Maybe a Republican has a chance to become governor for the first time since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. But probably not. Of the two Republicans battling for their party’s nomination, one is an unimpressive county sheriff who speaks in the dullest of Republican slogans, and the other is Steve Hilton, whose campaign tract Califailure is badly written, poorly argued, lazily researched, barely edited, and entirely uninspiring.

Hilton’s inability to write an inspiring political tract was an odd discovery, because his most prominent role in British politics was doing strategy and communications for David Cameron. Since then, he has remade himself as a Fox News commentator, and now has designs on the governorship. Califailure, then, has taken on new importance since its publication in March.

Not only is it totally unserious as an analysis of the Democrats’ bad policies, it also fails as political messaging. It’s a book written to exercise the emotions of Hilton’s Fox News audience, but a message designed for the geriatric ideologues and fantasists who watch Fox News is not going to break the Democratic Party’s death-grip on California politics. It will do little to help people truly understand the policy disasters that have befallen California, and it will persuade few California voters who aren’t already Republicans to vote against Democratic rule. What Califailure will mainly do is convince faithful Fox viewers in Tennessee and Colorado and Michigan that the cartoon portrait of California they get on Fox News is the truth. Don’t get me wrong. It’s closer to the truth than a cartoon portrait should be, but it’s still a cartoon portrait.

You can see Hilton’s role as a talking head taking over his duties as an author in the table of contents of Califailure. After a short chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton goes on a run of nine chapters whose titles are words that will resonate as incendiary insults with Fox News viewers: “Elitism”, “Narcissism”, “Maoism”, “Climatism”, “Socialism”, “Bureaucratism”, “Compassionism”, “Cronyism”, and “Incompetism”. For those words that aren’t already recognized “-isms” (unlike Maoism and Socialism), Hilton affixes “-ism” to them to indicate that these aren’t just governing tendencies or pathologies but full-blown “ideologies” of their own. For example, the Democrats who run California aren’t just incompetent. They have turned incompetence into a belief system. Thus “Incompetism”. Translating the stubborn pathologies of California’s Democratic governance into discrete and conscious systems of belief serves Hilton’s interest as a Fox News commentator, but it doesn’t help anyone understand the underlying forces of political idiocy that afflict the state.

Take “Elitism”. If you remember what happened in California during Covid, and you have a feel for Hilton’s way with a political message, you can guess where his “Elitism” chapter is heading: it’s heading out for an expensive dinner at the French Laundry. The French Laundry is the famous Wine Country restaurant (three Michelin stars) where, in November 2020, Gavin Newsom and his wife were joined by rich friends and powerful colleagues to celebrate Newsom’s 50th birthday. Even as he was demanding that California residents wear masks when they were inside stores and other public buildings, and limiting California restaurants to outdoor dining, Newsom and his party dined maskless and indoors.

I suppose this is an example of elitism, and the fancy-restaurant destination, as well as Newsom’s status as a pretty-boy scion of a rich and politically connected family, make it a satisfying reason to reach for your pitchfork. But the fact that powerful people think the rules they apply to others don’t apply to them is a fairly generic lesson of politics. Power corrupts, even when it’s attained by popular vote, even in places that aren’t California. Hilton is just rabble-rousing here, eliciting familiar tones from his bell, cueing readers to froth in the clinically predicted ways.

A more telling example — also dating from the lockdown era — appears near the end of the “Elitism” chapter. Hilton points out that expensive private schools, such as those attended by Newsom’s own children, were holding regular in-person instruction while “public”, government-run schools were still doing online instruction, holding classes via Zoom session. “So why didn’t he insist that public schools educating the majority of California’s students open for in-person instruction, and not just the schools attended by his children and the other children of the elite?” He doesn’t answer this question. He takes it to answer itself. And the answer is the title of the chapter in which it appears: “Elitism”. People in the elite like Gavin Newsom just take themselves to be better than the rest of us, and so they get to follow different rules. It’s an ideology.

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But a much better, much more concrete and parsimonious, explanation for why public schools persisted with phony video schooling, in which kids didn’t learn anything, is the strength of teachers’ unions. Teachers at public schools are unionized. Teachers at private schools generally aren’t unionized. Unions took a maximalist view of the Covid risk their members faced. This was not reasonable, from either an educational or a public health standpoint, but from the standpoint of the institutional game that teachers’ unions are always playing, it was totally comprehensible. It’s what you’d expect.

The challenge for a book about the many failures of California governance is not to find the best insult for teachers’ unions. It’s to understand why teachers’ unions have so much power that they can force a disastrous pandemic policy onto students and their families with no resistance, indeed with the full complicity of the other major powers in state politics. The answer is not mysterious. Local teachers’ unions are members of the California Education Association (CEA), and the CEA is one of the most powerful forces in California politics. Since the CEA basically sets its own agenda within the state Democratic party, and since that party has a monopoly of power in the state, the CEA can pursue its favored policies enviably free of electoral or institutional constraints. In other words, the so-called elitism in Hilton’s private school example is entirely downstream of the power of unionized public school teachers, which is entirely downstream of the fact that Democrats have total control of state government.

This line of causality — from the Democrats’ unopposed power to the state’s pathological governance — is pretty obvious and direct in the case of the CEA. In other areas Hilton covers, the connections are a touch more subtle, but they’re far from obscure. For instance, in his “Compassionism” chapter he describes some of the now-familiar examples of progressive officials in California seeming to favor chaos and crime over mundane public order maintained by police officers. Hilton uses “Compassionism” to describe a vague mental condition — an ideology, yes, but also a sort of mental illness, in his treatment — from which California progressives supposedly suffer that leads them to tolerate chaos and oppose measures to control it.

But the destructive and weirdly selective compassion expressed in the state’s Democratic policies — summoned for the criminal targets of police power but withheld from the victims of these criminals — reflects internal political dynamics predictable in one-party rule, in which the strongest pressures are applied from the ideological fringe. I’ve described this phenomenon as it affects my own city of Oakland — progressive politicians facing no electoral constraints from their Right, only the threat of shaming from activists to their Left for their lack of ideological purity. Both social status and political survival in this sort of one-party governance depend on submitting to puritanical ideologues. At some point in the moral bidding wars that drive progressive politics, it becomes socially and politically treacherous for even sensible officials to concede, for example, that the police should enforce the law.

The strange thing about Califailure is that, though it begins with a chapter titled “One Party Rule,” Hilton doesn’t use this basic electoral fact to frame his treatment of California’s bad governance. For the sake of his TV audience, he treats his various pathologies — “Elitism”, “Compassionism”, and so on — as independent variables, freestanding causes that explain the bad governance. But he can’t decide how they explain it. He mostly seems to think that progressives just inherently have these “diseases”, as if one is drawn to Leftist politics as symptomatic expression of clinical Cronyism or whatever, but sometimes he suggests that they take on these mental illnesses willingly. “The pathology of Narcissism,” he writes, “is tailor-made for an elite class that believes its own utopian fantasies can replace… mundane reality….” Tailor-made? On one hand, this is terrible writing, another instance of the crude, sloganeering prose that makes up Califailure. On the other hand, it reveals the trick Hilton is trying and failing to pull off, using the polemical language of sickness but also wanting the sick people he’s talking about to be fully deserving of his scorn because they’ve somehow, consciously chosen their diseases, as a man chooses the cut of his suit. Narcissism is a mental illness and an ideology. Compassionism is an ideology and a mental illness.

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In either case, Hilton treats the excesses of progressivism — his nine silly “-isms” — as independent causes of California’s problems, which allows him to yell about them as he yells about things on TV. But, again, these excesses are better understood as effects of one-party rule. In this context, a party’s extremists hold a potent advantage in negotiation and persuasion precisely because of their extremism. When there’s serious inter-party competition, though, those extremists lose this structural advantage. Faced with electoral competition, party leaders are more likely to resist the influence of purists and ideologues whose favored policies alienate moderate voters.

We Californians don’t get to see this happen in state politics these days, but we have gotten recent glimpses of it as our Governor, who seems to be readying a 2028 run for President, reacts to the demands of national politics, where elections are competitive and moderate voters matter. Indeed, my city has enjoyed direct benefits from this altered political logic. Gavin Newsom doesn’t want national voters imagining rampant crime and homelessness when they hear his name, and so he’s made several high-profile moves in recent years that have angered the Left-wing of his party. Among these moves was dispatching a large contingent from state law enforcement to aid the Oakland Police Department — shrunken and “defunded” by extreme progressives on our city council – as it struggled to fight a devastating crime wave. This worked, and, in working, it showed electoral competition to be a healthy antidote to fanatic-driven policymaking in our one-party city.

But why is there no electoral competition? Why do Republican candidates no longer have a chance in statewide elections? If California’s absurd governance is an effect of Democratic control, shouldn’t a book about that absurdity direct a little curiosity at the other party’s performance through these years of dysfunction? Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. Hilton assigns no blame to the Republicans for their own weakness. Instead, he blames the Democrats. His “One Party Rule” chapter briefly examines the effects of Democratic dominance on Republicans, and he makes a pretty good case that the Democrats have gamed the supposedly non-partisan system for drawing districts for the State Assembly, in the classic manner of partisan gerrymandering. If districts were drawn in a truly non-partisan manner, he points out, the Assembly should be around 40% Republican, reflecting the usual Republican vote in statewide elections. Instead, Republicans hold only 22% of Assembly seats.

This is a fair point. But why should the Republican share of the state electorate be capped at 40%, especially when Democratic rule has made the state into a national laughing stock? Why can’t the Republicans grab enough voters disgusted with the crime and the dysfunction and the overall idiocy to make statewide elections competitive again?

Hilton directs no criticism or even advice or encouragement towards his fellow Republicans on this matter. And these voters exist. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, the state’s Republican Party is more ideologically uniform than its Democratic Party. In other words, conservative Democrats are much more numerous than liberal Republicans. But there’s nothing in Califailure about winning over those ambivalent Democrats from their malfunctioning party.

He could have made his book a true provocation to Democratic voters frustrated with their party by focusing on the self-satirizing details of progressive governance and messaging, which are generally hidden from everyday people precisely because there’s no viable opposition party to broadcast these things. That is, instead of the few brief passages he devotes to the specifics of progressive policymaking (especially in his worthwhile “Bureaucratism” chapter), he could have filled his entire book with such things in their infuriating and irrational specifics — the petty, hostile, relentless regulation and taxation of small businesses; the rich payouts to Left-wing NGOs that work to perpetuate rather than to mitigate their pet disasters; the proud non-enforcement of basic criminal law; the unimaginable waste of environmentalist dreams like our bullet-train-to-nowhere, and progressives’ crippling efforts to make us the greenest country in the world when we’re not even a country.

Hilton touches on these things, but his research is lazy and haphazard. He’s easily distracted. He’s more interested in issues that agitate his national audience of Fox watchers than with the concrete troubles of us beleaguered Californians. He can’t help dredging up worked-over culture-war tropes, so that you can forget sometimes he’s even writing about California. His “Narcissism” chapter includes a long rant about the activist neologism “LatinX”, in which he rebuts the need for such a term with a hilariously earnest and misplaced digression on Spanish grammar. It’s as if he’s seeking relief from the shallowness of his own book through a fantasy of being a linguistics professor. His “Maoism” chapter is consumed with Stanford University and the authoritarian Leftism of its administrators. Stanford is technically located in California, but the maddening things happening there are happening at every elite university in the US. These campus issues are national issues. They illustrate nothing about California’s failed governance.

Indeed the focus on rarefied Stanford hints at a sort of elitism in Steve Hilton’s worldview, and in the ways of the state Republican Party he hopes to lead. This elitism, ironically, mirrors that of the state’s ruling Democrats. Just as the Democrats’ insulation from electoral competition allows them to indulge the elitist, utopian fantasies of their activist base, the Republicans’ impotence in this competition enables a similar dynamic, in which ideological purity and fidelity to elites in the national Republican party displace hard thinking and compromise about bread-and-butter issues that affect everyday Californians. Once you decide that statewide victory is off the table, you can let go of difficult, impure politicking and settle into the easier business of placating activists who vote in primaries, parroting the themes of Republican celebrities in Washington, and playing up abstract culture-war fights.

As Mike Madrid, former political director for the state Republican party, said in 2023, “The Republican Party is really not trying to be a viable political party anymore in California. It’s kind of content being this small, regional, marginalized social movement, and for the moment that’s what it is, and that’s probably what it’ll be for a very long time.” You can see how this arrangement would suit individuals at the core of the Republican party, as it suits those on Democratic side. Those people are already where they want to be, enjoying the quantum of reliable influence they’ve been given in our unhealthy equilibrium.

And, in the composition of his dashed-off book, you can see Steve Hilton bidding to secure his own place in this arrangement. Nothing in his book suggests he’s serious about actually winning the statewide election he’s made himself a side-character in. Despite the book’s title, Califailure doesn’t read like something addressed to California voters at all, who will find its fixations only occasionally and vaguely connected to the concrete problems of their state. He’s talking to nationwide consumers of partisan media, who relish their Schadenfreude about liberal California and like to have it reinforced periodically from their TV sets. He’ll still be talking to them after the next election, and still as someone who doesn’t hold political office, and, if his ridiculous book is any indication, he’s perfectly content with that.

The UK’s various authorities have agreed to relax Covid-19 restrictions for five days over Christmas. The result will be that some people will die who would not otherwise have died.

I don’t say this as criticism — either of the policy, the people who made it, or the people who will make use of it. Because there’s actually nothing unusual about a policy choice to accept some deaths in exchange for something else. Policy decisions that kill people are made all the time. Which is why we need to get better, and more honest, about the process of deciding when to let people die.

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By Timandra Harkness

How much is a human life worth? Philosophers and theologians would give answers in words. Civil servants and — though they never say so explicitly — politicians have a simpler answer: £1.6 million.

That is the current Value of a Prevented Fatality, according to Her Majesty’s Treasury. This is not, technically, the value of a single life. It’s just the maximum sum that HMT says is worth spending to avert a death that would otherwise take place. The figure exists to help officials and politicians decide whether any given policy is justified by the lives it would save — and, by implication, to decide when deaths are acceptable because it would cost too much to prevent them.

That figure of £1.6 million is potentially hugely important. It is baked into all sorts of choices, made by government and the private sector — which transport safety improvements are justified, for example, or how much money to spend reducing the chances of nuclear power stations blowing up. But there’s a tiny problem with that “VPF” figure. It’s nonsense.

The VPF is essentially based on some numbers plucked out of the air by a few dozen random members of the public in 1997; 167 members of the public, to be precise. They were responding to the Carthy Study, which asked how much they thought it was worth paying to prevent a minor and then major injuries. The Carthy authors calculated each respondents’ implied answer about the value of a death prevented. Then they averaged out the results and came to the remarkably neat figure of £1 million, which has subsequently grown with inflation.

And according to some academics, it’s far too low. Professor Phillip Thomas of Bristol University reckons it should be between £16 million and £22 million. If that’s even vaguely accurate, we’ve been spending far less on making safe reactors and railways than we need to in order to reflect the value people actually place on the lives of their fellow citizens.

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But the trouble is, this is a crude measure that takes no account of the differences between people. Have you ever wondered why the accidental deaths of children get much more media coverage than the comparable deaths of adults? Of course you haven’t: we all instinctively recognise that there is something more viscerally upsetting about the passing of a child.

Part of that gut reaction has a sound economic basis: a child stands to live longer than an adult, so the death of a child means a greater loss of life-years. If we must put a cash figure on lost lives to reflect our collective valuation of life, shouldn’t that figure vary with the amount of life foregone? That would certainly accord with our instinctive gut feel about life, death and loss. But it could take us down a dark path, which we have occasionally caught sight of during the pandemic. Some lockdown sceptics have come close to arguing that the lives of older people are simply less worthy of preservation, meaning the case for precautionary measures that do economic harm to younger people are less justified. Some older people have made the same point. “Should we die, we deserve fewer tears than do those who come after us,” wrote 74-year-old Max Hastings in March.

Those arguments make me uncomfortable, because what happens when their underlying logic is applied on a population-wide scale to things such as healthcare: do we really want to formally declare that older people’s lives are less worth saving than those of the young? And if life expectancies determine our value, are rich southerners’ lives worth more than those of poor northerners?

But the answer to this stuff isn’t to shy away from the issue; it’s to debate it properly and systematically.

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The good news is that the Whitehall machine is, slowly, moving to replace that nonsensical VFP figure with something that might just capture the different weights we give to deaths at different ages. Over the summer, the HSE published a comprehensive “scoping study” describing how government could better calculate the values that we collectively assign to human lives.

As the paper concludes:

“Applying such values would lead to better and more informed policy decisions and would have major implications not only for efficiency of government spending but also for equity in population well-being.”

Unsurprisingly, there is no sign of politicians engaging with that study or its implications, even though it’s their job to balance “efficiency” and “equity”.  That’s probably because explaining clearly and openly how you strike such a balance would mean telling some painful truths to voters. Truths such as: sometimes we decide that a few deaths are a price worth paying in order to keep the traffic moving, keep your taxes down or let you spend Christmas with your relatives.

What value has been assigned to the lives that might be lost from that festive relaxation? How does it compare with the benefits for the vast majority who don’t die? If the ministers who advanced the policy — or the opposition parties who accepted it — have answers to those questions, they aren’t sharing them. No doubt in due course a SAGE estimate for the number of additional deaths expected from those five festive days will come to light. But only after the fact, rather than as part of the Government announcement, the scandalously limited political debate about it, or any individual’s decision-making about whether to get together with others for Christmas.

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The pandemic has been a test of our thinking about the value of life. Yet we have largely taken decisions that can have life-or-death consequences without a proper conception of how much we are prepared to give up to prevent deaths. And despite the evidence that it will kill, and polls showing the electorate is split on the case for it, the five-day Christmas Covid amnesty is effectively going through on the nod. It’s a stunningly casual way to enact a policy with potentially fatal consequences.

To repeat, I don’t criticise people who chose to travel and mingle at Christmas and in so doing marginally increase the transmission, symptomatic or otherwise, of the virus. Because we all routinely do things that marginally and sometimes indirectly increase the chances that other people will come to harm. If you drive at 80mph instead of 60mph, you make it more likely that someone will die if you have an accident; you also contribute more to both air pollution and climate change, both of which are associated with some additional fatalities. (And yes, I have driven at 80mph and may well do so again.)

The state that acts in our name, uses our shared resources and sets the rules for all sorts of activities, makes similar decisions of life and death on a regular basis, and generally on the basis of shoddy evidence and limited, if any, debate.

Household mingling over Christmas will mean more people die than would otherwise have died. And that’s a perfectly defensible choice, both for individuals and the people behind the policy that allows and encourages it.

But those are choices that should be based on a clear and open discussion of their consequences, not least since those consequences are likely to fall on others. If our representatives have concluded that having a nice lunch with your family in late December is worth contributing to the risk that someone’s gran dies in January, they should set out that calculation calmly, explicitly and openly, rather than by mute implication.

People choosing to make use of the freedom to mix might want to give it some thought too. Enjoy your turkey.

Her first action as Eco Rep was to design a new recycling system that could be built into the walls of the school. She has filled several pages of A4 with complex schematics showing how it will work: how food waste will be composted into gas which heats the building, how metal will be melted down and turned into cutlery, and how plastics will be shredded and remanufactured into swimming costumes. And yes: all this is to happen inside the school walls.

Unfortunately, the teachers at the school have imposed a set of draconian restrictions on the cadre of Eco Reps. The teachers say the children are only permitted to take forward suggestions that are actually possible.

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This failure of ambition and imagination has been roundly condemned by my daughter, who would have roused a rabble in rebellion if the school holidays hadn’t come around in the nick of time. When September came around, I feared she’d have them chanting “Build the (recycling) wall”, and declaring that the teachers just need a good dose of optimism to get things going.

I fear my daughter belongs in today’s politics far more than I do. Because I rather like confining my thinking to the possible. I’ve got very little interest in bulldozing through to another plane of reality, where up is down, left is right, climate change isn’t happening, the gravitational model of trade doesn’t exist, and liars make the best leaders. I’m a possibilist, and proud of it.

The first possibilists were a faction of the French socialist movement, led by Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon. They were leftist firebrands and radicals, but they opposed the anarchists, and those advocating for a worker’s revolt, because they didn’t believe those solutions could or would ever work. Instead they proclaimed the reformist principle of achieving only what is ‘possible’: working for the measurable, reachable gains instead of the utopian ideal.

You can imagine how a possibilist of the Left would be treated by the Corbynistas today. Anyone who argued for reasonable reforms to improve the lives of the poor – instead of a unicorn policy like Fully Automated Luxury Communism – would be shouted down and condemned. They’d be accused of being a Tory at least a thousand times a day. If they had the audacity to be a woman, they’d get rape threats. If they were Jewish, they’d be accused of conspiring with Israel. If they were black, they’d be called a coconut.

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Meanwhile, we’ve already seen what happens to a possibilist of the right, when Rory Stewart faced the scorn of the true Brexit believers of the Conservative party. Stewart has the makings of the Patron Saint of Possibilism, with his observation that believing in Brexit won’t automatically make it work, any more than believing in a bin will increase its ability to accommodate extra rubbish. But his obsession with the possible killed off his candidacy for leader before it took its first steps.

In healthy political times, we possibilists don’t have to announce ourselves to the world. In healthy political times, everyone shares a common reality – different opinions about what to do with it, but no debate about the basics of facts, or evidence. Possibilists only find themselves reaching for the title when politics has gone mad.

Now is that time: when the assumption is that wishing for a policy is the same thing as making it happen.

Take the 20,000 new police officers that our new Prime Minister has promised to recruit. I support this choice. But it isn’t simple. They need to be paid. They need to be trained. They need equipment. The equipment needs storage. We’ve closed a lot of police buildings over the last nine years, as we downsized the force. These complications need to be addressed. And yet I’ve seen commentators and journalists who tried to discuss these complications condemned as unpatriotic pessimists, with plenty of unrepeatable swear words thrown in for good measure.

The problem is that possibilism is much more boring than populism, in the same way that a pony is more boring than a unicorn.

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And worse, I think people have started to expect so little of their politicians that they’d rather have a lie that draws a smile than the truth. After the Brexit referendum, the most depressing research I saw was from Britain Thinks, who argued that people didn’t mind not getting their £350m a week for the NHS because they never believed it in the first place.

When you stop expecting politicians to do anything they promise, policy just becomes a game of trying to communicate your values. Instead of cutting crime, I’ll communicate that I care about crime by announcing plans to hire more police officers. I’ll communicate that I’m modern by implying I’ll legalise cannabis. I’ll communicate that I’m not a racist by suggesting I might have an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

When the possibilists were in charge, there’d be a 40-page strategy document and implementation plan behind every one of these ideas. But now, who cares? Just say it and make people feel good. After all, when it comes to voting, marginal improvements in your everyday life count for nothing compared with the promise of a unicorn over the horizon.

Will the voters ever tire of being promised the moon on a stick, and demand a real life stick they can actually touch, instead? I’ve no idea. I hope so. My daughter can dream of recycling systems in the wall. But I’d rather a simple system that works and leave utopia where it belongs: in the land of fiction.