated the economy too. 

All that changed with de-industrialisation. For the Flemings, the cultural and political dominance of the French-speakers was always hard to swallow — but once the latter began demanding subsidies, it became unbearable. Today, Belgium is a rare example of a country in which the ethnic majority has separatist tendencies. 

But perhaps the industrial revolution was a unique moment in history that gave early adopters a one-off boost which then faded away. Certainly we see shifts in the geographical distribution of power and wealth that are too big and began too early to be explained by coal deposits or anything like that. Look at the whole of Europe. In classical times, the Mediterranean was where it was at. Ancient Greece, followed by Ancient Rome, were the dominant powers. To the north lay the abode of barbarians — to be civilised at the point of a sword or walled-off behind fortifications.

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And yet long before the industrial revolution, the balance between the Europe of wine and olive oil and the Europe of beer and butter began to swing the other way. There was an intermediate period in which the south held its own — for instance, the Renaissance had an Italian origin and Spain and Portugal pioneered the Age of Exploration. But by the time of the Enlightenment, it was clear that the future of Europe — indeed the whole world — would be shaped in northern cities like London, Paris, Berlin and Moscow

Of course, I’m describing a mega-trend that unfolded over centuries and millennia. A conscious policy of levelling-up needs to show progress over a much shorter time frame — decades at most. So do we have any examples of that happening?  

Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, looks to the Republic of Florence for inspiration. Under the rule of the Medici family, the city-state became the birthplace of the Renaissance. As Gove himself makes clear, there’s a wider range of reasons for its success than the Medicis’ famously lavish patronage of high culture. Nevertheless, a key part of his levelling-up strategy is to redistribute arts funding from London to the rest of the country. 

For a more recent — and more significant — example we need to look east. When the Iron Curtain fell, it revealed a profoundly unequal continent. The ex-Communist countries are still much poorer than the countries of Western Europe, but the extent to which they’ve levelled-up has been impressive. Indeed, in recent years we’ve seen the richest parts of countries like Poland and Hungary overtaking the poorest parts of the UK — much to the horror of British tabloids. 

But from a British perspective, the most relevant ex-communist state is the former East Germany. That’s because since reunification, the story is one of levelling-up within the same country. 

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It’s not been a total success. After three decades of living together, the East is yet to catch-up with the West. But, again, there’s no denying the progress made. Immediately following reunification, economic output per head in the former East Germany was only 60% of that in the former West Germany. It’s now more like 85%.

This has produced a sobering outcome for the British. The fact is that, today, most of East Germany is as rich or richer than most of northern England. Data analyst Tom Forth illustrates this by comparing the English region of Yorkshire and Humberside with the German state of Saxony. At first sight this might not appear to be a fair contest. Saxony had a pretty rough 20th century: in the post-war period it passed from Nazi to Communist rule — until, that is, the Berlin Wall fell and East German industry collapsed.

And yet since 1990, Saxony hasn’t just caught up with the Yorkshire region, it has overtaken it. The crossover point was around 2010. By 2017, GDP per head was €28,000 in Saxony compared to less than €25,000 in Yorkshire.

So what can we learn from the German example? Well, there’s one thing that stands out — but, for a Conservative government, it’s rather awkward: the Germans spent a whole heap of money. According to Kathrin Enenkel of the Centre for Cities, the total sum between 1990 and 2014 averages out at £71 billion a year. She puts the UK’s levelling-up fund at £4.8 billion in total.

Of course, the German challenge was much bigger. After 45 years of democracy versus communism, there was a lot to be levelled-up between the two Germanies. But even if we focus on the policy areas that are relevant to the British situation, it’s obvious that we’ve been out-spent. To return to the Yorkshire example, Forth puts the level of government funding for R&D at €150 per head per year. The figure for Saxony? €450.

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It’s encouraging that today’s white paper includes a promise to increase R&D funding for the rest of the country beyond London and the South East. But by how much does it intend to boost the total? Just one third. The Yorkshire-Saxony comparison would suggest that’s simply not enough. 

Transport is another area in which south-eastern England gets the lion’s share of public funds. So how much levelling-up can we expect from the Government here? Again, not much. In recent months we’ve seen funding for the “Bus Back Better” initiative slashed; the Northern Powerhouse Rail project has been downgraded; and the eastern branch of HS2, which would have run to Leeds and Sheffield, has been chopped. Meanwhile in Saxony, the city of Leipzig has been part of the German high-speed rail network for years. 

The problem with the white paper, then, is what’s not in it: ambition and a sense of urgency. Levelling-up the land is not an impossible dream. The lesson of history is that economic miracles do happen — but only if you put in the investment. 

Another satirist, every bit as biting, took the opposite view. Jonathan Meades loves Birmingham, its “aptitude for substance over cosmetic style”, its “self-deprecating, unboastful, and peculiarly ironic humour”, and, most of all, its accent: English as it was before the great vowel shift. It is the closest thing we have to Shakespeare’s English; the Bard knew the northern reaches of the Forest of Arden on which Birmingham was sited. Meades asks you to declaim Polonius’s  “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” in Brummie. It makes perfect sense. An all-Brummie Hamlet would be quite the show.

Birmingham not only attracts satirists, it creates them. Christopher Spencer, aka ‘Cold War Steve’, has become the cold-eyed visual chronicler of Brexit Britain and its post-pandemic wasteland. His bleak, biting collages of two-bit celebrities, floundering mendacious politicians, and Harold Shipman, mark him out as the heir to Hogarth, to Rowlandson, to Gillray. He has tapped into the radical, non-conformist tradition of Birmingham.

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Birmingham did not become a city until 1889, when it was already the dynamo of late Victorian Britain. It was a mere municipal borough when it became the “best run city in the world” under its charismatic mayor, Joseph Chamberlain — a self-made dandy, whose fortune derived from screws; a political liberal with a loathing for the aristocracy. In that, he was true Brummie.

Birmingham’s identity was forged, literally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the centre of a trading and manufacturing network built on iron and coal from its hinterland — what would become known as the Black Country. It was strongly Protestant: a Brummie, John Rogers, compiled the first authorised edition of the Bible in English and was martyred for his sins in 1555 during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary. It became an arsenal for the Parliamentary forces during the Civil Wars, attacked by the Royalist Prince Rupert in 1643 — an event satirised in the tract Prince Rupert’s burning love for England, discovered in Birmingham’s flames.

When Charles II was restored, Nonconformism came under fire. But the Act of Uniformity of 1662 — and the Five Mile Act that followed, banning dissenting ministers from within five miles of a borough — didn’t affect Birmingham, a thriving metropole but an unincorporated one. In fact, the repression worked in its favour, as it became a haven of dissent, nonconformist in every sense, welcoming those who were different. And then it changed the world.

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If we can point to the Ur-moment of the Industrial Revolution, it is surely 1709, in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, where the Brummie Abraham Darby constructed the world’s first blast furnace using coke — abundant in the Black Country — to make cast iron. The nearby town of Ironbridge made his achievement tangible.

The Industrial Revolution in Birmingham and the Black Country was different to that in the North of England. There, it was about textile manufacturer on a grand scale, chewing and spitting out a low-paid, low-skilled workforce. In Birmingham and the Black Country, it was built on highly-skilled, highly-paid specialisms, incremental and adaptable. In the 100 years after 1750, Birmingham registered three times the patents of any other British settlement. Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, of which his Soho House residency remains in the city’s North-West, is where he teamed up with Scotsman James Watt to produce an improved steam engine, central to British manufacturing prowess at the time. No more would mankind be limited to the energies of hand, of water, of beast.

Culture accompanied this revolution. Birmingham became a focus for the British Enlightenment, centred on the Lunar Society. Ignoring the barriers between art and science, it often met in Boulton’s Soho House. Among its luminaries were Watt, Erasmus Darwin (who was an influential poet as well as an empirical scientist), Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Day (who wrote the anti-slavery tract, The Dying Negro in 1773.)

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Political radicalism peaked in Birmingham during the febrile Days of May, just before the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832; the nation had been radicalised by Thomas Attwood’s Birmingham Political Union. Its vast political assemblies on Newhall Hill were the largest the nation had seen. Lord Durham, who drafted the Reform Act, noted that “the country owed Reform to Birmingham, and its salvation from revolution”. You’ll have heard of Peterloo, because it happened in Manchester, where people shout loud. But the real action was elsewhere.

And it didn’t end there. The Second Reform Act of 1867, which brought some of the male working class into the democratic fold for the first time, was led by MP for Birmingham, John Bright. The street named after him once housed the Futurist cinema, a haven, like the old Arts Lab in Aston, for those seeking European cinema during the 1980s.

By then, Birmingham was suffering. It had been bombed heavily, and inevitably,  during the war — but remained prosperous, maintaining its position as the nation’s manufacturing hub. Until the 1970s, the average wage in Birmingham and its environs surpassed that of the City of London. Preposterously, there were those associated with the Heath government during the early 1970s who thought the region should be levelled down, that it was overheating, that too many people wanted to live there, to the neglect of other cities. They didn’t have to wait long. The assault on manufacturing that began in the early 1980s hit Brum hard. Unemployment, which was 7% in 1979, rose to 20% just three years later. But it is a quietly resilient city.

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Sometimes one wishes that it blew its own trumpet a little more, but bragging is not in Brum’s nature. So I’ll do it. Its great orchestra, the CBSO, is one of Europe’s finest — brilliant at discovering world-class conductors: Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo, Andris Nelsons, and now the mercurial Lithuanian Mirga Grazynyté-Tyla, whose repertoire is bold and original. She gets Brum and Brum gets her.

Graham Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company is simply the nation’s (and one of Europe’s) finest — a model of innovation, which mirrors the city in its diversity and its radicalism. It has engaged thousands in performances of the highest quality, making use of the city’s industrial spaces and architecture.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has prospered, too, with the arrival, to join its Pre-Raphaelites, of the Staffordshire Hoard. This has been a reminder of the region’s deeper past, rooted in Mercia and the magic of settlements with names such as Wednesfield (‘Woden’s Field), Willenhall, Wolverhampton and, perhaps the greatest Anglo-Saxon name of all of them, Bloxwich, birthplace of Noddy Holder.

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But let’s return to the present, and Cold War Steve. Not all his visions of modern Britain are bleak. He has created one wonderful exception. It’s called Benny’s Babbies, named in honour of the dim-witted character in the little-lamented Birmingham-based soap opera Crossroads, who became the very woollen-hatted embodiment of the Brummie ‘daft’apporth’ in the city’s darker days. But Cold War Steve’s image is pure joy: a collage of the people and places that are Birmingham, crowned by Black Sabbath atop the Rotunda, and the statue of King Kong that became something of a cause célèbre in the 1970s.

Jumbled in this image are the mediocre and the magical, the surreal and stable, and what you realise is the sheer diversity of Brum’s people. The latter is still the city’s greatest strength; it has come a long way from the division of the 1970s, when the population was fired up by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech, made in the Midland Hotel in 1968, and stoked by the IRA Pub Bombings of 1974. Birmingham has passed through that fire, thank God, and feels at ease in its diversity. It doesn’t bang on about it, it just is.

Much has been made of late of Britain’s supposed ‘world-beating’ capacities — in trade deals, in vaccines, its test and trace capacity — most of them chimerical. Birmingham — self-deprecatory, modest but assured — represents a blueprint for a better Britain, at ease with itself, less concerned about being number one, just content to be itself.

Yet even with these variations, the overall story is plain. Average living standards (in terms of food consumption, ownership of goods, and life expectancy) improved very slowly, if at all, over the millennia; any fluctuation around that relatively low level was due to climate, disease, population growth and political conditions.

A historic change came only with the Industrial Revolution, the shift from an “organic” to a “mineral” economy — from one reliant on muscle, wind and water to one using the power of coal and later oil — that raised global living standards at a previously unimaginable rate, with the good and bad consequences that we know.

Pioneering this change was early Victorian or “Dickensian” England, and so one might think that we would remember it as a time of epoch-making success: instead I don’t think it is controversial to say that we generally think of it as a time of grim suffering and oppression.

Historians have long been aware of a paradox: that while productivity rose over the crucial period of the Industrial Revolution, living standards did not. Working hours greatly increased. Women and children worked more intensively. Yet real wages barely shifted — by only 4% between 1760 and 1820. Food prices rose and diet deteriorated. Health and hygiene in industrial cities worsened. Infant mortality was high, and life expectancy low, and both actually deteriorated. In 1841, average life expectancy at birth was 41.7 years — comparable with much of Africa in the 2000s.

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People’s physical condition as measured by their heights fell to one of its lowest ever levels, and showed marked difference between classes – over 5 inches difference between rich and poor boys in 1790. It would seem that industrialization amounted to stunted and damaged lives for generations of ordinary people.

This could of course be explained by assuming that the new industrial working class was simply exploited and downtrodden by a combination of a ruthless landowning ruling class and a hard-faced capitalism. Traditional rights had been lost, and with them status and culture: craftsmen ruined by mechanization, cottagers deprived of their access to common land. The new towns were vast slums, where small wage increases were offset by disease, overcrowding and unstable employment.

This grim image was perpetuated over the generations. Blake bequeathed a memorable if inscrutable phrase: “dark satanic mills”. Tory democrats, most famously Disraeli in Sybil: or the Two Nations (1845), were not far behind: in his lawless and savage fictional town of Wodgate, “swarming thousands lodged in the most miserable tenements in the most hideous burgh in the ugliest country in the world”. Dickens himself left perhaps the most memorable vignettes, such as Coketown in Hard Times (1854).

Friedrich Engels wrote in the 1840s a harrowing account of The Condition of the English Working Classes, published in English only in the 1890s, when it had a powerful impact on early socialist historians such as Barbara and Lawrence Hammond, who popularized a dark vision of what they called “The Bleak Era” in which the poor were trapped in “smoke and squalor” by means of a “class war” fought against them by the rich. In the 1960s, E.P. Thompson, in perhaps the most influential single work of English history of modern times, similarly dramatized the tragedy of “the English working class”.

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Is this, then, the truth about “Dickensian poverty”? Is our grim collective memory simply a reflection of reality?

There are some fundamental retouches that need to be made to the picture. The population of Europe was rising at an unprecedented rate, and that of England rose fastest of all, from 8.6 million in 1801 to 17 million in 1851 — an increase of 98%, with the highest ever recorded growth in 1811-21 (16% in a decade). Around 40% of this population was under 15, comparable with much of Africa today. The total urban population, already the highest in Europe, increased three-fold.

London more than doubled, making it by far Europe’s biggest conurbation. In the 1820s alone, Manchester grew by 47%, West Bromwich by 60%, and Bradford by 78%. In any previous age, this would have led to a catastrophic fall in living standards. But in Dickens’s time it did not, even by comparison with poorer parts of the world in our era: GDP per head in Britain in 1840 was 50% higher than in Africa in the early 2000s.

A growth in productivity and new industrial employment prevented disaster: if living standards hardly improved, they did not collapse. English wages, already very high by world standards, remained so. In most of continental Europe, where living standards did indeed deteriorate as the population boomed, real wages dropped to half or a third of those in England. The visiting French liberal Alexis de Tocqueville thought that “the English poor appear almost rich compared to the French poor”.

But what about living conditions? Were they not appalling? Given the explosive growth of the towns and cities, some were. But Engels’s famous denunciation of the filth of Manchester, which he described as the “degradation” of a new industrial proletariat, was in fact something quite different: the overcrowded slums of pre-industrial Manchester failing to cope with an influx of Irish refugees.

What Engels was really describing was what poverty would be without an industrial revolution, with Irish refugees living in conditions more like rural poverty. Of course, his aim was political, as was that of the Hammonds, who blamed the ruling class for the sufferings of the poor: “the disinherited peasants that are the shadow of its wealth … the exiled labourers that are the shadow of its pleasures … the villages sinking in poverty and crime and shame that are the shadow of its power and pride.” Thompson’s sympathies were similar.

So to a degree were those of Dickens. But again, if we take a comparative view, it is hard not to conclude that Dickens’s contemporaries were less heartless and incompetent than he shows them. Infant mortality in 1839 was 151 per 1,000 in England (comparable with that of Afghanistan in 2010); but in France it was 160, in Belgium 185, and in southern Germany 285.

So is there another vision of Dickensian poverty? Yes, if we look more carefully. The industrializing economy coped with huge population rises, and from around 1850 there were substantial increases in real wages and mass consumption. The exploding towns were unhealthy (though so were ancient cities), but less so than elsewhere. The British state, contrary to conventional assumptions, was unusually interventionist in sanitary and workplace regulation.

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Most important of all, poorer people were helping themselves, in families, workshops, neighbourhoods, churches and pubs, where friendly societies and trade unions were born, and where a new society and culture was being created. The real place on which Disraeli based his hell-hole Wodgate was Willenhall, a Black Country lock-making town. But Disraeli, drawing on an official report, left out the Sunday Schools and chapels, and the finding that despite industrial pollution “the inside of the poorest houses is [often] perfectly clean”.

Poor people also had rights to financial help under the Poor Law, and were quick to stand up for them by applying to Overseers of the Poor and, if dissatisfied, appealing to the magistrates. Tocqueville was scandalised to see old men, unemployed labourers and pregnant girls doing so unblushingly before the Justices of the Peace.

Poor people themselves did not necessarily share the pessimism either of contemporary upper-class commentators or of later historians. The rural poor, especially young people underemployed in over-populated villages, found in towns and factories an escape from dependency, chronic poverty and exclusion from adult life and marriage. However risky and accident-prone, a move to town meant more regular work, money in their pockets, freedom, the chance of family life, and exciting new social and cultural opportunities. Judging from their own writings, many working people felt not only that they were living in a rapidly changing world, but that it was changing for the better.

Typical was a Wiltshire carpenter, John Bennett, looking back later in life on his rural childhood in the 1790s: “what troublesome times we had during my bringing up,” whereas today “the working classes in my opinion, was never so well off”.

There was, however, a bitter irony. The traditional and relatively humane Poor Law, which has been described as the biggest system of wealth redistribution in the world, was slashed by reformers in 1834. This caused huge suffering and discontent, memorably evoked by Dickens, but the authors of this disaster were not black-hearted Tory reactionaries, but high-minded Liberal modernisers — brought to power by the Great Reform Act of 1832.

Historic turning points are not uncommon – maybe every century or so something happens to change the fate of countries and even continents: wars, collapses of empires, economic crises. Think of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the Mughal invasion of India, the Russian revolution.  

But changes affecting the whole planet are much rarer and usually slower: the agricultural revolution, the spread of metal use, the Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, which, even after 250 years, is not quite complete.  

Changes such as these are slow processes that can rarely if ever be ascribed to individuals. What we might call global events are quite modern – short-term human actions that have a world-wide effect. Perhaps the first of these was the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), a barely remembered episode that Winston Churchill called “the true first world war”. 

In a sense, it is the only world war – the only global conflict involving all the great European powers that began outside Europe, was fought primarily for extra-European aims, and whose consequences were greatest beyond Europe. Playing a crucial role in that event was William Pitt: arguably the first Englishman to affect the history of the world.  

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The Seven Years’ War was, in part, another of those Central European dynastic conflicts that punctuated the Age of Enlightenment. So far, so familiar. But the conflict drew in France, as the ally of Austria, and Britain, as the ally of Prussia. This made the war global. 

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had pitted Britain against a much larger and more powerful France. Overseas trade and the possession of colonies had become both the means and the end of this conflict: both countries needed to channel the profits of trade – in sugar, textiles, spices, tobacco, coffee, tea and slaves – into their European struggle. France and Britain were rivals in the Americas, Asia and Africa in what has been called the Second Hundred Years’ War.  

A perceptive French diplomat wrote: “The discovery of the New World has transformed the political system of Europe. Once, land forces made the destiny of states, but since a century ago Neptune’s trident has become the sceptre of the world.”

For this reason, the first clashes, well before war was declared in Europe, came in North America (where in 1754 a British colonial force commanded by young George Washington slaughtered a small French patrol) and on the seas (where the British navy seized 300 French merchant ships) – well before France and Britain came to blows in Europe.

Things then went disastrously for Britain. The naval base at Minorca was captured by the French. In Bengal, France’s ally the Nawab captured the British post at Calcutta (leading to the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ incident). French troops invaded New York and Pennsylvania. The army in Hanover commanded by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, was forced to capitulate. Widespread food riots broke out at home. One British politician lamented that “we are undone at home, by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are no longer a nation. I never saw so dreadful a prospect.”

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Enter William Pitt, who was appointed a secretary of state briefly in 1756, aged 48, and again, from June 1757 to October 1761. Pitt was an early example of a coldly professional populist politician – able, wrote a colleague, to “deny his own words with an unembarass’d countenance”.

An unstable maverick, often in poor health, he stood as a “Patriot”, purporting to represent the interests of the nation against the Hanoverian elite, and glorying in the sarcastic label “the Great Commoner”. His heedlessly destructive and implacable ambition made him a man whom it was sometimes safer to have inside than outside the tent. His power depended on swaying the House of Commons by bombastic, rambling but often brilliant oratory. 

When he took over a major part of the direction of the war, his popularity enabled him to persuade parliament to increase British involvement on the Continent, landing troops in France and reinforcing the bloody struggle in Germany, which ironically he and other Patriots had strenuously opposed as only serving the interest of the Hanoverian monarch. He persuaded parliament to borrow and spend unprecedented sums of money on the war, and this was crucial to victory.

Finally, he was able to communicate an indispensable sense of boldness and determination. While this has arguably been exaggerated, it certainly frightened the French, who ascribed Britain’s sudden run of successes to him alone. Their loathing was a back-handed compliment – as a French foreign ministry report put it:

His ambition is not wealth, for he despises it, and is incorruptible, but power. An extreme Republican in a moderate Monarchy, he wishes above all to be patriotic, or at least appear it, to be the favourite of the people. Mr Pitt, insolent to his sovereign, in France would end his days imprisoned in Mont Saint-Michel; in Russia, would have made a revolution, or had his tongue torn out and perished under the knout.

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Whatever the role of luck, Pitt was in charge when the tide turned decisively, and Britain enjoyed in 1759 its ‘Year of Victories’: at Minden in Germany, in India, in North America with the capture of Quebec, and with the destruction of the French navy at Quiberon Bay. Pitt wanted to go further, and resigned when his colleagues drew back.

Nevertheless, the end of the war marked a decisive global shift. France had lost its position in North America and India – as it turned out, for good – and its primacy in Europe began to wane. The global balance of power was set for at least 150 years.  

What if things had gone the other way? A French Raj in India? The dominance of ‘New France’ in North America? In trading terms, France would have outstripped Britain. The Industrial Revolution might have been still-born. The French Revolution would probably never have happened.

France was well placed – better placed than Britain – to become the world’s first hegemonic power. French would have become the first global language. France might easily have become what General de Gaulle later hoped for – a country of 100 million people. But Pitt, that lonely unstable hypochondriac, had his moment, and he left his mark on the world for good and ill.  

Robert Tombs is co-author of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2007)

There’s an old joke about England’s cities. Ask a Brummie which is the second city of England and they’ll say, without hesitation: Birmingham. Ask a Mancunian, and just as quickly, they’ll say: London. Whatever other problems it may have had down the years, Manchester has never been short of civic pride.

I am not a Mancunian. I’ve never lived there and have no connection with the place beyond admiration and a vague sense of excitement, every time I visit, that it has trams. Nonetheless, I have no hesitation in arguing that if Britain were ever to move its capital, Manchester is where it should go.

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The arguments for moving the capital have become more familiar, as the idea has moved from unthinkable to merely very unlikely; but they’re worth laying out again, if only to show how Manchester might help us address them.

At the moment, the vast majority of power in Britain – political, cultural, financial – resides within a couple miles of Nelson’s Column. The result has been a sharp divide between London and the rest, with the Westminster bubble treating much of the country as a strange foreign land. It’s meant a lop-sided economy, in which wages, productivity and house prices in the over-heated south east have soared into the stratosphere, while those in the rest of the country have fallen behind: average wages are more than a third higher in the south east of England than they are in the north west, and while the area around London ranks as one of the wealthiest in Europe, productivity in much of the north is now on a par with the former communist parts of eastern Germany.

And it has fuelled policy choices that have made this divergence worse: witness the way London always seems to have two or three major new transport schemes on the go, even as the North awaits electrification or new trains that are not, quite literally, buses on rails.

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The far-Right's appeal to resentful Germans

By James Bloodworth

Luckily, there’s one thing the government can do to break up London’s stranglehold on British life: move itself. Shifting the government to another city wouldn’t just mean shifting 650 MPs and their staffs, but vast numbers of civil servants, journalists, lobbyists and other groups that cluster near political power. That’s the sort of GDP that could offer a major boost to a regional city – but which London, with its finance and film and tech industries, could lose without skipping a beat.

So why Manchester? One of the most compelling arguments in favour of shifting the government there isn’t about Manchester per se, but about the region around it. The city is slap bang in the middle of the urban North, with Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and umpteen smaller cities all lying within a radius of about 40 miles (roughly the length, as it happens, of London’s Central line). Backed up by the right infrastructure investment, an intervention in Manchester – unlike any other city – could boost the economy right across this region.

Such infrastructure investment has not, of late, been forthcoming. But this is the second argument for moving the capital to Manchester. Historically, the government and its civil service have found it rather easier to grasp the case for, say, London’s £15bn Crossrail service than it has for improved regional bus services or a functioning Trans Pennine Express. Once they found themselves commuting from Stockport or Huddersfield, though, their investment priorities are likely to magically shift.

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Westminster's broken: To rescue our British parliament, establish an English parliament

By Peter Franklin

All this was the central insight of George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse policy: that there are 10m people in the overlapping conurbations of the M62 corridor, and that if you can fix the economy of those cities, you’ve gone a long way to solving Britain’s productivity puzzle. The policy never worked, because it never really happened – but the theory remains sound, and moving the government to Manchester would finally make it a reality.

There’s another, more philosophical argument for making Manchester the capital. The history we’re taught at school, and through the choices of TV commissioners, is that of the kings and queens and prime ministers. The fact our politics is conducted in the Palace of Westminster, with all the pomp and ritual that comes with it, reinforces the sense of continuity with all that: it suggests that government is something that other people do to you.

But there are other histories, which aren’t as widely taught, yet which cast our national story in a very different light. The radical history of the fight for democracy. The economic history of the industrial revolution, and the social history of those whose lives were transformed by it. Manchester was not only the site of these histories, but was created by them. The first city of the industrial revolution, its physical form was created by the needs of the cotton trade; its politics by the fight for parliamentary reform and the backlash in the form of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

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Has the Left weaponised Peterloo?

By Allan Mallinson

If London is the home of the British establishment, then Manchester is the heart of Britain’s radical history. It’s the perfect place to reconnect our politics with those other stories – the ones that say government is about us, not them.

Moving the capital would not magically erase the economic and social divides that run down this country like a canyon (you’d think, if things were that simple, we would have at least talked about it). But it could separate the political establishment from the financial one, making the latter less likely to influence the former merely by virtue of being at the same dinner parties.

Manchester, as its self-image suggests, already has all the ingredients to be major global city. It wouldn’t be one of those “…what?” capitals like Brasilia, Canberra or Bonn. It has one of the finest cultural offerings this country can offer – an abundance of fine Victorian architecture and top-ranked universities; places such as the Whitworth Gallery and Royal Exchange Theatre – and its music scene and football teams are world famous. It could be Washington to London’s New York, spreading the wealth and the power, and giving this country two major world cities rather than one so over-heated it’s in danger of spontaneous combustion. And it’s right in the middle of the country, next to a major international airport.

The old joke is right: England’s second city really should be London.

Some believe the loan should be permanent. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles,” says Nick Forbes, leader of Newcastle city council: “It should be here all the time.”

In equating Stephenson’s workaday wrought iron with the marmoreal art of the Parthenon, Councillor Forbes risks hyperbole, but he knows it will get the sympathy of his party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Corbyn’s views on the Elgin marbles are for him unusually clear: they should be returned to Greece.

But what is so important about Stephenson and his Rocket, and why does Councillor Forbes believe it should stay in the city?

Rocket was a steam locomotive built in 1829 for the new Liverpool and Manchester Railway – the first railway built to carry passengers rather than coal. Rocket was by no means the first locomotive, but she (it’s discourteous to call a steam engine “it”) incorporated several innovations which made her the first engine really capable of hauling passenger trains. Rocket was the template for steam engines for the next century and a half, and is, quite simply, the most famous locomotive in the world.

Rocket was designed and built at the Forth Street works of Robert Stephenson and Company, just round the corner from the Discovery Museum in which she now sits – the first company formed specifically to build railway engines. As such, Rocket is emblematic of the North East’s heavy engineering heritage. Coal mining and ironworking, together with shipbuilding and seafaring, gave “Geordieland” its gritty character – industries now gone.

It’s not surprising therefore that today’s Geordies are keen to see the greatest symbol of the city’s tough, pioneering history. Or that schoolchildren facing an uncertain future in this post-industrial age should be brought by their teachers to see how one of its most famous sons took the Industrial Revolution to a new level.

Tyneside today is brooding as well as depressed. The area voted overwhelmingly for Brexit in a sort of modern-day Jarrow March. Those who visit the Discovery Museum are being inspired by the past – by their cultural heritage. Should Rocket therefore remain in the city indefinitely? Or should it return to London, where visitors from around the world, as well as the whole of Britain, can see what Tyneside could once do – and still might? Would it not serve the region better if Rocket continued to take pride of technological place in the Capital of the nation that once led the world – and has aspirations to do so again – in engineering, technology and innovation?

This in essence is the Elgin Marbles argument too. Isn’t Greece better served by showing the best of its exquisite ancient civilization to millions of visitors from around the world each year (6.25 million people visited the British Museum in 2016-17) – a far greater and more international footfall than could ever be achieved in Athens? “The sculptures are part of everyone’s shared heritage and transcend cultural boundaries” says the museum’s website. It’s a strong intellectual case.

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People not places: the real hope for a northern powerhouse

By Phillip Blond

Indeed, Councillor Forbes does Newcastle no good by equating Rocket’s case with that of the Elgin Marbles. “Stephenson’s Rocket is our Elgin marbles” is a clever sound bite, but historically the circumstances of the acquisition of the two artefacts were entirely different. The Elgin Marbles were either purloined or rescued, depending on your viewpoint, but Rocket was bought – legally – by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And after being sold on, in 1862 was given by the then owners (a mining company in Cumberland) to the Patent Office Museum, forerunner of the Science Museum.

The leader of Newcastle City Council would do better to make the case that Rocket’s intended final resting place (or, strictly, “long-term display”) – the National Railway Museum in York – fails both of what we might call the ‘Elgin Marbles tests’: it neither returns the artefact to its cherished place of manufacture, nor does it maximise its “shared heritage” by being displayed in one of the greatest tourist centres of the world. The National Railway Museum – for all its appeal – is a comparatively niche attraction. Its footfall is barely 50% more than Newcastle’s. It’s not Rocket science.

It is true that the British Industrial Revolution, which spanned much of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries, led to more jobs, better jobs, and ultimately the huge increases in wealth and comfort that frame modern life. “Prior to 1750, per capita incomes in the world doubled every 6,000 years; thereafter, it has taken some 50 years.”[1. Carl Benedikt Frey et al., in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2 July 2018]

But researchers have been looking in more detail at the costs involved in this huge jump in prosperity, at what effect the new machines had on the working population. They have unearthed disturbing facts that we need to remember as we face fresh changes ahead.

We tend to think of automation as using machines to do routine work. But at the core of the Industrial Revolution was the opposite. The heart of Britain’s hugely successful textile industry was the “domestic system” – skilled craftsmen working their looms at home. The new machines took this work into factories, and made it simpler. So unskilled operators could now provide most of the labour.

One effect of this was a big increase in child labour; the machines were designed so they could be operated by children, and they made up around half the factory hands. Having lost their skilled work, the craftsmen now faced fresh competition for the new, lower-paid, machine-based jobs.

This led to the most startling effect of all: an astonishing increase in the number of unskilled labourers. As pointed out in a recent speech to the Trades Union Congress by Andy Haldane, chief economist of the Bank of England, between 1700 and 1850 the proportion of unskilled workers in the British labour force actually doubled, from 20% to 40%. Of course, many of these workers did have skills, but they were skills no longer in demand in the economy. To find work they had to compete with farm labourers and others for unskilled jobs. It was, literally, generations before the situation turned around.

Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey sums up the research:

“Technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large, yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market. During the days of the British Industrial Revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology.”

“During the first six decades of the Industrial Revolution, ordinary Englishmen did not see any of the benefits of mechanization: as output expanded, real wages stagnated, leading to a sharp decline in the share of national income accruing to labour.”[2. Oxford Review of Economic Policy]

To be more specific, the academics found that, according to best estimates, while output per worker increased by 46%, real wages rose by just 14%. But as working hours also increased by 20%, hourly wages actually declined in real terms.

Further reading

The full effects of automation will be way more disruptive than globalisation

By Peter Franklin

No wonder the Luddites resisted the new technology – weaving machinery introduced in the textile industry – which threatened their livelihoods. There had been machine-breaking before, and petitions, and demonstrations. But the Luddites took protest to a new level. Their efforts were short-lived. The government in London sent the army north in 1813 to quell the revolt, and soon after, 24 ring-leaders were swinging from public gallows and dozens more transported to Australia.[3. It was rough justice. Here is an affecting account of the hanging of 14 of them, based on local newspaper reports. The men sang a hymn as they walked to the scaffold. Between them, they left 57 fatherless children.]

David Ricardo, the nation’s most famous economist after Adam Smith, is credited with developing the theory of comparative advantage which is the basis of globalisation. Ricardo lived through the Industrial Revolution, could see what was going to happen and agreed in principle with the Luddites: “I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers”, though he considered it pointless for the government to oppose new technology, since “it will be done abroad” anyway.

Introducing the technology was therefore the lesser of two evils: “By investing part of a capital in improved machinery,” he wrote, “there will be a diminution in the progressive demand for labour; by exporting it to another country, the demand will be wholly annihilated.”

As we look ahead in the 21^st century, economists have labeled the coming changes, powered by AI and robotics, as the “Second Machine Age” (two MIT economists) or the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” (World Economic Forum). If we are on the cusp of a “revolution” that parallels the original Industrial Revolution in impact and scope, its implications for labour markets could indeed be catastrophic.

Automation then becomes a major political challenge. Because one big difference between then and now is that in the days of the Luddites, the workers did not have the vote. Economic deprivation is a potent driver of the rise of populism in contemporary politics, especially in the United States, as my UnHerd colleague Henry Olsen has been explaining. Most of those who have lost out blame bad trade deals, off-shoring, and the immigration of cheap labour. If their resentments begin to focus on technology, a fresh Luddism would be a potent force.

We should heed these sobering words from Frey: “Although the Industrial Revolution began with the arrival of the factory, it ended not just with the construction of the railroads but also the publication of the Communist Manifesto.”

Further reading

Why aren't we more worried about the new slave economy?

By Nigel Cameron

Max Weber has an influential addendum to this story: that Calvinism came to think of hard work and thrift as indicators of a life that is saved by God. And as such, the characteristics of a financially successful life became fused with a particular understanding of religious piety – hence the Protestant work ethic. Others have argued that it was Catholicism, and specifically patterns of financial stewardship developed by the late medieval monasteries, that produced a concern for financial efficiency that reflected many of the later concerns of capitalism.

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Protestant practice can save capitalism

By Adrian Pabst

But whatever the variations on this general account, the basic problem is that capitalism didn’t exist during that time period. Capitalism, both as a word and as a developed idea, is a product of the mid-nineteenth century. Even Adam Smith, writing in the eighteenth century, wasn’t really discussing capitalism as such. His concern was with markets and commercial society more generally.

If you want to understand the relationship between capitalism and Christianity, therefore, you have to look at a much shorter time frame – which also has the advantage of helping to avoid some of the soggy generalisations that characterise many of the more familiar approaches to this subject.

Capitalism, in anything like the form we now know it, is something that came into being in Britain around the 1840’s and 50’s with the introduction into law of the stock company as an independent legal personality, and with the idea of limited liability.

The idea that individuals could group together and pool their capital for common commercial enterprise was itself nothing new. The East India Company was given a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I in 1600 for this very purpose. But it was the legal protections afforded by the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liability Act 1855 that created the private company as we now know it. Coupled with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, this was the period when old style state mercantilism gave way to free enterprise driven by private interest.

The hostility to the Corn Laws – and to import duties more generally – was led and financed by non-conformist mill owners in the North West who attacked the established church as benefiting from corn prices kept artificially high by the imposition of duties on cheaper imports. The tithes that the clergy of the established church were able to collect from their parish were based on the average price of corn over seven years, and so they, along with the agricultural landowners, had a financial interest in maintaining import duties.

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Christian Democrats should back Brexit not Brussels

By Giles Fraser

But the Church of England was more than just a high Tory alliance between church and the landed aristocracy. For it was during this period that a theological revolution was taking place within the Church of England, namely the Oxford Movement. Originally a reaction against the growing forces of Whig secularism – the government’s decision to reduce the number of Irish bishops was the spark that ignited it – the Oxford Movement sought to re-introduce into the Church of England an emphasis on the importance of liturgy and the beauty of holiness.

This led to many being distrusted by a broadly evangelical church leadership, with the consequence that Oxford Movement clergy were denied the best livings and forced to work in the slums. And it was as a result of this association that the Oxford Movement came to develop a particular concern for social justice, having a ring side view of the impact that industrialisation was having on mid-nineteenth century Britain.

Conservative in nature, the Oxford Movement looked back to local forms of association that were thriving in the middle ages – the parish, the guilds, the historic connection between people and place – and contrasted this with the dark satanic mills of industrialisation, and particularly the free movement of labour which created social dislocation.

Those broadly of this group all had things to say about the so-called ‘Condition of England’ problem, and were generally highly scathing in their condemnations of industrial capitalism as creating a new form of urban poverty, with the poor cut off from their traditional forms of support. In other words, the earliest Christian critique of Capitalism originated from a broadly conservative, not progressive, perspective.

One such was John Ruskin who in 1860 published Unto This Last, a reference to the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” from Matthew’s Gospel. It was perhaps the first ever specific attack upon capitalist economics from a Christian perspective and generated much outright hostility from the general public.

Ruskin argued that all deserve a basic level of pay irrespective of their contribution to the economy. Credited with anticipating the welfare state, Ruskin was also developing ones of the earliest critiques of the labour market from a Christian perspective. The capitalist economics of his day was “the most cretinous, speechless, paralysing plague that has yet touched the brains of mankind” wrote Ruskin. And Adam Smith was a “half-bred and half-witted Scotchman” who had taught the “deliberate blasphemy” that “thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods”.

Among the various criticisms Ruskin had of the economic practices of his day, one of his most serious charges was that the division of labour inherent in the basic efficiency gains of the capitalist working model led to the worker being distanced and thus alienated from the overall purpose of his task.

On this, Smith and Ruskin agree. Where they differ, however, is on the whole subject of human motivation. Adam Smith may only have used the phrase once in The Wealth of Nations, but his “invisible hand” is the holy ghost of capitalism.

Self regard – or “self love” as Smith prefers – is the animating spirit that benefits all through the beneficial effects of trade. The idea that “self-love” can be a powerful force for good is at the heart of the moral defence of capitalism. Christians, however, will always be suspicious, pointing out, as Ruskin does, that it can produce as much “ilth” (Ruskin’s invented word for the opposite of wealth) as it does wealth. And those who maintain a robust commitment to original sin and human depravity will always be suspicious of a system driven along by so corrupted an engine. Capitalism, in contrast, is confident that it can harness the energy of selfishness for public benefit.

There is much more to say about all of this. Churches like the Church of England are generally in no position to mount an all out attack on capitalism, benefiting as they do from substantial investment portfolios. Oxford Movement radicalism has given way to an acceptance of the broad principles of the capitalist project. At most, the churches seek to moderate the worst excesses of greed and injustice – but have little to say about the nature of capitalism per se. And here, it seems, the Church has surrendered its principles too quickly.

Because Christianity and capitalism differ very substantially when it comes to their respective attitudes towards human motivation. For Christianity, “self-love” is dangerous stuff. Indeed, for many theologians, it is precisely that from which we need saving. The great aim of Christianity is to transfer the centre of interest from self to others.

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The oppressive individualism of human rights

By Giles Fraser

The experience of the 2008 banking crisis and the fact that the state had to spend hundreds of billions of pounds of public money to bail out reckless corporations that had been driven to excess by private greed suggests, at the very least, that the confidence that capitalism has in the moral safety of Smith’s “self love” ought to be thought through once again.

Capitalism has continued to change since it was invented not yet two centuries ago. But the human beings that power it remain very much the same. And when it comes to human beings themselves, Christianity may have the more realistic appraisal. Are they compatible? I fear not. For I suspect that the dangers of “self-love” will one day overpower all the undoubted good that capitalism does in bringing many out of poverty. Smith thought the market could be held in check by the exercise of his very residual Presbyterian values. In reality, however, he contributed to their erosion. And a market without values, driven by “self-love”, will eventually destroy itself.

The origin of this flyover designation for the North is both economic and cultural. Yet the standard explanation is almost exclusively the former, with nearly all analysis and policy focus directed at economic decline. Broadly speaking let us call this the ‘place hypothesis’ – that if only the North had what it needed as a functioning economic ‘place,’ then equity with the South of England would be restored, and decline reversed.

It is certainly the case that the North has woefully insufficient connectivity, with poor railways, roads and tunnels, and it has acre upon acre of sub-standard 19^th century working-class housing.  And some might additionally argue that it lacks investment, interest and the radical governance/devolution structures to turn it all around. But if we really want to understand the North’s decline then focusing solely on the economic is a mistake, as most of this only really arose as a problem during the last forty years or so, whereas the North’s decline began much, much earlier.

If we wanted to maintain the ‘place’ explanation, we might with more merit argue something like the following. The decline of the North is probably due to its unprecedented global and regional success in the 18^th and 19^th centuries – the massive innovations in commodity production and its transportation focused all the investment and expertise on production in industries like shipbuilding, cotton, coal, and steel. Then when, after the First World War, the global economy shifted and northern British commodities became uncompetitive against both new international competition and revived trade barriers, the North proved incapable of adapting.

Instead it was the South that moved towards services and complex manufacture like planes and cars. And in adapting to this structural shift it was the South that captured, through deploying ideas and innovation, the future of production. Whereas the North, overly invested in a now defunct and low skill raw production model, remained too far from the global innovative frontier for it to catch up.

I think all of the above is true, but I also believe it is insufficient in explaining how the North became “flyover” territory. For it was not so much a dearth of place, but more of people. After all, the Industrial Revolution happened in Northern England, and not elsewhere, largely because of the people.

The rightly celebrated work of economic historians like Robert C Allen may highlight the material explanations for the Northern English location of the Industrial Revolution – the enormous coal deposits lying near the surface, and the high wages and cheap energy that created an incentive to develop machines that replaced expensive people with inexpensive coal. But the North of the 18^th century also had decentered capital, lots of opportunistic merchants looking to invest, and a phenomenal mass grouping of innovators and inventors in Northern towns who founded small scientific and technical clubs in places like Wigan and Preston, as well as the big cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. This is the mix of human talent and local capital that allowed the North to give birth to the industrial age.

It is the loss of an active and engaged middle and upper class – highly educated, high status and heavily invested in the private as well as the public sector – that propelled the North into a century of decline. And it is getting back the talented, technical, entrepreneurial and artistic classes that can alone reverse it. All of which means that much of current policy towards the North which is almost exclusively place, needs to become people based if it is to have any meaningful and subsequent effect.

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And finally: the good news from flyover county

By Peter Franklin

This is not just conjecture. In a brilliant paper based on the study of ancestral surnames and birth and mortality data, Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins conclude “that the decline of the North is mainly explained by selective outmigration of the educated and talented.”[1. Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, ‘The Big Sort: Selective Migration and the Decline of Northern England, 1800-2017’, LSE, May 2017]. The decline of the north is to be found in its makeup of people, not in its place.

This is best understood by recognising the scale of inward migration. Between 1800 and 1900 the population of northern England quadrupled, with massive immigration from Scotland, Wales, and most especially Ireland. But this was mostly the inflow of relatively unskilled labour that came to work in the new industries.

Fascinatingly, it appears the outflow of the educated and higher skilled from the North had already begun in the mid-19^th Century, even when the Northern industries were prospering. Perhaps because this commerce did not demand or require high levels of skill or education those endowed in both went South were their services were in demand. So, as Clark and Cummins put it, as the educated left “the North retained its unskilled population, and attracted unskilled migrants, leading to a decline in the average skill and education level of the Northern population.”

Largely as a result of this prolonged and selective migration out of the North, the North is now at the level of population share that it had before the Industrial Revolution, with much of its population remaining below the average skill and educational levels of the country and especially the south. The resulting impacts on the multiple inequities of health, wealth and opportunity remain to this day for all to see.

So much of flyover country – from the American mid-western rust belt to these abandoned Northern towns – has something of this character. They share an over-concentration on a single type or pattern of industry and its this lack of socio-economic diversity that makes them so vulnerable to economic shocks.

The question therefore, is what can be done to renew these areas? A clear lesson is that while the hard infrastructure “ask” of the North is no doubt needed, even if the investment is forthcoming it is unlikely on its own to narrow the gap between North and South. There must additionally be a focus on human capital: attracting it, retaining it and creating it locally. And politicians and policymakers concerned with regional inequality need to recognise that the working class monoculture that exists in many of the most deprived areas in the North is also part of what has cut off the white working class off from opportunity.

Just as racial apartheid is rightly abhorred, we now need to turn that disgust into revulsion at the class apartheid that marks too much of the North too strongly. We need to build back into these areas institutions that mix classes, peer groups and career pathways to create a socio-economically diverse North that can better look after, nurture and educate its people.

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No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Peter Embery

The “build it and they will come” approach is not sufficient to help these isolated communities – the shiny new buildings erected in cities like Manchester and Liverpool are no substitute for a genuine focus on creating, restoring and, of course, recognising northern culture. The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

Our northern universities, particularly the higher performing ones, remain introverted institutions largely focused on their own development while ignoring the wider social and economic renewal that  they could both facilitate and benefit from. And we need even more desperately and urgently to save northern children from the long tail of underperforming, below average schools that endlessly depress the aspiration and achievement of their pupils – and probably one of the things that could help them is a mass influx of middle class families and their children.

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The flyover town that dodged decline

By Henry Olsen

The planned relocation of Channel 4 is an example of what is needed to attract these families and individuals – a high performing cultural institution moving its creative functions outside of London (at the laudable behest of government). We need much, much more of this; along with the sort of investment capital that the rich merchants of the Industrial Revolution invested in the North. Might a regional capital gains tax relief help facilitate this?

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

You can’t flyover where you live, and the mark of the North’s success will only really be found when the middle classes who left it some 100 years ago return.