Disintegration

Western introspection has allowed an acceptance of malaise

Towering columns

At Compact, Dan Hitchens believes Sir Kier Starmer will avoid economic radicalism by increasingly focussing on social and constitutional change.

The hope is that, as with all forms of AI, the issue isn’t with the Starmer algorithm itself. The issue is just with the inputs. The union leader Mick Lynch, the most eloquent spokesman for Old Labour, keeps telling his allies to stop carping and get on with pressurising the man. “We’ve got to make Starmer as bold as Attlee, even if he doesn’t realize it’s happening to him.”

But even Lynch, a born negotiator, sometimes sounds worried. “Labour must not bend the knee to corporate greed,” he said in reference to Starmer’s recent u-turn. No, not the one where he said he’d nationalize water and energy, then realized he was opposed to it. Or the one where he vowed to “end outsourcing” in the NHS, then realized he was in favor of it. Or when he supported taxes on high earners and tech companies; or wanted to remove the punitive “two-child” cap on welfare; or set aside £28bn for green investment. The other one: where, to fend off criticism of Labour’s timidity, Starmer would point to a series of labor-rights reforms. Now he is backtracking on those too. As the Financial Times reported, corporate lobbyists had been pushing hard against the proposals, but “One business leader said that after several meetings with the party, they were now “pretty relaxed” about its plans.”…

…As hopes of material radicalism fade, Labour will devote itself more and more to the destructive social radicalism with which Starmer has already begun to associate himself. Assisted suicide for the vulnerable, crackdowns on “conversion therapy,” childcare expansion to “help parents back into the workplace” as fast as possible, constitutional tinkering (perhaps in the form of citizens’ assemblies or an “Ethics Commission”), racialized equality legislation.

For The Telegraph, Lord Frost makes the case for the importance of integration in compensating for multiculturalism’s failures.

Last autumn, Rishi Sunak described Britain as a “fantastic multi-ethnic democracy”. He was right. With the serious exception of resurgent anti-Semitism, racism is rightly at the extreme margins of politics and Britain has a strong record in ensuring people from all ethnic backgrounds can get right to the top.

But that’s not the same thing as being a successful “multicultural” society. I am not even sure large numbers of voters want us to be a multicultural society. Everyone, I think, wants us to be a society where all opinions, beliefs and practices are tolerated, within the law. But many proponents of multiculturalism seem to disavow the very concept of a mainstream British culture, history and ideas to which migrants must accommodate themselves if they are to have a successful life here, and to oppose any attempt by the state authorities to maintain one. I simply don’t agree with that. 

If we are to discuss all this honestly, the major political parties need to set out what they really think. That is especially true for the Conservative Party – for if we do end up in opposition, Labour will seek to portray all criticism of its agenda, for example its dreadful proposed Race Equality Act, and any debate about the success of integration, as “far-Right”. If we don’t want this, then we need a proper sense of our own values, of what we are ready to defend and what we aren’t.

At CapX, Guy Dampier argues that control over immigration will continue to define British politics beyond this election cycle.

Although there has been much justified criticism of the government for promising to reduce numbers in their 2019 manifesto while actually increasing them, it isn’t true to say that the Conservatives always failed to control migration. Back in the heady days of the Coalition government, they nearly got net migration to 150,000, the lowest level since the year 2000.

During the Thatcher and Major years, controls on immigration were strong enough that it wasn’t even an issue. It’s only their adoption of misguided Blairite ideas about the economic necessity of immigration which has turned one of their core issues into an electoral vulnerability. Indeed, if the government wanted to then it could achieve similar results quite fast. After all, the visa for social care workers was only introduced in the last few years, the huge number of international students is a result of the government’s International Education Strategy, and we only need to import foreign health workers (and their dependents) because we don’t train or retain enough doctors and nurses domestically. 

There are vested interests who will argue against this, but there’s no reason why we have to suppress the wages of native care workers or allow universities to effectively sell work visas to paper over their broken financial model. Much better to let the free market act as intended within a strong national framework. Not least when there is mounting evidence that mass immigration is bad for the economy, meaning that taxpayers are effectively being asked to subsidise the failing business models and practices of these industries.

For The Atlantic, Jerry Useem exposes how Boeing’s falling standards is a reflection of the decline of American manufacturing.

When the wave of Japanese competition finally crashed on corporate America, those best equipped to understand it—the engineers—were no longer in charge. American boardrooms had been handed over to the finance people. And they were hypnotized by the new doctrine of shareholder value, which provided a rationale for their ascendance but little incentive for pursuing long-term improvements or sustainable approaches to cost control. Their pay packages rewarded short-term spikes in stock price. There were lots of ways to produce those.

Which brings us to the hinge point of 1990, when a trio of MIT researchers published The Machine That Changed the World, which both named the Japanese system—“lean production”—and urged corporate America to learn from it. Just then, the Japanese economy crashed, easing the pressure on U.S. firms. In the years that followed, American manufacturers instead doubled down on outsourcing, offshoring, and financial engineering. This round of wounds was self-inflicted. Already infused with a stench of decay, manufacturing was written off as yesterday’s activity.

At GE, which produced three of Boeing’s last four CEOs, manufacturing came to be seen as “grunt work,” as the former GE executive David Cote recently told Fortune’s Shawn Tully. Motorola—founded as Galvin Manufacturing and famed for its religious focus on quality—lost its lead in mobile-phone making after it leaned into software and services. Intel’s bunny-suited fab workers were the face of high-tech manufacturing prowess until the company ceded hardware leadership to Asian rivals. “Having once pioneered the development of this extraordinary technology,” the current Intel CEO, Pat Gelsinger, wrote recently, “we now find ourselves at the mercy of the most fragile global supply chain in the world.”

On his Substack, Sohrab Ahmari observes how a new America is emerging in the booming Southern states.

The boom is bringing about what geographers and boosters call “the New South” (or perhaps we should say “the New New South,” since there have been previous iterations). The classification has no strict definition, but it roughly encompasses an archipelago of rejuvenated, energetic urban cores like Atlanta, Charleston, and Nashville and suburban agglomerations like the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Such locales join perma-booming areas like Dallas-Fort Worth to form New South culture.

These areas boast diverse, increasingly tech-forward economies, often fostered by world-class if underrated academic institutions. Their culture and demographics are shaped by domestic migrants (often from points further north) and Hispanics of various vintage blending in with heritage-stock black and white communities. A shorthand way of explaining the racial dynamics of these places is that you’re far more likely to encounter middle-class whites and blacks commingling at the same bar as patrons and occasionally as friends than you are in the Old South—or in Manhattan, where the heavily white and Asian professional class is all too typically served by a black and brown service class.

The official politics of some New South areas might tend liberal, but it’s a different liberalism than that you encounter in, say, New York City or the Bay Area. It’s the kind of culturally constrained liberalism familiar to anyone who has lived in a bluish city situated in an otherwise red state. In Atlanta, as one observer of the South told me, they call this “the Atlanta Way”: a black Democratic political class joining hands with a multiracial entrepreneur class to keep business development front and center. In other cases, the political split is roughly half-half or conservative-dominant.

At UnHerd, Geoff Shullenberger reflects on how a Marxist historian foresaw the current dire state of American politics.

Our increasing “concern with the self”, Lasch explains in The Minimal Self, “takes the form of a concern with its psychic survival”. The issue with the contemporary narcissist, in other words, isn’t that he demands too much, but too little. “Under siege,” Lasch wrote, “the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “minimal or narcissistic self,” he goes on, “seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” The underside of what looks like narcissistic grandiosity is an implacable “sense of inner emptiness”.

The error of the “moralistic indictment of ‘consumerism’”, Lasch argued, was the failure to see it “as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control”. This pattern derives from the fundamental modern restructuring of social, economic, and political life into systems far too vast for anyone to comprehend, much less exert any control over. Adrift in “a world of giant bureaucracies, information overload, and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown”. individuals have lost “confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and provide for their own needs”….

…A less selective reading of Lasch helps to account for what many pundits take to be the great enigma of the 2024 election cycle: how is it that a man assailed by trials and scandals that would have long since tanked the career of many politicians before him retains a lead in most polling? The answer is that the once-and-possibly-future “narcissist-in-chief” dramatises more vividly than any other public figure the beleaguered condition of the self under present conditions. His enduring hold on his followers, as well as his ability to broaden his appeal to demographics previously claimed by his rivals, speaks to the general retreat of more aspirational political sensibilities in favour of what Lasch called “the imagery of victimisation and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonised, and inhabited by alien forces”. Trump’s key achievement, in this regard, is simply survival — in the face of the overwhelming forces arrayed against him.

Wonky thinking

The Times published an exclusive extract from The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, describing the five-year grassroots campaign to protect sex-based rights and stop the Scottish Government’s plans to introduce the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. This includes J.K. Rowling’s reflections on why she broke ranks and challenged gender identity ideology.

In what might be loosely described as my professional community, there was bewilderment that I’d abandoned the safe, generally approved position to support Maya and campaign against the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill. What was I playing at?

People who’d worked with me rushed to distance themselves from me or to add their public condemnation of my blasphemous views (though I should add that many former and current colleagues have been staunchly supportive). In truth, the condemnation of certain individuals was far less surprising to me than the fact that some of them then emailed me, or sent messages through third parties, to check that we were still friends.

The thing is, those appalled by my position often fail to grasp how truly despicable I find theirs. I’ve watched “no debate” become the slogan of those who once posed as defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based rights. I’ve listened as certain female celebrities insist that there isn’t the slightest risk to women and girls in allowing any man who self-identifies as a woman to enter single-sex spaces reserved for women, including changing rooms, bathrooms or rape shelters.

I’ve asked people who consider themselves socialists and egalitarians what might be the practical consequences of erasing easily understood words like “woman” and “mother”, and replacing them with “cervix-haver”, “menstruator” and “birthing parent”, especially for those for whom English is a second language, or women whose understanding of their own bodies is limited. They seem confused and irritated by this question. Better that a hundred women who aren’t up to speed with the latest gender jargon miss public health information than that one trans-identified individual feels invalidated, seems to be the view.

When I’ve asked what the lack of female-only spaces would mean for women of certain faith groups, or survivors of sexual violence, the response is an almighty shrug. Over and again I’ve heard “no trans person has ever harmed a woman or a girl in a female space”, the speakers’ consciences apparently untroubled by the fact that they are parroting an easily disprovable lie, because there’s ample evidence that men claiming a female identity have committed sexual offences, acts of violence and voyeurism, both inside women’s spaces and without. Indeed, the Ministry of Justice’s own figures show that there are proportionately more trans-identified males in jail in the UK for sexual offences than among male prisoners as a whole. When this inconvenient fact is raised, I’m sometimes told trans-identified sex offenders “aren’t really trans, they’re just gaming the system”. Well, yes. That’s the point. If a system relies on an unfalsifiable sense of self rather than sex, it’s impossible to keep bad faith actors out.

One of the things that has most shocked me throughout this debacle has been the determined deafness of so many opinion-makers to whistleblowers at the UK’s now-discredited Tavistock gender identity clinic. Medics who were resigning from the service in unusually high numbers asserted that autistic and same sex-attracted young people, and those who’d experienced abuse — groups that were over-represented among those seeking to transition — were being fast-tracked towards irreversible medical interventions of questionable benefit by activist groups and ideologue medics. Those whistleblowers have since been completely vindicated: after an independent investigation, it’s to be closed.

Looking back now, and notwithstanding how unpleasant it’s been at times, I see that outing myself as gender-critical brought far more positives than negatives. The most important benefit of speaking out was that I was free to act.

Book of the week

We recommend Lord Salisbury on Politics: A selection from his articles in the Quarterly Review, 1860-1883, edited by Paul Smith. As a young MP, the future Conservative leader and prime minister, Lord Salisbury started writing regular articles to provide much needed income and criticise the establishment. In an unusual move for a Victorian party leader, Lord Salisbury published Disintegration in 1883, defining his distinctive philosophical view of conservatism.

There are prophets who would persuade us that the political barometer stands at 'set fair,' and that any such fears or hopes are the offspring of partisan imaginations. We could wish that we saw on the political horizon any signs to justify this complacent optimism. To our minds there are many indications of an unstable equilibrium in our present political condition. We do not refer merely to the more ephemeral topics on which a political writer might naturally dwell.

The blunders, the shortcomings, the misadventures of the present Ministry, the contradiction between the promises which landed them in office and the tenor of their actual practice since those promises have achieved their purpose - out of these things a formidable indictment can be constructed. Such topics have been and will be submitted to the verdict of the constituencies by many trenchant pens and tongues. But it is not only from these that the misgivings spring, with which we look upon the future. It is a necessary result of political discussion as carried on in this country, that the individual has too large a portion of our thoughts and the principle too little; and controversy is apt to be made up, not so much of political argument, as of a series of political biographies of an adverse character.

But the evils against which we have to struggle will last longer than any living men. There is abundant call for the vigilance and energy of those who love their country and its institutions, not merely because the policy of the statesmen of the hour is mischievous, but because of the dangerous temper of men's minds which the acceptance of that policy reveals. Some of our evil symptoms have outlasted in a form more or less acute several shifts of Ministry, and require not only a change of persons, which in its nature must be an experiment, but a change in our political methods and ideas.

We need to restore, not laws or arrangements that have passed away, but the earlier spirit of our institutions which modern theory and crotchet have driven out. There is a general disposition among those who in the constituencies are opposing the party now in power, to substitute the word Constitutional for the word Conservative in their political language. It is the fruit of a true instinct. The object of our party is not, and ought not to be, simply to keep things as they are. In the first place, the enterprise is impossible. In the next place, there is much in our present mode of thought and action which it is highly undesirable to conserve.

What we require is the administration of public affairs, whether in the executive or the legislative department, in that spirit of the old constitution which held the nation together as a whole, and levelled its united force at objects of national import, instead of splitting it into a bundle of unfriendly and distrustful fragments. The dangers we have to fear may roughly be summed up in the single word - disintegration.

Quick links

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