Retrieving a sense of bigness

From my forgetting to our sense of loss

Having just completed the proofing and indexing for my next book (see cover below), I thought it’d be nice to do a survey of articles I’ve had published elsewhere in the past year and a bit.

Strangely, I want to do this largely for myself. For there’s this weird thing that has kept nagging me while working on the book, which is how much you forget. You forget what you’ve written. You forget what you’ve read through and revised even dozens of times. You forget what you’ve thought; even what you think, kind of.

I guess the human mind cannot retain much information. But it’s more than about mere data, facts. It’s about knowledge and understanding, even wisdom.

Sometimes when I leaf through my first book I go ‘bloody hell, that’s good’, or ‘oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know that.’ Once, before giving a talk at The Battle of Ideas, one of my respondents pressed me on what I’d written about ‘FGM’. I told her I hadn’t written about FGM. But then we had a look in the index of the book, and there it was. She, a reader, knew more about my book – at least on this matter – than I did as the writer of it.

This makes me feel both vulnerable and intrigued. On one hand this book thing is a massive slug of your life. As representations of it go, there is really nothing that comes close. But on the other hand the book is entirely separate to your life as it goes on. You write it and it goes off into the world to have its own life. You go your own separate ways. You forget much of what’s in it. Readers forget nearly all of it. Its contents merge into a fug of general stuff they’ve been reading and thinking and engaging with.

And this way, the distinctive value of the thing you have done – indeed the distinctive value of your life, your self – can get lost.

It reminds me of something the novelist Jonathan Franzen said:

You adopt a certain attitude when you feel like you have something that’s not appreciated. You have to generate some sense of bigness on your own; that’s an insufferable activity.

I think I need to do a bit of that again, to retrieve some of that bigness, to be at least aware of what I’ve done, even what I think on some things: hoping the process won’t be insufferable.

So I’m going to go over six articles I’ve written but haven’t highlighted here on Substack: three in this piece plus another three to follow in a second instalment. The three we shall look at now are on: 1) The death of New Labour populism – for Unherd; 2) Why farmers should revolt – ditto; and 3) The sense of loss many of us are feeling – for The Critic.

So, let’s get into it.

1. On the death of New Labour populism, Unherd, 10^th October 2023

This article, from before the 2024 General Election, is based around my reading of a book called The Unfinished Revolution by Philip Gould. Gould was Tony Blair’s pollster both in Opposition and in Government – and a key figure in the New Labour project. In reading the book, a very good one by the way, I was struck by his advocacy for what he called ‘a new populism’. He wrote a memo about this the day after Blair was elected leader in 1994:

I argued that the real political agenda was a combination of Right and Left. It was Right-wing on crime, welfare, immigration, discipline, tax and individualism, but Left-wing on the NHS, investment, social integration, opposition to privatisation and unemployment. People wanted change, but they didn’t yet want Labour… There is still a lurking fear about unions and the loony Left; there is potential concern about Labour because of its liberal social positions; there is anxiety about tax; there is almost no idea what Labour stands for.

Nothing changes, eh?

And yet, how much it does. Nowadays, the Blair project, as we might call it, is fixated on populism as the enemy, treating it like a disease that needs to eliminated from the population. It appears that Gould’s programme got lost, surviving merely in New Labour communications, in what they told the electorate (remind yourself of all those denunciations of them as right-wing – it served them well electorally).

As I wrote in the piece:

[The] transition among Blair and his followers [sic] from populism to anti-populism reflects the transition from being outsiders to insiders. Formerly, they saw themselves as an insurgent force. But now they are comfortable and indeed broadly set the tone for public life both in state institutions and the mainstream media.

In other words, their rejection of populism signalled a changing of the guard.

And, despite its problems with Blair, Labour has broadly followed this progression under Keir Starmer:

Today’s Labour Party ... does not present itself as a populist insurgency against a tired Establishment as Blair and Brown did in the Nineties. Rather, it appears almost purely in a defensive role, its task being to reconsecrate the hegemony that New Labour initially established, restoring the equilibrium of the state and of Britain’s relations to the outside world.

I concluded, “as Labour leader, Starmer is almost necessarily aligned to a failing, incapable technocratic state which orders itself using the same, broadly unpopular, progressive identity politics that Labour does. This all promises trouble ahead. Starmer himself is certainly not leading a populist uprising — but I think we can expect one to develop against his incoming government in pretty short order.”

Slight negatives: I found the article a little strange to read. It seems to have suffered in from the transfer to Unherd’s new website set-up. I didn’t like the beginning: and see from going back to my original version that some of the meat of it had been stripped out: that’s just the way with these things sometimes. Still: interesting stuff, effectively confirms what is a hegemonic change in the structure of British politics and the state.

Why farmers should revolt, Unherd, 11^th March 2024

I wrote this piece as British farmers were just starting to follow their Continental neighbours into public protest against their situation, including low prices, cheap imports and the costs of ‘Net Zero’. The Social Democratic Party (SDP) had just released a timely ‘Green Paper’ called Farms, Fields and Food seeking to bring together the situation of rural areas and farming - and find some solutions. I thought it would good to write about it.

I wrote of this paper,

its core theme is that, as [party leader William] Clouston puts it: “Cheap food is very expensive.” We may welcome it in the supermarket, but we pay for it in other ways: through suffering farm animals and poor public health, through degraded fields, rivers and wildlife. And through farmers giving up, their children leaving the family business rather than soldiering on. Margins are too small, the paperwork too gruelling, the lack of respect galling. And now, to top it off, they are facing organized gangs roaming the countryside and stealing their equipment, something to which they have no response; the police likewise.

That was before Labour got into government with its unsympathetic perspective on the countryside, fitting in with other social trends. “As in the cities, the ground has started to erode under the feet from those whose families have lived there for generations. Others are moving in with other interests and priorities, more money and little familiarity with traditional ways of life.”

Alongside a bit on the SDP’s proposed remedies, I reflected on how this has all come to pass, how even the Tories, traditionally the party of the countryside, have become largely indifferent to the plight of farmers. As I wrote, “ultimately, the Conservative Party’s attitude to the land and farming is really subservient to their wider economic assumptions and the interest groups that feed into them, notably in finance and property development, sectors that are very much global in scale and urban in origin. They treat the land of Britain as “UK plc” or Atlantic Zone Production Unit No. 325: a place to be managed not for the sake of the people who live on it but as a business whose purpose is to maximise returns for shareholders.”

Following this are some reflections on our treatment of land as a tradeable asset and on “the Glazerisation of Britain, by which the country’s territory serves like Manchester United has for the Glazer family of Florida: as a distant resource to be tapped for income, without reference to its meaning and significance for those who live and breathe it.”

Interesting stuff. But it’s time to move on.

3) On conservative despair – The Critic, 21^st April 2024

The last piece I’m going to talk about drew quite a response. One quite well known writer wrote privately to say how “heartening” it was. “Obviously it chimes with what a number of us are experiencing.”

I submitted it with the title ‘A sense of loss’ and sub-titled ‘The culture we relied upon is disappearing’. It wasn’t about a bunch of people who we might call ‘conservatives’. It was about me and many others, of all political persuasions: how we are feeling about the massive demographic and cultural ruptures generated by recent decades of mass immigration and associated politics of diversity.

It starts off with something a ‘rebellious parliamentarian’ once told me: “You know, you and me: we’re unemployable.” I drew this out to something much bigger and wider that is afflicting our society, “how the world has turned against many of us more or less explicitly, and many more (perhaps nearly all) implicitly.”

As a project directed to the home front, this [social] revolution is just as utopian and impractical as the doomed attempts at Western modernization in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is another example of the uprooting processes of modernity. For the mass transformation of society that we are going through has parallels both with the ruptures of the Industrial Revolution and the effects of Western colonialism.

After bringing in Karl Polanyi and Jonathan Lear on the Industrial Revolution and the ‘Indians’ of North America respectively, I introduced my notion of ‘existential defeat’ from The Tribe:

It is a process in which political, social and economic changes make certain forms of life and identity effectively impossible. The connections into the world which made life meaningful are severed and replaced. Existential defeat is not a sudden and absolute phenomenon; it is a process which happens by degrees which are not always materially apparent, appearing to the people themselves more as a curtailment of possibilities, or a reduction of opportunities, not appearing as amenable to effective intervention or resistance.

A dam seems to have burst among many people about the changes taking place. People are finding themselves and their loved ones living in areas which have become unrecognizable and unfamiliar, where they feel increasingly exposed and unwelcome. And the trends tell us that this process is going to ramp up in coming years.

Talking about it helps, I think. Reading the piece back again strangely generates some optimism. It attempts to see the situation clearly: and I think it does a pretty good job. It took a while to get to that stage: Unherd rejected an earlier version.

As Hannah Arendt said: “Writing is an integral part of the process of understanding.”

For the most part, we don’t understand and then write; we write and then we understand. And then we forget: so we need to read and write it again.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this.