Articles by Nicholas Barrett

"close to being right"

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The Strix Machiavellian of the Year 2016

Since we launched the Strix in May, our political horizons have changed beyond recognition. Instead of working together to battle inequality and climate change, leaders in Europe and the United States will, for the foreseeable future, find themselves dealing with disintegration, degradation and damage limitation. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” wrote Yeats, and yet, much of the turbulence of 2016 was no accident. There have been winners and losers who have been elevated and pushed away, not just by electorates and the tides of history, but also by the finagling we forgot about while we were busy gasping. And so as the hosts of the Prince’s Podcast, we wanted to identify a Machiavellian of the Year for 2016. One person, who, more than any other, crafted power out of chaos. But first, we should consider a few other candidates.

Starting in Britain, 2016 was an excellent year for Theresa May. Although she found herself on the wrong side of the referendum result, she quickly ascended to 10 Downing Street without a single vote. May had quietly told the financial and political elite that Britain would be worse off outside the European Union, but she also sensed the political volatility. She stayed quiet during a divisive campaign and thus emerged unscathed from the tribalism and trench warfare surrounding her. Today, without a compelling enemy in UK politics, May now seems politically insurmountable. Despite her dominance, it is hard to respect a politician who disingenuously follows an economic trajectory she knows to be severely damaging, merely to appease conservative backbenchers and tabloid newspaper editors. Theresa May is a follower posing as a leader. An isolated and disunited kingdom with a shrunken economy will have her name written all over it for decades to come, and it is hard to imagine Niccolo Machiavelli having anything nice to say about a Prince in thrall to the mob. And so we cannot choose May this year because becoming the captain of a sinking ship is quite a generous definition of astute leadership.

Another obvious candidate for our Machiavellian of the Year for 2016 is the man to which the Strix has devoted more words and paragraphs to than any other: Donald Trump. The property mogul destroyed every expectation, norm and candidate in his path, including the two established political dynasties of Bush and Clinton. One of his smarter gambits was to suggest that all of his opponents were beholden to billionaires such as himself. He claimed to have been able to phone almost any of them and demand favours in return for political donations. Not only did he make this unprecedented (if slightly obvious) accusation, he made it during live debates right to the faces if his dumbfounded opponents, creating shocking and captivating television in the process. In a political ecosystem that many on the left had assumed was the plaything of Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers, he won by spending less than almost everybody else. But it would be remiss of us to call a man who has made so many unsustainable promises to his voters a Machiavellian. Chapter six of The Prince instructs those who gain power through promises to form a watertight way of maintaining their support when their pledges collide with the reality of the world around them. Trump cannot bring back the coal industry, deport tens of millions of Mexicans or bring industrial jobs back from China. His voters are headed for heartbreak. That’s why it would be easier to give the award to one of his acolytes. After all, Niccolo Machiavelli never wielded any direct political power himself beyond that of a high-ranking bureaucrat. For instance, Mike Pence, a religious fundamentalist, has smuggled unelectable socially conservative ideals into the West Wing by jumping onto the Trump Train at the right moment. Similarly, Steve Bannon has emerged from the sewers of the white supremacist blogosphere to the corridors of the White House in under a year by attaching himself to the next president when few other media outlets would. A year and a half ago, when Breitbart started supporting Trump, the odds were long, but the potential payout was staggering. Bannon is now one of the most powerful and influential human beings on earth, a fact that is remarkable as it is repulsive.

Nevertheless, we want to give our first ever award to the man who has done more than anybody else to disrupt American democracy and has done so from that furthest possible distance. We do not name him to celebrate or to satirise his behaviour, but to draw attention to it and to remind our readers of that unshakeable Machiavellian truth, that politics is as much about skill as it is about ethics and when the former collapses it can create a vacuum of the later.

Our Machiavellian of the Year for 2016 is Vladimir Putin. In the space of twelve months, the Russian President has redefined the war in Syria, reset relations with Turkey and, with the assistance of an underground online army, helped to elect pro-Russian leaders in Bulgaria, Estonia, Moldova and even the United States of America. It experiences that Vladimir Putin personally instructed hackers to break into the Democratic National Committee servers to steal and leak embarrassing information about the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who Putin personally blames for Moscow’s 2011 anti-government protests. In doing so, the Russian President not only removed a potentially hostile leader of the free world but also earned a debt of gratitude from her rival, Donald Trump who has now appointed a Russian friendly oil executive, Rex Tillerson, as his chief diplomat. Twelve months ago, Russia was struggling under the thumb of Western sanctions following the annexation of the Crimea and the attempted annexation of Eastern Ukraine. In 2017, Russians will live next door to a diminishing European Union, and Putin may have enough sympathy from Donald Trump and the next President of France — be it Fillon or Le Pen — to relieve himself of sanctions. The shift back to normality was already evident last week when Glencore and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company.

For the last few years, Putin has deployed the techniques of Vladislav Surkov, an enigmatic advisor at the Kremlin. Once described as “Putin’s Rasputin”, Surkov has returned to prominence after spending a few years in the wilderness after backing a presidential rival. Surkov is known for his ability to blur and entangle the political world around him. He has sponsored Russian political groups at every end the ideological spectrum, from white supremacists to human rights activists, including groups working in direct opposition to Putin’s government. But Surkov then told the world what he was doing and thus created an indefinable and bewildering political landscape where nobody could ever tell whose side anybody was ever really on. Meanwhile, Russian television keeps much the population on an almost constant war footing by manufacturing a siege mentality assembled around the fabricated caricatures of an aggressive western hemisphere. The perpetual paranoia allows Putin, who has watched sanctions tear through his economy and bite into the living standards of the Russian people, operate in a word free of accountability. When the food runs out in Russian supermarkets, it’s Obama’s fault. In 2014, Surkov applied the same principles of constructed confusion to the conflict in Ukraine, where he attempted to create a chaotic world of hard and soft power in which it was almost to define the enemy. Putin’s fighters become “Russian-backed separatists” volunteering their lives to save Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea from fascism. Surkov likes to think of it as “non-linear warfare.”

On an international level, Russia has granted loans to the French Front National while using Kremlin propaganda channels, such as RT and Sputnik, to amplify the radical left. On RT you can watch shows hosted by fringe socialists like George Galloway being broadcast back to back with those made by apologists for Donald Trump. In America, Russian trolls and hackers have acted in the interests of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to undermine the centre ground. In a world of Facebook clickbait, fake news and a shrinking public sphere, where algorithms feed us more of the articles we want to read, muddying the waters from every ideological position is easier than ever before. The message from these outlets is less a defence of an infallible Kremlin, but a consistent suggestion that western capitalism and western democracy can be just as insidious as Russia’s kleptocracy. As it happens, this narrative may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. America already has its own vainglorious kleptocratic leader in waiting, and European electorates are embracing strongmen while rejecting liberal democratic norms and almost every opportunity. By luck or by genius, but probably by both, Putin has not only managed to rescue Russia’s fragile economic and geopolitical position, but he has also helped to spread a new kind of popular illiberalism in his own image.

On the Prince’s Podcast, we have spent the last year defending the character and the motivation of Niccolò Machiavelli, who sought stability and stewardship about all else. It may seem strange to name a man who has committed war crimes in Aleppo and made life so difficult for so many of his own people as a good Machiavellian example. Indeed, much of Putin’s behaviour has derived from his own desperation, paranoia and weakness. Strategically, he was hemmed in by Nato alliance countries, from the Baltic nations to Turkey, while the Russian economy was gasping for air after the global fall in oil prices. Russia is riddled with corruption because autocracies are infamously inefficient and the Kremlin isn’t brave enough to allow for any kind of meaningful public accountability. But being a Machiavellian is about making the best of what you’ve been given. Russia tried to become a westernised democracy in the 1990s, but the speed and clumsiness of the reforms led to chaos and mistrust. Putin, for all the blood on his hands, has returned his country to relevance.

The strength of Putin’s candidacy is laid out in chapter seven of The Prince. Machiavelli was keen to note that those who ascend to power quickly, like Donald Trump, will find it difficult to manage their principalities without the experience, respect and connections that come from years (and sometimes even decades) of political life:

“Those who solely by good fortune become princes from being private citizens have little trouble in rising, but much in keeping atop; they have not any difficulties on the way up, because they fly, but they have many when they reach the summit.”

Leaders cannot rely on the popularity and goodwill of the general population because people are fickle. Organic goodwill is an unsustainable resource. Meanwhile, Putin has been operating at the peak of international politics for 16 years, and he has been cultivating his influence in Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He fought his way to the top in the power vacuum left over after the fall of the Soviet Union, and once he got there, he started to apply his skills to geopolitics. When he saw a similar vacuum on the world stage, he was ready to pounce. By intervening in Syria, Putin gained leverage in the middle east, and by bombing civilian areas he exacerbated the refugee crisis in Europe and contributed to the continent’s ongoing political disintegration.

And yet, even now, it is hard to know if his influence can last. If it doesn’t, it will not be because of Putin’s Machiavellian instincts but his petty personality. There is evidence that all is not well behind those infamous eyes. Knowing that she was afraid of dogs, Putin once invited his black Labrador to sit in on a bilateral meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a childish effort to unsettle her. Using a pet to try and intimidate a contemporary is not how confident people behave. Intimidating your perceived rivals with an animal is how a coward behaves. Merkel herself has pondered whether Putin is even in touch with reality himself. He was, she once remarked, “in another world.” She may be right. Every Russian generation has grown up with an inbuilt suspicion of almost all public intuitions, and who could blame them? Russian intuitions didn’t work for ordinary Russian people under the Tsars, they didn’t work under the communists, they didn’t work under the free-marketeers, and they don’t work now. Russians have always had to depend on their direct personal relationships with other Russians. When times are hard, as they often have been, everyone and everything had a hidden agenda, and if you wanted to win you had to bend or break the rules. Putin, it seems, is now projecting his own lack of trust onto the rest of the world. In 2016, Western liberal democracies have validated his scepticism, in 2017, they will have to prove him wrong.

С новым годом

Written by the editors of the Strix

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Hello Fuckface

Has the standard of political rhetoric been lower at any time in living memory than it is today? All over the world, the bar is being lowered by increasingly chauvinistic language. The mouth of Donald Trump and its obnoxious harassment of ‘low energy’ Jeb Bush, ‘lying’ Ted Cruz and ‘crooked’ Hillary Clinton might spring to mind. The scapegoats are easy, foreigners are killers, rapists, and terrorists. The solutions are easier, build a wall, ban Muslims from entering the country and bring back torture. Indeed, threatening to imprison your political opponent to her face on live television was an unprecedented departure from the established tone of modern American democracy. And yet, across the world, politicians are turning up the hyperbolic volume. In Europe, the EU has been described as if it was a tyrannical empire, “swamped” by immigrants. Meanwhile, the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has compared his own violent ambition to purge his country of drug dealers to the genocidal tendencies of Adolf Hitler. Many of us are repelled by such comments, but they also break through the repetitive news cycles and become endearing to those who feel a distance between themselves and the powerful. But why does it pay off to be rude, arrogant and chauvinistic on the modern political landscape?

I want to share an anecdote from Catalonia which might help to explain. A few months ago I was talking to an old friend I made in primary school. Today he works on La Rambla, a street popular with tourists in Barcelona. Every night he stands on La Rambla handing out vouchers for a free shot of hard alcohol with every drink purchased in an Irish pub just off the thoroughfare. For his trouble, he receives the Spanish minimum wage of €5.05 per hour with a bonus for each customer he brings into the bar. It sounds like a rough life, and yet he lives in his own three-bedroom apartment. As I write this, he’s enjoying a holiday in Manhattan. How on earth does he do it? “What I do”, he told me, “is I wait for a bunch of British tourists. I approach the group and harass them.” When he gets close to the Brits, he always says “hello Fuckface”.

But why on earth would you insult them? “If you run up to them and shout ‘hello fuckface’, then it becomes impossible for them to ignore you. They find themselves baffled; they want to know why they’re being insulted for no reason. They have to engage.”

The ‘hello fuckface’ method has been honed and refined by three years of trying to gain the attention of tipsy tourists. La Rambla is the home of numerous nuisances. Even sober pedestrians entering at the southern end of the street on any given evening, are likely to be offered cans of supermarket lager by African migrants, cannabis by Catalonian drug dealers and oral sex by disturbingly youthful prostitutes. The best way to get your wallet and your dignity from one end of this obtuse obstacle course to the other is to advance quickly and avoid eye contact if possible. If you attempted to engage honestly and politely with everyone, you wouldn’t get very far. But one thing proven to break through this white noise is hearing the words “hello Fuckface” at point blank range in a familiar accent. However hostile or bewildered the reaction is, it almost always starts a conversation and starting a conversation is half the battle. Often, the whole group will stop to investigate the faux-aggression, 30 seconds later they will all be holding a voucher for a free drink.

The political class described as ‘the establishment’ by the new generation of populists are defined by their habit of speaking in an overtly politically correct language in perfectly constructed paragraphs. They are now routinely characterised by their inability to sound natural and conversational. To millions of dissatisfied voters, their desire not to offend is the most offensive thing about them. The voices of this political class have, for many, merged into one long and tedious groan. Imagine that the price of living has increased for your whole life and you haven’t had a pay rise in the last decade. Every year the same standard of living gets more expensive while your economic expectations fade into the distance regardless of who you vote for. Eventually, every decibel of conventional political rhetoric starts to sound like an orchestra playing the same song over and over. Everybody wants your attention, but nobody stands out. In this frustrating environment, every politician is an annoyance until the moment you hear a reflection of your own anger breaking free to callously castigate the castrated cage of caution.

By breaking the code of politically correct platitudes, any demagogue can instantly attract an excitable press. The rise of social media and the ideologically disparate journalism it fosters will provide ample protection from the kind of high-minded editor who might have once opted not to reward such lewd behavior with free publicity. In the new world of clickbait, hot air always rises.

And yet, tactics that appear to work well on La Rambla are unlikely to do so for very long in the wider world. Vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity may be a good way of gaining the attention and the votes of the general public in any given moment, but it will never be able to solve the world’s problems in a meaningful way. As annoying as it is, the tediously politically correct language of the so-called establishment was invented for a reason. If you’re Asian, black or female, you’ve probably benefited from efforts to create a seemingly sensitive society. Whether or not that society is genuinely sensitive or inclusive is a different question. In England, it is becoming a taboo not to blame migrants for our social and economic dysfunctions. To deny that immigration is a problem in itself, even when citing academic evidence, has become “elitist”. But even if we put aside every social and criminal consequence associated with xenophobia, it remains true that if you scapegoat a group of people for problems they did not cause, then you’re probably never going to solve those problems. Unfortunately, history seems to suggest that almost every generation of almost every culture, simply has to learn this the hard way.

In the meantime, there is a serious question that liberal minded people on both sides of the Atlantic, who believe in the freedom of markets, of people and ideas, must ponder; if an ideal isn’t systemically flawed but can be widely perceived to be systemically flawed, does that in itself make it systemically flawed?

Think about it Fuckface.

This article was first published on thestrix.com

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2Q16: The Age of Post-Fact Politics

As the American comedian Bill Maher described it; “48% voted for Sense and Sensibility and 52% voted for Pride and Prejudice”. Since the morning after Britain’s referendum to leave the European Union, various versions of the term “post-factual politics” have popped up on television, radio, social media, and in newspaper columns. Specifically, the idea has been evoked to describe the impotence of experts and statistics during what was a campaign of emotion. But what does post-factual (or post-truth) politics actually mean and is there even anything new about it?

It is my belief that we are living in a new, myopic, political universe. Mexico sends murders and rapists into America. Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheered as the twin towers collapsed. The UK spends £350 million per week to be in the EU. All of this is believed, but none of it is true. Indeed, there has always been bullshit. Contrary to what we were told, Nixon was a crook, Clinton did have sexual relations with “that woman”, and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were a little over 45 minutes away. Misinformation is impossible to measure or quantify, so what’s so especially deceptive about public life today?

In Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, a protagonist named Aomame starts to notice subtle but sudden differences in her reality. At first, they are small, such as an uncounted for change in Japanese police equipment, but upon inspection, they become rather significant as the changes are linked to events of which she has no memory. The police in Tokyo have new firearms because of an allegedly infamous gunfight that everybody else seems to remember happening. Aomame investigates by pulling old newspapers out of a public library and in doing so finds herself living in an alternative version of 1984, one in which the USA and USSR have joined forces to develop a permanent base on the moon. She decides to call this new world 1Q84. “Q is for question mark. A world that bares a question” she tells herself. “Like it or not” she reflects, “I’m here now, in the year 1Q84. The 1984 that I knew no longer exists. It’s 1Q84 now. The air has changed; the scene has changed. I have to adapt to this world with a question mark as soon as I can.”

What sets 2016, or 2Q16, apart from the bullshit of days gone by is that there used to be a public consensus evolving within a shared public sphere. It was easier for new information to change the direction and tone of the conversation for everybody because most of us trusted the same people. Before the internet started to eat journalism, the news which people read was controlled by a relatively refined clique of reporters in each country. On television, on radio and in newspapers, editors focused on delivering information as opposed to today’s emphasis on opinion. Much of what was reported in the past was slanted, but journalists would generally cover the same set of stories with the same set of facts. Today, we hear about breaking news on Facebook, Twitter and via instant smartphone notifications. Traditional outlets are no longer the first to tell us what’s happening and now exist to add detail, analysis, and editorial opinion to current affairs. The result is often ideological entrenchment. News organisations, which no longer focus primarily on delivering news, have a harsh economic incentive to reflect the pre-existing beliefs of their readers, whether those beliefs are based on facts or are not.

For must of us, our experience of news delivery has been cannibalised by Facebook and Google, who now collect 85% of all online advertising revenue, often for ushering users towards other people’s work. Both of these websites employ invasive algorithms designed to feed us the content we are already pre-disposed to like. Facebook, now a primary source of news for over one billion people, provides a particularly efficient form of intellectual insulation. Our Facebook friends are usually made up of the people we went to school with, went to work with or grew up with as part of the same family. They are often predominantly clustered around a familiar geographic location. For instance, the majority of my friends live in cosmopolitan South London and are far from representative of the whole of the UK. The political tone of my Facebook feed manifests itself as a constant cascade of liberal/socialist dissatisfaction, a cosy universe of therapeutic consensus reminding us how right we are and how the wrong the rest of the world is. This new media landscape means that candidates and voters can inhabit realms of their own curation, potentially devoid of any authoritative gravitational pull towards reality.

In 1Q84, Aomame’s first reaction to the realisation of her new altered reality is one of recognition and adaptation. In 2Q16, the world’s most successful populist politicians have adapted by selling competing versions of a future without any hint of compromise to their increasingly absolutist supporters. But with seven billion people all alive at once, any absolutist vision of anything is doomed to disappoint. In the meantime, expect a post-factual political landscape to foster bigotry, ignorance and scapegoating, delaying our efforts to solve the world’s real problems.

This article was first published on thestrix.com

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The First Three Tragedies

A quick note on the first three tragedies of the British vote to leave the EU. I wrote this on Facebook in the small hours in the wake of the result and it went slightly viral so I thought I would share it here. 

Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term from the dearth of jobs and investment. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another one. 

Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors. 

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said 'the British people are sick of experts' he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has lead to anything other than bigotry. 

Oh, and one other thing. It looks as if the UK will now lose Northern Ireland and Scotland, both of which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. When the Financial Times endorsed the Conservative party in the 2015 election the  headline was "The compelling case for continuity in Britain".

If you’re interested in my thoughts on what this means for the world in general, you can read my recent essay on the growing popularity of destructive ideas.

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Bribes, Boulders, and Suicide

In the eyes of any other writer, Albert Camus had an intimidating talent for opening his books. In his 1942 novel The Stranger, he begins with the unforgettable "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." In English, "Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure." Camus stood out from his French existentialist classmates thanks to his desire to smile often and his ability to smile well. Photographed with his Mad Men hair, a cigarette and an iconic upturned collar, Camus could easily have been a film noir detective. (If James Dean had lived beyond the age of 24, he would have looked quite similar to Albert Camus.) When asked what he would do if he were forced to choose between the stadium and stage, he was alleged to have picked football "without hesitation". As a goalkeeper, he won the North African Champions Cup in 1935. Unsurprisingly, this devastatingly handsome philosopher lamented loneliness between the beds of multiple women and rarely had fewer than three girlfriends. Sadly, like James Dean, he perished in a car crash at a relatively early age. The year was 1960. It was the dawn of a decade that could have been divinely designed for his enjoyment, he was only 46 years old.

Aside from seducing the uninitiated, it is worth indulging in the classic myth of Camus if only to reiterate the romantic idea that not every existentialist was sitting in the cafe as a refugee from the popular world. Camus may have been an emissary from Dostoevsky's underground, but he wasn't a full-time inhabitant, and so when he wrote the momentous opening sentence of his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, he did so with the often elusive authority of relatability. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," he wrote "and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy." For Camus, life was defined by its absurdity. We live in a frustrating twilight between our expectations and the reality. We strive in the hope for a better future and yet every passing day brings us closer to the end of life itself. As the old Slovenian saying goes, "the light at the end of the tunnel is the light of an oncoming train." This scenario would have been acceptable if God existed, but he probably doesn't and, according to Camus, a secular world would have to reexamine the nature of mortality and find new reasons to justify it. "The subject of this essay," he wrote, "is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd." To do this, Camus evoked Sisyphus, the mythical king of Corinth. According to one legend, Sisyphus had temporary detained Thanatos in chains, putting a brief halt to all death on earth. As punishment for defying the deities, Zeus forced Sisyphus to spend the rest of eternity repeatedly pushing a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down again when he approached the top, at which point he would have to walk back down the hill and start the futile process all over again. To Camus, Sisyphus is the paragon of human mortality. Without God, life can easily be considered as a pointless, repetitive and self-perpetuating struggle. So why do so many of us, including you and I, still put up with it?

In a pensive discussion with Interview Magazine, the author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips attempted to shed some light on the sustainability of the human experience. In his new collection of essays, Unforbidden Pleasures, Phillips explores the ways in which we prioritise unattainable desires while neglecting those that are readily available to us. “Being preoccupied by mourning and loss," he remarked "is a fear of the future, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real or valuable as a human experience, but it can also be a refuge from the future. So (Oscar) Wilde’s interest in pleasure is an interest in how you keep the future open and alluring.” What interests Phillips is the unspoken deals we cultivate which allow us to carry on living without the need to justify the meaning of life every evening:

“I think it comes down to the question of whether the suffering in one’s life makes one’s life bearable or not. Whether it actually feels worth being alive. Because there’s a kind of enforced consensus that life is the thing. Life can be unbearably painful for a lot of people and indeed has been for most people who have ever lived. So the question is: what keeps us going? And are we being bribed to live when actually we’d rather not be alive? Or if it’s not that way around, then what can we do to make life actually worth living to ourselves and to other people? You could think that that is what culture is partly about. That culture is about keeping the show on the road.”

Here, Phillips ponders the idea of "being bribed to live", which suggests that the lack of an ultimate justification for existing is unimportant enough to be dismissed in favour of life's enduring emotional and material perks. Once the bribes dry up or diminish in their appeal, the individual becomes disinvested and is capable of destructive behaviour. Phillips is merely musing, but what if we were to extend his train of thought to the wider social and political landscape? In Europe and the USA, the established post-cold war political consensus has found itself under siege. Consider two prominent examples of populist ascent. Firstly, the climax of British eurosceptics and secondly the enduring appeal of Donald Trump.  Both cases represent a threat to the global economy and the geopolitical world order envisioned in the 1940's for the sake of preventing war between industrialised countries. What the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Donald Trump have in common is the reliable support of millions of working class white males who didn't go to university and now consider themselves as outcasts of a modernity that has stripped them of their predominant social status. There is nothing remarkable about these anti-social beliefs, and it is still possible that by the end of 2016, Britain will have voted to stay in Europe and America will have voted to keep Trump out of the White House. And yet, both are bound to have profound and long-lasting political legacies. Those who voted for the middle finger won't be going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump has raised the prospect of a religious test for entry into the United States, the forceful deportation of millions of immigrants, the torture of those who happen to be related to terrorists (in defiance of the Forth Geneva Convention) and the termination of NATO. He has also threatened to instigate a global trade war while bragging about his denial of climate change. As Paul Krugman puts it, in 2016 "the planet is on the ballot." Meanwhile, there are no international organisations with anything other than pessimistic things to say about a British exit from the European Union. With the notable exception of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, there are no world leaders and almost no economic experts who believe that such a decision would be a good idea for Britain. A vote to leave the EU would deprive Britain of influence on the continent and starve the country of scientific research funding, investment and talent. Across the world, the public sphere has been ruptured and replaced by an archipelago of ideologically siloed online communities impervious to accountability as well as each other’s perspectives. People almost everywhere are now voting for disruptive candidates and ideas, from the newly elected authoritarian government in the Philippines, which is now urging the public to murder criminals, to the far right Austrian populist who came within 30,000 votes of becoming his country's president.

Some commentators, such as Andrew Sullivan, writing in New York Magazine, have argued that we may be witnessing the symptoms of "late stage democracy." Sullivan describes the rise of Trump as "an extinction level event." In a recent essay, he cites Plato's Republic and the morbid idea that "tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy." For Plato, the freedom and liberty of late stage democracy would be so great that respect for authorities and institutions would inevitably wither away over time, leaving nothing and nobody to restrain the bully and the tyrant. It could be argued that the economic crash of 2007-2008 was the first time in living memory when standards of living dropped while a majority of voters around the world had no direct of experience of the second world war. It was the moral disarray of Nazism and the Holocaust that informed the ideas of Albert Camus and every political architect of the modern western world including the authors of the Geneva Convention, the European Union, and NATO. All three were crafted as insurance policies against the worst kind of man-made disasters and all three now find themselves as the victims of populist applause lines. The questions that most divide those on the left and the right between each other are no longer about how to improve national and international institutions, but increasingly about whether or not they should simply be torn up and discarded with. For many of the world’s angriest people, the one truly serious political problem is strikingly similar to Camus’ one truly serious philosophical problem.

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, globalisation and increased mobility has had a swift, chaotic, and in some cases, catastrophic effect on communities in every part of the world. Industries have fallen, jobs have been lost, and incomes have been frozen as cultures have homogenised at the expense of their historic identities. Liberals are often correct to point out that cultures, communities, and economies are always, and have always, been in a constant state of transition, but what they often fail to recognise is that it has never happened this quickly and on such a scale without resulting in political and economic instability. As this tide of globalisation occurred, politicians appeared to lose power and influence as they fell into the shadow of a dominant free-market global economy. (Those on the right often did so with palpable enthusiasm.) In the process they descended from the status of leaders to that of mere managers of public life, their job was to find ways of bribing the benefits of the global market back into their country's and constituencies with varying degrees of success. The result is a wide-spread perception that the elites everywhere are useless careerists and that an interconnected world is a chaotic competitive mess and that nobody is holding the steering wheel. This perceived lack of control - which is relatively unsurprising on a planet which we all have to share with 7 billion other people - has tempted voters in Turkey, Russia, Hungary, Poland and apparently the USA, back into the arms of the so-called ‘strongman’ leader. To millions of the iconoclastic voters now standing behind the anti-establishment political movements across the world, one question might be to ask whether they regard the future as "open and alluring" or whether the future anticipated by the world's besieged political elites, is something that needs to be controlled and restrained.

If, as Phillips speculates, we are all of us being "bribed to live" and suicide is what happens when the bribes lose their appeal, then what would happen if this idea was realised in regard to the preservation of our political institutions and on a global scale? If suicide is the loss of faith in the pleasures life, what would it look like if we lost faith in the benefits of constructive multicultural collaboration? If there is no positive international narrative and internationalism comes to represent little more than the consequences of the unfettered global profiteering of a tiny unreachable elite, then what will we tell ourselves to preserve the institutions and values that fostered the civilisation that most of us still take for granted? For Camus, the meaning of life was whatever you tell yourself to stop yourself from killing yourself. Every liberal democracy is mortal, without the right bribes in place to peddle their appeal, what can we hope for that might prevent them from destroying themselves?

The moment in the endless cycle of Sisyphus that captivated Camus more than any other was the slow march down the mountain, the rest between heaving before he has to start all over again. In these moments, an unengaged Sisyphus has time to contemplate his incorrigible condition. At that moment, "with a heavy yet measured step towards the tournament of which he will never know the end", Sisyphus becomes an absurd hero as he enters what Camus describes as "the hour of consciousness." Camus concludes his essay by denouncing suicide, which teaches us nothing, before rescuing Sisyphus by asking the reader to envision a subject at peace with the absurdity of his situation. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy," writes Camus, because "his fate belongs to him." Once the nature of absurdity has been recognised and reconciled, the subject is free to proceed with emotional impunity. For centuries, dissatisfaction and frustration have acted as the engine of social progress, and yet progressive theories of political, economic and social justice rarely consider the danger of complacency or Plato's somewhat Sisyphean theory of mortal democracy. Perhaps if we could arm ourselves with the knowledge, and even the enjoyment of, our inherent collective weaknesses then we might be able to employ a more constructive tone of political and social frustration. Our aim should be to see the world as Camus would see it, a planet ruled by chance, indifference and the petty prejudices of an imperfect species. Like Sisyphus, taking ownership of his repetitive plight, we all have the ability to take pride in the world as it is and not just the worlds we wish we could live in.

This essay was originally published on my new website TheStrix.com

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The Girl of Your Dreams

Deep in the depths of Morrissey’s back-catalogue lies Southpaw, a slightly epic experiment in sound and storytelling. Here, the transition between the innocence of childhood and the loneliness of adulthood is played out over ten mesmerising minutes on a track that was never performed live and was seldom celebrated. The song, written by Morrissey, Alain Whyte and produced by Steve Lillywhite, was at the bottom of the Southpaw Grammar album of 1995. It was the same year that Radiohead released The Bends, with a similar effort in the shape of Fake Plastic Trees, which painted a tragic, detailed and disillusioned portrait of dented desires. The reality of a “fake plastic love”, beyond the singer’s control “wears out” a rejected and remorseful Thom Yorke. Meanwhile, in Southpaw “the girl of your dreams is sad and all alone”.

Rock music in the UK had spent the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s patrolling the perimeter of its potential before collapsing in the form of Britpop. But perhaps a small corner of Britain’s musical landscape had recognised its lamentable limits. By 1995, Morrissey has outgrown his Smiths honeymoon. Unfashionable and unfavoured, his Vauxhall and I masterpiece of the previous year had been largely overlooked. As the rock genre entered a prolonged period of Freudian regression, which continues to this day, the Southpaw protagonist ran with his friends in the sun, looked around and found himself alone before scurrying home to his mother.

Two decades later and the track has been revitalised by cutting room floor detritus, washed up and collected on YouTube. Those who know him well would never trust Morrissey to be the best judge of his own material. Back in January, a clandestine ‘studio version’ of Southpaw emerged, which somehow manages to eclipse the original. Morrissey fans – and sadly it is only Morrissey fans who have appreciated it – have been treated to a truly haunting rendition. In the unearthed recording, a melancholy collection of strings gently lowers the listener into an oblivion of abandonment, opening up a void to remind us just how sobering Morrissey can be when he tries. Southpaw is the sound of youth circling the drain.

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Martin Sandbu is the author of Europe's Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt. He also writes the daily Free Lunch column for the Financial Times. This is one of the most enjoyable interviews I conducted during my time at the Florence School of Banking and Finance. I also had a chance to sit down with Lee Buchheit and Patrick Honohan, who was the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland between 2009 and 2015.

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The Shawl

The archipelagos of Indonesia represent an unending playground of volcanoes, rainforests, and temples. Like many of the nation's myriad islands, Bali is emblazoned by a panoply of coral reefs. Here, the child, the adult, the expert and the tourist can admire the blue and yellow of the angelfish, the orange and white of the clownfish, and the green and pink of the parrotfish without the need for much effort of patients. This aquatic toy store can remind anybody of the infant’s eye view of the world, but there is also a dark curtain for the curious at the back of the shop.

Beyond the reef crest, there is the outer reef and beyond the outer reef, there is the reef drop-off zone. This void is where the flamboyancy of the coral and tropical fish turns into the dark and mysterious cerulean of the Java sea. Swimming over the precipice of the outer reef and into the drop-off zone for the first time is like soaring over the edge of a cliff. Below you is the cliff face, where the finned flying colors of the reef crest risk the teeth of a moray eel if they linger too long. To inspect this fascinating facade, the snorkeler must quickly divorce the surface with an inquisitive ambition and a deep breath.

The valuable air in the diver's lungs runs out fast, and it also creates an almost magnetic physical and psychological attraction to the surface, so time down there is limited. Or at least, it seemed limited until the moment I looked down as 5 meters of manta ray elegantly emerged beneath me. At such a moment time stops. The first thing I noticed was the sheer the scale of specimen below me. As an eight-year-old, I immediately imagined myself sitting on the ray with my legs crossed as if I were Aladdin on his magic carpet. Manta rays can have a wingspan of 7 meters. Their streamlined, and almost two-dimensional appearance resembles a lost and lonely blue whale fin. Compared to the A4 sized rays we tentatively tickle at the topless aquarium tanks, the Manta is a giant. Before seeing one, I'd had no idea that such a monster existed.

The name Manta derives from the Spanish word for a shawl. Aside from their remarkable size, they have also gained a reputation as the most intelligent fish on the planet. Recently, they were credited as the first fish capable of successfully identifying themselves in a mirror. Due to their inability to swim backwards, these enigmatic creatures are often killed or injured in nets designed for smaller fish.

The encounter was fleeting. The shadow of the shawl seemed to disappear as swiftly as it had emerged. As a dusky shape drifting amidst the cobalt blue darkness, the Manta seemed somewhat ghostly as she humbly hallowed the drop-off zone before vanishing and leaving an emptier world behind her. 

Running underneath the world's daily dosage of disseminated tragedy, we are all of us living through a manmade catastrophe, the sixth great extinction in the history of our planet. With 17 years and over 7,000 miles separating me and my memory I can still say with confidence that these are the moments we stay alive for as well as being the reason I live in fear of a blank planet. 

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The Polarising Worlds of Therapeutic Politics

How do you know you’re right? It’s a consequential question because for a democratic society to be responsive, there have to be occasional shifts of public perception. But in recent years, our relationship with the news has nudged us away from the ability to develop a common consensus. Instead of learning about an ambiguous and complicated moral world, we increasingly seek reassurance because it is easier than ever. The result is an increasingly polarised political landscape with the potential to delay and disrupt the flow of new ideas: 'therapeutic politics'.

In short, therapeutic politics is what happens when people engage with politics in a way that makes them feel good about their previously held beliefs instead of confronting challenging new ideas. It is the habit of reading, writing and watching that which conforms with our pre-existing political positions. Many of us are being cut off from the realities of the world around us. How did it become so easy to get lost in our favourite narratives and what are our therapeutic reading habits doing to the political landscape?

Jeff Jarvis is an American journalist and author. He writes BuzzMachine, a popular blog about the news media. Back in April, Jarvis delivered a lecture at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. It was called “To Hell with Mass Media”. In the Palazzo dei Priori, once known as Perugia’s “New Palace of the People”, Jarvis enthusiastically declared that the age of journalists trying to talk to all the people at once was over. The mass media, he said, had been killed by digital abundance. To survive and succeed in today’s competitive media landscape, publishers have to talk to their audience as individuals, as opposed to a diverse populous. Journalists, he says, should aim to provide a service, a more personalised experience for the reader. This tactic is entirely understandable, the days of loyally subscribing to one newspaper or gathering around the television for an evening news broadcast are coming to an end. The digital revolution has allowed a diverse range of website, blogs, YouTube channels and podcasts to democratise the old world. There is more choice than ever and that in itself is becoming a problem.

After his speech, I had the chance to ask Jarvis whether we should be worried about people becoming entrenched and polarised in their political beliefs. I cited the persistent and petulant denials of man-made climate change on Fox News. “History,” he told me “has always had idiots and jerks who refuse to pay attention to the facts.” He’s not wrong, but these idiots and jerks now enjoy their own alternative reality of tabloid pseudoscience and in America global warming has become a partisan issue, with one party trying to solve the problem while the other bury their heads in the sand. How could they possibly get away with this kind of flat-earth denial in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence? They get away with it because the providers and consumers of news have become intolerant of opposing ideas and settled for therapeutic politics.

Instead of providing a news service, Fox provides a confirmation bias service. Initially, the channel’s predecessor, Television News Incorporated (TVN), was conceived by Roger Ailes in 1970 in a memo he wrote for his paranoid boss, President Richard Nixon. The memo was entitled “A Plan for Putting the GOP (The Republican Party) on TV News.” In the memo, Ailes writes “Today TV news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication. The reason: people are lazy. With television you just sit, watch, listen. The thinking is done for you.” The point was also to “provide pro-Administration” news on behalf of the Republican President. And while TVN died after failing to save Nixon from the newspapers, Ailes would find himself establishing Fox News to do a similar job 20 years later.

Fox News, is probably the most obvious example of therapeutic politics. The typical viewer is old, white, male and conservative. It would be inaccurate to describe the belligerent Fox News anchors as propagandists because propaganda is designed to persuade. Those who indulge in the journalism of therapeutic politics are rarely propagandists, more often they resemble prison wardens guarding the ideological exits. Each event provides fresh building material to bolster the political silos of the mind. To the left wing therapists, a race riot is always the result of racial and economic exclusion, to the right-wing therapists a race riot is what happens when society allows a deficit of personal responsibility. Nobody learns anything because each side simply becomes further entrenched. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter and the ad-revenue they can generate, this phenomenon has now travelled beyond commentary and into reportage; a trend well documented by Jordan Liles in his criminally underappreciated YouTube series, The Rise of Political Clickbait.

The internet is a perfect environment for therapeutic politics to flourish. It is easier than ever to banish opposing writers and online publications from your Facebook news feed, which has become one of the most popular sources of news on earth. And the rise of Facebook as a news service isn’t just a habit of young people, a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center indicated that the increased trend of Americans who regard Facebook as a news source (now 63% of us) cuts across almost every demographic. So instead of us all seeing the same news stories, we each curate our own comfortable worlds of relentlessly refreshed reassurance. If the bubble is ever pierced, it’s often done with the articles shared by our friends, who usually share our socio-economic backgrounds and are unlikely to harbour views that differ dramatically from our own. We use the news we do like to service our own biases, while the sources of news and analysis we don’t like, be they people, blogs, or news organisations, can be unfollowed and permanently disregarded in an instant. This proliferation of soft-core scorn for the other side matters because history is bound the present us with new and challenging problems we will need to solve.

If these problems become partisan, as climate change has in America, they will be exacerbated by zealots. Right now, the most infamous unintended consequence of Fox News is the ongoing phenomenon of Donald Trump. The Republican front-runner tells his followers that those in the press are incorrigible liars. They can’t be trusted. Trump has recently been described as “the Uber of politicians” because he has cut out the middlemen between himself and the electorate to disrupt the established political order. In doing so he is effectively sealing off his core supporters from critical influences, he encourages their right wing reactionary tendencies and they do the same to him. The reason Trump can describe Mexicans as “murderers” and “rapists” as well as threatening to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, is partly because there is nobody left to define the line in the sand. Ultimately, Roger Ailes lost control over the phenomenon he created, Trump and others like him have caused havoc in the republican primaries. The monster is no longer in need of Frankenstein.

Meanwhile, in Britain, therapeutic politics has taken hold of the left. After its defeat in the 2015 election, the Labour party turned in on itself. Party members, who represent a relatively narrow segment of the British population, elected a staunch socialist with little or no regard for the wider electorate. The ascent of Jeremy Corbyn is regarded as a repudiation of Tony Blair’s third way, when the Labour party capitulated to the right on economic policy, the legacy of which was permanently stained by Britain’s disastrous involvement in the Iraq war. While losing popularity on the left, the domestic direction of the Labour party under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did reflect wider public attitudes, which have tended to turn towards the left on social issues and towards the right on economic issues.

In 2015, the arrival of Jeremy Corbyn revitalised many on the left who felt betrayed or left behind by New Labour’s third-way adaptation. The problem for the left is that in Britain, they have always been a minority. That’s why during the rise of Corbyn, the party’s membership went through the roof while the party’s popularity continued to fall through the floor. There are now almost no serious political commentators or pollsters in the UK who believe that Corbyn could win a general election, and many of his supporters agree, but that doesn’t seem to matter because for many of them the point isn’t to win and gain power, the point is to have a principled opposition to David Cameron. The problem is that while strongly held principles without power can make people feel good, they can’t do much more than that.

Supporters would be forgiven for believing that Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Nigel Farage, and even centrist figures like Hilary Clinton, could rebuild their relationships with the pubic if only they were covered with fairness and accuracy. The problem is that the new world of therapeutic politics makes this almost impossible. Many Corbyn supporters suspect that most of the British press are constantly preparing to persecute him, regardless of what he actually says or does. These supporters would probably be correct in their assumption. But that’s because the British media editors know that their readers don’t read political news to be challenged and are taking advantage of this. The only way for the best leaders and ideas to prosper is for us the readers to afford the opposing side the same degree of curiosity and oxygen that our own ideas would need from them if they were ever to grow. There is no single political tribe currently capable of shaping the world by itself, and none of them are going away any time soon. It is no coincidence that after respective election defeats in 2012 and 2015 the American Republican Party and the British Labour Party both published detailed post-mortems examining the circumstances of their loss. Both reports concluded that not enough effort had been made to talk to voters who had supported the other side. Since then, both parties have ignored the evidence in their respective post-mortems. The Republicans continue to believe that they can win with the support of white voters alone and the Labour Party still behave as if they will never need to appeal to moderate conservative voters.

At this point, therapeutic politics becomes an intellectual dead-end because our political opponents will almost never change their mind. A recent study by American social scientists indicated that the best way to make and win an argument against a political antagonist is by understanding and adopting their moral perspectives and explaining yourself from their point of view. We lose arguments when we overestimate the appeal of our own values and argue for our positions solely from our own perspectives. When we do that, we simply alienate our opponent. I emailed the study’s co-author Matthew Feinberg, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at the University of Toronto. He explained that “we experience our moral attitudes as intuitive facts that everyone else must also experience. It is extremely difficult for us to take the moral perspective of others because we often do not even recognise that others have a different perspective, and if we do, we automatically view this other perspective as wrong and not worthy of us comprehending.” I then also asked Feinberg how we could break through to those whose views we find to be the most alien in comparison with our own. I cited Donald Trump’s supporters. “I would say that no matter what we believe ourselves, we should try to understand where everyone else is coming from. This, by no means, suggests that we must agree with their point of view. But we must understand why these individuals are so entrenched, and by understanding their perspective, we'll be less likely to dehumanise them – which just entrenches them further – and more likely to find ways to persuade them, or at least loosen their grip on the entrenched positions they hold.”

Jeff Jarvis was right to predict the demise of the mass media; therapeutic politics is certainly here to stay. The only thing we can do to preserve an open political and public sphere is to be aware of the enclosed communities we so easily wander into and to constantly challenge ourselves and the information we consume. When reading or watching news, opinions or analysis, we must always ask ourselves what we are learning, whether or not we are predisposed to like what’s in front of us and most importantly of all, whether or not it bolsters a familiar sense of ideological comfort. The best ideas, perspectives and narratives will survive such scrutiny and if you think you possess the best ideas already then you’ll have nothing to lose.

This article was originally published on the Open Democracy website.

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Introducing the Prince's Podcast

My new hobby is podcasting, and my new after-hours project is called The Prince's Podcast. Each week I will ask my friend Lewis Miller, a political scientist, what modern day politicians can learn from The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.  Each episode is approximately half an hour long and recorded in a Lewis' flat, opposite the author's final resting place in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. We're currently working our way through the little book chapter by chapter, applying contemporary case-studies, such as the triumph of Trump and the tragedy of Jeb Bush, to Machiavelli's lessons in statecraft. We will also be discussing geopolitics, including European and middle eastern politics, and I also hope to apply the book's teachings to workplace management theory, as that is where people are most likely to encounter so-called 'Machiavellian' behaviour. Anyone interested can subscribe to and download the podcast for free via iTunes or listen on AudioBoom.

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N.B. The theme tune is called Rictus, and was created by my cousin Conrad Kira.

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Ambition and frustration back on the minds of British workers

John, 26, is looking for a new job. He complains about his long commute, his long hours, and the phone he’s not allowed to turn off. When asked about workplace morale he says his colleagues are “disenchanted because they sense their work is pointless.” After three years studying at Oxford and another two years training to become a solicitor, he finally found a place in London’s so-called ‘Silver Circle’ of corporate law firms. But after six months of the new job, John, who asked me not to use his real name, is looking for a way out and he’s not alone. Almost half of the workers in Britain will be looking for a new job in 2016, with 1 in 5 currently searching for alternative employment, according to a new study. 

The survey of ‘job exodus trends’, conducted by Investors in People, reveals that over a third of British workers would prefer greater flexibility at work to a pay rise. These statistics come at the end of long period of wage stagnation in the UK, where unemployment is now at the lowest rate for almost a decade. 

Paul Devoy, head of Investors in People, believes that the steady recovery in the job market has shifted the focus of employees towards workplace frustrations and the prospect of greener grass. According to Devoy, “improved salaries over recent months means that pay is less of a gripe for UK workers. But longstanding issues around poor management and how valued people feel in their work continue to make UK workers miserable.”

The report shows that 29% of working Brits are unhappy in their current jobs with poor management cited as the leading cause of unhappiness. Meanwhile, 38% believe they will be valued more elsewhere. 

In the City of London, working life is infamously strenuous. A housing boom has forced young workers, including John, into the suburbs. For many this means a tedious daily commute to the office where few leave the desk before 7 pm. It is estimated that approximately 10 million working days are lost due to stress every year in the UK.

“The City is full of workers who were hired because of their impressive academic and extra-curricular records who soon found themselves limited to a diet of financial and commercial documentation,” laments the exhausted solicitor. 

John spends three hours a day commuting and is expected to keep his blackberry on at all times. He’s critical of flexible working hours, which he describes as “an extension of the working day into workers' home lives, meaning that they are unable to switch off."

So what can organisations do to encourage their staff to feel at home? According to Devoy, “saying thank you, involving employees in decisions and giving them responsibility over their work are basic ways to make staff happier, and more likely to stay.” Meanwhile, a grumbling John has to get back to work, “it’s no wonder people want more time than money."

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George Osborne’s BBC Muse

In a change to his usual programming, the George Osborne used Wednesday's Autumn spending review to announce additional funding for the BBC World Service. This would have come as a surprise to anybody paying attention to the BBC, which has spent the last five years weathering the storms of austerity. When George Osborne came to power, the World Service was subsidesed to the tune of over £250million, 12% of the Foreign office budget. It couldn’t last. First the license fee was frozen. Then the government announced that it would no longer be subsidising elderly fee payers or the World Service. Since then, dark clouds have hung over Broadcasting House, where the newly integrated newsrooms failed to escape from the sinking feeling now familiar to almost every public service in Britain.

With approximately 2,000 journalists, the BBC is still the largest news broadcaster on earth. It is also one of the most highly regarded, and it's hard to find anybody in the business of world news who can name an organisation of the BBC's size with anything even approaching such high standards of trust and impartiality.

The BBC will now receive £34 million over the next two years. It will then be rewarded with £85 million a year to "build the global reach of the World Service." The money will also be spent on digital services and television. So why the sudden change of heart, and why now?

The funding was first announced on Monday, on the 49th page of the government's Strategic Defence Review. Evidently, this U-turn is less about providing a service than it is about projecting a message. Naturally, the headlines focused on the new fighter jets, drones and soldiers. Anybody who kept an eye on the Bush administration will know that security spending reviews in the wake of terrorist attacks are where right-wing notions of smaller government go to die. But buried behind all that was a section on soft power, the politics of global influence.

While remaining a dominant figure in international journalism, the BBC has been challenged in recent years by a new generation of ambitious outsiders broadcasting across the globe in multiple languages. These include Qatari broadcaster Al-Jazeera, who recently established a 24-hour news channel for American viewers and the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, currently investing in African influence. Alongside them is Russia Today, which specialises in giving a voice to critics of western foreign and economic policy, commissioning shows hosted by George Galloway and Julian Assange. Last year the Russian government launched Sputnik, an international radio service broadcasting 800 hours of Kremlin-approved news in 30 languages every day. While BBC News editors were adjusting to a state of managed decline, these competitors have been finding new audiences, on radio, on television, and online, and on behalf of their anti-democratic proprietors.

Meanwhile, a more insidious rival has emerged. Isis now publish high-quality videos of their appalling crimes on a regular basis. A recent interview with a former Isis cameraman published by The Independent revealed that Isis media teams spend hours recording multiple takes, in high definition, of the group’s various atrocities before delivering their gruesome files to an edit suite outside of Aleppo. It’s a world away from Bin Laden and his grainy Arabic monologues, recorded onto VHS.

Isis have also spent the last year and a half using the shock value of their imagery to pollute social media with their vile ideology while simultaneously encouraging ostracised young Muslims to commit acts of terror in the West. They even publish a regular English language magazine, downloadable as a PDF file anywhere in the world, rebranding war criminals as well mannered public servants. Dabiq Magazine, named after the Syrian site of an ancient Islamic prophecy, was recently used to conduct a glossy interview with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the wretched ringleader of the massacres in Paris.

As it stands, radicals travelling to fight in Syria now outnumber new Muslim army recruits across Europe, and Putin has more control of the international news agenda than ever before. What's missing is a confident liberal perspective, free from direct government interference.

Back in July, during slightly happier geopolitical times, the Chancellor told Andrew Marr he was worried about BBC becoming "imperial in its ambitions", in relation to online journalism. It's possible that the Conservatives’ long-standing suspicion of the corporation has prevented them from appreciating its diplomatic potential. But if Broadcasting House can enhance its impression abroad, their relationship with the government could improve just in time to rescue one of our greatest cultural exports. In the wake of Putin's new narrative in Syria and the attacks in Paris, it appears that the international ambitions of the BBC and those of our aspiring Chancellor might not be so different.

This article was originally published by the New Statesman. 

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During my last visit to London, I had a chance to talk to Piers Haben, Director of Oversight at the European Banking Authority. From his office on the 46th floor of One Canada Square, he can quite literally oversee the big banks. I wanted to ask him about the stalling Chinese economy and he wanted to reassure me that the banking sector was big enough to adapt to a world without an overwhelming oriental economic engine. It must be hard for people like him to strike the right balance between the kind of alarmism that might damage confidence and what Alan Greenspan once described as “irrational exuberance”. I fear that Haben might be leaning slightly too far towards the later, but you can judge for yourselves.  

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Jeremy Corbyn and the Left Wing West Wing

No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, it is almost impossible to dislike Jeremy Corbyn. He's honest, good natured and he has quite a few good ideas too. I'm glad to see him running, and this post certainly isn't a polemic. The problem I have with him, and more specifically his supporters is one of dismissiveness towards the British public. Those who complain about Cameron commanding a parliamentary majority with such a thin slice of the electorate behind him are now hoping to kick a hard left candidate into Downing Street without any regard for the political center ground.

Britain is a conservative country. There was no great fraud in May. Those on the left who decry our unfair first-past-the-post voting system should consider themselves lucky to have avoided the significantly worse fate they would have suffered under proportional representation. With such rules, UKIP could have won 82 seats (instead of 1) and would probably have formed a coalition with the Tories. Moreover, I am yet to see any polling data to suggest that the result of the election would have been any different if Ed Miliband had dared to lean further to the left.  For some Labour represented little more than 'austerity lite'. But for many others, policies to tax mansions, reduce tuition fees and allow the state to run our railways again, simply couldn't compete with Cameron's message of economic stability. And the public gets what the public wants.

So what now for the left? Across Europe, social democratic parties are splitting with those strictly opposed to austerity and neo-liberalism on one side and third-way centrists on the other. This division is unnecessary and needn't be considered inevitable. The evidence is in Washington.

Prior to 2008, American politics was a running to joke to liberal Europeans. Back then it was hard to imagine anything other than jingoism, corruption and religious bigotry setting the agenda on Capitol Hill. But since then Wall Street has been regulated, millions of Americans have been granted affordable health insurance and military interventions have been curtailed.  If that wasn't enough, the American economy recovered without resorting to stringent austerity measures, and an ambitious climate deal with China, that would have been almost unimaginable only a few short years ago, has now been signed. This is change you don't have to believe in, because you can see it with your own eyes. And all this was achieved by a president who always strived, often to an infuriating degree, to put forward his ideas in an inclusive and centrist fashion.

Heads might explode when I say it out loud, but Barack Obama is by far the world's most successful left-wing politician of the 21st century. Partly, this is because he understands that politics is far more polarised than the general public. Those passionate enough to involve themselves in politics are, and almost always have been, a small minority of the population. Few will thank me for quoting Tony Blair, but he was right when he wrote that "for most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog." That’s why it’s folly to try and change a country by appealing to one narrow political tribe, even if it’s my own tribe.

The center ground of politics and public sentiment has moved to the left on social issues and the right on economic issues, these two trends are in my view undeniable. To get things done in the 21st century, you have to understand the cultural terrain you're fighting on. You also have to acknowledge the will of the people you're fighting for and to do that you have to be a champion of the underdog from the political center ground. As it stands, few see how Jeremy Corbyn can do that.

Regardless of your political ideology, we should all desire a strong leader of the opposition all the time. Firstly, because they could become the Prime Minister and secondly because it stops the sitting Prime Minister from governing with impunity. We should all take a sensible interest in the Labour leadership race. And if any Europeans on the left want to remember what winning looks like, they should try looking west.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post. 

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The Purpose of European Purpose

It will take much more than an economic recovery to fix Europe. The recent referendum in Greece has been by far the biggest test of European character since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has led many to ask whether the European Union and the Euro, projects that were supposed to bring member states together, are in fact tearing them apart.

Even if the Eurozone does eventually recover, the damage to the ideal or European unity will probably outlive the continent's economic misery and challenge the foundations of the European Union itself. The UK for instance, which unlike the Eurozone, has experienced impressive economic growth in the last three years, is as divided as at any other time in living memory. Last year Britain came within 400,000 votes of an irrational breakup. And a jingoistic exit from the EU may yet become the climax of a great British identity crisis that rumbles on irrespective of the county's growing prosperity.

The EU's member states, when combined, form a larger economic power than both China and the USA. The central idea of the Schuman Declaration, written in 1950, was quite brilliant. "The pooling of coal and steel production" between the French and the Germans would, Schuman argued, render another war between the two nations as "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible." He was right. But now that a conflict between industrialised European countries is unthinkable and has been for decades, the Schuman declaration has lost its appeal. The document is a victim of its success. So the question now is whether European unity in the 21st century works for anything other than its own preservation. The current tide of Euro-skepticism suggests that many don't believe preservation is worth the effort. Unaddressed, this may prove to be Europe's biggest problem.

The EU still represents an unparalleled political and diplomatic achievement but has also become the perfect scapegoat for national politicians who can always find ways of taking credit for the good news and blaming Brussels for the bad news. But now the problem has been exacerbated by a new exodus of advocates.

European integration has always viewed with mild suspicion by those on the right, many of whom, like David Cameron, worry about migration and the erosion of sovereignty. But now the European project is haemorrhaging support among those on the left too. To them, European unity is becoming a vehicle for the kind of economic chauvinism of the Greek bailouts and the ascent of unpopular global trade deals like TTIP. So where might the EU cultivate the public enthusiasm it needs to survive?

Since Winston Churchill's famous "United States of Europe" speech in 1946, European leaders have quietly coveted the confident formalities of the US constitution. Washington DC has held hundreds of millions of people together, in semi-autonomous states, thousands of miles apart, since the end of the civil war. As has been pointed out, if a state such as Alabama were to go bankrupt, voters and taxpayers in New York would be infinitely more forgiving than their German counterparts. But the united state of American society isn't just the product of a seamless founding document. Much of what unifies America as a culture came from two seminal 20th-century political projects, one from the left and one from the right. 

After the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's New Deal sought to link economic growth, and investment to national pride on a scale that had never been seen before. More than ever, Americans could take pride in far off developments. A New Englander could feel a patriotic connection between the construction of a dam in Utah and their own economic prospects.

Twenty years later, America set out to culturally define itself against the Soviet Union. One focus of this contrast was a mass celebration of democratic values, which helped to fuel the civil rights movement. The dynamics of American democracy were taught and practiced in every school and "Old Glory" could be seen hanging everywhere. Meanwhile, the rise of McCarthyism revealed that patriotic impulses, once unleashed, could take on a more insidious form. But what America needed were myths to hold itself together during one of the most divisive periods in its history, myths that celebrated the successes of America in an uncertain world. At their heart were iconic achievements in the fields of politics, cinema, and scientific endeavor, which climaxed in 1969 when Apollo 11 left the Stars and Stripes on the surface of the moon.

What these projects had in common was an attempt to unite the country on a cultural level. 

In 2015, the focus of conversation among the European political cognoscenti has been about returning the continent to the state it was in 11 years ago. Essentially, this means turning the clock back to before the Eurozone became visibly problematic, before we could hear Putin knocking on the cold Ukrainian door and before immigration and to a time before mobility and immigration became an unavoidable issues. Instead of confidence, Europe is, understandably perhaps, projecting anxiety and undermining its ability to act assertively in a chaotic and evolving world. The danger is that during these times of crisis, an introverted and unwelcoming continent kicks water just to stay afloat while its destination disappears over the horizon.

Europe, if it isn’t careful, risks becoming a place where things use to happen;  a romantic novelty for enterprising American students to explore while they’re young and to retire to when they’re old. This unfortunate prognosis describes Italy, a country reduced to a cultural petrol station where foreigners fly in to fill up on pizzas and piazzas before heading for the door. Where a despised political class argues over how best to revive a stagnant economy while the best and brightest leave to join a growing economic diaspora on the other side of the Alps. Italy is, of course, an incredible land to visit and a wonderful country to live in but a wholly uninspiring place in which to come of age. Young Italians have lost hope and without an optimistic and meaningful narrative, they have nothing to keep them at home. But ask not for whom the economic bell tolls, because this could soon become the story of a whole continent.

For now there is, despite all that has happened, much for Europeans to smile about. It was Europe after all that build the Large Hadron Collider and landed a probe on a comet moving at over 80,000 miles per hour. The continent remains one of the places on earth to be female, gay, disabled or of an ethnic minority. And yet, it is not going to get any easier to ignore the economic and political synopsis of our time. Since the creation of the EU, billions of people have emerged from poverty across the developing world, in countries driven by patriotic and ideological narratives of ambition. The ashes Europe crawled out of mean that such movements are greeted with understandable suspicion anywhere to the west of Minsk.

If European unity can survive the current crisis, it's challenge will be to find and spread a new and optimistic raison d'être of it’s own, one that goes above and beyond the preservation of its own continued existence. The alternative I fear would be a decline defined by more of the jingoistic and economic schadenfreude we have all become so use to over the last few years.

This article was originally published on the Huffington Post.

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Yesterday I sat down with Professor Brigid Laffan to discuss Syriza. (Full disclosure; she’s kind of my boss now.) It’s the third time I’ve interviewed her and the most pessimistic she’s ever sounded. Usually, political scientists describe political parties as symptoms of their time and circumstance, so it’s rather remarkable to hear rhetoric as polemic as this at the EUI. We are indeed living in historic times. 

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As the Greek crisis rumbled on I had a chance to talk to Evi Pappa, a macroeconomics professor at the EUI. While we were setting up the cameras I asked her if this was as exciting as economics gets, she said, “this isn’t economics, it’s politics.” I think I agree. The game is now one of jingoism and economic schadenfreude. Greece can’t pay and the creditors know it, but if they admit that they know it then they will look weak and will galvanize the left in Portugal, Spain and Italy. In the interview, Evi suggests there will be a secretive haircut so that everybody can quietly save face. The plan might just work, just so long as nobody tells the truth.