The narrative of conspiracy theories

 I wrote some time ago (here) about the universal nature of narrative in the ways we engage with the world. Just recently I have become aware of a striking illustration of that phenomenon. In the period after Trump's defeat in the election I (unwisely) responded to a Twitter thread about how fishy it was that Alaska and North Carolina had still not been called for Trump, when Pennsylvania and Arizona had been called for Biden.

The responses to my contribution gave me a glimpse of the dark and dangerous rabbit hole that seems to have swallowed up the large numbers of Trump supporters who are buying his 'Big Steal' conspiracy theories. Of course I knew about the prevalence of conspiracy theories in contemporary far-right 'politics' - QAnon anybody? - but it was interesting watching new theories being constructed in real time. I shan't bother with the details - something about pro-Biden states being called too early and pro-Trump states too late, so that the corrupt Lamestream Media could create a false impression of Biden having won - but what I noticed was some of the language, which people on this thread exchanged without feeling the need to expand or explain what, to outsiders, seemed very cryptic messages.

And the word that jumped out most was 'narrative', often used alone. Here is one example: "And they called Virginia with 1% reporting. Narrative." Another: "If you think that matters you haven't been paying attention. Narrative" and a third, simply: "Narrative, you cocksucker."

This got me thinking, and I suddenly realised that narrative is in fact completely central to any conspiracy theory. You see, the creators and disseminators of conspiracy theories face a fundamental problem in that they generally have little or no actual, hard evidence on which to base their claims. So what do they do? They use what in QAnon world are actually called breadcrumbs: little snippets of largely unconnected or irrelevant 'facts' that they suggest are in fact intrinsically and causally related and together reveal a massive, previously untold story.

This is precisely the way narrative works. History may be (in Alan Bennett's immortal words) "One fucking thing after another" but we simply cannot prevent ourselves connecting those things: this happened because that happened. We construct a narrative to make sense of the things, because that gives the world meaning.

But in conspiracy theories the human narrative imperative has a very powerful effect: it draws the listener in and makes them entirely complicit, and in a sense the less clear or relevant the base 'facts' of the conspiracy theory are, the more powerfully they draw people in. Why? Because it is the listener who is making the connections themselves and the listener who is, in a sense, constructing their own narrative out of them. And the more other people say, "That's ridiculous, those facts don't lead to that conclusion!" the more they can say, "you just don't understand. I can see the narrative that connects them but you can't, because you are stupid/ a Democrat/ a Remainer/ blinded by mainstream media etc etc."

In fact, any attempt to persuade a conspiracy theory victim of the absurdity of the narrative they have bought into risks itself becoming part of the same narrative: "You would say that, because you're obviously [insert appropriate insult here]." 

So how can conspiracy theories be combatted? Well, one way is simply not to pay much attention to them. To frame it, yet again, in narrative terms, the despised and rejected truth-teller who fights tirelessly against the hordes who deny his truth (and yes, it's largely a masculine image, I believe) is a heroic figure. The deluded fantasist who walks the streets shouting whilst others simply ignore him is not.

Living in Interesting Times

You will almost definitely have been reminded at some point over the last months and years of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." If you are anything like me you will probably have responded with a sadly bewildered shake of the head, accompanied perhaps by some comment about Trump, Brexit or Covid-19. "Interesting times. You're telling me," you may have said. You won't have had to ask to have the reference explained, because it is such a well-established truism, with the sort of paradoxical incisiveness that gives saying like this such force.

Except there's a problem: there is no real evidence of any such Chinese curse ever having existed.

So why do we like to think that one did? Well, until very recently there was a sector of society who believed at a pretty instinctual level that too-rapid change of any sort was fundamentally worrisome - that the best thing the world could do was to keep pretty much everything as is, except for improving the availability of avocados and consumer electronics. This of course was conservatism, and back then it aligned pretty closely with Conservatism. Agitating for change was what socialists and animal rights activists did, and framing your resistance to change as a piece of ancient Oriental wisdom gave it a sort of solemn legitimacy.

And then, suddenly, in the US and the UK at least, everything went topsy-turvy. Who are the angry ones now, taking up arms and invoking the language of war, their faces red with fury? It is the brexiteers and the Trumpians who talk of American carnage and fighting them on the beaches, whilst the anti-racists and the climate activists and the liberals engage in passive resistance and "take the knee."

So how come? Well, my theory is actually an optimistic one. For decades, the movement of societies across the developed world has been away from patriarchy, white supremacy and parochial nationalism. The process has hardly been smooth or consistent, but just look back fifty years to see how far we have come. I am still shocked watching clips from seventies TV shows to remember how little I questioned the profoundly racist, sexist and xenophobic tone of many of them. But back then, so much existed to support the innate sense of privilege of the white, hetero, English-speaking male and it must have seemed that that was the way it was always going to be. Conservatism and a profound desire not to rock the boat made sense for white, English-speaking males, particularly those with limited other sources of privilege (such as wealth, education or elevated social class). And then, when change did begin happening (women's lib, gay rights, increased immigration, more awareness of other counties, languages and cultures) conservatism was a vital protection against the forces of anarchy.

And then change began reaching a tipping point. The innate privilege that had seemed so permanent began to weaken. The voices of women, people of colour, gay people, foreigners (for God's sake!) began to be heard. Still nowhere as much as they deserved to be heard, but still far too much for the fragile egos of the Donald Trumps, Nigel Farages, Steve Bannons and Boris Johnsons of this world, and certainly far, far too much for their otherwise completely unprivileged, but still White, male and English speaking supporters.

So, suddenly, resisting change was no longer enough. The change had happened, and now it had to be undone, and that wasn't going to happen without a fight. Now it was a question of recapturing rather than just retaining that innate privilege. And so Conservatism (or Republicanism in the US) abandoned the notion of conservatism and became activist. The had to take back control, make america great again, build the wall, send the asylum seekers back. And there was an obvious place to look for the language and imagery they needed - the Second World War. Pretty much the epitome of the 'interesting times' that that mythical Chinese curse evoked, but a time when (at least in the hazy, one-generation-removed 'memory' of the trumpy/brexiteers) the innate privilege of the white hetero English-speaking male was at its height.

So, suddenly, 'interesting times' is what the Trumpians and the Brexiteers seem to want - chaos, division, ripping up of well-established customs and protections and a leap into the economic unknown of twenty-first century isolationism. And why do they want it? Because they know they've lost, and this is their last, desperate roll of the dice.

The trouble is, ancient Chinese curse or not, these interesting times are going to be pretty bloody difficult for everybody.

A strange sort of nationalism

So back in the days of good old-fashioned xenophobia, nationalism was when you believed your country to be superior to any other country and hung your nation's flag over your balcony to prove it. Other countries were sly, untrustworthy, useless or dangerous. THEIR judges were corrupt and/or stupid, THEIR politicians on the take and/or useless and THEIR whole system of government and public service overpriced, weird, ineffective and convoluted.

Somewhere along the line though, that all changed, though it took 2016 (the year of Trump and Brexit) to make that fact clear.

You see, what the brexiteers had in common with Trump was their populist nationalism, to the extent that the two campaigns seem to have come to define nationalism for the 21st Century. And the thing is, it is actually a very weird sort of nationalism indeed when you come to think about it, because to 21st Century nationalists it's not THEIR judges, politicians and public services that are shit, it's OURS!

Take the brexiteers. British Nationalists they may be, but look at the range of things they are willing to turn against: British judges (aka Enemies of the People); the British civil service (foot-dragging Remoaners, every one); British ambassadors ("emotionally needy", according to Theresa Villiers, and expressing sour grapes, according to IDS); the British Parliament (not to be trusted with any sort of decision on Brexit) and of course the Act of Union with Scotland, hence the United Kingdom itself.

Pretty much the full house, you might think, but still trumped by Trump, who has repeatedly described the entire system of government in the US as a swamp in need of draining. But that's not the weirdest thing. The xenophobic arch-nationalist has then turned on his own country's intelligence services whilst praising the leader of a foreign power who has been exposed as engaging in cyber-warfare against the US. You really couldn't make it up.

So it seems that 21st Century nationalism goes hand in hand with full throated attacks on pretty much every institution of that same nation. So what exactly is it that nationalists these days support? Even the flag is problematic, surely. Even more in the US than in the UK, the national flag is an inseparable symbol of the national institutions that Trump's nationalists attack with such gusto. The stars and stripes flutters constantly over the swamp they chant about (over every State building in the land, in fact), and if Russia is suddenly more to be trusted than the US's own intelligence agencies, then which flag should they be rallying behind anyway?

You see it seems that 21st Century populist nationalism is a very direct and emotional concept that bypasses systems of government and national institutions, so that the 'nation' becomes whatever any individual nationalist deems it to be. It's generally a pretty vague concept, but can be easily conjured by well-chosen three-word slogans, apparently: "take back control", "build the wall", "lock her up", "brexit means brexit" and "drain the swamp." Not that specific maybe, but they clearly work, and certainly a hell of lot simpler than the average National Anthem.

Occam's chainsaw

I loathe Michael Gove, but I have to say I am often grateful to him for clarifying what it is I do and don't believe. It isn't quite as simple as saying that 'Gove says it therefore it is wrong' (though that is an entirely reasonable starting point), it is more a question of the faux-reasonable and pseudo-intellectual style in which he pontificates provoking a stronger than usual reaction in me.

Take his recent performance as chair of the new commons 'Brexit' committee in which he "pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process." Clearly proud of his erudition he invoked the image of Occam's razor as the tool to be used in this sort of debate. And something about the posiness of that reference really got me thinking.

Occam's razor (named after the English Franciscan friar of that name) is the scientific principle that simpler hypotheses are preferable to more complex ones, and that therefore scientists should seek to reduce rather than increase complexity in their hypotheses. Michael Gove, clearly delighted by this idea, sought to apply it to the Brexit process, and why not? Throughout the referendum campaign he and his colleagues sought again and again to reduce the complexity of the arguments involved until they essentially came down to one sentence: "Take back control." Control over what was never clearly defined, and neither were the mechanisms by which this amorphous control was to be regained, nor the other consequences that might ensue. Occam's razor, see! Everything else could be left as vague and unspecified assertions about immigration, £350 million a week, new trading opportunities, return to pounds and ounces... anything you want really.

The thing is, of course, that that is not remotely how William of Occam intended his philosophical razor to be used. The point for him was that simpler hypotheses are better because they are MORE EASILY TESTABLE. Gove and his cronies have used their version of the razor to achieve the exact opposite. By airily dismissing any discussion of any of the intrinsic complexities of the questions in hand they have come up with sweeping generalisations that almost by definition can never be tested. When will we know that, as a country, we have 'taken back control?' The only way literally to achieve that would be to remove ourselves from any and all trans-national agreements (the UN, NATO, the International Criminal Court, the Commonwealth...), banish any and all multi-national companies from the UK and replace parliament with a system of rolling plebiscites, with everything from tax to street-lighting decided by referendum.

Is that what the Brexiteers were arguing for? Who knows. Maybe some were, but there is no way of knowing, and that's the point. Once a political aim becomes so simplistic and general that it is completely untestable then you can read into it whatever you want.

And it isn't just in the Brexit debate that this distorted Occam's razor has been weilded. Trump' campaign was all about simplistic, generalised and utterly untestable statements like "Drain the swamp" or "Make America great again." Even the apparently testable ones like "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" were really there as rallying cries rather than statements of intended policy, as Trump's rowing-back since the election has made clear.

And there is a wider seam of this sort of stuff that goes way beyond election politics. I happened to come across a Facebook argument between my brother (a mathematician and scientist) and various climate change deniers. My brother's posts were long (sometimes overlong, to be fair), thorough, nuanced and well researched. What he was often met with was memes. I happened across the same phenomenon in the bizarre world of the flat-earthers and wrote about it here.

But what Michael Gove, with his faux-philosophical intervention on the subject, prompted me to realise was that occam's razor remains a very useful image in these circumstances. A razor is a tool one uses with circumspect precision to remove hairy irrelevances to reveal the living essence of the person (or issue). Once a razor has been applied properly (and carefully) one can see clearly who or what one is dealing with, and so come to sensible and robust conclusion about them. What Gove, Farage, Trump, the flat-earthers and their like are wielding is what I would like to call occam's chainsaw. By recklessly destroying all complexity, relevant or irrelevant, from an issue and reducing it to puddle of minced flesh suitable to be formed into a meme they remove any possibility of any further debate. How are you supposed to argue with "take back control" or "make America great again"?

However the converse of this is also clear. Just as one should never, under any circumstances, use a chainsaw to shave with, so one should immediately reject any response to a complex issue which reduces it to a meme.

Or, to express that as a meme:

So, are Trump and Brexit the internet's fault then?

It goes without saying that there has been a troubling sea-change in the way politics is done (in the UK and the US anyway) over the last few months. The question is, why? Of course, populist demagoguery and the appeal to the lowest common denominator of mysogyny and racial and religious prejudice are hardly new, and neither is the phenomenon of post-truth politics . It's just that in the past it has taken conditions like the collapse of the Weimar Republic to bring them to the fore. And though there has been an economic downturn since the global financial crash, people aren't yet having to take a barrowload of banknotes to the shops to buy a pound of potatoes.

So why have the electorate turned their faces so vehemently against 'experts' and 'the establishment' that they are prepared to support people who are saying things that would not long ago have been unthinkable? And I don't just mean Trump's offensiveness towards women, the disabled, muslims and even PoWs, Johnson's racial slur on the President of the USA or Farage's Breaking Point poster. There is their utter disregard for normal standards of truth and honesty and their willingness to threaten political violence if they don't get their way (both Farage and Trump have explicitly warned of, and even encouraged, people taking to the streets if their agenda is frustrated). There is their willingness to talk in ludicrously broad terms of what they are going to achieve without the slightest attempt at formulating policies for doing so. Their willingness to whip their electorate up with promises they have absolutely no intention of delivering on.

Not so long ago these people (Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove and others) would have become political pariahs for the way they have behaved - banished to the wastebin of political history like Nick Griffin, Jean-Marie le Pen or Ross Perot (all of whom would probably in 2016 be seen as rather conservative with a small c). So what has changed?

Is it ludicrous to suggest that the growth of the internet and social media holds part of the explanation? You see it used to be that the general electorate had an extremely unequal relationship with the political establishment. Political leaders were part of a secret world to which we, the electorate, had no real access and whose denizens knew far better than we did what was wrong with the world and how to put it right. You could protest of course, and many did, but you would never really know what went on in the corridors of power and never fully grasp the hugely complex levers of power that these people wielded.

The internet has changed all that. There is wikileaks of course, exposing the soiled underwear of that political establishment for all to see. But there's also Twitter and the like. Time was that political leaders pontificated on the BBC news and all you could do was shout at the television. Now political leaders have twitter accounts and your tweets are allowed exactly the same number of characters as theirs. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz when the curtain gets pulled back to reveal the funny little man operating the machinery.

But the other thing that twitter does is allow (encourage even) strident and simplistic comments to be instantly disseminated with no real challenge. Time was, if a politician wanted to say any of the things Trump has put in his tweets they would have to do it either on TV or in parliament, and there they would be subject to more or less effective questioning and made to explain or justify their remarks. On twitter, that simply doesn't happen in the same way. Social media operates as a series of 'echo chambers' within which people generally hear repeated and amplified messages with which they are already inclined to agree. And if there is any voice of dissent it can quickly descend into a 'he said, she said' twitter storm that really doesn't hold anyone to account.

And it seems to me that this provides fertile ground for the dissemination of the sort of populist, demagogic politics we see from Trump and the Brexiteers (now there's a name for an apocalyptic Death Metal band...). And once a movement like that starts in social media world it can be very hard both to gauge accurately and to stop. The normal standards of decent political discourse simply don't apply in social media echo chambers, and anyone interjecting with rational, fact-based or expert counter-arguments can easily be dismissed (and/or personally attacked) as establishment stooges or even 'enemies of the people.' And the left-wing liberals would never set foot in these sort of social media echo chambers anyway (they have their own) so such a movement can grow virtually unchecked.

So what can be done?

I have always felt that, in the long term at least, an increase in the ability of people to communicate directly with each other must be a good thing. However recent events have shown beyond doubt that removing too rapidly the governing mechanism of respect for political establishments has been extremely dangerous. And now the only thing to do is somehow offer and disseminate an alternative discourse with which at least some of the people currently caught up in demagogic populism can engage. We won't do it by lecturing either (which sort of rules me out!) The liberal left needs to develop memes and (non-sarky) tweets and snappy one-liners about the empowerment of ordinary citizens and the benefits of cultural cross-pollination and the enormous benefits that liberal democracy has brought.

We need clever people and young people and people whose minds haven't atrophied or solidified around crass simplifications about immigration and scroungers. Thankfully that's just what we've got. But they need not to disappear into their own comfortably outraged echo chambers but get out there and start repairing the damage.

Good luck with that.

Spare a thought for the Leave voters

There has been a lot of commentary in my particular social media echo chamber since Thursday on the topic of the despair felt by Remain voters since Thursday's EU referendum. However it is worth considering also how cheated and baffled many of those who voted Leave will be feeling over the next few weeks.

For the moment, leave aside the vague and aspirational promises made by the Brexiteers during the campaign (that the UK will proper as never before once freed from the shackles of Europe). Admittedly the signs are not looking good, but three days in it is far too early to say that these were false promises. Instead, focus on the definitive 'factual' commitments given to voters prior to the vote.

If the country voted Leave, we were told, then the following would certainly occur:

1) The UK would 'take back control' by acting immediately to initiate the process of separation from the EU.
2) £350 million pounds a week, freed up from EU budget contributions, would be spent on the NHS (and other like causes).
3) Immigration would be 'controlled'. The clear implication was that this meant bringing net migration figures down to the current government's 'tens of thousands' target.

So now that the country has voted leave, what now? Already it has been made clear that none of these commitments will be met.

1) Far from the UK (meaning, presumably its PM) initiating the process of separation immediately this will not even begin for at least 3 months, and then will be in the gift of the UK's first unelected prime minister since Gordon Brown.
2) This commitment was a 'mistake', as made clear by Farage withing hours of the announcement of the result.
3) 'Control' of immigration will not mean reduction, according to both Boris Johnson and, more explicitly, Daniel Hannan.

Numbers 2) and 3) are where most anger is being generated, but actually 1) is a very significant issue. Whatever you do or don't think about its merits, the core Leave case was pretty straighforward: leave the EU and we regain control. Yet Cameron's refusal to invoke article 50 means that, for at least the next three months, the UK will have surrendered control entirely over its future, in a period of unprecedented global uncertainty.

We will still be in the EU of course and still subject to all of its 'control' but will have no power or influence within it whatever. Cameron will be a totally 'lame duck' leader and the other countries very motivated to rally together. It is not hard to imagine the mood in next week's Council of Ministers' meeting.

So far from gaining control, the UK has now put itself in a position where it has sacrificed any real influence in the EU whilst not even beginning the process of leaving it until at least October. And what must Leave voters be feeling about that? They were promised a brave new world of renewed power, sovereignty and authority and will get the opposite. They were promised better funding for public services and reduced immigration and will see no sign of either. And that is presuming that the economy doesn't tank!

If I were a Leave voter I would be bloody furious already. But do not make the mistake of thinking that this is an optimistic post. In the history of European democracies it has not generally gone well when a populace has realised that they have been cheated and lied to by their political leaders, when their livelihoods and the country's prosperity have collapsed and when hatred has been whipped up against the immigrants in their midst.

Why?

So Britain has voted by 52% to 48% for a course of action that experts lined up to tell them was unwise, while its proposers responded that "people have had enough of experts."

Why?

Two things seem clear enough: a high proportion of leave voters were c2de (the lower socio-economic classes) and the issue with most traction in the leave campaign was immigration. In other words, a lot (though not all) of the leave voters were people whose lives are shit and who blame immigration for that fact.

If we accept this interpretation (which seems a fairly widespread one) then we still have to ask ourselves why the 'disenfranchised working class' put the blame for their ills on immigration and immigrants rather than elsewhere. Was it racism, a rational response to the destruction of their security, or somewhere in between?

The lives of the poor, the low-waged and the otherwise disadvantaged in this country are pretty shit these days and showing no prospect of getting better any time soon. Theirs is a world of zero-hours contracts, of overpriced and/or unavailable housing, of unobtainable benefits, of vanishing pensions and of bewildering social change. So who is to blame?

Most people, I reckon, would put it down to four groups: the bankers who gambled away our prosperity and financial security; the Tories/Lib Dems whose punitive austerity made the poor pay the price; the corporations that took advantage of the financially vulnerable to rob them further through zero-hour contracts and unpaid internships; and the Eastern European immigrants who saw even that sort of pitiful employment as superior to what they had at home and so took (at least some of) the jobs on offer.

Of that list, it seems pretty clear from all the analysis that I have seen that the group whose impact was the least damaging was actually the last. So why is it that they have emerged as the chief scapegoats?

Partly I believe this is an issue of power imbalance. The poor and poorly-employed may recognise that a lot of their problems are down to the banks, the government and the big corporations, but what the hell are they supposed to do about that? The banks have all of their money, which sort of gives them the upper hand, and without the big corporations there would be no jobs at all. As for government, not only they are aloof and powerful, but what option have you got anyway in terms of getting rid of them? The parties are all as bad as each other and/or incapable of running a piss-up in a brewery.

Immigration and immigrants though are a different manner. Like Bob Ewell turning on Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird it is far easier for the disadvantaged in society to look down on swarthy Bulgarians in pleather jackets queuing for casual labour outside Wickes than it is to join Occupy and picket major financial institutions. And in the EU referendum the 'disenfranchised' were suddenly given a large stick to lash out at at least one of those four factors that they considered to have ruined (or at least threatened) their lives. And in retrospect, are we surprised that they used it?

The leave vote was largely fuelled by anger, I am in little doubt of that. And when you are angry and armed with a big stick it doesn't really matter much whether the person within range is your real enemy or not. It still feels good to hit him.

And of course it wasn't just immigration and immigrants that the leave voters hit out at, it was the EU itself, and this is where the other explanation comes in too. Because it seems to me that what made both immigration and the EU into appropriate targets was what they have in common, and what sets them apart from the other major factors in the working poor's problems: they are both clearly foreign. Immigrants are visibly and audibly foreign, particularly in communities with no historical tradition of immigration, and the major problem with the EU is that it is political leaders and civil servants from other countries, like Germany, Belgium or France, that can determine our future, and they are by definition foreign.

It is easy to see the desire to lash out at that which is foreign as synonymous with racism and therefore anti-social and deviant, yet in some ways the impulse is the opposite of anti-social. To define a group as 'them' you have to first define an 'us', and that is increasingly difficult these days. In fact of course, the typical member of the working poor has almost nothing in common with the financial futures traders in the city or the ex-Etonian trust-fund kids in cabinet, but it doesn't FEEL like that when you can tell yourself that what you are doing is fighting to get your country back. People want and need to have some sort of sense of an 'us', and that certainly is the language one is hearing from the triumphant Leavers today. "This is our independence day," they say. "Now Britain can be great again." There'll be street parties soon.

The point is that, to many, both the immigrants who they fear are about to 'flood' into their towns and the 'Brussels bureaucracy' with its mythical banana obsession are unmistakable more foreign than the bankers, the government, or even the multi-national corporations. Particularly to the generations and populations that grew up in a largely mono-ethnic community and have never lived in another country.

And that is the other interesting thing about the leave voters. There was a strong direct relationship between average age and likelihood of voting Leave. 18-24s seem to have voted overwhelmingly to remain. Could it be that the young, who have had so much more exposure to ideas and people their parents and grandparents see as 'foreign' do not make the divisions in the same way? Some of the young certainly do seem to regard the bankers and the big corporations as 'the other' just as strongly as their elders see immigrants and the EU.

So is there hope for us all after this?

Of course there is. If Brexit leads to the diminution in the power and influence of Britain in the world that many commentators seem to expect then maybe that's not a bad thing. And if our young people start seeing more clearly who the authors of their misfortune are then that certainly isn't.

The only problem is that from here on in it is pretty clear that one of the major authors of the future misfortunes of the young is the generation who voted to take away their EU citizenship from them. My generation.

At breaking point? Yes Nigel, maybe we are.

On the day Jo Cox was murdered, Nigel Farage unveiled a poster so vile that even the Daily Mail condemned it. He didn't intend the coincidence of course, but it was striking nonetheless, and what the reaction to it suggested to me is that maybe the country is at breaking point with the facile, little-england nationalism of UKIP and the Brexiters more widely.

The poster depicts hundreds of Syrian refugees queuing at the Slovenian border, with the words "Breaking Point" in red over. What it suggests is two things: first that Europe is at breaking point from the numbers displaced by the Syrian conflict and second that Britain should therefore break away. In other words that when Europe is faced with the biggest existential crisis since World War 2, we should Put Britain First and leave them to it. That the poster echoes Nazi propaganda just strengthens the parallel. And the fact that the upcoming Chilcott report will almost certainly show the link between the ill-advised Anglo-American adventure in Iraq and the current crisis adds just another layer of irony.

Of course in 1939 when Germany invaded Poland the government and the British people didn't Put Britain First in that narrow and selfish way and maybe it is that spirit of cussed defiance combined with compassionate care for the underdog that we need to combat the Brexiters. I have been heartened by a number of Facebook posts today and yesterday saying "I want my country back" and meaning by that the inclusive, forward-looking spirit of the 2012 Olympics.

What Jo Cox represented was what I like to believe is at the heart of the British psyche. Alongside her passionate commitment to her heritage and place of birth she held fast to the desire to stand up for the underdog, specifically for the very Syrian refugees that that poster seeks to demonise. And she was killed by someone shouting "Britain First," or "Put Britain First." Her killer may not have seen Nigel Farage's poster, but the the echo is uncanny.


Jo Cox wanted the sort of Britain back that those Facebook posters are reminding us of: in fact maybe she believed that it had never left. Let's hope she was right. I shall end with the best tribute I can find to her: her own words on the Syrian refugee crisis. Because I want her to have the last word, not Nigel Farage.

"We all know that the vast majority of the terrified, friendless and profoundly vulnerable child refugees scattered across Europe tonight came from Syria.

We also know that as that conflict enters its sixth barbaric year that desperate Syrian families are being forced to make an impossible decision: stay and face starvation, rape, persecution and death or make a perilous journey to find sanctuary elsewhere.

And who can blame desperate parents for wanting to escape the horror that their families are experiencing. The reality in which children are being killed on their way to school, where children as young as seven are being forcibly recruited to the front line and where one in three Syrian children have grown up knowing nothing but fear and war.

These children have been exposed to things no child should ever witness and I know I personally would risk life and limb to get my two precious babies out of that hell-hole."

The main problem with the EU referendum debate

is that as the arguments run into the ground of futile speculation it is increasingly becoming a matter of the personalities involved.

Do you detest Cameron, Osborne and all they stand for? Vote Leave!
Are Johnson, Gove and Farage even worse? Vote Remain!
Do you not even know which side Corbyn is on? Don't vote at all!

This is ridiculous of course, though given the nature of the UK electoral system, in a sense not surprising. The nearest analogy to the upcoming referendum vote is a general election, and the fact is that, in a first-past-the-post system where one party (with occasional exceptions) is likely to emerge as possessing a majority sufficient to govern alone then in general elections you are voting for people rather than ideas. Yes, political parties produce manifestos full of vague promises that they may or may not seek to implement, but it is not the manifesto that you elect to office, it is the assemblage of individuals who will wield the levers of power.

So a vote in a UK general election quite reasonably comes down to a question of who you trust to govern in your and the nation's interests and who you either detest or would not not trust to organise a piss-up in a brewery. Opposition politicians and the press often make a huge song and dance over governments' abandonment of manifesto pledges but my sense is that that is seldom a key issue with voters. All they care about is, are these lot doing a marginally less bad job than the other lot would have done. If so then, carry on.

Fortunately though, the referendum really isn't a question of personalities at all. The politicians involved are sort of still behaving as if it was, making wild promises about what will or won't happen after the result, but with even less actual expectation of implementing those plans than when they announce general election manifestos. Today saw two classic examples: George Osborne announcing an emergency Brexit budget that he will certainly never deliver and the Johnson and Gove revealing a post-Brexit roadmap that will clearly not be theirs to implement.

What the EU referendum is about is ideas, and large, complex and all-embracing ideas at that: ideas about joint working versus go-it-alone independence; ideas about how to manage the tensions created by the changing nature of the nation state, the economies of the rich West, terrorism and security; and of course ideas about what to do about the unprecedented movement of peoples brought about by the conflicts in the middle East.

And somehow or other we have to separate our thinking about those ideas from our response to the people espousing each of the two sides.

Ronald Reagan was instrumental in initiating a massive programme of reduction in nuclear weapons and the fact that I despised him as a simple-minded right wing ideologue doesn't mean I am opposed to nuclear disarmement just because he promoted it. Similarly, words are probably insufficient to express my contempt for Cameron and Osborne, but that doesn't mean that I want to vote for isolationism at a time when what Europe needs is to stand together.

TTIP and Brexit

So, I've heard an argument recently that progressives in the UK should vote Leave in the EU referendum because of TTIP. OK. I accept that the referendum debate appears to have placed a moratorium on sanity, but really???

Here is the argument, as I understand it:
1) TTIP as it currently stands is bad. Really really bad. Primarily because it cedes power to US mega corporations, allowing them for instance to sue eu governments if they adopt policies that impact on their profitability.
2) Because of the power imbalance between the EU and the US it looks possible that the US will be able to demand the retention of those sorts of clauses despite opposition from within Europe.
3) By leaving the EU, the UK will avoid having to abide by the terms of ttip.

So, 1 and 2 - no real argument from me, though there is thankfully still some doubt over 2 given opposition from the French amongst others. But please! How can 1 and 2 imply 3? Can anyone seriously argue for a second that although unable to resist the power of US corporations as part of the EU, Britain will be able to do so alone? If a post EU Britain wants to make a bilateral trade deal with the US then it had better prepare itself for a far more draconian set of conditions even than those in TTIP.

Time was that the left were the ones with the truly international commitment to workers' rights. Time was, the left would have stood shoulder to shoulder with European comrades labouring under the yoke of a capitalist, neo-liberal governing elite. Whereas now it seems the hard left brexiters are taking refuge in a self-deluding image of a British socialist utopia that is every bit as parochial and little - englander as that of their UKIP foes.

The logical flaw in the Brexit argument (you can't have your cake and eat it)

Martin Lewis, of Money Saving Expert fame, has published this careful assessment of the pros and cons of Brexit and there is little I can add to it, except to point out that it outlines neatly what I see as a fundamental logical inconsistency in the Brexit case (without naming it as such).

Briefly, the strongest Brexit arguments, as I see it, are these (I honestly think that the democratic deficit argument is of real interest only to politicians and the economic upside/downside argument has left us all baffled):
either
1) Leaving the EU will protect us from the invasion of immigrants who are taking our jobs, lowering wages, swamping services etc. This implies that the alternative to the EU is an economy that is properly regulated by the UK government, with less immigration and more guarantees of jobs, housing and services (health, social care etc) for UK residents.
or 
2) Leaving the EU will free the UK economy up from burdensome regulation on issues such as workers' rights and enable us to make free trade agreements with economies across the world. This implies that the alternative to the EU will be, in Martin Lewis' formulation, "a nimble low-tax, low-regulation, tiger economy. Trading unfettered with all nations across the globe, able to create our own rules and speedily reacting as a niche player to a changing world."

The thing is, I have presented these advantages as either/or because they really are mutually exclusive. A "nimble low-tax, low-regulation, tiger economy" won't limit immigration for long if immigration provides for cheaper labour, particularly if it wants to "[trade] unfettered with all nations across the globe." What's more, the "rules" such an economy will create will absolutely not be rules that hamper business growth by protecting British workers' rights. And "tiger economies" are not generally known for their social protection. No place for an NHS in a tiger economy, not with all those rapacious entrepreneurial multinational healthcare firms out there.

So what I'm saying is, if either of the two arguments above is on its own sufficient to trump the Remain arguments about peace and stability, communitarianism rather than isolationism and the desire to make common cause with our European allies, and on its own sufficient to justify the leap in the dark that Brexit will inevitably involve AND you believe that you will get to choose the version of standalone Britain you like then go ahead, vote leave.

But don't go thinking you can use both justifications simultaneously.

Extremism and the concept of righteous anger

I wrote in July 2014 this post about radicalism and extremism and that already seems a very long time ago indeed. Since then there has been a very visible (and audible) growth in extremism in two groups which, for all their apparent difference seem to me oddly similar: Trump supporters and Daesh.

Similar?!? I hear you ask. Well, I am certainly not claiming any sort of moral equivalence between a a conglomeration of brutally fanatical jihadists and a bunch of whooping American bigots but there is certainly one thing that they (and other groups) have in common. They are, it seems to me, fuelled by what they would regard as righteous anger.

So what do I mean by righteous anger?

Society has always distinguished between two different sorts of anger. First there is interpersonal anger of the sort that inevitably arises between people who live in close proximity to each other. Societies have generally regarded this as unfortunate and unproductive and have evolved more or less successful ways to contain it, from ritual and religious practices to systems of law and order. This sort of anger has been at the root of much of the crime and violence in human society from time immemorial (look at Cain and Abel) and civilisation has as much as anything been a means of keeping it in check.

The other sort of anger is what I have called righteous anger. This is anger not directed at someone one knows well and not generated by close contact but prompted by some larger cause or some more abstract concept. It is anger at a group of individuals, a nation, a system or even an idea. When I say 'righteous' I do not imply any sort of moral approval (anti-semitism falls firmly into this category), but am referring to how the anger is experienced by the people who feel it.

In the early days of human society this sort of righteous anger would have been a positive asset to a group or tribe, because its likeliest focus would have been members of an opposing neighbouring tribe so it would have had the effect of binding the group together with a common purpose. Indeed conflicts between neighbouring tribes have often become formalised and ritualised over time, presumably as a way of harnessing and making safe this sort of righteous anger.

Outward-focussed righteous anger became a major asset to national leaders with the rise of the nation state- it was the power-source for the sort of patriotic jingoism that had endless generations of young men sacrifice their lives in pursuit of glory in an a series of pointless European wars for instance. Probably it was the First World War that began its demise, not so much because of the mechanised slaughter (nothing like a few deaths in war to fuel righteous anger) but because soldiers in the trenches began to question the way they had been suckered by the concept of righteous anger into miring themselves (literally) in a futile battle against individual Germans they found it less and less easy to see as their personal enemies. Indeed the clearest focus of anger in soldiers' poetry seems not the German soldiers but rather the British generals and public at large:
"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye.
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know.
The hell where youth and laughter go."

This was far from the end of state-sanctioned righteous anger of course. It was Hitler's trump card, and the force that transformed 1930s Germany from a broken and demoralised failed state to a hyper-efficient blitzkrieg and genocide machine. Differently expressed it was the force behind the resolve Churchill saw in the British people after Dunkirk and articulated in the immortal lines, "we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

However the Twentieth Century saw a growth in a different sort of righteous anger too, directed this time by oppressed minorities against their own national leaders. There were the suffragettes in Britain, the civil rights movement in the US and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, to name but three. This is the sort of thing most of us would be happiest to call righteous anger- the struggle for justice in an iniquitous system- but is it really that different to the forms of righteous anger that preceded it? There was a coherence to the groups motivated by it and a clarity as to its target that calls to mind the anti-Bosch jingoism of Britons in the early years of the first World War, and if we now see the latter as lacking a moral justification that is to forget the stories of baby-massacring and the like that were used to whip up fury in 1914.

It is more recently that what one might call righteous anger has begun to morph again into something altogether less clear and immediately comprehensible, and this is where Daesh and Trump come in. Because it seems to me that both islamist jihadism and tea party republicanism are fuelled by a powerful but inchoate wave of anger against someone or something 'out there' that its supporters want to bring down by any means possible.

And to be clear about how this is different from either the anti-apartheid movement or even Nazi anti-semitism it is important to understand that we seem nowadays to be living in a post-nation state era and enemies are no longer so easy to define. Sure, both groups have their bogey-men- for the Trumpers Obama and for Daesh the Great Satan (ummm, Obama)- but their anger is, in both cases, more wide-ranging than that. The Trumpers can be whipped up into fury on a whole range of issues from Mexican fruit-pickers to muslim women in headscarves or from healthcare insurance to US foreign policy. Daesh direct anger not just against Western interventionists but almost as strongly against Arab Christians, muslim apostates or women without headscarves (what is it about head scarves that seems to prompt such fury?)

Yet for all the differences it seems to me that the fundamental motivation is exactly the same as when righteous anger was used as the justification either to smash windows in Kristallnacht or to march unarmed into the live ammunition of the South African police. Anger, it seems, operates almost independently of morality. Indeed if anger is powerful enough then it provides its own moral justification: if one feels that one's entire way of life- one's existence even- is threatened by some distant collection of unindividualised strangers then one's anger can seem to justify almost any actions against that 'other'.

It used to be that this powerful force was kept under control and directed (for good or ill) by even more powerful social structures- first tribal customs, then nation states and then idealistic movements or causes. But in the interconnected twenty-first century those sorts of social structures have less and less force. We have seen the little man who hides behind the Wizard of Oz's thunderclaps and we no longer care much what he says. Instead, people turn to self-selected groups of the like-minded and there their anger is not contained but amplified; not directed but inflamed.

So anger has (for me) emerged as the most dangerous threat to society today, leading to everything from the brutal death-cult of Daesh to the mainstreaming of neo-Nazi xenophobia on US TV. And the problem is that the populist media, and particularly the tabloids, seem hell-bent on whipping anger up further all the time. What else could be the intention of headlines like "One out of every five killers is an immigrant" (a genuine headline)?

Which is why I am becoming increasingly distrustful of any attempt to whip me up to anger, and that too is a problem. Because righteous anger, for all its dangers, has been an immensely powerful force for good and there are still plenty of issues that are easily iniquitous enough to prompt such anger- violence against women for instance. It is just that so long as Trump and Daesh make so free with it righteous anger no longer holds the attraction for me that it once had.

What happened to the Labour party?

There have probably been thousands of well-informed words written by those in the know (and millions of ill-informed ones by those who wish they were) about the latest apparent slow-motion suicide of the parliamentary Labour party and I suspect there is little I can add to the sum of human knowledge in that regard. However that has never stopped me in the past and I have my own angle on the current situation born of my personal experience, that may be worth sharing.

Briefly, for anyone who is not aware, the narrative over the last few months has been (or the version promulgated by the UK media at least has been) one of open warfare between Jeremy Corbyn and his 'team' (the corbynistas) and large and vocal sections of his party's Westminster MPs. There have been off-the-record and even live on-air complaints by Labour MPs of everything from bumbling inefficiency to Stalinist ruthlessness and a steadily simmering air of dissent, dissatisfaction and dislike. The person most often absent from all this has been Jezza himself, whose pronouncements (such as they have been) have generally sounded reasonable (non-contentious even), conciliatory and non-aggressive. At least they have sounded like that until deconstructed and spun by a range of commentators inside and outside the PLP, seeking to interpret them as confrontational and/or naive.

So what the hell is it all about and why are the PLP behaving like this? There is no realistic prospect of them ousting Corbyn and having him replaced by a leader more to their liking, nor is there any possibility that this sort of internecine strife will do anything but damage the Labour party's chances of electoral success (on which their future careers depend). So why?

Perhaps it is less to do with political and ideological differences (does anyone actually, really, want to see billions and billions of pounds spent on a missile system designed to ensure that if the world is destroyed in a nuclear holocaust at least plucky Britain will have got to play its part?) and more to do with the nature of institutions and the relationship between staff and their bosses. Labour MPs may be the democratically elected representatives of their constituents, but they are also members of a small to medium-sized enterprise operating out of dilapidated premises in SW1 and as in all such institutions the relationship between staff and boss is a complex one.

Very rarely a charismatic boss (and one who is in the right place at the right time) can transform an institution, or at least be the figurehead who catches a process of transformation and makes it his or her own. In a political context Tony Blair pulled that trick, and before him Maggie Thatcher. True, in both cases the party they became leader of was ripe (desperate even) for change but arguably without them that change would never have come to fruition.

Much more often though, it is the institution that transforms the boss, much as the boss may believe otherwise. So David Cameron, shallow, plausible, untroubled by detail and human cost and able to articulate a vague vision of a 'stronger Britain' that covers a multitude of sins is the perfect leader for a Tory party that wants to dismantle the state and not feel guilty about it. Gordon Brown and Ed Milliband on the other hand were both troubled, ineffectively sincere, occasionally prone to impotent petulance and overshadowed by more successful and charismatic mirrors of themselves. They were the leaders the PLP expected and in a masochistic sense wanted because they gave MPs an excuse to
feel sorry for themselves.

Jeremy Corbyn doesn't fit that mold though. Habituated for so long to being on the losing side of any given argument he is no longer phased by voicing anti-populist sentiments. Unlike Brown and Milliband, both of whom appeared to have lived Labour party internal politics for so long that it had replaced the blood in their veins Corbyn seems endearingly out of touch with the complex shenanigans that clearly occupy most labour insiders' every waking moment. The bottom line (which is an ironic one in the situation) is that the PLP has evolved into an archetypally political (with a small as well as a big P) organisation and its new boss does not appear to be a political operator in that institutional sense.

So what happens when an institution acquires a boss who does not appear to be singing from the unwritten hymn sheets the staff have all memorised over years? Well, that is where my personal experience comes in. As head teacher I inherited a school that was obsessed with its own internal politics and I am simply not very good at (or very interested in, come to that) that sort of politics. And it seems that when an institution acquires a boss who does not fit its expectations then the reaction is confusion and (for some) something like hatred. It doesn't really matter what the boss does or says, or whether the staff involved agree with or even like him or her. It is more that they aren't playing the game by the rules the staff have internalised and made their own.

Some of my staff, I am convinced, never forgave me for not fitting the image they had of a 'proper' head. They might have complained about my predecessors- called them dictatorial bullies- but at least they knew where they were with them. I disorientated them. I asked them what they thought and believed in and told them that I didn't have magic top-down solutions for every situation and some of them hated me for it.

Of course I am not comparing myself with Jeremy Corbyn. I was head teacher of a secondary school, not potential Prime Minister of the UK, but in a sense I can empathise with him. And perhaps what he is doing is the right thing: rising above the vitriol and simply doing his best to keep a clear head (its is what I did in a similar situation).

However quite possibly it isn't. If I had my time again I wouldn't have been so high-minded about internal politics. Labour MPs (like my staff) are human beings who have dedicated a significant portion of their best years to serving in an institution that they may hate, but also identify with and have made their home. A leader who tells themselves they are above their staff's petty vindictiveness and squabbles is no sort of leader in fact. And if Jeremy Corbyn is to transform the Labour party then he has to engage with it. All of it. And that includes the MPs who are currently running him and themselves into the quagmire.

Why do we talk about prime ministers winning power?

I half-heard an item on the Today programme this morning about Jeremy Corbyn needing to "appeal to older voters if he is to win power in 2020," and all of a sudden it was that last phrase that struck me. It is pretty much the universal formulation to describe the process of appointing a prime minister, to the point where I at least have never before questioned it. Why would I? Elections are competitive processes and the office of prime minister carries a great deal of power, so the leader of the successful party has clearly won power.

Except that, if you transpose the phrase to another context it suddenly sounds very strange indeed. Imagine if the newly-appointed head teacher of your child's primary school wrote to parents to announce that she had won power over the school. Even in the private sector chief executives do not win power over multinational corporations: they are appointed by the board (usually these days to rescue the company from whatever scandal its recent actions have embroiled it in).

The point is that both words in the formulation are problematic, and both transfer an inordinate amount of agency in the wrong direction. When a board 'appoints a new chief executive' or governors 'appoint a new head' the successful candidate has clearly won, but the linguistic formulation gives agency in the process to those who have appointed him or her. Not so, it seems, in general elections, where the electorate become not merely passive but absent from the phrase used.

And then there is the word 'power' itself. Yes, anyone heading a large organisation (such as a national government) has power, but is it not hugely more important that he or she has responsibility too? Yet there is nothing in the phrase 'winning power' even to hint at such responsibility. And with the current government in particular that is a massive problem. I have written before about the extraordinary way in which ministers in this government and the last have ceased to take responsibility for the areas under their charge. Time was that if a scandal broke in say, the NHS the relevant minister would take responsibility and resign, even if the scandal related to events that happened before they took office. Now it is as likely to be the minister who breaks (or even engineers) the crisis, to empower them to bring in more and more sweeping changes.

The current government like power, it is clear (which governments don't, once they get it?) and do not have a great deal of time for responsibility. How else could they preside over benefit changes that drive large numbers of their citizens to suicide? The thing is, while we persist in talking about David Cameron "remaining in power" until 2020 then we are, in a small but crucial way, gifting them more of that power and relieving them of more of the responsibility.

So what should we be saying? Pretty simple, in my view. In the early hours of the morning of the 8th of May 2020 I want to hear David Dimbleby say that "The British electorate has given Jeremy Corbyn responsibility for leading the country."

Well it could happen...

You can frighten some of the people some of the time...

Q: What do Scottish independence, the migrant crisis and Jeremy Corbyn have in common?
A: Despite the Establishment trying to frighten them into one viewpoint the British public eventually stuck two fingers up and went the other way.

I think this statement requires a bit of unpacking.

First, what do I mean by the Establishment? Well, I am referring to a strange and unholy alliance that seems to have grown up on some issues between the Libdemtorylabour party high command, the newspapers and mainstream TV. Basically, all those who seem convinced that UKIP (which received 12.6% of the vote in the 2015 election) represents the views of the British population and Nigel Farage is their spokesman. There is (on the face of it) little in common between the SUN, the BBC and the Labour party, but on all three of the issues mentioned above they seem to have been pretty much of one mind, and passing on more or less the same messages to the population at large. Which were (and are):

Scottish independence - Oooh. NO! Definitely not. Scottish independence will result in economic collapse, the disintegration of our glorious country and the summary execution of English incomers at the border by armed SNP terror groups.

Migrant crisis - Shit! Help. We're going to be overrun. There are swarms of them out there and they are ALL climbing the fences in Calais to get to Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn - Oh My actual God! He will single-handedly bring about a reversal of the space-time continuum and take us back to the seventies! There will be rubbish in the streets, black and white TV and crimplene flares. And Jimmy Saville ffs!

I am summarising, but those were pretty much the messages. And how did the Great British Public react? Initially they seem to have gone along with it. The pro-independence campaign had a slow start in Scotland, for a time Jeremy Corbyn seemed a bit of a joke, and few people seemed keen to challenge publicly the ludicrous idea that most of sub-Saharan Africa was parked out in Calais, waiting to get across to Britain where they would, on arrival, be given a house and generous benefits for life.

But in time things changed. Support for Scottish independence grew through a grass-roots movement of unprecedented scope, coming to within a whisker of victory. Corby emerged as the front runner, increasingly desperate scare tactics by the BlairMandelbrot doing nothing but boost his momentum. And as for the migrant crisis - well that has been the most heartening of all. Because what people did was not pontificate or protest. They started giving. It has been a grass roots campaign again, people collecting and distributing stuff for the migrants in Calais and offering places in their homes to Syrian refugees.

And what does that show? That, thank God, scare tactics only work up to a certain point, and in today's interconnected world probably less well than they ever did before, because people can talk to each other now. They no longer rely on the Establishment to provide their world view.

They have learned that they can say, "No. Fuck off. We are better than that."

What would it mean for the Labour party if Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader?

I would begin by saying that Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader appears a foregone conclusion, except that the combined effects of unreliable polls and extreme press coverage make any such definitive statement questionable. It really is quite hard to dig beneath the hyperbole-ridden narrative to discern what real people actually think, but what I can say is that a remarkable range of people of my acquaintance seem (sometimes to their own surprise) to be pro-Corbyn.

However his election will not (would not) be the end of the story. There is a line of argument that suggests that he will lead the Labour party, and henceforth the country, back to the sunlit uplands of austerity-free social justice and progressive socialism, and another that he will preside over internal division and electoral collapse unmatched since the days of Michael Foot. Others of course believe that it won't make a blind bit of difference either way.

So what is the truth? And, more generally, what difference does it make to a large organisation like the Labour party (or an even larger one like the United Kingdom) who is or is not appointed its leader?

I have always found it mildly irritating when presenters on TV history shows say of a castle that it was built by King Alan (or whoever. There never was a King Alan, I don't think, but I like the name). Whatever the truth about the construction of the castle in question, one thing can be said with some certainty: King Alan did not build any part of it. Indeed King Alan would probably have struggled to tell one end of a pickaxe from the other and would have been very unlikely to have had any meaningful understanding of the load-bearing properties of stone arches. Why should he? He would have had people to do all that.

The same thing applies in a more general sense to the leaders of almost any large organisation. It is often said of chief executives that they "built the business up from nothing" and of head teachers that they "turned the school around," but what does that actually mean? The chief executive of a widget-manufacturing company will never have manufactured a single widget and neither will the head teacher have done much in the way of teaching of the students in their school. Indeed in very large and hierarchical organisations the head will have had very little direct involvement at all in any aspect of the running of their organisation. There will be levels and tiers of management between them and any of the actual workings so that their role becomes purely strategic.

So is that the fundamental importance of a leader then - to provide strategic direction? That would seem almost too obvious to be worth stating. Yet even there the importance of the leader is a shifting and amorphous thing. In really big organisations the only ways for the leader to provide strategic direction are through the appointment of (a few) key individuals and the occasional statement of principle. Yet the really effective leaders are those who appoint independent-minded people with strategic understanding of their own and then delegate to them not just tasks but responsibility and decision-making power too. And if they do that, is it not the people they appoint that begin providing the strategic direction? What is more, though the central decisions and keynote policy statements that a leader makes would appear to define strategic direction, in reality that is often less clear. Keynote policy statements are often pretty vague and amorphous things until they are translated into working policies, and that is work that is never done by the leader who made the initial statement.

All of this is very true of party leadership and of the office of prime minister as well. The PM may have made a grand statement in a party conference or an election manifesto, but that means nothing whatever until it is translated into deliverable policy by an army of civil servants, by which time it may well resemble only very loosely the vision that the politician initially outlined. They can hire and fire of course, but only (in most cases) within the relatively restricted pool of elected MPs, each of whom will have his or her firmly established strategic vision, to the point where cabinet reshuffles seem less like opportunities to provide strategic direction and more like attempts at herding cats.

And yet, it is the leaders who have made the political weather over time, is it not? There would have been no New Labour revival without Blair, and (obviously) no Thatcherism without Thatcher. And to take the example most closely related to the topic of this post, it was Michael Foot whose appointment hammered the last nail into the coffin of Old Labour, was it not?

Well, yes and no. Thatcher came to define a generation with its unholy amalgam of unbridled free-market capitalism, social division and the diminution of all forms of collective action. Blair was synonymous with Cool Britannia, PFI and the availability of highly skilled, cash-in-hand Polish builders. Yet did they change the weather or simply reflect meteorological changes that would have happened whether they arrived or not?

And what of Michael Foot? A more decent, principled politician it would be hard to identify yet the utter collapse of the Old Labour project did take place on his watch and the worry that the appointment of the modern-day politician who most closely resembles him (Jeremy Corbyn) will have the same effect seems a reasonable one.

I would argue though that the contexts are utterly different, and context is all. The assumption from a cursory analysis of UK history would be that Blair and Thatcher were effective leaders and Foot ineffective, but that is to ignore their context. Blair and Thatcher each in their own ways articulated a desire (which struck a chord with the electorate) for change - for an escape from a set of attitudes and process that people had tired of. In Thatcher's case it was an escape from the ageing and crumbling post-war consensus on the need for large and bureaucratic collective structures (nationalised industries, banks, unions) to to keep the country on the straight and narrow. In Blair's it was the nasty parochial anti-communiarianism of Thatcherism people were fed up of.

But what of Foot? Well it seems to me that he didn't offer the populace escape from anything really. In a time when many people were pretty much fed up of collective action, in "the longest suicide note in history" he proposed more of it. There might have been a great deal of unease about where Thatcher was taking the country, but even the working class (so-called Essex Man) was guiltily seduced by the idea that maybe they wouldn't have to sit through interminable union meetings any longer but could sell their council houses, get a credit card and spend, spend, spend.

Jeremy Corbyn's context is very different. It is free-market capitalism that the general populace is sick to the back teeth of now. They have had enough of city wide-boys putting their pension pots on the 3.45 at Chepstow and laughing all the way to the bank when the bet failed, leaving them having to work until they are 75. There is a depressing uniformity, and has been for years, to what politicians are allowed by their spads to say in public and at least Jeremy Corbyn is saying something different, and even appearing to say what he thinks rather than what a focus group in Wolverhampton has determined is the most electorally acceptable thing for him to say.

Being a refreshing voice on the media circuit is very different to being party leader of course, let alone PM, but what is interesting is the effect Corbyn has had during the campaign, even on what one might think to have been the archetypal tough audience- his leadership opponents. Until he emerged as the potential winner the Labour leadership[ contenders appeared to be vying with each other for the "Blandest Political Statement Imaginable" prize - desperate to show how electable they would be by never saying anything whatever that might alarm or offend (or indeed interest) anyone at all. Yet, stung into action by Corbyn's direct honesty and inexplicable popularity they have suddenly started coming up with ideas that one couldn't imagine having been pre-approved by Conservative Central Office. Yvette Cooper caught the changing public mood rejecting Tory little-Englandism by arguing for  the admission of 10,000 Syrian refugees and Andy Burnham said he would include Corbyn in his cabinet and agreed with many of his ideas.

And I can't imagine Corbyn being a Brown-like control freak intent on stifling any and all opinions that are not congruent with his own world-view. The role he has laid out for himself in the campaign is something between what Belbin would call a 'co-ordinator' and a 'plant' and that really isn't a bad position for a party leader, or indeed a PM, to take. If he can regenerate the self-belief and political engagement of the Labour party and remind them why they (presumably) got into politics in the first place then maybe all he has to do is make a few high-minded statements of principle and let others get on with the business of translating those into policy.

For too long Labour has been frightened of its own shadow and ashamed of the political compromises they have had to make to cling to power. But that is no sort of atmosphere to bring out the best in people. So if Corbyn at least gets people thinking a bit and gives his colleagues the confidence occasionally to say what they actually think, then maybe that is all that the Labour party needs.

We'll have to wait and see.

Why the anti-Jeremy Corbyn vitriol?

Jeremy Corbyn's unlikely emergence as the clear front-runner to succeed poor Ed seems to have got the Labour party all in a tizzy. At one level this is amusing: surely only the Labour party would become so terrified when one of its leadership contenders turned out to be popular. At another level though it is initially baffling that so many Labour stalwarts seem so keen to predict electoral meltdown, internal schisms, fire, pestilence and eternal damnation should a mild-mannered North London intellectual be elected to become their leader.

Some degree of antagonism during an election process is inevitable of course - how does one rescue a failing campaign except by attacking one's more successful rival? However what we have seen of recent days has been an order beyond that. There seems a real hatred of Jeremy Corbyn and all he stands for - odd, since the hatred seems one-way. He by contrast has refused to engage in mud-slinging and appears to be conducting a campaign remarkably free from vitriol. Even his supporter Ken Livingstone, usually the first to enter any slanging match, accused Tony Blair of no more than having failed to read Corbyn's manifesto.

So what is it all about, this hatred? Why did Blair accuse Corbyn of seeking to 'annihilate' labour and why did Alistair Campbell urge Labour voters to support 'anyone but Corbyn'?

The Corbynistas' view would be a simple one of course. Blair and Campbell are the spawn of the devil and all the other candidates have been brainwashed by their evil campaign to turn Labour into an offshoot of the Tory party. New Labour was a cynical betrayal of everything true believers like them held dear and so New Labour cannot forgive heroic mavericks like Jeremy Corbyn who speak truth to power and question its legacy.

There is some truth in this of course, but also some wilful fantasy. Many of Corbyn's supporters probably are champagne socialists plotting the downfall of the capitalist hegemony from the comfort of their Georgian townhouses, safe in the knowledge that whatever radical policies he pursues it won't touch their final-salary pensions or (horror of horrors) lead to house price deflation. Also, much as it soured towards the end, Blair's New Labour project certainly did do some good things. In the shadow of Iraq it is easy to forget the minimum wage, capital investment in schools, reductions in child poverty, Third World debt write-offs, peace in Northern Ireland... I could go on.

It is also pretty absurd to suggest that Blair and others hate Jeremy Corbyn because he stands for social justice and a protective State. For all their differences of opinion on methods, surely Labour supporters broadly agree on ideals. So why the hatred then?

Partly of course it is the simple fact that there is no conflict more vicious than an internecine conflict. The human species seems to reserve its bitterest hatred for those most like themselves: the Jews and the Arabs; the Northern Ireland Protestants and the Northern Ireland Catholics; Indian Kashmiris and Pakistani Kashmiris; New Labour and Old Labour. Where fundamental values and cultures are entirely different we seem to rub along pretty well: it is only when we are identical but for one small, but (to us) hugely important, difference that we start killing each other in significant numbers.

There is more to it than that though. Labour has had its fair share of internecine hatreds, even before Iraq, but Blair's outbursts recently, and those of other party stalwarts, feel different. For a start they have not come in the context of an unedifying cat-fight of the sort politicians seem particularly prone to. Jeremy Corbyn is not fighting back (he doesn't need to. He is sitting pretty on 53% in the polls). The hatred seems to be self-generating, and coupled with what appears a genuine fear of an existential crisis for the Labour party.

So why would that be then?

Well, oddly enough I have a theory. I think the explanation lies in a variant of the 'zealous convert' syndrome, by which converts to a religion are frequently more antagonistic to their old beliefs than those who have never converted. Blair, Campbell and the rest seem to me to have just the same uneasy, fearful hatred of Jeremy Corbyn as would a zealous convert of worshippers at their own old church.

You see, much as I never liked or trusted him that much I simply cannot believe that Tony Blair joined the Labour Party with the explicit desire to subvert its fundamental principles in a swivel-eyed pursuit of Thatcherite neo-Conservatism. I remember the honest idealism of his first term. As a country we were reeling from Thatcher's onslaught and Blair brought back some sense of social responsibility, of interest in and care for the under-privileged and of an ethical dimension to policy.

The thing is that, like all serious politicians, Blair was a realist. See things from his point of view and there was a logic to his drift to the Right (sort of). Free enterprise and the unfettered power of capital seemed (at the time) a hugely powerful force which could, if harnessed properly, lead to real social good. And for a time it worked. Brown let the bankers off the leash and Labour used the money that came rolling in for some fantastically valuable investment in schools, hospitals and the incomes of the less well-off. Win-win, surely.

Yet there are consequences to selling one's soul, even for the best of motives. Blair, Brown and the rest knew that financial deregulation and the opening of public services to private enterprise was making some people hugely and unfairly wealthy and eroding something central in the UK's view of itself. Yet they went along with it with the slightly manic zeal of recent converts to a charismatic cult. Peter Mandelson's use of the word 'intensely' to show just how relaxed he was at people becoming extremely wealthy shows the internal tensions they were all living with though. Surely even he could have spotted the absurdity of the oxymoron.

And now it is those zealous converts to New Labour that face the existential crisis. Like Faustus, having sold their souls they then discover not just the price, but the illusory nature of the prize too. It is not just that New Labour's reputation now seems (unfairly, in some ways) tarnished beyond recovery, it is also that the unsavoury weapon (neo-conservative economic policies) they gritted their teeth to grasp in pursuit of their aims turns out not to have been a very useful weapon at all. Bank deregulation didn't give us riches beyond the dreams of avarice, it bankrupted us for a generation.

And what Jeremy Corbyn does that is completely unforgivable is to remind them that the uncomfortable road they bravely chose to follow in pursuit of their noble aims really wasn't the only road at all. And didn't take them quite where they wanted to go either. But one thing a zealous convert will never do, however conflicted (s)he might feel and however uneasy deep down about their new religion, is to convert back again.

So don't expect a gracious acceptance of Jeremy Corbyn's victory form Tony Blair any time soon.

Fear and self-doubt in politics

Yesterday I read an article that suggested that Michael Gove might end up being the best hope this country has seen for some time to carry through liberal reforms of the criminal justice and penal systems. Once I had picked my laptop back up off the floor I read the article again and gave it some serious thought. Because, although I detect a worryingly uncritical attitude to Gove's destructive and anti-intellectual 'reforms' of the education system, I think perhaps on this specific issue the writer may have a point.

The thing is that any putative incoming Labour justice minister would have been prey to the same fear of 'not being tough on crime' that over the past few decades has led Labour Home Secretary after Labour Home Secretary to ramp up both the pointless rhetoric and the unproductive policies of harsher prison sentences. It is called "doing a Blunkett" in the trade. Michael Gove has no such fear. For a start he is the darling of the Right and thus immune from criticism in this sort of area, and secondly he is entirely devoid of any emotion as humanising and empathetic as self-doubt.

Thinking about this led me to reflect more widely on what it takes to be a 'great' political leader: to be a Hero in the terms of the hero-quest narrative of election campaigns that I discussed in a previous post. And it seems that one of the key elements is indeed a complete absence of normal human self-doubt. Thatcher had it, as did Blair in his messianic post-Iraq years, and maybe Cameron has it too, though for a different reason- he has had his self-doubt removed, not by zealous belief in his cause but by utterly impenetrable arrogance.

But why does removal of self-doubt help a leader? Is not self-doubt one of those things that make us human? That allow us to relate to those around us and to question the effect of what we do on others? Indeed it is, but as Shakespeare understood, the qualities that make us human are almost diagrammatically opposite to those that make some of us 'great leaders' in these terms.

(Yes, I had to get it back onto Shakespeare, didn't I.)

King Lear is the best example that comes to mind. Admittedly it is not established particularly forcefully at the start of the play that King Lear is a great leader, but presumably one is expected to take that as read. The country certainly seems settled and prosperous- a "fair kingdom" with "plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads" and Lear is very certain of his own "majesty", appealing to "the sacred radiance of the sun" more or less as an equal and describing himself with grandiose images such as in the phrase "come not between the dragon and his wrath." Even Tony Blair never went quite that far.

What changes, particularly in the course of the thunderous third act, is that he discovers self doubt. At first it is just self-pity, as he describes himself as "A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man," but eventually becomes a genuine impulse to question himself and his previous actions. He admits that "I have ta'en/Too little care of [the plight of the poor]!" and later famously describes himself as a "foolish fond old man" and "not in [his] right mind."

This is far more Ed Miliband than Tony Blair (let alone Thatcher or Cameron) and it is very clear that, although he is bizarrely recrowned King just before his death he is not, by the end of the play, any sort of King at all (or in the terms of my previous post on elections, any sort of Hero). What he is though, possibly for the first time in his life, is a decent, caring human being.

Does this then lead us to the depressing conclusion that what it takes to be a Hero, and thus a successful political leader is a level of hubris and arrogance that banishes self-doubt? Surely not!

For a start, I have never fully understood why absence of self-doubt is equated with heroism (or even bravery) in the first place. Certainly in the more simplistic fairy tales that you find in Hollywood blockbusters it often seems to be (I am not sure that John McClane would ever describe himself as a foolish fond old man) but surely true heroes are those who confront their fears and their self-doubts and work through them in the interests of others. Aren't they?

Interestingly, that is an idea that Hollywood has a peculiar take on, which maybe points us to some of the reasons why thoughtful, questioning politicians are so infrequently successful in the Anglo-American world. In super-hero films self-doubt seems often to be symbolised as something entirely external to the Hero (Superman's kryptonite for instance) which almost fatally weakens him (the gendered pronoun is deliberate) and has to be utterly excised before he can triumph. Far from being an intrinsic and potentially valuable, humanising aspect of his character self-doubt is the enemy of true heroism, or so it would appear to Hollywood executives.

My sense though is that this antiquated notion of political leader as Hero has a pretty limited shelf-life now anyway. In the internet age everything is open to question as never before, and my hope is that any political leader who obdurately refuses (or is unable) to question themselves, their policies or their effect on peoples' lives will not retain public support for ever. To quote the Who, surely to God we won't get fooled again.

And there have been great political leaders who had not had their self-doubt surgically removed, haven't there?

Admittedly the only one who comes to mind right now is Nelson Mandela, but surely there are others.

So what does the election result say about the British people?

My previous post was about the political parties' election campaigns, but election campaigns only explain so much and there are many people out there who believe that the way the general population (or a proportion of them) voted says something profound about the nature of society. And whilst those (like me) on the left may be heartened by the upswell of social consciousness north of the border we are in danger of descending into misanthropy when considering what the election appears to have revealed about our fellow citizens in the rest of the country. Faced with the evidence of the Tories' anti-immigrant, anti-poor, pro-rich policies they voted for more of the same and the Guardian readers amongst us have reacted with something like disgust.

The difficult point though is that, if your sensibilities are democratic then the use of that 'they' is problematic. If we believe that the English are fundamentally self-interested and illiberal then what are we supposed to do? Emigrate? Establish a dictatorship? What? These people don't deserve the vote, do they?

By coincidence, there was an item on the Today programme this morning about the Bradford stadium fire, in which  a doctor who had treated some of the victims commented on the extraordinarily uplifting atmosphere amongst those waiting for emergency surgery. And as he described their unselfish good humour and patience I reflected that more than likely a lot of those football fans would have been UKIP (or at least Tory) voters, holding forth in the pub about fucking immigrants and fucking benefit scroungers.

Certainly, history shows that there is in the English character (if such a thing exists) a strong impulse towards mutual supportiveness, consideration for the underdog and rejection of illiberal dictatorship. Yet there is an equally strong strand more recently for Little Englander insularity and a what-I-have-I-hold lack of generosity towards the 'undeserving' poor. How can that be?

It has often been said that what the right wing parties tap into is a sort of selfishness born of fear. Certainly fear was a powerful weapon for both the Tories and UKIP this time round. UKIP's support is fundamentally dependent on whipping up fear of immigrants and the EU whilst the Tories were all about fear of a Labour-SNP coalition and a descent into the abyss of financial crisis.

However what the Bradford City example (and countless others) show me is that when faced with real and overwhelming fear the British people generally seem to respond nobly and well. In the really tough times they never supported a Hitler or a Stalin (not even a Putin) or turned on their own minorities and the vulnerable within their populations. So why are they apparently doing the latter now?

Well actually I think it is because the fear that the Tories and UKIP evoke is NOT real and NOT immediate, and whilst real fear and real danger can bring about nobility and selflessness the prospect of fear and danger somewhere down the line rarely does. Take immigration for instance. It has come to appear almost a given that the English fear immigration and vote UKIP to protest about it. Yet in the place where immigration has actually been the highest, and had the greatest effect (London) the UKIP vote was the lowest. It is in places near but outside the capital that fear of immigration is at its highest. People from the Home Counties and East Anglia for whom a visit to London is something of an occasion look at the bewildering diversity of ethnicities in the capital and it terrifies them. People who live in the midst of that diversity are relatively much more at ease with it.

Or take the fear of economic crisis and poverty. It is a fact easily ignored, but amidst all the talk of austerity and hard times and financial crises there is a large swathe of the British electorate who have done just fine over the last few years. Yes, their salaries might not have increased, but their mortgage payments have gone down, prices in the shops feel more affordable than they have ever done and their house has shot up in value. Most people in this country aren't on zero-hours contracts. They haven't had their benefits slashed. They probably haven't even lost their jobs, or necessarily know anyone who has. So while everyone has gone on about the economic crisis they have quietly wondered, what economic crisis?

Meanwhile all around fear is being whipped up about the dire and far-reaching consequences of economic ruin and a seed of fear has lodged there, but it is a sort of theoretical and abstract fear- not one that forces its way into their faces and brings out whatever fundamental decency they have deep down. Instead it turns them inwards. Makes them feel grateful that none of this seems at the moment to have affected them too badly and makes them want things to stay that way. So they have voted out of something like cowardice. They don't actively want policies that will lead to a dismantling of the Welfare State and the creation of an entirely unprotected underclass, they just want to ignore all that because, for the moment, they are doing fine and all that talk emanates from a scary parallel reality which they really don't want to think too much about.

My hope is that once the reality of Tory policies start playing themselves out people may start recognising that it is not some parallel reality at all, but their country and their people who are affected, and that may start triggering the fundamental nobility and decency that has served the British so well in times of actual crisis. Once they have seen the implications of the removal of Human Rights legislation, the sell-off of social housing, the £12.5 billion cuts to the last rump of benefit payments, the removal of schools from local democratic accountability, the triumph of insularity over internationalism on the EU question, and more.

Then maybe they will realise that they have sleep-walked into something they really cannot stomach and someone will be able to channel their shame and disgust into a genuinely progressive politics.

The narrative of election victories

The results of the 2015 UK General Election have been described as extraordinary now more times than I can count, and everyone is scratching around for explanations as to why the pollsters got it so wrong and why two neighbouring countries with a shared heritage should have elected two such entirely different sets of political representatives- broadly, England (except for London) going Tory/UKIP and Scotland going to the left of Labour.

(One VERY important caveat here, by the way. Though Cameron's victory is being hailed as if it were virtually unanimous, his party received well under 40% of the vote and still has a majority slimmer than John Major's in the 90s. Still...)

The SNP whitewash has been categorised south of the border (and particularly by the tabloids) as a nationalist, anti-Union and even anti-Labour surge but actually it seems to have been in a sense more extraordinary than that. A country which has always been if anything more socially conservative than its neighbour has apparently swung politically to the left of the most left-wing of the UK-wide parties. The SNP is anti-Trident, anti-austerity, pro-progressive taxation and increased welfare spending and pro-immigration. The Siriza of the UK, or more akin to pre-Blair Labour than anything else. The Tories whom the English elected, meanwhile, argue for reduced taxation and the taking of a flamethrower to the Welfare State.

So how did that happen? One argument of course would be that the Scots have, en masse, moved politically to the Left whilst England (and Wales, it appears) have moved to the Right. To some extent this is no doubt true, but in a sense saying that does no more than restate the original question, with no real explanation. So why has it happened?

Well, one explanation, that is appropriate to the (vague) themes of this blog is the issue of narrative. I have argued before (here for instance) that there is a strong narrative imperative in the way we view the world. As a species we use narrative to construct and inform our view (political and otherwise) of the world, and a simple, clear narrative is more powerful than any logical argument, however clearly stated. And it seems to me that this election has shown that fact more clearly than ever, because the parties that won were the ones with the clear narratives.

First, the Tories. Like any political party facing an election it presented the electorate with a hero quest narrative and they did it very well: there was a goal (the Long Term Economic Plan), a serious danger to escape from (the nameless horrors of the global economic crisis), a villain (the Labour party, which single-handedly, recklessly and with malice aforethought created that global economic crisis), various perils to be navigated (Europe, immigration, financial perdition) and of course an element of comedy (Ed Miliband). Essentially of course there was a hero (David Cameron). I will come to the hero bit in a minute, but it is worth pointing out that there was even a mini-narrative for the election campaign itself (Lynton Crosbie's assertion that polls would not budge until a sudden last-minute swing when people realised they couldn't afford the Miliband risk) and a useful prop (the jokey note to a 'friend' left by the Labour finance minister).

The SNP had an equally strong hero quest narrative. They also had a goal (the establishment of a Scottish Shangri-La), a serious danger to escape from (austerity and the Tory dismantling of the Welfare State) and a villain (a three-headed monster, the ThatcherBlairCameron). Their unexpected, but archetypally Scottish, heroine was Nicola Sturgeon, a feisty wee woman who rose to superstar status.

The UKIP narrative started simple and direct (I have just eaten, so really don't want to spell it out) but began to lose its clarity as Farage back-pedalled from some of the more extreme crap spouted by supporters. It is maybe for that reason that, thank God, UKIP began fading in the polls and didn't achieve their breakthrough.

So what of the losers? Well, I don't think I am the first to point out that neither Labour's not the LibDem's narrative was in any way clear or comprehensible. The LibDems villain was (sort of) the coalition partner they had been in bed with for five years. The danger to be escaped was both (sort of) the same as the Tories' and (sort of) the Tories themselves. Labour's danger to be escaped was in some ways their own past in government (never a strong start...). Business was both a villain and an ally and the prop they used to counter the Tories' treasury note was both literally and metaphorically a tombstone.

(On a side note, it is quite extraordinary how Labour failed to construct a coherent narrative out of the Tories' record, with its failure to eliminate the deficit, bring down immigration or protect the NHS from top-down meddling. It is also extraordinary that they only once seemed to mention that the bogeyman economic crash was brought into existence by policies on bank deregulation that the Tories of the time condemned as not going far enough!)

The disappointing performance of the Greens was another illustration of the narrative imperative. The key moment was Nathalie Bennett's 'brain-melt' in that LBC interview. This was presented as going to the trust issue- that potential voters lost trust in her competence- but I think it was simpler than that. Her inability to recall her party's policies on social housing showed that she had quite literally lost the plot (or forgotten the narrative she was attempting to outline). The Greens have always presented a clear narrative (danger to be avoided- environmental catastrophe and villain anyone who recklessly pursues economic growth) but this time they seemed sometimes to forget themselves what it was and they paid the price.

So what of the heroes of these respective narratives? There is not much point discussing the inadequacies of Clegg and Miliband in that regard. Flawed heroes are all very well in literature, but not for politics. Miliband came across as a decent, well-intentioned geek, Clegg as an unprincipled, power-hungry wannabe, but what they had in common was the fact that both lacked an indefinable something that both Cameron and Sturgeon (for all their diagrammatic dissimilarities from each other) had in spades- self confidence. Clegg knew that the fresh promise he had held out in 2010 was tarnished beyond repair by the student fees betrayal (and more) whilst Miliband was, and no doubt still is, in some sense still the nerdy boy who used to shut himself into the library of Haverstock School every lunchtime.

So what about Cameron and Sturgeon? Well, both had one enormous thing in common: neither had anything like as much to lose as either Miliband or Clegg. Cameron had already announced he would not be standing again after this election and Sturgeon wasn't standing at all. For Sturgeon, anything even vaguely close to what the polls were predicting was always going to be a vast improvement on any previous SNP performance and for Cameron, even if he lost he could pretend that he had sacrificed himself and his political career in the greater national interest and laboured on with the politically unpopular 'tough choices' that only he was brave enough to make (sorry- had to stop for a while. I feel a bit sick).

But there is something deeper still about the nature of both of these heroes. Utterly different in almost every ways, their cultural heritage has gifted both of them a sort of fearlessness that removed the self-doubt which condemned Clegg and Miliband to oblivion. Cameron's fearlessness is born of entitlement- the utterly impervious arrogance of the public school elite, which I have discussed here for instance. This innate self-confidence was boosted by the fact that I really don't think that he (or Gideon or the rest) actually care that much. They haven't got Thatcher's passion or Blair's messianic zeal. They're just doing it all for kicks.

Sturgeon has a different sort of fearlessness. Her's is the 'fuck it, why not?' of the perennial Scottish underdog. She is an Archie Gemmill for the 21st Century, nutmegging the Dutch goalie as Scotland celebrated yet another heroic sporting failure at the 1978 World Cup. She (and all Scotland) knew that however many SNP MPs they sent to Westminster it was unlikely to make a lot of difference so they really had nothing to lose, and God, did she make the most of it.

So how important is this sort of fearlessness to elections in general? Utterly crucial, unfortunately. Thatcher had the fearlessness of the zealot while Major was racked by self-doubt and tempered by reasonableness. Blair was positively Messianic whilst Brown was clearly tortured by inner demons. Some US presidents (Reagan, George W Bush. Need I go on?) have had a fearlessness that is born of stupidity but interestingly Obama- clearly beset with self-doubt of his own when  it comes to actual, policy delivery- seemed able to either simulate or genuinely experience a sort of selfless embodiment of some higher force when contemplating the large and abstract concepts of government.

So there you go. And the implication is obvious really. If Labour wants to return to electoral success (and that is not a redundant question- Miliband often came across as terrified of the idea), then what they need to construct is not so much a coherent set of policies as a compelling narrative. And, like it or not, the primary quality they need in their leader is neither intellect nor compassion nor even political vision, but self confidence.