Does history only travel in one direction?

From cultural capture to open borders and economic stagnation, can decline be reversed?

Towering columns

In The Times, Fred Sculthorp argues that the tide may be turning on “woke capitalism”, a trend that emerged in part to plug the West’s desire for values.

After the financial crisis of 2008, the idea of socially responsible capitalism became a useful reputational tool to prop up corporate America’s dismal reputation. The growing liberal tilt of elite universities also produced a millennial white-collar workforce increasingly focused on finding purpose and meaning in the daily grind. Injecting morality into capitalism provided a convenient outlet for these impulses.

…Vivek Ramaswamy, an American entrepreneur running for the Republican presidential nomination, takes a cynical line, arguing that big corporates are engaged in “wokewashing”. In his book Woke, Inc. he argues that big companies are using ESG and a pose of “practised vulnerability” as a distraction technique, in order to protect their profits and power. So, he points out, Amazon donated $10 million to black areas after Floyd’s death, but just a few months earlier fired employees who had spoken up about the grim working conditions in its warehouses.

…There are more perennial themes at play too. The American writer James Poulos has suggested the rise of corporate morality is, in part, a product of the failure of secularism. Without churches and religious leaders to guide us, with the erosion of the communities and institutions that once bound us together, had the corporate brand become one of the last effective organising powers of western life?

…[There are] signs that the tide is starting to turn on the marriage between corporates and progressive values. Even voices on the left are sceptical of “allyship” by big corporates, viewing the sponsored floats at Pride or ineffective diversity and inclusion schemes as the fig leaves they so often are. Then there is the hypocrisy, which is hard to ignore. Coutts found Farage to be insufficiently “inclusive”, but were happy to allow Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar, an institutionally homophobic country, to deposit millions in cash there. There’s nothing wrong with having corporate values, but lecturing society on morals you don’t even apply to yourselves is difficult for the rest of us to swallow.

On UnHerd, Aris Roussinos says Britain is becoming the liberal outlier of a Europe that is becoming increasingly focused on borders and defence.

British liberals will recoil from the new European Union as they once did from Bush’s America, finding in it the perfect ideological foil for their own acts of political self-definition. As the Greek political scientist Angelos Chryssogelos observed last year, the deepening enmeshment of British liberals with American progressive causes “means that any centre-left alternative to the Conservatives will be as uncomfortable with Europe as the Conservatives are today, albeit for different reasons”, so that “core features of the EU like its […] commitment to border security will become sources of ideological friction with progressive Britain, as much as the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice or fisheries are with conservative Britain today”.

There are already hints of the poles reversing, here and there: in The Guardian and the BBC’s newly horrified reaction to the brutally effective border management regimes of EU nations, or Gordon Brown’s claim that, “if you want to peer into the future of Europe”, you must observe with horror the rise of Vox, whose “power will embolden far-Right parties that have been proliferating across the continent”. His essay’s framing of Spain’s election this weekend as “a key battle in the Europe-wide struggle against neofascism”, in all its overwrought appeals to the ghosts of a century ago, is a perfect distillation of the mythologised version of the Second World War which still distorts our political discourse. Threatened by the 2010s version of populism, whose central tenets of rejecting unfettered globalisation and uncontrolled immigration have now become the European mainstream, the guardians of the neoliberal order reanimated the ghosts of Europe’s 20th century to preserve their hold on power. Once it was no longer tenable to claim that There Is No Alternative, the populist alternative was reframed as fascism to render it taboo to voters.

…Strong on defence, hard on migration and hawkish on Russia, the Europe now rapidly coming into being is a natural lodestar for British Right-wingers, dissatisfied at the failure of the Conservative Party to institute conservative governance. Like American conservatives making ideological aliyah to Budapest, perhaps British conservatives will soon look to Brussels as the inspiration for an unabashedly Right-wing politics, its harder edges ameliorated by sharp suits and inoffensively mainstream political aesthetics. Drawn closer into America’s cultural sphere by its wholesale adoption of the superpower’s progressive values, Britain’s political Left will conversely view our neighbouring continent with increased suspicion and distaste.

On his Substack, Iain Mansfield questions the one-directional arc of history, noting that social conservatives have had many forgotten victories, and may have more to come:

To sustain my contention that social conservatism has value, it is not necessary to show that progressives were wrong about everything – only that they were wrong about some things! And, of course, that the conservatives were right. And, I would argue, not just right about some things they blocked, but about some things they failed to. It is simply not the case…that social conservatism simply involves complaining about policies the complainer will support in a few years time. Social conservatism has blocked many evils, beneficially moderated many reforms and remains a reliable guide to life – and will continue to do so into the future.

The single greatest triumph of social conservatism is the defeat of eugenics. It is often conveniently forgotten by all sides but, in the period up until the Second World War, support for eugenics was not just commonplace and seen as forward-thinking by most ‘smart-thinking’, high status individuals, across the political spectrum. The Fabian Society, the intellectual well-spring of the Labour Party, was riddled with support for eugenics. It was seen as scientific, progressive, the way to build the society of the future…On the other side of the aisle, Sir Winston Churchill was also a keen supporter.

…So where did opposition come from? Eugenics was ultimately discredited by the horrors of World War II and the atrocities of the Nazis, when the world had its eyes brutally opened to where eugenics led. But what kept it from being implemented before then? It wasn’t the progressives, or the scientists. It was the social conservatives, the Catholic Church, the quiet mass of public opinion and the few unfashionable, fuddy-duddy and yet often eloquent social conservatives who opposed it, citing ‘old-fashioned’ concepts such as human dignity or the sanctity of life.

In The Times, Tomiwa Owolade laments the rise of indifference to pervasive crime, and the ineffectiveness of “nudging” campaigns.

Another reason [the “maaate” campaign] won’t work also applies to the Tube posters that condemn sexual staring and touching: they miss the point of criminal behaviour. The people who commit these crimes will not be dissuaded by posters or public campaigns. They know what they are doing is wrong. Some of them don’t care; for others violating the law is part of the thrill in the first place. What makes these campaigns tragic is many of the issues they try to address do need to be addressed. But the gloss of advertising campaigns is a shallow cover for a deepening rot.

There is no specific campaign against fare-dodging, and I accept it is not as morally repugnant as sexual harassment or assault, but I nevertheless think it testifies to a wider problem that we ignore at our peril: that crime is currently not faced with enough severity.

Societies are as fragile as China bowls. They can break with sufficient pressure. And I am starting to see the fractures. Unless we stop it, by stringently punishing those who commit petty crimes, these fractures will continue to increase. It won’t happen overnight. But it will happen if there is no countervailing force against it. Sadly, we are increasingly numbed to various crimes in public. When someone used me to dodge a fare for the second time, I shouted to a staff member in the station; he looked at me like he was about to fall asleep.

Resigned to this status quo, civil society loses an integral part of itself: a basic respect for law and order. We can’t trust what can’t protect us. If there is a third time someone dodges a fare by using my body, it will be impotent fury above all else I feel. And after that, then perhaps the most worrying response of all to crime: indifference.

In The Critic, Gavin Rice says mass, low-skilled immigration undermines the economic status of British workers and holds back growth:

Orthodox economists say immigration doesn’t displace local workers, calling this the “lump of labour fallacy”. There isn’t an amount of fixed demand for work, they argue — migrants themselves will need goods and services, leading to more jobs and so on. However, economists and thinkers such as Ha-Joon Chang and Michael Lind dispute this, arguing that increasing the supply of labour — particularly from poorer countries — does by definition undermine pay and conditions. It increases the monopsony power of bosses, allowing them to engage in wage arbitrage. The anti-inflationary (read: wage-reducing) effect of immigration has been noted by Goldman Sachs, the Bank of England and the IMF. Indeed, a former Chancellor has even recommended increasing immigration specifically to keep wages down. The minimum wage provides some protection, but it does nothing for those hoping to make any more than this.

The pay of HGV drivers has gone up stratospherically since Brexit, far above the inflation rate. In Plymouth, annual salaries went up by £3,000. Workers in London pubs have received amongst the biggest pay rises in the country. Nearly a third of hospitality employers say they are raising pay and conditions to remain attractive to workers. Clearly, in some areas migration control has increased the real value of labour.

This will present challenges for some businesses. Reliance on immigration reduces the incentive to invest in labour-saving technologies; switching to automation will be costly up-front, but would help improve Britain’s cripplingly poor productivity. In customer-facing businesses like restaurants, this won’t be possible. The answer to unprofitable businesses cannot be de facto corporate welfare via immigration, though. Is a business wholly reliant on poorly paid overseas labour really fit for purpose?

In The Spectator, Terry Barnes says former Australian prime minister John Howard is right to highlight the positives in the country’s historic relationship with Britain.

Howard is right in so much that Australia could never have avoided the expansionist sweep of the Age of Empires. Both royalist and Napoleonic France sent expeditions to Australia in the wake of James Cook’s discovery of its east coast in 1770. In Europe’s imperialist 19th century scramble for colonies, had Britain not settled Australia, France or another less liberal continental power would have.

There is, however, no denying the death, disease and dispossession experienced by the first Australians due to British colonisation. But there was never such systematic and government-sanctioned exploitation, enslavement and and destruction of native peoples as, for example, Belgium’s Leopold II inflicted on the native peoples of the Congo.

As Howard and another former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott have pointed out, Australia’s British inheritance – especially constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary, and the common law – has been a huge factor in modern Australia becoming the stable, prosperous, and successfully diverse society it is. It’s something the near-unanimous outcome of the 1967 Aboriginal recognition referendum highlighted powerfully.

Wonky thinking

Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove unveiled the Government’s plans for house-building, committing to building beautiful environments alongside greater urban density.

[T]he first, and most important, component of that plan is our programme of urban regeneration and a new inner city renaissance. Renaissance – because we want to ensure our cities have all the ingredients for success that we identified in our Levelling-Up White Paper last year as the Medici model. Beautiful homes, flourishing public spaces, cultural jewels, safe and orderly streets, space for trees and nature, centres of educational excellence, dynamic new businesses and excellent public services.

In our White Paper we committed to the regeneration of 20 places across England as the core of our long-term plan for housing. And today I want to say more about how we are implementing our ambitions. We are unequivocally, unapologetically and intensively concentrating our biggest efforts in the hearts of our cities. Because that is the right thing to do economically, environmentally and culturally.

As my colleague Neil O’Brien argued in his landmark study for the think tank Onward on housing – Green, Pleasant and Affordable – cities are where the demand for housing is greatest. It is better for the environment, the economy, for productivity and well-being if we use all of the levers that we have to promote urban regeneration – rather than swallowing up virgin land. That is why we will enable brownfield development rather than green belt erosion, sustainable growth rather than suburban sprawl.

So the economic and environmental imperatives all point towards a move away from a land-hungry destruction of natural habitats in favour of a much more efficient regeneration of our cities. And in the UK we have been markedly inefficient in this regard. Inefficient in how we use land. In recent years the rates of housebuilding in rural areas have been greater than in urban areas. And in our cities, especially those outside London, the population densities are much lower than in comparable competitor Western nations.

We occupy more land with fewer people. That approach has not only been inefficient in planning terms – it’s cost us in productivity. Failing to densify our inner cities means lower growth – with a 10% increase in our cities’ population potentially unlocking a £20 billion increase in UK GDP. Failing to densify means longer commutes, a longer wait for a plumber or ambulance, and more vehicle journeys leading to congestion and pollution. At present, only 40% of people living in our great cities can get into the city centre in 30 minutes by public transport, compared to over two thirds of the population in comparable European cities.

And we would not only be more productive, we would have an enhanced quality of life. People living and working in close proximity to one another is a key feature of the most creative, productive and attractive cities in the world and in particular a feature of the most attractive parts of those cities.

The heart of Gaudi’s Barcelona, the Haussmann-designed centre of Paris, the Nash terraces of Regent’s Park, the apartment blocks of Pimlico, Marylebone and Knightsbridge, Edinburgh’s New Town, the Upper West side of Manhattan or the centres of Boston or Austin, Texas – all are districts where what economists call the agglomeration effect – the mixing of talent and opportunity which sparks innovation and growth – is marked.

Book of the week

We recommend David Edgerton’s The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History.

‘You can’t understand Great Britain when all you know is the island itself.’ This resonant banality came from the lips of the German industrialist and philosopher of industry Walter Rathenau addressing the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig. It was hardly original. It half plagiarizes the British writer Rudyard Kipling, who asked: what Should they know of England who only England know?' The line comes from his poem ‘The English Flag, 1891’, an attack on the street-bred English, who did not know what the British did abroad, especially in the empire, where Kipling was born. The expression, which became a cliche, has a lot going for it. To understand the United Kingdom (and not just Great Britain, or England) one needs to know its peculiar relations with the rest of the world. This was not, as fans of Kipling might imagine, primarily a question of empire. The United Kingdom’s relations, economic, military and political, with foreigners, mostly Europeans, like Rathenau, were almost always more significant. The United Kingdom’s economy was quite exceptionally open. Its people, ships and factories were spread all over the world; its largest wheat fields and its abattoirs were abroad, and its coal fuelled a whole hemisphere. It was not, in short, self-contained. The story of the United Kingdom was not, for the first half of the twentieth century, a domestic, insular story, nor a merely imperial one, even in two great wars.

In 1900 the United Kingdom was (comparatively speaking) cosmopolitan, liberal, free-trading with the rest of Europe and the world, and part of a much larger British empire. It was the world’s greatest importer and the empire the world’s richest and most populous. By 1950 the force of foreign events and the evolution of domestic politics created a novel situation which satisfied neither internationalists nor imperialists. By 1950 the United Kingdom had national borders impermeable in ways they were not in 1900. While the United Kingdom had been part of an empire, it now had an empire, but a much reduced colonial one. It was part of a Commonwealth of Nations, but one which was no longer British. It had been changed, by what happened abroad, more than by the desires of its people.

The new British nation increasingly knew only itself. The character of its politics was different from what had gone before. Now the nation was at the centre of politics, and for the first time one-person-one-vote was achieved. The Labour Party, which transformed the character of the House of Commons in 1945, saw itself as a new sort of national party whose politics were those of the collective, national interest. Politics was now national politics, based on the politics of class, of production and of national social services. Whereas once politicians addressed ‘the nation’ - a term of unclear geographical scope, and in any case referring to a notion of a political community, not all the people - they now spoke of ‘Britain’.

To understand the history of the period 1900-1950 we need to think our way out of national assumptions and enter a world in which the nation as it existed in the third quarter of the century was not yet in existence, nor yet even much argued for. The political story of the United Kingdom can usefully be framed as a contest between two programmes or projects: the liberal, internationalist, free-trading one and the imperial-protectionist one. Imperialism was probably more visible than liberalism. But the third option, nationalism, is practically invisible, and insofar as it is seen, it is as a feature of the Second World War. This trio of positions may be compared with the standard implicit story which is that liberalism, perhaps liberal-imperialism, was superseded by a weak socialism or social democracy in the war or after 1945. Events, foreigners, elevated nation over Empire or the world economy, after 1945.

Quick links

The CEOs of Coutts and NatWest have resigned in the wake of the Farage debanking row.

The British economy will out-perform Germany this year, the IMF has predicted.

Tony Blair said anything Britain does alone is not going to affect climate change..

…and research suggests that the “break-even” year for the energy transition may not be until 2080.

The Home Secretary has bought tents to house 2,000 migrants on former military sites.

The Home Office is in discussions with EU governments to allow waiters, baristas and au pairs UK work visas.

The expansion of the ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) across Greater London has been ruled lawful by the High Court.

A major new study links cannabis to mental illness.

Labour has committed to liberalising gender recognition law.

MoD officials sent classified documents to Mali, a close Kremlin ally, by mistake.

The Prime Minister has stepped in to review Sadiq Khan’s housing plan for London.

74 per cent of US students say a professor should be reported if they say something a student finds offensive.

Japan’s population fell by 800,000 last year.

Brazil’s current account surplus has continued to soar.

The estimate of R&D tax credit fraud has been revised up to £1.13 billion.