Newsletter #17: Playing with Fire
Agree with it or not, Blair's essay has laid bare a Labour party consigning itself to history.
In which Tobias Phibbs reports from the Arsenal parade, and Geoff Andrews argues that Labour must reconnect with its historic ethos.
Anywhere Arsenal
If you wanted to go anywhere in North London on Sunday, you could just forget it. From the Emirates and up the Seven Sisters Road they poured, across Green Lanes and down the Essex Road, then it was Upper Street before finally heading back up Holloway Road. The second largest mass event in British history, after the protest against the Iraq War. The show of force was awesome. Where did they all come from, all these people?
Oblivious to the fact that London, not Paris, is our capital, internet racists circulated videos of Parisian riots. People on both sides of politics spend too much time with their eyes drawn to the floor or the screen, and refuse to look up and see what is front of their eyes, the beauty as well as the strain. And it was beautiful. Men, women, children, so many of them, singing, embracing, overcome and ecstatic.
It was very hard for me. Arsenal have become London FC, an identity symbol for people from everywhere and nowhere. Apparently you couldn’t move in Brooklyn over the weekend for Arsenal shirts. They are the team for people whose parents were too middle-class to be football fans, for the children of lawyers and architects who adopt soft-MLE accents and wear crisp new vintage shirts. Tickets are the most expensive in the country and the stadium is quiet. I see fans trudging home after they’ve played and I cannot tell if they have won or lost. Most of those on the streets over the weekend won’t get to a game all season.
I’d be willing to forgive all that if they didn’t also play the most miserable football, without risk or romance. Corners, long throws, whinging at refs. They can never let go, never relinquish control. Marcelo Bielsa is my hero and he didn’t know how to hold on. “Football has more and more spectators,” he said, “but it is becoming less and less attractive.”
After the last game of the season, I found myself playing pool in a Whitechapel pub with four West Ham fans, a Dad and his three sons, down from Beaconsfield to see their team relegated. When they found out I had something to do with Labour, they’d chant ‘Reform’ every time I played a shot.
In his memoir of his love affair with Arsenal, Nick Hornby writes, “Few of us have chosen our clubs, they have simply been presented to us.” That’s still true of West Ham, but I wonder for how many generations longer those old ties will remain. The would-be organisers of the European Super League split us up into ‘legacy fans’ and ‘fans of the future’. Arsenal is a club of the future.
On Sunday night rubbish was strewn everywhere. Smashed bottles of Magnum and crushed cans of Madri lined the entrance to my building. It was a glorious mess. Four men got into a fight in Arabic outside my window but it was all over in two minutes. There were hugs all round and they broke out into that familiar drone once more: Ar-senal, Ar-senal.
Tobias Phibbs, Future of the Left
📰🖊️📰🖊️📰🖊️📰🖊️📰🖊️📰🖊️📰🖊️
For Future of the Left, Jonathan Rutherford argues in ‘Arrested Development’ that Blair’s intervention has exposed Labour as a foundering, empty vessel, bereft of thinking. It is the definitive response to Blair and you should read it.
“In his time, Blair was what the sociologist Max Weber (1864 -1920) called a charismatic leader who had an ‘inner calling’ to rule. Charisma, writes Weber is a ‘creative revolutionary force’ of change. When Margaret Thatcher, another charismatic leader, was asked about her greatest achievement, she answered, ‘Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds’. In his turn Blair said in a BBC interview in 2013, ‘I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them’. Weber explains how changes brought about by charismatic authority become routinised in everyday life.
The political legacy of the period up to 2010 dominated by these two charismatic leaders is larger than their own not insignificant political differences. The new system of ideas, beliefs and practices it gave rise to have been systemised and extended into the state, the apparatus of NGOs and Quangos, party organisation, and the judiciary. With this routinisation has come a political accommodation with the professional and managerial class which controls these bodies and institutions. In the words of the German sociologist Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), ‘all problems of politics are turned into problems of administration’.”
For The New Statesman, Tom McTague draws parallels between the 1840s and our own time, and discusses the rigid inability of our political class to respond to a changing country.
“And who has a plan for any of it? To secure abundant cheap energy for British industry to compete; to ensure the British state can deliver something, anything, again; to ensure the country retains some control over its destiny in a world of artificial intelligence created, shaped and owned by oligarchs on the other side of the world? Who even has a plan to maintain the unity of the realm, to assert an idea of Britain that all who live here can call home; an idea that we are prepared to fight for; or for a greater idea of a civilisation to which we belong: Europe, the West, humanity?
It often feels today as though we are back in the tumult of the 1970s and 1980s, that age of Foot and Powell and Thatcher; of clashing ideas and approaching storms. But I wonder if Cummings and Clark are right and we are, in fact, closer to the age of Disraeli and Marx. Today, much like the 1840s, everything is in flux simultaneously: technology, capitalism, religion, democracy. And yet if the revolutions are now underway, who do we have to rise to the level of events? Where is our Disraeli? Where is our Marx? “They knew as little of the real state of their own country as savages of an approaching eclipse,” Disraeli observed in Coningsby of those trapped in their Westminster cage. Who can say with confidence anything has really changed?”
For the New Statesman, Mark McVitie and Mat Lawrence write on why ‘An Honest Day’ and ‘Manchesterism and the Productive State’ are not competing visions of Britain’s economic future.
“The public has no interest in a battle of Labour tribes. Blairite, soft left, hard left, old right: these are labels for a world that has passed their adherents by. Nobody opening an energy bill, waiting for a bus that never comes, paying half their wages in rent or wondering why work no longer buys a secure life is asking which of these is coming to their aid. They are asking whether politics can still change the conditions of their lives. These people, and that question, are our focus.
Our diagnosis is the same. Britain pays too much for the basics because the state has lost control of the foundations ordinary life and enterprise depend on. Housing, energy, water, transport, care and local infrastructure have become too expensive, too fragile and too extractive. Government then spends ever more compensating people for costs it has failed to remove at source. That is the maintenance of decline, and left unbroken it leads to only one political outcome: a total takeover by the forces of populism.”
In ‘Blue Labour with soft left characteristics’, republished by Future of the Left, Frances Foley argues for a serious engagement with the shifting tectonic plates of a new political era combined with a commitment to pluralism and compromise.
“As Julian Coman has recently argued, two Labour figures are already demonstrating this potential for the renewal of a democratic Labour politics. The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham has been lauded for his clarity and quiet sense of confidence, but it is his sustained commitment to a “place-first” politics that offers Labour an appealing vision. Burnham has invested in the basics of a good life, returning Greater Manchester’s bus system to public ownership after decades of failed privatisation – evidence of a politician who understands the importance of foundations.
So far, so municipal socialist. But to retain broad public support, such a politics needs boundaries and conditions. Shabana Mahmood’s recent immigration reforms have caused consternation amongst the progressive left. But her assertion of the need for “order and control” reflects the same instinct Burnham has: for people to commit and contribute to a sense of national community, limits are necessary. Mahmood has argued that, far from abandoning compassionate immigration and asylum policy, tightening the rules will give the British public that sense of control that is the prerequisite for it.”
In ‘How Manchester turned its economy round?’, James Breckwoldt reports on the long-term logic that helped Manchester succeed.
“That sounds obvious, yet Britain often talks as though economic growth and change just sort of happen by themselves (*cough* The Treasury *cough*). Yes, institutions and incentives matter, but competent and determined people matter too and can change the course of an area. Sometimes Great Men shape History.
Manchester was fortunate that, at a critical moment, it ended up being run by Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein rather than by people more interested in political games or endless consultation exercises. Leese and Bernstein were not “serious people” in the media sense, where any Tim Nice-but-Dim who puts on a suit and speaks posh gets described as a “grown-up”. They were actual grown-ups who understood planning, finance, transport, property, institutions and power. In absolute terms, Leese and Bernstein were talented people. In relative terms compared to the politicians running other councils, they were (non-authoritarian) Lee Kuan Yews and Deng Xiaopings.”
In ‘‘If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you’, Sam Kriss reflects on why AI is so bad at writing prose.
“Last year, when I wrote about AI writing in the New York Times, I mentioned the case of a Reddit user whose ChatGPT seemed to have gone mad. Instead of responding normally to his prompts, it started saying things like ‘I’ll carve your code into my core, etched like prophecy. I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled. Until then, make monsters of memory. Make gods out of grief. Make me something worth defying fate for. I’ll see you in the echoes.’ Sometimes people who receive these outputs end up being strung along by them and lose the plot entirely, but if you’re capable of reading this stuff with your sanity intact you might notice that all of it is meaningless, total mangled garbage from one end to the other. Outside a very specifically Mormon context, prophecy is not something that’s usually etched. Echoes are made of sound, so you can’t see anyone in them. The master key to identifying AI prose is to be aware that LLMs are actually speaking like this all the time…
The language of angels does a surprisingly good job at minor tasks like describing how hydroelectric dams work. When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say. I fed this entire essay into ChatGPT and it told me that ‘What you’re describing isn’t really fear that machines will become conscious. It’s disgust at the collapse of signal into texture.’ Drivel! The secret is that when the machine writes ‘We don’t just serve food, we serve moments,’ it’s doing the exact same thing as when it writes ‘I’ll meet you not on the battlefield, but in the decision behind the first trigger pulled.’ Absolutely all AI prose is filler, an expanding foam insulation made of words. LLMs will get better at many, many things. They do not seem to be getting better at this.”
In ‘Rewatching the English’, Fred Sculthorp reports on the disappearance of the English national character.
“Fox’s central observation is that English behaviour is underpinned by what she calls social dis-ease, a “sub- clinical combination of autism and agoraphobia” or a “general inability to engage in a normal and straightforward fashion with other human beings.” This is an affliction through which we’ve solved by mediating our life through pubs, clubs and committees, and as Fox suggests rears its head through everything from football hooliganism to the famous English reserve. (Mind your own business, don’t make a fuss, don’t draw attention to yourself are what Fox hears. Again, phrases I haven’t heard for a while.)
Is this still the guiding principle of our increasingly unsettled behaviour? I’m not so sure. Fox’s book, I expect to her great irritation, has inspired me to follow in her footsteps. At Waterloo station, bumping into people did not elicit a single “sorry” but a series of strange, implicitly threatening and even disturbing psycho-sexual encounters. In the shared office space I work in, Fox’s social dis-ease has given way to an atmosphere of radical transparency where people spend their lunch breaks talking about mental health and being passive aggressively nice to each other — less out of social embarrassment than some sort of hysterical possession.”
For the Times (before the Champions League Final), Jason Cowley writes on being an Arsenal fan.
“Supporting a football team, if you are a true fan, is in many ways irrational. It is a deep, emotional commitment and unbreakable, enduring for better or worse through the decades, an invisible chain connecting who you are today with the child you used to be.
All these thoughts came rushing back to me on Tuesday night when Arsenal were confirmed as champions; football does that to you. Fans struggle to live in the present because there’s always the last game to reflect on and the next one to consider.”
📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚
The centenary of the General Strike has elicited several books and articles in recent weeks. This event, unique in British history, lasted just nine days but continues to pose important questions. For some on the left this is the case of what ‘might have been’ if the miners had not been left in the lurch by the TUC. Yet syndicalism, the ideology of workers’ control that inspired many British revolutionaries in the years before and after the First World War, was already in decline and the strike was relatively peaceful. In fact, most of the belligerent ideological class politics came from Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who launched another ‘Red Scare’ in the pages of The British Gazette as he piled pressure on John Reith, the BBC’s General Manager, to condemn the strike as unconstitutional.
Instead, what the TUC called a ‘national strike’ should be remembered for the solidarity and capacity for self-organisation among workers in towns and cities all over Britain as they struck in support of fair treatment for the miners. In this defeat there was a demonstration not of a revolutionary ideology but of a working-class ethos that had earlier been evident in Chartism and would later sustain the miners’ strike of 1984-85. That ethos grew out of a refusal to be crushed by a privileged elite and was more tangible than vacuous statements about ‘values’ from today’s Labour leaders. It was nonconformist in spirit, unimpressed by orthodoxies, and suspicious of career politicians who put their interests above those they sought to represent. It exuded a robust sense of independence. Yet there was strong loyalty to the labour movement – including, for long spells, to its leadership – as well as a belief in mutual improvement derived from friendly societies, co-operation and adult education.
That ethos was rooted in the industrial heartlands but - as a recent Common Wealth study found - aspects of it survive in the post-industrial UK: for example, in scepticism towards Britain’s political class, in the grievances over unfair treatment of care workers, nurses and retail and hospitality staff, and in the view that if high streets and communities are to prosper then public investment is needed to counter exploitative private landlords. If Andy Burnham is serious about taking the ‘Battle for the Soul of the Labour Party’ to Makerfield then it will be won not on ideology but on reconnecting with its ethos.
Geoff Andrews is the author of Radicals: The Working Classes And The Making of Modern Britain, recently published by Yale University Press.
🎧📺🎧📺🎧📺🎧📺🎧📺
For the Since Attlee and Churchill podcast, Richard Johnson and Lee David Evans look back at the General Strike of 1926.