Nick Tyrone's Blog, page 2

Is political correctness destroying artistic creation? How writing fiction became difficult

I have a new book out called “The Patient”. I’m now in that stage of having to talk about it all the time – to keep the publisher happy, to give myself a chance of selling enough copies to be able to publish another one – which I don’t really relish. But there is something interesting I can talk about with this one and the run in to its publication as it relates to the wider universe. It has to do with fiction in the current age and how certain assumptions are creeping in that will make it very hard for challenging fiction of any description to continue being produced.

When you get published by an imprint attached to a major publisher, they send your book out for review. They give it to all the big newspapers and magazines, hoping to get a bite, but they know for relatively unknown writers a safer bet is to send it out to book bloggers. These are people who will be willing to write a review in return for a free copy of a book. I got a lot of pick up this time from these bloggers, who knows why. I suppose the book is set in a hospital and deals with medicalisation as one of its themes in a time when that is relevant to a lot of people, but I’m only guessing. Maybe they liked the cover – sometimes it is as superficial and unrelated to what you actually wrote as that.

Anyhow, as is always the case, some of the reviewers really liked it, some of them sort of liked it, some of them sort of didn’t like it and some of them hated it. So far, so normal. Yet what interests me this time round is what I’ve picked up on as a strange form of political correctness that I believe is very dangerous. In fact, if spread across novel writing as a whole, the genre might as well pack it in.

“The Patient” has two main characters, Mr and Mrs Sincope, a couple who are about to have their first child. He is a fairly terrible person – he is sexist, xenophobic, arrogant without even any justifiable cause. In fact, one reviewer summed him up beautifully:

“If you wanted a picture of your typical, think I am better than everyone, misogynist, racist male – he is it.”

Great, the reviewer got it, spot on – always nice when your character is understood. Except, this is the next line in the review:

“It was really distracting from the book and difficult to read.”

In other words, having a sexist male character in a book that is specifically about sexism and a woman’s right to her own body is….distracting? Just having to be confronted with the actions of a misogynist in a novel is now “difficult”?

I realise what I might be heading into here is the territory of a writer bitching about negative reviews – I assure you, that’s not what this is about. Even the positive reviews of the book I have found a little bewildering, as they tend to have a “really enjoyed this, cracking read, but beware, it’s somewhat offensive” vibe to them – “This didn’t bother me, but it probably will appal most people”. No, the reason I feel the need to write about this is that there appears to be a widespread idea, baked in for a certain group of people now, that if a novel has a sexist, xenophobic character, even if this character is obviously a “bad guy”, then the book is in itself is sexist and xenophobic as a result. As in, just presenting characters who have these traits, even if they are being displayed so that they can be shown to be problematic, is somehow crossing a line in the sand.

If you think this isn’t that important, I should let you know that book bloggers have become to some extent gatekeepers in the publishing world. Getting reviewed in a major publication happens but is rare and increasingly difficult unless you are very famous and/or your last book was an international best seller. The source of decent reviews for most up and coming writers are these bloggers. And the fact that so many of them, even those who liked my book and gave it a good review, have trouble with politically incorrect characters being present has shaken me a little. It will have a definite effect on how much writers of all fiction will want to ‘rock the boat’.

I think of someone like Irvine Welsh, as leftie and right on as you can get, and all of the horrible characters in his books. Think of Begbie or Sick Boy in Trainspotting – actually, think of any character in that book, including Renton. Once upon a time, challenging your audience with distasteful scenes and characters in order to make a point about the world was the edgy thing all vaguely progressive writers did. I guess I didn’t get the memo.

Anyhow, given all that, if any of you faithful readers can have a look at the book and tell me if you think it is actually offensive, I would be grateful. Plus, if enough of you who read this buy a copy, I can shut up about the book and talk about other shit for a while. Here it is:

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Why we need to talk about 2004 and Brexit – how immigration became important

While even the basic statement I’m about to start off with is still somewhat contentious in certain circles, anyone who isn’t trying one on has to admit that immigration played a large part in the vote to leave the EU in 2016. The desire to end freedom of movement – at least, in the direction of people coming from the continent to Britain – was undoubtably one of the big factors in the referendum going the way that it did. What no one wants to talk about is why the desire to end FOM became so strong amongst a certain, key audience.

Liberals don’t want to talk about it because for most of them, immigration is an unquestionable good. So, they fight against the very idea that any aspect of FOM at any point in time could have been bad. Conservatives who are pro-Brexit don’t want to talk about it because it pinpoints a certain time and political action that was specific and not likely to be repeated, not to mention the fault of the UK government and not the EU – thus very possibly ameliorating a certain’s group of people in Britain’s dislike of FOM and indeed, the EU in general. Labour people don’t want to talk about it since it lays the blame at their own party’s door.

It all has to do with 2004, the ascension of ten new states into the European Union, most of them in eastern Europe, and a crucial decision taken by the Blair government that probably changed the course of British history more than anything else that government ever did, which is really saying something.

On May 1, 2004, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia all became members of the European Union. It was a huge expansion of the EU, unlike anything ever seen before – and likely ever again. Partly given the size of the intake and partly because a lot of the new members were economically poorer than any of the already existing members, it was decided that existing member states could offer the new members freedom of movement on a staggered basis. In other words – and here is the part that is crucial to Brexit – individual member states were allowed to decide when they offered FOM to the new members states within a seven year range.

The existing member states could offer FOM right away if they felt like it, as in, from the 1st of May, 2004, citizens of those newly acceded states could have full FOM into their countries immediately. Or, they could wait until a deadline of May 2011 to offer full FOM. In the meantime, individual member states could put in place any restrictions on FOM from the newly acceded ten member states that they wished.

Some, like Germany and Austria, had pretty heavy restrictions in place right up until the 2011 deadline. Others were more lenient – France had five years of heavy restrictions of FOM from the new member states, whereas a two year restriction, sometimes with immigrant limits put in place afterwards up to 2011, were more common.

Only three states decided to lift all meaningful restrictions on FOM from May 1, 2004: Ireland, Sweden and yes, you guessed it, the UK. To be fair, there were some welfare restrictions put in place in the UK, but that was it – apart from that, full FOM was offered to the ten new members states immediately.

This needs to be heavily stressed: the Labour government of the time chose to do this of their own, sovereign will. The EU did not force them to offer full FOM in 2004 as they opted to. It was a decision by the UK government of the time, not the EU.

What happened next was predictable in retrospect. Sweden was never going to be under much threat of a large wave of immigration for several reasons. It is very, very difficult to work in Sweden if you are not fluent in the language and there is a lot of red tape involved if you want to be a tradesman there. Ireland did attract many immigrants, but it was never going to be anywhere near what the UK, a country that had a booming economy, was relatively liberal in terms of ease of setting up a business and had been seen by many as a gateway to the US, was bound to expect.

The New Labour government was intensely naive about all of this at the time. Official estimates of how many immigrants from the ten new member states were expected was collectively around 13,000 per year. How many actually came is a topic of debate – many workers only came to Britain seasonally and returned to their homelands during down season, making it hard to calculate – but over the five year period during which France had heavy FOM restrictions in place, 2004 through 2009, about 1.5 million people from the ten new members states immigrated to the UK.

This was the largest wave of immigration into Great Britain in the nation’s entire history. Places like Boston, which had had a fairly stable make up of residents for over a thousand years, were suddenly welcoming a large influx of immigrants. This changed perceptions of FOM over the next five years in profound ways. Pre-2004, most of the public was broadly fine with freedom of movement. After the large wave of new immigrants from eastern Europe came to the country in numbers never before seen, the mood changed.

Now, I happen to be pro-immigration and passionately pro-FOM. I, like many liberals, can talk about all the economic benefits the eastern Europeans brought post-2004 until your eyes roll back in your head. So, I’m not here to argue against the lifting of any restrictions in 2004 by Labour. You may think it was a good thing, you may think it was a terrible thing. All I’m asking is that it be heavily considered when talking about the issues of immigration and freedom of movement. Because the pro-Brexit right rolled the larger than expected immigration numbers from 2004 through 2009 into a story about how FOM was a dangerous thing as opposed to talking about what really happened, namely, the whole thing was a decision made by the UK government of the time. It was not forced upon Britain, nor was it a condition of remaining in the EU. We could have had strict restrictions on FOM from the ten new member states until 2011 if we wanted, when countries like Germany, which is much closer geographically and culturally to those ascension countries, were also offering full FOM.

It is too late to stop the country voting for and indeed, leaving the EU. I get that. But I still think this is an important thing to talk about going forward. If we want to have a grown up conversation about immigration, it is key to start with what really happened – and whose decision it was to make.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and it goes horribly wrong. The book explores themes of xenophobia, sexism and the problems involved in becoming a parent. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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The four assumptions behind Brexit, explained

Yesterday, I put out the following tweet:

Brexit was based on four assumptions: 1. It would cause the EU to collapse. 2. We’d get all the benefits of the SM without having to follow the rules. 3. We’d get a great trade deal with the US. 4. There would be a painless solution to the NI problem. None of these happened.

A reaction from a lot of Brexiteers to this tweet has been: that’s not why I voted for Brexit. Another reaction which goes further than that is: no one thought Brexit would bring those four things to fruition, what are you talking about? To be clear, I never meant to infer that your average Leave voter in Boston or Clacton or anywhere in Britain really thought of those four things when they went to the ballot box in June 2016. What I meant was, those four assumptions underpinned the intellectual project that was leaving the European Union, back when no really cared much about such thing happening or not pre-2015 apart from a committed band of Brexiteers.

For I can recall a time when talking about the UK’s relationship with the European Union was a minority interest, something only for super nerds to get involved with. I organised panel events at Labour and Tory conferences on the subject, inviting both hardcore Leavers and Remainers, and was almost always underwhelmed by the level of interest. For Remainers, ie most people at the time, you either didn’t really care whether we were in or out – you might have preferred to stay in as it was the status quo, but you didn’t actually spend any time thinking about it – or even if you thought being a member of the EU was really important, you didn’t take seriously the idea that we would ever actually leave.

If you were a Leaver, you either sort of wanted to leave but didn’t care that much about it, or you really did want to leave the European Union but figured it would never actually happen. That is, unless you were part of the hardcore Leave set, ie Nigel Farage and his UKIP followers or part of the Eurosceptic cult within the Conservative party. These people had a plan and were sure that we would leave the EU – and sooner than everyone thought. Back then, these people talked in practical, scientific terms about leaving the EU – all the slogans came later, in the run in to the referendum itself. They didn’t even talk about immigration much at the time.

What they did talk about, a lot, was the EU’s imminent collapse in the face of Brexit. This was perhaps the most vital assumption made by the band of Brexiteers who fought to make Brexit a reality. The bloc wasn’t destined to last and just needed a catalyst to break it apart. Brexit would be perfect. Once the UK voted to leave the EU, the tensions between France and Germany, east and west Europe, north and south Europe, would become unbearable. In negotiating a post-Brexit relationship with the UK, the EU would never hold together. Brexit would start an exodus of nations fleeing the EU, with the UK at the centre of new trading vanguard.

In addition to the EU stuff I hosted between 2010 and 2016, I attended a lot of Eurosceptic events as well. The notion that Brexit would kill the EU off was perhaps the biggest idea that was tossed about. And I can understand why – it remains crucial to Brexit’s ultimate success or failure as a project. For the UK to be outside of a trading bloc it is 22 miles away from and for that trading bloc to continue to function and indeed, grow more commercially powerful, would be deeply silly. They all knew this and that’s why “Brexit will kill the EU” remains to this day so central to the whole thing, at least in spirit. It’s important enough for the Daily Express to run several articles a week on the subject to this day.

Again, I am not saying that people in Burnley voted for Brexit in 2016 because they were convinced it would destroy the EU. They almost certainly had all sorts of reasons for voting Leave. What I’m saying is, those who directly fought to make the referendum happen – and by extension, for Brexit to happen – were powered greatly by this idea.

Back to the original Brexiteer concept of Brexit: once the EU started to fracture, the UK would pick off trade deals with former member states themselves. This would add to the pressure on the crumbling EU, causing it to fracture further. The single market would have to change to adjust to this new post-Brexit reality. As a result, the UK would get all of the benefits of being in the single market without any of the perceived downsides, such as freedom of movement.

Once outside the grip of the EU, the UK could then fulfil its manifest destiny: to get a trade deal with the US like no other ever in the history of America as a trading nation. Its benefits would blow being part of the single market out of the water. It would also lead to other trade deals in the UK’s interests, as the UK-US nexus became to new centre of the western world.

Finally, in the face of all of this, the EU would be in no position to make any demands in terms of how Northern Ireland was dealt with. The UK would hold all the cards here.

None of these things happened in the wake of Brexit. The EU stayed united throughout the negotiating period, forcing Boris Johnson in the end to settle on a very poor set of terms. Northern Ireland is separated from Great Britain via a customs border. There is a great deal of trade friction between the UK and the EU. There is no US trade deal anywhere in sight. And because of all that, those who were at the centre of pushing to get Britain to leave the EU from 2005-2015 will run a mile from my assertion that these assumptions were the heart of their project all that time. Why wouldn’t they? They are under no pressure to admit that this is what they were so sure would happen once we voted to leave the EU and since none of it came true, they are at liberty to change the story. But I was there and heard it all. These assumptions don’t have anything to do with the Brexit project any longer because they didn’t ultimately take place as they predicted. But they were the core of the idea behind leaving in the first place to those who cared about it when no one else did – and without which, Brexit would never have happened.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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The important difference between rights and privileges

I had some fun on Twitter over the weekend. Here’s a tweet I put out there:

One of my favourite Brexiteer lines is “If you like the EU so much why don’t you go and live there?” Perhaps because Brexit removed my right to do so?

Although I didn’t tweet this to specifically phish for information, what I learned was interesting to me. A lot of people don’t actually understand what a right is and by extension, when that right has been taken away. Many Leavers shot back at me that Brexit hadn’t removed my right to live and work in the EU at all. I could fill in some forms. I could get a visa. What was my complaint? Any British citizen could still work in the EU if they qualified and did the right things.

Except, this just demonstrates a deep lack of understanding of what constitutes a right and what does not. And for the political right to be failing to understand this is interesting in and of itself given rights have been at the centre of so many of their concerns over the last thirty years.

But first, let’s define the difference between a right and a privilege. A right is something that cannot be legally denied to anyone who falls within its remit. Basically, if you are a citizen of a country that grants a particular right, no government can legislate to take it away from you without legally removing the right in the first place. A privilege, on the other hand, is something that is legally allowed but is at the discretion of whomever is in a position to dispense whatever is contained within the privilege.

The easiest example of a privilege is the drinking of alcohol. Everyone who is over 18 in the UK and tries to buy alcohol between licensed hours has the privilege to do so – not the right. For instance, if I run a pub and you come in obviously, stinking drunk, I can refuse to serve you. I can do so because the drinking of booze is a privilege not a right. If you had the right to drink alcohol if you were over 18 and it was during licensed hours, I could not legally deny you a drink, no matter how drunk I thought you were. To do so would legally be the same as if I told you to get out because you looked gay or Irish or because you were black.

The best example to use here of how important rights can be is the National Rifle Association in America. They certainly know the difference between a right and a privilege. The crux of their whole campaign is keeping the second amendment of the US constitution in place, which is the right to bear arms. They know that if gun ownership becomes a privilege, even one with few caveats, they have lost the game. The difference between your right to bear arms and a privilege to bear them is strikingly different. This is the little talked about difference between the US and Canada – in Canada, bearing arms is a privilege, not a right. Now, it is much easier to get a gun in Canada than it is in the UK, but you can still be denied the legal ownership of guns for many reasons. This is what happens when something is a privilege, not a right – there will be someone who thinks they should have had a gun when they don’t, I should have been allowed a drink, I’m a grown man, etc. Someone will be denied access, inevitably, and the NRA knows this.

The British right knows this as well. At least, it used to. Remember when they used to rail against the European Court of Human Rights? It was because they understood that when you give people rights, it has consequences. Whether you think the consequence of the rights being given out is a good thing or not, you can’t deny they exist. I could stay on Brexit and demonstrate this point even further – people from the EU27 used to have the right to live and work in the UK, now they do not. Brexiteers mostly seem happy about this fact.

Yet they cannot seem to understand that they, like all Britons without an EU passport, have lost their right to live and work in the EU at the same time. Yes, British people can still work in the EU, obviously – they can buy property there that meets immigration standards, they can get a job and then a visa, they can even pretty much buy a passport from a few member states – but this isn’t the same as having the automatic right to live and work in the EU. The fact that you have to do something proactive, even it is just filling out some forms (which it isn’t, by the way), and there is even a small percentage chance you will be turned down, this turns your former right to live and work in the EU into a privilege.

Now, it is a perfectly reasonable position to say that you either don’t mind having lost this right or even that you are happy about it. I can disagree, but it is an intellectually defensible position. But saying, ‘We haven’t lost our right to live in the EU’ means you either just don’t understand the basics of the Brexit deal or you don’t understand the difference between a right and a privilege. Or both. It’s an important distinction – just ask the NRA if you don’t believe me.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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What is the UK government really doing on climate change?

To say that the release of the IPCC’s report on climate change has caused much more of a stir than most green policy reports tend to would be a massive understatement. The headline take away of ‘code red’ for humanity in relation to the environment dominated the news in the UK on the day the report was released.

The report is fascinating, at least if you’re used to normally reading fairly dry and not very well thought out green policy reports like I am (there are good ones as well – unfortunately, there are a lot of bad ones out there too). There was the ‘stick’ in the report of ‘you need to do this now or else’, with the ‘or else’ being vividly laid out; there was also the ‘carrot’ of, ‘this can be fixed if there is the political will and way’. The report lays out a lot more than just this, being large and comprehensive in its scope, but these were my main takeaways for the lay audience.

As it happens, I have written a report on green policy that is out the very same week as the IPCC’s report. I wrote it for the Centre for Progressive Policy and its called ‘Solving the Climate Crisis’. My paper is a lot narrower in scope than the IPCC’s – I focused mainly on the UK government’s ten-point plan for green growth, detailing what is good about it and what is bad about it.

A little background: the ten-point plan is officially known as “The ten point plan for a green industrial revolution” and it was released to the public in November 2020. It marked a huge change in Tory policy on sustainability, moving beyond the strange and cheap plan the government previously had for ‘post-Covid green growth’ that had all sorts of strange little gremlins in it, like the plan to spend £10 million on a spaceship that would fire lasers into clouds.

What’s good about the new plan: it contains some decent and even ambitious targets. ‘Ensure that the public sector has reduced its direct emissions by 50% compared to a 2017 baseline’ by 2032 is one example. What’s bad about the plan: the practicalities of how the government intend to reach these targets is often confused, missing or severely underwhelming. For instance, the ‘jet zero and green ships’ section states that, “Up to 5,200 jobs supported by a domestic SAF industry” will be created. Yet the plans as detailed make it extremely difficult to understand how these jobs will actually be created and the danger is that underlying assumptions are being made that, given
the lack of success of recent green initiatives from this government, are not warranted.

In my report, I talk a lot more about what I think the government should be doing in the immediate future to fill these gaps. It is only meant as a guide to ‘quick wins’ for the government’s ten-point plan to start to work, but I think, particularly in light of the IPCC report, that these sorts of steps are urgently necessary. I think it comes down to three essential components:

Create the jobs necessary for the ten-point plan to workBetter incentivise the private sector to play its partPut in place structures to hold the government to its own promises and measure their real-world impact on the environment and the economy.

I detail how I would do all of that in the report, which is a relatively brief read that you can find here:

https://www.progressive-policy.net/downloads/files/Solving-the-climate-crisis-Nick-Tyrone.pdf

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How everything became woke

Laurence Fox was on GB News last night. This isn’t news, obviously; Fox, maybe even more than Farage, is built for the channel. I watched his clip so you don’t have to. It revealed a lot, I’m pleased to say.

I like watching Fox because he is one of the least sophisticated right-wing pundits in Britain today – not the least sophisticated, mind you, for I suspect that is a bottomless pit – and as such, reveals more than he intends every time he speaks. Last night, he was on about the “green movement” which I think to Fox means everything from the guy who does green washing at a major corporation to the XR activist who thinks humans should be exterminated to save the planet. He talked about how greens should find God instead of the religion of wokeness – beyond the very basic problem of monotheism’s less than stellar track record, tying green issues into being ‘woke’ reveals a lot about the way the right wants to talk about this sort of stuff at the moment.

Environmentalism is increasingly popular across the political spectrum. I was very taken a few years ago when I was doing a project built around preservation of bat habitats only to find that many Tory MPs with rural seats told me about how important the issue was for a lot of their constituents. So many right-wing pundits wonder why Boris Johnson has spent so much time on building a green growth plan without figuring out that for a lot of Conservative voters, it’s becoming more and more important.

So, if you’re on the right and you don’t like the environmental agenda, what’s the best way to make others on the right not like it either? Attach it to wokeness. It worked for Brexit, and as such it’s the climate sceptic right’s best chance of knocking the green agenda out of the spotlight.

When I think of what ‘woke’ means to me, it comes down to Theory. The idea that everything is relative, a social construct; there is no objective truth, just power structures. One doesn’t need to know anything about Theory or that such a concept even exists to be woke, course – in fact, it’s arguable that the less you know about Theory, the more you’ll just go along with the whole thing. Fox has a point when he compares wokeness to a religion – there are definite religious elements to the belief system that runs through a lot of the modern left, all of which spring from Theory originally, however much a lot of it has taken on a life of its own over the last decade.

What Fox was trying to do on GB News yesterday was take everything the right don’t like and put it in a box labelled ‘woke’. The desire to breath cleaner air, halt or reverse the emergence of weather patterns less than ideal for human existence or save animal habitats has nothing whatsoever to do with Theory, even tangentially – meaning there is nothing inherently ‘woke’ about caring about sustainability. You can be woke and green, and many young people might well be, but that’s beside the point. You can like football and you can like lager, and lots of men in this country like both, but they have nothing to do with each other and you can like either of them without liking the other.

The reason Fox was doing this – consciously or unconsciously, who knows – is that ‘wokeness’ is really unpopular with a great many voters. They often don’t know exactly what they don’t like about being ‘woke’, but the ones that hit the marks most consistently are the extreme end of trans activism (where biological sex itself is negated as a meaningful concept), the idea that all white people are inherently racist and there’s nothing that can be done to change this ‘fact’, a general hatred of Great Britain and finally, the suspicion that all of this is being done to service an extreme vision of far left anarchy (‘defund the police’ being the most recognisable part of this last tranche). This stuff is electoral poison. It helped us get a very hard Brexit when the right tried to make leaving the EU about those four concepts (even though they have nothing to do with our relationship with Europe in any way, shape or form) and the left obliged by going along with it.

Now, it’s the green agenda. If you want to destroy the popularity of environmentalism using intellectual arguments, you are on increasingly shaky ground. The science is not only solidly on the greens’ side, the effects of climate change are becoming unavoidably visible. On the other hand, if you try and make the equation “caring about green stuff = the obliteration of sex as a concept + defund the police”, you’ve got a much better shot at making climate scepticism popular once again. Throw the term ‘woke’ around and hope it sticks. It might not work, but it’s probably the best weapon they have at present – which just goes to show, the right don’t have as much of a stranglehold on the political conversation as is sometimes assumed.

Say what you want about GB News – you can’t say that it isn’t occasionally education, even if that’s usually by accident.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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Why the popularity of left-wing policies don’t translate into Labour winning elections

A common refrain heard from the left of Labour during the Corbyn era was that ‘left-wing policies are popular’. This was a reference to the fact that when polled, policies such as rail nationalisation turned out to have widespread approval. Yet this was not the silver bullet the Corbynistas always thought it was because it immediately prompts the question: if Labour policies are incredibly popular, then why aren’t Labour doing better electorally?

The water is muddied somewhat by the fact that a lot of policies which could be considered rightfully left-wing really are popular, but other left-wing policies are certainly not. For instance, the four-day week doesn’t poll well, mostly because people have worked out that it might lead to job losses – it could lead to fewer people doing fewer things, meaning fewer positions in the workforce. But I don’t think this is really the crux of Labour’s electoral problem. The public is in a ‘spend more’ mood and has been for a few years now and a left-leaning economic platform should do well, whatever weaknesses its constituent parts carry.

You could say the problem was Corbyn’s personality and the fact that people just didn’t like him. While this was certainly a factor in why Labour lost so badly in 2019, I don’t think this is the whole problem either. If it was, Labour would be ahead in the polls now.

No, I think the real problem is that the part of the electorate that Labour wants to win back and who are attracted to the economically left-wing policies are relatively socially conservative. In other words, they don’t like the woke stuff, very broadly speaking, and it puts them off Labour, particularly when there is already a big spending Conservative party in office. This is the bit that the left of Labour continues to fail to understand.

By the way, I’m not telling them not to believe in what they want to believe in. I would just suggest that while rail nationalisation is popular, ‘children are born without sex’ is definitely not. Saying this out loud, it’s really obvious, but yet this is perhaps the biggest thing the left still do not understand. The idea that the culture war stuff really hurt Corbyn is obvious to the point of tedium to me, and yet I’ve never heard a prominent Corbynista publicly admit this.

The most interesting thing about the recent European football championships was that it demonstrated how easy it is to blindside the right on culture war shit; how simple it is for the left to find themselves on the correct side of it all, from a public popularity point of view, for once. People in England like the England football team way, way more than any politician and certainly more than any political party. They are also broadly not racist and feel defensive of English footballers when they are being racially abused. Beyond even that, the fact that a multi-ethnic England team managed to get to the finals being supported by 98% of the country demonstrated beautifully how English patriotism – not even British, but English – could be mixed with a progressive idea of what England actually is these days.

Yet the Labour party has yet to fully embrace the gift that was the Euros, particularly following how badly the Tory frontbench handled the whole thing, because the frontbench of that party still doesn’t know how to handle the culture war stuff. But at least in comparison to the Corbynistas, they know that they do have to find a way to deal with it all in order to stand any chance of a parliamentary majority. Say what you want about Starmer, it’s clear that he understands what a problem this is for the Labour party. If there were nothing else about him that was an improvement on Corbyn, the fact that he doesn’t go and support gender self-ID and then wonder why the rail nationalisation shtick isn’t cutting through would be enough. He knows the problem, which is at least half the battle.

Now, people on Labour’s left will shoot back, ‘Things like trans activism are more important than winning elections’. That’s a perfectly defensible position to take, intellectually speaking. But again, don’t then wonder why not enough of the electorate like what you’re buying. I would like the Labour party to be more openly pro-European, taking at least a rejoining the single market stance, but they aren’t because they want to win back the red wall seats. Trans activism is at least if not more harming to Labour’s chances of winning in these seats in the near future than wanting to rejig Brexit, so the left of Labour should stop using the ‘But electoral popularity’ argument if they want to keep doing the culture warrior stuff to the degree that they do.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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Why Priti Patel is the worst Home Secretary of all time

Charles Moore believes that ‘a special animus’ is directed towards Priti Patel by portions of the left simply because she is ‘Indian, female and firmly Tory’. While I wouldn’t deny that there is a bizarre form of racism on the left in these matters – the ‘we own the BMEs’ sentiment that they never realise really is completely racist – there are several problems with this argument. The first is that this sounds an awful lot like the identity politics the right is always railing against. You can’t have it both ways – complain that the left always yells ‘racism’ whenever Diane Abbott gets opprobrium for saying something silly and then use the exact same excuse when it’s Priti Patel getting the stick.

The other problem with Moore’s argument is that Priti Patel is in fact a very, very bad Home Secretary in an objective sense. And just so we’re clear here and we can this out of the way, the fact that she is Indian, female and Tory has nothing whatsoever to do with this.

Patel is an odd combination of ruthlessly authoritarian and embarrassingly prone to gaffes. Her perfect society is seemingly one in which mistakes are punished without miss and yet she is a constant contravenor of her own rules. What Westminster watcher doesn’t recall the ‘counter-terrorism’ routine? For those who missed it or don’t remember, Priti Patel spent a day going around London, doing interviews with numerous media outlets, in which she constantly referred to terrorists or terrorism as ‘counter-terrorists’ or ‘counter-terrorism’. Referring to a terrorist attack which had happened extremely recently, she said of the perpetrator that he ‘clearly had a history in relation to counter-terrorism offences’. She went on to talk further about ‘counter-terrorism offenders’, which just for reference, isn’t actually a thing.

If she’d said it once, offhand, that would have been completely forgivable. It must be stressed here that to be the Home Secretary and confuse terrorism and counter-terrorism once, in the heat of the moment, whilst silly can be explained by the tension of the moment. But Patel kept saying it, over and over again, pointing to the idea that she really somehow thought terrorism and counter-terrorism, as in, the opposite of terrorism, were one and the same thing.

If Priti Patel were just a little gaffe prone, she wouldn’t even deserve particular singling out amongst this cabinet, which is full of people who should be nowhere near a ministerial post, never mind amongst the many poor Home Secretaries we’ve ever had. Theresa May springs to mind as one for instance. No, what makes Priti Patel so notably bad boils down to two things: the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 and her department’s current plans to lock up journalists for 14 years for reporting on leaks.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill 2021 is for the most part a reaction to the tearing down of the statue in Bristol. I understand that episode was unpleasant and that there have been other instances where the police have seemed scared to engage in stopping public disorder. Yet it seems obvious to me the answer to this must be around police protocol and training. The cops already had the powers to halt protestors dumping Edward Colston into the harbour last year; they didn’t need more help under the law or for there to be tougher sentencing in place to stop it from happening.

This gets to the heart of where I think Priti Patel and many who take the same approach to law and order get it so wrong. While sentencing can of course be too light and act then as a lack of deterrent to crime as a result, this is rarely the case. What’s much, much more often at fault is that the perpetrator of a crime feels like their chances of getting caught for it are very low. Take corruption. If you want to stamp out grifting in a country or an institution, the secret isn’t to make the penalty for getting caught steep; it’s making the chances of getting caught for it very likely. The penalty doesn’t even have to be that great for this to work wonders. If you’ll lose your job and your pension for corruption and there’s even a 50-50 chance of getting caught for it – and crucially, the punishment is enforced in almost every case – people will stop the behaviour, en masse, very quickly.

Then we come to the whole locking up journalists for 14 years malarkey. Under current legislation, whistleblowers, those who leak unclassified documents to the press, and foreign agents looking to do the UK actual harm are all treated very differently, as you might intuitively expect. The Home Office plans would do away with these distinctions and make any publishing of any government leak become a criminal offence – with some steep prison sentences available to offenders. This represents nothing less than the devaluation of the UK as a liberal democracy. If any and all information pertaining to the government that the government itself does not place in the public domain is criminally off-limits, the ability of the media to hold the government to account will be severely diminished.

There are more complaints I could make about Priti Patel as Home Secretary – I haven’t even got to the part about how she annoyed the entirety of the police force across the country recently – but gravely endangering the state of liberal democracy via clamping down on the rights of citizens to peacefully protest while also taking away the means for the media to hold the government to account are enough to make her the worst ever holder of the position in my books.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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Why Twenty20 cricket is shit

It’s becoming harder and harder to say anything original about the current state of British politics. It feels like a lot of stuff is happening under the surface, and by that I don’t mean in backrooms or offices of state (although, there probably is a lot of that taking place). What I mean is Covid, the relative ceasefire in the Brexit wars, Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, all of that is having an effect on the body politic, but none of it is having a visible effect for the time being. There will be some new Tory scandal and then the polls don’t move an inch. Starmer walks out onto the streets of Blackpool and the most common thing that gets thrown at him is that no one knows who he is. It feels like once the nation feels psychologically past the Covid crisis, things could move fast. But we aren’t particularly near that point, ‘Freedom Day’ rhetoric aside, and so it sort of feels like nothing is happening at all, politically speaking. And that is a problem if you write about politics. What is there particularly noteworthy to say about it all at the moment?

Which brings me to the cricket. It’s late July, which normally means England would be playing a test series at home right about now. Yet instead, we have a summer in which the last test match ended in very early June and the next one doesn’t begin until August 4th. So, no test cricket for a whole two month stretch of an English summer. This might be because Covid means wacky scheduling was necessary; scarily, this might also be the foothills of the mountains of shit that English cricketing summers could become in the near future. I want to believe the last possibility isn’t a goer, yet the existence of The Hundred makes me wonder otherwise.

The Hundred is so perfectly a concept built for the early 21st century, it’s almost a parody of our times. Twenty20 cricket apparently didn’t lack substance enough, so they had to lop a ball off of every over to ensure that people who don’t like cricket might somehow be lured into watching some once in a while.

Twenty20 was already way too far down a certain road for me. I don’t mind the one day game; at least there is some element of strategy remaining there. You can’t just blast every ball in 50-over cricket and expect to win, you need some way to navigate certain parts of the match that require finesse and thought. Twenty20, on the other hand, is like public nets. You can afford a wicket every two overs and still expect to win. I know there is more to it than just that – but not much more. Just swing at everything and hope for the best.

Test cricket remains the most beloved form of the game in England for good reason – it is by miles and miles the best form. The whole idea that because it lasts five days (some of the time at least) it lacks urgency and therefore interest is a spurious argument. For one, I think if constant action is your thing, cricket is probably not the game for you. What’s great about the game is that it’s relaxing and not big on pace, except in certain segments of a match that become pressure filled and key. It is this ebb and flow that makes the game what it is.

I suppose I wish the authorities who run cricket wouldn’t keep trying to figure out ways to change it in order to get people who don’t like the game to think again. All they really need to do is remove some of the more annoying features of the game. Like not having matches end on Day Five when the match is in the balance because of light meter readings. We have floodlights these days, lets figure out a way not to have light be an issue given we clearly have the technology to make this work. Or how about having additional days made available in a test match if too many overs get rained off?

The panic around finding ways to get people to like cricket always astounds me. Lots of people love the game. It’s fine. We don’t need ten overs a side bash-a-thons to ‘save it’ since it doesn’t need saving. Just give us more test matches, please.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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If even Steve Baker thinks so, have the Tories gone too far with the culture war stuff?

The culture wars have been good for the Conservative party. They were undoubtedly one of the things that helped the Tories win the 2019 general election so decisively. The party was able to paint itself as the guardians of old school British common sense, protecting the country at large from the army of the woke.

Yet this week has exposed the problem with using the culture wars as the main plank of your political strategy. Times change, sometimes very quickly. And that means your positions can look old hat all of a sudden. This week felt like just such a watershed moment.

Tyrone Mings tweeted at Home Secretary Priti Patel on Monday, saying that she couldn’t call out racism as suffered by members of the England football team after her “gesture politics” comment of a few weeks ago. The tweet went viral, in doing so presenting us with the question: have the Conservatives gone too far down the culture war road and exposed themselves electorally as a result? No less than Steve Baker, hardly someone who could be confused with a social justice warrior, said, ‘This may be a decisive moment for our party. Much as we can’t be associated with calls to defund the police, we urgently need to challenge our own attitude to people taking a knee.’

The government placing themselves in a PR battle with the England football team was a very bad idea. For millions of people in England, the national football side is a deeply important thing in their lives. This is particularly true in rural and small town England, where there are no big clubs to support locally and thus England is taken even more to people’s hearts than is true elsewhere in the country. They also happen to vote Tory as a matter of course in the areas where this applies, at least for the moment. The party annoys these voters at their peril.

If you want to maintain your position as the party for patriots, creating a situation in which a lot of very patriotic English men and women are left wondering why and how the Tories ended up seemingly attacking one of the most potent symbols of that feeling was a really poor move. I understand the worry from many on the right about the fact that a group calling themselves Black Lives Matter started calling for things like defunding the police on social media last year. Was parts of the far left trying to use the George Floyd moment for its own political ends? I also understand the feeling that taking the knee had been borrowed from American culture and the worry that we were thus unconsciously borrowing even more culture war baggage from the States.

However, there came a point where the taking the knee ritual took on a life of its own in English football; it clearly came to symbolise the players expressing discomfort with the racism that they and their teammates had personally suffered or witnessed, whatever its origins. And so, there comes a point where you have to pick a side. It begins to feel like you’re either with the England players or you’re with those who are racially abusing them. And that shouldn’t be a difficult choice to make, particularly for those who have cheered on the Three Lions all their lives.

For the moment, the Tories are still way ahead in the polls. Starmer remains unable to break out of his funk and steer Labour back to a place where they look like they could win an election. As a result, there is a nailed-on assumption that the next election is in the bag for the Tories. But as I said at the top, things can change in politics very quickly. It must be remembered that Starmer, whatever his faults, isn’t Jeremy Corbyn; he doesn’t frighten middle England in the same way, and the Tories will never convince that slice of the electorate to be scared of the Labour leader like they were of his predecessor.

If the Tories become unpopular enough, Labour could win by default. And while that seems unlikely at the moment, doing more things like picking fights with beloved symbols of English patriotism, particularly at a delicate time in terms of unlocking from Covid restrictions, might just start to swing the polls away from Boris in a meaningful and lasting way.

Of course, this could just be a bad week for the Tories. They can obviously recover from this tussle with a beloved national treasure, particularly if figures like Steve Baker lead the charge. But if they aren’t careful, Boris could become hoist with his own petard – the very stoking of the culture wars he did to win in 2019 coming back to burn him at the next general election.

While I’m here, I’ve got a new book coming out in the autumn entitled The Patient. It’s about a woman who goes into the hospital to give birth to her child, being two weeks overdue….and ends up staying in the hospital for a year, still pregnant the whole time. If you want to find out more, here’s where you can have a better look.

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