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People

- Just Stop Oil’s Morgan Trowland: ‘This is more important than our individual lives’

- On the font lines

- How Jacqueline Alnes escaped fruitarianism

- The tech CEO who stepped down at 29

People

Just Stop Oil’s Morgan Trowland: ‘This is more important than our individual lives’

Last year, Trowland and his fellow activist Marcus Decker scaled the Dartford Crossing to protest climate complacency. Now, from prison, he says it was worth it

By Miles Ellingham   December 6, 2023

Image: John Watson

Morgan Trowland never expected to be imprisoned for this long. He’d meticulously prepared for the events of 17th October 2022 alongside fellow activist Marcus Decker, tracing out each step at the local park. When the day of the protest came, the pair scaled the Queen Elizabeth II bridge without incident, unfurling their orange “JUST STOP OIL” banner, rigging hammocks and causing gridlock when the police closed the Dartford Crossing below. Everything went to plan… everything except the jail sentence.

Trowland and Decker, sentenced to over two-and-a-half years each, have now spent roughly 400 days behind bars. “The UK legal system can be very erratic,” Trowland tells me, his voice distorted through the prison telephone. “It tries to be very cool and even handed when policing protest, then suddenly it loses its shit.” Trowland’s solicitor described the jail terms as “the longest ever handed down in a case of non-violent protest in this country in modern times.” Even the UN criticised the sentences for being overly severe. Rishi Sunak responded, calling the sentencing “entirely right” for “selfish protesters intent on causing misery”.

Prison has taught Trowland a lot. He’s learned how “people are cut off and made useless… with no avenue to give anything back to society.” As he turned off the lights one evening in London’s Pentonville, his cellmate—an alcoholic, former bank robber in his late fifties—muttered, “Don’t worry if there’s some claret in the morning… I’ll have bled out by then.” He stayed up all night counselling his cellmate, potentially saving the man’s life. Trowland has since been moved to a category C prison, Highpoint, in Suffolk, where he can pursue gardening and philosophy courses.

Between horticulture, disappointing vegan meals and occasional exercise, Trowland, 40, has read 70 books this year—and it shows. Over the course of our interview, he references John Milton, Charles Eisenstein, David Graeber, Victor Hugo and Percy Shelley. Take a look at Trowland’s X account, and you’ll see a catalogue of handwritten notes and poems: “began talking to Coleridge…” starts day 337. You’ll also see a lengthy correspondence with a ghost from a distant, anarchist, utopian future. Trowland tells me the ghost is baffled by the concept of prison, despite ongoing explanations.

The “emotional weight of rendering the rest of the world uninhabitable” first hit Trowland on a motorway bridge in Wellington, in Somerset. It was 2007 and he was returning from a viewing of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Then came “15 years of stewing psychological discomfort”, during which Trowland worked as an engineer in Canada, India and the UK, eventually becoming involved with Just Stop Oil’s progenitor, Extinction Rebellion, in the late 2010s.

Trowland has read 70 books this year—and it shows

At first, Trowland had reservations about Just Stop Oil’s disruptive tactics of blocking roads and motorways but became convinced when he saw how many people were—however furiously—being engaged by the issue. After watching a clip of a female protester being aggressively nudged by a Range Rover, he decided he had to take action. “You could see that she just went calm, she knew what was happening and was ready to die. That’s how serious this is.”

Just Stop Oil is unpopular: a 2023 poll by the University of Bristol showed that 68 per cent of people disapprove of the group. The government isn’t listening to them either. Only a few months ago, Sunak announced a major U-turn, watering down key green commitments. Trowland will soon be eligible for early release and I’m eager to know how he reflects on the success of the protest. Was it worth it?

“It’s had a big effect on so many people: thousands of people have written to me… You have to demonstrate via actions that this is really serious and more important than our individual lives. I had an opportunity to demonstrate that as best I could, and I couldn’t look back and live with myself knowing I had that opportunity and turned it down.” When the hour mark comes, the line goes dead. A quick, “it’s done, I’m done” is all he can manage, then silence.

Miles Ellingham is a freelance journalist

People

On the font lines

Calligrapher and designer Sahar Afshar describes her push to bring Arabic typefaces to the mainstream

By Danielle Han   December 6, 2023

Image: Sahar Afshar

“Type doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s part of a continuum.” Sahar Afshar sits across from me in a café on Gipsy Hill in south London, one hand holding her still-steaming chai latte and the other on her belly. In broad strokes, Afshar makes typefaces. In detail, she’s a London-based calligrapher, graphic designer, Arabic typographer and print historian (and 36 weeks pregnant).

When I ask which of her skills came first, she has to think about it. “It’s very chicken and egg.” She realised she had a knack for type while studying graphic design at the University of Tehran in Iran. Working with text was a big part of her studies, “and I would often find that when I was trying to do my project, I wasn’t able to find something that suited the tone and field I was trying to achieve. So I just started drawing my own.”

Afshar is leading the push to diversify the world of typography. You’d think that with globalisation we could expect better representation with, at the very least, our world lexicon, she argues. But the lack of development in Arabic typeface is stark. At airport arrival gates, a spread of welcome signs in different languages greets you—and the Arabic is often backwards and disconnected. “It’s not very welcoming.”

“It’s very much market-driven,” Afshar says of the problem, with a demand for “more Latin fonts than regional styles of Arabic.” She typically works with clients who request from her a bundle of Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic fonts. But Arabic typography is not a monolith and variations of the script are used in several languages. And instead of asking for type specific to Gulf countries, or ones with an Urdu flair that might work in Pakistan, clients will ask for an all-encompassing font with a “neutral tone that covers the needs of all these languages and specificities.”

These regional types aren’t wholly unobtainable; recovering them could be a matter of consulting the past. Compared to Latin, Afshar says, “there’s not a long history of painting with moveable type, digital type and so forth. But Arabic has a rich, old, rudimentary history of calligraphy ranging from North Africa to China… there’s a lot of rich history to draw on.”

Another part of the issue, she tells me, is a lack of access. Afshar says she would love to work with a typeface inspired by Nastaliq—a traditional calligraphic style “very particular to Iran”. Problem is, the font she wants to buy and download, Mirza, is not up for sale: sanctions make it impossible to buy Iranian products, including fonts. And because Arabic is not Latin, designing Arabic type for digital use requires a different skillset from what many western typesetters are used to. “In Latin, you always have vertical strokes being the heaviest and then anything horizontal is a bit lighter. In Arabic, it’s the opposite.” Plus, unlike Latin typefaces, which use the same baseline for each letter, Arabic characters use a “cascading baseline”—going lower and lower as the word progresses.

This issue can be propelled into relevance, Afshar says, simply by talking about the history behind it. She, among other designers and scholars, are working to research and talk more about the history of type, and highlight the practices from China, Iran, Mexico and elsewhere. Some countries are more difficult to represent than others. Printing was introduced to India by accident in 1556 by Jesuit missionaries. This meant that, for a long time, its printing technologies “didn’t suit the needs of the country or its writing systems—at all.”

Afshar and I talk about diaspora and identity. There’s this concept of social imaginaries that she subscribes to—how, even if members of a society never meet, what connects them is a social image. “You can’t grow up in Iran without seeing Nastaliq everywhere, it’s the language of poetry. And when you see something like that a lot, you’re exposed to it and it becomes your cultural heritage, your language.” She wraps her hands around her chai. “I don’t know if it’s nostalgia, but maybe something a bit deeper. Subconsciously, you relate to that form of letters.” She’s drawn lines, connected the dots—surely, the world will soon too.

Danielle Han is social media journalist at Prospect

People

How Jacqueline Alnes escaped fruitarianism

In 2013, Alnes was eating only raw fruits and vegetables in an attempt to cure illness. A decade later, she’s reflecting on how she was lured in

By Liz Connor   December 6, 2023

Image: John Watson

At the height of her desperate search for a cure, Jacqueline Alnes survived on a handful of raw fruits and vegetables each day. In 2013, she was “lured in” by a fruitarian movement called “30 Bananas a Day”. Its many thousands of followers claimed that eating a mono-diet of the potassium-rich fruit could miraculously heal chronic health issues such as depression, addiction and cancer.

“Some were peaceful, care-about-the-earth types who were drawn to the extreme of eating 30 bananas a day because it was environmentally friendly and cruelty-free,” Alnes tells me over Zoom from her Pennsylvania home. “But many were women in their teens or early twenties who had struggled with disordered eating. Like me, they were at very vulnerable stages of their lives.” Alnes, a journalist, has now authored a tell-all book about her fruitarian experience called The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour.

Alnes’s family moved every two years during her childhood—which was “difficult, as an introvert.” While living in Indonesia, she fell in love with running. “In my village, there were these family 5K runs… I’d take part with my brother; we were obsessed with Lord of The Rings, so we’d pretend we were running away from the orcs.” In her freshman year of college in the US, she was picked as a Division One runner, but her season was cut short by inexplicable neurological symptoms. “There’s a culture in athletic programs that you just ‘push through’ the pain.” Fainting episodes intensified, though, leaving her wheelchair-bound and unable to walk or speak.

Alnes was admitted to an epilepsy centre, but doctors couldn’t explain her symptoms. She turned to Google, and came across the 30 Bananas a Day website. “At first, I thought it was hilarious. The website had a very 1990s vibe to it—cartoon vegans lifting bananas with electronic music pumping in the background.” The testimonies piqued her curiosity. “I found people who had similar health issues to me—and they’d recovered by simply eating fruit! I clung on to the idea that if I could change what I was putting in my body, I could find a way to heal myself.”

The “30BAD” movement, also called “Banana Island”, started in Japan in 2008 but was popularised in the west by Leanne Ratcliffe and Harley Johnstone, two Australians who went by the monikers “Freelee the Banana Girl” and “Durianrider”. In the 2010s, the duo posted popular clickbait-style YouTube videos about how fruit had cured them.

This was a media landscape where being thin was everything

Alnes traces the concept of fruitarianism back to the 1800s, when it was linked to Christianity, but she believes social media reignited its appeal. “This was a time before body positivity, before we had the knowledge to debunk bogus health claims and the controls in place to recognise and ban pro-eating disorder content online,” says Alnes. “It was also a media landscape where being thin was everything.” It took her “five or six years” plus “lots of therapy” to untangle her disordered thoughts about food.

“For me, the end came in 2016, when Freelee and Durianrider started eating boiled potatoes,” she recalls. “They launched a new diet, called ‘RawTil4’, which said you could eat cooked food after 4pm.” The “strict guidelines” she’d “used to control her body” started to blur. “If the leaders of this restrictive community could eat at a mall food court, then what was stopping me from eating things that made me feel good?” The movement broke down the same year, as did the couple, whose split spiralled into accusations of domestic violence and competing legal claims.

Alnes believes that if fruitarianism has lost its mainstream appeal, it’s only been replaced by other restrictive forms of eating. “Right now, my Instagram Explore page is full of people following the carnivore diet [eating animal products only] and the raw milk diet [drinking unpasteurised milk directly from cows]… There will always be this sense that if you keep your body pure from evil things, you can somehow spare yourself from the many sad and distressing possibilities that might happen to your body. Rules give us the illusion that we have control.”

Liz Connor is a freelance features journalist who has been published in the Evening Standard, GQ, ELLE, the Independent, Metro and Business Insider. She writes mainly on the topics of health, wellness and sustainability

People

The tech CEO who stepped down at 29

Christian Owens on co-founding Paddle aged 18—and how Britain villainises success

By Josiah Gogarty   December 6, 2023

Image: Christian Owens

Christian Owens’s first office was not particularly evocative of Silicon Valley. “It felt like a hospital waiting area,” says the 29-year-old tech entrepreneur. “Like when you go into a council building, or a public library or something in a small town, and everything’s that very strange shade of blue, with fake pine everywhere.” We’re sitting in a meeting room at his current, slightly grander office: the London headquarters of Paddle, a firm he co-founded aged 18. Paddle handles online payments and legal compliance issues for thousands of software companies, including encrypted internet provider NordVPN and the popular game Geoguessr. A fundraising round last year valued the firm at more than £1bn, awarding it rare “unicorn” status—but in April, Owens stepped back as CEO, handing the title to the then COO Jimmy Fitzgerald, about two decades his senior.

Paddle began life in a room on an industrial estate at the edge of Corby, the Midlands town where Owens grew up. His dad worked at the local British American Tobacco factory; his mum was a secretary. He “didn’t do great in school”, he says, but taught himself to code aged 13 by reading an 800-page book on the subject. After going door to door in Corby making websites for local businesses, he moved into selling invoicing software, and his parents “begrudgingly” let him drop out of education at 16.

Owens’s co-founder, Harrison Rose, left Paddle just under two years ago, and now only advises it “around the edges.” After relinquishing CEO status, Owens named himself executive chairman—a role that “means whatever you want it to mean, in tech companies these days”, he says. For him, it was a case of clawing back the time he was spending on day-to-day operations to focus on long-term strategy and product development. He commutes into the office a few days a week from Bath, where he has a house with his girlfriend on a hill just outside the tourist-thronged centre.

“It’s a really lonely thing, building a company,” Owens says. He recalls going to business networking events in his early 20s where all the other attendees would be 50-somethings complaining about juggling children with work. What provided some much-needed community was becoming a Thiel fellow—a programme launched by PayPal founder and former Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel, which provides funding and networking opportunities to young entrepreneurs. “It’s not as mysterious as it sounds,” he says: events with fellow fellows involve work talk but also off-duty activities like hikes.

Spending time in the US showed him that people starting businesses there were “celebrated”, and failures weren’t stigmatised. In Britain, however, you become a “villain” once you reach a certain level of success. “We live in a society that encourages people to play it safe”, he says: bright kids study to go to good universities, then take safe jobs in big companies. With each of those steps, you “dig the hole a little bit deeper.”

Nevertheless, Owens is optimistic about London’s burgeoning tech scene. “We’re doing the right things to attract talent,” he says, and people are tempted over from Silicon Valley precisely because the city isn’t a monoculture. “You go to Silicon Valley or San Francisco, and everybody works in tech. You go to a gym or a yoga class or something, and everybody’s in tech.” The capital is “definitely in the top three, if not number two” of hubs for AI development, and the first place where many notable US companies, including Sequoia Capital and OpenAI, opened offices outside of Silicon Valley. Owens doesn’t rule out moving stateside himself—“the weather’s really nice” in California, for one thing—but is clear where his loyalties lie. “I really love London. And I love building a business in London.”

Josiah Gogarty is assistant editor at The Knowledge, an email news digest, and a freelance writer elsewhere

Columns

- What I’m teaching my students about AI

- Goblin mode is out. Monk mode is in

- Why the Rwanda policy was always likely to fail

- Is Israel waging a just war?

- Carol Vorderman’s diary: I’m counting down to Tory wipeout

AI

What I’m teaching my students about AI

The academy has been rocked by the rollout of powerful artificial intelligence that can write an essay in seconds. The key is knowing that students will use it—and trusting them to disclose it

By Ethan Zuckerman   December 6, 2023

Many fields will be transformed by AI. Education already has been, says Zuckerman. Illustration by Vincent Kilbride

The rise of powerful artificial intelligence systems, exemplified by ChatGPT, is threatening an upheaval in the world of work. Unlike previous generations of automation, in which assembly-line workers were replaced by robots, the jobs threatened by AI include white-collar roles: paralegals, bookkeepers, financial advisers and so on.

In many of these fields, the day-to-day effects of AI are in the future. But one field is in crisis right now: education. Within moments of the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, enterprising students found that the chatbot could be prompted to give plausible-sounding answers to exam questions and write impressive-looking essays. Many of my fellow professors freaked out. How can we evaluate our students’ performance if automated systems can instantly produce work that would receive top marks?

Some of my colleagues responded by instituting a blanket ban. Using ChatGPT to complete an assignment would be considered plagiarism, a cardinal sin in the academy. To enforce this rule, they turned to AI detectors, which use statistical patterns to identify texts produced by machines. These are so unreliable that OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, pulled its own detection product due to inaccuracy. This hasn’t prevented other firms from advertising their own, similarly flawed tools to universities as safeguarding “academic integrity”.

Other professors have gotten more creative. I recently spoke to an academic who teaches machine learning, and who revamped his take-home exam to be unsolvable using ChatGPT. This required him to feed a slew of possible questions to the chatbot and select only those that it consistently got wrong. He reports that it took him five times as long as preparing a normal exam: “Next time, I may go old school—pen-and-paper exams in a proctored exam room, no phones or computers.”

Before teaching an undergraduate class this semester I turned to my favourite pedagogical resource, the blog of Catherine Denial, a distinguished professor of American history. Denial writes insightfully about teaching from a position of kindness, helping academics understand what young people have been going through during Covid-19, explaining the importance of respecting students’ pronouns and pronouncing their names correctly, making the case for treating them as collaborators, not antagonists. Denial advised fellow educators that generative AI was sufficient enough of a shift that it should be a point of discussion with students—not just about what AIs can and cannot do, but about the industry’s privacy standards and labour practices. I designed my class policies on AI around the idea that it should be a topic for discussion and around Denial’s injunction, “Do not default to distrust.”

Students who learn how to use AI will have an advantage over those who choose not to become cyborgs

The core of the instructions to my students this semester: you’re welcome to use AI, but be warned that contemporary AIs perform some tasks better than others. However, you must disclose whether you used AI, preferably sharing your prompts and inputs. I hadn’t realised it, but this set up a natural experiment. Two-thirds of the way through the semester, roughly 30 per cent of my students have disclosed their use of AI. Their work is not measurably better or worse than that of students who have not disclosed use of AI, which isn’t all that surprising. A new study from a team of business school professors working with Boston Consulting Group found that AI had a levelling effect on many tasks, with the bottom performers significantly enhancing their output, and top performers improving only a little.

I encouraged students to use AI to polish their writing, to help them rewrite awkward sentences or shorten sections. AIs like the original Grammarly program have been on the market for more than a decade, before the generative AI revolution that has seen programs create original texts on their own, and have been a boon for people who are not native speakers of the language of instruction. I’m teaching about media and democracy, not English grammar, so if an AI removes barriers that prevent students from sharing their thinking, I’m all for it.

I’ve also encouraged experimentation with ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner. Most of my assignments require students to explain a problem in our contemporary public sphere and describe a solution—when stuck for an idea, you might ask ChatGPT for several possible solutions and develop one in detail. I’m unsurprised that fewer students have used AI for this than for polishing writing. In my experience, generative AIs give competent but uninspiring answers to such questions. The surprising and exciting ideas I’ve read in papers this semester appear to have come from the students themselves, something I’ve verified by spending much more time talking with them in my office hours than I was able to during the pandemic.

There’s a critical use I warned my students away from: generating whole paragraphs of text. The reason is simple. As I’ve written about in this column before, ChatGPT generates plausible-sounding text but hallucinates details, including academic references. In other words, if you ask a generative AI to write about Walter Lippmann’s theory of the “restless searchlight” and to include academic references, you may get footnotes that look believable but reference articles that don’t exist. When grading papers, I follow all unfamiliar references, which means an imaginary reference would send me down a rabbit hole searching for a book that ChatGPT invented. Fortunately, my students took this advice to heart and I’ve not encountered imaginary references in their writing.

In talking about AI with my students, they expressed concerns about becoming too dependent on technology. “I learned to drive with a GPS,” one explained to me. “I can’t navigate my hometown the way my mother does, from landmarks and memory.” It’s possible that students will end up similarly dependent on assistive AI… and yet, I have no strong desire to return to navigation based on paper maps.

In some fields, students who learn how to use AI productively will likely have an advantage over those who choose not to become cyborgs. The machine learning professor who’s considering pen-and-paper exams told me that he encourages his research assistants—graduate students who are helping him write code for his research—to use generative AI as a “co-pilot”, helping automate the tedious parts of programming. These students are vastly more productive than those writing code entirely by hand, he notes, but only because they have good coding skills to start with and can detect when their AI co-pilot makes errors. The problem is that the AI co-pilots can ace most assignments for an introductory programming course, meaning that we might not be able to train competent programmers in the first place, as beginners will be able to avoid the frustrating and challenging work of learning to code that is a necessary part of developing expertise.

I am less worried about students gaming the system than I am about losing their trust. My students were most concerned about being falsely accused of using AI, particularly from professors using detectors. Several of them reported receiving failing grades in other classes for using AI on assignments they insisted were completed manually. That’s plausible—a popular AI detector labels the US Constitution as “almost certainly written by AI”. I advise my students to write in a text editor like Google Docs, which can maintain snapshots of a document as it is written, showing that it was not cut and pasted from AI.

But more importantly, I am serving on my university’s task force on generative AI, making the case that not only should we discourage the use of AI detectors but that we should approach teaching from a stance of kindness rather than distrust. In the next few years, virtually every profession will need to figure out what it means to use AI ethically and effectively. Our job is preparing students for work in the new world that we’re figuring out together, not penalising them for the fact that our methods of academic evaluation need to change.

Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's a veteran of the early dotcom industry and was part of the founding team of Tripod.com, one of the internet's first user-generated content sites. He is the author of Mistrust (2020) and, with Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media (2021)

Language

Goblin mode is out. Monk mode is in

2022 was the year of unapologetically base behaviour. In 2023 we have compensated—some of us a little too hard

By Sarah Ogilvie   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Andy Smith

As one year ends and another begins, I will be activating “monk mode”, meaning I’ll be unplugging from all devices and focusing on a single task: in this case, relaxation and recovery from a busy year. My mode will be less zen master and more the lazy friar put in charge of the cellar.

Monk mode originally referred to focusing on a single task with unrivalled concentration for a short period of time. The term was popularised by Jim Collins, an American self-help and management guru, who used it to describe his disciplined approach to getting things done. As he explained to the FT in 2017, his road to success lay in adopting a strict regime similar to that found in monastic communities: “It is not uncommon for me to go through a cycle where [it’s] bed at 10 at night, sleep until maybe two, up, work two till breakfast, nap, then another chunk of time, followed by an afternoon workout, another nap, evening session before dinner, little bit of relaxation, work session before dinner, bed at 10, up at two, repeat.”

The recent vogue for monk mode is a reaction against the 2022 fad of “goblin mode”, a type of socially unacceptable behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent and slovenly—think embracing your inner slob, lying lazily on the sofa, doomscrolling, bingeing on Netflix and ice cream. Goblin mode thrived during lockdown and was great for big tech as it kept us chained to our devices. The term was chosen as word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries in 2022.

It makes sense that our return to the office in 2023 had everyone swapping goblin mode for monk mode as we scrambled to rediscover self-discipline, adopting “productivity hacks” as social media calls them. A recent “monk mode challenge” on TikTok encouraged participants to go cold turkey on alcohol, online porn and sugary foods. You’ll notice however that turning off our devices has been cleverly dropped as a productivity hack—and that’s exactly how social media companies want it. They employ hundreds of behavioural scientists to capture our attention and trick us into spending more time on their platforms.

Finding ways of keeping devices part of the monk-mode solution, rather than the problem, is now big business. In gaming, monk mode is a slower, often less violent, version of a game. Startups have developed apps such as Rescue Time, Cold Turkey, Forest and Freedom that offer a service for blocking distracting websites, tracking offline activity and providing groovy graphs of your device usage—so you can use your devices without guilt.

Personally, though, I’ll be rescuing my time by switching off my devices completely, eating leftover turkey, walking in the forest and feeling the freedom return to my being. Whether you’ll be channelling your inner monk or goblin these holidays, happy new year!

Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist, lexicographer and computer scientist based at Oxford

Law

Why the Rwanda policy was always likely to fail

Last month’s landmark Supreme Court judgment highlighted deficiencies in the asylum scheme that should have been obvious to any serious government from the start

By David Allen Green   December 6, 2023

A slogan without substance? David Allen Green writes that the Rwanda plan was flawed from the outset. Image: PA/Alamy

Once upon a time there was a policy that never made sense as a practical measure, even on its own terms. This was the proposal by the government of the United Kingdom to “remove” asylum seekers to Rwanda for their applications to be processed and, if granted asylum, to remain there. The policy was loudly promoted by ministers. In essence, it was a play performed for certain media and political audiences for their claps and cheers.

But despite this media and political reaction, it was a policy with flaws. One was that the proposal was muddled, another was that it lacked an evidence base. And in November yet another flaw became stark, when the Supreme Court held that the scheme was inherently unlawful. The judgment of the highest court of the land was emphatic and unanimous. Few policies can ever have failed so comprehensively.

At the core of this policy are confused aims. On one hand, the explicit and avowed intention of the ministers promoting it is to deter asylum seekers from using small boats to cross the English Channel. The home secretary who introduced the measure, Priti Patel, said the government was confident the policy represented the best chance of producing this effect. Such a deterrent, she insisted, would break the lethal business model of the criminal gangs running the crossings.

But for any deterrent to be effective, there must be the real prospect of a substantially worse outcome for those targeted. And here is where the policy contradicts itself. For under both domestic and international law, an asylum seeker can only be removed to a third country if there is actually no disadvantage to the asylum seeker. In other words: the “deterrent” can only be lawfully implemented if there is nothing in practice that amounts to a deterrent effect.

Then there is the lack of concrete evidence that the policy would actually work. Civil servants at the Home Office, who are not known for their woke naivety, warned Patel that the evidence of a deterrent effect was “highly uncertain” and not sufficient to justify adoption of the policy. Patel overruled these concerns, issuing a rare formal ministerial direction to push the proposal forward.

The hard work of establishing an appropriate legal framework for the scheme was never even attempted by ministers. The relationship with Rwanda was set out only in a “memorandum of understanding” (MoU), but this MoU expressly had no legal effect and contained nothing to guarantee, in law, the rights of those being removed. The document was so flimsy that it may as well have not existed. Only a formal agreement in a robust instrument would carry the weight of what was required. The government had enough time to negotiate such a treaty and lay it before parliament, but it chose not to do so. (Even when a House of Lords committee report confirmed these issues in late 2022, the government chose to ignore the problem.)

Ministers continued to promote a policy that did not make sense even to the sponsoring department

So ministers continued to promote a policy that did not make sense even to the sponsoring department and which had no visible legal means of support. Prime ministers and home secretaries came and went, but it was maintained that the Rwanda removals scheme would be the solution to the small boats problem.

The policy in practice was even more inept. In June 2022, a plane was to take the first asylum seekers to Rwanda. A Boeing 767 was chartered for half a million pounds. But by a variety of legal challenges in a number of different courts—not just the European Court of Human Rights—the plane was emptied of those to be removed until there was none left. The aircraft then just flew back to Spain. And still, at the time of writing—late 2023—no asylum seeker has been taken to Rwanda, although the policy has dominated the news.

Unsurprisingly, the policy was placed under continual legal challenge. The High Court initially held that, in the round, it was capable of being lawful. But the judges also imposed conditions on individual cases that would be difficult for a resource-starved Home Office to meet. Yes, a removal could take place, but there would be strict procedural safeguards. The Court of Appeal then went one step further, with the majority holding that the policy itself was not capable of being lawful. The government appealed to the Supreme Court.

There was reason to think that the Supreme Court would side with the government. Under its current president, Lord Reed, the court has a reputation for being deferent to the executive and legislature on policy issues. Like the High Court judges and the Lord Chief Justice who dissented at the Court of Appeal, it was not hard to conceive of the court holding that it was entirely a matter for the home secretary to assess the suitability of Rwanda. If ministers were going to win on a “policy” case, it was going to be at the Supreme Court of Lord Reed.

But instead the government lost. The Supreme Court justices, in a single judgment co-authored by Lord Reed himself, and having regard to copious and uncontroverted evidence provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), were persuaded that the detailed failures of Rwanda’s asylum system meant the rights of individuals could not be properly safeguarded.

In particular, the court had regard to the legal principle of non-refoulement, which means that an asylum seeker should not be returned to their country of origin without their application being properly considered. The UNHCR had provided compelling evidence that there was such a risk. The court was also concerned about the documented lack of human rights protections in Rwanda. Against this evidence, the government had nothing in response but the non-binding MoU.

The justices were careful not to base their judgment on the European Convention on Human Rights, but on other international law such as the UN Refugee Convention, as well as domestic law. Indeed, the court expressly said that it had not decided the ECHR point. This wrong-footed the politicians and pundits who sought to use the defeat in their calls to leave the Convention. The judgment was plain: the Supreme Court would have held the policy to be unlawful even if the United Kingdom was not a signatory to the ECHR and the Human Rights Act never existed.

The court also, significantly, mentioned in passing that the principle of non-refoulement is part of what is called “customary international law”. This is the international counterpart of the common law, and so is not set out in any codified instrument or treaty. In other words: it is a law that the UK cannot simply legislate out of existence. This places the government in a tricky situation if it wants to use an Act of Parliament to circumvent the ruling.

The justices, however, also said that the structural changes and capacity-building needed in Rwanda to eliminate the risk of refoulement may be delivered in the future. The judgment was not an absolute prohibition on the policy for all time. Once it can be shown that the individuals are not at risk of being wrongly returned to their countries of origin, the policy may be implemented.

Here the Supreme Court was simply showing the deficiencies of the policy that would have been obvious to any sensible minister from the beginning. The removals policy had to respect the rights of the individuals concerned, and that required shared standards and firm legal structures. But investing in such improvements would require taking the policy seriously—and the government did not.

The final court decision was not inevitable: the judges could still have said it was for the home secretary and not the court to have the final say on whether Rwanda was a safe third country. But that veil of deference would not have made the policy coherent and workable, just established that it was not within the court’s remit to reverse. The policy would still have been expensive and subject to onerous procedural safeguards. Few, if any, individuals would have been removed to Rwanda and, if the asserted deterrent effect did not work, the boats would have continued. This was an immense policy failure, even had it been held to be lawful.

But this proposal was never about sound and lawful policymaking. It was about politics and the media, regardless of law and policy. The scheme provides an index of just how far the government has departed from actually having policies that work and which stand up to sustained legal challenge. Ministers and their supporters may have wanted to create a narrative, but the real story is in how they failed.

Yet such is the perceived political appeal of the Rwanda scheme that the policy may somehow be resurrected before the next general election. Mere legal defeat may not halt this irrationality. That the scheme does not add up, has no evidence in its favour and is anyway unlawful will not stop the push for the Rwanda flights to take place, for this is not about practical policy. The Rwanda scheme is now a totem.

David Allen Green is a writer and lawyer from Birmingham

Philosophy

Is Israel waging a just war?

It is almost impossible to apply abstract moral principles to the horrific situation on the ground. But we have to try

By Sasha Mudd   December 6, 2023

The rubble of the Yassin Mosque. Is Israel’s action in Gaza in accordance with "just war" principles? Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

Amid the maelstrom of outrage and despair unleashed by the war in the Middle East, there has been tremendous global pressure to call out the greater evil and take a side. Arguments about whether the horrifying toll on Palestinian civilians is proportionate to Israel’s legitimate goal of self-defence spark outrage—many find the very question inhumane. How can the mass killing of innocents possibly be justified?

This question points to a central tenet of pacifism: that there can be no justification for the killing of non-combatants. Because war unavoidably involves such killing, many pacifists argue that war is morally unacceptable in all cases, even when waged with restraint in self-defence, or to avert a greater evil. From this perspective, there can be no moral debate about civilian death in Gaza. The killing and destruction on both sides must end.

The problem with this pacifist stance, though, is that no matter how right it may sound in the abstract, when something truly existential is at stake—for example, a people’s right to safety and self-determination in their homeland—we sometimes think it is legitimate, even morally necessary, to fight for the cause.

Enter “just war” theory. Contrary to pacifism, this theory accepts the legitimacy of war in some cases and insists that war can be waged in more or less morally acceptable ways and for more or less morally acceptable reasons.

Once we concede this much, then difficult debates about the permissibility of the aims and methods involved in specific wars become not just tolerable, but necessary. This will include gut-wrenching judgements about exactly how much “collateral damage” may be acceptable or proportionate in a given context. How does just war theory go about determining these things?

Drawing heavily on Thomas Aquinas’s master work, the Summa Theologiae, as well as Greco-Roman sources, proponents of just war theory offer several familiar criteria, many of which are codified in the Geneva conventions or elsewhere in international humanitarian law. To wit: war must be waged by a legitimate authority, as a tool of last resort and in the service of a just cause. It must be motivated by a “right intention”, such as establishing a just peace, and it must have a high probability of success. War must not cause harm disproportionate to the amount of good it is expected to bring about and civilians must never be treated as targets, nor disproportionately harmed by the fighting. These principles are taken to bind all parties categorically, regardless of whether the other side acknowledges or respects them.

Israel was subject to unconscionable atrocities on 7th October, and believes the safety of its people, as well as its national survival, to be at stake. But while self-defence is certainly a just cause, its war aimed at Hamas’s destruction has drawn moral outrage by appearing to run afoul of other just war principles, particularly the proportionality of harm to civilians.

Just war theory seeks to extend morality into the most brutal, abysmal corners of human life

Arguments about ceasefires often appeal to these principles, but the issue is inevitably contentious and complex. This is because applying just war principles is hard, especially when there is radical asymmetry between combatants, and jointly fulfilling all or most of these principles might not be possible. For instance, whether Israel can provide its citizens with the defence to which they are morally entitled without causing disproportionate death and suffering to civilians in Gaza is a question with no obvious answer. That Israel’s historical actions may have helped create the tragic situation in which it finds itself does not make the moral dilemma any less genuine.

Despite the difficulties involved in applying just war principles and in getting warring parties to live up to them, this intellectual tradition takes on the vital task of extending morality into the most brutal, abysmal corners of human life, rather than ceding that territory to our animality. When the other side are perceived as savages who show no restraint, it is easy to believe they are owed no restraint in return. The bloody free-for-all that follows from this logic is the ultimate abasement of our humanity and makes no one safer in the long run. Just war theory stands against such a prospect by insisting that nothing licenses the waging of war without restraint.

The horror of war and the slaughter of innocents can lead us to throw up our hands and cry out for a maximalist, pacifist solution. But embracing just war theory does not have to mean rejecting the pacifist’s dream of peace. Instead, it can empower us to advocate for the lesser evil in cases where, tragically, peace remains elusive.

Write to Sasha

Each month Sasha Mudd will offer a philosophical view on current events.

Email editorial@prospectmagazine.co.uk with  your suggested topics, including “Philosopher-at-large” in the subject line

Sasha Mudd is Prospect’s philosopher-at-large. She is an assistant professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and visiting professor at the University of Southampton

Politics

Carol Vorderman’s diary: I’m counting down to Tory wipeout

The TV presenter and author says tactical voting will make the next election a bonfire of Conservative vanities

By Carol Vorderman   December 6, 2023

The 1997 Labour landslide was the first time I had ever heard the term “tactical voting”. It was, effectively, pre-internet. It was certainly pre-social media. I know that in the next election, tactical voting will be the third party in the room, and it will be driven online. This time around, tactical voting will wipe out the Conservative party and I can’t wait to be a part of it.

Even now, 23 per cent of voters say that they will use tactical voting to rid themselves of as many Tory MPs as possible—that’s 23 per cent of people willing to put their own first choice aside because they are so desperate to give this government the boot. No wonder the current polling is already so dire for the Tories. No wonder, as one news site reported this week, “the Tories are shitting themselves”. There seem to be endless versions of that word nowadays.

♦♦♦

Let’s go back to early May. The weekend before the local elections, I came across a new tactical voting website called www.stopthetories.vote. All you had to do was punch in your postcode and the website did the rest. Depending on your ward, up popped recommendations for Lib Dems, Labour, Greens or for an occasional Independent. As someone who intensely juggles numbers in my head just to make myself smile (it always makes me smile), I contacted them to ask how many people had used the website so far. And this is where it got interesting.

On the Monday before the local elections, around 10,000 people had typed in their postcode. Then my followers and I started tweeting. Three days later, by the morning of the election day, half a million people had typed in their postcode. Boom.

I was proud to help the Conservatives lose 1,063 council seats in May, around a third of their initial total.

Stopthetories.vote is run by volunteers. I’m now one of them. We all want some form of proportional representation in order to reform our inadequate democracy which favours just two parties, and the bunch of uncaring charlatans who hold power right now.

Back at our little organisation, we have tens of thousands of volunteers and a system ready to go live. We have more voters signed up for our newsletters than almost all political parties have members.

♦♦♦

Back to numbers. Let’s say that there are around 50m adults age 18 and older who are registered to vote. Twenty-three per cent have already said that they are prepared to vote tactically against the Tories. Twenty-three per cent of 50m (I’m keeping to rounded numbers here to give an overview) would give us 11-12m voters who will hold their nose and vote Labour, Lib Dem, Green, Plaid Cymru or SNP, even though they would rather not, if it will keep the Tories from gaining a single seat.

Right now, the general polls say that Labour is anywhere from 17 to 24 points ahead of the Conservatives, indicating a landslide to Labour. But still, if these polls are to be believed, the Tories could still have over 150 seats. Far too many.

We can do to the Tory party what it has done to this country, and utterly dismantle it. Marvellous

Much polling doesn’t take tactical voting into sufficient account. With this we can do to the Tory party what it has done to this country, and utterly dismantle it. Down to 70 MPs or fewer. Marvellous.

The evening of the general election will be the bonfire of their vanities.

The autumn statement was Rishi “seven bins” Sunak’s last attempt at wooing voters before the election. You know the Tory story. Let’s gaslight the voters some more and tell them these are the “biggest tax cuts since the 1980s” and if the Daily Mail says so, then they’ll believe it. Excuse me while I cough… a lot.

The old techniques of papers telling voters a lie, and them believing it, are mostly now gone. It’s over, boys (and girls). We’ve had enough of the “batshit” bullshit, to echo our home secretary’s verbiage. Everything Tories say now is considered dubious, except to the establishment minority. Look at the opinion polls.

♦♦♦

In the past, all we had as news sources were the newspapers and mainstream broadcasters. Now, according to the latest Ofcom report, broadcast news remains king, while online news comes in second, and newspapers way down.

The Guardian leads newspaper brands online, with 16 per cent of adults saying it is their source of news. It’s a clear reminder that we no longer need to rely on the establishment newspapers anymore. It’s also markedly different in age groups. Most under forties get their news online. When you get down to the under twenty-fives, forget mainstream. I, for one, love it.

And if all of the above is known, why then do the endless “press reviews” on television show only the front pages of newspapers (please don’t say because the facts have been checked as they patently have not), but don’t include anything of what has been trending online?

I hope a canny TV news editor will soon start to include where we actually get our news from. Now that “news review” I would watch.

Carol Vorderman has been a television host for 41 years. A bestselling author and philanthropist, she left the BBC after refusing to accept its new social media rules

Regulars

- Steve Bell’s Christmas carol

- Stephen Collins: The rest is extinction

- The Generalist: January/February 2024

Politics

Steve Bell’s Christmas carol

By Steve Bell   December 6, 2023

Click here to view Steve Bell’s Christmas Carol cartoon

Steve Bell is a cartoonist

Cartoons

Stephen Collins: The rest is extinction

By Stephen Collins   December 6, 2023

Stephen Collins is an illustrator and cartoonist. He is the author of "The Gigantic Beard that was Evil" (Jonathan Cape)

Crossword

The Generalist: January/February 2024

December 6, 2023

Lives

- Sex Life: I ask my client “can you come four times in an hour?“

- Mindful life: Why I love cycling with a group of middle aged men

- Farming life: A perfect storm

- Clerical life: Giving a same-sex blessing was the ultimate joy

- Young life: What my bedroom says about me

- Sheila Hancock: “I don’t care if I’m cancelled. Death will do that soon anyway”

- Sporting life: The nourishing nature of cricket

Lives

Sex Life: I ask my client “can you come four times in an hour?“

Understandably, clients want to make the most of their time with me, and don't provide aftercare. I crave human connection after performing, whether in sex work or giving literary talks

By Tilly Lawless   December 6, 2023

Clients are often reluctant to spend much time with sex workers, perhaps distrustful of people who trade in curated intimate experiences, and not wanting to be “taken for a ride”. Because of this, they often try to fit an inconceivable number of things into a booking (“I want to try this, this and this all in the space of an hour”). Sometimes a client will ask me if my service can include him orgasming three times in 60 minutes. “I don’t know, can you come three times in an hour?” I ask, to remind him that often it is our own body’s capabilities that hold us back from achieving our fantasies, not the other person’s desirability.

When clients book a BDSM-type session, they don’t factor in time for aftercare. If they pay for three hours in which they will tie me and another girl up and call us slaves while using sex toys on us, they want to milk every minute of that. They either don’t want to pay extra to chat afterwards or have to rush back to their work or their families. Over time I’ve learnt, through experience, about “sub drop”—the low that can follow when you’ve made yourself physically and emotionally vulnerable to someone. I’ve had to learn to self soothe after particularly exhausting sessions; to go home, have a bath, smoke a joint, watch a movie. These are things that are meant to be done alongside the person who has consensually humiliated or dominated you, but I have to do them solo. To be frank, it’s better than the alternative of lingering with a client who isn’t paying me—that certainly wouldn’t make me feel any better.

After being a submissive, sometimes all I crave is a hug

A few months ago, I was interviewed at a literary festival. While on paper it went well—the audience responded with applause, I answered the questions in a way I was content with—I was left feeling morose. What was it that dissatisfied me? It wasn’t until I called a friend and started to speak about it that I realised I was feeling the same way I do after an intense booking. I needed some sort of aftercare; I wanted to feel embraced and enveloped by the audience, just as after being a submissive, sometimes all I crave is a hug. I had exposed myself to a crowd by speaking about things that were difficult, and it felt similar to the times, in sex work, when I have done things that are sometimes not easy, while pretending to feel at ease and confident. And, unlike speaking engagements I’ve had in the past, because I was in a foreign city, I had no readers and followers coming up to chat to me afterwards, or friends to kick on from the event with.

This made me contemplate the two modes of work, and the exposure that different kinds of performances demand generally. Recently, I rewatched Etta James’s live performance of “I’d Rather Go Blind” at Montreux in 1975. At the height of both her heroin addiction and her truly incomprehensible singing powers, her face dripped with sweat. I couldn’t help thinking about how hard the comedown must have been from the high of that performance, and why it is that performers often chase that high afterwards, in other ways, and what it must feel like to step back into a subdued hotel room after giving so much of yourself on stage. Whenever I have made a spectacle of myself, whether through speaking about my book or through roleplaying with a client, afterwards I always desire a moment of connection outside the realm of performance. I wonder if that is common to all performances.

Tilly Lawless is a queer, Sydney-based full-service sex worker who uses her Instagram @tilly_lawless to speak about her personal experiences within the sex industry

Lives

Mindful life: Why I love cycling with a group of middle aged men

My dad's off-road biking friends are the epitome of non-toxic masculinity. Being immersed in their group is good for my mental health

By Sarah Collins   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

Last month it was my dad’s birthday, and to celebrate I joined him for his weekly ritual: a Saturday morning off-road bike ride with a group of other male cyclists, all between the ages of 40 and 80. (Trevor, who rides an electric bike, celebrated his own birthday recently, becoming the first octogenarian in the club.) The group meets at the Bonded Warehouse, a 19th-century redbrick building that sits proudly on the Stourbridge canal, at the early-for-a-Saturday start time of 9.30am.

There was some mild bickering between my father, Mike, and I about who was going to make us late—a debate that was settled on our arrival by fellow-cyclist Ian, who confirmed that my dad usually turns up at around 9.45am and I had, in fact, made him early. Ian is a familiar face, as I had done the off-road ride several times before, usually when back home for an OCD bootcamp. This is a regime of eating well, sleeping properly and completing mindfulness exercises that, when I’m struggling, I force my long-suffering parents to supervise.

The birthday ride had inauspicious beginnings, as I was recovering from having broken my wrist just six weeks before, and my mother waved us off with a stern: “Mike, do not let her fall off that bike.” Of course, I dramatically fell off my bike within five minutes, when crossing a bridge over the canal and turning a corner. Thankfully my knee, rather than my fragile wrist, took the hit. I considered going back home, my confidence not only in my wrist but in myself wavering, as my physical injury had coincided with an OCD relapse from which I was only in the baby-steps of recovering. But with the gentle encouragement of Ian, Gary and the rest of the group I got back on the saddle and continued down the trails.

Being immersed in a group from an entirely different demographic to your own is soothing

The bike ride is a staple of my bootcamp because I have noticed that its mental health benefits extend beyond the simple effects of the exercise and the scenery (which is, in my humble opinion, underrated—the West Midlands boasts a stunning canal network and rolling hills). Being immersed in a group of people from an entirely different demographic to your own is soothing and mindful in a way that a coffee and a gossip, or a big night out or even a bike ride with friends your own age could never be.

The cycling group’s conversations are of a different register to my friends’: they embody a gentle, non-toxic masculinity. Every conversation has an undercurrent of teasing, and the focus is very much on practical developments: who has a new bike or new car, and who has completed what DIY? Not a single compliment is exchanged for the duration of the ride—except to me: I am given helpful tips and genuine praise when I complete a tough hill or get through a patch of mud.

But the deep care that is clearly shared among the group is demonstrated in more subtle ways: Ian regularly brings my dad vegetables from his allotment; one cyclist takes a slice of Bakewell tart from the café where we stop halfway round to the house of another man who couldn’t make it that morning. More personal concerns and thoughts are exchanged; they are just delivered and received in a more matter-of-fact way than the confessional tone my friends and I use. One particularly skilled cyclist, who singlehandedly coached me through a sandstone gully, shares his worries about his son who has autism and receives empathy and validation from the group.

I leave the ride feeling thoroughly refreshed, and less lost about what my future holds. Being around people from all walks of life who have been there, done that, survived their twenties and are having a great laugh is deeply reassuring.

I wonder whether this is what community is meant to be. In the digital age, we are constantly, algorithmically, pushed towards people who are similar to us in age, in views, in socioeconomic background. On social media we are steered into echo chambers of others who think like us. Normally, that’s the world I live in. But sometimes it’s helpful to step away from the shared angst of your own demographic and be a fish out of water. It’s a privilege, for me, to share mornings with my dad’s cycling friends

Sarah Collins is Assistant Editor at Prospect

Lives

Farming life: A perfect storm

Agnes, Babet, Ciaran and Debi have recently revealed the fragility of farm life

By Tom Martin   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

What do Agnes, Babet, Ciaran and Debi have in common?

Well, they’re all names that I will not be giving my children. Or my dog, for that matter. They’re names that are not welcome in my household, and yet they’ve made their intrusive presence known in recent weeks. They are, of course, the increasingly unusual names given by the weather forecasters to the storms that have battered our coastline, ravaged our towns and drowned my fields.

Each struck worst in different parts of the UK, generously doling out misery to Northern Ireland and Wales (Debi and Agnes); southern England (Ciaran); and the east of England and poor Scotland (Babet), the last of which was nearly sunk.

It was Babet that our farm fell victim to—on Friday 20th October we saw 65.8mm (2.6 inches) of rain, with nearly 12mm (or just under half an inch!) falling in one hour. The roads were flooded, ditches were full and the sheep were distinctly unimpressed. As was I. I was worried that recently sown fields would be wastelands, and that any planned planting would be cancelled until spring. That month was one of the stormiest Octobers on record in the UK, and the three days of Storm Babet, from the 18th to 21st October, were the wettest three days in a row in England and Wales since 1891.

On the farm, we’ve been working to improve our soils in recent years, making them more resilient to extreme weather. We’ve been reducing our tillage to improve soil structure, and growing unharvested “cover crops” through the winter to hold up water and retain goodness. Interestingly, gardeners employ similar techniques, calling it “green manure” as plants take up and hold nutrients through the winter and release them as they die off in the spring. We have left harvest straw residue on the surface of the field to protect the soil from heavy rainfall. These measures have definitely made a difference.

But despite this, the strongest defences and healthiest soils can be overrun by the sheer volume of water. During Storm Babet, some parts of Scotland received 150 to 200mm of rain and many areas to the east of Scotland recorded the highest-ever monthly rainfall figures for October. No precautions could defend against this level of rain—we saw videos of silage bales being washed out to sea, flood defences breached and sadly several lives lost.

The Met Office has announced the full roster of potential storm names for the 2023 to 2024 season

For farmers, however, the fallout has only just begun. Recently, in a group on social media, I saw respected farmers writing about crops lost, soils damaged, and their concerns for the impacts on the harvest next year. Potential knock-on effects on grain markets and straw availability could drive up on-shelf prices for food items from bread to beef.

What makes matters worse is that weather—despite being a favoured topic of conversation for those of us making a living from the land—is not the only pressure on farmers. In the last harvest year, the cost of fertiliser reached record highs after fuel prices spiked in part due to Putin’s war in Ukraine, but by the time harvest rolled around, grain prices were back down again. This means that farmers are approaching this winter with low cash reserves, or—more likely—very high overdrafts. In a recent conversation with an accountant, she told me of her grave concerns for where her farming clients will be financially by this time next year, when another year of higher input costs and lower market prices for our produce could put even more resilient farm businesses in danger.

You see, there’s a lot going on for farmers, and so a named storm serving up a few extra millimetres of rain might just be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. A recent survey on mental health in farming produced worrying results, as only 8 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men said they had good mental wellbeing, and farmers have a historically high suicide rate compared with other professions. We’re isolated, we’re stressed and we’re vulnerable.

The Met Office has announced the full roster of potential storm names for the 2023 to 2024 season, right through to “W” for Walid, which would be the name of the 23rd storm (please no!). So, if you hear Fergus, Gerrit, Henk or Isha named in the forecast in the coming weeks, spare a thought for us farmers, the 1 per cent of the nation battling the beastly weather to feed the 99 per cent. We appreciate your thanks, but, more than that, we need your support so we can still be here next year, stewarding soils and holding back floodwater from your homes. Just another service that we provide

Tom Martin has a mixed arable and sheep farm in East Anglia

Lives

Clerical life: Giving a same-sex blessing was the ultimate joy

God loves same-sex couples, and the Church of England should recognise it unequivocally

By Alice Goodman   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

God is not a human being that he should lie, or a mortal that he should change his mind. Has he promised, and will he not do it? Has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it? See, I received a command to bless; He has blessed and I cannot revoke it.

(Numbers 23:19-20)

Last March, I sat down with two of my parishioners to plan the service to bless their union. Their marriage, actually: they’d been married about four and a half years at that point. The General Synod of the Church of England had finally—after years of foot-dragging and stalling, kicking the can down the road and reflecting in small groups about questions of “Living in Love and Faith”—agreed to approve prayers to be used in churches to acknowledge the presence of God’s love in the relationships of people of the same sex. Gay Marriage Blessings, in other words, though one was warned not to use the words “marriage” or “blessing” in relation to the word “gay” unless there was a “no” or a “not” in the sentence. This, remember, is 10 years after the passing of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act of 2013 and 19 years after the Civil Partnerships Act of 2004.

By October we should be able to bless you, I said. “Make it towards the end of October, and we can have it on our fifth anniversary,” they replied. So they chose the music and readings, invited their friends and families, and began to plan the party. By this point, I’d read over the “Prayers of Love and Faith” that we were going to be allowed to use, and, frankly, I didn’t think much of them. They seemed half-hearted, pinched, meagre and principally concerned with reassuring everyone who was opposed to this couple’s marriage that the Church of England didn’t believe that they were actually married and devoutly hoped that they were not having sex. So I turned to the green book, Common Worship Pastoral Services, to the service of prayer and dedication after a civil marriage. Ah, yes, here we go. Cross out all the preliminary penitential material inserted into the service back in the year 2000, when the Church believed that people who get married at the registrar’s office must have something to repent, and go directly to page 177. “N and N, you have committed yourselves to each other in marriage, and your marriage is recognised by law.” Ah. Here we find the need to do a little more editing: “The Church of Christ understands marriage to be in the will of God the faithful union of two persons [not "a man and a woman"], for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer… etc, etc. Is that your understanding of the covenant and promise you have made?” Couple: “It is.” Then just change “your wife” and “your husband” to the names of the couple, and we’re set. We could go back to the marriage service for the prayers, glad to have #13, “For marriage as a sign to the world.”

On this day, it was as if the church was filled with light

The afternoon before the service, Friday 20th October 2023, a document was released by the House of Bishops: 108 pages, none of them cheerful reading. More work needed to be done. No blessings before 2025, anyway, it said. But, in my parish, the feast had been prepared. The church warden had chosen his tie. The bellringers were paid, and the orders of service were printed. The Parochial Church Council had given its unanimous approval more than three years ago for us to bless marriages like this.

After a lifetime of writing, I’m still ill-equipped to give an account of the joy that filled St Vigor’s at J and B’s blessing. I’ve never known anything like it. The church was full, but we’ve had big congregations before. On this day, it was as if the church was filled with light. The music was glorious. My sermon, though, veered off-piste. Even with the excellent readings they had chosen (Romans 8.28-39 and Matthew 5.15-16), I had to add another. Thinking of the bishops, and looking out at the congregation: young women in floral dungarees, one feeding her baby, a dozen or so other children squashed in the pews or playing in the north transept, elderly relations in rakish hats, young men in loud coats, a little red poodle in a rainbow collar, I began to retell the story of Balaam, who, I said, was hired to curse the people God loved, and eventually set out to do it, until his donkey—a she-donkey, by the way; important to get the pronouns right—stopped and wouldn’t move another step. How the donkey rebuked Balaam in good Biblical Hebrew, and how the angel, whom the donkey had been able to see, told him that if it weren’t for the donkey, he would have been struck dead. And then what the angel told Balaam to say, and how Balaam, to the consternation of those who had hired him, pronounced the full and unequivocal blessing that God gives those God loves.

Alice Goodman is a poet, librettist and Anglican priest in Cambridgeshire

Lives

Young life: What my bedroom says about me

My childhood bedroom has been turned into a guest room

By Alice Garnett   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

“Can we arrange a FaceTime soon?”—this unprompted text from my mother sent a jolt of fear through my very being. Naturally, my first thought was oh God, who died? We’ve already lost our cat, Stanley—a chunky orange legend we’d had since I was 12. I scanned my brain for breadcrumbs of information that could lead me to a deceased or unwell relative.

As it turns out, she merely wanted to get my blessing on turning my childhood bedroom into a “guest room”. The relief coursing through me was enough to make me agree immediately. She proceeded to gut my room of all the novelty fairy lights and trinkets that never made it to university with me.

As soon as my childhood belongings were stashed safely away in a storage unit, I was swept into a depressive episode that forced me out of London. Like a sickly Victorian woman, I retreated to the countryside, where I could safely languish until the storm passed. My hometown sleepily awaited my arrival, ensconced as it is within the rolling hills of the Peak District.

I found my bedroom (or “the” bedroom—for it no longer belongs to me) transformed, grown-up-ified. A few childhood relics still haunt the space; my bedraggled and beloved teddies sit forlornly on the shelf, Blu Tack marks linger stubbornly on the white walls…

The bed now sits in the middle of the room. There’s something inherently grown-up about a centralised bed. It takes up vastly more space this way and implies that this room is for sleeping—it is not for hanging out, agonising over boys or hormonally spiralling. There’s no space for such juvenile activities.

My room is me; I am my room.

Meanwhile, my bed in London sits in the far corner, with a nightstand on just the one side (because there is only one of me). If guests do stay over, they have to settle for a lack of nightstand and must awkwardly clamber over me if they wish to use the bathroom in the night. The same, I’ve noticed, is true of most bedrooms of London residents in their twenties.

With the rental market and economy being what it is (shit), space is a rare commodity and house-sharing is the norm. Even out and about, your personal space is constantly invaded by jostling bodies—there is little in the way of respite. I’m lucky that I share my home with three of my closest friends; everyone does their bit when it comes to keeping our communal spaces tidy and we are a peaceable house. We share medicines as well as germs, and give one another fair warning before we take an extended shower in our single communal bathroom.

Regardless of how fond you are of your housemates, though, you likely still require your own space to retreat into whenever the outside world gets a little much. For me, my bedroom is my sanctuary. It is filled with books, bizarre charity-shop finds and other kitsch objects that reflect who I am as a person. I even have a hot-pink cast of my own tits hanging above the mantlepiece. Each time I tuck myself into my far-corner bed at night, I gaze adoringly at the shrine I’ve created around said anatomical sculpture.

My room is me; I am my room.

My room is such a personal space that I feel taking a partner into it for the first time a pretty big step. One guy I was dating last year was aghast when—after three dates—I took him home to meet my housemates (and my bedroom). He compared the space to a museum; a carefully curated and arranged array of objects set up to educate the viewer on a given subject. In this case, the subject is me.

Alice Garnett is a 23-year-old writer based in London

Lives

Sheila Hancock: “I don’t care if I’m cancelled. Death will do that soon anyway”

After being challenged by readers for complaining about politics, I have written my own road-map to a solution

By Sheila Hancock   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

Yesterday, waiting for the fishmonger to fillet my mackerel, I got into conversation with a half a dozen other customers in the shop. We shared memories of lockdown with disbelief that more than three years had passed since we shut ourselves away, washed our hands red-raw, wiped down deliveries with disinfectant, took nervous daily walks while not daring to sit on a bench next to anyone and watched through windows as confused old people died uncomforted. Someone asked, “do you think we would be so obedient now?” There was an immediate chorus of “no way”, “not bloody likely” and “what—obey this fuckin’ lot?”

We have been watching, open-mouthed, the behaviour of “this fuckin’ lot” revealed during the Covid inquiry. Most of us obeyed the rules, even though there were clues in the daily briefings that all was not well. We solemnly listened to the medical experts on either side of the dishevelled clown who was in charge of the country. We observed his impatience with diagrams and warnings, which he dismissed with roguish positivity in his fatal desire to be loved. Then there was Matt Hancock, our health minister, swearing he knew all the answers, when he didn’t even know there was a camera recording him groping his girlfriend’s bum.

I and my fish shop friends mulled over the series of failures since that time by a line-up of risible leaders and a Cabinet chosen to Get Brexit Done, and little else. And our constitution didn’t prevent a fanatical Svengali with a bald head, un-ironed shirt and bad eyesight from using his dim-witted Eton and Oxford-educated Trilby to attempt to totally change the structure of government.

Mind you, I am with Cummings there: change is imperative. We need people of wisdom and vision; leaders who treat us like grown-ups, facing the future with trepidation but also excitement; a government capable of implementing the huge changes needed to cope with AI, global warming, mass migration, worldwide unrest and the rise of populism.

On the occasions I have visited parliament, it feels like a run-down gentlemen’s club: lots of jokes, lots of showing how they all get on, lots of booze. These days, in the Commons chamber, there are often a few members sprawled on the benches, and some are even having a nice snooze. Occasionally they will deign to attend and have a braying session at Prime Minister’s Questions, but the place seems to have lost its purpose.

Okay, let’s close it down, get rid of the existing House of Commons and have members meet in a less confrontational, circular chamber. No more aggressive swords-length separation, no more playground shouting and barracking. No mobiles. No reading out prepared speeches or watching porn. It will be a space solely for listening to others, thrashing out the pros and cons of a problem. And no party whips, telling MPs what to say and banning disagreement. They won’t be necessary anyway, because—and this is my most important reform—there will be no more political parties, which drive MPs to make decisions for outdated ideological reasons.

In my plan each constituency will elect their MP by voting for people who are truly local. Candidates will seriously want to serve their country for a few years, in what must be a well-paid job. Maybe a doctor, dustman or teacher who knows the problems of their area and comes to the appointment with an open mind, a knowledge of world affairs and a desire for radical change. In my mad, idealistic scheme, they will campaign to be chosen from about four candidates with obligatory public meetings where the voters can listen to and challenge them, thereby helping them make their choice of representative.

Oh, and it will be compulsory for the electorate to attend at least one of these meetings to entitle them to their vote. (And I don’t care if I’m cancelled. Death will do that soon anyway.)

The House of Lords will be abolished and replaced by experts, elected by people that know them. For example, film, TV and theatre unions would choose a media representative; people working in the NHS will choose the representative of the medical profession. The same selection process will apply for scientists, carers, housewives, transport workers, etc etc, so that we have a second chamber vetting new laws, with a spokesperson in the ranks who has personal experience of what is being discussed.

The overriding rule for my new parliament will be the novelty of absolute honesty. One lie detected and they are fired—we are sick of lies. If MPs are not sure about something they will say so. And they will keep talking until they find a solution. Locked in if necessary.

And for God’s sake, let some women’s voices be heard. The Covid inquiry has revealed the incompetence of unleavened male power.

So, there it is. What was that word used during Covid? Oh yes, roadmap. This is my roadmap for a revolution. There are a few loose ends to tidy up but could it be worse than what we have now?

Sheila Hancock is an actor and writer

Lives

Sporting life: The nourishing nature of cricket

Cricket excites and bores—it rouses and calms

By Michael Brearley   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Clara Nicoll

As a captain and player, I believe that sport is storytelling, and that even a disinterested observer can find the tensions of narrative on the field. I am reminded of the Adelaide test of 1979, when we, England, had batted first and been dismissed for a modest score. By the second morning, we were on top, but Australia’s opening left-hander Graeme Wood was looking good. Off-spinner John Emburey and I discussed the importance of keeping Wood quiet, not letting him get going again with freedom. We could see he was champing at the bit. We knew he liked the sweep shot. We put our best fielder, Derek Randall, at deep-ish square leg—in an unusual position slightly in front of square and 15 or so yards in from the boundary. A single loose ball down the leg-side would have scuppered the plan, as we had minimal cover for a sweep played well behind square leg. In the event, Emburey’s persistence and accuracy worked. Trying to cut loose, Wood swept from off stump or just outside, top-edged the stroke, and was caught by Randall for 35. The plan was good, the execution perfect. The cat caught the mouse. The tussle was not only tactically and pragmatically satisfying, but also elegant.

For the spectator capable of disinterested attention, this engagement between batter and bowler (and captain), with its uncertain but urgent denouement, gives pleasure that goes beyond its practical contribution to tilting the game towards an ultimate result. It is of interest and value in itself, whatever follows.

German friends of mine, who have continued to be ignorant of and puzzled by cricket during their 30 years living in England, were visited by compatriots who asked to see an example of this peculiar pastime. The four found a green where a village game was taking place. They were all charmed by the rhythm of the activity. The slow repetitions with slight variations; the pulse of moments of activity with little and larger rests and pauses.

The white-clad figures, once described by British art critic Adrian Stokes as liable to be hard to distinguish from the air “from a scattering of cows”, represented for Stokes the browsing and feeding nature of this slow dance of white on green. He emphasises the nourishing nature of cricket, the feeling that alongside the aggression of the struggles, there are also echoes of the peaceful nature of the infant-mother feeding situation.

Australian painter Brett Whiteley, who had little or no liking for cricket, came to one of the first ever day-night internationals, between Australia and England in Sydney in 1979. He was intrigued by the beauty and drama of the ball-by-ball encroachment of fielders towards the batter, each movement climaxing in the bowler’s delivery. Brilliantly lit, in the darkness of the surrounding crowd, stands and sky, this pulse, regular as breathing, delighted him.

Cricket excites and bores. It rouses and calms. Organised, rule-based, umpire-surveyed games, as well as more informal ones on the park or maidan, offer participants and spectators satisfaction that goes beyond the momentary aesthetic pleasures, and far beyond the tribal jubilations and disappointments involved in winning and losing.

Aesthetic pleasure also merges with moral and psychological admiration. While we value people for their moral excellence, the integrity of their behaviour and actions, we also admire them for something that comes closer to grace or elegance of personality.

In his autobiography, novelist Graham Greene wrote the following about Herbert Read, another art critic. “He was the most gentle man I have ever known, but it was a gentleness which had been tested in the worst experiences [on the Western Front] of his generation… It was the same man who could come into a room full of people and you wouldn’t notice his coming—you noticed only that the whole atmosphere of a discussion had quietly altered… Complete honesty, born of complete experience, had entered the room and unobtrusively taken a chair.”

Such ease of personality is not merely a matter of good manners. It is an inherent, unwilled capacity to influence others toward a more open, more honest orientation. And it has aesthetic overtones. There are beautiful personalities as well as beautiful bowlers and batters.

I suspect that the great Garry Sobers, whose every movement was relaxed and flowing—he even walked beautifully—conveyed something of his personality in his cricket that went beyond the technical. Watching Sobers, we as spectators saw a person whose arrival on the scene, like that of Herbert Read, evoked calm, perhaps even wisdom. We witnessed Sobers’s natural poise and generosity.

Players need challenging opponents. Viv Richards owed something to Shane Warne, and Shane Warne had a debt to Viv Richards. Each stretched the other, within the aegis of the game. Each enhanced the other’s play. Each was immersed in the immediacy of the contest. The pleasure for them, for their teams and for the spectators, was closely related to the fascination of the battle between these two star-players. At every level, there can be similar duels.

The attitudes of such antagonists, such protagonists, approaches the sublime. And the sublime is a central feature of play itself. Dutch historian Johan Huizinga believed that the essence of play is epitomised by that of young animals. For them play is physical, enjoyable for its own sake with no ulterior motive. There are even “rules” restricting aggression; lion cubs nip each other, but don’t do actual harm. All this applies equally to young humans. Such qualities remain, in differing degrees, in human adults, both in game-playing and in life. This kind of involvement is playing for its own sake, not from any extraneous motive.

Huizinga thought such an attitude is easily contaminated, for example by an intense desire to win, or by being infected by the lure of monetary gain. But such simplicity of involvement, such sublime enjoyment in the thing itself, exists in sport and in other forms of life. And I can’t think of a better word for it than “aesthetic”.

Michael Brearley is a former England cricket captain and psychoanalyst

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Israel

All that remains

Israel has brought death and destruction to Gazans many times. But in retaliation for Hamas’s terrorist acts, it has raised the possibility of something much worse than before: ethnic cleansing

By Avi Shlaim   December 6, 2023

Palestinians in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, search through rubble for survivors of Israeli bombardments on Wednesday, 22nd November 2023 Credit: © Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

On 7th January 2009, while Operation Cast Lead was in full swing, I wrote an article in the Guardian. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”. This was Israel’s first major assault on the Gaza Strip after its unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Further major military offensives followed in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, not counting minor flare-ups and nearly 200 dead during the border protests in 2018 known as the March of Return. By my count, the current war is the sixth serious Israeli assault on Gaza since, and by far the most lethal and destructive. And it also raises the ominous spectre of a second Palestinian Nakba.

The only way to make sense of Israel’s cruel and self-defeating wars in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. From whatever perspective one chooses to view it, the establishment of the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. Three quarters of a million Palestinians became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. Israelis call it “The War of Independence”; Palestinians call it the Nakba, or the catastrophe. The most horrific event in the suffering-soaked history of the Jews was the Holocaust. In the history of the Palestinian people, the most traumatic event is the Nakba, which is not in fact a one-off event but the ongoing process of the dispossession and displacement of Palestinian people from their homeland that continues to this day, in the unspeakable horrors being visited by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on Gaza.

The United Kingdom was the original sponsor of the Jewish state, going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. But by 1948, the United States had replaced the UK as the principal backer. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state, although they themselves had enabled and empowered the Zionist takeover of Palestine. The conditions that gave rise to the Nakba were made in Britain. Yet no British government has ever accepted any responsibility for the loss and suffering it brought upon the people of Palestine.

In the period since 1948 the western powers, led by the US, have given Israel massive moral, economic and military support, as well as diplomatic protection. The US has used its veto power in the UN Security Council 46 times to defeat resolutions that were not to Israel’s liking. America also gives Israel around $3.8bn in military aid each year, with more this year to enable Israel to sustain its military offensive in Gaza. The trouble with American support for Israel is that it is not conditional on Israeli respect for Palestinian human rights or international law. As a result, Israel gets away, literally, with murder.

In August 2005, a Likud-led government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pull-out from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,500 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace. But in the year that followed, more than 12,000 settlers moved into the West Bank, consolidating Israeli control, and further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority, but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. This did not stop Israeli spokespersons from making the preposterous claim that by quitting they gave the Gazans a chance to turn the strip into the Singapore of the Middle East.

In December 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, in breach of a six-month ceasefire that Egypt had brokered. This was not a war in the usual sense of the word but a one-sided massacre. For 22 days, the IDF shot, shelled and bombed Hamas targets and at the same time rained death and destruction on the defenceless civilian population. In all 1,417 Gazans were killed, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 wounded. Eighty-three per cent of the casualties were civilians.

War crimes were investigated by an independent fact-finding mission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council and headed by Richard Goldstone, a distinguished South African judge who happened to be both a Jew and a Zionist. Goldstone and his team found that Hamas and the IDF had both committed violations of the laws of war. The IDF received much more severe strictures than Hamas, on account of the scale and seriousness of its violations. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups were found guilty of launching rocket and mortar attacks with the deliberate aim of harming Israeli civilians. The Goldstone team investigated 36 incidents involving the IDF. It found 11 incidents in which Israeli soldiers launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcomes (in only one cause was there a possible “justifiable military objective”); seven incidents where civilians were shot leaving their homes “waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so”; an attack, executed “directly and intentionally” on a hospital; numerous incidents where ambulances were prevented from attending to the severely injured; several attacks on civilian infrastructure with no military significance, such as flour mills, chicken farms, sewage works and water wells—all part of a campaign to deprive civilians of basic necessities. In the words of the report, much of this extensive damage was “not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

In conclusion, the 452-page report noted that while the Israeli government sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of the right to self-defence, “the Mission itself considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.”

Under the circumstances, the mission concluded that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.” Goldstone later published an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying that while Hamas had committed war crimes (its rockets were “purposefully and indiscriminately aimed at civilian targets”), “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel. The other three members of the fact-finding mission said that they stood by the conclusions, which were “made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility.”

Neither Israel nor Hamas was held to account nor made to pay any price for its war crimes. The Israelis resorted to a character assassination of the report’s author rather than engaging with any of its findings. Although it did not lead to any action, the Goldstone report offers a deep insight into the pattern of Israeli behaviour in Gaza in this and all subsequent operations. The absence of sanctions also explains why Israel was able to continue to act with utter impunity and, yet again, to get away literally with murder.

While committing war crimes, Israel claims to be exercising its inherent right to self-defence, and its western cheerleaders repeat this claim parrot-fashion. In this most recent and most devastating attack on Gaza, Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party, outdid even Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak by stating that Israel’s right to defend itself justified the denial of water, food and fuel to the civilian population. All three leaders persisted for eight weeks in their refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire, contenting themselves with feeble pleas to Israel for pauses in the fighting to allow humanitarian aid to reach the besieged civilian population.

Like most of its claims in this savage war, Israel’s claim that it is simply exercising its right of self-defence is baseless—or at least hotly disputed. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, has noted that under international law this right is only relevant in the case of an armed attack by one state against another state, or if the threat comes from outside. The attack by Hamas, however, was not by a state, nor did it come from outside. It came from an area for which, under international law, Israel is still the occupying power because after its withdrawal it continued to control access to Gaza by land, sea and air. Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies. In this case, therefore, the self-defence clause, Article 51 of the UN Charter, has no relevance. It is the people under occupation who have under international law the right to resist, including the right to armed resistance. And the Palestinian people are in a unique position: they are the only people living under military occupation who are expected to ensure the security of their occupier.

Taken together Israel’s attacks on Gaza reflect a profoundly militaristic outlook, a stubborn refusal to explore avenues for peaceful coexistence, habitual disregard for the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and utter callousness towards enemy civilians. Israeli generals talk about their recurrent military incursions into Gaza as “mowing the grass”. By this they mean weakening Hamas, degrading its military capability and impairing its capacity to govern. This dehumanising metaphor implies a task that must be performed regularly and mechanically and with no end. It also alludes to indiscriminate slaughter of civilians and inflicting the kind of damage on civilian infrastructure that takes several years to repair.

Under this grim rubric, there is no lasting political solution: the next war is always just a matter of time. “Mowing the grass” is a chilling metaphor but it provides another clue to the deeper purpose behind Israel’s steadfast shunning of diplomacy and repeated resort to brute military force on its southern border.

The current Israeli bombardment of Gaza is a response to the Hamas attack on Saturday 7th October, or Black Saturday. This was a game changer. In the past, Hamas has fired rockets on Israel or engaged with Israeli forces inside its territory. On 7th October, Hamas and the more radical group Islamic Jihad used bulldozers to break down the fence round Gaza and went on a killing spree in the neighbouring kibbutzim and settlements, murdering about 300 soldiers and massacring more than 800 civilians, 250 of whom were at a music festival. They also captured 240 hostages, including some military personnel. The brutal, murderous attack on civilians was a war crime, and it was rightly denounced as such by international political leaders.

Whether the Hamas attack was totally unprovoked, as Israel and its friends claim, is another matter. The attack did not happen in a vacuum. The backdrop was 56 years of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories—the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times. It constitutes daily violence against the residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and a daily violation of their basic human rights.

Hamas is not a terrorist organisation pure and simple, as Israel and its western allies keep insisting. It is a political party with a military wing whose attacks on civilians constitute terrorist acts. Indeed, Hamas is more than a political party with a military wing. It is a mass social movement, a prominent part of the fabric of Palestinian society which reflects its aspiration to freedom and independence. It is the failure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to achieve freedom and statehood that largely explains Hamas’s growing influence.

In 1993 the PLO signed the first Oslo Accord with Israel. Mutual recognition replaced mutual rejection. For the Palestinian national movement this was a historic compromise: it gave up its claim to 78 per cent of Palestine as it existed between 1920 and 1948 under the League of Nations Mandate, in the hope of gaining an independent state in the remaining 22 per cent, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with a capital city in east Jerusalem. But it was not to be. The Oslo Accord turned out to be not a pathway to independence but a trap.

Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies

Following the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, the hardline nationalist party Likud came back to power under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has spent the rest of his political career in a relentless and so far successful effort to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has never been a partner for peace with any Palestinian faction. His game is to play them off against one another in order to frustrate the Palestinian national struggle. “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” he told his Likud colleagues in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” By weakening and discrediting the moderates in the West Bank, Netanyahu inadvertently assisted the rise of Hamas.

The 1988 Hamas Charter is antisemitic, denies Israel’s right to exist and calls for a unitary Muslim state in the whole of historic Palestine, “from the river to the sea” as the slogan goes. But like the PLO before it, Hamas gradually moderated its political programme. Perhaps realising that the suicide bombings it carried out during the Second Intifada were both morally wrong and politically counter-productive, it opted for the parliamentary road to power. In January 2006, Hamas won an absolute majority in an all-Palestine election, in both Gaza and the West Bank, and proceeded to form a government. This was a more moderate, pragmatic government and it offered to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel for 20, 30 or 40 years. Although the Charter was not revised until 2017, in a long series of speeches Hamas leaders indicated that they would accept a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders.

Israel refused to recognise the democratically elected Hamas government and turned down its offer of negotiations. The US and EU followed Israel’s lead and joined it in measures of economic warfare designed to undermine it. The western powers claim to believe in democracy but evidently not when the Palestinian people vote for the “wrong” party. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, if the Israeli and western governments are dissatisfied with the Palestinian people, they should dissolve the people and elect another.

With Saudi help, the rival Palestinian factions managed to reconcile their differences. On 8th February 2007, Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement in Mecca to stop the clashes between their forces in Gaza and to form a government of national unity. They agreed to a system of power-sharing, with independents taking the key posts of foreign affairs, finance and the interior. And they declared their readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.

Angry at Hamas’s election win, Fatah gunmen and members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade stormed Palestinian parliament buildings in Ramallah, 28th January 2006

Israel did not like this government either and again refused to negotiate. Worse was to follow. Israel and the US secretly plotted with Fatah officials and Egyptian intelligence to undermine the national unity government. They hoped to reverse the results of the parliamentary election by encouraging Fatah to stage a coup to recapture power.

In 2008, a leak of memos from the Israel-Palestinian Authority negotiations showed that Israel and the US armed and trained the security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas with the aim of overthrowing the Hamas government. (Later, the “Palestine Papers”, a cache of 1,600 diplomatic documents leaked to Al Jazeera, would reveal more.) American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Hamas pre-empted a Fatah coup with a violent seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007. At this point the Palestinian national movement became fractured, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip.

Israel responded to the Hamas move by declaring the Gaza Strip a “hostile territory”. It also enacted a series of social, economic and military measures designed to isolate and undermine Hamas. By far the most significant of these measures was the imposition of a blockade. The stated purpose of the blockade was to stop the transfer of weapons and military equipment to Hamas, but it also restricted the flow of food, fuel and medical supplies to the civilian population. One American senator was outraged to discover that pasta was on the list of proscribed items. The boycott applied not only to imports but, perversely, also to some exports from Gaza. Why prevent the export of agricultural products, fish and other non-lethal goods? It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the hidden motive was to cripple Gaza’s economy and to inflict poverty, misery, and unemployment on its inhabitants.

In its non-military aspects, the blockade constituted a form of collective punishment that is clearly proscribed by international law. Given the scale of the suffering inflicted by the blockade on the inhabitants of the strip, if Israel were a person it could be considered guilty of “depraved indifference”, a concept in American law (its equivalent under English common law is “depraved heart”) that refers to conduct that is so wanton, so callous, so deficient in a moral sense of concern, so lacking in regard for the lives of others and so blameworthy as to warrant criminal liability.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza since 7th October may undoubtedly be described as “depraved indifference” on account of the indescribable suffering it is inflicting on civilians. While the main enemy is Hamas, Israel keeps targeting civilian infrastructure, residential buildings, schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and UNRWA food depots. By the end of November, the death toll has risen to more than 15,000 dead and more than 30,000 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. An estimated 6,150 of the dead are children and 4,000 are women. Slaughter of civilians on such an industrial scale may well have taken Israel to the verge of committing genocide, “the crime of all crimes”.

There is one other aspect of this campaign that was not present in previous ones: the danger of ethnic cleansing. In previous campaigns Israel brought death and destruction to the people of Gaza but kept them cooped up in the enclave, “generously” allowing them to stay in their homes. This time Israel ordered the residents of the northern part of Gaza, nearly half the total population, to move to the southern part of the enclave. Some of those who obeyed the order were subsequently killed in Israeli air strkes. At the time of writing more than 1.8m, out of a total of 2.3m, have been internally displaced. As the Israeli military offensive moved into southern Gaza, the refugees were ordered to move out of the area to which they had fled. This amounts to a forced transfer of civilians: a war crime.

The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe. Stretching the laws of war beyond credulity, Israel argues that civilians who disobey its orders and stay put in their homes in the north become legitimate military targets. In addition, Israel seems to be working on a plan to transfer people permanently from Gaza into northern Sinai. In a leaked document dated 13th October, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence drafted a proposal for the transfer of the entire population of Gaza to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptian government has expressed strong objection to the plan as well as its determination to keep the Rafah crossing firmly closed—apart from to allow some aid into Gaza during the ceasefire. But the combined pressures of the massive bombardment by the IDF and its medieval-style siege on Gaza may result in a human avalanche across the border. One thing is certain: any civilians who leave Gaza will not be allowed to return to their homes. More than half of the houses in Gaza have already been destroyed or damaged in indiscriminate Israeli bombing. So nearly half the population do not have homes to return to. No wonder that the bleak legacy of 1948 haunts the Palestinian community.

While the martyrdom of over two million innocent Palestinian civilians continues, despite the temporary ceasefire and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, a bigger question looms: who will run what remains of the Gaza Strip after the guns fall silent? Netanyahu has declared that he wants the IDF to keep indefinite security control of the strip but no one in Israel wants to assume all the responsibilities of an occupying power again. Meanwhile, his own grip on power at home is weakening. He faces strong popular opposition for his failure to prevent the horrendous Hamas attack and, more generally, for making Israel the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live. He is also embroiled in a corruption trial on charges—all of which he denies—including fraud, breaching public trust and accepting bribes. Politically speaking, he is a dead man walking. His days in power are numbered and there is a chance that he will end up in prison. But he is still the prime minister, and his clearly stated aim is to eradicate Hamas and to prevent it from returning to power ever again. So, who will govern the Gaza Strip after the Israeli army leaves?

This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population

Early signs suggest that the Americans and the EU’s foreign affairs chief, Josep Borrell, favour the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. This is a totally preposterous proposition. The problem is not Hamas—which did not exist until 1987—but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Moreover, the Hamas that committed the massacre of 7th October is far more extreme than the Hamas that won the 2006 elections and formed a national unity government. By blocking the path to peaceful political change, Israel and its western supporters are largely responsible for this regression to fundamentalist positions. Hamas may not be to their liking, but it still commands broad popular support. If an election were held today, Hamas would almost certainly beat its Fatah rival again.

And what about the sclerotic Fatah-led Palestinian Authority? It is docile, weak, corrupt and incompetent, and can barely govern the West Bank. It receives funding from the EU and to a lesser extent from the US, essentially to serve as a subcontractor for Israeli security in the area. It has shown itself to be utterly incapable of resisting the expansion of Israeli settlements, the escalation of settler violence, the slow but steady takeover of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the flagrant encroachment by fanatical religious Zionists on the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem. Fatah also lacks legitimacy because no parliamentary elections have been held since January 2006. It has stalled on holding another parliamentary election precisely because it realises that Hamas would win.

Leaving Gaza City: Palestinians flee northern Gaza for the south on 13th October, amid warnings of an Israeli ground invasion

The idea that this discredited Palestinian Authority can be imposed on the proud and long-suffering people of Gaza on the back of Israeli tanks is completely detached from reality. But it is mildly interesting, in as much as it exposes the moral and political bankruptcy of the people who espouse it. It is not for Israel or its imperialist backers to tell the people of Gaza who should govern them. If the events of the last few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is that the old narrative of Israel having a right and a duty to defend itself against a terrorist organisation, no matter the human, civilian cost, can no longer be sustained. What is happening in Gaza today is the cruel manifestation of Israeli state terrorism. Terrorism is the use of force against civilians for political ends. The cap fits and Israel must wear it. The Israeli politicians and generals who orchestrate the criminal assaults on the people of Gaza are no better than riffraff.

This ghastly war has also exposed the ruthless hypocrisy of the western leaders, their blatant double standards, their indifference to Palestinian rights and their complicity in Israel’s war crimes. Israel is an aggressive settler-colonial state and increasingly a Jewish-supremacist state intent on keeping the Palestinians in a permanent state of subordination. As long as Israel has western support, it will continue to act unilaterally, in violation of international law, in breach of a raft of UN resolutions and in defiance of the most basic norms of civilised international behaviour.

This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population. And there is absolutely no military solution to this conflict. Israel cannot have security without peace with its neighbours. A negotiated political compromise, as in Northern Ireland, is the only way forward. That settlement required external intervention, as does this one. Here, however, the US cannot serve as the sole broker because its pronounced bias in favour of Israel would make it a dishonest one. Ever since 1967, it has arrogated to itself a monopoly over the Israeli-Palestinian peace process but failed to put pressure on Israel to compromise. What is needed now is a new international coalition led by the UN which includes the US and EU but also Arab states and members of the global south. The priorities of such a coalition would be humanitarian relief, reconstruction and a long-term political plan that includes an independent Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank with a capital city in East Jerusalem.

Such a plan is eminently practical. All it would take to realise it is for Israel to shed its settler-colonial and Jewish-supremacist ambitions, for America to end its unconditional support for Israel, for the EU to morph from a payer to an active player, for the United Nations to overcome its self-imposed impotence, and a few similar trifles.

Correction: This article initially attributed the ironic suggestion that a government might dissolve the people and elect another to the German novelist Günther Grass. It was, in fact, made by the playwright Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution) following the 1953 East Berlin uprising.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at Oxford University. His books include "The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World" and "Lion of Jordan: King Hussein’s Life in War and Peace"

World

The World’s Top Thinkers 2024: ideas for a world on the brink

As a planet and a civilisation we are approaching tipping points—some frightening, others freeing—that will transform life as we know it. Here, we present our annual list of intellectuals—from priests and strategists to neuroscientists and historians—who will help us navigate the world in the year ahead

By Prospect Team   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Carlo Cardenas

Every year, Prospect puts together a list of Top Thinkers—a curated list of people who, through their ideas, are making an impact in the world right now—and asks you, the readers of this esteemed magazine, to vote for a winner.

This year the Prospect editorial team, together with some of our regular writers and contributors, have chosen 25 people whose work informs us about issues of critical global importance: climate, economics, freedom, geopolitics and technology.

In the climate category, nominees include experts on disinformation, policymaking, diplomacy and investing. One of the activists on the list marries hard-nosed protest with exuberance, empathy and a compelling case for joy.

In economics, our thinkers look beyond money and markets to address some of the biggest global trends and transformations. Among them are scholars whose work helps us understand inflation after the Ukraine War, tech’s impact on inequality, Westminster’s obsession with growth and the polarisation that could influence the outcome of the 2024 US election.

On the theme of freedom, our thinkers put forward contentious ideas: that the history of the British Empire is “morally mixed”; that the greatest threat from cancel culture isn’t to freedom of speech; that the left has much in common with the reactionary right; that liberals have paved the right’s way to power; and that homophobia in Uganda, where repressive legislation was passed in 2023, is a political tool used by self-interested politicians.

On geopolitics, our contributors suggested many worthy thinkers on China and US-China relations. Among these, we’ve highlighted a historian whose account of the influences on Chinese nationalism is essential to understanding Xi’s China, and a US government adviser who is challenging the widely held view in Washington that interactions with Beijing are a zero-sum game. Elsewhere, our thinkers include a historian who has made an enemy of billionaires, an academic who asks whether nuclear disarmament is possible and a strategist who is training Ukraine’s leaders to think creatively about how to win the war—and then rebuild.

Finally, in the world of technology, our nominees span everything from the risks and opportunities of AI to gene-editing, neuroscience and the possibility of a decentralised world wide web.

A disclaimer: this list is not exhaustive. There are many bright minds who haven’t been featured here—this time. But when you visit our website to vote for your Top Thinker, we hope you’ll take the time to let us know whose ideas, in your view, will change the world in 2024.

Profiles written by Sarah Collins, Alex Dean, Ellen Halliday, Peter Hoskin, Emily Lawford and David McAllister

World's Top Thinkers 2024 is sponsored by Higginson Strategy

Prospect Editorial Team

Politics

Is Kemi Badenoch a new kind of Tory?

Kemi Badenoch could be the next leader of the opposition. It’s a notoriously difficult job—and hers is a notoriously mutinous party. But she might just have the qualities to succeed

By Matthew d’Ancona   December 6, 2023

Badenoch: a subtler politician than her critics allow? Illustration by Tim McDonagh

On Tuesday 14th November, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, and Kemi Badenoch, secretary of state for business and trade, gave a press conference in Jacksonville on the new “memorandum of understanding” (a nonbinding cooperative agreement) reached between the UK and the Sunshine State.

Standing behind a lectern bearing the slogan “Strength Through Partnership”, Badenoch said how much she liked her host personally—“I found him very warm and engaging, and we had a lot in common”—and praised his dynamism in getting the deal done. DeSantis, for his part, alluded to their respective struggles as culture warriors, “making sure that our institutions and our society are governed by sound principles and not some of the outlandish ideology that we’re seeing.”

There was indeed a symbolism in this joint appearance: both DeSantis and Badenoch are deeply engaged, on their respective sides of the Atlantic, in the race to define the next iteration of post-2016 conservatism. Barring a huge upset in the presidential primaries, DeSantis’s campaign to be the Republican candidate in November 2024 looks headed for failure. His new British ally, on the other hand, is just getting started.

Too often caricatured as a predictable right-winger with boilerplate Daily Mail opinions, the 43-year-old Badenoch is a politician of greater subtlety than her (many) opponents allow. Yes, her base may be on the Brexiteer right of the party. But those who admire her include Conservatives of a very different ideological complexion—notably, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, who is both a likely rival as the one-nation candidate in a future leadership contest and, he told me, “a good friend”.

She also has supporters far beyond the Conservative stockade. In mid-2022, for example, Julie Bindel, the left-wing feminist author and activist, posted the following: “I would rather give Donald Trump a massage than vote Tory, but if you want to know who I’d back to be the next PM? @KemiBadenoch all the way. She has her head screwed on. Only real grown up in the room.”

Though the general election could be held as late as 28th January 2025, and Badenoch (like every cabinet minister) must remain publicly loyal to Rishi Sunak in the meantime, she (like every cabinet minister) is working on the assumption that the Conservatives will lose and that there will be a leadership contest shortly thereafter.

In July 2022, having resigned as equalities and local government minister over Boris Johnson’s mishandling of the Chris Pincher sexual misconduct scandal, Badenoch took Westminster by storm when she stood in the Conservative leadership race to succeed her former boss.

Everything about her campaign was audacious, cheerfully disruptive and magnetic to Westminster journalists who wanted a story more interesting than Sunak and Liz Truss arguing about tax cuts. Though she had been a minister for less than three years, and an MP for only five, Badenoch launched her campaign in a room festooned with posters and banners bearing the slogan: “Kemi for Prime Minister”.

It certainly helped that she had been backed by as senior a figure as Michael Gove, her former boss at the Levelling Up Department, recently sacked himself by Johnson for alleged disloyalty. “[W]e need someone with Kemi’s focus, intellect and no-bulls**t drive,” Gove wrote in the Sun. “As a Tory leader, she would be Sir Keir Starmer’s worst nightmare.”

Badenoch is a politician of greater subtlety than her opponents allow

In her recent book, The Plot, former culture secretary Nadine Dorries suggests that Gove, as a senior member of an alleged “movement” secretly manipulating the Conservative party from the shadows, had encouraged Badenoch to run only to split the vote on the right with Truss and “allow Rishi to come in down the middle.”

Sources close to Gove—now reinstalled as levelling-up secretary—dismiss this account. “This is bonkers, even by Nadine’s standards. Michael rated Kemi highly and saw her as the future of the party. He thought she should run, if only to put down a marker.”

Gove’s patronage, in any case, was not Badenoch’s only asset. “All the data was showing that Tory members absolutely loved her,” recalls one of her campaign team. “There was a real energy around, this sense of something new unexpectedly emerging from a government that had been around for 12 years. We never mentioned Obama—that would have looked madly conceited—but some MPs did. And we felt that if we could get past the parliamentary rounds, we had a good shot at winning with the members.”

It was not to be. Badenoch made it to the fourth round, securing the support of 59 MPs, and was knocked out. Truss went on to defeat Sunak in the final ballot—and, notoriously, served as prime minister for a grand total of 49 days.

This time, as Badenoch acknowledges to friends, will be different. No longer a newcomer, she has been a member of the cabinet since September 2022, initially as international trade secretary—a portfolio that was expanded by Sunak in February to embrace all business and trade policy, and minister for women and equalities since October 2022.

As a senior government member, she has had her share of scrapes. In May, Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker of the House of Commons, furiously denounced her for disclosing a change in government policy to the press before a minister announced it to the Commons (a controversial decision to abolish 600 EU-era laws by the end of the year rather than the 4,000 pledged). “Who do you think you’re speaking to, secretary of state?” Hoyle raged, after Badenoch apologised a little too archly for behaviour “not to your satisfaction”.

In June, she clashed with her fellow Conservative MP David Jones at a hearing of the Commons European Scrutiny Committee over the same issue. Badenoch, rapping her fingers on the desk, insisted that she had kept colleagues informed in private and that “it is not the bonfire of regulations. We are not arsonists. I am certainly not an arsonist.” The problem was that a “bonfire” of EU rules was precisely what many Brexiteers wanted.

In Number 10, there is irritation that Badenoch does not spend as much time schmoozing business leaders as they would like. In response, her allies deny this charge—and point out she has hardly been idle, securing in July the UK’s accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a trade pact with 11 nations including Japan, Canada and Australia.

However, if she stands again, she will no longer be the break-out star. As Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and author of many books on the Conservative party, puts it: “She’s now more of a known quantity and, despite the fact she’s recently focused on being able to say she’s helped the UK make the most of Brexit, her abrasiveness towards some of her fellow MPs and her reputation for not suffering fools gladly might be an issue.”

Badenoch concedes that “plain-speaking” has a political price. “I’m not necessarily sure it’s popular when you start governing,” she said at the Cato Institute in Washington DC in late 2022. “When you start telling the truth in government, and being very honest and plain-speaking, it’s not that fun for people who have to hear some of the hard truths.”

Badenoch is described as ‘soft right’—though, in this case, the softness is relative

One of her friends puts it more bluntly: “She does cross the road to have an argument with people. The body count is mounting up a bit.” Many drinks receptions and dinners for MPs will be needed to make new friends and reassure the bruised.

More to the point—assuming that the Conservatives lose the election and Sunak goes—she will be competing this time for the role of leader of the opposition rather than prime minister.

A thankless task at the best of times, the job will be especially difficult for Sunak’s successor, who will inherit a party that has been riven by factionalism, fury and multiple neuroses since the Brexit referendum of 2016. Badenoch has had to think hard about the potential impact upon her husband Hamish, now a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, whom she married in 2012, and their three young children. Even with her current responsibilities, she has little time for family life, more closely resembling Margaret Thatcher in her round-the-clock dedication to work than David Cameron, who famously believed in “chillaxing” at Chequers.

Badenoch has told allies that it is her “duty” to try to unite and rebuild the party. And she believes that no one else is as well-suited for what will be a truly formidable task. Already, Alex Morton, a research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and former adviser to David Cameron, is being mentioned as Badenoch’s prospective guru in the expected contest. She remains close to Lee Rowley, the recently appointed housing minister who ran her first campaign.

Her most dependable advantage remains her popularity with the party’s 170,000 or so members. In the regular surveys conducted by the Conservative Home website, she vies with home secretary James Cleverly for the top spot as most popular cabinet member.

According to the site’s editor, Paul Goodman, who is also a former Tory MP: “The surveys suggest she would have a good chance with the members if she could get through the parliamentary stage of any contest. That a black woman vigorously articulates their worldview is undoubtedly a plus for them—for some it may also seem to legitimise it.”

In this context, to speak of Badenoch’s “backstory” is crass, because her life experience has given much more to her than an appealing political showreel.

Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born to Nigerian parents in Wimbledon in January 1980, her mother having sought obstetric care in the UK. Her father was a doctor and her mother a professor of physiology. She grew up in Nigeria where, with Yoruba as her first language, she saw much that was to influence her political evolution.

With Nigeria in political chaos, she returned to the UK in 1996 to take A-levels at a further education college in Morden, flipping burgers at McDonald’s to pay her way. Her ascent was swift: having gained a masters in systems engineering at Sussex University, she obtained an LLB at Birkbeck, University of London.

Starting her career as a software engineer at Logica, she proceeded to positions at the Royal Bank of Scotland, Coutts and the Spectator, where she was digital director from 2015 to 2016. Though the centre-right magazine once edited by Johnson (and, for full disclosure, by me) has been a formidable force in Conservative government circles in the past decade, contemporaries do not remember Badenoch as conspicuously political in the workplace.

They could have been a duo like Thatcher and Keith Joseph: Badenoch and Gove have apparently drifted apart. Image: Tayfun Salci/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

Having achieved her initial ambition to join the London Assembly in 2015, she became MP for Saffron Walden in the snap general election two years later. “Growing up in Nigeria, I saw real poverty,” she said in her maiden Commons speech in July 2017. “I experienced it, including living without electricity and doing my homework by candlelight, because the state electricity board could not provide power, and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps.”

Her distaste for the authoritarianism she had witnessed in her youth led her not only to classical liberalism but a radical belief in the smaller state. And on this matter she left no room for doubt at her campaign launch in July 2022: “[We] can only deliver lower taxes if we stop pretending that the state [can] continue to do everything we are currently trying to do. We need to recognise that it’s not just a matter of doing the same with less.”

On Nick Robinson’s podcast Political Thinking in November 2020, she said that she could not “believe the way people talk about Margaret Thatcher in this country… She’s an icon and I love her”. She also cited American thinker Thomas Sowell and his conservative textbook Basic Economics (2000) as a key influence.

After her precocious run at the leadership, Truss was more or less obliged to promote Badenoch to the cabinet—though she vetoed Badenoch’s choices of culture or education in favour of international trade. Truss was apparently trying to limit her ability to enhance her reputation as a culture warrior. But truth to tell, that train had already left the station. Even before she became a minister, Badenoch had established herself as an incisive critic of “wokery” (a word she dislikes), of “critical race theory” (which explains racism entirely in terms of power relations) and of trans activism.

In her 2023 conference speech in Manchester, she declared that “I tell my children that this is the best country in the world to be black—because it’s a country that sees people, not labels. Conservatives want young people to be proud of their country when others want them to be ashamed… And if that puts us in conflict with those who would re-racialise society, who would put up the divisions that have been torn down—well, Conference, all I can say is: bring it on.”

This was catnip for the Tory faithful, and traumatising hate speech for the social justice left. For Badenoch herself, however, such rhetorical moments meant the most delicate of political calculations—involving Suella Braverman, the ferociously populist home secretary (who was finally sacked in November), and Badenoch’s principal rival for the support of the Tory right.

“There is always an element of triangulation,” says one supportive minister. “Kemi has to be right wing. But not too right wing. Suella talks about a ‘hurricane’ or an ‘invasion’ of immigrants, or an ‘existential challenge’ to the west. Kemi’s strategy has been always to avoid such language. Suella is essentially developing a British version of Trump’s Maga. Kemi doesn’t want that red baseball cap vibe at all.”

Hence, the events she does not attend are as significant as those she does. She steered well clear of the eye-wateringly right-wing National Conservatism Conference in May, where Braverman was the star turn. Badenoch also surprised many members of the global technocratic elite by turning up at the 2023 World Economic Forum in Davos.

Increasingly, her approach is described around Westminster as “soft right”—though, in this case, the softness is relative. She may not be as Trumpesque as Braverman, but she is still ready to countenance withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights and was a strong supporter of Sunak’s postponement of net-zero targets.

Most significant of all, perhaps, is the ending of her close alliance with Gove, who some MPs expected to play the role of Keith Joseph to Badenoch’s Thatcher. In November, the Times reported that Badenoch “has had a significant falling out with Michael Gove after he had an affair with an acquaintance of hers.”

But there was more to it than a row over a romance, I am told. “We’re not as close as we were,” she told one fellow Tory recently. “Michael said some silly things.” Meaning what? “This time will not be a trial run,” says another MP. “Kemi has started to think that Gove is too mercurial and sometimes toxic. Remember how he stabbed Boris in the back in 2016 at the last moment?” So: exit Gove, stage right.

As for Labour, the party takes Badenoch seriously. According to a senior member of the shadow cabinet: “She still has the aura of being a new kind of Tory and that’s always unsettling to face across the despatch box. Keir has seen off two Conservative leaders, and he’s planning on seeing off a third pretty soon. But of the available successors to Sunak, she’s one we have to keep an eye on.”

The Kemi Badenoch of today is certainly a more ruthless, wily and weathered figure than the smiling novice of 2022. She is in it to win it. “I’m not a difficult woman,” she said at the Tory conference, “but I do like doing difficult things.” And with that, it is hard to disagree: the political job she is now seeking may be the most difficult of the lot.

Matthew d’Ancona is an award-winning editor and columnist. His most recent book is ‘Identity, Ignorance, Innovation’ (Hodder & Stoughton)

Stage

Under the spell of the franchise

From Harry Potter to Stranger Things, adaptations of major franchises are lucrative for theatres. But do they push out original productions?

By Kate Maltby   December 6, 2023

© Jeffrey Blackler / Alamy

Cambridge Circus, the circular intersection in London’s West End, stands like a redbrick amphitheatre. In his spy novels John le Carré placed the headquarters for British intelligence just off “The Circus”, but nowadays the strongest cultural footprint is that of JK Rowling’s teenage wizard, whose name emblazons the frontage of the 1,400-capacity Palace -Theatre. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has been running at the Palace since July 2016; Potter souvenir franchises litter the surrounding shopping streets. Warner Bros, who own the film rights, have trademarks plastered over the building.

British theatre has always been partial to a blockbuster franchise. Hamlet owed its creation in part to the popular success of Thomas Kyd’s revenge-play The Spanish Tragedy, which itself spawned two prequels, The Spanish Comedy and The First Part of Hieronimo. Though it is likely a myth that Shakespeare churned out The Merry Wives of Windsor after Queen Elizabeth I declared Falstaff her favourite character in Henry IV and wanted to see him in love, the anecdote endures. Perhaps because a royal yen for franchise expansion remains relatable.

When I get in touch with Sonia Friedman, the super-producer who brought Harry Potter and the Cursed Child to London, she tells me that it’s not only popular culture which has taken to looking at old stories anew. “Just look at Lucas Hnath’s brilliant play A Doll’s House: Part Two, or even Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.” She’s got a point. Hnath’s sequel to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was nominated for multiple American awards before coming to London’s prestigious Donmar Warehouse last year; Stoppard’s spin on Hamlet remains the pinnacle of intellectualism in modern theatre.

The upcoming theatre year, however, looks dependent on an unprecedented level of existing intellectual property, with results of more varied quality. Most anticipated is the adaptation of cult TV show Stranger Things, opening on 14th December and which Friedman has also produced. Next June sees the arrival of Mean Girls: The Musical, already a success on Broadway. In between, you can catch Dirty Dancing, Pretty Woman, Moulin Rouge! or Sister Act, all of which feel like paint-by-numbers affairs.

TV comedies are in on the act, too, with Only Fools Or Horses currently on tour after a West End run. This summer saw runs of The SpongeBob Musical—as in, “SquarePants”—and Idiots Assemble: The Spitting Image Musical, a supposedly progressive piece of satire that depicted the entire female leadership of the Tory party as monstrous sexual manipulators. This was cheap stuff.

Though Spitting Image did have one strength in performance. As a TV satire, it was built on the appeal of Peter Fluck and Roger Law’s iconic puppets. Bringing those puppets to the stage allowed its creators to use an inherently theatrical vocabulary its audiences already knew. Other stories which built their success on the conventions of a nontheatrical genre have experienced more of struggle in their transition to the stage.

October saw the musical theatre opening of The Time Traveller’s Wife, a story first told as a novel by Audrey Niffenegger in 2003, then as a film directed by Robert Schwentke in 2009 and eventually as a TV series written by Steven Moffat in 2022. As Clare, an ordinary woman with the misfortune to fall in love with a man who keeps falling into other dimensions of time, Joanna Woodward is compelling—she thoroughly deserves her rising profile.

The novel’s success, however, owed much to its alternating first-person perspectives, as the story shifted between Clare and her time-travelling husband Henry. Try as the producers may —and try they have, bringing in big guns Joss Stone and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics to write the music—no one has found anything as formally interesting in the theatre adaptation.

In their screen versions, both Schwentke and Moffat were able to mark moments of time-travel by cutting adventurously between contrasting landscapes. By contrast in the stage version, Henry, played by a permanently bemused David Hunter, is simply flung about the stage by stagehands clad in ninja-black—it’s unclear whether we’re supposed to pretend we can’t see them. This is not a story that needed to be told again, in an ill-suited genre.

Yet sometimes the switch can work, and to unexpected effect. Many culture writers—myself inclued—were sceptical when it was announced that JK Rowling’s already over-extended franchise would be coming to theatre; in large part we were wrong. While developing Cursed Child, Friedman had two strokes of genius. The first was to hire director John Tiffany, who looked afresh at each of Rowling’s favourite magic spells and re-constructed them as sleights of theatrical illusion. The second was to understand that, to invest in a new story, we would have to meet a new generation of wizards: Cursed Child tells the story of Harry’s son, Albus, and his friends.

For Stranger Things, she’s almost replicated the formula. While instead of Tiffany the show will be directed by Stephen Daldry of Billy Elliot fame, the Cursed Child playwright Jack Thorne has penned the adaptation. As with Harry Potter, the focus of Thorne’s script will be one generation away from the characters with whom we’re already familiar. Stranger Things: The First Shadow takes us from the 1980s to the 1950s and to the teenage life of Joyce Maldonado, whose son Will is a protagonist in the TV series; it will also deal with the arrival of Henry Creel, whose fate defines the later franchise. Alongside Thorne is a credit for Stranger Things TV writer Kate Trefry—naturally, Netflix is all over this venture.

“At base, it all comes down to story,” says Friedman. The challenge of any intellectual property’s theatre experiment is to find a story within the same universe that can only be told on stage; of all the teams who can pull it off, Daldry and Thorne are as good as any. Thorne has a fondness for re-examining theatre’s icons: his play The Motive and The Cue, about John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s production of Hamlet, has also transferred to the West End, and responds in turn to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

But while existing franchises provide a readymade fanbase, they also come with an ultra-invested community of critics. The weaknesses of Cursed Child included convoluted time-travel sequences and new backstories that appeared to undermine the storylines established by the books; Stranger Things fans have already voiced fears that Henry Creel’s story, brought to a close in the fourth series of the show, risks being similarly destabilised.

But will those fans flock loyally to the Phoenix Theatre regardless? The souvenir shops are betting on it. At The House of Spells on Charing Cross Road you can find Stranger Things merchandise alongside your Harry Potter wands. The Cursed Child team are keen to point out that 70 per cent of their audience were first-time theatregoers in the show’s first year. If plays like Stranger Things are successful in drawing in a new generation of theatregoers, let’s hope there are still a few places left in London offering original productions for them to discover next.

Kate Maltby is chair of the UK Critics' Circle, Drama Section. She is Prospect’s theatre critic

Features

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- Vote for your World’s Top Thinker 2024

United States

America’s undoing

Triumphant at the end of the Cold War, the United States pledged to lead humanity in a new world order. Two conflicts—in Gaza and in Ukraine—have exposed that it has never been weaker

By Samuel Moyn   December 6, 2023

US meltdown: conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine have exposed the limits of US power. Credit: Sara Morris

The date of 7th October 2023 will go down in history as a turning point for the global role of the United States. The country’s promise both to defend and model democracy on the world stage has taken a huge hit, from which it is doubtful that it can recover. When the Ukraine War began in 2022, and the US responded with enormous military aid, the credibility of that promise had been briefly revived after the nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency. Now it is smashed once again, joining the rubble of Gaza’s streets.

The horrible day of hostage-taking and mass slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, by Hamas has provoked a nasty war in Gaza, with all eyes focused on the unprecedented human costs of the violence. But the day’s biggest ramifications go beyond the pitiable fate of a small and densely populated patch of land, and its 2.2m residents. The brutal incursion quickly put an end to the nostalgic revivalism about the US’s thoroughly quixotic pursuit of democracy globally, with incalculable consequences for the coming of a new world order.

It was only a year ago that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reanimated hopes for a restoration of an American-led globe. Transatlantic politicians and publicists spoke of a standoff between “democracy” and its enemies that demanded nothing less. America’s leadership, familiar from the Cold War and after, would need to take on a new form, transcending the glaring mistakes that had made it unpopular. But Ukraine’s plight vindicated the need for this leadership and implied the possibility that America could reform. A corrected US leadership was not just desirable; it was necessary. According to liberal journalist George Packer, it was nothing short of “the last best hope”.

Last false hope is more like it. Today, it is clearer than ever that the war in Ukraine is deadlocked. Bogged down by criticisms of mainstream foreign policy and wracked by its record of military quagmires, the US is no longer credible as the lynchpin of freedom and justice worldwide. Gaza has reinforced this conclusion without the carnage-filled wait that Ukraine involved; after Hamas acted, illusory yearnings for restored credibility for US leadership were shattered within days, not months or years. And worse will be to come, if America has put its own democracy on the line even as it has invested in another endless war.

Joe Biden ascended to the US presidency promising to save democracy from internal threats. Initially, his administration signed off unconditionally on Israel’s commencement of a ground invasion even though it was predicted to be as arduous and bloody as it has in fact become. In a televised address on the evening of 20th October, he ignored the growing dissent at home and abroad over both this and the failure of his Ukraine policy and instead took the opportunity to call for American restoration rather than regression on the world stage. He invoked “our responsibilities as a great nation,” and recalled the hopeful saying of his “friend Madeleine Albright” (the country’s late secretary of state) that the US is the “indispensable nation”. Biden placed Ukraine and Gaza in the same frame and insisted they offered another occasion for US superintendence.

The US is no longer credible as the lynchpin of freedom and justice worldwide

The president’s “response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 was to fuse the wars in Israel and Ukraine into a single struggle,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books. In both, Biden asserted, evil struck first and with no provocation. In both, he said, authoritarians hoped to “completely annihilate” democracy. In both, America was, through its allies and its own action, called upon to either defend freedom or it would die. It was not the petty interests of states but the legitimate expectations of all humanity that were on the line: “There are innocent people all over the world who hope because of us,” Biden sermonised, “who believe in a better life because of us, who are desperate not to be forgotten by us, and who are waiting for us.”

Biden’s analogy—which he repeated verbatim weeks into the imbroglio—is flawed. But the truth is that, separately and together, the two crises demonstrate the limits of America’s power. Both appear to accelerate the decline of its leadership, while putting its own democracy at risk. The world is desperate, but its victims should not wait on the US, which is so burdened by its mistakes past and present that it may not succeed in saving its own democracy from them.

American foreign policy has crashed hard since 1989, when it emerged from decades of domestic strife and military violence as the Cold War’s sole victor.

Hard on the heels of its victory, President George HW Bush, a Republican, announced a “new world order” that the US would lead, and from which humanity would benefit. And Bush’s success in turning back Iraqi aggression in Kuwait in the first Gulf War set up rapturous expectations of beneficent rule by one superpower. That war, a stirring victory compared to so many disasters before (and since), quieted old ghosts of military failure from the Cold War—Vietnam especially. In part through Bush’s restraint in allowing Iraqi forces to flee back across the border, and despot Saddam Hussein to remain in power, the events implied that millennial freedom under American auspices need not involve messianism or recklessness.

Bush’s promises of a new world order were made in 1990 in the most stirring of rhetoric. “There is no substitute for American leadership,” he explained. “In the face of tyranny, let no one doubt American credibility and reliability. Let no one doubt our staying power.” The country’s unilateral might would usher in “a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, east and west, north and south, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor.”

That pleasant illusion was wrecked by a series of harsh realities. It wasn’t just the Iraq War ordered by Bush’s son in 2003. Whether for the sake of saving civilians, as in the case of the Libyan regime change in 2011, or in the name of self-defence, as in the war on terror, now it was America’s thousand wars that raged. Only ever making the world worse off, they were eventually enough to help make Trump credible in 2016, and thus put the continuity of American democracy itself at risk. When Trump blindsided Democrats and Republican warmongers alike, who continued to preach the need for the US’s indispensable role amid the haze of one failed war after another, many could still take offence—but they were unceremoniously cast from the circle of power for four years.

Yet instead of prompting a reckoning with how endless war abroad had led to Trump’s unexpected victory, many openly treated Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 as providential. According to the New York Times, it provided the cadre of Beltway elites who were perturbed by the immediate past with “a new sense of mission”, and “re-energized Washington’s leadership role in the democratic world just months after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ended 20 years of conflict on a dismal note.”

Clearly, Putin’s act—which appeared to seek the atavistic goal of territorial conquest, to which the US and other western powers had not stooped since before the Second World War—was so outrageous as to require a response. And Russia’s brutality in the field provided a legitimate occasion for disgust and rage.

In Washington on 10th October, President Biden set out America’s position: “We’re—we’re with Israel. Let’s make no mistake.” Credit: © SHAWN THEW/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

But restorationist wishes were also coming true. The sunlit uplands of a just cause afforded new scenery after a dark period. Atlanticist elites could seek to turn the page, denouncing Russian aggression while memory-holing the west’s own with palpable relief. Old playbooks were dusted off. Diplomats were back in business organising resolutions and sanctions; big cheques were written for a good friend in the concert of democracies; military hardware was dispatched for battlefield use; experts in uniform travelled to advise; intelligence networks hummed. Overnight, the war restored the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to some purpose. Indeed, despite claims that Nato expansion precipitated the conflict, it led Finland to join and Sweden is on its own path too. Internationally, familiar rhetoric about democracy and freedom was recycled. America moved backwards from the ethical complications of its war on terror to a new Cold War and a familiar moral high ground.

During the opening months of the war in Ukraine, there was a hegemonic consensus around “western unity” in the face of Russian barbarity. Besides genuine horror at the aggression and brutality of Putin’s invasion, many politicians and publicists combined gloating about a pure new cause for leadership with palpable relief about putting the Trump era, with its attacks on Nato and its spotlight on fruitless wars, behind them.

But the euphoria that Putin was pushed back so quickly, in a heroic reversal of predictions of his lightning victory, could not conceal the risk of quagmire. If Russia could not be expelled beyond Ukraine’s sovereign borders before the invasion, let alone to its original ones violated when it annexed Crimea in 2014, some deal would have to be made. A few called for peace talks from the start, but were drowned out by censorious voices insisting that democracies could not capitulate to tyrants or appease a genocidal imperialist, even if the cost in blood and treasure would be steep.

Within short order, the Ukraine War became a war of position in the east, with Russia’s biggest territorial loss in May 2022, when the Kharkiv region was recaptured. Since then, the battle lines have only shifted microscopically, even after a ballyhooed “counteroffensive”.

The US has spent almost $80bn (including almost $50bn in military aid). Europeans have pitched in enthusiastically, as Germany abandoned any remnants of its pacifist legacy and Nordic countries their historic neutralism. They can claim a defensive victory in saving Ukrainian democracy—no doubt Ukraine would not have fought Russia to a standstill without American and other help. But that was true from the earliest weeks of the war. The funds and weapons have done nothing since to eject Putin back whence he came. And while the price has been enormous for Russia, in the order of more than 100,000 casualties and extraordinary amounts of materiel, Putin was also willing to pay it. A year later, it looks like the sceptics were proved right. “The breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom,” observed Lily Lynch in the New Statesman recently.

The most striking thing about the parallel American response 18 months later to Hamas’s incursion across the Gaza fence is that the credibility of America’s nostrums about democracy and its defence collapsed almost from the start, and much more visibly. This time, America could not rouse the world around its beleaguered policy and rhetoric.

It was not for a lack of trying. In the first days of horrified response to Hamas’s attack, Biden resembled no one more than George W Bush in his hard-line response to terrorism. Adversaries were “pure, unadulterated evil”, and there were no political solutions other than their destruction. Comparably, Hillary Clinton—never one to learn anything from her record of failed warmongering in Iraqi and Libyan regime change—went on television to repeat the same tired tropes about the “barbarity” and “savagery” of Hamas, as if 19th-century imperialism were a viable script for 21st-century politics. The cause of the free world of democracies apparently meant issuing Israel a blank cheque.

In this Manichean atmosphere, Bush himself was recorded as agreeing with the no-holds-barred response to terrorism in Israel—but the blowback illustrated that Biden was trying on Bush’s rhetoric for size at a moment when there was far less tolerance for it. “There’s at least some awareness of the perils of an emotional response to terrorism,” Michael Schaffer, a Politico journalist, commented. “Whether or not you think this sensitivity should drive policy, it may well be Bush’s singular, and inadvertent, political legacy in Washington.” Even before Israel’s bloody ground operation in Gaza began on 27th October, the opinion of many Americans and most of the world indicated that the blank cheque that Israel had already received might need some amendments.

The clearest reason for more immediate scepticism was the fraught morality of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, which made it tough for Biden to sustain the analogy between the Palestinians and the Russians. Far from being an oasis of freedom in a desert of tyranny, Israel has been trending antidemocratic in recent decades, under the stewardship of its hard-right coalition governed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Whatever one thinks of the democratic credentials that entitle Ukraine to external help, Israel just lived through a massive protest wave inspired by fears that Netanyahu’s coalition was giving up their democratic credentials.

More importantly, the undoubted turpitude of Hamas’s acts could not negate the colonial history that produced the Gazan situation. Hamas’s similarity to Putin pales beside the similarity of the subordination of the Palestinian people to the history of Russian imperialism that Putin fancies reviving. Within days, even former president Barack Obama, as the New York Times delicately put it, was “seemingly attempting to strike a balance between the killings on both sides” of the conflict. Who wasn’t, Obama disarmingly wondered, “complicit to some degree” in cycles of violence—a far cry from the consensus after 9/11 that the powerful in the world are innocent, acts against them inexplicable, and their own violence in response irreproachable.

Despite Xi and Biden meeting in San Francisco, Sino-US relations remain tense Credit: © Xinhua/Shutterstock

Even so, the realisation that simply siding with Israel would not work took an agonisingly long time for Biden and his senior staff.

This conflict has made graphic just how far the default of sympathy with Israel has been reset in recent years, especially among America’s youth. Indeed, in recognition of profound shifts in the liberal and left American opinion, catching up to longstanding global support for the Palestinian national cause, Biden and his staff soon communicated to Israel that its room for manoeuvre might not last indefinitely. “Some of the president’s close advisers believe that there are only weeks, not months, until rebuffing the pressure on the US government to publicly call for a ceasefire becomes untenable,” CNN reported in early November.

Within days of 7th October, it emerged that Biden’s strategic calculus was to postpone that eventuality as long as possible by insisting that Israel adhere to humanitarian limits in its response. In line with America’s own insistence on a practically unlimited right of armed self-defence balanced by a promise of “humanity” in warfare, secretary of state Antony Blinken cautioned Israel to take care not to harm too many civilians. As Le Monde observed, the White House was “forced to move the needle” by emphasising the importance of “the laws of war”.

In the early days, such reminders were coupled with reassurances that those limits were being observed, notwithstanding the death toll—an estimated 15,000 Palestinian lives at the time of writing, including a likely 6,150 children. Americans were invited to conclude that it was morally acceptable, however tragic, for people to die collaterally (or as human shields) on one side of the fracas in numbers more than 10 times those on the other side, who died in direct terrorist attacks. Astonishingly, one US official admitted on the record that the reason for new talk about humanitarian limits in warfare was the mercenary one of managing later public relations: “If this really goes bad, we want to be able to point to our past statements.”

It went bad quickly. Blinken was forced (in part by staff revolts) to acknowledge that civilian death was disproportionate—though, so far, no US officials have publicly conditioned support for Israel on restraint, reducing their moral concerns about the death American aid and weaponry enabled to monitory worries that Israel could and apparently did simply ignore. After a four-day halt to the carnage was announced and then extended—and as hostages were exchanged—the Biden administration signalled its desire to see it extended further, without retracting its backing of Israel’s right to self-defence or questioning its objective of eradicating Hamas.

America’s lack of credibility as a global saviour of democracy, or a fair and honest broker in the longstanding strife in Israel and Palestine, dawned on the global south before others.

In spite of the overwhelming vote in the United Nations General Assembly condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, the US could unify the north Atlantic but not the world in its depiction of a pure cause. In a brilliant and edgy speech last May, former US official Fiona Hill, famed for her defence of a hawkish Russia policy in the Trump years, offered that the global south had understandable reasons not to buy the democracy hype, and regretted that Ukraine’s defence proved hostage to US decline and its legacy of double standards. “Perceptions of American hubris and hypocrisy are widespread. Trust in the international system(s) that the US helped invent and has presided over since World War II is long gone,” she said.

Now America’s Israel policy has eroded support for Ukraine further, along with the last residues of belief in the geopolitical virtue of US leadership. Not all the reasons for the global south’s scepticism about America’s Manichean stances in eastern Europe and the Middle East are convincing, but the global south is on firm ground in treating the west’s sanctimonious talk, past and present, as so many rationales for the violence of the powerful against the weak, and a smokescreen for continuing global hierarchy. If Biden’s newly minted mantra of a “rules-based international order” means America’s Gaza policy, the global south “won’t ever listen to us again”, as one official mordantly put it.

Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco a month into the new phase of struggle in Israel, but the paltry results hardly suggested that the west’s emerging Cold War against Beijing has been postponed or relaxed. Indeed, some voiced anxiety that yet another American-sponsored war—Israel on top of Ukraine—would interfere with the campaign against China that they regard as the truly existential one. America can afford to fight many wars at one time, treasury secretary Janet Yellen reassured anyone who would listen. But even if this is true, the credibility and legitimacy of America’s global enmities are not widely shared enough to be sustainable.

The global south doesn’t buy into the revivalist sloganeering of Beltway policymakers chanting about freedom. Of course, it is familiar with being bypassed and ignored. But the Gaza conflict is showing that its misgivings about American beneficence are hitting home with Americans themselves—especially the young. A shift in opinion has thrown American global leadership into doubt.

In December 2022, Packer, the liberal journalist, issued a manifesto portentously entitled “A New Theory of American Power”. Interventionism around the world before and since the Cold War’s end in 1989 now looked hard to defend, he conceded, and the Afghan withdrawal that Biden himself came into office to complete reflected that lesson. But the answer to too much intervention, Packer insisted, was hardly too much restraint.

Those “living in the safety and comfort of the West,” Packer explained, could not deny that “liberal values… depend on American support.” And after Afghanistan came Ukraine which, he asserted, saved US foreign policy liberalism from a dire period of inaction and withdrawal. In the face of those anxious that “American arms would achieve nothing” in the struggle against Russia, he proposed a corrected vision of American might: it could save democracy in Ukraine, preferring the practice of sending money and weapons rather than troops. But the lessons were generalisable. “Call it the Biden doctrine,” Packer concluded. “Limits would make a foreign policy founded on liberal values more persuasive abroad and more sustainable with the American electorate, holding off the next oscillation towards grandiosity or gloom.”

But contemporary history—as the Ukraine War continued, and more money and weapons than before flowed to the defence of Israeli democracy too—has not been kind to such a vision. The Ukraine War, Packer observed recently, is stalemated: American arms achieved nothing after all, other than holding Russia in place. Will the results differ in the Middle East when Netanyahu anticipates a “long and difficult” fight, and American officials are warned by their Israeli counterparts that current operations could last “as long as 10 years”?

The blow to any confidence that America’s foreign policy elites know what they are doing is hardly softened by a “new theory” of cautious and indirect intervention abroad, when those elites prove more adept at nurturing rather than resolving intractable conflict. Rushing to war and planning for the messy outcomes later is something America knows a lot about, given the failures not just of its direct interventions but its outrageous record of arms dealing and proxy support. The US can be embroiled in endless wars even when it does not send its own troops. Indeed, the struggle over Israel and Palestine, to which there is only a political solution, has been perpetual long since.

Then there is the matter of the US’s own faulty democracy, which was never perfect and is visibly getting worse, in part because of the dream of advancing democracy elsewhere through force of arms.

“Our ability to function effectively as a great power abroad depends on how we conduct ourselves at home,” remarked George HW Bush in proclaiming a new world order in 1990. History since not only proved his point, but also the reverse: that a series of misbegotten wars could undermine what passed for US democracy and leave it prey to a charlatan not once but twice.

America could not rouse the world this time, around its beleaguered policy and rhetoric

For the biggest consequence of America’s wars is the self-destruction of its liberal and rules-based order domestically, such as it was. Understandably, as the carnage in the Middle East mounted, Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign staff freaked out the earliest and most visibly. One reason was moral: “The president centered his 2020 campaign on a ‘Battle for the Soul of the Nation’, but it seems as though the administration is currently in a battle for its own soul,” commented one campaign staffer about the human consequences of American-abetted war. But for those with different or no ethics, it was strategic concern about an electorally disastrous policy that came to the fore, with Trump the likely Republican presidential nominee for 2024.

The chattering classes began pondering how the hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan—a state Biden won by fewer voters in 2020 (and that Trump won in 2016)—would react. “I will never vote Biden,” one Arab-American exclaimed. But the problem far transcends any specific community. Initial support for Israel plummeted, and over two-thirds of Americans backed a ceasefire. Though Trump was hardly a peacenik, polls showed that voters would expect his presidency, if he won in 2024, to be the less warlike option. Biden’s policies appear to be setting democracy back at home—if the US even survives a second Trump term—as a result of purporting to advance it abroad through war.

Shifts in Congress combine all the hallmarks of America’s new situation in microcosm. Alongside new critics of America’s Israel policy on the left, the body also features a new right that is sceptical about imperial overstretch. Unlike Congress’s first lopsided vote in 2022 in favour of even more Ukraine funding than Biden initially requested, the new far-right speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, dithered. “He’s by no means an isolationist,” one colleague nervously assured himself. Johnson proposed $16bn in new Israel funding—on top of the billions allotted annually, amounting to more than $120bn since the 1940s. But because Johnson mortgaged the funds to crackpot grievances against tax collection, the Senate rejected them. And so far he has rebuffed requests for more funding of Ukraine’s frozen war.

The American dream of advancing democracy through force of arms is obsolete. It has failed abroad in practice even when morally defensible in theory, and it is not easily transposed to the messy situation in Israel and Palestine. And it is domestically unsustainable when the US’s own democracy is on the brink. Biden “has not learned from America’s mistakes, rushing headlong into the latest war,” commented Stephen Wertheim in the New York Times. After Ukraine, Gaza provides a final confirmation of a generation of failed militarism, beckoning us not to old promises of security but to the new realities of US decline amid endless war—and to the need to imagine an elusive new politics that could replace a passing world order for the better, since things can always get worse.

Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale. His most recent book is “Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale)

World

Eliot Higgins: the man who verifies

The founder of the Bellingcat website has changed investigative journalism. His open-source sleuthing has unmasked assassins and humiliated dictators. But as internet lies spread ever faster, can his team keep pace?

By Tom Lamont   December 6, 2023

Photography for Prospect by Paul Black

There might not be a more innocuous centre of influence and resistance in the world than this one. Welcome to the suburbs of Leicester, where Eliot Higgins, founder and guiding spirit of the investigative bureau Bellingcat, lives with his wife and two children. The bearded, spectacled 44-year-old commutes most days to a single-room office near the city’s ring road—and from here he has embarrassed palace-dwelling warlords; helped solve mass murders; exposed far-right ghouls and tripped up totalitarian bullies.

Higgins, who has devoted the last dozen years of his life to untangling the long, knotted lines of misinformation that wrap around and constrict 21st-century discourse, thinks of himself and his Bellingcat colleagues as “an open community of amateurs on a collaborative hunt for evidence... an online collective, investigating war crimes and picking apart disinformation, basing our findings on clues that are openly available on the internet.” As such, he can get going on his day’s work while eating breakfast and getting the kids to eat theirs. “As soon as I’m awake I turn on my phone,” Higgins told me, when we spent a September day together in his office. “I go to the bathroom. I brush my teeth. I check if any stuff has come in overnight.”

“Stuff” is a good word for it. The subjects that Bellingcat focuses its investigative energies on are eclectic, counter-intuitive, often important, sometimes odd. One contributor might track questionable troop movements through a conflict zone in the Middle East while another tries to debunk a pernicious western conspiracy theory. Still another contributor might be trying to overthrow an international spy ring, or find somebody’s stolen pet.

That month, Bellingcat had just published a story about grain-smuggling in Crimea, based on images taken from the website planet.com; and a story about an Israeli military action in Jenin in the West Bank that drew from CCTV stills circulating on social media. The October eruption of violence that would plunge the region into a full-blown war–and raise profound questions about online disinformation in global conflicts—was still about a month away. The Jenin story zeroed in on a single incident on a single road, to try to work out how and why at least three people had been killed.

What unifies almost every Bellingcat investigation is an organisational devotion to the open source. To secure a scoop or solve a mystery, the ideal Bellingcat contributor might use a combination of videos from Instagram, satellite images from Google, digital documents dug up through an online archive called the Wayback Machine or weather reports from weather.com—with links included to each source. Tips come from anywhere and everywhere; most full contributors these days are former readers and admirers of the site who have risen up to become paid staff (Higgins calls them Bellingcats). The idea is to encourage the use of readily available, ideally free-to-use online resources, in combination with Bellingcat’s widely read platform, to push back at powerful bullshitters. “Identify, Verify, Amplify” is the organisation’s founding motto.

A browse through the archives of the Bellingcat website, which was formally launched in 2014 and evolved out of Higgins’s personal blog, Brown Moses, is like picking through the aisles of a journalistic curiosity shop. On one shelf, a story about a fake Pentagon employee; on another shelf, an exposé on a neo-Nazi sauna retreat in Finland; on another shelf, an investigation into an assassination squad. As Higgins put it: stuff. One morning in the winter of 2020, the stuff that hit his inbox overnight was incendiary, scary, darkly funny—probably one of the wildest journalistic coups in the history of the profession.

Aided by the painstaking research of Christo Grozev, a Bellingcat contributor, the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny (then in a safe house in Germany) had been able to figure out the identities and telephone numbers of some of the Russian assassins who had only recently tried to murder him. Navalny actually called one of the alleged perpetrators, pretending to be his boss, and teased out a long and detailed confession. They got the entire thing on tape. Miles away in the Midlands, Higgins (rubbing the sleep from his eyes, about to make the kids breakfast) couldn’t believe what he was receiving. “I remember the message from Christo said, ‘Oh, Navalny spoke to the poisoners.’ I thought, ‘What?!’”

That week, working in tandem with other news outlets including CNN, Bellingcat published what they had in a series of explosive, drip-fed stories. “We wanted to cause maximum drama,” Higgins recalled, of a decision to save the most incriminating audio until senior Russians, including Vladimir Putin, had had a chance to make a comprehensive denial. “Very satisfying... There’s nothing I’ve enjoyed more than giving Putin a bloody nose like that.” The story secured record traffic for Bellingcat and ended up forming a centrepiece scene in Navalny, an Oscar-winning documentary about the dissident. Looking back, Higgins described it all as “great fun... from the comfort of my own home”. The home part of the equation was important to him. “I think it’s empowering, because if I can do it, many, many other people can. A core principle of Bellingcat is to teach other people how to do this, so that one day they might be giving Putin a bloody nose, and if not him, some other terrible dictator.”

Higgins is an anonymous dresser, a fast talker, a reformed shy-guy who says he once had to “reprogram” his brain in order to undertake the sort of public-speaking engagements that now form a large part of his schedule. He has an ego, that much is clear—but there is a pleasing absence of the grand about him, perhaps to do with the fact that he does not see himself as part of the established media fraternity. By my count, Higgins and Bellingcat have published at least two other world-halting pieces of journalism aside from the Navalny story, one of which—their identification of the suspects who carried out the Salisbury Novichok poisoning in 2018—made me stop what I was doing when I read it and, like an impressed person in a cartoon, actually gulp.

In the Midlands office I confessed to Higgins that I’d tried to write an investigation of my own into that unsettling case in Salisbury, when the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was targeted for murder, alongside his daughter Yulia, while living in sleepy English exile. The assassination attempt involved such irresponsible methods that a police officer was hospitalised and one civilian was killed through exposure to Novichok months later in a neighbouring town—her husband had found a perfume bottle containing the substance. I had rushed to the scene in the immediate aftermath of the Skripal poisoning and clustered at the do-not-cross lines with dozens of other notebook-wielding reporters. I met with ex-intelligence officers from both the UK and Russia. All a total waste of time—at least compared to the brisk and efficient job that was done at Bellingcat.

Higgins’s contributors stayed away from the initial scrum in Salisbury. In fact, they didn’t see any desperate need to visit the city. “At Bellingcat, we watched,” Higgins recalled in a 2021 book, We Are Bellingcat, “awaiting a point of entry.” They waited half a year. My story about Salisbury came and went, along with many others that failed to answer the question: who were these assassins? Then British police belatedly released pictures of two Russian suspects and the false names under which they had travelled to Salisbury. “Within days,” Higgins wrote in his book, “we had cracked the case.” Grozev, the talented contributor who later allied with Navalny, pored through hundreds of Russian databases, which included flight manifests. He paid hundreds of euros of his own money to get access to the booking data of different airlines and identity documents held by the Russian state. “Found them”, wrote Grozev in a text message to Higgins and others in the Bellingcat braintrust.

Alexei Navalny identified his would-be murderers with the help of Christo Grozev, a Bellingcat contributor

From a distance of a few years, the Salisbury investigation was a good and bad example of the Bellingcat method, Higgins told me. They used plenty of legitimate sleuthing tricks, such as trawling through online yearbook photos, reading military biographies, scrolling through Skype handles—techniques available to anybody with an internet connection. That was the good. What troubled Higgins in hindsight were those payments for private documentation (not something confined to the Salisbury case; elsewhere Grozev has paid five-figure sums of his own money in exchange for documents and records).

From a credo perspective, this paid-for information was problematic because it was not open access. It was therefore against Bellingcat’s guiding ethos: that anybody could or should be able to perform similar investigations if they had the will and the nous.

“It’s very hard to say, ‘No, I’m not going to look into these assassins that are murdering people because it’s not open source’,” Higgins told me. “You kind of get drawn down that path. But over the last year or so, we’ve tried to move away from that and get back to those open-source roots.” He explained: “We started to find it difficult to keep doing that kind of work when we became aware of the risks presented to people doing it… If they [the Russians] arrest you, they aren’t taking you to prison, they’re taking you to an open grave in a forest.” That’s literally what happened to the business partner of one of Bellingcat’s sources on the Navalny story: he was mock-executed. “We had to get [our source] out of the country after that,” Higgins said.

Grozev, Bellingcat’s star contributor, has stepped away from the organisation during the last 10 months or so—amid security concerns that we will come to. As I sat there with Higgins in his office, he seemed to have arrived at an inflection point—attempting to keep up the ambition of the scoops of the previous decade, while trying to turn himself towards the challenges of the future, without quite being sure what those challenges might be.

Bellingcat emerged out of the UK’s austerity era. Higgins was born and raised in Shrewsbury. By the 2010s, at a time when councils around the country were having their budgets throttled by Cameron and Osborne’s government, he was a 30-something college dropout working as an administrator for a refugee charity in Leicester. That charity lost its contract, at which point it entered a period of managed decline. Employees left one by one. Soon, Higgins remembers, “it was me and the maintenance guy. I would get in very early, about 7.30am. This was before I had kids. I would get all my work done in a few hours. And then…”

And then he would set about some citizen journalism. Civil war had broken out in Libya and Syria. Higgins, a keen reader of the news, in particular the Guardian’s Middle East coverage, had noticed that traditional media outlets were slow to make use of the civilian- or soldier-shot pictures and videos that were emerging out of conflict zones via social media. He started commenting below the line on the Guardian and later publishing posts to his Brown Moses blog. (That name comes from a Frank Zappa song; Higgins is a fan.) Word about Brown Moses spread. Information he had dug up found its way into mainstream news coverage and was once cited in a front-page story in the New York Times.

Wasting his offline days in a dying office, online Higgins was more and more of an authority, a respected and sometimes plagiarised source of remote reporting. His niche, he later wrote in his book, “was the detail. I never attempted to tell a complete story, as a news reporter strives to do. I unearthed nuggets that others might use.” Scrutinising hours and hours of raw footage, searching for details and verifiable facts that war reporters hadn’t or wouldn’t notice, Higgins in his Brown Moses guise helped texture and fill in western readers’ understanding of a distant conflict.

A core principle of Bellingcat is to teach other people—so that one day they might give some terrible dictator a bloody nose

“It was half an hour’s work,” he told me, of the day in summer 2011 that he accidentally stumbled upon the now-widespread journalistic technique called geolocation. In his empty office, “twiddling my thumbs”, Higgins set himself the challenge of identifying the city or town in the background of a newly emerged piece of footage—a selfie, essentially—posted online by a Libyan rebel soldier. Higgins figured, if he could prove that the rebel was walking around in a particular part of the country that was supposed at the time to be controlled by Muammar Gaddafi’s loyalist troops, he would have proof that the frontline of the civil war had shifted. He took a piece of A4 paper out of the office printer and, cross-referencing details in the background of the picture against Google Maps, sketched out a rough street map. “With a bit of a brain shift,” he wrote later, “you could construe video images from a top-down perspective… It became a matching game. I had stumbled across ‘geolocation’, as we came to call it—the first technique of the digital detective.”

Over subsequent years, more techniques would be added to the digital detective’s playbook. Higgins and others like him make habitual use of Google Earth, Wikimapia, an app called Pixifly that helps them search Instagram posts according to time and place, and SunCalc, an app that helps them determine the length of shadows in photographs and video stills. Where software doesn’t exist they have programmed it, for instance, creating tools to find satellite pictures free of clouds or for figuring out when a TikTok video went live. They have taught themselves the patience to trawl through hours of video; shocking footage; mundane footage; footage recorded at weddings and graduations and children’s birthday parties as well as footage recorded in the scatter zones of crashed aircraft; aboard tanks; at public executions. Which leads to another important entry in the digital detective’s playbook: learn to recognise the signs of secondary trauma in yourself.

“There are different kinds of trauma you can get from this work,” Higgins told me. He has known contributors to feel dizzy, depressed. Early in his investigative career (trying to find proof of the use of sarin gas in one of Assad’s bombing attacks on his own civilians) Higgins spent hours studying social-media footage of dying adults and children, trying to spot incriminating signs of altered pupils. “Not good,” was how he described the effects of that activity on his health. Later, when he was looking through images of the wrecked MH17, the Malaysia Airlines plane that crashed in 2014 over Ukraine killing hundreds of passengers, Higgins came across a picture of a stuffed toy. “A Miffy rabbit, do you know those? My daughter had the exact same one.” He found the picture of the toy rabbit harder to process than gorier, more explicit images of the same disaster. “It was just very upsetting,” he told me.

The MH17 disaster—up there with Salisbury and Navalny in Bellingcat’s landmark investigations—happened to take place just a few days after Bellingcat went live. Higgins had finally lost his job at the refugee charity. He worked for a pipe company in Leicester for a while, then did admin for a retailer of women’s underwear. He had applied for journalistic traineeships, including at the BBC, but never heard back (despite the fact that the broadcaster had made use, he said, of findings he had publicised via his blog). Frustrated, broke, starting to outgrow Brown Moses, Higgins was encouraged by readers of his blog to formalise the operation, leading to a crowdfunding drive and the foundation of Bellingcat.

It was the journalist Peter Jukes, an admirer of the way that Higgins and his collaborators held powerful global actors to account, who suggested the name Bellingcat, a riff on a fairytale in which cunning mice hang a bell on a cat so that however sneakily it tried to move against them, they would know what it was up to. The cat-like Russian state denied military involvement in the downing of MH17, despite mounting evidence that Russian-backed soldiers had ground-launched a missile at the plane by accident. Mice-like, a newly formed core of Bellingcat contributors went to work to prove military involvement. Piecing together digital scraps, sifting through hours of dashcam recordings hoping for glimpses of clues, they were able to chart the movements of the renegade unit that fired the fatal missile.

Whenever they were stumped in this work, Higgins asked for and received help from followers on social media. After finding a useful piece of video that potentially identified the route the missile was transported by, Higgins tweeted: “Gold star sticker to the first person who geolocates this video.” Minutes later, they had a hypothesis that would help them piece together the where of the crime. Soon they had also figured out the who and the likely why (a colossal fuck up that Russian generals tried to cover up with falsified digital evidence). Putin’s state media agency, RT, started calling citizen sleuths like Higgins “a dangerous trend”. Higgins fully agreed.

Bellingcat’s reporting on MH17 established its reputation, a reputation that was lacquered four years later by the Salisbury scoop and then, two years after that, the Navalny scoop. Higgins has been able to expand his permanent staff from one to six to 18 to over 40 at the time of writing, and open a physical office based in Amsterdam. There is an executive board that Higgins sits on as chairman alongside a business director, Dessi Lange-Damianova, and a training director, Giancarlo Fiorella. “We power-share,” Higgins told me, explaining that this came about in part to avoid a Wikileaks-style scenario where the whole thing became a one-man psychodrama. (“I didn’t want it to be the Eliot Higgins Show.”) There are separate supervisory and advisory boards to provide oversight. Top salaries are publicised on the website: Higgins and his executive colleagues pay themselves €90,000 a year, more than he got working in pipes but also not a fortune.

It’s very hard to say ‘No, I’m not going to look into these assassins that are murdering people because it’s not open source’

The outfit is funded by donations—including anonymous donations—and by income from its training division, which teaches the tricks of the trade to aspiring digital detectives. Just over a third of its overall funding comes from nonprofit organisations; just under a quarter comes from individual donors; 13 per cent is income it generates itself. Smaller wedges come from lotteries and private companies. In the mid-2010s, Google donated a high five-figure sum to Bellingcat, apparently a gesture of encouragement as Higgins and his team were finding their feet back then. “They didn’t get me to sign for it,” Higgins recalled, still a little surprised, “they just transferred it to my bank account.” He has several times had to defend himself for once accepting money from the National Endowment for Democracy, an organisation set up by the American government and which some sceptics believe has links to the CIA. Higgins doesn’t buy this theory. “There’s such thin evidence… one former CIA guy made that accusation in the 1990s and it was never backed up.” But in recent years Bellingcat has “moved away from taking money that comes from organisations that are mostly funded from a single government—just so in the future people can’t use that lame attack on us again. It’s annoying.”

Bellingcat’s work is mostly conducted over Slack these days, on which app the larger Bellingcat operation has dozens of private or semi-private channels. Frequent contributors get invited in to certain Slack channels, which often serve as pitching rooms for story ideas. While I sat with Higgins in Leicester, he scrolled through these Slack channels. There was one specifically for the Ukraine War and several more for Russia-related global activities. There were channels called “Far Right Monitoring”, “Financial Investigations”, “Chemical Weapons” and so on. In one Slack channel (“Bellingcats”) staff and contributors were invited to share photos of their pets. Another (“Bellingcooks”) was full of recipes. As Higgins scrolled down the list, my eye was caught by a channel called “Drama”.

Drama. There’s been plenty of that.

In 2021, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late leader of a mercenary army, took issue with some reporting of Bellingcat’s that portrayed him as the leader of a mercenary army. Instead of suing the organisation, Prigozhin (or rather his solicitors, London-based and well-schooled in the absurdities of British libel law) went after Higgins personally over social media posts he had made to promote the reporting. The UK Treasury, then under Rishi Sunak’s chancellorship, apparently helped Prigozhin to circumvent its own sanctions. As the legal commentator Peter Geoghegan described this, um, unusual situation in the London Review of Books: “A man who [was] forbidden to enter the UK or hold a British bank account was given permission to harass a British journalist.” Higgins, helped by colleagues at Bellingcat to pay for lawyers of his own, ended up accruing £70,000 in costs despite the claim later being thrown out.

“It started out as a nightmare,” Higgins said to me in his office. “But it worked out better for me than it did for him.” Prigozhin was killed in August. I asked Higgins what he thought when he heard the news of Prigozhin’s demise. He said: “The world’s a better place.” I asked him how he felt, two-and-a-half years on, about the Treasury’s curious involvement in the case against him. He said: “It was probably a Monday morning in the civil service and they hadn’t had their coffee. There probably wasn’t any malicious intent.” I asked him what happened to Bellingcat’s 70 grand. Higgins wasn’t sure; there were complications involving Prigozhin’s estate. “But if I don’t get the money back because he’s dead, I’m willing to take the loss on that.”

I was fascinated by the breezy tone Higgins tended to adopt when discussing dangerous men like Prigozhin and Putin. The privately anxious often tend towards public bravado, of course. But there was something else: a stubbornness about being cowed by bullies, perhaps. “I take necessary precautions as best I can,” he said, when I asked him if he was ever concerned about his personal safety. “It depends on the context. Like, if I’m in a hotel, I won’t have room service. If they leave out complimentary chocolates or something, I have to flush that away. I can’t stand having it in my bin. I’m thinking about it being GRU poison.”

Mourned by some—but not by Higgins. The death of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is marked in Moscow © Yuri Kochetkov/EPA/EFE SHUTTERSTOCK

He recalled travelling to Amsterdam in 2018, right as Bellingcat’s big Salisbury story was about to publish. He was staying in a familiar hotel in the city. “I got a knock on the door. It was a guy in a suit. Name badge. He said, ‘Mr Higgins, we want to thank you for staying in this hotel 10 times.’ He gave me some free biscuits. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve literally never heard of anyone doing that before’.” Higgins spent half the night Googling, do hotels give gifts for staying 10 times? He had already thrown everything away. He had washed his hands and checked his pupils for dilation. “The next morning, when I went down to the lobby, the receptionists asked me if I enjoyed the complimentary cookies.”

But seriously, Higgins said, he was more worried by random, unhinged individuals—people who have come to dislike him online—than he was by any state actor. He often gets into arguments on Twitter. He has had a few stalkers, as well as an inexplicable series of run-ins with a pressure group formed of European farmers who, Higgins told me, had taken against some statement by him and kept appearing at his speaking engagements. “Sometimes I still do have moments of anxiety,” he said, recalling a recent panic in a hotel room when the air conditioning unit started emitting a sulphurous smell. “They pass, these moments. I’m not going to let my life be ruled by anxiety of being assassinated. I would say Christo [Grozev] has had more problems with that, as you’ve probably read.”

Yes. Retaliation directed at some of Bellingcat’s key contributors, individuals who live in Russia or have close links to the country, has been severe. Roman Dobrokhotov, a Moscow-based journalist whose online publication The Insider collaborated closely with Bellingcat on the MH17, Salisbury and Navalny stories, had his home raided by state authorities in 2021. Fearing for his life, Dobrokhotov walked across the border into Ukraine. As for Grozev, whose digging and database sourcing was fundamental to Bellingcat’s biggest scoops, he was arrested in absentia by a Russian court despite not being a Russian national. In fact a Bulgarian national, resident for many years in Vienna where he lived with his wife and children, Grozev recently told the Financial Times of an extraordinary warning he was delivered by Austrian authorities.

Leave Austria (Grozev says they said) because we can no longer protect you from the Russians. Grozev is now living in America without his family. In March, he missed his father’s funeral. Not that having a Kremlin-made target on his back has made him any less belligerent. In the summer he told the FT: “The Russians are spreading legends and narratives about me that we are CIA because the alternative would make them look so weak—that they are being beaten by journalists. That’s not acceptable to their pride.”

Is Higgins ever concerned about his personal safety? ‘If I’m in a hotel, I won’t have room service’

The CIA smear and others like it have been a source of mild but persistent drama for Bellingcat since its foundation. As recently as the spring, Elon Musk dismissed the entire Bellingcat project as a “psyop”, a reference to psychological operations practised by military and intelligence services.

An awful lot of sceptical people think that Bellingcat’s reporting is too good to be true. They think that the organisation gets its goods from one or other intelligence organisation, if not in the US then in the UK. Higgins denies this. But he would. I asked him, if he was a digital detective who existed outside the Bellingcat bubble, how would he dig into whether this organisation had links to spy agencies? Higgins pondered this, then said that he would look at the organisation’s structure, how transparent it was about its money, its information sourcing. (He said that this was one of the reasons Bellingcat was set up the way it was, with his salary and others made plain on the website: to combat conspiracy-mongering.) When he ran out of ideas he acknowledged that, eventually, open-source investigation hit its limits. Some things just had to be taken on trust or not taken at all.

It was time for me to leave his office. He had to get some work done before the weekend. Bellingcat’s next story, then taking shape on its Slack channel “Far Right Monitoring”, was an exposé of a fantasist who claimed to be a dangerous mercenary when he wasn’t. As well as keeping an eye on that, Higgins was about to spend time answering emails for a documentary on MH17. He had a staff retreat to think about; a paid corporate speech to tinker with as well as a university lecture; a journalism award to accept in Gothenburg. There weren’t many pictures on display in his office, but as I was leaving I noticed a holographic image on a shelf of a mouse scurrying across a computer keyboard. It put in mind those earlier, friskier days of the Bellingcat experiment, when Higgins and his collaborators, self-acknowledged mice, scurried under the feet of mighty governments and, occasionally, made them whimper.

In October, as violence took hold of the Middle East, Palestinians killing Israelis and Israelis killing Palestinians with a ferocity that was hard to make sense of, a familiar routine played out in the wider world. People miles away from the conflict zone turned to the internet to try to find out what was happening. They encountered a space brimming with nonsense, best guesses, half-truths or quarter-truths. “Grift” was a word that Higgins kept using when I met him. It was his way of describing the most destructive kind of internet lie, the deliberately seeded untruth that flourishes all too well on social media. I thought of “grift” often during those early days of the Gaza violence, when fabricators, guesswork merchants, propagandists on both sides seemed at their most prevalent and divisive.

When Higgins and I spoke again in November, he sounded changed, fatigued by events as the conflict in Gaza entered its second month. If the Bellingcat project was to count for anything, Higgins told me, it must quash or at least reduce the power of the internet lie. Society needed this more urgently than ever. As Higgins saw things, people with sympathies on both sides of the conflict—understandably confused, sad and scared—were tending to huddle in online spaces where they could expect to hear confirmation of what they already believed or suspected. Grifters, dealing out fake news and conspiracy theories to different camps, were thriving.

Higgins partly blamed Elon Musk’s slow and miserable quasi-deregulation of Twitter (or X, as Musk wants us to call the social-media tool now, as if in acknowledgement of its no-go toxicity as an online place). “Oh, he’s made a great environment,” Higgins said wryly—“for the spread of disinformation.” There were times during the first weeks of the conflict in Gaza that Higgins removed Musk’s app from his phone. He slunk back to the service eventually, as so many of us do, despite our better instincts. These were instincts that Higgins still hoped to tap, he told me. I knew that Bellingcat had been slowly deprioritising the singular, smash-and-grab scoops that made it famous. Instead, it was trying to propagate the investigative techniques that underpinned those scoops. Higgins intended to ramp up those efforts. Bellingcat was involved in the launch of a new investigations lab at a Dutch university. He had once hoped to teach people the trick of giving the Putins of the world bloody noses. Now, it felt imperative simply to teach and spread the tricks of basic factual verification.

When a hospital in Gaza was bombed in mid-October, there was widespread confusion about the culprit. Into a very human gap of instinctive empathy and shock, deliberate misinformation flooded—all the worst that the modern Musk-y internet could muster. I suggested to Higgins that Bellingcat would once have devoted investigative resources to figuring out what really happened to that hospital. “Things are moving so fast [in the region],” he said. “We can focus on one incident, look properly at the disinformation there. And by that time there’s been 10 equally bad incidents.”

He continued, “The question is, how do you create something useful from this? It’s one thing to write all these articles about all of these terrible things that are happening—but does that make any difference, ultimately? Because what we’re seeing in the way people approach Israel and Palestine, they aren’t really looking for truth, they’re looking for something they can bash you over the side of the head with. And that doesn’t really bring us closer to solving fundamental issues that are at stake both with Israel and Palestine but more broadly with the way our society consumes information.”

October’s events in the Middle East seem likely to have as wide a radicalising circle as any in memory; it shouldn’t be a surprise that Higgins has become a little radicalised himself by the apparent hopelessness of it all. Jeremy Paxman once described him as a journalistic hero. With the collaborators he has teamed up with, Higgins has achieved sustained journalistic success beyond my or most other reporters’ wildest imagining. To hear him question the efficacy of investigative reporting—“Does it make any difference, ultimately?”—disturbed me enormously. But Higgins went on to insist that while Bellingcat’s editorial arm would continue to pursue compelling stories, its broader organisational focus had to be on the causes of misinformation, not just the symptoms.

Otherwise, Higgins guessed, we were likely to end up with a society “where a truth doesn’t really matter anymore. Where it’s more about what you feel is accurate rather than what is accurate. Where people never know what’s really going on. Where people get to pick-and-choose whichever version of reality they prefer.” Bellingcat’s motto has been to identify, verify, amplify. Things being as they are in the world, that might already have changed. Verify, verify, verify.

Tom Lamont is a freelance writer living in London

Politics

13 years of failure

This may have been the worst government ever, says one former Tory adviser—who collates evidence of truly dire policymaking into one damning chargesheet

By Sam Freedman   December 6, 2023

Image: Sergey Borisov / Alamy. Composite by David McAllister / Prospect

Politics might be polarised but there is one thing that everyone can agree on: the country is in a mess. Our economy is stuck. Our public services are overwhelmed. Public trust in politics is shot. Even Conservative MPs seem to agree. It’s impossible to argue that things are going well, so they try to find other culprits to blame: civil servants, the courts or metropolitan liberals.

For everyone else, the party that has been in government for the last 13 years has to take a large share of the blame. It’s true that governments all over the world and on every part of the political spectrum have struggled over the last few years due to the cumulative impact of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the unwinding of historically low interest rates in response to an inflationary surge. But the UK’s problems started well before Covid hit. Our government not only failed to fix the roof while the sun was, at least, peeking through the clouds, but it took a sledgehammer to the walls as well. When the storms hit, we were left without shelter.

This is the story of how we ended up with every trend graph going in the wrong direction. And it starts with the big gamble of the coalition government. When David Cameron (astonishingly now back at the heart of government), George Osborne and Nick Clegg arrived in Downing Street in May 2010, the public finances had deteriorated rapidly following the financial crisis.

In deciding how to deal with this they made three big calls. First, to reduce the deficit harder and faster than other countries, despite the precarious state of the economy. Second, to get the vast bulk of this deficit reduction (80 per cent) from spending cuts rather than tax increases. Third, to concentrate these cuts on benefits and services used by groups with little political voice, while (largely) protecting those parts of the state, like health and education, that most of us come into contact with. In doing so they had the support of most of the media and, at the time, the majority of the public too. It’s easy to forget the sense of fear that the debt crisis, which almost overwhelmed Greece, would become a contagion affecting other countries, as hyperbolic as that might seem now.

But the net result was that large chunks of the state that don’t make the news very often were absolutely hammered. Departments like the Ministry of Justice saw spending cuts of over 25 per cent at their peak (Figure 1) and even the Home Office saw cuts of 20 per cent. Worst hit was local government, with massive reductions in government grants, only partially compensated for by tightly controlled increases in council tax. Councils’ average spending power fell by almost 30 per cent (Figure 2), and considerably more in the authorities with the poorest households. Intense pressure on statutory duties like social care, with an ageing population, and special educational needs, with huge unmet demand, reduced the scope for discretionary spending by councils even more.

The very poorest were hit hardest. Osborne and his Liberal Democrat colleagues did make some attempt to spread the pain around. Wealthier families saw their child benefit removed and higher marginal tax rates. Lower earners in work were helped by a higher minimum wage. But those reliant on benefits saw their income drop away. Increasingly, the welfare state became more detached from assessments of need. And the pain only got worse after the Conservatives took sole power in 2015. Osborne proceeded to implement his harshest round of benefits cuts yet, leading to welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith’s resignation.

Departmental cuts stopped in 2017, after Theresa May’s disastrous election campaign—remembered for her woodenness and the so-called “dementia tax”—confirmed that austerity was no longer popular. Budgets for all departments have been flat or slowly rising since then. But not benefits. They have continued to be squeezed, bar a brief boost during the pandemic. Housing benefits have fallen to the point that barely any properties are affordable (Figure 3). The benefits cap, which limits the amount any household can receive, was set at average income in 2013 but has hardly ever been increased since then. As inflation has hit, more and more families—especially with multiple children—have been affected. The “two-child limit”, implemented in 2017, which stops benefits being paid from the third child onwards, has added to the misery.

At first this strategy was successful, politically at least, leading to the surprise Conservative majority of 2015. The most widely used services were still functioning well. The people most affected were not Conservative voters—indeed were much less likely to vote at all. Osborne’s master plan was working.

For those paying attention, though, the warning lights were starting to flick on. The decision to focus cuts on marginal populations had meant the worst effects were hidden to most voters. But those effects were causing real problems. Trussell Trust food banks, which had barely existed in 2010, were distributing one million food parcels a year by 2014–15 (it’s now three million; Figure 4). Increasing numbers of households were living in overcrowded accommodation (Figure 5). Numbers living in “relative poverty” on the government’s measure stayed fairly stable, due to higher wages for lower paid people in work, but that masked the descent of the very poorest into deep poverty. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report from October 2023 found there were now over one million children living in destitution—that is, living without proper shelter or without enough food.

Meanwhile the departments that had absorbed the biggest cuts were struggling badly. The prison system was one example. Turnover of prison officers increased as pay was frozen, there weren’t enough staff to provide proper support to prisoners, conditions worsened and drug abuse and self-harm among prisoners rose dramatically (Figure 6). Overcrowding increased as prisons got ever fuller with little money invested in new accommodation. In 2023 we finally hit the point where there was no space left at all and prisoners had to be released early.

Elsewhere, the immigration system started to fall apart as underpaid caseworkers left the Home Office and the backlog of cases rose, well before the small boat channel smugglers got going (Figure 7) and the right of the Conservative party developed its now all-consuming obsession with Rwanda. Local councils cut discretionary programmes such as SureStart, parenting classes and youth provision, which weren’t a legal requirement but nevertheless were a lifeline for many families.

There was only so long the social problems caused by this concentration of austerity on the most vulnerable could be hidden. Even before the pandemic it was becoming clear that austerity was having a detrimental effect on the services that ordinary voters—Conservative voters—relied on. Police numbers became a big issue during the 2017 campaign, due to a number of high--profile terrorist attacks. But one of the main reasons the police were struggling was because they were dealing with the consequences of that concentration of austerity. For instance, domestic abuse cases went up as families came under more stress, and by 2022 these cases accounted for almost a fifth of recorded crime.

Police have also had to deal with a rise in mental health disorders, which correlate closely with poverty. Between 2019 and 2022 alone the number of mental health incidents they had to attend rose 20 per cent. As the Chief Inspector of Constabulary has written: “In blunt terms, too much police time is still being spent performing the work of other public services. This is because many public services are under financial pressure and can’t meet their own demand.” Partly as a result of this, crimes experienced by ordinary voters are now much less likely to be charged (Figure 8).

Schools are suffering from having to do the work of other services. Exam results are one of the few things that haven’t got worse over the last decade, and there is even some evidence of improvement relative to other countries in comparative international tests. But these positives are at risk due to schools having to cover for other services—75 per cent now provide some form of food bank or parcel service for children or their parents. They are also having to manage more safeguarding cases, with 24 per cent more children in care in 2022 than in 2012. Pastoral care has become a big drain on teacher time and a major cause, alongside lower pay, of a crisis in teacher recruitment. This year, only half the target number of secondary teachers started training.

Of course the problems caused by the concentrated hit on the most in need have been exacerbated by appalling governance, particularly since the Brexit referendum set off a period of turmoil that saw us run through five prime ministers. There have been seven education secretaries since 2019 alone. There is no way the public sector can be managed well in such circumstances, especially as all the various cabinet combinations have prioritised loyalty over competence. The Covid inquiry has revealed in gory detail quite how incapable of basic management or decision-making Boris Johnson’s regime was.

Add in a global pandemic and you have a perfect storm. What’s happened to the NHS is the most vivid case study. Before the pandemic performance was already starting to deteriorate, with waiting lists and A&E wait times rising. While budgets had been maintained they had not risen in line with need. Money for non-urgent budget lines like preventative healthcare, buying new equipment, and building repairs, were squeezed to cope with day-to-day costs during increasingly acute winter crises. A stream of health ministers had different priorities for reform, engaging in multiple incoherent restructures and sucking up more precious time and resource. Cuts to the number of beds continued despite it becoming apparent that hospitals were dangerously full, and care homes were struggling to provide enough beds for older patients who needed to be discharged.

When the pandemic hit, the health service quickly became overwhelmed (Figure 9). There was simply no capacity to deal with the waiting lists that built up while medical staff were focusing on Covid patients. Ministers’ stubborn refusal to negotiate with doctors taking industrial action for almost a year, until starting talks in October 2023, has caused waiting lists to rise even further, to historic highs approaching eight million. Because hospitals are so full there is nowhere to send those attending A&E departments, leading to chaos and 10 per cent of patients waiting more than 12 hours for help. In 2009-10, less than 350,000 people had to wait more than four hours to be seen. In 2022-23, that number was over six million (Figure 10). All the while medical staff are also having to deal with the consequences of rising poverty, poor-quality housing, and growing numbers suffering from mental health problems.

It’s all so bleak that it’s hard to identify any successes. Ironically, where there have been achievements they tend to run counter to the populist rhetoric that the Tories are employing to keep their fracturing 2019 voter base on board. Gay marriage is the one thing from the Cameron era that almost everyone now applauds—although it was opposed by a narrow majority of his own MPs at the time. Renewables have become a much bigger part of our energy market, in part down to innovative public policy. Furlough, and the universal credit uplift during Covid, briefly restored some of the welfare safety net, only for it to be taken away again. Skilled immigration has increased since Brexit, bringing in some of the world’s smartest people from outside the EU. But added together it’s a meagre legacy, and certainly not one they want to shout about.

Which does raise the question as to what the government is going to hold up as achievements during the impending election. Ministers will, of course, try to raise fears about Labour, but even voters who share some of those concerns may be thinking: “What have we got to lose?”

If Labour does find itself in power, as looks very likely, its inheritance will be the worst of any government since the 1970s. Every aspect of that gamble Cameron, Osborne and Clegg took in 2010 has failed. It is perhaps appropriate that Cameron is back in government as foreign secretary to witness the consequences of his errors.

Debt is higher than at any point since the 1960s, and much more so than when we were told there was no alternative to hard and deep cuts (Figure 11). Throughout the 2010s, interest rates were very low and borrowing was cheap, yet the public realm was allowed to deteriorate. Borrowing now to repair the damage would be far more expensive, but cannot be delayed much longer. There is a £22bn maintenance backlog in education and health alone. The initial decision to focus on reducing the deficit through cuts rather than tax increases was made with the interests of Tory voters in mind. But as budgets have had to start rising again since 2017 the tax burden has been forced up regardless, to its highest level since the war, with millions more people paying higher-rate income tax.

Labour will be caught between higher borrowing costs, a strong desire to avoid significant further tax rises and -collapsing public services. Economic growth is the only sustainable way out, but current projections suggest ongoing stagnation. There are certainly things that can be done to improve the picture, from making it easier to build houses to rejoining the EU single market. But none of these things will happen quickly, and all are beset with political difficulties. There will need to be some investment in infrastructure but, again, the state of our public finances will limit what can be done.

Meanwhile, everywhere you look there is a crisis: the NHS, the entire criminal justice system, housing, social care, higher education and on and on. Almost all NHS trusts are in deficit. Several councils have already fallen into effective bankruptcy—including the biggest, Birmingham—and 26 others are at risk, with some of the larger Tory shires on the list. There is a recruitment crisis across most of the public sector, as lower pay and the sheer emotional exhaustion, exacerbated by huge demand and a crushing sense of failure, have made it harder to persuade people to sign up. It is worst in social care, where there are over 150,000 vacancies, more than the total number of doctors in the NHS (Figure 12).

All these problems feed off each other. The initial focusing of austerity on the poorest increased pressure on public services, helping to trigger crises. These crises have their own knock-on effects. For instance the inability to get adequate healthcare has pushed up the numbers out of work for health reasons, and the numbers on disability benefits (Figure 13). Which in turn has created a tight labour market, even in a stagnant economy, which has made growth even harder to achieve and public sector recruitment more difficult too. That lack of growth reduces the scope to invest in public services.

It looks horribly like a spiral that we will struggle to break out of. And the risk is that if conventional politics is seen to have failed completely, voters become willing to try out extremists—a pattern that is not confined to the UK. The Conservatives will, no doubt, keep searching for someone else to blame. But, during one of the more challenging periods in our history, we have been saddled with our worst-ever government. You wonder if they will ever be forgiven.

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Government and senior adviser to the Ark schools network

Housing

Could Harold Macmillan solve today’s housing crisis?

The mass housebuilding Macmillan oversaw in the 1950s was revolutionary. Can today’s government learn from his approach?

By Rowan Moore   December 6, 2023

New homes are built for Ilford Borough Council in 1947. Image credit: Harry Shepherd/Getty Images

“Housing is not a question of Conservatism or Socialism”, said the Tory housing minister and future prime minister Harold Macmillan during the 1951 general election campaign, “it is a question of humanity.” His party won the contest with the help of a promise to build more council homes than Labour, a “great housing crusade” that saw 245,160 completed in 1953, the record for a single year. It is a mark of the success of the outgoing Attlee administration that Macmillan stole its policies, just as New Labour later felt obliged to adopt aspects of Thatcherism in order to get elected.

The Labour government that had come to power in 1945 was as radical and determined in its approach to housing as it was in health. Despite austerity, it started building council homes in unprecedented numbers. It launched the programme of creating new towns in which 2.8m people now live, and would eventually deliver the successful new city of Milton Keynes. The Attlee administration was prepared to use wartime powers of requisition to take over empty properties to house people in need. It set ambitious policies followed by all governments until Margaret Thatcher’s, which at their peak in 1968 delivered more homes of all types, public and private, than in any other year before or since.

Britain, especially England, is now in a seemingly endless housing crisis. Average house prices stand at about nine times average annual earnings (compared with a ratio of about three to one on the 1980s), making home ownership an impossible dream for millions. This in turn puts pressure on rents, which are at their highest ever levels. Numbers of socially rented homes are falling. Many Britons expect to spend their lives in insecure, expensive and sometimes substandard rental accommodation.

All of this has effects on relationships, families, well-being and quality of life. If 60 per cent of your income goes on rent, that fact will dominate whatever other financial gains and losses come your way. There’s a new class division—generational and regional, as well as social—between property haves and have-nots.

The question is: can the ideas and methods of the 1940s help us now? The preferred option of recent governments—to “reform planning” and “slash red tape” in the hope that an unshackled private sector will build new homes of the types and numbers required—has failed. Is there then a role for a more interventionist approach, which includes such dread measures as compulsory purchase, state-led planning and large-scale public expenditure?

Labour in 1945 was heir to a history of public housebuilding that went back to the very first council homes, the 146 units built in the two four-storey blocks of St Martins Cottages in Liverpool, completed in 1869. This once-novel idea was encouraged by legislation towards the end of the 19th century that empowered local authorities to provide housing. After the First World War, it was boosted again by the demand for “homes for heroes”, which led to the creation, for example, of the 26,000-home Becontree Estate on the eastern edge of London.

The post-war government was also influenced by the writings of Ebenezer Howard, first published in 1898, which called for the creation of garden cities: “wholesome and beautiful” communities of 32,000 people where buildings and nature, and industry, agriculture, homes and leisure, would be harmoniously integrated. Howard was in turn shaped by the American political economist Henry George, whose popular book Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, argued that wealth in property was social rather than private. It was, he said, a creation of the collective building of such things as businesses and infrastructure, and that this wealth should therefore be turned through taxation to public benefit. Howard’s garden cities depended on a version of George’s theory: they would be funded through capturing the “unearned increment”, the uplift in value that came with development, and turning it not to private profit but to public assets such as parks and educational institutions.

Labour’s policies from 1945 emerged out of a ferment of debate about the ways in which a better society might be built after the Second World War, driven both by the approximately two million homes destroyed or damaged through bombing and the decades-long desire to replace urban slums with more salubrious and less crowded places to live. Such was the interest that British prisoners of war created a “town planning group” in Stalag Luft III, the camp made famous by The Great Escape. The Labour administration passed several acts of parliament with the aim of achieving well-planned development and state-built housing. The politician in charge was Nye Bevan, whose remit as minister of health included housing, reflecting a belief that your physical wellbeing is inextricably connected to the place where you live. The creation of the National Health Service and the building of decent homes were two aspects of the same project.

The aim, said Bevan, was to “solve, first, the housing difficulties of lower income groups.” The “problem of the higher income groups in the matter of housing” had, he believed, “been roughly solved” before the war by the private sector. Quality was for him as important as quantity: “we shall be judged in a year or two by the number of houses we build”, he said, “but in ten years’ time we will be judged on the type of houses we build.” He believed that new developments should achieve the “living tapestry of a mixed community”, social segregation being “a wholly evil thing.” If, he said, “we are to enable citizens to lead a full life, if they are each to be aware of the problems of their neighbours, then they should all be drawn from different sections of the community.”

The means to his government’s ends were extensive and sometimes drastic: requisitioning and compulsory purchase; public subsidies and low-interest loans; and a requirement to local authorities that only around 25 per cent of new homes could be built by the private sector. There was a “development charge” whereby developers had to pay the whole of the increase in land value following planning permission and development. The latter proved unworkable and short-lived, but in general the policies were effective. Between 1945 and 1951, 800,000 council homes were built and—as Macmillan’s words and actions demonstrated—the change in political attitudes lasted a generation.

There were the new towns, launched by an Act in 1946, created by publicly appointed development corporations armed with powers to buy, plan and develop land, who could invest upfront in the roads and schools and other essentials of a new community. These were funded with the help of the uplift in value that came through investment in infrastructure and the change of use of land from agricultural—which, by turning this uplift to public benefit was effectively a version of Howard’s “unearned increment”. Low-interest government loans assisted the process. Thanks to this method, the entire new towns programme ultimately cost the Treasury little or nothing.

Then, alongside this promotion of construction and development, came equally consequential legislation aimed at limiting it. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 introduced the requirement to gain planning permission. While individuals might own land and buildings, the rights to develop them were effectively nationalised, and would be selectively returned to landowners when they got permission. The idea of green belts, which originated in the early 20th century as a means of giving the urban poor access to nature, was expanded and fortified. Underlying the endeavour were the aims of alleviating urban squalor and overcrowding, providing new homes and protecting the countryside from sprawl, all under the benign direction of government.

That was then. Now we face another housing shortage, albeit for different reasons than aerial bombardment and an inheritance of Victorian slums. The current problem is one of affordability and access to housing. Meanwhile, half of the 1940s legacy—the one about planning and building driven by the public sector–has largely been dismantled. The other half, about restriction and control through the planning system, including the protection of green belts, remains powerful. What was meant to be a complementary relationship between development and control has become adversarial. An opposition has grown up between the interests of those who would benefit from new homes and those who want as little change as possible to their views of the countryside.

A major cause of this crisis is the way that governments, going back to Thatcher, have encouraged house price inflation, celebrating it as a sign of economic virility, and exploiting it as a source of (somewhat illusory) growth. Fiscal policy, such as the absence of tax on the capital gains you might make on your own home, encourages owners to invest as much as they can in it. Quantitative easing, and low interest rates set by the Bank of England, have further pushed investment towards capital assets, including housing.

In times of crisis, instead of allowing values to adjust—as believers in the free market should do—governments have rushed to prop them up. In the aftermath of the 2008 crash the coalition government introduced Help To Buy, in which it loaned first-time buyers money to cover their deposit. During Covid, Rishi Sunak temporarily suspended stamp duty on the first £500,000 of a property. Both measures were introduced in the name of helping first-time buyers—as in some cases they did—but the main effect was to increase prices and thus the main beneficiaries were housebuilding companies and people who already owned.

There is also a straightforward issue of supply and demand. The population of the UK, in the very possible event that it returns to pre-covid and pre-Brexit levels of increase, could rise at a rate of more than 600,000 people a year, which would on average require about 250,000 additional homes annually.

In theory this ought not to be too hard, given that only 6 per cent of Britain is built on—a figure that includes parks, gardens and other green spaces within towns and cities—and that buildings themselves occupy 1.4 per cent of the land area. It would take only a sliver of the remaining 94 per cent to meet the need. In practice, of course, it is extremely difficult, due to the ferocious opposition that new development arouses, especially in rural and green belt areas, and the reluctance of private housebuilders to construct homes at a rate that would reduce the price of their product.

Nor is it simply a matter of churning out residential units. Successful communities need schools; places of work, community and leisure; parks and infrastructure. They need a range of homes and tenures and different levels of affordability—Bevan’s “mixed communities”—and not just the lucrative private homes that the big house-building companies prefer to provide. As the planning barrister and author Hashi Mohamed has pointed out, austerity-driven cuts to local authorities have left planning departments under-resourced, which places a further drag on building.

Where such communities might go is a vexed question. The official preference, since Tony Blair’s government if not before, has rightly been to develop brownfield sites first, and at high density. As a result, cities like London and Manchester now have thick clusters of residential towers on ex-industrial land. But even Blair’s government set a target that 60 per cent of development should be of this sort, which left a sizeable 40 per cent to be built elsewhere. Most of the more viable brownfield sites have since been built on, leaving a remainder that are challenging and expensive to develop.

The obvious alternative is to build on land in the designated green belt around cities and on greenfield sites outside them. This is an idea that is and should be approached with extreme caution, as the limiting of sprawl and the protection of the countryside are huge successes of the British planning system. But it’s not tenable to insist forever on lines drawn 60 or more years ago to define the edges of cities. Given that the London green belt is three times the area of the city itself, it’s not outrageous to propose that a small proportion of it be given over to alleviating the capital’s expansion.

Most of this land, it’s true, is in some way spoken for. It’s part of someone’s view, or walk, or livelihood, and the resistance of nimbies to almost everything is the more understandable given the mediocrity of most new housing, and how little it gives to the communities it adjoins. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

New developments can bring the population that helps keep schools and pubs and bus services alive, and can provide homes within reach of younger generations. Done right they can improve the local environment. Nine years ago, the urban design consultancy URBED won the Wolfson Economics Prize with its proposal of Uxcester Garden City, an imaginary extension to an existing city.As well as being a sustainable mixed-use development with public facilities and public transport, it would transform dull and ecologically impoverished fields into public parks.

Uxcester Garden City plan, prepared as part of the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize. Image credit: David Rudlin

It’s easier to achieve the numbers and quality and amenities required by building at scale, rather than in small incremental additions, which is one reason why the concept of new towns (which should include large extensions to existing towns and cities) keeps coming back. Starmer has talked of a “new generation of Labour new towns”. The idea is not fantasy. The developers Urban&Civic, with the Wellcome Trust, are successfully building the 5,982-home Houlton, outside Rugby, and have several similar projects on the way. The North-West Cambridge Development, (also known as Eddington), backed by the city’s university, will, when complete, provide 3,000 homes and 2,000 student bedspaces. Poundbury, the Dorset-backed extension to Dorchester initiated by King Charles, includes about 2,000 homes. All are genuine towns, not just agglomerations of units, with public buildings and spaces and networks of streets that encourage walking and cycling.

There are even realistic ways in which this building can be paid for. For example, one way could be an updated version of the capture of land value that built the post-war new towns, which went back to Howard’s “unearned increment”. In this scenario the government sets up development corporations that buy land, draw up plans, obtain permissions, install infrastructure and, in partnership with the private sector, build, sell and rent out homes. In the process the value of the land goes up many times, which in principle means that the whole undertaking can be self-financing or even profitable. It needs both a long-term view and significant upfront investment, neither of which are within the capabilities of most commercial house building companies.

New towns, though, are not going to address housing need all by themselves. If the target, as both Starmer and Sunak have said, is to build 300,000 homes a year, that would require an unfeasible annual output of over 50 Houltons or nearly three Milton Keynes. There is also the crucial and under-discussed question of the environmental impact of this construction. Will Hurst is managing editor of the Architects’ Journal, which started the Retrofirst campaign to encourage the reuse of existing buildings. “No one at the top of politics,” he says, “is aware that you can’t build 300,000 houses a year and hit the country’s carbon target.” According to one study, building at this rate, combined with emissions of existing stock, would use up 104 per cent of the UK carbon budget by 2050.

It is therefore essential to work out ways to address the housing crisis that don’t involve digging holes and pouring concrete. Given that the current situation is partly a creation of economic and fiscal policies, it would be nice, if over-optimistic, to think you could fix it with financial wizardry, without laying a single brick. Future chancellors could as a minimum avoid the measures that have pushed prices up and make it a stated goal to keep house price inflation to zero. Stamp duty, which acts as a brake on older people downsizing from their family homes, could be reformed. A tax—albeit an electorally challenging one—could conceivably be introduced on under-occupied homes.

Starmer talks of a ‘new generation of Labour new towns’

It is equally important to encourage the re-use of existing buildings as homes. The abolition of VAT on renovations and conversions (which, absurdly, encourages demolition) would be a good start. So would the promotion of intelligent adaptations of redundant office and retail space—that is to say, something other than the tiny and barely habitable residential units that developers have carved out of commercial buildings, as a result of the government’s decision to remove the need for planning permission for such changes of use.

There’s also an opportunity in the fact that the housing crisis is regional in nature. The problems of affordability and supply are particularly intense in London; cities including Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol; and some rural areas, especially in southern England. All over the country there are very similar housing types—Victorian terraces, interwar semi-detached—whose value might vary by a factor of 10 or 20 depending whether they are in Fulham or Gateshead. There are also more redundant industrial buildings that haven’t yet been converted, like their cousins in London, to apartments. Historic England estimates that 42,000 homes could be created out of empty northern textile mills.

One might hope—though thinking on this is sketchy—that hybrid and remote working might enable some employees to live further away from big expensive cities, especially London, and thereby disperse the pressure on prices. One might also hope that a future government would actually be able to achieve some of the promises of regional regeneration contained in this government’s “levelling up” agenda.

The world now is very different to how it was in Bevan’s day. The war engendered both faith in large-scale public endeavours (if you can pull off D-Day, then building Harlow and Stevenage shouldn’t be too hard) and a sense of being all in it together, from which modern nimbyism has travelled very far. The colossal increase in property prices since then means that there is much more at stake for those who think the value of their homes is threatened, and opponents of development are more organised, resourced and motivated. There is also a climate emergency.

It also has to be acknowledged that plenty went wrong with the mass house-building programme he initiated. As council estates became housing of last resort, serving those to be considered in greatest need, they created the social segregation that he abhorred. It is no longer politically or practically feasible, as it was for him, to sweep away swathes of inner cities and rebuild them with council housing. It is surely possible, though, to learn from past mistakes.

Now, as then, there is serious housing need, and an opportunity—social, economic and political—in putting it right. It will take courage and skill and the sort of determination that previous governments have managed to find for roads, railways and airports. Bevan had those qualities, and many of his ideals and methods are as good now as they were in his day. The alternative, of letting this situation drift on forever, will lead to continuing immiseration and stagnation.

Rowan Moore is the architecture critic for the Evening Standard

Law

A law unto herself

Nemone Lethbridge smashed the glass ceiling to become a criminal barrister in the 1950s. What she did next—befriending the Kray twins and marrying a convicted murderer who wrote plays with Ken Loach—no one could have predicted

By Duncan Campbell   December 6, 2023

Photography for Prospect by Sarah Lee

Sue Carr was sworn in as the chief justice of England and Wales in October, the first woman to hold that post since the office’s inception in the 13th century. The news was warmly welcomed by another woman barrister who blazed her own remarkable path through the criminal justice system nearly 70 years ago.

Nemone Lethbridge, now 91, chuckles as she recalls how remote such an appointment would have seemed when she was first called to the bar in 1956. Such was the attitude to women barristers that at her first chambers she was told that because the men felt uneasy about sharing their “facilities” with a woman, she would be required to use the lavatory in a nearby café. She did this for the next four years.

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she says at the home she shares with her son and his family in Stoke Newington, northeast London. “But I find that a lot of women had the same sort of experience even 20 years later.”

Lethbridge has led an extraordinary life. She has experienced the law at its very worst and its very best. She has seen close-up those most affected by it, defendants and victims, lawyers and lawmakers. She has defended and befriended some of Britain’s most notorious criminals. She was a pioneer, in more ways than one—and when we meet she has more than a few stories to tell.

A child of the Raj, Lethbridge was born in 1932 in Quetta, now in Pakistan, the daughter of a captain in the Bengal Sappers. Her father would later become the chief of intelligence in the postwar British Army of the Rhine and was a key figure in obtaining evidence for the Nuremberg trials. She was in Germany with him as a child during this period, and he took her to see the bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun had died.

She was educated in England, initially at a grim preparatory school where the headmaster was a creepy abuser. At her next, a Church of England school, she was a rebel. “Although I was baptised into the Church of England, I simply couldn’t tolerate an institution that had been founded by Henry VIII,” she says. “When everybody in my school was confirmed, I refused. I was a communist at the time and thought I was going to be the first communist prime minister of Great Britain.” But then she became—and remains—a practising Catholic.

She went to Somerville College, Oxford, and was one of only two women studying law at the university. Friends there included Ned Sherrin, later the producer of That Was The Week That Was, and Jeremy Isaacs, later the first head of Channel 4. “Ned used to take me out—I didn’t know he was gay, people were very much in the closet in those days.” Having graduated and passed the necessary bar exams by 1956, she sought work as a junior barrister and found to her dismay that this was a very male profession.

Nemone Lethbridge represented Frank Mitchell, aka the Mad Axeman

“What did disappoint me was the reaction of Gerald Gardiner, who went on to become lord chancellor in the Labour government. I went to see him and he said, ‘I’m very proud of you. I think you’ve done a wonderful thing. But I don’t take women in my chambers’.”

One of her father’s colleagues at Nuremberg, David Maxwell Fyfe (Lord Kilmuir), recommended her to the barrister Mervyn Griffith-Jones: “His instinct was to turn me down but his senior clerk had seen the letter from Kilmuir.” The clerk suggested that, while they might be obliged to accept her, she represented “an experiment which doesn’t have to be repeated”. He looked her up and down and insisted that she remove her nail varnish, telling her “this is the Temple, not the Palladium.” Griffith-Jones would later become famous for his role as prosecutor in the 1960 obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

One of Lethbridge’s first jobs was to appear for the Kray twins, England’s most notorious gangsters. She met them for the first time in the magistrates’ court in Stepney Green, accompanied by their redoubtable mother, Violet. They had been charged with attempting to break into cars. “I’m their mum, they’re innocent,” Violet informed Lethbridge. She was impressed that, even after a night in the cells, the twins were immaculately turned out and “Brylcreemed to glossy perfection”.

Ronnie Kray told her that car theft was beneath their dignity as he and his brother, Reggie, owned three clubs. He assured her that “we’re starring in the film of our life story, which is going to be directed by Joan Littlewood.” They were duly acquitted. (Later, Lethbridge attended, with the Krays, the premiere in Stratford of Littlewood’s hit musical Oh! What a Lovely War.) Thanks to the Krays’ network, she was never short of work. Initially she imagined that she was winning her cases because of her advocacy, but gradually realised it might have something to do with the regular presence of scar-faced heavies at the back of the courts.

Even after a night in the cells, the Kray twins were ‘Brylcreemed to glossy perfection’

One client was Frank Mitchell, later known as the “Mad Axeman” because he had held a couple up with an axe. “He was quite a sad person with a big, smiling, flat face. I took my little sister to Wandsworth prison with me to visit him. It was very naughty of me, I said she was my junior. He said, ‘The Krays have been so kind to me, they gave me a lovely watch and now they’ve sent me two lovely ladies,’ and then he kissed both our hands.” On this occasion, Mitchell had been charged with stabbing a fellow inmate. The Krays sat in the court when Lethbridge represented him and—remarkably—many of the witnesses said that they could not now be sure that it was Mitchell who had carried out the attack. He was acquitted.

To celebrate, the Krays invited her to their home in Bethnal Green, where Ronnie tried to press wads of £5 notes into her hand. When she explained she was paid by legal aid and couldn’t accept the money, they said they would get her a crocodile handbag instead—“the last thing I wanted,” she says. Mitchell was later murdered on the Krays’ instructions.

Another client was Ronnie Knight, then the husband of actress Barbara Windsor, whom Lethbridge secured an acquittal for on a robbery charge.

One evening in 1958, Lethbridge went to a pub in Belgravia with a friend from her chambers. “My friend said, ‘I want you to meet the most fascinating man in London’.” This was Jimmy O’Connor, who had been sentenced to death for murder in 1941, a crime he always denied. The death sentence had been halted at the last moment by home secretary Herbert Morrison, but he served 11 years and was now fighting to clear his name.

Lethbridge also represented Ronnie Knight, then husband of actress of Barbara Windsor

In her memoir, Lethbridge describes their meeting as Desdemona encountering Othello. “Not love at first sight but fascination at first sight,” she says now. “Jimmy was a great raconteur and very funny.” The pair married secretly in Dublin in 1959, but when the news became public, she was asked to leave her chambers and became a pariah in London’s legal circles.

She and Jimmy moved to the Greek island of Mykonos and had two sons, Ragnar and Milo. Jimmy had already established himself as a television playwright, thanks, strangely enough, to the encouragement of a former police officer. His first play commissioned by the BBC, Tap on the Shoulder, was directed by a young Ken Loach, who went on to direct several others, including Three Clear Sundays. This was about a man sentenced to death, and attracted 11m viewers. “He’s terribly nice and we’re still in touch,” she says of Loach. O’Connor was described in the Guardian as “perhaps the most important writer from prison since Bunyan.” Lethbridge says now: “I treasure that quotation.”

Lethbridge embarked on a playwriting career herself, and describes her 1966 television play The Portsmouth Defence as “a bit of a revenge on the bar”. It became a trilogy.

Lethbridge exuded the sort of charm, wit and engagement that must once have won over juries

When the Krays stood trial at the Old Bailey in 1969 for the murders of George Cornell and Jack “the Hat” McVitie, she and Jimmy were commissioned by a publishing house to cover it. “They wanted a book, but it didn’t happen because Jimmy and I fell out.” Their marriage ended because of Jimmy’s drinking and its effects, but they would later reconcile. He died in 2001, aged 83.

After the Krays’ convictions, Lethbridge kept in touch with Ronnie, visiting him in Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital, after he was certified insane. She recalls one visit: “the man who acted as Ronnie’s ‘butler’, dressed in a white jacket, came up to me and said, ‘would you like Assam or Earl Grey or PG Tips? And would you like a meat pie? They warm them up lovely here.’” Ronnie “had a boyfriend there and he asked me to do an appeal for him.” One time he gave Lethbridge “a teddy bear sewn by his own fair hands”.

We had first met in the Blind Beggar pub in east London, where Ronnie had shot Cornell dead. Lethbridge instantly exuded the sort of charm, wit and engagement that must once have won over juries and magistrates.

Lethbridge’s son Milo helped her to publish her memoir, Nemone: A Young Woman Barrister’s Battle Against Prejudice, Class and Misogyny, a frank and entertaining read that ends in the 1960s. She also wrote a book of poems, Postcards from Greece. One entry, “The Rent Boy’s Song”, is about Roy Cohn, who was counsel for Senator McCarthy in the 1950s during his pursuit of communists and later adviser to a young Donald Trump. They met on Mykonos in the 1960s. “He was a very nasty piece of work who would take out famous women in America but come to Mykonos in the summer to pick up blonde boys in his white Jeep.”

Who were the greatest barristers? She says Jeremy Hutchinson “was the best, very funny, very effective”—he defended Soviet double agent George Blake, Christine Keeler of the Profumo affair, great train robber Charlie Wilson and drug smuggler Howard Marks. George Carman, who defended Jeremy Thorpe and starred in countless libel cases, “was very good”. Victor Durand “had a beautiful speaking voice” and Jean Southworth, who had been at Bletchley Park during the war, “was very good and never received the recognition she deserved.”

Despite the playwriting success and work for BBC Two as a television presenter in the 1970s, Lethbridge wanted to return to the bar. “It was 18 years before I could.” She then represented Winston Silcott at the Old Bailey, who was applying for bail in a murder case; he was later charged and eventually cleared of the murder of police constable Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Tottenham riots. With another barrister, she helped to found the Our Lady of Good Counsel Law Centre in Stoke Newington in 1995. It’s open for walk-ins on Saturday afternoons, and she still gives advice there every other week.

“It’s a vale of tears now,” she says of the legal profession. “When they had their strike the average earnings for a young [criminal] barrister were £12,200 a year. It really frightens me because, in 30 years’ time, who are going to be the judges? It means that only people with a rich daddy or a private income can do it now. It’s going right back to Victorian times. I just detest this government.”

Her days with Griffith-Jones have now led to a tradition for women barristers. “One day I was going to the Old Bailey with Mervyn in his Jaguar. I had a nice pair of pink kid gloves which my mother had given me. He looked down at my hands and said, ‘Pink gloves, Nemone, at the Old Bailey!’ I had to take them off —only white or black! A few years ago, Katie Gollop KC thought this was very funny, so she went and got some long white gloves, now known as ‘the Lethbridge gloves’. Every year they have a raffle for the new women ‘silks’ [King’s Counsel] and I’m allowed to pick the recipient [of the gloves] from the hat. The new batch of women silks are very impressive, very forward-thinking.”

She is busy on volume two of her memoirs. With the criminal justice system in catastrophic disarray, what better time for Lethbridge, who confronted the legal profession’s failings decades ago, to tackle them once more—gloves off?

Duncan Campbell is a former Guardian crime correspondent and author of “We'll All Be Murdered In Our Beds: The Shocking History of Crime Reporting in Britain” (Elliott & Thompson)

Health

Bad medicine

In their effort to eradicate malaria, scientists must counter not only mosquitoes, poverty and war—but a vast, criminal industry of fake or substandard drugs

By Sarah Boseley   December 6, 2023

© Shutterstock, Alamy

It’s a “wicked problem”, says Paul Newton. The Oxford professor of tropical medicine is talking about the faking of drug treatments, a counterfeiting business that has none of the naughty charm of a rip-off Gucci handbag. By wicked, he means that it is difficult: “it’s really hard to know quite how to prioritise what should be done.” But it is wicked in the other sense too. One struggles to imagine how anyone could knowingly be involved in such a trade without evil intent. Fake drugs kill. They most often kill children.

People who are aware of faked medicines may associate the term with Viagra, which has been illicitly copied and sold online to shy or unwary punters around the world. But while linking drug counterfeiting with pills for sexual performance can make for grabby or grubby headlines, it devalues the true problem. Erectile dysfunction is a distressing condition, but it’s not a killer. Malaria is.

Around 600,000 people die of malaria every year—the majority of them small children—despite the existence of very effective drug treatments called ACTs, or artemisinin-based combination therapies. Tu Youyou, a Chinese scientist, won the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, derived from the plant Artemisia annua, in 1972. In her Nobel lecture in 2015, she called it a gift from traditional Chinese medicine to the world.

If children who have contracted malaria are given artemisinin compounds—some form of artesunate combined with a second antimalarial to thwart resistance in the malaria parasite—they should survive. If they get falsified drugs, containing little or none of the original active ingredients, these children, often already underweight and malnourished, may die. And the malaria parasite, treated with a minimal amount of the drugs in a fake or substandard pill, can develop resistance to the treatment, so that the real thing will no longer work. In this way, the deadly trade in fake drugs is undermining the world’s efforts to eradicate malaria. Ironically, many of the falsified antimalarials are made covertly in China. A gift given with one hand, taken away by the other.

There are two sorts of drugs that don’t work: those that are deliberately faked or falsified, packaged in boxes with convincing batch numbers and labels; and those that are substandard, most likely because of poor manufacture.

For some years, there was dissension and confusion at the World Health Organisation (WHO) over what to call faked medicines—a hangover from the battles over drug patents for the antiretrovirals used to treat HIV and Aids. In the early 2000s, Aids campaigners backed the use of generic HIV drugs. These were cheap but identical copies of patented medicines made by Indian companies who defied Big Pharma and exploited legal loopholes in intellectual property (IP) rules to manufacture affordable drugs for low-income countries.

For patients around the world, the chances of getting a drug that doesn’t work are high

The multinationals, wanting to protect their patents and the profits they made in affluent western countries, lobbied against generics companies, depicting the low-cost firms as denizens of a new Wild West—rule-breakers making counterfeit pills that were potentially below par. This angered campaigners for access to medicines, who saw generic drugs as lifesavers for people in low-income countries. The row over terminology spilled into malaria control. “There were lots of accusations that the innovative industry was using the word ‘counterfeit’ as a way of countering increasing use of generics. That caused an enormous kerfuffle, in Geneva especially,” says Newton, who heads the Medicine Quality Research Group at Oxford.

In 2017, the WHO settled the question by labelling dodgy drugs as “falsified” when they have been manufactured with a criminal intent to deceive, or “substandard” when they contain unintentional errors (sometimes “terrible examples of gross negligence,” says Newton).

For patients around the world, the chances of getting a drug that doesn’t work are high. According to the campaigning organisation Fight the Fakes, one in 10 medicines in low- and middle-income countries is thought to be either substandard or falsified. In a report in February 2023, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that as many as 267,000 deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa are linked to falsified or substandard antimalarials and nearly 170,000 additional deaths are down to falsified and substandard antibiotics. That’s almost 450,000 needless deaths, mostly in children, every year. The cost to the struggling health systems trying to treat those people whose drugs are not working is said by the WHO to be between $12m and $45m.

These are wide estimates, perhaps because there’s no exact way to count the number of fake or substandard drugs on the global market, just as it is impossible to enumerate the fake Rolex watches sold worldwide. But every now and then, a successful effort by the authorities gives us a glimpse of the way the trade works.

In June 2012, a ship from China arrived in Luanda docks in Angola. On board was a container of loudspeakers, in which were hidden 1.4m packets of two important drugs. Some appeared to be the gold-standard antimalarial combination treatment, artemether-lumefantrine. The label said they had been manufactured by the Swiss-based Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation, and they also bore the logo of the Affordable Medicines Facility, which funds antimalarials for low-income countries. The other packets were of a de-worming treatment for children, labelled as mebendazole, manufactured by Janssen-Cilag.

There were no active pharmaceutical ingredients in the antimalarial tablets. The de-worming tablets contained no mebendazole. They did, however, contain levamisole, a drug that had been withdrawn from human use because of side-effects and was at the time being used to “cut” cocaine. In a 2014 letter to the Lancet on lessons from the Angola haul, Newton notes that the presence of this drug “suggests links between criminals who produce narcotics and those who produce falsified medicines.”

© Shutterstock, Alamy

But the story of dodgy drugs goes beyond organised crime. The UNODC says, in its report, that “investigations have uncovered a variety of actors involved in the illicit medical product trade. Traffickers include pharmaceutical company employees, public officials, law enforcement officers, health agency workers and street vendors.”

Who are these people and how can they bring themselves to make money from children’s suffering? Dr Bahijja Raimi-Abraham, lecturer in pharmaceutics at King’s College London and founder of the university’s chapter of Fight the Fakes, says she struggles to understand their motivation. “Some of the counterfeited products are high-grade pharmaceutical level. [The producers] have thought about the tablet, the formulation and all this stuff, but they’re putting talcum powder in there. Then there’s the effort to make the label look right, to make the bottle look right, to make sure, if it’s a solution, that there are no particles. I guess this is me being very idealistic, but I can’t believe that anybody can be so evil.”

The powers of one drug after another have waned, as parasites evolved to overcome their effects

It’s hard to get to the dark core of the business. Those who are arrested tend to be the foot soldiers, the guys storing packets in a garage or delivering the goods. But Ian Lancaster, a holograms expert who has been heavily involved in challenging the faking of medicines with the WHO and others, and who now runs a consultancy, says that brand counterfeiting, including medicines, makes big money for criminals. “It’s much more lucrative for them than illegal drugs, and not nearly as heavily policed,” he says. “A counterfeiter is a counterfeiter is a counterfeiter… They don’t care what they are counterfeiting, if they can make money at it.” The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center was partly funded by counterfeiting, he says, as in part was the IRA.

To make a fake medicine, though, you need the know-how and the equipment and chemical components. This is not an enterprise undertaken in somebody’s kitchen. There are stories about pharmaceutical factories in China that manufacture legitimate pills in the day and switch to lucrative fakes once the night shift takes over. Lancaster, who rails against “the lack of policing by brand owners of their contract or subcontract producers,” says this third shift is “notorious”. On a trip to Mumbai, he was invited out one evening to the local market by somebody from one of the major pharmaceutical companies, who showed him all the high-end branded clothing on sale. It was the same as the genuine article but had been produced on the night shift, out of quota. “While these people were simply doing a third shift for something they were legitimately producing, it was an easy step to work for Mr Big and go from trafficking those clothes to saying, well, I think I’m gonna do medicines as well.”

Alice Sherwood, in her recent book Authenticity: Reclaiming Reality in a Counterfeit Culture, accuses governments of moral culpability. China is “allowing—even encouraging—[artemisinin drugs] to be counterfeited,” she writes. “A nation that can land a mission on the moon, that can lock up a city and throw a cordon sanitaire around 60 million people, can surely track down the diluters and counterfeiters in its midst.” But western governments are also to blame, for increasing their own quality checks on Chinese medicines but looking the other way as they are shipped to malaria-endemic countries.

Drug falsification is as old as medicine itself. Quinine, the earliest malaria drug, started to be falsified in the 1800s. The cinchona bark, from which it comes, was faked as early as the 1600s. In Carol Reid’s film The Third Man, based on Graham Greene’s story, the character Harry Lime smuggles fake penicillin in post-war Vienna. His best friend Holly Martins is persuaded to entrap him after police take Martins around wards of sick and dying children, harmed by the drugs. Greene’s fiction was based on fact: the arrest of seven men and three women for manufacturing fake penicillin in Berlin in 1946. The vials and bottles they sold were filled with other drugs (including antimalarials) and with face powder and were probably also contaminated.

As much or more damage to the malaria effort may be done by substandard drugs as by fake ones.  Substandard pills are those that contain the right active ingredients, but perhaps too little of them to kill all the parasites. Artemisinin monotherapy—artesunate on its own without extra antimalarials—is still sold and used, in spite of warnings from the WHO that this can accelerate the malaria parasite’s resistance to treatment. That building of resistance has long been a problem: the curative powers of one malaria drug after another has waned, as parasites have evolved to overcome their effects. Worrying signs began to be detected in the artemisinin compounds in western Cambodia in the early 2000s, when increasing numbers of parasite infections were slow to clear.

Nick White is one of the world’s leading malaria experts and a professor of tropical medicine at Oxford, though based at Mahidol University in Thailand. He says that falsified and substandard drugs are not the only problems for malaria control. “I think [malaria control] is going well in places where you deliver healthcare well, and it’s going badly in places where you deliver healthcare badly, because of a combination of war, corruption, inefficiency, the usual things that affect low-resource settings.”

He has advocated for mass dosing of populations while the drugs are still effective: giving ACTs to the communities at highest risk, to prevent them getting malaria. The fewer people there are with malaria, the lower the chances that a biting mosquito will pick up a malaria parasite from their blood and pass it on to its next victim. “We did it in the Greater Mekong sub region. We did it in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. It worked,” says White. Malaria is now stable there.

Success was down to more than mass treatment, he says. In villages where mass dosing did not take place, farmers, shopkeepers and others with standing in the community were designated as health workers who could do a rapid diagnostic test for a feverish child and give out drugs when necessary. “They’re identified in that community. And that’s the key intervention that has been incredibly successful in controlling malaria across Southeast Asia, but it has not been adequately implemented in Africa where [prescribing medication] is still the old-fashioned district hospital type thing,” says White.

© Shutterstock, Alamy

The mass treatment programme also worked in the most malarious region of Myanmar, but war has since compromised healthcare and allowed a resurgence of the disease. “You have completely disrupted infrastructure. You can’t even go to the next valley without being shot, so you can’t deliver the product,” says White. “Malaria always prospers under those circumstances. You look where malaria is bad. It’s where there’s war.” He lists the countries where cases are mounting: northern Nigeria, which now has a diphtheria outbreak too. Then there’s the eastern DRC, South Sudan and across the Sahel. Healthcare weakens or collapses under the strain of conflict, and malaria returns.

White and colleagues aim for a treatment cure rate of 90 per cent—and ideally 100 per cent. “The more failures you have, the more quickly resistance spreads... There’s a little bit, you don’t see it… and then suddenly it takes off,” he says. He is now advocating for triple antimalarial combination drugs—an artemisinin compound with two others—instead of the current double. He also thinks there’s a need to better identify the people most likely to fail on treatment. Those are the people with the most parasites in their blood. Old-fashioned microscopy showed that up but the new tests, better in many ways, do not.

It’s not just the tablets they have to worry about, either. The parasites have also developed resistance to the impregnated bednets—and the mosquitoes have become sneaky, White says. “They bite you before you go near a bed, and they’ve got a better chance of surviving than if they bite you when you’re in the bed. So you get these behavioural changes in mosquitoes.”

Excitement around the recent approval of a second malaria vaccine may have caused some people to assume that the long struggle against the killer disease is nearly over. The Oxford vaccine will reach far more children than the Mosquirix vaccine we already have, because it will be manufactured in millions of doses by the Serum Institute of India. But both vaccines require three or four shots, a hard ask for African families living far from a clinic, and will work best when given just before the malaria season starts. Only time will tell how well the vaccines protect children in practice.

Fighting malaria is hard, there’s no doubt about it. The problem is a complex combination of human behaviour, poverty, war and displacement, climate change and the evolution of mosquitoes and their parasites. Fake drugs make the fight so much harder.

Newton and his team are using their ingenuity to beat the criminals at their deadly game, employing forensic techniques that include DNA and stable isotope analysis to find those responsible. Fake drugs contain traces of the environment in which they were made. They may even contain human DNA—although identifying whether it’s the DNA of the drug-maker, or an innocent passer-by, is harder.

Another tool of detection is social network analysis, tracing the origins of fake drugs using the same techniques that are employed to track the poaching and smuggling of African ivory. “Quite surprisingly, there hasn’t been much innovation in trying to work out where fake medicines come from,” Newton says. “The social network analysis… is inspired by work on the illegal wildlife trade, where colleagues use publicly accessible reports about where (for instance) elephant ivory went to try and work out which were the places where enforcement may wish to do more interventions.”

The pharmaceutical companies don’t always make public what they know for fear of damaging confidence in their products. The Angola haul of 1.4m packs of fake drugs was revealed finally only on Facebook, five months after it happened.

Medicines regulatory authorities need to be able to take tougher action, says Newton. In 2011, he and colleagues called for the WHO to use the International Health Regulations (IHR) to designate bad medicines as a global health threat—a categorisation more normally applied to pandemics—to try to stop the spread of resistance from Asia into Africa by making more resources available, and alerting all countries to the issue. “We are woefully ignorant as to how best to tackle poor medicine quality in different situations and there has been a damaging lack of public health, civil society and political will to tackle the problem, which those combating the fake cinchona bark and quinine scandals in the 17th-19th centuries would have found puzzling,” they wrote in the Malaria Journal.

While the WHO did not invoke the regulations, it has charted a clear path now that the thorny issue of IP has been put to bed. In 2013, it launched its Global Surveillance and Monitoring System (GSMS) which collects reports of falsified and substandard medicines. Two landmark reports from 2017 spell out the dangers and the progress that has been made, citing major incidents such as the toxic cough syrup containing levomethorphan, a drug five times stronger than morphine, that killed 60 adults in Pakistan in 2012. When 44 children were admitted to hospital in Paraguay the following year with breathing problems, a WHO team identified that they had been given an identical toxic cough syrup and were able to sound the alert and stop its production.

The WHO reports set out what must be done to strengthen those countries’ drug regulatory bodies, which struggle to keep up with globalised medicines supply, while educating professionals and the public on the dangers of fake or inferior drugs and how to spot them. Yet experts say there is still a long way to go. In 2018, delegates to the first-ever international Medicine Quality and Public Health conference, held at Oxford University, called in a statement for more investment, effort and transparency. “Substandard and falsified medical products… represent a significant and growing threat to human health,” wrote the signatories in a letter to the Lancet in November 2019. “In the face of mounting harm, regulatory bodies are alarmingly underequipped”. They called for political commitment. “With significant human health and economic consequences at stake, urgent action is needed now,” the writers concluded.

Within a month, the first case of Covid would be identified in Wuhan, China, and new batches of fake medicines would soon arrive in global pharmacies. Interpol’s Operation Pangea, which works on pharmaceutical crime, made 121 arrests across 90 countries in the week that the WHO declared Covid-19 a pandemic. “The illicit trade in such counterfeit medical items during a public health crisis, shows a total disregard for people’s lives,” said Interpol’s secretary general Jürgen Stock.

The malaria experts may agree—and perhaps add that the disregard has been going on far too long. There is a roadmap now, as a result of the WHO and the Oxford statement, for dealing with faked and inadequate drugs. The question is how many of the players in this dark trade—from politicians, to medicines regulators to pharma bosses—will follow it, inspired by the possibility of ending many thousands of unnecessary deaths, and how many will sit back and allow the toll to keep on rising.

Sarah Boseley is an award-winning journalist and writer who was health editor of the Guardian for more than two decades, until 2021

World

In Taiwan, China is covertly preparing for battle

Ahead of Taiwan’s elections, Beijing is amping up its campaign of intimidation, disinformation and cyber attacks. Such tactics fall short of outright war—but only just

By Elizabeth Green   December 6, 2023

Chinese warships and airplanes now regularly cross the median line of the Taiwan Strait—an unofficial buffer. Image: Eyepress News/Shutterstock

Preparations for Taiwan’s presidential elections on 13th January are in full swing. The eight-year tenure of Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, is ending. Buildings and billboards are plastered with the beaming faces of the remaining presidential candidates. In the coming weeks, they will stage grand campaign rallies, complete with elaborate performances and laser shows.

The festival-like atmosphere jars with the purported stakes of the competition: for Taiwan’s political heavyweights, the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Kuomintang (KMT), the vote is a choice between autocracy and democracy, or war and peace.

Taiwan is a flashpoint for great power conflict. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) regards Taiwan as an inalienable part of its sovereign territory, and “reunification” as an “inevitable requirement for realising the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Beijing would prefer a peaceful reunification with Taiwanese “compatriots”, but if Taiwan crosses the PRC’s “red lines” and moves towards formal independence, Chinese law enshrines the right of the Communist Party (CCP) to respond with violence.

Despite growing geopolitical isolation and aggression from the island’s expansionist, communist neighbour, Tsai has nurtured Taiwan’s hard-won democracy with cool determination. For Beijing, the rule of her pro-sovereignty, independence-leaning DPP has become ever more of an affront. Accordingly, the CCP’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric about unification has been accompanied by the rapid modernisation and development of their armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). This includes advanced missile systems, capabilities in cyber warfare and in blocking adversarial forces from entering a theatre of war, and the further expansion of what is already the world’s largest navy. Shortly before stepping down, former Chinese premier Li Keqiang announced a military budget of 1.55 trillion yuan (roughly $224.8bn) for 2023, explicitly calling for heightened “preparations for war”.

Hives of analysts spend their days gauging how these threats could escalate, and for good reason: a potential invasion could start World War Three. The US, though not legally bound to defend Taiwan in the event of Chinese invasion, has implicit defence commitments to the island encapsulated by the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act—though these commitments are intentionally left vague. This shroud of “strategic ambiguity” allows the US manoeuvrability and dissuades both unprovoked attack by China and unilateral declarations of independence by Taiwan. Still, Taiwan sits at the heart of the security architecture and trade routes of the Asia-Pacific region. To abandon it would be to unravel US influence in the western Pacific. The US has sold arms to the Taiwanese military for decades and Joe Biden has, on multiple occasions, let it slip that America would support Taiwan with its own military against coercive force. For Beijing, gambling on US intentions could be fatal.

The possibility of clashing with a US-led coalition, along with the logistical obstacles of deploying forces by sea, serves as a strong deterrent for the PRC. The Taiwan Strait is 110 miles wide and whips up 20ft tidal surges. Chinese troops who managed the tricky amphibious landing would encounter miles of bogs, mountainous terrain and Taiwan’s potent asymmetric defence networks, which use unconventional tactics and technologies in an attempt to counter a military that is roughly 14 times the size of its own. Success would be far from guaranteed; any failed attempt would be catastrophic. Diplomatically, a violent annexation would risk international isolation for Beijing, inviting sweeping sanctions and lasting diplomatic rifts. Economically, an invasion would further weaken China’s faltering economy and jeopardise its standing in the global market. Consequently, a forceful “unification” likely poses too great a threat for both the stability of the CCP and its grander strategic ambitions—that is, for now. Analysts and senior US figures, including CIA director William Burns, US secretary of state Antony Blinken and the former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Philip Davidson, have predicted that the PLA will be war-ready by the centenary of their founding, in 2027. In the meantime, Beijing is covertly preparing the battlefield.

Russia, Iran and China do not perceive war and peace in binary terms, instead operating fluidly in the “grey zone”. Labelled variously as political warfare, sub-crisis manoeuvring and hybrid warfare, grey-zone activities are coercive statecraft actions below the threshold of armed conflict. This nebulous realm exists between peaceful diplomatic engagement and outright warfare, allowing revisionist states to shift the status quo through a subtle blend of political, informational, technological and economic tactics. These methods often deviate from internationally accepted norms and are calibrated to advance these states’ interests little by little—without triggering armed combat or providing a casus belli. The emphases are on ambiguity and gradualism, allowing room for plausible deniability. For example, the Kremlin’s actions before its annexations in Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014) exemplified the grey-zone approach: in Georgia, it backed separatists and staged military exercises, and in Ukraine, it deployed unmarked troops— “little green men”—to seize the Crimean parliament, thereby achieving strategic gains while denying involvement.

The PLA have similarly mastered the grey zone. Chinese military thinkers drew pivotal lessons from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, noting the transformative impact of precision munitions, real-time intelligence and surveillance systems, and electronic warfare in the US-led coalition’s victory. From this, they predicted the centrality of information in modern warfare, an idea that transformed traditional conceptions. Now, the battlefield is everywhere, and encompasses all economic, financial, technical and informational domains. A new warfare paradigm emerged, with PLA colonels advocating the use of every means at a nation’s disposal to “compel the enemy to accept one’s interests”.

President Tsai, whose term ends in January, has overseen the cultivation of a vibrant civil society, pioneered same-sex marriage in Asia, and led an impressive Covid-19 response. Image: Chris Stowers/Panos Pictures

In 2003, China incorporated the “Three Warfares” (三戰, sanzhan) into its PLA Political Work Regulations, formalising this shift. This strategy comprises public opinion warfare (輿論戰, yülunzhan), aimed at aligning global and domestic narratives with Beijing’s interests; psychological warfare (心理戰, xinlizhan), intended to sap the morale of enemy forces and exploit internal divisions; and legal warfare (法律戰, falüzhan), the manipulation of legal frameworks to serve China’s geopolitical aims.

These offensive operations function in concert as what’s known as the peacetime employment of force, tilting the geopolitical balance in line with China’s interests while undermining the political, ideological, psychological and legal domains of its adversaries. It constitutes a continuous, long-term reconfiguration of the battlefield that falls under the threshold of overt conflict, and lays the groundwork for swift victory. The ideal is to win without fighting (不戰而勝, buzhanersheng).

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, China deployed tools of public opinion warfare in the west through multilingual media, social media platforms, government officials and online networks, deflecting pandemic blame and spreading narratives insinuating the US created the virus as a bioweapon. In Xinjiang, psychological warfare is given the form of random arrests, frequent inspections, forced labour, digital tracing and mass internment, terrorising the ethnic Uyghur minority under the pretext of combating extremism. The 2020 National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong, characterised by its vague criminalisation of various acts and extraterritorial reach, exemplifies the PLA’s legal warfare, providing Beijing a veneer of legal legitimacy with which it can suppress dissent globally and project power beyond its borders while claiming to uphold “national security”.

Taiwan is effectively on the front line of Beijing’s grey-zone warfare tactics. It is what Georgia and Ukraine were to Russia: a real-world testing ground, an “R&D laboratory” for sustained and multi-pronged covert and overt influence, espionage and interference campaigns. These tactics, perfected in Hong Kong and Taiwan, are then deployed against other democracies. In the UK, for example, the Intelligence and Security Commission (ISC) has sounded the alarm about Beijing’s penetration into every sector of the British economy and academic institutions, noting it now exerts undue political influence, suppresses criticism of the CCP and uses UK intellectual property to enhance its military capabilities. These tactics have set the UK on track for what the ISC has called a “nightmare scenario” of losing control over its sovereign interests.

In Taiwan, Beijing aims to convince Taiwanese people that unification is inevitable and irresistible, balancing its deployment of coercive measures to constrain decision-makers with incentive-driven approaches to “win Taiwanese hearts and minds”.

In mid-October 2023, crowds flooded Taipei’s central boulevard to demand peace across the Taiwan Strait, frantically waving flags emblazoned with the “blue sky, white sun, and wholly red earth” of Taiwan. A gruesome video had mobilised them: a soldier massacring scores of civilians and consigning them to a mass grave (ostensibly taken from the war in Gaza, though according to Eve Chiu of Taiwan FactCheck Foundation it actually originated from Syria’s civil war in 2013). Its Chinese caption read: “This is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not a movie! This is war. People have nowhere to escape, families are destroyed.” Sinisterly, the footage had been repurposed to propel the narrative of a pro-unification rally—that peace must be preserved at all costs—denouncing the DPP as warmongers and demanding an end to their rule in 2024.

Taiwan’s information ecosystem swims with this type of disinformation, compounding deep-seated ideological divisions about the country’s relationship with China. This rift manifests in a political spectrum polarised between “blue” pro-engagement parties under the KMT and the DPP-led “green” China-sceptics. Each side discredits the other using propaganda, creating fertile ground in which disinformation injected and amplified by PRC agents flourishes.

According to an analyst from Doublethink Lab, a Taiwanese NGO investigating PRC global influence and information operations, the PRC exploits vulnerabilities in Taiwan’s open, free and relatively unregulated media ecosystem, intensifying longstanding debates and muddying the truth. Previously, fake or deliberately misleading journalism created in Chinese “content farms” was relatively simple to identify, because of its clumsy phrasing and lack of originality. However, since 2018, the PRC’s tactics have shifted significantly, and are now underpinned by extensive data collection and advanced artificial intelligence technologies. This has resulted in the amplification of comparatively convincing content that appears to originate from sources within Taiwan. Tailored, misleading messages and unverified rumours are spread widely through bots and trolls, flooding social media and the popular messaging app LINE, where they are further circulated by unsuspecting Taiwanese users. The aim is to “Lebanonise” Taiwanese society, intensifying existing societal divisions by fostering confusion and fear. Beijing’s revised approach enables it to better elude detection by Taiwan’s vigilant civil society.

Additionally, in line with a Mao-era policy known as “using civil actors to promote political ends”, Beijing targets and co-opts individuals with economic, cultural or political influence—often social media influencers and artists—to disseminate narratives that spread discord in Taiwan’s media environment. The DPP is portrayed as inherently corrupt and responsible for Taiwan’s societal challenges, such as wage stagnation and rising youth unemployment. Parallel narratives question the Taiwanese military’s competence, undermining trust in its defence capabilities. The “American scepticism narrative” (疑美論, yimeilun) paints the US as an opportunistic ally who will abandon Taiwan. This narrative is especially pernicious given the island’s geopolitical isolation, ambiguous status in international law and its vulnerability—acknowledging the CCP as the only legitimate Chinese government and de-recognising Taiwan is sine qua non for establishing diplomatic relations with mainland China. Taiwan’s diplomatic allies have therefore been whittled down to just 13 governments, and it is barred from participation in multilateral organisations such as the UN and WHO, where it could otherwise defend its interests. All roads lead to Rome, and the “master narrative” is that Chinese and Taiwanese are one family and should be united—vote for blue, or “Taiwan will be the next Ukraine”.

The ‘master narrative’ is that Chinese and Taiwanese are one family and should be united

Beijing’s pollution of Taiwan’s media environment is accompanied by another form of psychological warfare: constant military intimidation, including daily incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ)—a buffer between international and Taiwanese airspace—and naval drills in the Taiwan Strait. Following former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in 2022, the PRC launched a 10-day military exercise, Operation Joint-Fire Strike, where 11 ballistic missiles were launched near the island. Similarly, following a visit to New York by William Lai, Taiwan’s vice president and the DPP’s 2024 presidential candidate, whom Beijing has menacingly branded a “troublemaker” separatist, China initiated air and naval patrols around Taiwan.

Military demonstrations overtly display China’s power and resolve, but the PRC’s covert use of civilian vessels allows for a more subtle, yet persistent, form of pressure while furthering its military objectives. Fishing fleets and research vessels loom in the contested waters of the South China Sea and around Taiwan, conducting maritime militia operations, surveillance and data collection. This grey-zone strategy of combining direct military aggression with disguised maritime presence asserts China’s territorial claims and complicates international responses by blurring the lines between civilian and military engagement. These threats serve dual purposes: they not only degrade Taiwan’s military equipment and deplete its resources but also aim to instil a perpetual sense of crisis.

If this were not enough, Taiwan endures around 20m cyber-attacks every day, predominantly from China. The establishment of the Strategic Support Force (SSF) within the PLA, consolidating space, cyber and electronic warfare capabilities, underscores Beijing’s emphasis on information control in any conflict scenario. In the event of invasion, the primary goal of the SSF would be to disrupt, paralyse or destroy Taiwan’s critical infrastructure, intelligence networks and military command systems, thereby gaining information superiority. During the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the PLA were unable to roll in tanks as they might have wished due to high levels of connectivity and, hence, visibility. In Taiwan, the emphasis is clear: in areas yet to be “liberated”, China plans a communications blackout, which could plunge the country into darkness and sever it from the outside world.

You would be forgiven for wondering how Beijing intends to win over Taiwanese hearts with threats, aggression and manipulative interference in its internal affairs. Has Beijing reached its Machiavellian moment in its operations against Taiwan, and realised that peaceful unification is a pipe dream? Bizarrely, no. As Tsunghan Wu from Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research explains, under Xi Jinping, the approach has evolved. China is now applying more intense pressure, and offering more enticements—in other words, harder sticks and juicier carrots. This strategy is manifested in economic statecraft, and is particularly evident in the “31 Incentives’’ of 2018, boosted by 26 additional measures in 2019, designed to beguile young Taiwanese entrepreneurs and professionals and foster closer integration of Taiwan’s economy with China’s. Additional seats for Taiwanese students are reserved at China’s prestigious Peking and Tsinghua universities, and handsome awards and funding are offered for Taiwanese scholars. But young Taiwanese must weigh the advantages of these lucrative offers and their career prospects in China’s vast market against potential compromises in their quality of life and freedoms.

Presidential candidate William Lai has softened his former pro-independence stance. Image: Daniel Piris/EPA/EFE/Shutterstock

Meanwhile, the PRC’s harsh takeover in Hong Kong and oppression of minority groups have alienated younger Taiwanese, fuelling a generational shift in favour of Taiwan having a distinct, autonomous identity. Greater support for progressive values and more connections with other liberal democracies have intensified Taiwan’s ideological divide from China. Recent polls indicate that less than 6 per cent of Taiwanese favour unification, while more than 88 per cent support the current status of de-facto independence.

The positions of the 2024 electoral candidates reflect this. The DPP’s William Lai, leading in polls at the time of writing and seen as the “continuity candidate”, has softened his former pro-independence stance and made assurances that he would not alter the status quo. In the blue faction, the KMT’s Hou You-yi, former police commissioner of New Taipei City, proposes a “three Ds” strategy for stability in the Taiwan Strait (deterrence, dialogue and de-escalation), indicating cautious optimism towards the mainland while also upholding the status quo. Independent candidate Terry Gou, founder of the iPhone assembling giant Foxconn, promised Taiwan economic and technological prosperity and a defence policy involving 80,000 robots (he’s since dropped out). For a while it looked as though the Taiwan People’s Party, led by former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, might break the longstanding KMT-DPP duopoly. Ko advocates pragmatic solutions to domestic issues and appeals to anti-establishment voters tired of the blue-green divide. These may be too few in number, but his judgement that Taiwan’s 24m residents do not want to think about the “China question” every day could still work in his favour—most people want higher wages and affordable housing.

Given the PRC’s acrimonious stance towards the DPP and their candidate William Lai (Zhu Fenglian, spokeswoman for the mainland’s Taiwan Affairs Office, has equated a vote for William Lai with “bringing war to Taiwan”), might we expect an escalation in China’s grey-zone tactics if it looks like they will win another term? Will Taiwanese people be scared into voting for the party most accommodating to Beijing? I asked Marco Ho of Taiwanese Civilian Defence organisation Kuma Academy. “No. The foundation of China’s current legitimacy in governance is expansional nationalism… Any military ventures or escalation of conflict depends entirely on the legitimacy crisis faced by the ruling authority. The stances of current candidates merely serve as pretexts for future Chinese actions rather than actual reasons.” The real indicator to watch, then, is how secure the CCP leadership feels in face of legitimacy challenges as it manages rising debt, plateauing economic growth and demographic decline—not the rhetoric of election candidates in Taiwan.

Taiwan’s fiercely competitive elections underscore the island’s commitment to democratic ideals and self determination—even as it resists grey-zone aggression from its anti-democratic neighbour. But, as Chiu emphasises, “What do you do in the face of a bully, when he keeps pushing you? You don’t beg him to stop. You stay calm and confident, and you make yourself so strong that he can’t touch you any more.”

Revanchist autocracies such as Russia and China seek to rewrite the rules-based international order through grey-zone warfare. To withstand it, values and institutions must be bolstered—and not just in Taiwan. This island’s battle to preserve its democratic system is part of a broader battle for liberal democracy and against authoritarianism everywhere. If it is to be won, allied governments should learn from Taiwan the best practices for neutralising grey-zone tactics, and share knowledge and technologies to assist its cause. Only with unambiguous, multilateral support from international allies, can Taiwan’s future be secured.

The writer has used a pseudonym to protect their identity

Elizabeth Green is a researcher focused on Chinese politics, cross-strait relations and security and defence issues. She has used a pseudonym to protect her identity

World

Vote for your World’s Top Thinker 2024

Vote for the person you think should take home title of World’s Top Thinker 2024

December 6, 2023

Illustration by Carlo Cardenas

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Culture

- Sarabande: a new short story by Oliver Soden

- In dreams I walk with you

- The Great Crash 2023

- Mário de Andrade, the troll of the tropics

- I ain’t got time to bleed

- There’s too much television

- Let’s hear it for the Scala

- A different kind of love song

- Classical notes: The sound of gunfire

- Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Politics & Reportage

- Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Ideas

- Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Lives

- Prospect’s books of the year 2023: History

Culture

Sarabande: a new short story by Oliver Soden

A sumo wrestler. A child. And a cellist’s solo performance for no-one—and everyone. An new original short story

By Oliver Soden   December 6, 2023

Illustration by Amyisla McCombie

Sitting on the low wall opposite the empty house, he leans the neck of the instrument back over one shoulder and clamps its body between his knees.

♦♦♦

He lost the fax that bore the news, and soon forgot its exact wording, which must have reduced complex information to its terrible essence. The details he found out much later. He had been playing, rather than practising—playing just for himself, which was always when he was at his best, gifting himself the music for nothing but his own pleasure, in the bright morning light of his apartment on the Avenue Georges Mandel, where the walls were lined with oil paintings and the windows faced southeast. He was watching the bow glide across the strings, the sound made almost visible by the wispy smoke of rosin that spurted from the collision of horsehair and steel, as if from a bottle of newly opened champagne. There was a trembling remnant of gritty coffee shiny and cold in a white bowl on a small table, next to the metronome, some pencils and a pile of spare strings held like preserved specimens in long plastic tubes.

♦♦♦

Sitting on the low wall opposite the empty house, he begins to play his cello.

♦♦♦

What he did not do, when he read the fax, was stop to think, although there was no urgency in the way he began to pack up the instrument. In fact, he was slow, without being especially reflective, as he closed the music on the stand, and laid the bow in the faded plush of the cello case, after unscrewing the end so that the horsehair went slack. Something in his mind had slackened too, gone almost numb. The fact of what he had read seeped slowly through his consciousness, without any resulting emotion. He had no thoughts—merely knowledge, which may have meant that he had no second thoughts either, explaining what he then did, which was so bizarre, and so inevitable. There was nothing else to be done, and he did not consider doing anything else. But he was not quite sure what he was doing, and he did not know precisely what he was going to do.

♦♦♦

The music has been going on for ever when it starts. A thread of sound, usually continuous though sometimes splitting into two or even three, and occasionally snapped off to begin afresh, emerges from the strings and dissolves into the air. The music is in a triple metre and it dances, though it would be hard to dance to. It clings to the lowest strings and the sound is a deep ache: sometimes there is bright colour in it, and sometimes it is bleached into grey and the street fades, just a little. The trills loosen everything that matters. Behind the cello, as if muffled by the heat, there is a smear of traffic noise. The music does not stroll or amble, and it does not rush; speed and time are irrelevant. Instead, each note has its place, at the right moment, a series of actors finding their light. A figure, too far away to be made out, stands for a second to listen, about 15 metres down the road, in front of the sinking sun. The figure makes an almost imperceptible movement, no more than a slight raising of the shoulders and arms, and then goes on its way. The heat does not fade. The music continues in its own climate.

♦♦♦

All the best friendships are unlikely and this one was more unlikely than most. And then again, perhaps not. Their lives were divided by two continents and a sea, but were bound into similar rituals of discipline and performance. They saw each other seldom. They rarely wrote to one another. When they did they wrote in English, their sole shared language. Phone calls were an expensive rigmarole. But it was a friendship that had intensified without their noticing, and neither of them could explain it. It was an odd pairing, he knew, not least for its physical dissimilarity: the cellist and the sumo wrestler.

He remembered when they had met, but could not chart the gradual progression from acquaintance to friendship. Nor could he remember what had first sparked his enthusiasm for sumo. He realised it was an unexpected interest, and revelled in the surprise he inspired when explaining its grace and beauty, its ancient traditions. It was, he reminded people, an infinitely older practice than his own, and required an equal dedication. He liked its ritual and formality, revelling in its doughy ballet, the way it teetered between animal wildness and human elegance, the way a pirouette could disintegrate into a comedic thud, the ripples shooting through smooth flesh-mounds like underwater disturbance. The discipline with which any wrestler approached his craft, with a bulk that belied breathtaking flexibility, took his breath away. In his mind, he would often bless the concert platform with salt, to purify it—an imaginary ritual, taken from sumo, that honoured departed spirits.

He loved to perform in Japan, where they brought him flowers at the end of his encore, and clapped his performances in a unison rhythm. He liked the sea of shiny black hair reflecting the polished wood of the sleek concert halls, the brightness of the kimonos, the endless speeches that followed official receptions. Often he was thinking, with at least half his brain, even as the other half still thundered and shivered with the afterglow of some concerto or other, of a forthcoming wrestling match, and the grunt and skid of its own music. And he would make sure to drink hot sake with his friend the sumo wrestler, who, famous and celebrated now, worshipped even, lived in Tokyo with his wife and children. Mitsugu never seemed to take an interest in music, though he sat politely through concerts and bowed afterwards and made a show of delight that never seemed genuine. But that didn’t matter; it was almost pleasing. Their wives got on perfectly well, and took charge of greetings cards, and made sure to enquire after the doings of their children on the few occasions when they met as a quartet. But, although nothing was ever said, it was understood that the friendship was really a duo, of two masters wedded to an art, and welded by an understanding of dedication.

♦♦♦

There are very few people on the street. No crowd gathers. The driver has got out of the cab and now leans against it, wondering when this person lugging his instrument around Tokyo will realise his friend is not there, and ask to be taken to the nearest hotel. He does not know to whom the house belongs. He watches the short, balding, rather portly cellist playing, though does not recognise the music. He is not especially moved or excited, and in fact thinks the whole gesture a strange one, like a busker playing on any street corner. He can hear that the man can play well and fluently, but his attention is held more by the oddity of proceedings than by the power of the music. At the back of his mind there lurk questions about payment for this long job. The driver has a daughter who is learning to scratch out tunes on a small violin and he notices, almost with a laugh, the absence of little coloured stickers on the neck of the cello to show the man where to place his fingers. The choked giggle is to fend off what has threatened to become a terrifying intimacy.

♦♦♦

Galina Pavlovna was in Washington; in another room a housekeeper clattered; but, otherwise, he was alone in their Paris apartment on this bright morning in June, while the ornate trellis of the three Juliet balconies thinly sliced the sunlight onto the floor. Solitude was unfamiliar to him. The stretches of his life that he did spend alone were confined to dozing in aeroplanes or navigating the bland luxury of foreign hotels. Mainly it was a whirl of functions and orchestras, managers and musicians and acolytes in almost constant attendance. In another life, his dacha had been perpetually full, a constant to-and-fro of family, the paraphernalia of children and instruments, the piano sounding almost constantly amid voices raised in debate and anger and pleasure. And, for a time, there had been the curious presence of Aleksandr Isayevich, and the strange, even exhilarating, atmosphere, not of terror exactly but of unease—and foreboding.

He took the cello he had been playing that morning, one of a number he owned and not his best. When it was safely stowed, he moved swiftly: spoke to the housekeeper, dashed to the bedroom, put some clothes in a small wheeled suitcase with a washbag that he kept permanently packed for travel. He picked up the telephone, booked the usual car and, in the wait for its arrival, phoned both his daughters, as if for reassurance. Olga was in America and he had paid no heed to the time difference. She did not answer. Elena was in Paris, and the line was noisy with the cries of children. He told her he loved her. Ya tebya lyublyu.

When the car arrived an hour later, he made sure, as always, that the cello was leaning at a 45-degree angle against the back seats, wrapped in a green blanket. There were no seatbelts in the back of the car, and he wedged the base of the instrument under the front passenger seat, which he then sat on himself. His mind was elsewhere, and the driver realised his passenger was not going to talk a great deal beyond his usual request that the car radio be switched off. They made the journey to Charles de Gaulle in a silence that was not awkward. The fax, the news it had conveyed, pulsed silently in the stuffy car. The driver smoked a cigarette and wheeled down his window.

♦♦♦

He is absolutely calm, which gives him an odd professionalism. His hands are sturdy and powerful, the fingers long, his nails edged with thin crescents of dirt picked up on the flight. His cuffs are fastened with buttons rather than links. Occasionally his watch face flashes light out of the music as his hand wobbles on the string to make the sound tremble and shiver. The cello shudders on the long ferrule of its endpin, which does not seem as if it can support the weight. There is a scraping noise as the bow catches on the lowest string during a little rising phrase that works the melody upwards from darkness. The notes, the sound they make, are simultaneously woven of grief and of solace, roving through interlocking key signatures, as if from room to room of some abandoned house. F major. D minor. Each its own world. A universe of compassion. Sometimes there are many voices in the music, sometimes only one, in dialogue with itself. There is no argument in it. It is beyond analysis and virtuosity, beyond emotion perhaps, as it unravels, not tugged along but moving of its own accord. The sudden awareness of tragedy goes hand-in-hand with some great capacity for joy. In daring to express all that is unbearable and agonising, the music offers a world worthy of endurance.

♦♦♦

The airport routines were second nature, and some of the staff recognised the familiar figure with his small wheeled bag and his cello, which he manoeuvred easily. But this time, unusually, he was quite alone. This time, even more unusually, he had no pre-booked ticket. The next flight to Tokyo, they told him, was in seven hours. No matter: he paid for two one-way seats in first class without registering the cost, handing over his international pass for stateless persons. He stood, leaning against the counter, stateless and exiled in his shirt and tie, in the airport’s strange no man’s land, on the outskirts of Paris. Around him, citizens nonchalantly handed over powerful little booklets of belonging.

He kept the instrument with him, and went to the familiar first-class lounge, and sat with some fizzy water on a table by the window, watching the bubbles coat the little wedge of lemon. The blue-and-red ink of the Air France insignia on the soggy paper coaster was distorted and magnified through layers of glass and ice. He did not read, and realised that he still had no real plan beyond waiting for the hours to pass. He thought constantly of the information that had scrolled flimsily out of the white box with a beep and whir that he heard still. Later, he was to learn, or perhaps imagine, more: the cry from Akimoto, Mitsugu’s wife, and the tiny four-month-old body in the wooden cot, with not a mark on her, seemingly asleep were it not so clear that she was dead, even before they touched the slightly curved fingers of the small hand with its tiny fingernails, and found them cold. Beneath the black floss of her hair, one of her eyes was open: a shiny jet pebble, edged with white. She was their fourth child, and she had died for no reason, from no cause; she had simply stopped breathing, and so she had died. Her coffin, filled and covered with orchids, was impossibly small, and Mitsugu went into the honbasho with prayer beads draped round his neck.

♦♦♦

He is wrestling the sound, and with the instrument that produces it, lest either overwhelm him. Yet the strenuousness takes no effort. The music weeps for the illimitable human capacity for pain, from which he is calmly extracting some tiny kernel of elation. His shoulders are still, the music comes from his elbows and his wrists, and when an open string is played and his left hand is not needed it drops briefly to his side. His thin lips are slightly parted, with the lower jaw jutting, tongue moving from side to side. He is not performing from memory; “by heart” may be nearer to it, or perhaps just tuning into something that has always been there. The notes are in his bone marrow, and he no more has to think about what his two hands are doing than he would if he were -eating. The -technicalities of playing have little to do with what it is he is trying to say.

♦♦♦

The plane took off, landed to refuel, took off again. Ears crackled and burst. The hours passed, and he needed little to fill them. The cello was leaning up against the seat next to him. Company. Taking flight always, for him, had a double sense; he had many homes, and did not know where home was. In the air, it mattered less. A stewardess cooed over the cello as if it were a child, and brought champagne, which he drank to make himself sleep. Smoke from cigarettes and cigars wafted around the cabin, and he did doze, waking with a start to check the cello was still there (though where could it have gone?). Fragments of music played in his head—Bach, Dutilleux, Shostakovich. In his bag was a score of Tchaikovsky, and he took it out and looked idly at the opening page, hearing its low scurry of semiquavers very clearly in his head. But he was drawn inexorably back to the small hand, the tiny fingernails, the loss that would have to be carried through life by his friend, the champion wrestler.

He knew Narita airport well but was usually collected by a car, and he walked some way—a strange figure now, with his bulky instrument—in search of a taxi. He was rumpled, fatigued by the shallowness of his mid-air sleep, his ears still bubbling. He had flown in-and-out of nights and days and was fiddling with his watch, trying to prise up the stiff catch at the side of the dial that would allow him to swivel the hands forward, forward, into the late afternoon of a Japanese summer’s day, just 24 hours since the news had arrived on another continent, 6,000 miles away.

The address was written in his diary, but there was no question of being collected; sumo wrestlers, he knew, were not permitted to drive. The third taxi he asked was willing to make the journey. He was able to obtain a wodge of yen from an airport bureau, with the driver as halting interpreter. Wide awake now, he groped for his glasses, the better to revel in the rush and glitter of Tokyo, which always thrilled him. The air was damp with heat, and he sat in his shirt sleeves, longing for the traffic to pick up speed so that a rush of hot wet air would burst through the cab’s open window. He watched the crowds of people beneath the blaze of billboards, the symbols from the unfamiliar alphabets rose-gold in the afternoon light. The scene was of a speed and urgency unknown to the lazy elegance of Paris, but the palette was muted compared to the American stridency with which he was so familiar: the clothes more sombre, the pavements cleaner, the movement of the crowds more regimented. The streetlamps, not needed, nevertheless began to click on, warming from amber to white as they drove across a series of suspension bridges.

♦♦♦

His mind is drenched in the sound, but as often when he is playing it drifts and splits of its own accord, backwards to the mundanity of breakfast, sideways to an infant’s corpse. The tuning of one of the strings is still awry: some of the higher notes have curdled.

♦♦♦

The nightlight in the bedroom at Baku. Sleeping in my father’s cello case. Suitcases after gunfire, and my baby hands, reaching up to piano keys. Playing this piece in London long ago, quelling the shouts of the crowd with the music, with tears on my face as the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, and as I saw, through the silver mist of the music, the killing, and the killing, and mourned for a nation. Letters on headed notepaper that pulled our lives up by the roots. Names toll. Galina. Olga. Elena Mstislavna.

♦♦♦

His meetings with Mitsugu, who had not been allowed an independent dwelling until he was married, usually took place in restaurants or bars in the city centre. He had visited the wrestler’s house just once before; it was close to the sumo stables in Sumida. The large concrete cube of the building had tramwires slicing across it, and was softened only by two maple trees either side of the door, though there was a hint of further greenery on a balcony to the side, and he remembered a terrace at the back, and fountains. The cab parked in the black-paved courtyard, and he asked the driver to wait. There were no windows in the wall that faced the street. He pressed a buzzer by the black front door, where the glass was covered with the dense mesh of a metal grille that prevented the hallway from being seen. It had not occurred to him that the family would be out; it had not occurred to him even to consider whether the fax had been sent a day, a week, or an hour after the child’s death. But he was unsurprised when, even on a second and then a third push of the buzzer, nobody answered. On the spur of the moment, he had flown without announcement or warning across the world to see his friend, and his friend was not there. It did not matter. It might have been possible to speak to a neighbour, or ask the driver to find the stable, or track down one of his numerous acquaintances in Japan. Had he gone to the concert hall, he would have been greeted with reverence. But he did not think to do any of this.

He returned to the car and got the cello out of the back seat, snapped open the case, unhooked the bow, and then shucked the wooden instrument from the velvet lining of its pod. He crossed the road so as to sit down on a low wall that divided the series of front yards from the street, supported the cello with his body so as to tighten the hairs on the bow and, unwrapping the ruby pellet of rosin from its slippery silver cloth, he rubbed it up and down the hairs in a squeaky hiss of dust. The rosin caught the remnants of the day’s sunshine but seemed to take in the light rather than reflect it; some cloud deep within seemed to shift and swirl.

The cold of the plane and the heat of the Japanese summer had sent the instrument out of tune, and he took time adjusting each peg on the cello’s neck, winding and unwinding the four strings to the correct pitch, with the endpin anchored in its holder. In his sweaty shirt sleeves, the 62-year-old man with balding head and large, thick-rimmed spectacles completed these time-honoured rituals opposite the nondescript and empty house of his friend. He bowed his head, ever so slightly, as if mentally blessing the road with salt.

♦♦♦

In just five months’ time he will repeat this gesture, playing on into the night in front of the world’s press, sitting on a guardsman’s rickety chair in front of a bright scribble of angry graffiti, as a crowd of people step from East to West. A deafening tumble of concrete; broken glass at his feet. For now, as he sits on the Tokyo street and the day darkens round him, he is making his own private act, unhistoric: an offering for a friend who was not there and for a life that was never lived. He could have done nothing else. So he suffers. And exults. The orchids wither in the tiny coffin, amid the incense of the temple. The sound accepts its impermanence in the hope that its effect might be longer lasting. He sits alone in his music, glowing amid the matte faces of the dead, the jostle of absences for whom he plays, who seem to be plaiting unheard harmonies beneath the music’s single thread. That such total solitude should create such communion.

It seems to finish but there is a further note, some reminder of finality on the lowest string, and then there is a silence, and then it is over. He sits very still for a long while, his eyes closed. The neck of the cello suddenly soughs like a branch in wind and, in doing so, scythes through some invisible chain or thread—and cuts it. A world dissolves. Distances are restored. The buildings in the street return to their proper place and the distant rumble of Tokyo, temporarily stilled, returns.

Something indefinable that the music had etched onto his face shifted and then disappeared, like a change in the weather. He held the instrument with his upper body and let his arms fall down by his side, palms upward. Six minutes in all: a gesture of helpless compassion. He got up from the wall almost briskly, stepping out of the world in which he most belonged and back into the street, where life had to continue. The sky was navy; the night oily with heat. He saw the driver begin to move but held him still. And kissed him, once on each cheek.

Then he asked to be driven through the neon sparkle of night-time Tokyo, its lights reflected by warm pavements and hot roads and great towers of iron and glass, not to a hotel but back to the airport so as to catch the next flight back to Paris. And he assured the driver that there would be payment for the long round trip, and for the strange wait outside the house of the famous wrestler whose baby had died. Where, sitting on the dirty wall, a cellist had sent up a prayer for the dead, and for the living.

♦♦♦

“… when years later his friend, the Japanese sumo wrestler, Chiyonofuji, lost his baby daughter, Rostropovich found out, came with his own cello from Europe, and took a taxi to Chiyonofuji’s house without telling anyone, nobody, and sat with the cello at the front of the house, and then played the Sarabande of Bach as his prayer to Chiyonofuji, and to the champion’s daughter, who had just died. The taxi was waiting and came back to Tokyo Airport, which takes one hour and a half, and then he flew back to Europe. Can you imagine?”

Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello (BBC, 2011)

Oliver Soden is a writer and critic. His latest book is “Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward”

Books

In dreams I walk with you

A biographer can’t meet her 17th-century subject. Or can she?

By Francesca Peacock   December 6, 2023

A biographer‘s companion: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Credit: © Chronicle / Alamy

Six months ago, I found myself in bed with a 17th-century duchess. It was a rather crowded night—we were joined by her other titles and personae: a most esteemed “princess”, an “empress” and an “authoress of an entire world”—but I was less shocked than I might have been. Margaret Cavendish, the first duchess of Newcastle, the pioneering feminist author, philosopher, poet and scientist, had been my constant companion while I was brushing my teeth, standing on the tube, or (more explicably) sitting in the library for the best part of a year, during which I had been writing her biography.

The morning I woke up and realised I had spent the night with Cavendish was in a week of copy-edits: of changing individual words, moving semicolons and questioning the sense of every sentence I had written. Something about the process—one of literary stitch-ripping and subsequent repair—had brought her into my dreams again, months after I had written my way to the end of her life.

Over the course of the book, I had dreamed of Cavendish multiple times. She was never a spectral, ghostly presence, nor a particularly embodied one either. There were, sadly, no outrageous dresses in my room, or dazzlingly glamorous coaches outside my window. She had appeared to me mostly conversationally. Speaking with remarkable grace to a young upstart biographer— no duchess, empress or authoress of an entire world—she talked me through chapter structures, suggested lines of her work to quote, and, on one occasion, told me which words of hers should end the book.

These conversations didn’t happen every week. But they were regular enough that, despite their oddness, they went by almost unremarked. They were little more than an anecdote to tell friends when they asked me how the process was going, or a joke to tell my therapist, and my parents, when they worried how I was dealing with the pressure of producing a book (“I’m going crazy, but in an amusingly harmless literary way, I promise!”). I was never sure that anyone believed I was telling the truth.

There is, after all, something embarrassing about a biographer dreaming of her subject. It brings to mind the age-old accusation that the writer has “fallen in love” with her subject, with the corpse she’s reconstructing out of paper and ink. She’s no longer a neutral referee, marshalling the facts and material of a long-dead life, but instead is blushing at every letter she reads and, with the dedication of the besotted, trying to make the object of her crush appear in the best light possible. It’s an accusation that is meant to make the product—the biography—somehow flawed. Too unreliable; too emotional; too engaged with an act of distasteful literary necrophilia.

At her best, a compromised biographer could write flights of fancy in the way that, for instance, Peter Ackyroyd has (the novelist and biographer included one of his dreams in his experimental 1990 biography of Charles Dickens). At her worst, she could elide crucial facts in favour of reconstructing her subject as she would prefer to imagine them.

This is the point where I should say, “I am not crazy. I do not actually think Margaret Cavendish—a woman who has been dead for 350 years and lies in a tomb in Westminster Abbey—talked to me in my dreams.” I wish I could, without crossing my fingers behind my back. It would make me seem far more of a serious historian and a diligent, respectable writer.

Rationally, of course, I know there’s an explanation for my dreams: the subconscious works in weird ways and, in the face of a social life sacrificed to the British Library’s manuscripts room, my brain had decided to give me a little conversation, albeit that of a dormant kind.

And I have to admit there was—and is—a dangerous side to my imagination. In my waking moments, my vision of Cavendish became unmoored from her age; a figure who never, and could never have, existed. I started keeping long lists of her likes and dislikes in the notes app on my phone. (Likes: Florence and the Machine; “coquettecore” fashion all the rage on TikTok; Lana Del Rey; green gel pens; Mitski; Iris Murdoch novels. Dislikes: baggy cargo trousers; historically faithful productions of Ben Jonson’s plays; politicians quoting Latin). It is a credit to my publisher Neil Belton that, prior to this article, none of these ahistorical musings had made it into print.

Part of me cannot accept that my dreams and imaginings were just the products of an over-read subconscious

There’s an element of ownership here, in both my dreams and imaginings: with all the idiosyncrasies I conjured up for her, my Cavendish became unique, and mine alone. Nobody else has spent hours imagining the 17th-century author listening to Nina Simone on vinyl, or screaming along at the top of her voice to Lana Del Rey’s lyrics (“goddamn man-child, you fucked me so good I almost said, ‘I love you’”). It’s a 21st-century, more deranged version of Hermione Lee’s admission that she felt grief after finishing her biography of Virginia Woolf: “I felt she had been mine,” said Lee. (Obviously I don’t claim to be in the same league as Lee’s titanic work.)

Beyond my own love affair with my imagined Cavendish, these attributes I gave her in my mind had a more sinister impulse, one I tried to fight throughout the book. That is, the temptation to make a historical character—a woman, in particular—“relevant”; a figure who could be reduced to a slogan on the side of a tote bag. I believe, strongly, in preserving Cavendish’s historical contradictions: her moments of extreme radicalism (she wrote with shocking prescience on issues of women’s place in society) must be taken alongside her conservatism (she was a fierce Royalist; a believer in the “great chain of being”; and, among other things, a delightful snob). Did my imagined Cavendish—with a perfectly curated playlist in her AirPods and red-heeled Mary Jane shoes—still have these contradictions?

But, even with these caveats, a part of me cannot accept that my dreams and imaginings were just the products of an over-read subconscious. In The Blazing World—Cavendish’s brilliant, bizarre, protean early work of science fiction—she inserts herself into the work. The “Empress” (herself a veiled version of the author) wants a scribe for her mystical “Cabbala”. “The Duchess of Newcastle”—with her “sense and reason”—seems the most natural choice, and her soul is summoned from Earth to meet the Empress. In a moment of dizzyingly wonderful prose, the two travel through different worlds in winding, endless conversation and have steamy spiritual sex, which Cavendish assures herself does not count as cheating on her husband because it happened when they were divorced from their bodies and “immaterial” in another realm. It only happened in a dream, if you will.

In my more bizarre, self-indulgent moments, I let myself think the same happened to me: Cavendish and I met in a different world and we did have conversations about everything from feminist philosophy to the vagaries of publishing. Only, the dream-world leaves no traces; no proof to convince anyone other than me.

Does all this make my biography less reliable or less trustworthy? I very much hope not (and, I can assure any would-be reader that all facts came from archives and printed words, not Cavendish’s nocturnal whisperings). But biography is, after all, an attempt to capture a life. And, just for a fleeting moment, my sleeping mind had access to another.

Francesca Peacock is an author and arts journalist who writes for the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Times. She has an interest in women’s art and intellectual history, and her first book, Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish, will be published by Head of Zeus in September

Books

The Great Crash 2023

A verdict has been reached on the case and career of the crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. But is it possible to regard him differently?

By Ian Leslie   December 6, 2023

Busted: Sam Bankman-Fried arrives at his court hearing in New York in February. Image: Stephanie Keith / Bloomberg

REVIEWED HERE

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

Michael Lewis (RRP: £25)

Buy on Bookshop.org

On 2nd November 2023, the definitive judgement on Sam Bankman-Fried’s character came in. The founder of FTX was found guilty on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy by a New York jury. Bankman-Fried wasn’t merely a failed entrepreneur, as his lawyers had argued. He was a liar.

Just one year before, Bankman-Fried’s wealth was estimated at $26.5bn. FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange he started in 2019, had taken off like a rocket, as had his reputation. Statesmen, celebrities and titans of business came to pay obeisance to this scruffy prophet from whom dazzling disquisitions about the future of everything emerged like smoke. Bankman-Fried, who was in his late twenties but looked even younger, bestrode the world in cargo shorts. He held talks with the Bahamian government about paying off its national debt. He offered Donald Trump $5bn not to run for re-election.

Michael Lewis is an author who seems to get lucky in his choices of subject so often that you begin to suspect he might actually be good at choosing them. He found Billy Beane, a baseball executive who had adopted innovative techniques for talent recruitment, before Beane’s team went on a run of extraordinary success that changed the world of team sports. Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball was the result. When he started following Bankman-Fried, two years ago, he thought he was tracking the rise of another brilliant maverick disrupting an industry, in this case the one Lewis knows best and respects least—finance.

But, as Lewis was completing his book, FTX collapsed into bankruptcy. Over 10 days in November 2022, it became apparent that it was disastrously and illegally entwined with its sister company, Alameda. Bankman-Fried was arrested and indicted. Lewis now had his ending, but he also had a very different book to the one he thought he was writing. Had his hero suddenly become an antihero?

Bankman-Fried, who talked to Lewis at length and gave him access to diaries and other private material, was happy to reveal himself as a deeply odd person. He hated being a child and made almost no childhood friends. One he did make, through a shared love of maths, described Bankman-Fried as both “hyper-rational and extremely kind”. But he was generally regarded by his high school and college peers as aloof and apart, and he felt that way too. As an adult, he found a way to make his oddness work for him after discovering his talent for risk.

On graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in physics, Bankman-Fried joined Jane Street Capital, a boutique Wall Street trading firm, where interns were encouraged to play betting games among themselves, including with weighted coins, to inculcate the skill of thinking quantitatively about unknowable outcomes. Bankman-Fried was brilliant at this. He thrived in any game in which you had to make fast, calculated decisions with little information, especially those in which the rules changed as you went along. He started earning a lot of money as a trader.

But he felt he was wasting time. At MIT he had become a convert to effective altruism, a movement for social change, derived from utilitarianism, which seeks a mathematical basis for doing good. Effective altruists (EAs) believe in maximising one’s positive impact on the world. Sure, you could become a doctor, go and work in a poor country and save a hundred lives. But isn’t it better to get enormously rich so that you can pay for a hundred doctors and save 10,000 lives? To give at scale, earn at scale.

In 2017, Bankman-Fried decided to go big. He left Jane Street to start his own company, Alameda Research, and recruited a bunch of young traders who were also EAs. The bosses at Jane Street had been alarmed by this cohort of ideologically motivated bankers. Bankman-Fried dressed like a teenager, ate nothing but pizza and didn’t seem interested in acquiring a summer house in the Hamptons. That made it harder to seduce him with promises of riches, and easier for him to leave the firm for a start-up. “It wasn’t going to cut into his lifestyle, because he didn’t have a lifestyle,” a former Jane Street employee told Lewis.

Bankman-Fried pitched Alameda to similarly minded investors as a vehicle for making a lot of money and doing a lot of good. The question of how it would make money was secondary, but the nascent crypto market was fertile territory. Trading in these new digital currencies was largely unregulated, and the market was growing like crazy. Fortunes were being won and lost almost randomly. The time was ripe for a company able to bring analytical rigour to the market and yet take more risks than Wall Street firms.

Early on, Bankman-Fried fell out with his management team over what to do about $4m worth of cryptocurrency that went missing. The others wanted a pause in trading until they could figure out whether it had been stolen or lost. Bankman-Fried insouciantly insisted there was an 80 per cent chance it would turn up, and that they should therefore act as if they still had 80 per cent of it. His furious colleagues pointed out that if they never got the money back, nobody would accept this explanation: “Everyone is just going to say we lied to them. We’ll be accused by our investors of fraud.” Bankman-Fried hated after-the-fact arguments—the way that we look back on inherently probabilistic situations and pretend the outcome was certain all along. To his mind, it is always less clear in the moment who is right or wrong than we like to think afterwards. Hindsight is a deeply unreliable narrator.

One of Bankman-Fried’s favourite thought experiments goes like this. Imagine you have a friend called Bob. Bob is at a house party where someone is murdered. Nobody knows who did it. There were about 20 people there, and you have no compelling evidence on any of them. You are pretty sure Bob would never commit a murder, but one of those people did it. Since you are rational, you assign a 1 per cent probability to Bob being the killer.

The question is, how should you feel about Bob now? If you stay friends with him and he turns out to be guilty, that will seem bad. But the same applies if you cut him off and he turns out to be innocent. There is no obviously fair way to behave towards your friend. Bob is like a subatomic particle whose position cannot be determined; a spread of possibilities rather than a stable entity. Bankman-Fried believes this is what people are. They are not fixed characters with definite attributes—honest or deceitful, brave or cowardly—but probability distributions around a mean. You are neither the worst nor the best thing you ever did, even if you get judged on these outliers by society. A person should be treated as a weighted coin that hasn’t yet landed.

The story of FTX can be read as a parody of capitalism, with its mirrored promises and moral ambiguities

Bankman-Fried’s non-judgementalism was of a piece with his utilitarian outlook. When making moral judgements, utilitarians emphasise impersonal forces: society, situation, biology. Some go further, as Bankman-Fried does, and argue that blaming individuals is irrelevant or unfair, since what people do is always predetermined by these structural forces. Lewis’s account of Bankman-Fried’s life paints him as hyper-rational; as someone who never accepted inherited stories, like the greatness of Shakespeare, but fashioned all his opinions from first principles. Perhaps it is just coincidence that he arrived at the same highly unusual worldview as his parents. Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman were professors at Stanford University, and self-declared utilitarians. In 2013, Fried wrote an article for Boston Review entitled “Beyond Blame”.

There’s no doubt that Bankman-Fried was a singular person. He didn’t feel emotions, except a persistent sense of sadness. He had very little, if any, empathy. He stared blankly at people when they were talking to him, until he trained himself to move his mouth and eyes in a way he knew to be socially acceptable. He didn’t enjoy art or read any books except Harry Potter. But his sense of difference became an asset as an entrepreneur. It’s not so much that he was exceptionally intelligent—he was very smart, though not the smartest among his high-achieving peers—but that his alienation from the world gave him a unique perspective on it. He was also charismatic in his own way, a fluent talker who spun bewitching webs of words in the air. Investors found him mesmerising. An employee of FTX told Lewis, “Sam’s oddness mixed with just how smart he was allowed you to wave away a lot of the concerns. The question of why just goes away.”

In its early months, Alameda struggled, losing large sums of money on crypto trades. Bankman-Fried’s arrogant management style enraged his team. After the argument over the missing money, his EA associates tried to force him out. When that failed, they left and tried to ruin his reputation, “as a service to humanity”. But this apparent disaster proved to be a turning point. With Bankman-Fried in full control, Alameda started making a profit. What’s more, the missing money turned up (one of the departed managers admitted, “Ex-post I was wrong”). From then on, Bankman-Fried’s already strong confidence in his own judgement became impregnable.

In 2019, he decided to create a new company, separate from Alameda: FTX, a crypto exchange, with its own token. Bankman-Fried devoted his time to running FTX and appointed his girlfriend—Caroline Ellison, a former colleague from Jane Street—CEO of Alameda (Ellison later testified against him on the stand). The plan was to make FTX the world’s first legitimate crypto futures exchange, a place where established financial institutions would feel comfortable buying and selling. It proved to be the right idea at the right time.

Cryptocurrency markets were booming, despite not appearing to be built on anything but hype. Companies would launch virtual tokens, declare them valuable, and if enough people believed them, or believed others might believe them, they could make a fast profit. It was, in part, an ideological movement: true believers saw crypto as a way to smash a corrupt and self-serving financial system. Most financial experts were suspicious of everything to do with it.

That crypto peaked in 2020 and 2021 was probably not coincidental, the pandemic being a time when millions of people went quietly mad in multiple ways. Zeke Faux’s new book Number Go Up is a savage chronicle of the crypto fever dream. Faux never regarded Bankman-Fried as anything but a charlatan, and was surprised to see Lewis, who at one point interviewed his subject on stage at a conference, taking him seriously.

But Lewis was hardly the only one. Bankman-Fried became a global guru, the slouching avatar of a new financial order. His chubby face and frizzy hair became ubiquitous. Anna Wintour asked him to the Met Gala. He was invited to Congress to discuss crypto regulation. He moved FTX to the Bahamas, where he acquired a vast beachhouse in which his senior managers lived and worked. He commissioned architects to design and build a lavish headquarters, ordering a block of tungsten as a centrepiece at the cost of a quarter of a million dollars, because, well, why not? Within two years of starting up, FTX was worth more than $30bn.

All ears: Michael Lewis at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Florida. Image: Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Work on the new HQ had barely begun when FTX’s roof fell in. A leak revealed that a large proportion of Alameda’s assets—around $8bn—were comprised of the tokens issued by FTX, fatally compromising both companies. The crypto equivalent of a bank run was sparked, as traders rushed to sell FTX’s token, and FTX found that it couldn’t return the funds that had been placed with it. Bankruptcy swiftly followed. When the lid was lifted on FTX’s magic box, a grisly mess was revealed. Bankman-Fried and his team of earnest twentysomethings, fuelled by prescription amphetamines, had been running the world’s first grown-up crypto exchange like a student party.

The court case turned on whether Bankman-Fried had known about FTX’s and Alameda’s co-dependence and lied about it. The line between legitimate failure and fraud isn’t always easy to draw, even in retrospect. The same week that Bankman-Fried was convicted, another much-hyped business, WeWork, filed for bankruptcy in the US. Its founder received a multimillion-dollar payoff when he left, and was never found to have broken any financial rules. Crypto tokens have no inherent worth, but then neither does a $50 note or a stock option, even if the latter are guaranteed by institutions. The story of FTX can be read as a caricature or parody of capitalism, with its mirrored promises, moral ambiguities and magical transformations.

Before we get to finer details, let’s be clear: Going Infinite is a gripping, riotously entertaining read. Lewis, who writes plainly but not inelegantly, has a sure command of story, and stories do not come much wilder or more colourful than this one. He is relentlessly curious about people—about Bankman-Fried, yes, but also about the host of characters he encounters, each of whom is brought vividly to life. He weaves big ideas into the narrative without slowing it down. Going Infinite is a short book that packs a lot in—a model of efficiency, unlike FTX.

There are certain lacunae. Mr Bankman and Ms Fried were key sources for Lewis, and he presents them as intellectuals with no interest in money or prestige. We now know that Bankman took a job at his son’s firm and demanded a million-dollar salary, and that Bankman-Fried gifted him and Fried $10m in cash, with a $16m beachhouse in the Bahamas thrown in. According to a lawsuit underway, they accepted these gifts knowing that FTX was in a precarious state. This is the problem with utilitarianism—if you believe in the goodness of your ends with mathematical certainty, then all sorts of dubious means become justifiable.

It would not be true to say that Lewis gives Bankman-Fried an easy ride. He tells us about FTX employees who found Bankman-Fried evasive, manipulative and dishonest. He details, with gusto, the many ways in which Bankman-Fried sprayed millions or billions around on a whim, as when he paid a minor reality TV star $15m to appear in a few ads. You can’t come away from Going Infinite and think he was fit to run a company. What Lewis doesn’t quite do is arraign him as a fake.

Lewis includes a telling quote about Bankman-Fried from the chief Bahamian financial regulator, Christina Rolle: “It’s not hard to see you are being played by him, like a board game.” Critics of Going Infinite have suggested the quote applies to its author, who spent a lot of time with his subject and grew to like him, or at least be fascinated by him. But I think Lewis’s very inclusion of it signals that he is aware of that charge and wants to let the reader make up their own mind.

Does Lewis view Bankman-Fried as a cold-eyed scammer, as a case study in the limits of utilitarianism, or just as grossly incompetent? Or does he think about him like Bob—as indeterminate? My impression is that Lewis believes that Bankman-Fried’s quest for social impact was genuine, at least originally.

But I am having to guess Lewis’s true position, because his book is fundamentally ambiguous on this central question. While this has incensed some readers, the world is not short on loudly declared moral certainties, and there is something admirable about this refusal to join in the crowd’s condemnation. The jury, and the world, has delivered its verdict: Bankman-Fried is a crook. But Lewis is not interested in writing a book about a coin lying flat on its side; he’d rather show us one spinning in the air.

Ian Leslie is writing a book about Lennon and McCartney

Books

Mário de Andrade, the troll of the tropics

Two new translations of one of Brazil’s modernist greats have much to say about the country’s postcolonial reckoning—while still finding time to tell a good joke

By David McAllister   December 6, 2023

The last laugh: Mário de Andrade in 1930. Image: Benedito Junqueira Duarte / Acervo FBN

REVIEWED HERE

The Apprentice Tourist

Mário de Andrade (RRP: £14.99)

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Macunaíma

Mário de Andrade (RRP: £12.99)

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On 11th May 1927, Mário de Andrade arrived at the docks of Rio de Janeiro ahead of a much-anticipated boat trip along the Amazon River. For days, he’d been anxious over the whole thing. By his own admission, Andrade did not like travelling, though he did like fellow travellers: he’d only been wrested from his home comforts in São Paulo by the promise of the wealthy arts patron, Olívia Penteado, that this was no ordinary trip. It was to be no less than an intellectual gadabout with Brazil’s most renowned modernist writers and thinkers, among whom Andrade was known as “the Pope”. “I knew we’d have a real wild bunch from São Paulo,” he wrote excitedly in his diary; “a real circus troupe, all great fun and up for anything.”

Andrade was late to the docks, meaning it was only after the mad dash to board that he could take stock of the illustrious literary company he’d be travelling with for the next three months. Before him there stood: the patron, Dona Olívia; her 21-year-old niece, Dolur; and her niece’s friend, Mags. Andrade was the only writer who had bothered to show up.

“Everyone had flown the coop!” he lamented.

All the same, the trip might yet serve another purpose.

Modernism had arrived in Brazil at a particularly interesting juncture in the country’s history. In the year before Andrade’s birth in 1893, its emperor had been dethroned—the last monarch standing in Latin America and Brazil’s last living link to its colonial heritage. (Pedro II was a direct descendent of the Portuguese House of Braganza.) In the decades that followed, newly paved roads had begun slicing through the terra roxa of the rainforest; the vast avenues of São Paulo were filling up with new-fangled automobiles; electric streetlights illuminated the bustling pavements. The march of modernity, it seemed, was in lockstep with the founding of a truly postcolonial Brazil, a land of the future, a country of progress.

Yet if the constitution was no longer constricted by European norms, traces of those norms were still apparent in Brazil’s understanding of its national identity. Inevitably, that was going to cause friction. For if it appeared that culture led back always and inexorably to the mind of Europe—as TS Eliot might say—what did this tell us about a country that had only recently begun to move away from its European trappings? What did it say about all this so-called progress?

For Andrade, as for many Brazilian modernists of that time, European cultural hegemony had come at a price. By sidestepping the cultural lineages it owed to elsewhere, Brazil had, he wrote:

let itself remain that which by virtue of climate, race, cooking, everything, it will never be able to be, will only ever be able to ape: Europe. We take pride in being the only great (great?) civilized country in the tropics. This is the flaw in us… We ought to think and feel like Indians, Chinese, folks from Benin, Java… Perhaps then we might be able to create a civilization of our own.

The subtext was that it would fall to the Amazon and in particular its indigenous communities—many of whom remained elusive and obscure to the civilised (read: European) world—to play a big part in the project to rewrite Brazil’s national story. (“Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question,” as the modernist rallying-call “The Cannibalist Manifesto” from 1928 put it, sarcastically, in English.)

By 1927, Andrade was well established as a poet and modernist mover and shaker, having helped organise São Paulo’s influential Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922. His passion and profession in music had led to stints in the Brazilian interior and along the coast, mostly to catalogue folk songs, but never into the tropics; in any case, much of his understanding of Brazil’s indigenous people still came largely from books produced by German ethnographers. Biracial and (closeted) queer but living a bohemian, vaguely bourgeois lifestyle, Andrade was painfully aware that inside him there persisted a “neat grey European” who bristled at the “not-enoughness” of his homeland. And so, what better way to shake loose this neat European than to get his head out of books for a while and get down there among the reeds, where the foundations of his newly concocted civilisation could be found?

Yet judging by The Apprentice Tourist—a compilation of Andrade’s journal entries from his fated trip with Dona Olívia, recently published in a new English translation by Flora Thomson DeVeaux—the Brazilian tropics were much less forthcoming than had been presupposed. Andrade’s interactions with indigenous communities were limited, with those that did occur happening mostly from a boat’s distance. In their place came lonely days interrupted by prearranged “gubernatorial lunches”, where fawning provincial mayors bored Andrade stiff in their attempts to flatter Dona Olívia into offering her patronage. And this was to say nothing of the weather—which was too hot or too chilly—or the nature—which was monotonous and difficult to put into words—or Andrade’s fellow passengers—who were either ignorant, tedious or just irritatingly there all the time: “Too many children, I even dreamed about the little lambs having their throats cut,” he writes breezily one day. And let’s not get started on the fact that the only film every cinema in every town seemed to be screening was the dreadful Do It Now by William Fairbanks! (It was only later that Andrade discovered it was his own ship that was distributing the film.)

Farce from start to finish the trip may have been, but actually that was a blessing in disguise—for Andrade was a writer who was at his most inspired when trying to relieve himself of his boredom. Early on, he realised that if he wasn’t able to make any meaningful contact with indigenous people, then why didn’t he just… make it up? Peppered between his humdrum journal entries—and in the overly pompous tone of, say, a German ethnographer—Andrade digresses from his “life onboard” to relay details, with wide-eyed credulity, of his extraordinary encounters with indigenous communities, some partially real and others completely falsified, yet always well and truly beyond belief. Encounters with people such as the Do-Mi-So Indians, a tribe said to speak in musical tones rather than words, who consider the face and head more sexual than the genitals and who believe they are descended from sloths; and the Pacaás Novos—the name of a real community—who supposedly consider the nose and ears to be the most shameful parts of the body and for whom “speaking is the most sexual act” and who are “strict about the notion of virginity” as it relates to the ears (whatever the hell that means).

These as well as other outlandish events—such as the discovery of a government-issued tap attached to a tree that dispensed honey, or how he spent several days lost in the jungle with “Klein the German” and “Musset the Frenchman” surviving on nothing but skinned geckos—Andrade recounts with the straightest of faces and often with little suggestion that they are any more removed from reality than his gubernatorial lunches. “I often hesitate to recount certain things for fear I won’t be believed,” he quietly moans, with a wink.

While these fantasising asides might read as though they were written to pass the time and shoot the shit, at their root was a more serious intent. Andrade was perhaps not even aware of this himself until the return leg of his journey, when, while browsing a market in Belém selling indigenous tourist tat—“quite ugly, worthless, used”—he came to something of a casual epiphany. “It has yet to occur to anyone that falsification is the way to make these things worth more… The false document is what makes the true one legitimate. And value never really lies in truth per se, but in legitimacy, don’t you think?”

In other words, if reality was not quite fit for purpose, then the answer was to bend reality to fit your purposes—just as Andrade had been doing all along. At the very least, it was in the process of mythmaking that the country of Andrade’s imagination became more vivid, more alive—“It’s extraordinary how everything bubbles up with beings, with gods, with indescribable beings behind it all”—and more easily transcribed than anything he could have seen with his own two eyes.

If reality was not quite fit for purpose, then the answer was to bend reality to fit your purposes—just as Andrade had beendoing all along

The December before Andrade set off on his Amazonian trip, he had completed the first draft of a novel in a manic six days at his uncle’s farm to the northeast of São Paulo. In the following decades, that novel, Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character, would be regarded as a touchstone of Brazilian modernism. Apart from the retitling of some chapters, it seems the novel appeared in 1928 largely unscathed from Andrade’s time in the Amazon. You could say it took a trip into the unknown to affirm the things that he already knew.

“In the depths of the virgin-forest was born Macunaíma, hero of our people.” Thus the story begins—in this new translation by Katrina Dodson—setting the tone for a wild ride of adventure blending grand origin story with folksy urban legend. The plot, as far as it goes, follows the life of the titular Macunaíma—an “ugly child” born of a native Tapahumas woman—as he sets off with his two brothers, Maanape and Jiguê, to retrieve the coveted Muiraquitã amulet, stolen by the cannibalistic Piaimã the Giant (also called Venceslau Pietro Pietra).

Since it is broken up into episodes in the manner of an epic fable, you could, in theory, read the story in more or less any order without much loss of coherence. In his dogged pursuit of the amulet, Macunaíma partakes in strange rituals and meets an overwhelming array of “local” characters, historical, contemporary and mythological. He darts across great swathes of Brazil by train, plane and talking stork in a matter of minutes. He possesses shapeshifting powers (at one point turning Jiguê into a telephone in order to “insult Venceslau Pietro Pietra’s mother”) and superhuman strength, yet also mortal vulnerability, able to survive daring feats while still dying ingloriously from an arrow to the heart (before he is swiftly resurrected just a few pages later). He outwits his opponents with guile and street smarts, while also being outwitted in turn. In one notable incident, Macunaíma is convinced to give away all his money to a pedlar offering a magical possum that, it is claimed, can defecate gold coins. When he gleefully stretches out his pocket in anticipation of the first time the possum needs to go, you know exactly what’s going to happen.

All of this, told in urbane vernacular but with a vast vocabulary of indigenous words that would have been foreign even to metropolitan Brazil, results in a reading experience that is wholly disorientating. It is also—perhaps rare for a modernist work—a lot of fun. Unlike many of his contemporaries in Europe, Andrade refuses to speak in the cadence expected of a leader of the faithful; his language is energetic, witty and without a hint of pretension. “Get a load of this,” he seems to say on every page, nudging and (still) winking all the while.

There was much more behind this facetiousness than literary chicanery, however, as evinced by Dodson’s extensive endnotes to her translation. Each event and character in Macunaíma is derivative of something else, from myths and stories drawn from Pemon, Tupi, west African Yoruba and Brazilian folklore, to the names of flora and fauna from botanical books. “I hardly had to invent a thing in this poem that came so easily,” as Andrade boasted. And through this intermingling of multiple heritages came something a little like Brazil itself.

Yet despite this diligent completion of the brief—to create a narrative that was an admixture of so many parts yet still resolutely Brazilian—it’s clear from Andrade’s drafted prefaces and letters to friends before the publication of Macunaíma that he remained unsure whether he had created a “Brazilian” story, or whether that was even desirable. In a drafted note from 1926, he writes about achieving “the merit of literarily conceiving Brazil as a homogenous entity”, while adding a sentence later: “This is also to say I am not convinced that I have made a Brazilian work.” In his preface from 1928, one paragraph begins: “The best elements of a national culture appear in it.” Then, in the following paragraph, he begins: “Now I don’t want you all to imagine that I set out to make this book an expression of Brazilian national culture.”

Part of this ambiguity might stem from Andrade’s persistent cultural cringe. Despite mocking their pomposity in The Apprentice Tourist, Andrade readily admits that he drew much of his knowledge of indigenous myth for Macunaíma from those self-same, omnipresent German ethnographers. Chief among them was Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who in the 1910s had transcribed the legends of Pemon-language storytellers in the region straddling Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana; it was in a book of Koch-Grünberg’s transcriptions that Andrade first encountered (and lifted) the trickster character “Makunaimã”. In this light, it seems unavoidable that Andrade’s use of indigenous legend is still loaded with European assumptions about how such legends should be formulated and understood. Rather than standing on its own two feet, Brazil remains—in Macunaíma—beholden to the European example.

And aside from what nowadays some might call his cultural appropriation—or what many Brazilian modernists described favourably, though troublingly, as an act of “cannibalism”—we might also find Andrade’s characterisation of Brazilians as having “no character” equally problematic.

Like many heroes in myth, Makunaimã appeared as a protagonist free from the complexities of personality and development; he was there to fulfil whatever function a given storyteller required. For Andrade, this was a perfect analogy for Brazil as a whole. “The Brazilian has no character because he possesses neither his own civilization nor a traditional consciousness,” he wrote gloomily in the first preface from 1926; “it is from this lack of psychological character that we derive our lack of moral character.” We only need to look at the environmental devastation of the Amazon to know how this blank-slate mentality—of a land that is empty of culture, nothing but a wild frontier waiting to be conquered or controlled—plagues Brazil to this day.

But it would be wrong to consider any of this a mere failing on Andrade’s part, or Macunaíma as a lesser work for being unable to fully answer the contradictions it set out to confront. As with any difficult subject, the hardest part is often just to broach it. Andrade knew that the best way to begin a conversation was with a smile and a joke. Reading him almost a century later, his message is as simple and efficient as any good punchline: keep talking.

David McAllister is production & associate editor at Prospect

Culture

I ain’t got time to bleed

The muscular stars of 1980s action films were a generation’s heroes—and still are, for some, an example

By Scott Jordan Harris   December 6, 2023

© United Archives Gmbh / Alamy

My favourite sound in cinema is an untranscribable exhalation made only by Sylvester Stallone. He makes it when Rocky Balboa throws his most impactful punches; he makes it when Gabe Walker, the lead character in Cliffhanger (1993), clings precariously to a rock face; and he made it when, filming First Blood (1982), the original Rambo movie, he leapt from a cliff to a tree branch below and broke a rib in real life.

The noise is Stallone’s equivalent to the oft-quoted one-liners—“I’ll be back”; “Hasta la vista, baby”; “Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker”—that became catchphrases for his competitors in the action genre. Yet it is ironic that it is Stallone, the most literary of the supposedly meat-headed action stars—the one who was Oscar-nominated for Best Original Screenplay and who has wanted, his whole long career, to make a film about his hero, Edgar Allen Poe—who has had his on-screen essence boiled down to something beyond a one-liner, beyond even words, to a single distinctive sound.

Crucially, it is not a sound of triumph but one of struggle, because it is struggle—against the odds in Rocky (1976); against injustice in First Blood; against ageing in The Expendables (2010)—that defines Stallone’s movie persona. And that is why his movies appeal to me. I am severely disabled because of a combination of rare diseases and, the sicker that I become, the more I enjoy those absurd, overblown films made between the late 1970s and the early 1990s that are loosely defined as 1980s action movies.

I have a disabled friend who feels similarly. We often use a phrase inspired by Stallone: “Rambo repairs”. It references the extreme first aid, bordering on self-surgery, that John Rambo frequently performs on himself mid-battle. We use it to mean the DIY medical procedures—popping a dislocated joint back into place; treating fierce infections with whatever medications are to hand; strapping up an inexplicably disobedient body part—that disabled people routinely undertake while knowing that the need for them would scare an able-bodied person straight into A&E. Meanwhile, a famous line from Predator (1987)—“I ain’t got time to bleed!”—has become for us a catchphrase that we use when we are ignoring disturbing new symptoms because, if we reported them all to a doctor, it would mean that we never had time to do anything except report disturbing symptoms to doctors.

Nick de Semlyen is establishing himself as the leading chronicler of Hollywood in the 1980s. His first book, Wild and Crazy Guys, charted the careers, idiosyncrasies and cultural impact of the male comic actors and Saturday Night Live alumni—Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd et al—who redefined American comedy films in the 1980s and 1990s. His second book, The Last Action Heroes, focuses on their action-movie equivalents, once characterised by Bart Simpson as “the Schwarzeneggers, the Stallones and, to a lesser extent, the Van Dammes.”

Besides Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and (to a lesser extent) Jean-Claude Van Damme, The Last Action Heroes profiles five other leading men—Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and Steven Seagal—creating eight interwoven biographies that, taken together, form a patchwork portrait of an era when macho excess, on-screen and off, was at the heart of Hollywood’s most bankable genre.

De Semlyen has worked for Empire magazine for around 20 years and has amassed hours of interviews with most of the principal players in the biggest action movies of the 1980s. He draws heavily on these interviews and ones from other publications to give The Last Action Heroes elements of an oral history. The technique works well, with the stars’ boastful (Seagal, Van Damme) or modest (Chan, Norris) claims set against the reality researched by de Semlyen.

© Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy

Even so, the book has a few factual errors. For example, page 20 twice states that Chuck Wepner, the journeyman New Jersey boxer who was the primary inspiration for Rocky Balboa, lasted through a full 15-round fight with Muhammad Ali, just as journeyman Philadelphia boxer Balboa lasts through a full 15-round fight with Apollo Creed. But although Wepner made it into the 15th round of his 1975 fight with Ali, and with just 19 seconds to go, he didn’t make it out. Before the final round was up, Ali unleashed a spiteful flurry of punches that sent Wepner careering first into the ropes and then onto the canvas. The referee ruled that Wepner could not continue and Ali won by technical knockout.

This detail is important, because Sylvester Stallone’s brilliance in writing Rocky was not in simply replicating the story of the Ali-Wepner fight but in reimagining it with the perfect movie ending. Stallone knew that his character couldn’t be decisively knocked out, as Wepner had been, and that he couldn’t miraculously win, as a loveable long shot in a lesser movie might do. Instead, he had to be still standing, out-pointed but unbowed, when the final bell rang. It is this ending, perfectly pitched between Hollywood fantasy and downbeat realism, that gave Rocky the power to enchant audiences to the extent that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture and, as de Semlyen demonstrates, began the 1980s boom for action movies.

Reading The Last Action Heroes I realised that, for me, the real-life equivalent of the ever-resilient Rocky Balboa is not Chuck Wepner but Jackie Chan. There are, fundamentally, two ways to become disabled through injury. The first is to suffer a sudden accident that results in the loss of a limb, say, or some form of paralysis. The other is over time, through the cumulative or combined effect of multiple injuries. Jackie Chan appeals to me because he constantly seems to be in danger of both. Chan—whose skills as an acrobat and martial artist make him a legitimate successor to Bruce Lee, and whose skills as a physical comedian make him a legitimate successor to Buster Keaton—is an action hero in ways that other stars, American stars, are not.

When Schwarzenegger or Willis shoot an action sequence, any danger is managed and minimised and the actors are insured. As an audience we know that, if a character played by Schwarzenegger or Willis jumps from the top of a tall clocktower to the street below, the scene has been shot to make it appear that the character has performed this feat while the actor portraying him has not.

But when a character played by Chan jumps from the top of a tall clocktower to the street below, as Sergeant Dragon Ma Yue Lung does in 1983’s Project A, we know that Jackie Chan has performed the stunt himself (and we might know, too, that, because of his commitment to working this way, Chan and his stunt team often operate uninsured). We are well aware that one of the world’s biggest film stars hasn’t died on set during a stunt, but, watching him fall, we see the many ways in which he might have. That provides an excitement that we cannot get from the stunts in Die Hard (1988) or Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Chan’s stunt work has long been described as “death-defying”—and it is—but it also defies disability. Any one of a hundred stunts Chan has performed in films could have caused a catastrophic injury that would have left him unable to walk. For me, watching in my wheelchair, this thrills me in a way I find cathartic (even though I wonder what a psychiatrist or disability studies professor would make of my response—and what it reveals about my attitude towards my own disabilities). Chan also captivates me because he is an action movie star—not just an action movie character—who, like many disabled people, repeatedly suffers through physical torment in the course of an ordinary workday and just keeps working. When filming, Chan often undergoes Rambo repairs because, on shoots where budgets are tight and time is limited, he ain’t got time to bleed.

De Semlyen’s descriptions of the clocktower stunt in Project A, and of other spectacular feats that Chan has suffered through, are frequently as alarming and electrifying as the stunts themselves. And this is a key reason why The Last Action Heroes is such a success: it discusses movies that are fun and fast-moving in prose that is fun and fast-moving too. Which is not to say that the author takes his subject lightly. De Semlyen is Empire’s editor-in-chief and it is heartening that a major figure in British film journalism treats these movies as worthy of his sustained attention. When they were first released, they were often disregarded by prominent critics.

Flying high: Jackie Chan in “The Protector” from 1985. Action movies of this era are worthy of sustained attention © Pierre Perrin Gamma / Rapho via Getty Images

‘The most famous British film critic of the era was Barry Norman, who bemoaned the state of an industry that had allowed Schwarzenegger to become its biggest star and dismissed him as “not so much an actor as a human special effect”. The most famous television critic in Britain at the time, Clive James, summed up Arnie by saying that he looked “like a brown condom full of walnuts.”

But it is the same characteristics that made Norman and James turn away from Schwarzenegger that draw me to him. At the height of the 1980s action movie, Schwarzenegger looked to have (and, given that he was a seven-time Mr Olympia, perhaps actually did have) the perfect human body. And the characters he played could perform feats—and withstand assaults—that only a perfect human body could endure. As the owner and operator of a human body so imperfect it can seldom withstand the assault of a trip to the supermarket, imagining myself in Schwarzenegger’s place on-screen provides exquisite escapism.

Though he may be more special effect than actor, Schwarzenegger is, at least, a physical special effect. There is a level of reality to 1980s action movies that is increasingly absent from modern ones. Films that focus on real bodies, and use stuntmen and practical effects, speak to the disabled person’s experience of navigating hazardous physical environments in a way that films made with green screens, computer-generated imagery or—some day soon, God forbid—artificial intelligence cannot.

De Semlyen identifies Last Action Hero, the 1993 Schwarzenegger film that gives his book its title, as the end of the era of the 1980s action movie. He makes a convincing argument: contrast the embarrassing commercial failure of Last Action Hero, with the success of Jurassic Park. The latter was released at the same time and used new graphics and animatronics that looked years ahead of the explosions and car crashes that typified 1980s action movies, announcing the evolution of the genre.

But, for all it did to kill the kind of action movie that I love most, Last Action Hero gave me a scene I think about more than any action sequence. The plot of the film sees Jack Slater—an amalgam of every action hero Schwarzenegger had played—leaping from a cinema screen and into the real world in pursuit of a murderous villain who has done the same. Although Slater ultimately defeats the bad guy, he is mortally wounded and the only option is to drag him back through the screen he burst out of because, in a movie universe like that, a little thing like a bullet through a major organ is scarcely a flesh wound.

I often imagine myself in the same situation. When I lose the ability to do another basic physical task I’d previously been able to do; or I suffer complications from the transplant surgery I have already had; or I plan for the transplant surgery I still need, I wish I could be transported into an 1980s action movie, where even my broken body could be fixed with a few Rambo repairs.

Scott Jordan Harris is a film critic and UK correspondent for rogerebert.com

TV

There’s too much television

Take it from Prospect’s TV critic: so many shows started off as books, articles, ideas—and should have stayed that way

By Imogen West-Knights   December 6, 2023

Illustration by David McAllister / Prospect

I don’t often embark on a hate-watch. I watch bad movies and television, but bad in the sense of enjoyably bad. Dumb action movies such as The Meg 2: The Trench or trashy, put-it-on-in-the-background series such as Emily in Paris. Not stuff that I think is going to bore or anger me.

But recently I did watch something knowing, on the way in, that I was going to hate it. My boyfriend watched it first, on a whim, then told me he needed me to see it too, so that we could bitch about it. So I sat down to watch the Netflix documentary The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

Maybe you’ve heard of it. For a while, it was pushed quite heavily on the Netflix homepage. And there is also a 2016 book with the same name, the inspiration for this documentary, by a blogger called Mark Manson. The book, a sort of memoir-slash-self-help book disguised as an anti-self-help book, was a New York Times bestseller. Before the show began playing, I wondered how a book of that sort might translate to TV.

The short answer is that it really, really doesn’t. The problem is not primarily that Mark Manson, who fronts the documentary, is irritating, although he is. He comes across as relentlessly self-satisfied and convinced of being in possession of a great intelligence that I can’t see evidence of here.

No, the real problem is that the filmmakers have produced more than an hour-and-a-half’s material that did not need to be television and cannot sustain being television. Manson, sat in a dingy basement room decorated with expensive ceramic dogs and fine liquor, recites sections of his book, the main thrust of which is that you should stop focusing on bad things and focus instead on good ones. Manson makes repeated, unsubstantiated claims, for instance that nobody is enjoying their holidays because they spend those holidays on Instagram looking at other people’s nicer holidays and being furious about it, or that being too nice to your children will lead to them feeling like frauds as adults, for some reason. We also get the story of Manson’s life, which is not interesting enough to justify us learning about it. He was caught with some marijuana in his locker at school, his parents divorced, he has had some averagely bad relationships.

The filmmakers have no idea what to show us, other than Manson. Title cards saying things like “TRAUMATIC SHIT” or “HAPPINESS IS A PROBLEM” flash up over stock footage of, say, a clown smoking a cigarette, or a girl on the beach with no face, a woman in a crown getting doused in white paint, a car blowing up, cartoon people falling into galaxies, a couple looking at a fish tank. The revelation, near the end of this carousel of almost randomly chosen images, is that the key to being happy isn’t getting rid of your problems, it’s solving your problems, which is—unless I am the moron—the same thing. Watching this show made me so angry, so petty and het up that I am even minded to point out that he uses the term “precautionary tale” when he means “cautionary tale”. It is patronising, empty garbage, start to finish.

Forgive me for the rant. But there is a point to it. Watching this documentary got me thinking about the state of television in general. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck isn’t a lone blight on the current landscape of “content” (and this is content, really, not TV); it’s part of a larger trend. Things that should not be television are, increasingly, made into television.

The book to television or film pipeline is very old. The Godfather was a novel first, and a good one—I’m reading it at the moment, as it happens. Killers of the Flower Moon was first a book by the journalist David Grann, published in 2017, and is now a beautiful film directed by Martin Scorsese. Dune, Pride and Prejudice, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Hunger Games, Little Women, The Lord of the Rings. You could list examples for days. It’s no surprise that deals for these kinds of adaptations are made, given the fact that authors get comparatively tiny sums to write their books when compared to having their books developed for screens.

Even memes are becoming TV. Remember those videos of hyper-realistic cakes? That’s a TV show now, too

The jump is even bigger between something like a magazine article and a film. It’s part of what keeps features writers in the game: the real possibility that they will write a story for anything up to, say, 10 grand (although usually much less), and then a TV studio will buy the rights to adapt it for the screen for much, much more. The 2019 film Hustlers was originally a 2015 New York magazine story by Jessica Pressler. Nightmare on Elm Street, somewhat unexpectedly, began its life as an article in the Los Angeles Times in 1987.

All of this is to say: it happens a lot. And sometimes these deals make everybody happy, as in the examples I gave earlier. Good for the author, good for the film studio, good for the audience. Art begets new art. But what is happening more and more frequently now is that stuff that was either crap or thin to begin with is made into television simply in order for more television to exist. Just look at how the Marie Kondo book became a Marie Kondo television programme in 2019, which spawned a second even more boring Marie Kondo show in 2021, and then further copycat television series about decluttering your life, such as the deathly dull The Minimalists. Tiger King, the documentary series we all watched in a fugue state during the first lockdown, is apparently being turned into a scripted show, to squeeze the maximum amount of money out of the same intellectual property. A gameshow version of the Korean hit series Squid Game is here.

Even memes are becoming TV. Remember seeing all those videos of hyper-realistic cakes? Objects such as human arms and toolboxes that turned out to be cake? That’s a television show now, too, on Netflix, called Is It Cake?, where people have to guess whether or not a thing is cake.

It’s not just the profit motive behind all this, I don’t think. It’s also a result of the fact that video content is king in other spheres now. TikTok’s popularity means that if regular people have an idea, or something they want to express, it’s more likely to be committed to video than to another medium. The huge view counts on videos of people ranting in their cars, walking down the street, making meals for themselves, implies that there is a big audience for mindless moving images.

I watch those TikTok videos, too. They have their charms. But the massive increase in the amount of low-quality video content on social media shouldn’t mean we have to see a similar increase in low-quality televisual content. And yet, here we are.

Imogen West-Knights is a freelance writer

Film

Let’s hear it for the Scala, a church for perverted cinephiles

The Scala wasn’t just a movie house. It was a hangout, an experience, an entire scene

By Sukhdev Sandhu   December 6, 2023

© David Babsky

A common refrain: Barbie and Oppenheimer saved movie theatres in 2023. Greta Gerwig’s advertorial for Mattel has raked in over $1.4bn globally, while Christopher Nolan’s thriller about the US physicist and “father of the atomic bomb” is approaching the billion-dollar mark. Surely this is worthy of huzzahs? After all, what with streaming, the pandemic and, most recently, the actors’ and writers’ strike, cinema chains have been under the cosh. Still, nothing has made me more excited about film and filmgoing than Scala!!!, a modestly funded (and immodestly exclamation-marked) documentary about a venue in London that was shuttered over 30 years ago.

Formed in 1978 in Fitzrovia, the Scala moved three years later to King’s Cross, at that time a where-angels-fear-to-tread neighbourhood which was a magnet for junkies, prostitutes and criminals. Egged on by manager Stephen Woolley (who would go on to produce British films such as Mona Lisa and Scandal), its programming exuded arthouse cool, the wired, insurgent energy of post-punk music, and the filthiness of American grindhouse. It was one of the few places where English audiences could see Pasolini’s Salò, midnight movies such as David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, cult TV (The Avengers, The Prisoner), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Waters’s notoriously scatological Pink Flamingos, and the experimental animation of Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Švankmajer.

These films and their makers are widely known these days. In the early 1980s, when cinema attendance in the UK was nearly at an all-time low, things were different. “It was a very analogue period,” recalls co-director and former Scala programmer Jane Giles. “If households had a Betamax or a VHS machine, it was usually hired from a local electronics store. There were only three TV channels. It was hard to find interesting things in the broader culture. The Scala provided an unofficial curriculum. It was like a cool big sister or big brother. It offered concessionary prices to students and to people on the dole. You never felt stupid going to see something. Whatever it was—Citizen Kane or La Dolce Vita or something trashy—everything was given the same importance.”

Perhaps this was postmodernism in practice. Perhaps it was a vision of arthouse cinema as a commons, a mixed public space, an alternative metropolis. It certainly attracted audiences from inside and outside London. Some went on to become internationally celebrated directors: Joanna Hogg, Steve McQueen, Danny Boyle, Gurinder Chadha, Mary Harron, Beeban Kidron (now a peer), even Christopher Nolan (who saw the hardcore film Thundercrack! there). The Scala drew the capital’s various tribes: goths, rockabillies, rockers, Blitz kids, earnest young men in long coats. The documentary’s interviewees—among them comedians (Stewart Lee and Adam Buxton), musicians (The The’s Matt Johnson and S’Express’s Mark Moore), writers (Cathi Unsworth)—talk about the place as a “refuge”, a “ secret castle”, a “Garden of Eden of innocence”.

Are they being sentimental? I suspect not. Co-director Ali Catterall started going there when he was just 16. “I had a very fucked-up childhood,” he tells me. “I was brought up in a cult-like hippy squat by an Aleister Crowley worshipper, a black magician, a warlock—and a radical feminist mother. It was Angela’s Ashes, lentil poverty, no hot water. When I got to the Scala, I was seeing the kinds of things I’d been living through. There were lots of weird, broken souls there. The Scala functioned as a home for us. A safe place to filter through fiction what we’d been living for real.”

We go to the cinema to watch films. We also go to watch other people. At the Scala, no matter how crazed the drama on screen, the liveliest action was happening between the aisles. John Waters took his drag-queen muse, Divine, on acid, to see Ingmar Bergman movies. One employee routinely scored “blues”—which is to say, a type of pill—from someone at the Iranian embassy, which he sold for a profit to audience members. There was an unlicensed late bar. A house cat. Homeless people would sleep through all-nighter screenings. Punters would have sex in the back row. The Pogues’s Shane MacGowan was once kicked out for urinating on the seat in front of him. The atmosphere could be heady, rave-like. It could be troubling too: in 1986, at a screening of A Clockwork Orange, a group of troublemakers in Droog garb brought a bulldog into the building, sat in the front row and started cheering during the rape scene.

Few cinemas these days are seen as political venues. Maybe that would tarnish their brands or make would-be filmgoers associate them with worthy didacticism rather than fun. The Scala, though, hosted a “Pits and Perverts” fundraiser for the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners alliance, as well as other events for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign Celebrates International Women’s Week, the London Campaign for the Birmingham Six and the capital’s Anti-Apartheid Group. Its staff were bolshy too: in 1988, its managers complained to the Pearl & Dean advertising company about ads for military recruitment being shown between films, while a projectionist, in an act of intricate sabotage, engraved a CND sign onto consecutive frames of the offending advert.

It was hard to find interesting things in the broader culture

Thatcherism was a cultural project as much as it was an economic one. During the 1980s, the Conservative prime minister criticised the permissive society, praised Victorian values and introduced Section 28—a series of laws that forbade the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities. Depending on your point of view, the Scala was either part of the problem or the resistance. It staged (self-explanatory) “Blue Monday” bills. It frequently screened queer classics such as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, as well as Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, in which the singer was played by Barbie dolls. Guest programmers included Square Peg (a “Journal for Contemporary Perverts”) and the lesbian erotic magazine Quim. Visits from the Obscene Publications Squad were commonplace; the cinema’s mostly young, female programmers had to fight tooth and nail to stop prints being confiscated.

The Scala closed in 1993. It had always been a lean operation (some of its staff supplemented their meagre wages with Nigerian arranged-marriage scams and pyramid selling rackets) and was struggling to cope with rising leases and a growing home video market. Its aesthetic had partly been absorbed by TV programmes such as Jonathan Ross’s The Incredibly Strange Film Show. The end came when Warner Bros took it to court for a showing of A Clockwork Orange (which had been withdrawn from distribution in the UK at Stanley Kubrick’s request).

Nowadays, A Clockwork Orange is available for streaming. Does that mean there’s no need for countercultural spaces like the Scala? “There are more films being made than ever before, but they have a shorter distribution life,” points out Catterall. “They come. They go. We all know the experience of sitting in front of Netflix: flick, flick, flick, flick, flick. An hour and a half has gone by and there’s nothing you actually want to see. You can have too much choice.”

Giles believes that the spirit of the Scala persists at modern-day film festivals where the mood is often carnivalesque and audiences can access lots of films not in wide circulation. She says, a touch wistfully, “The film is an attempt to excite young people about the idea of cinema.” What is the idea? For me: magic, mutation, togetherness.

“Scala!!!” is in cinemas on 5th January 2024, then on BFI Player and physical home media from 22nd January

Sukhdev Sandhu runs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University

Pop

A different kind of love song

We’ve always written songs about love. But now a new generation of musicians are redefining what it means

By Laura Barton   December 6, 2023

via YouTube

“Flowers”, the best-selling single of the past year, was released in the early days of January 2023 by the indefatigable American pop sensation Miley Cyrus. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the colour and vim of the song lit up the pale midwinter charts, debuting at number one in the UK and staying there for 10 weeks.

It’s a barnstormer of a track, a tale of defiance and reclamation in the wake of a breakup; Cyrus singing as if suddenly alive to the idea that one does not need a relationship to feel loved—after all, she reasons, she can buy herself flowers, write her own name in the sand. “I can love me better,” she sings. “I can love me better than you can.”

“Flowers” was meticulously put together by a team of chart-conquering songwriters and producers, from Cyrus herself to Kid Harpoon. It has a power and precision to its aim that meets the singer’s voice—an instrument not marked by prettiness but by a kind of American determination.

Cyrus’s voice is well-suited to pop music, well-trained and well-honed. Loitering somewhere between nose and throat, hard and husky, it carries some of her own history: the child star offspring of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, raised between Tennessee, Los Angeles and the Disney Channel. There is some of that same infrangible ambition, that distinctly new world reinvention as she sings of moving on from her failed relationship with “no remorse, no regret”.

The interesting thing about “Flowers” is that, for a heartbreak song, it dwells little on love. The word itself appears over 20 times, and yet the ear somehow skips past it, resting instead on the track’s hard, bright details: cherry red nails, a home ablaze, on the indomitable refrain: “I can take myself dancing.”

When Cyrus does sing of “love” her voice takes the word lightly; it becomes a step, a beat on the way to the word “better”, as if we are in the presence of optimism drowning out sorrow.

Today the word love does not always have as much to carry as it once did

A few years ago, a study in the journal Sexuality and Culture found that we write fewer love songs than we did in the 1960s. Instead, songs are about sex rather than emotional attachment. The comparison was flawed, of course. In the pop songs of the 1960s, when somebody sang of “love” they might also have been singing about physical desire, bodily autonomy, forbidden longing, infidelities, brief flings; the word was a catch-all term, encompassing all of the feelings and wants that could not be addressed directly in lyrics. Today, the word love does not always have as much to carry as it once did, and so its appearance in song, and the emotional investment of its delivery, have shifted.

In the case of Cyrus’s hit, it’s interesting to note that while she sings about loving herself, her focus is on the physical illustrations of that love, in much the same way that a rapper might detail the mounting evidence of their success (see also: another of this year’s best-sellers, Central Cee and Dave’s “Sprinter”, with its talk of endless women, fast cars and platinum Amex cards).

Precisely a year on from the release of “Flowers” comes Iechyd Da, the sixth album by the British songwriter Bill Ryder-Jones. Its penultimate track, “Thankfully for Anthony”, is one of its highlights. Although it moves at a more lugubrious pace, thematically it’s not so different from Cyrus’s song—Ryder-Jones singing of emerging from hard times and choosing love.\

Here, though, the word “love” carries everything. It is the song’s central lexical pivot, and each iteration falls afresh, freighted with hope, wonder and warmth, but also the complication and vulnerability involved in loving and being loved. It’s a remarkable act of intimacy.

Ryder-Jones is from West Kirby, and his voice finds something in the word’s pronunciation that is flung far from Cyrus’s polished American pop intonation: love’s vowel sound dips low, becoming Scouse, and tender; it becomes weighty and expansive, as if accommodating a variety of meanings.

There is a place for all kinds of song—those written by committee and primed for chart success are every bit as worthy as those that are perhaps less pristine, more personal. But in these days of dwindling love songs, it is a joy to hear one that reconnects to the power of that word. A song that can love better, as Cyrus might sing it, can love better than you.

Laura Barton is the host of Radio 4's "Notes on Music", which is available on BBC Sounds. Her book "Sad Songs" (Quercus) will be published in 2023

Culture

Classical notes: The sound of gunfire

All over the world, the shadow of war—both past and present—is impossible to avoid

By Ian Bostridge   December 6, 2023

It has been a crazy month of globetrotting. London, Ottawa, San Francisco, Rome, Krakow, Shanghai and Seoul (plus various other South Korean destinations), all in the matter of weeks. I’ve done things that no sane classical singer would think of doing. I’ve flown into Montreal the day after a concert and sung Schubert’s Winterreise (75 minutes with piano) the same night, up the road in Ottawa. I’ve sung seven demanding orchestral concerts in quick succession in South Korea. There's a sort of ridiculous post-Covid anxiety to do all one can to perform, and also a sense that—somehow—normality can be willed back into being by just doing, over and over again, what one has always done. Classical musicians ask each other, nervously, “Has it got back to normal?”—and, of course, it hasn’t. And it won’t. Normality is a mirage, change is life, something that a lot of this music teaches us. But faith in the art form remains, along with a conviction that it has survived and will survive. People have been talking about the death of classical music for a very long time.

♦♦♦

So what did I learn, what did I notice, on my endless peregrinations? War is understandably—rightly—at the forefront of everyone’s minds; war in Europe, war in the Middle East. As I was due to give a lecture on Britten and war at a Seoul music festival during my stay there, war was again particularly on my mind.

My first column for this magazine, back in the spring, was about a trip to San Francisco to perform Britten’s War Requiem, so I’ll leave that return to the Foggy City out of the reckoning. On my trip to Ottawa, a city which I’d last visited 29 years ago, I discovered that it wasn’t just a randomly selected capital, chosen for being neither Montreal nor Toronto (like Washington vis-à-vis Philadelphia and New York, or Canberra vis-à-vis Sydney and Melbourne). Founded as Bytown in 1826, Canada’s future capital was the base for the construction of the Rideau Canal, a scheme designed to bypass a section of the St Lawrence River that had been vulnerable to US attack in the war of 1812. In the end, and after endless wrangling, the renamed Ottawa was chosen as capital by Queen Victoria in 1857 and confirmed by Parliament in 1859, partly because it lay equidistant between Montreal and Toronto, but also because it was more defensible than the alternatives; far from the border with the US and surrounded by impenetrable forest. So, this most peaceable and peace-loving of capitals was born out of worry at a future war that now seems utterly unthinkable.

♦♦♦

A week or so later, I was singing Schubert’s Winterreise, in a series hosted by the major university in Rome, La Sapienza. La Sapienza’s glory—and to some extent its shame—is that, though it dates back to 1303 and a papal foundation, its magnificent main campus, built in 1935, is an inheritance from the fascist era: a severely beautiful collection of modernist-cum-neoclassical buildings planned by Mussolini’s “high commissar”, the architect Marcello Piacentini.

The concert took place in the university’s Aula Magna, in front of Mario Sironi’s 1935 mural Italy between the Arts and the Sciences. I’ve performed in the hall several times over the years, but always in front of a blurry reproduction of the mural, which was long in restoration. Seeing as it is a piece of fascist art, a work of unashamed propaganda, it was papered over directly after the war, uncovered in the 1950s but with its offensive political symbolism remodelled. Only more recently, and following a successful Sironi retrospective in 2014, has it been restored to its original form. Propaganda it may be, with representative figures of the arts and the sciences, toga-clad, presided over by a winged figure of war, helmeted trench-style, feathers like fasci, the symbol of the Mussolini regime, but it’s compelling nonetheless, executed in a telling interaction of hallowed fresco technique and industrial steel and cement. It’s difficult to appreciate in cramped reproduction; but facing all of its 8 by 17 metres in the flesh it’s also difficult to know how much its impact is just a result of its sheer monumental force. It raises issues of art and morality, of course; but also stands as a necessary reminder of Italy’s fascist past, whatever its artistic merits and our complex response to them.

♦♦♦

And so on, via Krakow and Shanghai, with their own histories of war, to Seoul and a seven-concert tour of South Korea.

It’s a cliché that the Korean War, 1950 to 1953, is the forgotten war—the words are even inscribed on the war memorial in Seoul. The figures are difficult to absorb: 600,000 Korean military deaths, 1.5 million civilian, in a combined population, north and south, of about 25 million. To visit South Korea is to visit a country that has rebuilt itself from the depths of horror: almost every major city on the Korean peninsula was destroyed during the war.

Two things strike me when I come here, as I have been doing for about 20 years. First, the desensitisation—as one Korean friend put it—to the threat across the border. The Korean War never officially ended. It is, as they say, a “frozen war”, and the demilitarised zone is only 35 miles from the modern, thriving city of Seoul, which goes about its business apparently regardless. We all know about K-Pop and the renaissance of Korean cinema, but another part of that business—supported by a culturally savvy political establishment—is an extraordinary hunger for Western classical music. Audiences are young and enthusiastic, and they routinely cheer as you come on stage—before even one note has sounded. They are, conversely, frequently silent at the end of the piece, seriously engaged in the music. For a performer used to the “classical music is dying” narrative so often peddled in Europe and the UK (and the situation in the UK is indeed dispiriting), it’s inspiring.

I was in Korea to perform Britten’s orchestral song cycle Les Illuminations—and to talk about Britten and war. The composer sets Arthur Rimbaud’s revolutionary prose poems of the early 1870s to music by turns glittering and demonic, sardonic and sensual; a long way, one might think, from thoughts of war. Britten never again wrote such an unbuttoned, ecstatic piece. Yet the poems themselves, part of Rimbaud’s call for a “rational derangement of the senses”, emerged from his experience of war-time traumatic stress—the bombardment of his home town during the Franco-Prussian war, the violence of the Paris commune—and Britten made his reckoning with Rimbaud at the end of that “dark, dishonest decade”, Auden’s 1930s, teetering on the edge of unimaginable horrors. Violence lurks throughout Les Illuminations, ready to ambush us.

Performing in Korea, with a group of largely Korean musicians (the marvellous Sejong Soloists, named, like many other things in Korea, for the king who invented the Korean script), I was more than ever aware of the dark conclusion of the cycle, a sort of ominous, threnodic throbbing, dying away, in the lowest instruments of the orchestra. On the page the music ends, these words follow: “Amityville, October 25th 1939”. Britten far away from Europe, in upstate New York, as the Wehrmacht handed over control of conquered Poland to the German civilian authorities.

Ian Bostridge is a singer, historian and Prospect’s classical columnist. His latest book is ‘Song and Self’ (Faber)

Books

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Politics & Reportage

From understanding 13 years of Tory government to contextualising the conflict in Ukraine

By Prospect Team   December 6, 2023

A number of books this year have come to bury the Conservative government, not to praise it. After 13 years of Tory rule, and with a general election due next year, there’s a real sense that this is it. The end. A time for decade-spanning retrospectives, rather than of-the-moment hagiographies.

Best of these books—and, in fact, an exemplar of its kind—is The Right to Rule by Ben Riley-Smith, the political editor of the Daily Telegraph. Lots of Westminster-y books by Westminster-y people are well-sourced and engagingly written, and Riley-Smith’s shares those qualities. But it distinguishes itself with the clarity and cleverness of its analysis. This will become a set text on the era of Cameron to Sunak.

Another highlight is Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge. Stewart, the diplomat turned politician turned podcasting superstar, is an endearing mix of self-aggrandising (he clearly wants to be prime minister) and self-effacing (he understands that he’s a bit… idiosyncratic). But the moral and technical seriousness of this book should not be ignored: in his time in parliamentary politics, Stewart discovered a lot that needs mending—and he has plenty of ideas for doing so.

What else needs fixing after 13 years of Conservative government (and, in truth, much mismanagement before then)? Kieran Yates’s All the Houses I’ve Ever Lived In is a telling account of the housing crisis and what it’s meant for young people in particular. Meanwhile, Behind These Doors considers a different sort of accommodation—prisons—and shows how it has fallen into neglect and dysfunction. The fact that its author, Alex South, is a former prison officer helps to place both it and us on one of the British state’s most terrible front lines.

There is a sense of the front line about Madeleine Bunting’s The Seaside, too. Our coastal communities are not only situated where land meets water, but also where social decline meets ageing populations, and where incoming immigrants meet (in some cases) hostile receptions. Bunting scans this terrain with a reporter’s eye for a story and a holidaymaker’s eye for fun and diversion—because, let’s not forget, the seaside is also where fish meets chips.

There is little comfort to be found in a pair of books about the contaminated blood scandal that afflicted the NHS and other health systems around the world from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Caroline Wheeler’s Death in the Blood  benefits both from her decades of reporting on the story and her role in campaigning for justice for those who received poisoned transfusions in the UK. Cara McGoogan’s The Poison Line is a brilliant act of investigative cartography, tracking the virus-ridden blood packs from their source (a prison in Louisiana) to patients in the US, the UK and beyond.

Remaining in the US, Monica Potts’s The Forgotten Girls is a modern classic on deprivation and the fine margins that exist between a life of plenty and one of relentless hardship. As Tom Clark (former editor of Prospect) wrote in his review, “In the rich world, only in America is it routine for established citizens to see life and limb threatened due to a lack of medicines or other basic means of survival.”

Struggles elsewhere are recounted by Tahir Hamut Izgil’s Waiting to Be Arrested at Night, on China’s oppression of the Uyghurs, and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, on his home country of Iraq and its awful, insecure fate in the years after America’s war on terror.

Then there is, of course, Ukraine. The best account of the ongoing conflict—its preconditions and its present-day horrors—is Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War. Meanwhile, Ian Garner’s Z Generation shows how the amoral leadership of Vladimir Putin has corrupted the hearts and minds of young people in Russia.

Is there a global leader who can stand up to these challenges? Read Franklin Foer’s The Last Politician and you’ll come out of the experience with a fuller and perhaps more generous understanding of the current president of the US, one Joseph Robinette Biden Junior.

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Books of the year 2023: History

Prospect Editorial Team

Books

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Ideas

From the rise of AI and hacking to climate change

By Prospect Team   December 6, 2023

Some of today’s brainiest ideas are actually to do with the brain. In The Experience Machine, Andy Clark, a professor of cognitive philosophy, explains the latest thinking—some of it his—on how our minds work. Turns out, there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests we don’t receive information from the outside world passively. Instead, our minds act as predictive engines, anticipating what we’ll encounter next, filling in blanks and bridling at the unexpected.

What difference does that make, though? Lots. To take just one of Clark’s examples: prediction errors and how we respond to them could lie behind various mental conditions, from depression to autism spectrum disorders. It might even be possible to improve our minds’ predictive capacity by immersing ourselves in virtual worlds. This mind-bending stuff is at the forefront of science, technology, philosophy and much else. Clark makes it thrillingly understandable.

Similar could be said of Camilla Nord’s The Balanced Brain. Nord runs the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge, and much of her research is in the same areas as Clark’s. This brilliant first book goes into greater detail on the mental health implications of the predictive mind, as well as on the often surprising connections between the corporeal and the emotional. You’ll never look at yourself the same way again.

And you might not look at humankind the same way again after reading Eve by Cat Bohannon. The title is a nod to  the biblical first woman, but it’s what followed her that motivates Bohannon’s work—the entire span of human evolution and how it has led to women being very different, and in many underappreciated ways, from men. This is both a powerful recasting of thousands of years of history and a powerful argument: why, still, do societies regard men as the final word in evolution?

But enough about people— here come the machines. The rise of AI has led to a rise in books about AI, among the most insightful of which is The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (one of the founders of DeepMind) and Michael Bhaskar. Suleyman’s message is that this world-altering tech really is, as the title suggests, coming fast—and we might not be able to contain its more terrible implications.  For a broader and slightly more hopeful prognosis, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s Power and Progress argues that humankind has thrived whenever it has brought technology under widespread control—and that we can do so again.

Meanwhile, David Runciman’s The Handover contemplates (among many other things) what AI could mean for us as democratic citizens. And Meredith Broussard’s More Than a Glitch exposes the awful biases that are currently encoded within this future.

If you prefer your tech books to be more backwards-looking, then Scott Shapiro’s Fancy Bear Goes Phishing is a work of history about five hacks—including the Russian hack of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign—that have shaped the modern age. But it has an ever-relevant idea at its heart: that the biggest flaw in the system might be us.

Outside of technology, although not totally outside, is Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap. Mounk was already one of the great commentators on the rise of dangerous populism; now, with this book, he becomes a great commentator on the rise of what he calls “the identity synthesis”, though others may know it as “identity politics” or “woke tosh”, according to their preconceptions. Where did it come from? Where is it going? And is it a good or bad thing? Mounk addresses these questions calmly and intelligently, which is more than most have achieved.

Which leaves Claire Dederer’s Monsters and Siddarth Shrikanth’s The Case for Nature. The first is a perceptive exploration of whether we can separate the artist—the egoist, the misogynist, the rapist—from their art. The second is an argument for why and how companies should care for the natural world, not just the climate. Like all the best books, both overspill with ideas.

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Books of the year 2023: History

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Books

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Lives

From philosophers Derek Parfit and Daniel Dennett to Sonny Rollins and Daniel Finkelstein

By Prospect Team   December 6, 2023

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” A line by Allen Ginsberg that has lent some of its words to the title of Jonathan Rosen’s book, The Best Minds, about his exceptionally clever, severely schizophrenic schoolfriend Michael Laudor, who was treated as a cause célèbre—the subject of a potential movie—after graduating from Yale Law School in the 1990s.

What he was not, however, was treated, at least not sufficiently. Well-intentioned people around Laudor tried to give him a normal life. And then, in 1998, Laudor killed his pregnant fiancée, Caroline Costello, during a psychotic episode. It is testament to the empathetic brilliance of Rosen’s book that, by the end, you’re not entirely sure who the title is referring to—to Laudor, to a society that neglects mental illness, or even to Rosen himself.

There is also a blurring of personal lives and grand social forces in Naomi Klein’s wonderfully esoteric Doppelganger. It begins with an individual case of confusion: Klein is often mistaken for Naomi Wolf, another Jewish thinker and author—albeit one who, unlike Klein, has sunk into conspiracy theories about Covid vaccinations. But then it expands into the territory of mass confusion: about politics, technology and what we can ever really know.

It has been a good year for philosophical biographies. Our reviewer, Julian Baggini, described David Edmonds’s Parfit—about Derek Parfit, one of the late 20th century’s most important thinkers on identity and morality—as “surely the best biography of a philosopher since Ray Monk’s hitherto peerless Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1991).” The same accolade cannot be paid to Daniel Dennett’s I’ve Been Thinking, not least because it is the author’s own memoir, but it is nevertheless one of the most compulsively readable accounts of what it means to live as a philosopher.

Is Clare Carlisle’s The Marriage Question also a philosophical biography? In a way, yes. Its immediate subject is the novelist George Eliot, or (to give her real name) Mary Ann Evans. But its grander subject isn’t just that suggested by its title—what women, in particular, stand to gain and lose in marriage—but also what it means to lead the moral, rewarding life in general. With this and her previous book on Søren Kierkegaard, Carlisle has confirmed herself as one of the most deep-thinking writers about deep thought.

It has been a good year, too, for cultural biographies. Aidan Levy’s Saxophone Colossus gives the doorstopper treatment to one of the most intriguing figures in jazz, Sonny Rollins, and situates him properly, which is to say prominently, within popular culture. Oliver Soden’s account of Noël Coward’s life, Masquerade, is as clever and as playful as Coward himself. Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap is, as one would expect from its author, a poetic yet clear-eyed investigation of art, family and loss.

Family unites two works by two great journalists—as does horror. The first is Daniel Finkelstein’s Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, which, in describing the pains that his family endured to simply exist throughout the 20th century, describes many of the enduring pains of the 20th century itself. The other is Paul Caruana Galizia’s A Death in Malta. His mother was the crusading journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who fought corruption in her home country and was murdered in 2017 as a result. In Paul, it is clear, she has the perfect writer to tell her story—and, in fact, continue her legacy.

Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence is based on extended conversations with the Irish killer Malcolm Macarthur, who was responsible for the “Gubu” (“grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”) crimes in 1982. His book acts as a corrective to the salaciousness and stupidity of much true crime. Where, the author seems to ask, does any of this get us?

Whereas Arthur Parkinson’s Chicken Boy feels like a corrective to… everything? Here is a boy. Who likes chickens. And who draws and writes about them beautifully. Cluck.

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Books of the year 2023: History

Prospect Editorial Team

Books

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: History

From understanding the role of the Roman Emperor to accounts of East Germany and life in Ukraine and China

By Prospect Team   December 6, 2023

There have been many fine books about the Romans this year, including Tom Holland’s Pax and Peter Stothard’s Palatine, but Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome still stands out.

Which emperor is it about? Ah, but that is the point. Beard is not examining a single person but the role itself: who was this figure, what was expected of him, and what judgements can we cast now? In exploring these questions, she draws not just on a career’s worth of classical-historical knowledge, but on a career’s worth of thinking about how classical history itself—with its truths, lies and unknowns—should be approached. The result could be a manifesto for the discipline’s future.

Similarly, John Guy and Julia Fox’s Hunting the Falcon takes a familiar subject—the Tudors, or, more specifically, the union of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn—and still manages to shed new light on it. The book’s understanding of and sympathy for the personalities involved is impressive, but its explication of the grand politics behind this most politically momentous of marriages is surely unsurpassable.

Cat Jarman’s The Bone Chests is less traditional in form but is no less insightful, and rather more poetic, for it. It tells the story of the building of Anglo-Saxon England not event by event nor date by date but through the contents of half a dozen “bone chests”:  remains of 7th-century rulers and courtiers that have been exhumed from Winchester Cathedral. It pairs well with Jessica Rawson’s Life and Afterlife in Ancient China, which unearths the societies and mores of pre-imperial China by excavating fascinating tombs.

Leaping forward millennia, to the 17th century, Nandini Das’s Courting India is a revelation. Das is a professor of literature at Oxford, and she brings to this history of the early diplomatic relationship between England and India a profound understanding of texts and cultures. On one side, there is the impoverished yet still arrogant monarchy of King James I and VI. On the other, the power and splendour of Mughal emperor Jahangir. And in the middle? A diplomat called Thomas Roe, with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Britain had become a more confident and more terrible global power by the 19th century. As for other countries, they had their convulsions. Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring is a majestic account of the uprisings that spread across mainland Europe in 1848, from Sicily to Prussia to France. Its main argument is persuasive: although these revolutions and attempted revolts might not have been successful on their own terms, they had world-changing consequences.

On to the 20th century. Bernard Wasserstein’s A Small Town in Ukraine starts with the deportation of his Jewish grandfather from Nazi Germany, then ranges backwards and forwards to reveal the war-torn history of the Ukrainian settlement where that grandfather came from. Julian Jackson’s France on Trial grapples with the life and (mis)deeds of Philippe Pétain—the French general who led the Vichy regime during the Second World War—and the country’s dark feelings of hatred and guilt after the war. Meanwhile, Tania Branigan’s Red Memory uncovers the atrocities inflicted by the Chinese state on its own people during the Cultural Revolution.

It is not all horror in Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer—and that is the point. This is a from-start-to-finish account of the East Germany where Hoyer was born, which means not just the Stasi but also day jobs, picnics and rock albums. The result is a complete reconstruction of a country that stopped existing 23 years ago.

But where is all this history leading? One of the most esoteric, enjoyable and enlightening history—or should that be prehistory?—books of the year, Ludovic Slimak’s The Naked Neanderthal, attempts to teach us about ourselves by teaching us about the mysterious, dead creatures we call Neanderthals. It’s possible that our species-ancestors had a massive impact on the Neanderthals’ world back then, just as we’re having a massive impact on our own world now.

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Books of the year 2023: Lives

Prospect Editorial Team

Table of Contents

Prospect Magazine: January/February 2024

People

Just Stop Oil’s Morgan Trowland: ‘This is more important than our individual lives’

On the font lines

How Jacqueline Alnes escaped fruitarianism

The tech CEO who stepped down at 29

Columns

What I’m teaching my students about AI

Goblin mode is out. Monk mode is in

Why the Rwanda policy was always likely to fail

Is Israel waging a just war?

Carol Vorderman’s diary: I’m counting down to Tory wipeout

Regulars

Steve Bell’s Christmas carol

Stephen Collins: The rest is extinction

The Generalist: January/February 2024

Lives

Sex Life: I ask my client “can you come four times in an hour?“

Mindful life: Why I love cycling with a group of middle aged men

Farming life: A perfect storm

Clerical life: Giving a same-sex blessing was the ultimate joy

Young life: What my bedroom says about me

Sheila Hancock: “I don’t care if I’m cancelled. Death will do that soon anyway”

Sporting life: The nourishing nature of cricket

Editor's Picks

All that remains

The World’s Top Thinkers 2024: ideas for a world on the brink

Is Kemi Badenoch a new kind of Tory?

Under the spell of the franchise

Features

America’s undoing

Eliot Higgins: the man who verifies

13 years of failure

Could Harold Macmillan solve today’s housing crisis?

A law unto herself

Bad medicine

In Taiwan, China is covertly preparing for battle

Vote for your World’s Top Thinker 2024

Culture

Sarabande: a new short story by Oliver Soden

In dreams I walk with you

The Great Crash 2023

Mário de Andrade, the troll of the tropics

I ain’t got time to bleed

There’s too much television

Let’s hear it for the Scala

A different kind of love song

Classical notes: The sound of gunfire

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Politics & Reportage

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Ideas

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: Lives

Prospect’s books of the year 2023: History