The Joy of Six 1128

"With every echoing step, British parliamentarians are reminded by these weighty premises of their own importance. It is rather rare, however, that one of them makes their way from the halls of parliament into the underworld of the old palace, which was once built on a swampy island in the Thames. Here, in the low-ceilinged, labyrinthine catacombs, the foundation of Britannia’s democracy is literally rotting away, largely out of sight and out of mind. Most of the structure is contaminated by asbestos, while thick tangles of cables hang chaotically from the ceiling and pipes suddenly come to an end, seemingly in the middle of nowhere." Jörg Schindler sees Britain facing a perfect storm of struggle, with millions sliding into poverty and little to suggest that improvement will come anytime soon.

David Gauke has little time for Dominic Raab's defence against bullying charges.

Elon Musk's attempt to monetise the Twitter blue tick is a master class in business failure, argues Alex Kirshner.

Richard Vinen reviews Rory Carroll's Killing Thatcher: "There was a curious sense in which the IRA did kill Thatcher at Brighton. Magee and his comrades described the high-security units in which they were imprisoned as 'submarines', because they were so cut off from contact with the outside world. Thatcher’s own security team put her in a submarine of sorts, and it was one that dived ever deeper after Brighton. Isolation from ordinary life was one of the things that accounted for the erosion of her political instincts in the late 1980s and, eventually, her fall. 

"How did she do it? That’s the question that inevitably comes to mind when watching such moments of feminist audacity in a film written and directed by a woman working within the mainstream British film industry of 1957." Melanie Williams celebrates the achievements of the film director Muriel Box.

Joel Morris sees the culture war invade tributes to dead comedians.

The Tories' Blue Wall is turning into a Ballardian nightmare

Fred Skulthorp has visited the Blue Wall for Unherd and found it to be a land of discontent:

Travelling through Surrey, from the quiet villages nestled in the North Downs to its London border in the north, it resembles not a cliché of suburban aspiration, but a capsule of all England’s problems: the demise of its ruling party, a lost generation of millennials, polluted waterways and a cost-of-living crisis. In these leafy streets, decline and affluence have become entwined.

And Tory hegemony there is under threat from social change:

Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a "parasitical housing market" bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.

Skulthorp emphasises that this is not the traditional move to the suburbs that comes with economic maturity and that people driven out of the capital arrive in a Surrey that is very different from the stereotype of Surrey comfort.

That hegemony is also under threat from ferocious Liberal Democrats.

Take Chris Coughlan, who will fight Mole Valley at the next general election: he may be, in Skulthorp's words:

the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City.

But his verdict is clear:

"The Tory party needs to die."

Or at greater length:

Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.

Some of this new mood Skulthorp findsin the Home Counties may be an unwind from Brexit. 

The referendum wasn't won by Leave because of working-class voters in the North: it was won because great swathes of comfortable Southern England voted against their own economic interests.

Given what has hit the country since that vote, there must be many who are sick of the sight of sleek figures like Gove and Raab.

Is Dominic Raab about to prove that a bully is always a coward?

From the Herald:

An MP since 2010, Mr Raab barely held his Esher and Walton seat in 2019, as the Liberal Democrats cut his majority from 23,298 to just 2,743. 

The knife-edge Surrey marginal is now a prime Lib Dem target for 2024.

Mr Raab's refusal to confirm he is standing again in the seat suggests he may be thinking of leaving the Commons or potentially trying to find a safer Tory candidacy elsewhere. 

As headmasters used to say, a bully is always a coward.

Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will haunt the Tories for years to come

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If Rishi Sunak was meant to offer a fresh start, then his first cabinet was deeply disappointing. There was little sign of a cabinet of all the talents, made possible by the soothing of old enmities, beyond the return of Michael Gove.

In fact it's hard not to be depressed at many of the names he brought back or kept on yesterday: Gavin Williamson, Suella Braverman, Dominic Raab, Thérèse Coffey.

If you try to come up with a list of four more encouraging names, you are likely to come up with something like: David Gauke, Dominic Grieve, Justine Greening, Rory Stewart.

Trouble is, none of that four is still in the Commons. All were among the 21 Conservative MPs who lost the whip in September 2019 for, in effect, voting against a no-deal Brexit.

Gauke  and Grieve stood as Independents in the general election later that year, while the other two did not defend their seats under any label.

It's clear that Boris Johnson's 2019 purge will continue to hurt his party for years to come, and not just because it cannot spare people of that talent.

If the Conservative Party is to have a future that does not involve a permanent shift to being the English Nationalist Party, then at some point the moderates are going to have to fight back.

And if they are going to do so, those moderates and the party as a whole will need a leader - a Tory version of Neil Kinnock, if you will.

It's possible to imagine that such a figure can be found among the four names I chose. It's much harder to imagine he or she is to be found in Sunak's new cabinet.

The Joy of Six 1060

Alex Massie is not impressed by Dominic Raab: "Why should champagne be reserved to those with the right credentials? Why, for that matter, is there something self-evidently ludicrous about a working-class person enjoying opera? Should she know her place and appreciate that somewhere such as Glyndebourne may never be her kind of place?"

In a very real sense, Dominic Minghella was at school with Steve Bray.

David Baddiel on acceptable and unacceptable Jewish Jokes: "There is a somewhat idiot notion abroad, in the endless commentary on comedy online, that jokes either punch up or punch down, and one is evil and the other is acceptable, but actually comedy is much more fluid than that."

The Labour/Plaid Cymru government in Wales is consulting on banning the sale of tea and coffee to under-16s. Peter Black is not impressed.

"What set Blackwell apart from other British music moguls was his passion for the Black music of Jamaica. He made his first living stocking Jamaican jukeboxes and became immersed in the Jamaican deejay scene, seeking out esoteric dance records to keep feet on the floor." Daniel de Visé reviews the memoirs of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records.

Rick Glanvill looks at the reign of Ted Drake, who in 1954-5 became the first manager to make Chelsea champions of the top division.

Dominic Raab and the Tories' war on culture

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Dominic Raab's implication at prime minister's questions today that working-class people should not like opera is just part, not so much of the Conservatives' culture war, as their war on culture.

We are currently seeing a cull of arts courses in the post-1992 universities, which are the ones that students from poorer backgrounds are most likely to attend.

And this cull has received theoretical backing from David Goodhart, an Old Etonian whom I just missed seeing as one of the leading Trots on campus at York,* and my own MP Neil O'Brien, who went from a state education in Huddersfield to Oxford, but does not seem overkeen that others should follow his route.

Add to this the decline of subjects like music and drama in schools and there is a danger that a knowledge of the arts will once again become the preserve of the upper classes.

There was a good discussion of these issues in a Radio Four debate broadcast from a Leicester school in 2018. I am pleased to find you can still listen to it on the BBC website.

While we are talking about the arts, a word about Nadhim Zahawi and Philip Larkin.

After two years of Gavin Williamson, it's wonderful to have an education secretary who has his favourite poets and obviously cares about them deeply.

However, his reaction to Larkin and Wilfred Owen's omission from a GCSE poetry anthology - that it is "cultural vandalism" - turned it into one more salvo in the Tories' culture war.

Larkin and Owen have not been cancelled, it's just that there are many fine 20th-century poets and GCSE students cannot study them all every year.

I have a fondness for W.H.Auden and Edwin Muir. Is it cultural vandalism if they're not in this anthology?

Of course not.

* A few years before Goodhart, one of York's leading Trots was Peter Hitchens. These public school lefties are so predictable.

The Joy of Six 1032

"Watering down the HRA has long been one of Raab’s pet projects - he quite literally wrote a book on it – but to human rights lawyers like me who’ve spent the last 20 years seeing the Act change lives for the better, these plans make no sense." Louise Whitfield stands up for the Human Rights Act against Dominic Raab.

Nigel Warburton celebrates the power of disgust - it forced a government U-turn on an amendment to the Environment Bill to curb the discharge of raw sewage into our rivers.

"According to a wry joke in Central Europe, socialism was the long road between capitalism and capitalism. Is Brexit the long road between the EU and the EU?" Bob Hancké says Brexit has made trade in goods between the UK and the EU very difficult and also severely limited our ability to conclude free trade agreements with the rest of the world.

Sukaina Hirji and Meena Krishnamurthy look at the romantic friendship between the philosophers Iris Murdoch and Philippa Foot.

"While he hoped for progress in human affairs, he was only too well aware that it was not inevitable and might not be sustained. Throughout his career he celebrated the technological developments that were revolutionizing life but feared they might lead to eventual degeneration or, as came to pass in 1914, a catastrophic war." Peter J. Bowler looks at H. G. Wells and the uncertainties of progress.

Pete Jackson on Telford's role as birthplace of the climate revolution.

The Joy of Six 1031

"We need to find a way that we can return responsibility to local people and get all the sectors on board – to show how to build an economy that can save the planet and save our lives at the same time, and how the moving parts might fit together." David Boyle calls for a new-style national plan.

Louise Whitfield has no time for Dominic Raab's plan to overhaul the Human Rights Act: "Watering down the HRA has long been one of Raab’s pet projects - he quite literally wrote a book on it – but to human rights lawyers like me who’ve spent the last 20 years seeing the Act change lives for the better, these plans make no sense."

Mark Zuckerberg's pitch for the future of Facebook was a "delusional fever dream cribbed most obviously from dystopian science fiction and misleading or outright fabricated virtual reality product pitches from the last decade," says Jason Koebler.

Rachel Aviv on the frightening US shadow penal system for troubled youngsters run by a Christian organisation.

"They managed to open one wagon and free 17 of the prisoners. As the train continued slowly forward, other prisoners were able to free themselves. In all, 233 people got off the train; 89 were recaptured and 26 were killed, but 118 managed to remain free." Three young men from Brussels who set out in 1943 to rescue a train of deportees headed for Auschwitz are to be honoured, reports Alan Hope..

Sophie Atkinson explains why George Orwell hated Sheffield.

Six of the Best 919

"Already this week we have seen video of a police officer instructing a man that he and his family are not allowed to play in their own front garden, people doing yoga in local parks being told to go home, socially-isolating families being ordered off beaches even though they are within walking distance of their homes, Cambridgeshire police telling people what they can and cannot buy in supermarkets and Northamptonshire Police saying they might set up roadblocks and could start searching shopping trolleys." Peter Black fears overzealous police forces are undermining lockdown.

"In Raab’s favour, my father would point out that he paid on time and occasionally helped to carry the lawnmower through to the garden." George Steer remembers being the acting prime minister's gardener.

Mary Reid has been writing a daily 'isolation diary' for Liberal Democrat Voice - today's entry is typically thoughtful.

Blanche Wiesen Cook reviews a book about the powerful women who lived in Mecklenburgh Square, including Dorothy L. Sayers and Virginia Woolf.

"His work, then, was a brilliant deception on himself and others that, in the end, failed; when his audience realised they had practised the same deception on themselves, they ceased to believe anything he said. They stopped laughing." Tanya Gold reviews Woody Allen's memoirs.

What links Jack the Ripper and the Beatles' Penny Lane? Christopher T. George explains.

Brexit is giving Britain the economics of the Soviet Union

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There is a story we used to tell in the West to demonstrate the superiority of our economic system.

It concerns an official from the old Soviet Union who came on a visit to Britain.

Back home he was responsible for ensuring that the right amount of bread arrived in Moscow each morning.

When he arrived here he was asked if there was anyone he would like to meet.

He replied that he would like to talk to his opposite number - the government official who was responsible for ensuring that the right amount of bread arrived in London each morning.

And he was astounded to be told that there was no such person.

Well, that is not true any more.

Brexit risks the ripping up of all the elegant market mechanisms that ensure food from all across Europe fill our supermarkets every day. There will be borders, customs to clear and red tape.

So the government is having to step in.

Today Dominic Raab promised MPs he would ensure "there is adequate food supply" if the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal.

That's right. Now there is someone responsible for ensuring that the right amount of bread arrived in London each morning.

And his name is Dominic Raab.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Senior Tory MP's diary secretary caught selling sex online is sister of Channel 4 reality TV star

The Daily Mirror wins our Headline of the Day Award.

However, the judges were not impressed by the paper's attempt to turn this into a story about security. I doubt Dominic Raab's diary secretary has been entrusted to with many of the nation's secrets.

As to the suggestion that Raab "has been tipped as a future Prime Minister", one judge suggested the view to me that the only people tipping him are:

• Dominic Raab
• Dominic Raab's mother
• People who have been paid in used bank notes to do so.

I might add that if a newspaper feels it has to pixelate every face in a photograph, it is probably not worth printing it at all.

George Osborne first and 10 (whatever that means)

Last week the Guardian told us:

George Osborne wants to have an NFL franchise based permanently in London within the next five years to confirm the city’s status as the “sporting capital of the world”. 

The chancellor met with NFL executives, team owners and former players at Downing Street as the Miami Dolphins prepared to face the New York Jets at Wembley stadium on Sunday. 

Osborne said he would “love to have a team here based in the UK playing in the NFL” and he believed Britain was making steps towards that goal. “The real prize, the real touchdown for London, would be to get a team based here,” he said.

My first reaction is that Osborne should have more important things to do with his time. Bringing an NFL franchise to London is the sort of task that should consume a wacky backbencher, not the chancellor.

But this enthusiasm of his does confirm that he is not a traditional Conservative. If he were, he would be worrying about how to persuade more children to take up rugby or cricket,

To someone of Osborne's cast of mind, America is the future. His enthusiasm for elected mayors, a role unknown in British local government until recently, confirms this.

As I argued in a recent post on a cricket club in David Cameron's constituency, this sets Osborne apart from his prime minister.

But already this enthusiasm for all things American looks dated.

For the group of Tories who produced Britannia Unchained - Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, Liz Truss - the future is Singapore.

And for the former Liberal Democrat MP Jeremy Browne in his Race Plan, the future is China. That dictatorship makes an odd beacon for 'authentic liberalism'.

Still, Jeremy is not alone. Today Jeremy Hunt expressed the hope that, thanks to cuts in welfare, we would all have to work as hard as the Chinese.

Who knows where the future will pop up next?

What would the Tory right do after it left Europe?

There was a good article in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Oborne yesterday. He pointed out that David Cameron's speech on Europe had won him short-term acclaim but risks long-term disaster:

Mr Cameron, by committing the Tories to an in-out referendum, has greatly increased the likelihood that Britain will eventually leave the European Union, while a formal split within the Conservative Party over Europe now looks almost certain.

In other words, the Conservative backwoods are supporting Cameron now because he has made it possible for him to oppose him in any referendum campaign.

Oborne also draws instructive parallels between Cameron's position now and Harold Wilson's in his last years as prime minister.

Another thing that strikes me about the Tory right is that withdrawing from Europe has become an end in itself. They are never able to spell out all the exciting things a British Conservative government would be able to do if only it were not hamstrung by Brussels.

It reminds me of the way that, after the Revolution, comrades are told of the new Jerusalem that will arise once the saboteurs and traitors have been liquidated, but eventually the Terror becomes an end in itself.

The most substantial essay there has been in this direction was Britannia Unchained put together by a group of young backbenchers.

But it didn't sound the sort of stuff to win over centrist voters. In the words of a Daily Telegraph report:

Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss, who are all seen as rising stars on the right of the party, describe British workers as among the "worst idlers" in the world, and urge David Cameron to reform work places along the lines of the Asian, rather than the European model.

Britain's future as the Singapore or South Korea of the West? Suddenly the European Union seems remarkably attractive.