Newsletter #19: Lessons from the Leopard

Everything cannot stay the same

In which Tom McTague writes about the lessons from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and Aaron Wells reviews The Wire.

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It was reported last week that James Purnell, Andy Burnham’s old friend and new chief of staff, likes to quote Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s most famous line from The Leopard — the only one anyone seems to know: “If we want things to stay as they are, things are going to have to change.” The outgoing director of the Labour Growth Group, Mark McVitie, wrote that Purnell’s fondness for this piece of Lampedusan wisdom was encouraging because it was “the single most important thing for progressives who care about the post-war liberal settlement to internalise in this political era”. In other words, if the Left wants to protect all that it has built since 1945 it will have to start embracing much more radical reform to meet voters’ needs today.

This analysis captures something important about today’s politics. Indeed, I thought of it a few days later after reading about the prospect of David Miliband returning to government. Miliband — who writes for the New Statesman this week — was once seen as a figure on the Blairite right of the Labour Party. Yet, on questions of international aid, relations with Europe, human rights and immigration, he is well to the progressive left of most of today’s cabinet. The lesson many might take from all this is that if Miliband (David) wants a return to the kind of liberal consensus that he once represented, he will have to tear up many of the policy prescriptions he once favoured.

Perhaps so, but it is worth reflecting on the deeper message of Lampedusa’s The Leopard which, far from being progressive, is actually a melancholy and conservative reflection on the relentless nature of change which destroys as much as it creates. The hero of the book is the Prince, the philosophical patriarch who adores his revolutionary nephew, Tancredi, the character who assures him that the revolution must be embraced to protect old families like his own. At the end of the book, however, the Prince lies dying, reflecting on the real lesson of the revolution: that the old world did in fact die as a result of the revolution; that everything did not stay the same after all was changed.

When I pointed this out on X, McVitie replied, wisely, observing how Tancredi “survives hollow, absorbed into the new order” but the old world passes with the death of the old Leopard himself: The last Prince of Lampedusa. But as McVitie notes, for the Prince, the old world was doomed regardless. The revolutionaries were already in the hills. The question for progressives is not how to keep everything the same — that is the conservative agony — but how to protect what is good while changing what is not. That will soon be Andy Burnham’s challenge.

Tom McTague, Editor of the New Statesman, and author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a very British Revolution 1945-2016.

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In ‘Andy Burnham is a Catholic’, Patrick Maguire shows why the working-class, non-doctrinal Catholicism of Northwest England is key to understanding our first cradle Catholic Prime Minister.

“This was the faith in which Burnham was raised. Again, a practical Catholicism, not a doctrinal one. On the centenary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, [Derek] Worlock [Archdiocese of Liverpool]unwrapped a copy of that encyclical with theatrical flourish. Catholic social teaching, he said, was “the Church’s best-kept secret”. But not in the Culcheth church where Burnham was the altar boy, pressing play on tapes of Worlock’s sermons. “The stuff in the catechisms, and what I heard Worlock say,” he has said, “the political implementation of it was the Labour Party.” It’s not the Catholicism of JD Vance or even Tony Blair. Burnham knows this: the first time he ran for the Labour leadership he admitted neither he nor his mother Eileen, from whom he inherited his faith, were ones for “licking the altar steps”.”

Reporting from Makerfield, Will Lloyd argues that something is fundamentally broken in post-industrial Britain, and that not even Andy Burnham can fix it.

“You’re mad, lad… I wish we could go back to the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties. That were my England. If I had any money, I would leave.” He was in some disarray. Politically it made no sense. Rupert Lowe or Nigel Farage might have told him that he could go back to the Nineties. Andy Burnham, like a lot of people in the Labour Party, might have told him he could go back to the Seventies, turn back “neoliberalism” and return to the last period when Britain can be described as social democratic. Emotionally, I knew what he was asking for, though: all the grief of life to just go away. He wanted to be left alone with his paranoia. He slammed the door and returned to the chicken dippers and the sound of tears.”

In ‘To save Britain, Burnham must take on the Treasury’, Paul Collier argues Whitehall has too much power, recruits the wrong people, and is incapable of planning for the long-term.

“A recent vignette of bureaucratic disfunction is the problem of potholes. In the annual Treasury scramble to finance the budget without upsetting powerful lobbies, maintenance of the road network infrastructure often loses: Britain’s share of public spending devoted to infrastructure is the lowest of any comparable high-income country. Under Keir Starmer’s Government the road budget was squeezed, but as roads gradually deteriorated, voters started to complain. So in April, the minister of transport announced a new Pothole Pot for which Local Governments could bid. The upshot is that the bureaucratic cost of these remedial potholes vastly outweighs the precautionary cost of reasonable road maintenance.”

For Future of the Left, Tobias Phibbs argues that Burnham must lead where Starmer could not.

“Burnham has proved himself the man of the conjuncture. But Makerfield was the easy part. He will soon inherit a country ill at ease, tired of false promises, and quick to turn. This was the most pivotal by-election in British history: doors were knocked on, and knocked on, and knocked on again. Ashton-in-Makerfield was a carnival yesterday, every roadside verge and roundabout packed with Labour, Reform and Restore activists; every spare bit of wall festooned with flags, banners and posters. Despite that, 42% of voters didn’t think voting was worth their time. For others it was one last shot, and Labour activists who think Nigel Farage is the cause and culmination of the country’s malaise are severely naïve. Burnham will have less than three years to master the organic forces driving the profound discontent in the country, otherwise he will become their seventh victim.”

In ‘How Britain lost the art of economic warfare’, Oliver Harvey and Sahil Mahtani explain why the free-trade instincts that made Britain rich are now a liability.

“Britain’s weakness in geo-economic thinking is also striking because the UK has grand-strategic reflexes that require geo-economic competence. The government’s own Integrated Review Refresh frames the UK as an active power trying to shape an open global economy and resist coercion. It reaffirms a firm commitment to shaping an open global economy, adding that the UK will use trade policy and diplomacy to update international economic rulebooks for an era of systemic competition. The same document also emphasises the UK’s desire to ‘balance and shape’ in the maritime domain, including protecting shipping lanes and chokepoints. There is a clear and growing asymmetry between ambition and capability.”

For Future of the Left, Jonathan Rutherford argues that rise of Keir Starmer tells us more about the parlous state of the Labour Party than it does about Keir Starmer.

“Instead of following the example of New Labour and creating a revisionist politics for the new period, Labour relied on a moral righteousness in service to altruism – a belief that ‘our people need us’, ‘the country needs Labour’. It felt instinctively right and it didn’t require too much thinking about. Except the people didn’t need Labour or particularly like it. Brexit told them the feeling was mutual.”

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In ‘The Productive State’, Mat Lawrence and Alex Williams write on the failure of privatisation, and why the state needs to own and operate capital in essential sectors.

Research from the IFS finds that the average graduate can expect to be roughly £100k better off over a lifetime than their non-graduate counterparts, significantly lower than previously estimated. And that 20% of female graduates, and 30% of male graduates would have been financially better off not going.

In a series of reflections on the politics of belonging, David Smith MP outlines the case for a new social covenant rooted in mutual responsibility, the dignity of meaningful work, and the importance of culture and identity in binding people together.

In ‘The world we have lost’, Arthur Downing discusses Britain being a net importer of energy equipment, and what this means for the transition away from fossil fuels.

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“We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket,” so says stevedore union boss Frank Sobotka in David Simon’s The Wire (2002-2008), lamenting the decline of industry in America, and of the organised working class. Series two, in which his port union features heavily, was controversial upon release, following a first season focused on the drug trade in Baltimore’s housing projects and the machinations of the dysfunctional police force tasked with fighting it. This radical shift of focus was the first of a transition occurring each season, which took The Wire from a stylish and cerebral police procedural to a sweeping masterpiece of social critique.

In each series, a new institution and its characters are integrated into the story, and the dialectical tension of individual and collective depicted with skilful subtlety. In season three the port unions, by then euthanised through a RICO investigation, are replaced with hollowed-out Democratic Party urban politics. In season four, the public school system is displayed as the first sustained contact between individual lives and a broken state. In season five, the local newspaper beset by buyouts and layoffs is shown as the final frontier of the decay, a ‘fourth estate’ increasingly subsumed into the sordid world on which it reports.

Crime and the police remain a constant thread through the narrative, but the critique it delivers is united by the repeated heuristic of ‘The Game’. Used by characters in every institution depicted, it refers variously to gang turf-wars, the drug trade, jostling for promotion and sinecures within the police, and intra-party politics. ‘The Game’ becomes the byword for politics in general: the struggle for power and resources, made particular.

Seemingly unaware of the irony, aspiring Democratic city councillor Marla Daniels, when discussing the bureaucratic chicanery of the force with her police officer husband, tells him “The Game is rigged, but you cannot lose if you do not play.” Fan favourite Omar Little, who robs drug dealers for a living, tells us “The Game is out there, and it’s either play or get played.” The Wire does not dictate to us what stance to take vis à vis the internal politics with which every institution of state and society is riven, whether to conscientiously object, or to take part and strive to win on our own terms. It does however illuminate the form this politics has taken in the neoliberal era – arguments about fighting crime become ones about “juking the stats” to reduce the appearance of crime. Governing a city and representing its people becomes a matter of backroom deals with ‘community leaders’. In the almost 25 years since it first aired, our political circumstances have ensured this critique has become only sharper with time.

Aaron Wells

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For the LRB, James Butler talks to Gillian Plimmer and Mat Lawrence about HS2 as a case study in Britain’s broken model for building things, why private capital makes projects more expensive, Whitehall dysfunction, and the political failure to invest when borrowing was cheap.

On the Anglofuturism podcast, Calum Drysdale and Tom Ough talk to Dominic Cummings about why Britain’s institutions were built for a world that no longer exists, why science and technology must become a prime ministerial priority, and the potential for real institutional reform.