In this view — as strongly argued recently by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, for instance — the US arms manufacturing industry, the military, and our politicians are all essentially engaged in a circle of corruption and collusion to make each other rich. This common understanding of the military-industrial complex — and of how politics in Washington works in general — is essentially conspiratorial. The theory goes something like this: big defence contractors bribe the politicians with large donations, and the generals and other government officials with board seats and other lucrative positions, and they in turn come up with reasons to justify shovelling ever-increasing piles of taxpayer money into buying new weapons from the arms makers.

Washington has thus become a “multi-tentacle war machine”, Greenwald says, because “no matter what is going on in the world, they always find — or concoct — reasons why the military budget must grow no matter how inflated it already is”. (Emphasis mine.)

Let’s call this the Corrupt Conspiracy Model of how Washington functions (or dysfunctions). It is a model that can be powerfully convincing, because it taps into the truth that people really are naturally flawed and self-interested creatures, demonstrably prone to corruption. From this viewpoint, Washington politics is all basically a con game led by a pack of greedy psychopaths. As Greenwald notes with some frustration and confusion, this used to be a characteristically Left-wing critique of government and corporate power, but following the Great Political Realignment it’s now become more common to the disaffected Right.

Reading his argument made me recall how, back when I was younger and Left-leaning, I too believed in this model, at least implicitly. As noted, it can be quite persuasive, even satisfying, in its simplicity. It’s also a subtly idealistic and optimistic theory: the American system would work great, just as it was designed to, if not for all the selfish bad actors taking advantage of the system. The only problem was that, after enough time in Washington, I had no choice but to re-evaluate. Because what I found is that the swamp is populated almost wholly not by cynics, but by true believers.

True believers in what? Answering that will require trying to nail down a second, more complex model to explain how people in the Imperial City make decisions.

First, let me qualify by acknowledging that yes, Washington is indeed awash with lobbyists, corrupt politicians, psychopathic executives, cynical operators, and backstabbing climbers. It is a veritable hive of scum and villainy. They just aren’t what really makes the place tick. In fact, all these people conform themselves parasitically to that which does.

The real issue to contend with is that almost no one in Washington actually thinks in the terms of the Corrupt Conspiracy Model; i.e. they don’t think: “I will advocate for a hawkish, interventionist foreign policy so that the resulting wars will benefit the arms industry and make me and my friends rich…” The reality is more disturbing than that, honestly.

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What runs Washington is a Spirit. Or, alternatively, a Story.

No one wants to live a meaningless life. Humans are meaning-seeking creatures and they desperately want, need, what they do to have meaningful value. If they cannot find inherent meaning in life, they are liable to come up with a narrative framework — that is, a story — that imbues what they do with some sense of higher meaning. Since everyone wants to be the hero of their story, the story becomes central to their personal identity. And no one wants their identity to be dull (even if they’re a government bureaucrat).

But while a few very special people can create and maintain their own personal stories indefinitely, living life entirely in their own self-sustained dramatic reality, for most people the much easier and more reassuring route is to simply adopt a collective story that already exists. The more popular or high-status this story is, the more attractive and self-reinforcing it will be — and the harder it will, therefore, be to disbelieve, dissent, and defect from.

Now, when one talks to members of the Washington establishment, the collective story they hold to tends to quickly become apparent.

None are, in their own minds, either corrupt cynics or ideological zealots. Instead they are moderate, prudent, wise “public servants”; the trained and chosen elite guardians of American interests and values. Sensible centrists, they do what must be done to ensure America’s security and prosperity, steering the ship of state along a pragmatic course, eschewing both the goodhearted but naïve idealism of the too-far-Left and the crude jingoistic nationalism of the populist-Right.

This pragmatism does not, of course, preclude their simultaneously being moral exemplars. They embody America’s highest ideals, given that they are the ones extending the light of whatever truly makes America great, whether that be liberal democracy, equality and human rights, pluralism and diversity, scientific progress, or economic liberty. In protecting the global world order of Pax Americana, they make the world safe for American ideals. In fact, these guardians are basically the bulwark of Enlightened Civilisation writ large, taming barbarian savagery wherever it rears its ugly head, whether in Afghanistan or Alabama. Even a moment’s slackness and “the jungle grows back”.

American power is righteous, because it is on the right side of History; as clearly demonstrated by the fact that America is so powerful. And if that power is righteous and good, it deserves to be exercised. To use righteous power to remake the world in our own image would by definition be to make the world better. Thus extending American power is both the most pragmatic and the most idealistic possible course.

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By Mark Lilla

This story, which has dominated Washington since at least the end of the Cold War, is what we might label The Consensus. Maybe all or some elements of The Consensus are true. Or maybe it’s all nonsense. It doesn’t really matter; that’s not the point. Those who submit themselves to The Consensus can by doing so automatically consider themselves better people, engaged in more meaningful lives. And their peers will consider them to be as well.

A term that one is liable to hear used in Washington is “Serious Person”. On being asked to meet with someone he doesn’t know (maybe a journalist, or a potential new hire), for example, a Very Important Washingtonian may first inquire of his staff: “Well, is he a Serious Person?” But what makes a person Serious? A Serious Person is, naturally, an orthodox follower of The Consensus. Asking if someone is a Serious Person is a bit like a secular version of how one might have asked, back in the day, whether some new fellow was in fact a “God-fearing Christian?” “Yes,” would come the reply, “and he went to Yale.” “Good enough, let’s put him in charge of the OSS,” you could then say with confidence.

Rumour that some new acquaintance is in fact a Serious Person is greatly reassuring, as it means he is not a “Wingnut”. A Wingnut is an unsociable crank, living outside of The Consensus. Wingnuts demonstrate this by suggesting unserious ideas, such as cutting the defence budget, curtailing the surveillance state, or questioning the demands of the public health bureaucracy. Glenn Greenwald is a Wingnut par excellence. Nobody wants to be associated with a Wingnut, as that can taint your reputation as a Serious Person. And then you’ll never be invited to a swanky conference in Aspen again. Which is probably why for every mile closer to Capitol Hill a foreign policy think tank is, the more measurably it advocates in favour of militant internationalism. These are the Serious Institutions, able to court the serious money necessary to afford prime real estate.

Here then is the point: why is it so likely that any given person in the Washington “Blob” will automatically support raising the defence budget, or intervening militarily in some country abroad, or otherwise expanding the security state? In the vast majority of cases, it’s not because they’re taking bribes from some defence contractor. It’s because they simply want more than anything to be counted among the Serious People. And to do that they first have to accept the word and practice of The Consensus.

Sometimes they may not fully buy it, but conform merely because it’s the path of least resistance. Often, they do buy it completely. I once had a former General and Director of the CIA tell me, with complete earnestness, that the United States had to occupy every single “ungoverned space” on earth — every conflict zone, every “rogue state”, every barren patch of sand large enough for an Isis terrorist to do doughnuts in a Toyota pickup. No one was paying him to say this (yet); it was pure idealistic conviction. And there are a lot of people in Washington far less distinguished than he who labour daily to help shore up The Consensus: legions of non-profit workers, lowly staffers, and ambitious interns who happily pump out endless Consensus-reiterating briefing papers, reports, op-eds, and legislative bills (all of which are written by people under 35 who have no idea what they’re doing, by the way). The military-industrial complex doesn’t have to bribe any of them. They are working to cultivate the illustrious aura of a Serious Person.

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By Anton Jäger

Any financial rewards are secondary to the power, prestige, and psychological assurance of being counted among the ruling class and holding the right opinions. This does not of course mean there aren’t significant financial rewards that flow to senior figures, but to the “public servant” they genuinely bear no conceivable trace of wrongful quid pro quo. As far as they are concerned, they are merely doing the right thing in service to the public and the nation, and being fairly compensated for it. Being paid to sit on Raytheon’s board and lobby for a strong national defence is public service, as is being paid by CNN to go on TV and call dissenters a dangerous threat to our democracy. Advancing The Consensus is, after all, the essence of public service. This complex is utterly impervious to any charges of corruption or hypocrisy, because from the inside such charges literally sound like the mad rantings of an immoral and maliciously anti-American Wingnut.

It would be tempting to call this ideological capture, but I don’t think that quite describes it. The Consensus is not an ideology with clear or coherent doctrines. And it is extremely adaptable and flexible, seamlessly incorporating new threats and opportunities (which is why “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now regularly cited as a top foreign policy priority). Instead, it works more loosely, subconsciously, to shape what individuals and institutions value and what they believe is right and normal and just. It really is more like a deep story about the world and how it works; or a spirit that moves subjects without their understanding how or why, or even that it exists.

Which is why I think I need to introduce one more element in order to fully explain what really runs Washington.

Everyone and everything needs a hierarchy of values to operate, otherwise they risk having no telos — no purpose, motivation, or orientation for action. And at the top of this pyramid of values or principles must necessarily be some highest value or principle, from which all others descend.

Bureaucracies, which are themselves pyramidal, subsume an individual’s values and objectives into themselves; the individual’s value hierarchy and telos is then effectively restructured or replaced by the telos superimposed from above by the bureaucracy. Which is why the bureaucracy so often seems to co-opt its individuals and take on a life of its own. But many singular bureaucracies, such as the Defence and State Departments, exist side-by-side in Washington and operate simultaneously. And, at least theoretically, they are all part of the same government and on the same side. What unites them in direction and orientation, if anything? Some pyramid of higher values, naturally. This is the role of The Consensus.

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The West needs to grow up

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Does The Consensus itself also exist as part of an even higher story? Maybe. The author Paul Kingsnorth has I think wisely described there being, at the pinnacle of our collective Western civilisational subconscious, an “empty throne,” where once sat God:

“[E]very culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. It does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”

“The modern experiment,” however, “has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — ‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress.’” But one sacred value must necessarily rule above all others, and “when a culture kills its sovereign, the throne will not remain empty for long”.

What now occupies this empty throne today, if anything? Kingsnorth has suggested it is “money”. As I’ve written before, I don’t think that’s it. I think it is something more fundamental: I think it’s what could be called the spirit in Man that hungers for infinite “control” — meaning power itself. The power to have all good things, from material comfort to equality, without any limits or contradictions; power over all evils and all suffering and all dangers; power over human nature. It’s the desire for the power to eliminate all friction between the will and the world; to have the power to overcome all resistance and achieve heaven on earth, as fast as possible, by any means necessary.

The efforts of those few poor souls who spend their days trying to reason with Washington and convince it to follow some policy of “realism and restraint” are doomed. The place is busily fighting a holy war against the terms of existence.

When a Wingnut reveals himself as a Wingnut, it is because he has resisted the unrestrained exercise of power in some way. Such an act is grounds not for admiration of virtue, but for shock and suspicion: by doing so he has challenged the whole story of the new sacred order. In a real sense the Wingnut is not just unsociable but impious.

It may be that at some point in the past, when the empty throne was occupied by its rightful ruler, America’s governing institutions and the people who make their gears turn participated in a greater shared story, which subsumed their lower interests and appetites and rightly ordered them with a telos oriented toward a genuine highest good. Maybe this was God. Maybe it was the American Idea, or the Republican Ideal. Whatever it was, perhaps its very existence moderated and disciplined them. But if the baser value of power has now been elevated to this highest place, then they no longer have any internalised limits, and their quest has no stopping point. There are no longer any moral brakes on the run-away train of the state.

If so, then even all the money of the military-industrial complex definitely doesn’t run Washington. Indeed, if the military-industrial complex didn’t exist we’d have to invent it immediately just so that we could hand it all of our money.

A version of this essay originally appeared on The Upheaval on Substack.

The word “character” can mean a person (as in “he’s a sleazy character”), or someone of unusual probity and integrity, or a printed or written letter. In fact, the word originally meant not a person but the sign or description of a person. Your character wasn’t the kind of human being you were but an image of it, and this image could be either true or false to your inner nature. Your outward appearance could either reveal or conceal your inward reality.

People whose talk and behaviour masks their inner being are known as politicians. They say things like “I came into politics to make a difference”, rather than “I came into politics because I’ve always been an ambitious little sod”, while inserting the phrase “very clear” into every second sentence. If they are asked whether it’s true that they have just been sick all over the Speaker of the House, they point out that there are matters of far greater importance to attend to like the cost of living, or the war in Ukraine. They are meticulously scripted creatures, in a way that dinner ladies and truck drivers are not.

Yet they are not scripted in the way that actors are. It wouldn’t make sense to ask whether someone playing Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is sincere or insincere. The terms simply don’t apply, any more than a plumber could be said to mend a pipe sincerely or insincerely. The actor is just doing a job. Politicians, however, are expected to be sincere, and sometimes they are. The problem is that there is so much they can’t say, such as “You’d be barking mad to vote for us”, whereas an actor says all there is to be said. There is nothing he or she is concealing, such as what their character was doing before coming on stage. Since the character didn’t exist at that point, he or she was doing nothing at all. When an actor asked Harold Pinter what he was doing before making his entrance, Pinter replied “Mind your own fucking business”.

Boris Johnson rose to power largely because he was prepared to ditch the script. When someone remarked in his presence that grandiose schemes tended to collapse, he replied “Ah yes, all flesh is grass”, which is not an appropriate verbal move for a politician to make. You are supposed to be practical, not a cracker-barrel philosopher. Even so, stepping outside the script can be part of the script. The comedian Frankie Howerd got some of his biggest laughs from making sardonic comments on the mediocre stuff he was supposed to perform. Clowns spend a lot of time rehearsing falling over their own feet. Even when Johnson is being serious, he maintains a slight ironic distance between his outward bluster and what with pardonable exaggeration one might call his inner self — a distance which suggests that deep down it’s all a game, “it” stretching all the way from the House of Commons to human existence. The only reality is naked self-interest.

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Boris Johnson is no clown

By Terry Eagleton

Johnson blurs the line between performing himself and being himself. Clowning around, not taking himself seriously, is an integral part of what he is. He blurs the distinction between theatre and reality, rather as the concept of character does. The idea began in the theatre and was then extended to everyday life. The same goes for the word “person”, which originally meant a mask worn by an actor. It then mutated into “personality”, meaning either a celebrity or someone who is lively and engaging. Some persons have plenty of personality while others, like Ant and Dec, have none at all. In fact, you aren’t even meant to be able to distinguish between them. There are also personages, in the sense of people of elevated status, but most of us are just off-the-peg persons.

“Personal” and “individual” are relational terms. There couldn’t be just one person, any more than there could be only one number or one letter. We are human by virtue of the kind of bodies we have, but we become personal only through our dealings with each another. If none of the faces around the cradle actually speaks to the baby, or communicates with it in some way, it will continue to be human but fail to become a person.

Personalities are bouncy, glittering, larger-than-life types, entertaining but potentially overbearing. They aren’t necessarily eccentric, however, which is where they differ from yet another sense of the word “character”. To have character is to be solid and dependable, but to be a character is almost the opposite. It means being amusingly idiosyncratic, as in “Gad, but he’s a character, sir!” Hovering somewhere between the patronising and the complimentary, it captures a distinctively English view of individuals as quirky, off-beat and lovably eccentric. From Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch to Mr. Pickwick and Miss Marple, each of them is his or her inimitable self. The word “singular” means both one and peculiar. If there is something appealing about eccentrics, however, there is also something alarming. Pushed to an extreme, idiosyncrasy ends up in a kind of madness. It is related to the word “idiot”.

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By Terry Eagleton

It is this which accounts for much of the popularity of Charles Dickens. Dickens’s characters tend to be notoriously freakish, identifiable by some quaint habit or outlandish physical feature. Jane Austen’s characters speak the common language of polite society, but Dickens’s figures each have their own trade-mark mode of speech, whether quick-fire delivery, verbose ramblings, pious cant or portentous rhetoric. Each of them seems locked into his or her own private world, which randomly collide before bouncing off each other again. Like clocks or mechanical dolls, they just keep repetitively doing their own thing, unresponsive to their surroundings. It isn’t clear whether these oddballs are nothing but their appearances, like people glimpsed for a moment in a crowded street, or whether they have a secret hinterland of emotions and experiences which is inaccessible to others. Like rogues, in the zoological sense of the word, they live apart from the general herd; but if this is true of them all, then there isn’t a herd at all, just a host of deviations without a norm. A very English individualism is built into Dickens’s way of seeing men and women, and though it is wildly entertaining it can also be slightly sinister. Coherent communication between characters falters and falls apart. The eccentric moves quickly into the grotesque. The world is vivid but fragmentary, full of delightful bits and pieces but hard to grasp as a whole.

“Rogue” is a word often used of our departure-lounge Prime Minister, both in the sense of wandering from the pack and of being unprincipled but likeable. Rogues aren’t likeable despite being unprincipled but because of it. Because they kick over the traces, they allow us to do the same vicariously, which is always a source of pleasure. Because it is vicarious, we can smash the conventions and rip up the regulations while remaining eminently respectable. The reputable citizen needs the rogue as Wise needs Morecambe or angels need devils. Without devils, Dostoevsky remarks, the world would die of sheer boredom. The angels may play their harps in ecstasy, but the devils have all the best tunes.

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Boris Johnson broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Unscrupulous types are said to lack integrity, though it’s not clear what this means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines integrity as having strong moral principles, but also as the state of being whole. What is the connection between the two? Perhaps it’s the idea that being unprincipled corrodes or corrupts your nature so that it’s no longer all there. Or maybe a principled person is consistent, rather than self-divided and self-contradictory. Otherwise there seems no reason why acting morally should mean being complete. Lurking behind this word may be the Romantic-humanist view that we act well when we bring the whole of our being into play, as opposed to being lopsided. But the whole of my being may include an overwhelming desire to murder my hairdresser, which it would be better to repress. Ideas of wholeness, like visions of harmony, are usually suspect.

Boris Johnson is a character without much character. He is a character in the Dickensian sense, but not in the Austenite one. Or, to put it another way, he has too much personality and too little consistent selfhood. It was because he is likely to quote Horace when asked about the rate of inflation that a public bored with plastic politicians elected him. But it was for just the same reasons that he couldn’t govern. It helps to be a character to scramble into power, but you need to have character to stay there.

Day after day, 10 years ago, The Telegraph brilliantly drip-fed astonishing revelation after astonishing revelation on to its front pages. These stories, drawn from a disc it had purchased from an anonymous source, told of how our elected representatives were greedily rewarding themselves to make up for salaries they evidently viewed as being too low.

Such large news events often have a contradictory afterlife. On the one hand, they seem game-changing. But on the other, once the story has died down, it feels as though it had never happened. In fact, this story may have slipped from the front pages but it sunk down to form part of the deep sediment of the whole flow of politics. The effects of that scandal are one of the underlying causes of the current political crisis engulfing the UK.

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One very clear memory I have of the whole affair is when I bumped into an MP in Parliament Square one morning. Another slew of MPs had just been felled by the day’s revelations, and I was returning from the BBC’s Westminster studios. These were good days for journalists. Not simply for those directly involved in the leak and dissemination of the story, but for anybody reckoned to be in the opinion business. Back then, if an MP caught sight of a comment journalist, they would dart over and desperately try to accumulate some small residue of sympathy in anticipation of the Telegraph’s tumbrils.

The MP I bumped into asked what I thought the effects of the revelations would be. I batted the question back to him. “I think we will see the increasing Lib Dem-isation of our politicians,” this non-Lib Dem politician said to me. It was a slightly curious phrase, and I asked for clarification.

The point this MP was making was not – as I had first confusedly thought – that somehow the scandal would cause a great boost for whatever ideological causes were that month being pushed by the Liberal Democrat Party.

Rather, the point was a social one. The Liberal Democrat party had, in recent years, comprised a group of distinctly indistinct individuals. Noticeable among their traits was how unnoticeable they were. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with any of them. Or many of them. But almost all of them gave off the aura of being unremarkable local council officials who had, to their only slight surprise, ended up in the House of Commons.

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This wasn’t the case with all of their MPs, any more than the other parties were filled solely with colourful, brilliant and experienced statesmen. But there was enough that was recognisable in the type. My MP interlocutor’s point was that, in the months and years ahead, it seemed likely that the sort of people putting themselves forward for careers in Westminster would change. People with little to lose might make a stab at it, while those with much to lose might think about side-stepping any political calling.

Politics, until then, had attracted a good deal of people who had a variety of lucrative side careers (at the Bar, for instance). There are, of course, those who believe that being an MP should be a full-time job, completely filling every hour of every day, in an endless push of unceasing legislation. But many think politics would be better if MPs were discouraged from being overly busy in the House. One effect of the expenses scandal was to discourage from Westminster anybody who had the skill, ability and sufficient demand for their services to combine two careers. They started to hesitate before considering politics.

The public shaming during that period was such that it (rightly) harmed not just every culprit’s political ambitions but their reputation in every field of their life. As a result, people who did not need this sort of aggravation in their life simply stayed away.

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The advantages of being an MP inverted in a morass of public distrust and dislike. As their reputation plummeted, going in to politics turned from something that might burnish a person’s reputation to something that could only diminish it. Parliament started to look unattractive to people with a lot of options in front of them, attracting people with very few – if any – alternatives.

“No big loss” some people will say. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps Parliamentarians should be solely dedicated to the one job that they have been elected to perform in the House of Commons. But it is futile to deny that such a settled consensus attracts – and creates – a particular type of person. The type of person who is happiest of all sitting on committees, coming up with minor pieces of legislation and disputing with colleagues over these committee and legislative matters.

Perhaps such people are needed in politics. But for a political scene to be successful, it must attract people with a wide variety of skills and attributes. Among them will be those who are distinguished but impatient, those who are daring rather than cautious, and those who are willing to take risks rather than proceeding timidly according to the moment’s norm.

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After a set of embarrassments as comprehensive as those of a decade ago, it was inevitable that things would change. And indeed they did. The expenses system back then was rotten, not just allowing for abuse, but clearly encouraging it. The fact that a number of people went to prison for their extreme version of what most other Parliamentarians were doing was evidence that the system needed exposing and revising.

But as you look around the benches of all the major parties in Parliament today, you will see another effect of the scandal. They are all increasingly filled with people for whom politics is absolutely everything and who, therefore, have very little to bring to it. Few have achieved anything distinctive before heading into it. Few are in demand after leaving it.

The Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, for example, went to run a bus company in 2017, after losing his seat in the previous general election. A year later, he announced that he was leaving the role for unspecified future challenges after having “achieved goals“.

Who knows? Perhaps the consequences of this first political earthquake of the decade were among the reasons that the system was so unable to cope with the second. The House of Commons today seems to be increasingly stacked with people who are timid, limited and fearful of taking risks. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that people with little hinterland of their own can envisage little hinterland for the country they aspire to run.

An array of functions that were once the recognised duty of elected representatives have been progressively handed over to people from business and technocrats with no democratic mandate. Is it because our politicians are so bedevilled by a lack of confidence in their own abilities? Perhaps.

But it is also undoubtedly a consequence of the theory, embedded deeply in the psyche of the political class over the last 40 years, that governments shouldn’t meddle because ultimately the market and experts know best.

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By James Kirkup

Take the running of the economy – arguably the most crucial function any government can perform and one pivotal to the prosperity of a nation and the wellbeing of its citizens. Conventional wisdom has it that the decision by the New Labour government to grant ‘independence’ to the Bank of England in 1997 was a wise and far-sighted one. Few now question the merits of relinquishing control of the money supply – a cornerstone of the management of any economy – to unelected technocrats.

Yet, given the value of monetary policy in the armoury of any government – for example, by giving it the power to influence levels of investment and stimulate demand through the control of interest rates and quantitative easing – it beggars belief that a Labour government should wish to give it away. And it was given away to career bankers who, far from being ‘independent’, have been inclined to direct policy according to the interests of fellow bankers and asset holders, rather than those whose lives are rooted in the real economy.

In his autobiography, Tony Blair admits that, when it comes to the economy, he sees the role of government as nothing greater than “to stabilise and then get out of the way”. It is a striking departure from the attitude of previous Labour governments who understood only too well the need to use every available economic lever at their disposal to create jobs, build homes and fund public services.

That Corbyn’s Labour – which rails unremittingly against austerity and the rapacious power of finance – has not committed to restoring democratic control over the Bank of England is an indication of how deeply the ‘hands off’ philosophy has infected political thought.

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As with economic policy, so it has been for the public sector, with politicians of all colours eager to divest themselves of responsibility and control. The ideological drive to roll back the frontiers of the state pervades the public sphere at all levels, with few local institutions or services having escaped the onward march of outsourcing. Even modest, yet crucial, jobs that keeps our communities ticking over – the bus driver, the hospital porter, the town hall cleaner, the dinner lady – have often been contracted out.

There was a time when a shared civic pride existed between the communities running these services and the workers who delivered them. But with a diminished public ethos has come a diminished sense of public duty. These community-facing jobs are now seen as purely transactional, a commodified source of profit for an impersonal market. Little wonder that this new, abstract relationship between communities and their public servants has served to intensify the sense of loss and deracination felt in so many of our towns and cities.

The consequence of government disengagement from public provision is most apparent in the area of housing. We don’t build council homes anymore, and the government has no serious plan for addressing the chronic housing shortage. The result has been catastrophic. Try telling a young couple attempting to get on today’s property ladder, but faced with crippling costs due to inadequate supply, that the ‘market knows best’.

And perhaps the most indefensible shirking of responsibility by politicians has been in handing over so much of our justice system, including the running of prisons, to private companies. The punishment of crime, and such matters of moral right and wrong, ought surely to be the responsibility of the State alone, not of commercial entities seeking to extract a profit. Politicians who agreed to put the delivery of justice into the hands of multinational companies should hang their heads in shame.

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The fake patriotism of the liberal Left

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This ‘hands off’ approach sits neatly with the attitude of most parliamentarians to the European Union over the last 40 years. Our relationship with that institution has been one of increasing surrender of powers from Westminster to Brussels. We can see the result of that now: our MPs are petrified of control coming back. They are rabbits caught in the headlights. A parliament atrophied by decades of having its legislation dictated by someone else has given its members a mindset similar to that of the average parish councillor. No wonder MPs are reluctant to assume responsibility over laws governing every area of public life.

The ceding of control over large parts of the economy and public services to business and technocrats has profound implications for democracy. It weakens accountability and reduces the status and power of politicians. As the functions of government, national and local, have been outsourced, so has responsibility – and ultimately the blame when things go wrong.

This isn’t a crude argument about privatisation versus public ownership. Any economy, if it is to be successful, needs a flourishing private sector, and God knows politicians have often done more harm than good when it comes to establishing the conditions for one. No, this is a debate about the nature of our society and the health of our democracy, about the proper role of our elected representatives and how much we value a sense of national and civic pride.

In 2008, we saw where a ‘light touch’ government philosophy and misplaced faith in the ‘expertise’ of bankers and technocrats led us. Now, the frontiers of the state must be rolled forward just a bit, and the role of government and elected representatives as a force for good reasserted. But to achieve that, we need a new class of politician who actually believes it.

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Don’t believe what those idiots are telling you about echo chambers

By Peter Franklin

Writing for CapX, the pollster Matt Singh adds a third concept – the “salience gap”.

This one is about what those claiming expertise in the field of communications call ‘cut through’. To make an impact, a message has first to be heard; then it has to be trusted; and, finally, it has to be thought both relevant and important –i.e. salient.

Singh calls this the salience gap because of the chasm between the preoccupations of a small group of politicians and political journalists and what the general public considers to be worth paying attention too:

“Imagine being on an island where more than one in five people have never heard of Cambridge Analytica, gammon is an old-fashion pork cut, 78 per cent of people don’t talk about politics most days, and 99 per cent of people don’t watch Prime Minister’s Questions.

“In fact that island exists, and you may well be on it now. It’s called Great Britain.”

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The tragedy of the ‘gammons’

By Peter Franklin

The gammon controversy was a small, if nasty, storm-in-a-teacup stirred-up by, and largely limited to, political Twitter in the UK. However, the Cambridge Analytica story had trans-Atlantic repercussions:

“For weeks this story occupied the news, and political Twitter. It would be difficult to go near either, at any point during that period, without hearing the story or the fierce debate that it prompted.

“Yet when we asked the public, in polling conducted at the height of the scandal and published here for the first time, 21 per cent said they had not recently heard any news story about social media or data privacy. “

They probably did hear or see something about it, but clearly it didn’t register. What’s more the true number is probably higher than 21%, because, as Singh explains, there are always some people who claim to be familiar with a news story even when they’re not.

Then we need to add in those who do genuinely recall the story, but don’t consider it that important:

“But even if the public know about a story, do they care? Theresa May’s disastrous 2017 speech to the Conservative Party conference was covered extensively, and many politicos took to Twitter to describe it as an ‘epitaph’ to her political career, while in reality it made almost no difference.”

It made no difference, because what made Theresa May’s speech “disastrous” was that she had a coughing fit. The commentariat saw it as symbolic; the public saw it as a bit of bad luck – not that most of them pay much attention to party conference speeches anyway.

Even when some event does move public opinion, the effects are usually short-lived – leaving a tiny number of stories with a lasting impact.

Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Britain from 1902 to 1905, may have been the last politician to acknowledge this truth. It was he who was supposed to have said: “Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all.” Refined flippancy was very much Balfour’s thing, but in respect to the discipline of ‘news management’ he wasn’t far off.

In our own time, the more thoughtful kind of politician will privately admit the same thing, but that doesn’t stop politics – and, more seriously, policy making – from revolving around stories that make no real difference to public opinion, let alone the true state of the world.

Why do they do it, then? Why, given what people like Matt Singh can tell them about its ultimate insignificance, do the politicians, the press officers, the journalists, the lobbyists and the PR industry continue to chase one another’s tails?

Sophocles is said to have likened the male libido to being chained to a lunatic. Contemporary politics is chained to another lunatic – obsession with the news.

It has massively biased the culture of politics to those whose thoughts and actions are fast but shallow, attention grabbers with nothing to give.

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