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The one state

solution
Rethinking
Israel-Palestine

Why cancer screening won’t save you

David Lynch: sculptor of nightmares
Remembering VS Naipaul
Plus new columnists on sport,
family, nature and more
2
 THE CHANGE YOUR FLEET DESERVES
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PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 1

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2 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

Contents
September 2018

Features

The one state solution

Rethinking Israel-Palestine
20 Two states of denial
In a provocative essay, a leading Israeli
politician calls for his compatriots to embrace
the one-state solution
AVRAHAM BURG
plus A PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVE:
RAJA SHEHADEH
26 Bulldozing a vision
How the two-state dream faded: a report from
the West Bank
DONALD MACINTYRE

32 Breaking news
How Metro became Britain’s most-read newspaper
JANE MARTINSON
36 Prospect Portrait Ruth Davidson
She has a reputation for being a different type
of Tory—but just how far can she go?
DANI GARAVELLI
40 The dark side of cancer screening
Everyone knows that early diagnosis can save a life.
32 What if everyone is wrong?
MICHAEL BLASTLAND
44 Called to account
Decisions taken by power-hungry men in Frankfurt
have hampered the first 20 years of the euro
ADAM TOOZE
50 An Elizabethan Brexit
Our current crisis bears an uncanny resemblance to
that facing Elizabeth I in the late 16th century
MATTHEW DIMMOCK

36
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Letters & opinions
4 Letters
6 A second referendum?
DOMINIC GRIEVE
7 New parties, old egos
ANNE PERKINS
8 Remembering Naipaul
SAMEER RAHIM
9 Morality and markets
DIANE COYLE
plus ANDY DAVIS’S
investment column
10 A taste of Prospect online
Feminism and the climate
STEPHANIE BOLAND
plus STEPHEN COLLINS’S
cartoon strip
12 The view from Stockholm
Sweden’s hard-right turn
MADDY SAVAGE
Speed data
15 The gap of ages
Whatever you do, don’t
be young
The Duel
16 Is Donald Trump a fascist?
TALIA LAVIN VS
ANDREW STUTTAFORD
Art & books
54 The last warrior
Charles de Gaulle fought for a
France made in his own grand
self-image
PIERS BRENDON
59 Lend me your ears
For Roger Scruton the western
classical tradition reigns
supreme over modern music
IVAN HEWETT
61 Sculptor of nightmares
David Lynch’s memoir offers a
glimpse behind the curtain
WENDY IDE
64 Rest for the wicked
A brash US talent delights in
breaking taboos of all kinds
JOSIE MITCHELL
66 Books in brief
68 Recommends
CONTENTS 3
ProspectLife
71 Home front
Robot-proofing
HEPHZIBAH ANDERSON
72 The wild frontier
Sparks of life
CAL FLYN
73 In play
Stopping as the season starts 72
BENJAMIN MARKOVITS
plus HANNAH BERRY’S Things to do this month
cartoon strip
85 Prospect events
74 Classical musing Join us at our Book Clubs,
Your mob, my populus talks and debates
CHARLOTTE HIGGINS
plus The way we were Endgames
IAN IRVINE 87 The generalist crossword
75 Bad habits DIDYMUS
And finally... 87 Enigmas & puzzles
CATHY RENTZENBRINK BARRY R CLARKE
Brief Encounter
88 Frances O’Grady
“First news memory? England
winning the World Cup in
1966. But the flour bombing of
the 1970 Miss World contest left
a more lasting impression”
Listen to the
Prospect podcast
Hear the voices behind
the essays and big ideas in
this issue with our free
54
Prospect podcast. Listen now at
prospectmagazine.co.uk, iTunes, or
Prospect’s Think Tank
wherever you get your podcasts.
Awards 2018
76 Results from our biggest and
broadest annual contest yet Prospect online
Get the latest analysis on
Policy report: Prospect’s website:
Reviving the north prospectmagazine.co.uk
Including the Chair of the
81 A mayor writes
Low Pay Commission on how Brexit
BEN HOUCHEN could undo years’ worth of progress,
Kate Devlin on our smartphone
81 In search of the rich life
CAROLINE FLINT obsession and Ian Thomson on the
curious history of Dante on screen.
82 Policy focus: the northern
transport question @prospect_uk, @prospect_events
CHRIS GRAYLING facebook.com/prospect.mag
prospect_magazine
82 The NP problem
JAY ELWES
 4 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

Letters & opinions

letters@prospectmagazine.co.uk • @prospect_uk

Goodbye Google
Farewell Facebook,
Big Tech
Please don’t invade Time to break up
forces
Britain’s vanishing

absurdity of by-elections for he-

In fact
ISSUE 269 | AUGUST

reditary peers in the Lords was

2018

­excellent, and I agree that the up-

| £5.95
AUGUST 2018
prospectmagazine.co.uk

Prospect
Think again. Think

May’s per chamber needs further reform.

summer me
ltdown More 16-34 year olds say they
But I am writing as the spokes- often or always feel lonely (8 per
What starts
WHAT STARTS

person for Daughters’ Rights, cent) than those aged 65 or over

if Brexit
IF BREXIT STOPS?

which recently brought a case (3 per cent).

stops? to Strasbourg on behalf of five Community Life Survey, 2017-8
The backlash,
Zoe Williams
and Nick Clegg
the opportunities
and the surprises
daughters of peers. They are chal-
on a new Europe
lenging the government because Montenegro has 20 troops in
Syria’s conspiracy
correspondent | Wilde
days in Paris
rat-only election
they would like to stand in these Afghanistan as part of Nato’s
by-elections but are unable to do
sperm | The aristoc
The problem with

T 23/07/2018 15:33
ongoing mission—more per capita
Cover_v2.indd
1
so because of their gender. than the US (its official contribution
Our argument is very simple: is 8,475).
Switching focus while this system exists it is almost NBC News, 18th July 2018
Zoe Williams (“The Left road to remain,” August) tempts us down exclusively for men, and this state-
the path of “if only the past had been different, the future would be sanctioned discrimination at the Of the National Gallery’s 2,300
so much better.” We should resist and focus on the today. heart of parliament must end. works of art, 21 are by women.
The vote to “Leave” was perfectly rational and, contrary to what Should we not attempt to cre- BBC News, 6th July 2018
Williams suggests, went deeper than the left/right divide. Jeremy Cor- ate a level playing field for wom-
byn’s cohort on the left of Labour has been consistent in its opposition en? It is 2018 and time to get this In a survey of 40,000 Americans,
to the European Union. wrong righted. more Muslims (51 per cent)
Being able to remove those who make your laws is as much a con- Charlotte Carew Pole supported same-sex marriage than
cern for “well-heeled Surrey voters” as for factory workers in the Pot- white evangelicals (34 per cent).
teries. Now the focus must be on avoiding the youth unemployment Get it right Religion News Service, 1st May
levels of southern Europe—we ought to create an industrial base which Those of us who are doing our 2018
serves our needs. The left must embrace national renewal and pri- best to avoid a Brexit which would
oritise local communities, which are more than tiny links in global damage both this country and the The Zerão football stadium in
supply chains. rest of the EU have quite enough northern Brazil was designed to put
Gisela Stuart, former Chair, Vote Leave on our hands without having to the midfield line exactly over the
contend with the fantasies of Wolf- equator, so that each team defends
gang Munchau (“Europe does not a different hemisphere.
All change please would such a highly effective com- want us back,” August). His ver- Twisted Sifter, 9th April 2018
Brexit will harm everything the left missioner not be given a second sion of events if Britain were to
decide to remain is a remarkable In 2017, Australia was the most
should want. It must be stopped. term? Zeid tellingly observed that
popular country for millionaires to
But I agree, vigorously, with Zoe “to be re-elected in my job would example of “having your cake and
migrate to—10,000 individuals
Williams that to succeed in that be to fail” because it would have eating it” in reverse.
worth US$1m or more went there,
objective with no vision of our own required him to pull his punches In those circumstances, as-
while 4,000 moved out of the UK.
is to risk becoming self-interested rather than to speak out. suming this takes place before the The Guardian, 6th June 2018
and complacent. The problem is that, even Article 50 cut-off date, the prime
If you’re on the left, change is though the UN General Assembly minister would not write to Don-
This year for the first time, Netflix
an imperative. Recognising that is elects the high commissioner, per- ald Tusk (as Munchau suggests)
received the most nominations
easy. Far harder is describing that manent members of the Security to “ask for Brexit to be reversed.” (112) for the US TV Emmy awards,
changed world and then getting Council act as if they have a veto. He or she would simply withdraw beating HBO (108), which had led
there. So where did “Remain” go Three of them cannot wait to see the letter triggering Article 50, all networks for the past 18 years.
wrong? Were we swindled by the Zeid’s back. which was a unilateral decision. Slate, 12th July 2018
siren salesmen of easy change? Did UN Secretary General António The UK would then remain a
we fail to describe our destination? Guterres has nominated as the next member of the EU on the current On the classic British Monopoly
Or did we forget the imperative? high commissioner former Chilean terms. Perhaps Munchau could board, Old Kent Road is the only
As “Remain” starts to seem pos- President Michelle Bachelet. The stick to economics, about which property south of the River Thames.
sible again, it is worth contemplat- Trump administration wasted no he writes well, and keep out of Wikipedia
ing a tragedy. It happens if we suc- time in warning her to “avoid the politics.
ceed by throwing obstacles in the failures of the past.” David Hannay, House of Lords
path of others but offer no destina- As a victim of torture, Bachelet
tion of our own. That would betray brings a unique perspective. With Commode conundrum
a country that needs change. rights under widespread attack, Whilst your readers seem unlikely
Jolyon Maugham QC people worldwide will depend on to agree on Brexit, I wonder if they
her to be a forceful champion. can achieve a consensus on the
Failure is not an option Ken Roth, Executive Director, burning question of our times:
Tom Fletcher’s article on the out- ­Human Rights Watch Why do modern on-train toilets
going UN High Commissioner for require the operation of two but-
Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hus- Unequal opportunities tons to close and lock the door but
sein (“UN-diplomatic,” August) Martha Gill’s article (“The ­ermine only one to unlock and open it? “Let’s try a little less smile, Mona”
raises a disturbing question: why election,” August) regarding the John Eoin Douglas, Edinburgh
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6 OPINIONS
Georgia ahead of the Presidential election
The world is concerned that main political forces in the country underestimate the Russian threat
O
f all former Soviet states,
Georgia has been the main
candidate for future
membership of the Euro-
pean Union and NATO over
the last years. However there are still
some factors which may hinder the Euro-
Atlantic integration of the
Transcaucasian nation. To identify the
problems we need to pay our attention to
domestic political processes in Georgia,
which plans to hold presidential election
on October 28, 2018. Despite the
international support the Georgian
government received after the August
war of 2008, the presidential race is
nevertheless filled with heated debate as
to the reasons of the bloodshed in South
Ossetia. The ruling Georgian Dream
party supported an independent
presidential candidate Salome
Zurabishvili whose remarks caused public
outcry both in Georgia and abroad. Mrs.
Zurabishvili believes it was Georgia that
started the war back then. The statement
not only runs counter to the pro-
European political course of the nation, it
also makes NATO doubt whether to
continue its military cooperation with
Georgia. The efforts that international
funds and western diplomatic missions in
Tbilisi have been making over the years
instantly become worthless when the
government of Georgia suddenly fails to
show its willingness to essentially defend
western values in the face of the threat
coming from Russia. Considering that
stability of the foreign policy is pivotal
when estimating democracy development
in that country, improvement in relations
of Russia and Georgia may seriously
hinder the effective cooperation of Tbilisi
with the European Union and with
NATO.
The lack of a clear anti-Russian
attitude in Tbilisi may compromise
Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations as
well as frustrate NATO’s plans to
strengthen its military positions in
Transcaucasia which entails huge
financial and geopolitical costs for
NATO members. In fact if Georgia shies
Dominic Grieve
To stand up to Russia is Georgia’s only
way out of the political maze
away from Moscow’s destructive foreign
policy, it will jeopardize further
toughening of international sanctions
against Russia. Therefore both domestic
and foreign policy of Georgia directly
affect the interests of international
community, while the front-runner of the
presidential race Salome Zurabishvili
surely needs to explain to the western
partners the ambiguous remark she made
with the approval of the ruling Georgian
Dream party.
It is worth noting though, that
politicians from the European Union and
the United States have timely reacted to
the developments in Georgia by
increasing the number of diplomats and
representatives of civil society sent to
Tbilisi from Summer 2018 onwards to
adjust the perspective of the Georgian
Dream party members on the political
situation around the world. Missions from
the USAID, McCain Institute, The
Heritage Foundation are working hard to
bring back the hardline anti-Russian
attitude to the election campaign in
Georgia by reopening fierce public debate
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
on the events of 2008. The UK security
agencies have provided Georgia’s Ministry
of Internal Affairs with the information
that large-scale riots are being organized
in Tbilisi after the outrageous statements
of the ruling party politicians on the 2008
events in South Ossetia. It may become a
good incentive for the political elite in
Georgia to get back to the foreign policy
approved by the western partners. The US
and EU politicians in their turn have
scheduled for September-October 2018 a
number of meetings with representatives
of the Georgian opposition Davit
Bakradze and Grigol Vashadze to
demonstrate their support to the
candidates if the Georgian Dream party
fails to implement all anti-Russian
REX SHUTTERSTOCK
initiatives the international community
has proposed.
At the moment we can safely say that
the government of Georgia is fully aware
that if it defies the international efforts to
stand up to Russia, the Euro-Atlantic
integration of the country will be put to
question while the international
community may well prefer the opponents
of the acting government during the
forthcoming presidential election. Despite
their extremely hardline stance on Tbilisi’s
foreign policy London, Washington and
Brussels highlight the great geopolitical
significance of Georgia in the modern
world. Backing sanctions against Russia,
rejecting the economic and political
dialogue with the country and
investigating crimes of the Russian
military in Syria – all of it goes neatly
along with Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future.
In case the nation’s ruling powers fail to
comply with the recommendations of the
international community, western
partners will have every right to
strengthen global security by helping the
people of Georgia elect a leader whose
foreign policy will correspond to the
international environment and will ensure
that Georgia acquires membership of the
European and North Atlantic institutions
as soon as possible.
Dominic Grieve is Conservative MP for
Beaconsfield
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
New parties and old egos
A new political force might sound attractive. But the oddballs who start them spell trouble
T
here is a new fact in British pol-
itics: the homeless voter. This
class spans centre-right to cen-
tre-left. Its members are united
by their pro-European views
and metropolitan lives—in short, they are
the sort of people who used to benefit from
the political status quo.
Even if Dominic Grieve (opposite) tact-
fully downplays the possibility, there are
rising murmurs about realignment. Middle-
of-the-road MPs despair at parties they see
as hijacked by the extremes and paralysed on
Brexit. Conversations on the doorstep, they
say, suggest that today’s electorate is not so
different from that which used to smile on
Blair and Major—a worried country could be
rallied to moderation once more.
But what’s missing from these conversa-
tions, which imagine a new party mapping
neatly onto the pre-ordained contours of vot-
ers’ preferences, is perhaps the most impor-
tant factor of all in politics—personality.
Even if you want a new party, it pays to think
hard about who you want to pull it together.
The SDP, a cautionary tale for the centrists,
may have been disadvantaged by first-past-
the-post, but as much as anything else it
failed to “break the mould” because of indi-
viduals who simply couldn’t get on.
A new party is a fragile thing: there are
no established precedents, no institutional
memory to hold conflicting personalities
together. Yet it is just those big, forceful poli-
ticians who kick against constraints that are
tempted to create something new. They try—
as David Owen eventually did with his “conti-
nuity SDP” in 1991—to create a party around
themselves. They are Emmanuel Macrons
without the supportive electoral system.
Owen, whose career trajectory arcs from
passionate European to “Leave” campaigner,
has been the great disrupter of his gener-
ation. He was always at odds with Roy Jen-
kins, the senior figure in the Gang of Four.
Nor, later, could he forge a partnership with
David Steel, the Liberal leader during the
mid-80s Alliance years. This was not only
because of the Spitting Image puppet depict-
ing Steel in Owen’s top pocket, the very jun-
ior partner in an Owen appreciation society.
The arrogance of Owen and the mildness of
OPINIONS
Anne Perkins
Mosley started the New Party in 1930
Steel disguised real disagreements over pol-
icy. And in the end, Owen would never con-
cede enough to make the partnership work.
Paddy Ashdown, who eventually emerged
as leader of the merger of the Liberals and
the SDP-minus-Owen, spoke with unusual
chill to the BBC about Owen’s determination
to keep the SDP alive, even if this destroyed
the Lib Dems: “He was not a team builder,
he couldn’t create a team, he couldn’t work
with a team.” That ultimately did for Owen’s
career in Britain, but Ashdown added “he
would have been president in the US.”
Many generations have had a charismatic
original like Owen with a tendency to culti-
vate followers rather than colleagues. Oswald
Mosley broke with both the Conservatives
and Labour, and was briefly the darling of
the glamorous left before the appeal of the
adoring crowd led him to demagoguery. A
generation before that, it was the serial split-
ter Joe Chamberlain who Churchill thought
“the most live, sparkling, insurgent, compul-
sive figure in British affairs.” All these figures
ultimately left political ruin in their wake.
Churchill himself might be seen as
the ultimate ego in 20th-century politics,
and in his own words “re-ratted” between
7
parties. But he was in the end capable of
uniting against an enemy. He was the only
Tory leader Labour would work with in the
1940s and—in return for co-operation—put
Clement Attlee in charge of the home front.
The arrangement worked because Attlee
was, by temperament, a team player. Col-
legiate politicians can work around yawn-
ing chasms in ideology. In the 1970s Michael
Foot, a bookish CND idealist, forged a
respectful alliance with Jim Callaghan, a
hard-bitten union fixer. In the 1980s, one-
nation Tory Willie Whitelaw was indispensa-
ble to the ideologue Margaret Thatcher. In
the 1990s, John Prescott, a one-time union
militant, wanted a Labour government more
than he disliked what Tony Blair stood for.
The lesson of a new book on political part-
nerships, by former Labour MP Giles Radice,
is the enduring importance of matching initi-
ators and facilitators—the dazzling Church-
ills with the modest Attlees who actually get
things done.
Labour has too often forgotten the
importance of this mix, succumbing to the
sectarian zeal of the late Blair years or the
factionalism of today’s Corbynites. So have
the Tories. Indeed, one of the great frailties of
Theresa May’s government is the lack of per-
sonal glue. With Damian Green and Amber
Rudd gone, May is alone, zigzagging her way
solo through a blue-on-blue firestorm that
threatens to engulf her. Whether it does or
not will depend as much on personalities
as anything else. It is striking that Grieve—
an unusually cerebral politician—has pin-
pointed the thing that could make him walk
away from his party: not some high principle
on Europe but a Boris Johnson leadership.
Which brings us back to those homeless
centrists. The Lib Dems have a long road
back into voters’ hearts, so maybe it is time
for an ego. But the lesson of history is that
both awkward-squad sorts like Anna Soubry
who revel in argument, and limelight-hug-
ging charmers like Chuka Umunna need
to be handled with care. They need to fig-
ure out who their Attlees and Whitelaws are.
Then again, if the only ego on offer is John-
son, we’re in for disruption that will leave eve-
ryone running for cover.
Anne Perkins is a freelance writer
8 OPINIONS
The debt we owe Naipaul
Yes, he was a flawed character, but VS Naipaul was a literary giant
I
n December 1950, a young Vidia
Naipaul wrote a letter from Oxford
back to his family in Trinidad. “I
want to come top of my group,”
he said, “I have got to show these
people that I can beat them at their own
language.” By all measures of formal pub-
lic commendation, VS Naipaul, who died
on 11th August at the age of 85, came out
top of his group. He won the Booker and
the Nobel Prize among many other acco-
lades; in 1990 he was knighted. Along with
Chinua Achebe, he inaugurated what is
now called post-colonial fiction. Naipaul
leaves us 30 books written over 50 years,
evenly split between fiction and non-fiction.
He mastered every genre, from the pun-
gently witty stories of Trinidad street life
in Miguel Street (1959) and his tragi-comic
masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas (1961),
to the Conradian darkness of A Bend in the
River (1979). He invented a fair few gen-
res as well—most notably the beautifully
controlled autobiographical fiction of The
Enigma of Arrival (1987).
But despite his astonishing achieve-
ments, the obituaries and social media
comments have been rather grudging.
Unlike Philip Roth, another giant of post-
war letters who died earlier this year, there
was no late flowering. His last book, the
2010 travel narrative The Masque of Africa,
rehashed old stereotypes about the con-
tinent. Patrick French’s 2008 authorised
biography drew attention to Naipaul’s
troubled relations with women, especially
his first wife Patricia, whom he repeatedly
cheated on with prostitutes.
He was always ready to trash an old
friend (Anthony Powell, Paul Theroux) or
dismiss a canonical writer (he said, loft-
ily, that he could never share Jane Aus-
ten’s “sentimental sense of the world.”)
That in making such comments he was
often practising what West Indians called
“Picong” or provocative banter was usually
missed when his comments were set down
in bald print.
But we shouldn’t forget that he was a
great writer, and his greatest book is Bis-
was. Written between the ages of 25 and
28—an astonishingly precocious achieve-
Sameer Rahim
A success obsessed with failure
ment—the novel follows a character based
on his own father, Seepersad Naipaul, an
aspiring writer perpetually short of cash.
Though it starts slowly, the novel soon
delivers brilliant comic sequence after
comic sequence. Our flawed hero is always
searching for a home to call his own—a
search with wider political resonances for a
descendant of Indian indentured labourers.
Biswas’s fear of failure is overwhelming.
“How terrible it would have been,” Naipaul
writes, “to have lived without even attempt-
ing to lay claim to one’s portion of the Earth;
to have lived and died as one had been born,
unnecessary and unaccommodated.”
The same feeling of dislocation caused
the author immense pain and rage—feel-
ings he could only contain within the con-
tours of his balanced prose. In his travel
books he sought out others similarly
wounded by colonialism and doomed, as he
thought, to an inauthentic mimicry of the
west. Many turned to nativism or religious
fundamentalism to hide their shame. About
such men Naipaul could be harsh, and he
makes generalisations, especially about
Muslims and black Africans, that will make
many readers wince.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
But to dismiss him as a mere Islamo-
phobe is too easy. Among the Believers, his
1979 account of travelling in four Muslim
countries, was published soon after the Ira-
nian Revolution. In this prescient work,
Naipaul ruthlessly identifies the contradic-
tions inherent in Islamism: religious men
were ready to embrace western technol-
ogy, but not the thought that allowed it to
develop; they looked to an idealised Islamic
© AGENCJA FOTOGRAFICZNA CARO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
past for comfort, but comparing their pre-
sent weakness with the west’s strength only
brought discontent and ultimately violence.
By the time of A Bend in the River—a
withering account of the self-deceptions
of both the coloniser and the once-colo-
nised—something had hardened in Nai-
paul. The sympathetic portrait of the
“unnecessary and unaccommodated” Mr
Biswas had curdled into the aphoristic cer-
tainty of the later novel’s famous opening,
admired, among others, by Barack Obama:
“The world is what it is; men who are noth-
ing, who allow themselves to become noth-
ing, have no place in it.”
Every writer emerging from the periph-
ery owes Naipaul an immense debt of
gratitude. In a time when there were no
clamours for “inclusivity” or “diversity,” he
and his brother Shiva, also a fine novelist,
clawed their way to the centre. When there
were no models for how to write literary
novels about an Indian Trinidadian com-
munity, Naipaul had to invent a style. The
scars he suffered along the way were plain
for all to see—more often than not he was
the one who exposed them.
Last month, I was at a party at Buck-
ingham Palace to mark the Man Booker
Prize’s 50th birthday. Naipaul was there,
enthroned on a wheelchair, staring straight
ahead. I bent down and told him how much
his work meant to me. I tried to shake his
hand but it was curled into a tight fist. I
assumed he could no longer speak; but
no, I was told, he could speak, but on this
occasion he was choosing not to. It was a
piquant—or picong—comic moment, a last
piece of playfulness from a man who had
lived so long and seen so much.
Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Managing Editor
(Arts & Books)
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 OPINIONS
Economic View: Diane Coyle
Markets vs Property
A new book sets one of the Right’s favourite ideas against another
H T
alf a decade ago Michael
Sandel, the political philos-
opher, struck a chord with
his bestseller What Money
Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits
of Markets. Sandel gave multiple examples of
money buying what it ought not: the right to
name nursery schools, prison cell upgrades,
a fast track through airport security and
more. Published while the financial crisis
was still fresh in memory and shortly after
Occupy Wall Street, Sandel’s argument that
the market had gone too far seemed to res-
onate with the left. But a decade on from
the crisis, the verdict that there is too much
market is challenged by a book that argues
for more—far more.
In Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism
and Democracy for a Just Society, Eric Posner
and Glen Weyl assert that markets have not
spread nearly far enough. The book has sev-
eral eye-catching proposals: that digital com-
panies should pay for personal data; voting
credits that would allow people to pay to cast
multiple votes on the issues they care most
about. But most significantly it argues that
everybody would have to state their valuation
of everything they own (with exceptions for
small items of sentimental value) and pay a
wealth tax on the total. To keep things hon-
est, someone who put a higher value on one
of those possessions would have the right to
purchase it. No individual would have any
property rights. In effect, all property would
be held in common and there would be a per-
petual market in everything.
Setting aside the practical challenges,
Posner and Weyl argue that this system
has many advantages. It is a redistributive
wealth tax (as the rich own the most), and
raises a large amount of revenue, perhaps
enough to support a generous universal
basic income. It is also economically effi-
cient, allocating property to the people who
value it most.
This is free market thinking but not as we
know it. Most economists see property rights
as the solution whereas Posner and Weyl see
them as the problem. Since Ronald Coase,
the Nobel Prize-winner revered by free mar-
keteers, property rights have been seen as
essential to enable transactions.
In contrast, Radical Markets argues that
individual property rights create a form of
monopoly power, entrenching inequality.
Its proposals draw inspiration from a differ-
ent tradition in economics, known as mar-
ket design. This sees markets as processes
of exchange governed by rules rather than
simply as monetary transactions. It can fix
markets that aren’t working properly and
create them from scratch where they’re
missing. This thinking has been applied
in auctions of government bonds and
even of different parts of the radio spec-
trum. It has also been used in money-free
exchanges such as matching kidney donors
to recipients.
In general, economists are fans of
extending market processes to more
domains, seeing carbon markets, for
instance, as a more effective way of reduc-
ing CO2 emissions, or online platforms as
a more efficient means of matching supply
and demand. But the ideas advocated in
Radical Markets clearly go further.
“Hume wisely wrote,
property is ‘a convention
enter’d into by all the
members of society to
bestow stability’”
The book is thought-provoking. But it
commits the error Sandel identified, of tak-
ing markets too far. It would be good to end
the veto some property owners have over
new house building by limiting their own-
ership rights. But somewhere there is a
social limit. As the wise David Hume wrote
in his Treatise of Human Nature, property is
“a convention enter’d into by all the mem-
bers of society to bestow stability on the
possession of… goods, and leave everyone
in the peaceable enjoyment of what he may
acquire by his fortune and industry.” Effi-
ciency is not the only criterion for the eco-
nomic good.
Diane Coyle is Bennett Professor of Public
Policy at the University of Cambridge
Investment: Andy Davis
No fast cars
Pension freedom pitfalls
he pensions transfer tsunami
powers ahead. Savers moved
£11bn in the first quarter of this
year to new pension schemes, the largest
quarterly total since the government gave
all over-55s the freedom to withdraw
their pension savings and do what they
like with them.
The former pensions minister, Steve
Webb, grabbed much attention for
suggesting some might choose to blow it
on a Lamborghini. But there are taxes to
pay if you really were to blow the lot, and
in practice most of the cash is moving
from gold-plated final salary pension
schemes into individual pension pots
holding bonds and shares. These offer no
guarantees about future income and are
vulnerable to crashes.
With “drawdown” pensions, instead
of buying a fixed annual income which
vanishes when you die, you keep the
funds inside a tax-privileged wrapper
after you retire and access them as
required. Compared with an annuity, you
gain control of your money and anything
left over can be passed on. But again,
the new freedom comes with risks. In a
crash, your nest egg can vanish, if you
live “too long” or withdraw too fast you
can run out of money.
In this world of freedom and insecurity,
one of the few certainties is that is that it
pays to keep a close eye on fees. While
you are paying in, managers’ charges are
capped at 0.75 per cent of the fund’s
total value. Since the fund tends to grow
as people save, this suits managers well:
their fees grow in proportion.
But when people retire, there is no cap
on charges and their fund will gradually
shrink—a headache for the managers
since their fees will do the same. This is
why average drawdown fees are higher
than when you’re paying in. But higher
fees on a shrinking pension is a terrible
deal. Pension freedoms sound attractive,
but that freedom comes with risk—your
pension pot might just spring a leak.
Andy Davis is Prospect’s Associate
Finance Editor
10
A taste of the latest from Prospect online: Stephanie Boland
Feminist fix for a man-made problem
Mary Robinson’s humorous fight against climate change
M
ary Robinson, a former
president of Ireland and
UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights, has
been fighting for action on
climate change for over a decade. But now
she’s doing it in a new way. With comedian
Maeve Higgins, Robinson has created a new
podcast, Mothers of Invention, to highlight the
importance of tackling global warming.
When I met the pair in London, Higgins
pointed out that humour is a useful thing
to have in the climate change conversation.
Curiosity—and a willingness to ask stupid
questions—goes a long way.
As the title suggests, there is a femi-
nist aspect to the podcast, which tells the
stories of people—principally women—
who are leading initiatives to fight back
against climate change. “Climate change is
a man-made problem and needs a feminist
solution,” Robinson said. “It isn’t gender-
neutral,” Higgins added. “It affects women
the most and the worst.”
Stephen Collins
OPINIONS
Some may bristle at that, but the gender
dimension is something the UN agenda on
climate change recognises. It points out that
environmental hazards have the worst effect
on the world’s poorest, who are dispropor-
tionately female. After two tropical cyclones
hit Vanuatu—the sort of small Pacific nation
which stands on the frontline of the coming
struggle against climate chaos—one wom-
en’s counselling centre reported a 300 per
cent increase in new domestic violence cases.
Then there was the report which found that
women and children are 14 times more likely
to be injured or die during a natural disaster.
The UN also notes that women’s involve-
ment in political decision-making helps
deliver sustainable solutions. “I spend a lot of
time in Africa,” Robinson said, “and women
are really on the move there.” She cited “big”
initiatives like a ban on plastic bags in Kenya,
instigated by a woman minister.
But how to instigate that change else-
where? In some places, the fight against cli-
mate change is belittled by “strongman”
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
leaders in the Trump mould who disdain it.
Here in the UK, politics has become scle-
rotic while Brexit dominates. Amid frenzied
news, climate change keeps being knocked
down the agenda. And yet, as Higgins said,
“Climate is one of the top priorities whatever
you’re interested in. If your concern is migra-
tion, it comes back to climate change: the
worse climate change is, the more people are
going to be migrating.”
Similarly, although Robinson admitted
that “we’re not in a good place globally”—
citing Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris
Agreement—she takes comfort from the
fact that frameworks to make progress are
still in place.
“At the moment, we’re not on course for
a safe world. But if we can see it in terms of
what a better world could be—for health, for
jobs, for our economic future…” She trailed
off. “How can we possibly not care about a
safe world for our children and grandchil-
dren? For me, that’s incomprehensible.”
Stephanie Boland is Head of Digital at Prospect
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12 OPINIONS PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

The view from Stockholm: Maddy Savage

Sweden’s immigration battle

The traditionally tolerant Nordic nation is taking a hard-right turn

I
n one of the defining moments of the
last Swedish general election, the
country’s then prime minister and
leader of the centre-right Moderate
Party Fredrik Reinfeldt called on
Swedes to “open their hearts” to refugees and
argued that they would help to build a bet-
ter Sweden. The world looked on at a tradi-
tionally tolerant nation embracing openness.
Now, as Sweden prepares to head to
the polls once again, its image is of a coun-
try divided. Things began to shift in 2015,
just a year after the last election, when the
Nordic nation took in a record 163,000 asy-
lum seekers. Local authorities struggled to
cope with the influx amid intense national
debates about potential integration prob-
lems and rising support for the country’s
anti-immigration party, the Sweden Demo-
crats. The government changed tack, slam-
ming shut the country’s open-door policy,
which had previously granted asylum to all
Syrian refugees.
None of this has stopped the march of the
nationalists. After winning 13 per cent of the
vote in 2014, their support swelled to around
20 per cent, and has stayed there. Several
recent polls have them running narrowly
behind the centre-left Social Democrats, led
by the country’s current Prime Minister Ste-
fan Löfven, which is currently on course for
a record low of 24 per cent. The centre-right
Moderates languish in third.
The Sweden Democrats’ neo-Nazi roots
do not seem to matter. They’re framing the
debate, forcing Sweden’s traditional political
parties to toughen their tone. Cutting high
unemployment levels and subsequent wel-
fare payments to the foreign-born population
is at the crux of the Moderates’ current cam-
paign, alongside a promise to tackle the ris-
ing numbers of high-profile shootings in the
troubled suburbs where many immigrants
live. On the centre-left, the Social Democrats
have pledged to continue to slash refugee
numbers and argued that Swedish lessons
should become compulsory for foreigners
seeking to claim benefits.
While both sides of the mainstream have
made integration a focal point of their cam-
paign, their policies remain hazy. Immigra-
tion was something of a taboo in Swedish
society in recent decades, especially among
the middle classes. Nuanced debates about
policy just didn’t take place. The discussion
only got going when things started to spiral
out of control at the height of the refugee cri-
sis, and the Sweden Democrats were free to
own the issue from the start.
Arguably, the fact that the nationalists are
still gaining ground might suggest that voters
looking for a harsher line on immigration still
doubt the mainstream will deliver on their
newly populist promises.
Yet while stricter immigration policies
have done little to stem the flow of voters
from the mainstream to the nationalist right,
more liberal supporters of both the Social
Democrats and the Moderates are now jump-
ing ship. The Left Party has seen its support
double to 9 per cent since the last election,
reeling in disenfranchised Social Democrat
voters attracted to its more humanitarian
approach, while the Centre Party, which has
campaigned against restrictions on the right
to family reunification, has also picked up
voters from the Moderates.
In this fluid and fragmented landscape,
Sweden has a tough challenge ahead. Form-
ing a traditional centre-right or centre-left
government won’t be easy, with neither bloc
likely to have a majority and both sides ruling
out a coalition with the Sweden Democrats.
Potential political constellations move
into view. Some of Sweden’s smaller centre-
right parties could end up teaming up with
the Social Democrats. There is even talk
of a potential German-style grand coali-
tion across the political mainstream. That’s
unlikely, but conceivable as a last resort to
keep the nationalists out of power.
Neither situation is one that Sweden’s tra-
ditional big parties are keen to discuss. Even
though it is conversations not had that have
got the Sweden Democrats this far, the final
stretch of the battle against them looks set to
be dominated by more political evasion.
Maddy Savage is a British journalist based in
Stockholm
© JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, STEFAN SOLLFORS/
ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, DPA PICTURE ALLIANCE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Burnt cars after recent riots in Stockholm; Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the Sweden Democrats, a hard-right party with neo-Nazi roots;
Swedish footballer Jimmy Durmaz gives a statement after receiving racial abuse from fellow Swedes
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PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 15

Speed data

The gap of ages

Whatever you do, don’t be young
TORSTEN BELL

Change in typical hourly pay since 2009

+2%
22-29 30-39 40-49 50-59 Baby boomers

-3% -1% 53%

Youth clubbed
The slump hit the pay
packets of the young 44%
hardest—and the
recovery has been
weaker for the
-5%
under-40s too 28%

-8%
Baby boomers (1946-65)

T
Generation X (1966-80)
he financial crisis was a disaster for Later on to the ladder
everyone, but young adults were Millennials are half as Millennials (1981-2000)
hardest hit. Those in their twen- likely as boomers to
ties were the only age group to see have bought a home Aged: 22 27 32
a pay squeeze of over 10 per cent. Ten years by the age of 30
on, as they head into their thirties, this group
still has the most ground to make up.
Even before the crisis, the young were Pushed out
slipping behind their parents in important
respects, with home-ownership in particu-
By 40, millennials
look set to spend
+3 days
extra commute per year
lar slipping out of reach. Britain’s post-war three extra days a
baby boomer generation thrived by buying year commuting to Baby boomers
young. But it’s become much harder since— work compared to
millennials today are half as likely to own boomers at that age Millennials
their home by 30 as their parents’ genera-
tion. Meanwhile, commute times are on the
up for the young. High rents and prices seem Change in weekly expenditure since 2000
to be pushing them further away from work. Make do and spend
Grumpy boomers may suspect this is all It’s not the young Consume
Consume
down to feckless youth blowing their cash on that are splurging the same 15%
fancy phones, holidays and meals out. But in on holidays and less

fact, if anyone’s burning through extra cash lunches out. The

it’s older generations. At the turn of the cen- 25-35s used to
tury young adults and older workers spent consume the same Old
Young Old Young
more or less the same. A decade and a half as the old, but
on, the young were spending 15 per cent a post-crisis the
week less than those approaching retirement. 55-65s spend 15
Those lazy clichés about avocados should be per cent more
toast. 2000 2014
SOURCE: INTERGENERATIONAL COMMISSION
16
Is Donald Trump a fascist?
Talia Lavin
YES
YES In the American political conver-
sation, there seems to be a divide
between those who see Trump as a sui generis
horror—his vulgarity and brazenness arising
like Aphrodite from sea-foam, to dominate
American political and popular culture—
and those who frustratedly point out that
our current leadership is drawing on innate
American traditions of hatred and terror that
date back to the country’s inception. Broadly,
one can call these two schools: “We’re better
than this,” and “Well—no, we’re not.”
I’m in the latter camp. You don’t have to
look too far to find the roots of the current
administration. Look how the civil rights
of black people are today continually, bru-
tally violated. Just look at the Bush-era tor-
ture programme’s architects, all of them
unpunished. If you do look further back, the
ghosts of the lynched and the mass graves
of genocide lurk in the American psyche;
the descendants of those who perpetrated
these crimes walk among us. But some-
thing doesn’t have to be uniquely terrible, or
unprecedented, to be ghastly. And the cur-
rent administration has long ago earned its
role as inheritor to the worst instincts and
actions of American history.
It’s no accident that Trump has enthusias-
tically adopted slogans that echo authoritar-
ian and crypto-fascist movements of the past.
“America First,” a Trumpian refrain, was the
slogan of US Nazi sympathisers in the 1930s.
“Enemy of the People,” when referring to the
press, was a favourite epithet of Stalin’s. It’s
not as if these historical echoes are secret, or
as if Google is blocked in the White House.
Occam’s razor suggests, therefore, that they
are intentional: of a piece with the dehuman-
ising rhetoric of “infestation” that Trump
The Duel
Andrew Stuttaford
uses with regard to immigrants; with govern-
ment secrecy and barbarity; with rampant
disregard for the truth and florid, bald-faced
corruption. I would argue for Occam’s razor
in our language and outlook as well. Call a
fascist a fascist, and check his actions before
they can sink to the worst depths of the his-
tory of that word.
NO “Fascism” once had a reasonably
precise meaning, shaped by refer-
ence to specific ideas, policies and regimes.
But, as early as 1944, George Orwell was
complaining that it was a term used in ways
that had degraded it to little more than a
“swearword.” Nearly 75 years later that is
still the case. After all, as insults go, “fascist”
works very well.
Donald Trump (for whom I did not vote)
is many things, many of them disreputa-
ble—or worse—but to label him a fascist is
not only misleading, but credits this former
Democrat, former independent and cur-
rent Republican with a degree of intellectual
coherence, however appalling, that he simply
does not possess.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
NO
Puzzle your way through the often-con-
tradictory political positions that Trump
has adopted over the years, and you will not
find too much consistency beyond his dec-
ades-long insistence that America is being
exploited by its trading partners and its allies.
That is neither a fascist, nor always an unfair
viewpoint, even if it can at times curdle into
paranoia and xenophobia. It’s also worth
noting that he has typically taken a hard-
line stance on crime and illegal immigra-
tion. These two topics have been legitimate
causes of concern, but as we saw in 2016 they
contain plenty of potential for a media-savvy
political entrepreneur and his dog whistle.
Trump has an ear for a good catchphrase.
“America First” has a shabby past, which
he must have known, but in addition he will
have known that, to an electorate not famous
for its knowledge of history, those two words
could be repackaged as a declaration of
uncomplicated patriotism, nothing more. To
deploy them was not sinister, but tasteless,
something that will not have worried Trump.
That is a priority with disturbing conse-
quences, but fascism will not be one of them.
YES There are many insults you can
use to describe Donald Trump,
his ridiculous appearance or the cesspit of
his character. But “fascist” is not an insult
in this case; it’s a descriptor, and a necessary
and accurate one.
The Italian writer Emilio Gentile wrote
about the “myths, rituals and symbols” of
fascism, saying it created a kind of secu-
lar cult, aiming to “abolish the boundaries
between the religious and political spheres.”
The sight of red-hatted crowds cheering
Trump at one of his rallies evokes this secular
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
cultishness. It is a crude kind of worship
practised by the cult of Trump, with its own
symbols and catchphrases. Indeed the name
“Trump” is wielded as a weapon all over the
US against racial and religious minorities, as
schoolteachers have noted in particular.
Trump’s dog-whistle racism was a central
feature of his campaign. But as president he
has eased off, except when he wants to dom-
inate the news cycle. Instead, with the help
of like-minded aides, he sets the hounds on
people he disfavours, primarily immigrants.
His “Muslim ban,” though initially struck
down by courts, was reinstated and upheld
by the judicial system, leading to countless
US residents being cut off from relatives in
other countries. Much worse was the barbaric
policy of separating children from their par-
ents at the border, and imprisoning children
in inadequate and even improvised facilities.
This revealed a staggering lack of humanity.
Even now, in defiance of a court dead-
line, 572 children have been functionally
orphaned by the US government, which
has no plan for reuniting these families. An
administration willing to create such direc-
tives—and in command of forces willing to
carry them out—is not flippantly called fas-
cist, per Orwell’s worries. It is one whose
innate fascism long ago began to reveal itself.
NO Sure, fascism operates as a kind
of political religion, as does Com-
munism. But those are ideologies of total
immersion. It would have been absurd to
watch the distinctly worshipful adulation of
Obama in 2008 and conclude that Bolshe-
vism was on the march. It is no less absurd
to look at cheering “red-hatted crowds” and
tremble at the thought of Il Duce redux.
You maintain that Trump’s name is
wielded against minorities “all over the US,”
and cite the claims made by schoolteach-
ers. Well, despite those claims, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention found no
increase in bullying between 2015 and 2017.
That is not to deny that there were incidents
or to downplay them. Nor is it to deny that,
beyond the schoolyard, Trump’s rise gave a
noisy racist fringe a sense of empowerment,
but to see this as evidence that fascism is on
its way is a mistake.
Turning to immigration, the so-called
“Muslim ban,” a crudely drawn anti-terror-
ism measure, was introduced with a careless-
ness and—there is no getting away from this
administration’s authoritarian instincts—a
callousness that proved self-defeating. After
pressure from the courts, the ban was weak-
ened. It was diluted further by the Supreme
Court. Checks and balances still work.
You mentioned the separation of migrant
children from their families. This happened
under Bush and Obama, but on nothing
remotely like the same scale. What mainly
changed matters was the Trump administra-
tion’s decision to start prosecuting “all” those
THE DUEL
caught crossing the border illegally. Children
cannot legally be incarcerated, thus the cal-
lous resort to separations. Yet, following pro-
tests, the policy was abandoned. A judge then
ordered the administration to return the chil-
dren to their families. In some 80 per cent of
the cases it has done so. The failure to reunite
the remainder is a result of bureaucratic fail-
ure and a horrifying lack of empathy: their
parents had been deported.
YES Merely because the courts have—
just—held in check the worst
instincts of our racist demagogue of a presi-
dent doesn’t mean we’re not in a moment of
genuine national crisis. (It should be noted
that Trump is doing his best to stack the judi-
ciary, including the Supreme Court, with
nominees.) The fact that public outcry and
lawsuits could mitigate some of the damage
done by a hideous policy of family separation
doesn’t mean the instincts that gave rise to it
are any less cruel, or that the minds behind it
will not continue to inflict violence on those
who can least resist it.
As for dismissing emboldened racists as
a “fringe,” this should be done carefully in
America—we have a dismal history of pure,
unfettered white supremacy. This year, sev-
eral open neo-Nazis are running, or have
run, for elected office, from California to Illi-
nois to North Carolina—all on the Republi-
can ticket. The “Jewish question” has arisen
repeatedly among these candidates.
This is no coincidence: the tone is set at
the top. Trump, for all his crudeness, under-
stands how to exploit racial fault lines. Wit-
ness his war against NFL athletes protesting
against police violence. “Most of them want
to show their ‘outrage’ over something most
of them can’t define,” he says repeatedly, as if
they have not explained eloquently that they
are protesting against racist violence.
This racial demagoguery extends to
Trump’s closest aides; Stephen Miller and
Lee Cissna are working to denaturalise citi-
zens, restrict legal immigration, and terrorise
an undocumented populace of millions. All
this is intended, as Laura Ingraham put it on
Fox News, to prevent “demographic change”
that scares the aging white majority. There
is no way to prevent demographic change
and its political consequences without mass
17
deportations, violent deterrence, restric-
tion of visas, police terror and voter disen-
franchisement. This is a presidency of racist
white fear and rage—anyone who knows any-
thing about America knows it is a mistake to
underestimate that force, a force I’m happy
to call fascist.
NO As Nuremberg rallies go, the mid-
August “Unite the Right” march in
Washington DC, to mark the anniversary of
last year’s lethal disturbances in Charlottes-
ville, was a flop. Maybe two dozen people
showed up. There is no “national crisis” in
the sense that you mean.
It is true, disgustingly, that a handful
of neo-Nazis are running on the Republi-
can ticket (they have been disavowed by the
party). These were in overwhelmingly Dem-
ocratic districts that no Republican of any
type would have any chance of winning.
There was minimal turnout—the North Car-
olina nominee was picked with 824 votes—
careless vetting and administrative mess-ups.
In that Illinois “race” too there was only one
Republican nominee.
To be sure, the Republicans will put up
with other oddballs on their slate, as will the
Democrats, and, yes, Trump is adept with a
dog whistle. But, however unpleasant that
may be, it is more means than end. This
is not some sort of return to Jim Crow, or
anything like it. Rather, it is part of a more
direct assertion of America’s national inter-
est, together with populism, and, of course,
always, there is the self-promotion of Don-
ald J Trump.
Trump’s agenda features tougher
enforcement of immigration law. The votes
are not there for the substantive reform
that Trump favours—switching to a merit-
based system on roughly Canadian lines.
Enforcement of democratically passed laws
is hardly shocking, but enforcement should
be tempered with humanity, and there
Trump more than Obama—no saint in this
respect—falls short.
The guardrails of American democ-
racy are holding, the judiciary is not being
“stacked” and, in November’s midterm elec-
tions, the president will almost certainly lose
the House—with results he will not enjoy.
The authoritarian streak I referred to
earlier is real enough, but there is no drift
to fascism.
Talia Lavin is a journalist based in New York
Andrew Stuttaford is a contributing editor of
National Review
Is Donald Trump a fascist?
Vote now on our Twitter poll:
prospectmagazine.co.uk/issues/
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PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 19

Features

One state
One of the few things that most Israelis and
Palestinians can agree on is that the old dream
of a two-state solution is fading. Diplomats
mouth the mantra with less and less conviction.
But how to revise, or replace, the old blueprint?
A single state, with equal rights for all, is
controversial—where would it leave the Jewish
state, or the cherished promise of Palestinian
independence? But after 25 years of failure,
the world needs to engage with new ideas for
achieving a resolution.

Download and listen to Prospect’s free podcast

at: prospectmagazine.co.uk, iTunes, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Our writers
discuss the challenge of bringing peace to the
Holy Land. Is it time for a radical plan?
20
Two states of
In 1993 Israel and the Palestinians signed
the Oslo peace accords, the first step
down a path that it was hoped would lead
to two independent states living in peace,
side-by-side. A quarter of a century on,
that dream is shattered beyond repair and
Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the
Knesset and chair of the Jewish Agency
for Israel, proposes a bold new plan: a one-
state solution
M
any years ago, my friends and I were lonely
voices. It was a time of hubris, of outright Israeli
denial that peace was our best strategic alter-
native. Since 1967 Israel had occupied Palestin-
ian territory, telling ourselves that this was the
“Israel started building its great wall
before Donald Trump ever had the idea”
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
only way to keep our nation secure. But before the first Intifada
began in 1987, waking many Israelis up to the injustices of occu-
pation, we were among the very few people in Israeli politics to
insist that no enduring resolution to the conflict in our region
could be imposed by force alone, and to call instead for a nego-
tiated two-state solution. It wasn’t easy: we were called traitors,
well poisoners, Trojan horses and more.
But within a few short years, what we had called for—what
we had been told was impossible—became Israeli policy. What’s
more, it had been agreed to by the Palestinians themselves.
On a sunny September day in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin,
the Israeli prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the leader of
the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, shook hands in the
White House Rose Garden. The two men agreed to a process of
mutual recognition, which the world understood would one day
lead to two separate states, Israel and Palestine, living in peace
side-by-side.
So what an irony that today I find myself charged with the dif-
ficult task of telling Israel and the world something else that it
doesn’t want to hear: that the two-state solution is dead. A quar-
ter of a century on from the Oslo Accords, the two-state solution
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES TWO STATES OF DENIAL
lies in tatters. There is no peace process. There is very
little hope left. And yet somehow, we must still find a
way for Israelis and Palestinians to live side-by-side,
with equal rights within a single international border.
It is time for a progressive one-state solution. I accept
that this view is as unpopular among Israelis today
as the two-state solution was long ago. But, as I shall
explain, it is our only hope.
HOW THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION DIED
T
wo states may once have been wildly contro-
versial, but it has long since become a plati-
tude. We mouth the mantra without stopping
to ask whether it had already passed its expiration
date. Where once the formula was a practical possibil-
ity, and the best prospect for peace that we had, today
it is a hollow phrase. It provides a refuge for dishon-
est people, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
who refuse to countenance making the real sacrifices
it would inevitably require.
It is often said it takes two to tango, but two states
just won’t happen unless one tangos first: Israel. For
this is not a conflict between equals. In the dishonest
blame game we eternally play, all pious Israeli patri-
ots like to think in terms of a 50-50 share of responsi-
bility with the Palestinians. But if—a big if—this were
© DOMINIKA ZARZYCKA/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES
ever true, it is certainly not true today.
Try to forget the past. Whatever the historic mis-
takes of the Palestinian side, they cannot justify Isra-
el’s wrongdoing in the here and now. For the conflict
is today—fundamentally—one between the privileged
and the deprived. Israel now enjoys 100 per cent of
the privileges between the Jordan River and the Med-
iterranean Sea. Freedoms, resources, power, politi-
cal rights and industrial clout: all of these things are
monopolised by us.
21
The pre-condition to moving things forward is not
negotiation, in the old sense of one side swapping some
cards for the other’s, but rather one side—the Israelis—
becoming ready to relinquish some of the deck of cards
on which it has an exclusive grip. Only then can we start
thinking about moving from a monopolised space to a
shared one, as we know in our hearts we must one day
do if we are to enjoy the real security that can only come
through a just and durable peace.
But we seem to have less readiness the for requi-
site compromises than ever before, as has been made
abjectly clear by Netanyahu’s new quasi-constitu-
tional Nation State of the Jewish People law, which was
passed in July. It elevates long-standing day-to-day dis-
crimination into a formal ethnic hierarchy, by asserting
that “the right to exercise national self-determination
in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”
This shows contempt not only for the people of the
occupied territories, but also for the Israeli Arabs who
we used to like to claim as co-equal citizens.
Netanyahu still pays lip service to the two-state solu-
tion—mouthing the phrase doesn’t cost him a thing. But
he wilfully refuses to develop any strategy that could
make it happen, so when he says the words it is noth-
ing but a cynical evasion. Netanyahu is, in practice, an
arch conservative who simply wants to defend Israel’s
position of dominance for now, and put off the whole
question of the conflict so that it becomes someone else’s
problem to deal with down the road. In the meantime,
he deepens our country’s racialised character.
And yet, with all of this going on, because we hear
that “two state” phrase all the time, too many of us
Israelis kid ourselves that a two-state solution still is—
and always will be—an option. That matters for our
standing in the eyes of the world, and it matters, too,
because it makes us feel that at some point, somehow, in
some entirely unspecified manner, a way will be found
22 FEATURES TWO STATES OF DENIAL
to draw a line under the conflict. We can entertain that soothing
thought without doing anything about it. What we can’t do, how-
ever, is hope to make it a reality.
For the two-state solution is, quite simply, no longer viable.
Why not? Because the long-dominant Israeli right, with the active
if tacit support of successive Labor leaders, has changed the facts
on the ground.
For one thing, numbers matter. Israel was able to push
through a withdrawal—of sorts—from Gaza in 2005 and deal with
the practical consequences of bringing the settlers there back into
Israel proper because they numbered in the thousands. Back in
the 1990s, when West Bank settlers were still counted in tens,
rather than hundreds of thousands, it might still, had it mustered
the political will, have been able to withdraw from there too, and
so cleared the way for a viable a Palestinian state. But no longer.
Those settlers, who now number around 400,000, can vote for
the Knesset—entirely unlike the two million or so Palestinian
adults living under occupation in the West Bank, the overwhelm-
ing majority of Arabs in East Jerusalem or anyone living in Gaza.
And the settlers form an increasingly powerful bloc, even before
you consider their family and friends within Israel proper who
may also vote in their interest.
“Everything is now pushing against
a two-state solution and the
compromises from Israel that it
would require”
Furthermore, of course, Gaza has taken its own ugly turn
during the last decade of separate Hamas rule, sundering the
putative Palestinian state. Even more fundamentally, the mood
for compromise within Israel, as across so much of the planet,
has passed. Back in the 1990s, walls seemed to be coming down
worldwide: the Soviet Empire spluttered out, and the old iron
curtain countries were being integrated into the west; apartheid
was negotiated away; peace was being brokered between deadly
enemies in segregated Northern Ireland. Amid the bloodshed
of the first Intifada, Israelis were forced every day to confront
the reality that they, too, were living amid another conflict;
and the way the world was going suggested that the way out of
that was compromise. But now—post-9/11, post-Iraq, post-7/7,
with Europe struggling to keep its borders down, and national-
ism everywhere on the rise—we live in a different age; the walls
are back.
Nowhere is that more true than Israel, which started build-
ing its great wall before Donald Trump ever had the idea, and
which has developed considerable skill in using aggressive secu-
rity to keep the deep conflict over its land from intruding on the
day-to-day life of its citizens. It is less “two states,” more two par-
allel universes.
Meaningful words have long been palpably absent from the
peace enterprise, but—more than that—the whole melody is
adversarial in tone. If talks ever were to result in a peace agree-
ment, it would be a peace tinged with suspicion and hostility.
Many Palestinians are convinced that every Israeli is either a
West Bank settler or a soldier, because the shared spaces between
the two peoples have now shrivelled to the point where these are
the only Israelis they will ever encounter. And many Israelis are
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
certain that “they,” all Palestinians, hate Israel. The sourness of
Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers, as well as the suspicious-
ness of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah col-
leagues, a tired bunch often more interested in entrenching their
own position internally than in really moving things on, are an
obstacle to concrete change.
In sum, everything—the political geography of the settlements,
the deepening split between Gaza and the West Bank, the nation-
alist turn of politics—is now pushing against a two-state solu-
tion, and the compromises from Israel that would require. It is no
longer on the table. We won’t move forward until we face the truth
about that.
MOVING BEYOND BORDERS
I
srael can try to forget the occupation, and in day-to-day life it
sometimes succeeds. But running away from this argument
is morally irresponsible. It debases a real democracy into the
sham of an “ethnic democracy.” In an uncertain world, where the
politics of a declining America are increasingly mercurial, contin-
uing with an occupation that most of the world condemns leaves
you lonely, and so carries strategic risk. Looking forward 100 years
in this part of the world is not easy: try to do so, and some things
are frightening, and many things are always unclear, but they
become much more so without a plan for a just peace.
So if two states are no longer an option, we need to start talk-
ing about how we can allow Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in
a single state. Today we already have one version of the one-state
solution, the Greater Israel dream of the right, which involves a
single state which is—as now—beset by discrimination. But my
own proposal comes from a very different place—the idea that we
can create a single state that treats all its citizens equally.
Think of our political structure as a building with three levels.
The first storey—the foundation—of the new building contains the
principles upon which the entire future state will be built. Every
person between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is
entitled to the same equal rights—personal, political, economic
and social. They include the right to protection and security, equal
treatment, freedom of movement, property, judicial recourse and
the right to vote for, and be elected to, public office. Regardless of
your citizenship, Israeli or Palestinian, you will be bound by the
same constitutional framework and principles and entitled to the
same fundamental liberties, without discrimination based on eth-
nicity, faith or national affiliation.
The middle level of our building will be divided between
the tenants: an agreed-upon, logical division and separation
between the two self-identifying collective groups in the form of
two self-governing polities. There will be different ways of split-
ting things up—with, say, more or less devolution to individual
regions or cities, and more or less regard paid to where Arabs
and Jews actually live, as opposed to the historic green line. But
all of this is second order, and should be soluble, once the princi-
ple of self-government built atop of shared and universal rights
of citizenship is agreed.
Each self-governing community (or “nation”) will express the
respective aspirations and values of the Israelis and the Pales-
tinians, in its own allotted space and as it sees fit in accordance
with its own traditions. Like individual American states or the
Scottish nation within the UK, each community will be free to
pursue its own domestic social policy within this middle level.
But more than that, again mindful of its own traditions, each
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
SKETCHING A ONE-STATE BLUEPRINT
Supporters of an inclusive one-state
solution tend to agree on the basic
principles—a state where all citizens
enjoy the same political rights. But when
it comes to the details of how it would
work there are competing plans.
Burg favours a union of two “nations,”
but there is an arguably even more
© FRÉDÉRIC SOLTAN/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES. SOURCE: FEDERATION.ORG.IL
FEATURES TWO STATES OF DENIAL 23
LEBANON
SYRIA
Greater Jerusalem, which is very
diverse and includes the east of the city
which Israel annexed in 1980, might
need to have a special status. Settling
that would be fraught. And the Federation
Movement’s plan leaves Gaza to one side,
as a separate entity. That locks a Jewish Nazareth
majority into the new single state, but

radical plan, outlined in the map here, offers scant hope to the most desperate
mooted by the Federation Movement, part of the Palestinian population.
which is backed by several prominent
Israelis. Modelled on the US, with its 50
individual states, the new nation would
be formed of 30 cantons—20 with a
Jewish majority, 10 with an Arab (or
Druze) majority. Each would manage its Tel Aviv
own internal affairs, on both sides of the
“Green Line” which currently separates
the occupied West Bank from Israel
MEDITERRANEAN SEA Jerusalem
proper, while a federal constitution would
guarantee the rights for all.

Gaza City

DEAD SEA
PORT SAID

BARDAWIL LAKE

EGYPT
ISRAEL
THE CANTONS
Jewish majority
Arab majority
Druze majority
Greater Jerusalem JORDAN
Gaza Strip

Suez

GULF OF SUEZ

Eilat
A
B
AQA
F OF
GUL
24 FEATURES TWO STATES OF DENIAL PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

of our “nations” will have some room to conduct its own rela-
tions with the rest of the world.
But we cannot stop building there. Because the hostilities and
violent frictions of the past could return at any time, constant co-
ordination between the tenants is essential. And so a third storey
will have to be constructed for that purpose—a superstructure, A Palestinian perspective
joining both our polities in a federation. The federation of Israel
and Palestine will direct its attention both inward and outward.
Using the powers accorded to it by the twin communities of Israel

and Palestine, the government of the central federation will also
have the muscle to be the back-stop enforcer of the constitutional
system in the territory between the Jordan River and the Medi-
terranean Sea.
After all, there will never be quiet and reconciliation here
unless a language of common values can be created. A murderer
in one community must be considered a murderer in the other. We
have had enough of the intolerable situation in which the same act
is considered a heinous crime on one side and a supreme expres-
sion of patriotism on the other.
“The ideal of inclusive and equal
citizenship for everybody who
lives across this small and war-
weary corner of the Earth is a
noble and inspiring vision”
While each state will collect taxes from its own citizens and
maintain its own institutions, their infrastructure will be co-ordi-
nated. The federal administration will ensure that water sources
from the mountains are shared with the lowlands, that rivers are
kept clean for their entire length. If water and other resources
are controlled from the top for the good of all, then many of the
questions about which community gets to control every last slope
and scrap of land will become less fraught. The federation will
see to it, too, that road signs should use the languages of all the
region’s drivers; the same in both Netanya and Nablus, with the
aim being—as with an interstate American highway—to connect
people, rather than keeping them apart.
It is also on the federal level that the co-ordination of asylum
and immigration policy will have to be settled, including the rights
of return for both Jews and Palestinians. Vis-à-vis the outside
world, beyond the historical region between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean, a successful Israeli-Palestinian federation could
in time evolve into a framework that other political entities could
join in a sort of regional union, although only for those polities
that could accept the obligations deriving from the democratic
and constitutional principles of the building’s foundation floor.
The proposed building attempts to solve most of the issues on
T
here is little doubt that ultimately Palestinian Arabs
and Israeli Jews will have to find a way to live together
in the same land, undivided by borders. Whether this
would be an undivided single state, or a federation of some
sort, will have to be worked out through an arrangement that
is viable and agreeable to both sides. Until then the “one-
state solution” remains more of a slogan than a programme,
something to be further developed before this future attractive
prospect can ever become a reality.
Even though there is rough parity between the numbers of
Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs living in historic Palestine,
as matters now stand it is the Israeli state that dominates the
entire land—exploiting it as its own, and privileging the Israeli
Jewish citizens. When one farmer in the South Hebron hills,
where the settlers are doing all they can to drive out local
Palestinians [such as him], was asked whether the settlers
can stay, he responded that as far as he was concerned they
could, but he added a rider. “There is plenty of room, but only
on condition that they act like human beings.”
As long as Israel reigns supreme, and can violate
Palestinians’ rights to the land and discriminate against them
with impunity—whether they be disenfranchised people
living under occupation, or Palestinians living as citizens
within Israel itself—there is little likelihood that the present
reality will change. Without outside pressure allied with fresh
thinking, we are unlikely to get any closer towards finding an
equitable way to share the land.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and an award-winning
author; he is currently based in Ramallah in the West Bank
© HASSAN JEDI/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

the agenda, but not all. Those who hanker after an integrated sin-
gle state will find only partial satisfaction in the federal structure.
Advocates of a two-state solution will find some of their wishes
addressed in the middle level, while those dedicated to individual
rights will get partial satisfaction as reflected in the binding con-
stitutional infrastructure.
That’s all fine, the cynics will say, but what about security? I Palestinians run away from tear gas fired by
would respond to the cynics with cynicism: “Do you agree with Israeli forces during a “Great March of Return”
everything else? When we accomplish everything else, it will be demonstration near the Israel-Gaza border
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES TWO STATES OF DENIAL
a lot easier to deal with security issues.” And to those
delving more deeply, I would pose a question of my own.
Did anyone ever think open borders between Germany
and France were possible? Peace between Spain and
the Netherlands, or reconciliation between Russia and
Germany? When the environment changes, so do the
threats, and so does one’s perspective on security.
To everyone else I will say this. Have faith that we
are strong; that we can afford to abandon a strategy of
fear, and move to a perspective of trust. If I’m wrong,
we won’t be any worse off than before. And if I’m right,
then the current obsession with security will change
so much as to be unrecognisable. As indeed it recently
changed in response to Iraq’s disintegration, Syria’s
fragmentation and Egypt’s decline, so it will change
dramatically again in the face of a Palestinian-Israeli
partnership that will be completely different from any-
thing we have ever known.
THE ROAD TO ONE STATE
H
ow will we get there? In theory, the argument
should not be such a hard sell. It would start
from the assumption that our fates, Israeli and
Palestinian, are intertwined and that it is ultimately use-
less to ignore reality. Cancers left untreated on one side
send secondary growths to the other, and there isn’t a
wall in the world that can stop them.
But given current Israeli politics, this is a formi-
dably challenging sell. It is easier to foresee that the
argument for a just single state will ultimately have to
prevail, than to envisage how it will do so. The process
of getting there could turn out to be painful. One pos-
sibility is that we shall slide slowly into a new conversa-
tion, as the situation gradually deteriorates towards a
point where it is so stark that one state is the only via-
ble way forward, that can no longer duck debate about
what sort of state that will be.
Another disturbing possibility is that we will be
jolted out of our current complacency by a shock or
a trauma. All the big moments in Israeli history have
responded to trauma—the 1973 war led to a strategic
peace with Egypt, while the first Intifada gave birth to
the Oslo Accords. Or maybe, instead, someone—per-
haps from the right—will pass a Knesset resolution that
clarifies realities, by calling for the official annexation
of the West Bank, just as we did with Jerusalem and the
Golan Heights.
But how much better it would be if we could get there
without trauma, by fixing our politics instead. In par-
ticular, we need to overcome the partition wall between
Jews and Arabs—not only physically, but also figura-
tively in terms of politics. We cannot and should not
leave the Arab society in Israel as an alien and perpetual
opposition bloc in the Knesset, but must work together
across ethnic lines. We need to stand shoulder to shoul-
der, within Israel proper, and then in the Palestinian
territories too. The outmoded and ossified parties, in
Palestine as well as Israel, need to be opened up to chal-
lenge, by those who are unafraid to see the country they
are living in as it really is. Those of us with eyes to see it—
25
Jews and Palestinians, working together—must be ready
to confront those, also both Jews and Palestinians, who
cannot. None of us can any longer afford shelter behind
polite fictions about a peace process that processes
nothing, indeed a process that doesn’t exist.
AN ISRAEL FOR ALL
T
he 1948 Declaration of Independence established
Israel as a “Jewish state.” This has always been
the biggest obstacle to the idea of a single state—
how can it be both Jewish and, if non-Jewish votes are
to enjoy their full weight, also democratic? In the early
years of the State, the concept of “Jewish” was more civil
and cultural. Today it has a different interpretation that
is more religious and nationalistic. As a result, Israel has
de facto two sources of authority: the democratic and
the theocratic, colliding and contradicting each other
constantly. Furthermore, one resident does not equate
to one vote, since it has been decided in advance that the
votes of one ethnicity are bound to prevail. The federa-
tive formula I am proposing, of two self-governing com-
munities working within one federation, can solve that
seemingly intractable problem.
Politically, it will undoubtedly require some of the
Israeli political continents to move. The left, or parts of
it, has to depart from the Zionist paradigm, and move
into a more inclusive paradigm. Israel must belong to all
of its residents, including Arabs, not to the Jews alone.
Then we can forge the new and creative alliances that
will be required to really move things. On the Israeli Arab
side, those who believe in integration within general
Israeli society must prevail over the separatists, in order
to create a real bridge between the two communities.
Some on the right, like President Reuven Rivlin are
dedicated territorialists, but also sincere democrats.
They are dedicated to comprehensive human rights,
which means they are potential partners in building
a single state. Wiser Palestinians—intellectuals and
activists alike—are also increasingly pressing more for
the right to vote, rather than for an independent state
purely for the sake of having one.
A combination of these three—a new Israeli left, the
democratic Israeli right, plus new and courageous Pal-
estinian thinkers and leaders—might sound unlikely.
But in time it could be formed into a coalition which
just might begin to crack the ice.
It will certainly not happen overnight. We might have
to cross troubled waters. And we might well have to park
for a while longer in that dead-end street called “Two
States.” But the ideal of inclusive and equal citizenship
for everybody who lives across this small and war-weary
corner of the Earth is a noble and inspiring vision. It also
offers a way ahead, as it becomes more and more obvi-
ous that the old routes into the future are running out
of road. If we can find the guile and the courage to take
it, we can transform our iconic conflict into an iconic
symbol of reconciliation that will inspire other warring
nations and states to find their own way out of the quag-
mire of hatred and animosity.
Avraham Burg is an Israeli politician and former Knesset speaker
26
a vision
Donald Macintyre, reporting from the
West Bank, explains how the old dream of
two states is slipping beyond reach
S
itting with Nasser Nawaja and his father Moham-
med on the floor of his flimsy wood-framed shack at
Susiya, in the rocky, windswept South Hebron hills,
you sense how the history of the last 70 years is bound
up in their journey here—short though it was by the
standards of many Palestinian families. In 1948, Mohammed,
then aged two, was carried on his father’s shoulders as they
walked four miles north to flee advancing Israeli forces, like
over 700,000 other refugees who lost their homes in what is now
Israel. Susiya was just across what would become the 1949 armi-
stice line, in the West Bank, which after the first great round of
fighting stopped was controlled by Jordan.
But after the 1967 Six Day War, the West Bank—along with
Gaza and East Jersualem—was occupied by Israel, paving the way
for the settlers. And so, in 1986, it was the toddler Nasser’s turn to
be carried on Mohammed’s shoulders from his birthplace. Three
years after the establishment of a nearby Jewish settlement, the
Palestinian residents were ordered by the Israeli military to leave
to make way for an Israeli archaeological park around the ancient
ruins of a synagogue; no matter that a mosque had also existed
there since the 10th century. The families constructed a new,
makeshift Susiya, where today its 240 residents remain squeezed
precariously, between two Israeli-imposed “security zones,” which
exclude them from much of their previous land. To Susiya’s north
is that archaeological park; to its south are the red-roofed settle-
ment houses, homes to 950 Jewish residents, with their own syn-
agogue, community centre and swimming pool. It could expand
again without fuss, if the only Palestinian residents were once
again uprooted.
Which is just what the Israeli authorities intend. Israel’s mil-
itary has court authority to demolish seven of the ramshackle
dwellings, the first step in a process to move the Palestinians from
their land to the impoverished West Bank city of Yatta. But the
Nawajas have been fellahin, peasant farmers, in the area for gen-
erations—the very way of life, along with their land, that they are
now under military orders to abandon. Nasser is an activist; but
also a farmer to his fingertips. When we last met back in the late
spring, he broke off to worry aloud about the heavy rain beating
unseasonably on the nylon roof above us—it might be “good for
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
the vegetables,” but “disastrous” for his wheat and olives. And he
is determined to resist being forced, as if it were a once in a gener-
ation event, to carry his own youngest son on his shoulders from
his birthplace. “I won’t do it,” he says.
Whether he will succeed in resisting is another matter. Susiya is
in “Area C”—the mainly rural 60 per cent of Occupied Palestinian
Territory under direct Israeli military control. A significant minor-
ity of the Palestinians, estimated at 300,000, live here together
with the vast majority—around 400,000—of all the Israeli settlers.
Area C is easily the biggest territorial chunk of an independent
future Palestine, so without it there is not going to be the two-state
peace deal that the international community has long espoused.
But ultra-nationalist members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s coa-
lition want to see much or all of it unilaterally annexed by Israel.
If Susiya is demolished, it will be yet another case of the creeping
de facto annexation which hard-right ministers want to formal-
ise. Since a plausible Palestinian state would require settlements
to be dislodged, their expansion makes a peace deal correspond-
ingly more difficult.
Since its last move, Susiya’s story has been one of demolitions,
settler violence, damage to Palestinian property, expulsion orders,
and ultimately vain appeals to the Israeli courts. In international
law, the settlement—like all those in the West Bank—is illegal. But
in Israeli law, Susiya’s Palestinian residents are caught in a clas-
sic Area C trap. The ostensible reason for the Susiya demolition
orders is that the residents, forcibly transferred over 30 years ago,
built their present dwellings without permits, which is true. But
it is virtually impossible for Palestinian residents—unlike Israeli
settlers—to secure such permits. Between 2000 and 2014, 2,020
Palestinians embarked on the heavily bureaucratised process of
applying to the Israeli authorities for building permits. Just 33
were granted. Dismantling Palestinian Susiya would be a symbolic
but logical extension of the discriminatory process which many
are saying has already killed the two-state solution.
STUCK AT A STAGING POST
I
sraeli-controlled Area C was never supposed to last. It’s a
hangover from the Oslo accords, the first of which prompted
the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Ara-
fat on the White House lawn 25 years ago this September. It’s easy
to forget the excitement and hope the accord generated among
millions of Israelis and Palestinians. It was designed to lead to a
lasting peace between the two peoples by 1999. But supposed to
be an interim staging post, Oslo became the endpoint.

© HAZEM BADER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A member of the Establishing a Palestinian Authority with heavily
Palestinian circumscribed autonomy in the cities, Israel rid itself
security forces of any obligation regarding the welfare, education
in Susiya and other essential services for the Palestinians, with-
out sacrificing its overall control of the occupied terri-
tories. As Yossi Beilin, the Labour politician who was
the accord’s key Israeli architect told me, “the problem
with Oslo is not that it’s dead but that’s it alive.”
The agreement was always flawed. For one thing,
it gave Israel carte blanche to continue building settle-
ments in occupied territory in (what has proved to be
an indefinite) interim period. Opposition mounted.
Hamas rejected the agreement and unleashed a spate
of suicide bombings, after a Hebron settler, Baruch
Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinian worshippers in the
Ibrahim mosque, the site, holy to both Jews and Arabs,
of Abraham’s tomb. There was virulent incitement
“‘How can you be an occupier
in your own country?’ is the
rhetorical question posed by
one Israeli minister”
against the accords by the Israeli right, including the
present Prime Minister Netanyahu. And in November
1995, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing fanatic as
he left a Tel Aviv peace rally.
Whether or not Oslo would have led to a two-state
solution had Rabin lived, without his lustre and personal
authority as a general and war hero, the chances were
greatly reduced. Immediately after the White House
signing, Beilin—acting alone—had opened secret talks
overseen by himself and Arafat’s deputy Mahmoud
Abbas, to produce the blueprint for a full two-state
agreement. That was achieved, with tragic timing, in
October 1995; Beilin, temporarily abroad, intended to
put it to Rabin early the following month as the basis for
completing negotiations. Ahmad Khalidi and Hussein
Agha, the two Palestinians who had done the detailed
negotiation of the outline agreement, travelled to
28 FEATURES BULLDOZING A VISION
Gaza on 1st November and secured Arafat’s parallel assent. But
on 4th November, Rabin was killed.
Beilin thinks that Shimon Peres, who immediately succeeded
Rabin, made a serious error by refusing to make the two-state
blueprint the centrepiece of his 1996 election campaign. “He
said I can only do this once I have a personal mandate, and not
before,” recalled Beilin. Instead Peres lost the election to Netan-
yahu—who brought the post-Oslo process to a halt.
“Likud has never scrapped its own
founding document claiming a
‘Greater Israel’ from the Jordan to
the Mediterranean”
Two state diplomacy did not permanently stop—it resumed,
after Ehud Barak’s 1999 defeat of Netanyahu. Yet the paradox
of the next quarter century was that, as the basic contours of a
two-state solution became progressively clearer, the prospect of
it became more elusive. Partition would return to what it had
been between 1949 and 1967: 78 per cent of historic Palestine
would be Israel’s, and 22 per cent the Palestinians’.
A land swap would probably allow a couple of the biggest
Jewish settlement blocs to be sited within Israel while the other
settlers would be evacuated. There would be a capital for both
states in Jerusalem, respectively west and east, and at least a
recognition by Israel of the wholesale dispossession of 1948—
what the Arabs call the nakba, or catastrophe—underpinned by
a symbolic return for a minority of Palestinian refugee descend-
ants, with compensation for the large majority.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
© EYE UBIQUITOUS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, MARK KERRISON / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, EYAL WARSHAVSKY/AP/SHUTTERSTOCK, GETTY IMAGES
It was hardly an impossible dream, so how has it come to be
regarded as unattainable? One factor is the shrinking of Beilin’s
centre-left peace camp in Israel’s domestic politics. Most Israelis
said they favoured—and still do—a two-state deal. But they blame
the Palestinians for the failure of the Barak-Arafat Camp David
talks in 2000, then the subsequent, second intifada, as well as the
doomed Ehud Olmert-Abbas talks of 2008. But some American—
and in the case of Camp David—also Israeli officials disputed this
apportionment of responsibility. Israel always took more account
of its own strident anti-deal minority, than of the Palestinian belief
that Arafat’s “historic compromise” of 1988, ratified at Oslo, set-
tling for 22 per cent of historic Palestine, left scant room for fur-
ther concessions. Nonetheless, the Israelis spun—and came to
believe—that there was “no partner for peace.”
A similar narrative embedded itself in the Israeli psyche
after Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal of 8,500 settlers from the
Gaza Strip in 2005. Disengagement from Gaza potentially
set a momentous precedent. But Sharon was determined to
act unilaterally, denying Abbas a political dividend—which
might have helped him win the fateful 2006 elections against
Hamas—and refusing to link the move to any wider peace plan.
And disengagement—by design, and in contradiction to ear-
lier deals—started to separate Gaza from its markets in Israel
and the West Bank. After Hamas seized full control of Gaza in
2007, that separation rapidly accelerated, halting all exports
and destroying Gaza’s economy. But the Israeli right—again
including Netanyahu—was deaf to the idea that this impover-
ishing separation was something Israel had imposed. Instead,
it popularised the argument, “We left Gaza to the Palestinians
so they could prosper in peace, and all they did was fire rockets
at us. That’s what happens when we give up territory.”
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES BULLDOZING A VISION
THE NEW NORMAL
B
ack in the 1990s a gruesomely funny sketch in
the Israeli television satire show, Hahamishia
Hakamerit, depicted three long-skirted female
Jewish settlers cheerfully swapping cooking tips in a
Hebron street. The scene is wholly normal except that
two of the women, without halting their homely discus-
sion of whether olive oil can be re-used, fire their M16s
at a (presumably Palestinian) target off camera, while
another hurls a hand grenade.
Underlying this caricature was an assumption that
most of the show’s mainstream audience would see its
characters as, well, crazy. Ideological settlers were still
seen as an outlandish fringe minority. True, the num-
bers had grown rapidly; but there were around 100,000
Jewish settlers across the whole West Bank, a small
constituency in a population of 5.5m. Today there are
at least 380,000 settlers in the West Bank, as well as
the 200,000 in East Jerusalem—an increase that has
convinced some analysts that it is now “too late” for
two states.
And it’s not just about the numbers. Hebron, is in
many ways a microcosm of the wider occupation and the
only Palestinian West Bank city with settlers in its heart.
After the Goldstein massacre, Rabin considered remov-
ing the Hebron settlers but eventually decided this
would have to await a final peace agreement. Instead
the greatest impact of the atrocity was on the Pales-
tinians themselves; to prevent revenge attacks the mil-
Two states, few itary imposed a six-month curfew and then closed part
statesmen: of Shuhada Street, the city centre’s main artery, to Pal-
(from left to estinian vehicles. The neighbourhood began to empty
right) PLO of its Palestinian residents, and the bustling shops and
leader Yasser markets, which had once made this commercial hub of
Arafat and the southern West Bank, began to wither into the deso-
Israeli prime late ghost town of today.
minister Things got much worse during the second intifada.
Yitzhak Rabin, With settlers so close to the Palestinians, Hebron was an
who signed the incendiary flashpoint. Between 2000 and 2007, Pales-
Oslo Accords in tinian militants killed five Israeli civilians, and 17 Israeli
1993; Shimon security force personnel. The Israeli military killed 88
Peres, who Palestinians—over half of whom were “not taking part
failed to in hostilities,” according to the Israeli human rights
campaign for agency B’Tselem.
two states in the I visited Hebron this year, as I had a decade earlier,
1996 election; with Yehuda Shaul, who had served in a combat unit
Benjamin there at the peak of the second intifada, and has since
Netanyahu, who founded Breaking the Silence, a veterans’ group which,
has overseen in Shaul’s words, thinks “the military should be for Isra-
Oslo’s demise el’s defence and not for the oppression and occupation
of Palestinians.”
Steel shutters and cages on every window protect
the few remaining Palestinian residents from stones
thrown by their Israeli neighbours. International vol-
unteers were still preparing to escort the 100 remain-
ing Palestinian pupils from the neighbourhood’s girls’
school to guard them from the hostile children in the
adjoining four settlements. More than 600 Israeli sol-
diers protect around 850 residents of four distinct set-
tlements. Only settlers can drive their cars on Shuhada
29
Street, and on most of it Palestinians are barred even
from walking.
Today, the Hebron settlers are no longer deemed an
embarrassment; they enjoy the Israeli establishment’s
moral and political esteem. In 2012 Gideon Saar, an
annexationist tipped as Netanyahu’s successor who
was then education minister, expanded a programme
of school visits to Hebron, saying that “the Arabs
mustn’t get the mistaken notion that Jews can be
uprooted from Hebron.” In 2015, State President Reu-
ven Rivlin, one of Likud’s relative moderates, officially
opened a visitors’ centre at the Beit Hadassah settle-
ment. And last November, the government approved
a new, fifth settlement in Shuhada Street which would
bring another 31 Israeli families to Hebron.
“‘We have a right-wing
government and Knesset,’
said one settler. ‘We have
waged a long struggle, and
we’re winning’”
All of which reflects a wider political shift. Israelis
often point out that Hamas has never rescinded its noto-
rious charter, pronouncing the whole of historic Pales-
tine as Arab land. But while Hamas did, in May 2017,
signal it could entertain a state on pre-June 1967 bor-
ders, Likud has never scrapped its own founding doc-
ument claiming a “Greater Israel,” from the Jordan to
Mediterranean. Where even the hardline Ariel Sharon
would talk in office about the “occupation,” none of the
Netanyahu cabinet would use that term, and some sen-
ior ministers simply proclaim the whole land as right-
fully Israel’s. “How can you be an occupier in your own
country?” is the rhetorical question posed by ultrana-
tionalist education minister Naftali Bennett.
A
nnexation may not happen. Netanyahu seems
comfortable with the status quo, continued
occupation and expanding settlements, without
any change to the legal status. But with senior Israeli
politicians freely discussing formalising their conquest,
it is becoming easier to imagine this than partition into
two states. And right now, the international dynamics
only reinforce this sense. In his book last year, The Only
Language They Understand, the International Crisis
Group’s Nathan Thrall argued it would be “irrational”
for Israel to end the occupation, unless the US and the
rest of the world imposed costs on it for not making con-
cessions which exceed the relatively modest price—for
Israel—of maintaining and entrenching the status quo.
Sometime in the future, that could happen. Among
US Democrats the traditionally bipartisan assumption
of “Israel right or wrong” is fraying. The EU, in many
respects the sleeping giant among Israel’s allies as its
biggest trading partner, could at some stage impose a
robust ban on trading with companies in occupied terri-
tory. However, there is little sign of serious movement
30 FEATURES BULLDOZING A VISION
in Europe for now, and Donald Trump’s Washington has been dou-
bling down on uncritical loyalty to Israel. Of course Jared Kush-
ner and Jason Greenblatt are supposedly working on his “deal of
the century.” But Trump’s moving of the US embassy to Jerusa-
lem, and remarkable boast to have taken the defining city of the
entire conflict “off the table” makes a mockery of that. He has also
cut funding to the UN Palestinian refugee agency, and remains
electorally dependent on a fanatically pro-Israel Christian right.
The last time the US actually used its huge potential lever-
age on Israel—which includes the $3bn a year it spends on Israeli
defence—was at the outset of the process which led to Oslo.
George HW Bush suspended $10bn of loan guarantees to bring
a resistant Yitzhak Shamir, Israel’s prime minister, to the table.
But the early 1990s proved the high watermark of the conviction
that America’s interests were served by using an Israeli-Palestin-
ian solution as a way to stabilise the wider Middle East. Few can
believe that today. With Syria, Yemen and Libya ravaged by war
and with Islamic State a major security threat to the west, the
Palestinians look increasingly marginalised on the world stage.
Meanwhile, a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf States now regard the
Palestinian cause as less important than a strategic alliance with
Israel—and the US—against Iran.
POWER WITHOUT A PRICE
A
ll this helps to explain the loss of faith in the two-state
solution since Oslo. Even Yossi Beilin, still working away
on the conflict at 71, is updating the old blueprint in the
light of subsequent events, and thinking anew. Under his new
two-state plan, the smallprint of which is being developed in con-
junction with London’s Chatham House, Palestinians would get
a state on 22 per cent of the total land: the West Bank, Gaza and
East Jerusalem. So far, so conventional. But there is a twist; any
of the settlers beyond the major blocs—nearly 200,000 in all—
who wanted to could stay put. They’d retain their Israeli citizen-
ship, but would live under Palestinian sovereignty, without the
Israeli military to protect them. Those remaining would then be
matched by a similar number of Palestinian refugees who would
be returned to Israel proper. The continuation of the idea of
“Israel proper,” alongside a new Palestine, means this remains a
variant of the two-state model, differentiating it from the Avra-
ham Burg plan (p20). But, with the same emphasis on seeking
justice without displacing all the settlers, the line between the two
visions becomes a little hazy. Like Burg, Beilin talks about “con-
federation,” and a series of joint Israeli-Palestinian institutions,
covering security, water, and communications, as well as freer
movement than today.
But does he seriously think the most ideologically driven
settlers would suddenly co-exist peacefully with their Arab
neighbours—and vice versa? It would, Beilin admits, be a “real
challenge” but in his view “not impossible.” Many settlers, he
thinks, would leave for Israel with financial compensation. His
plan focuses on them because, he is quite clear, the “biggest fear
of any prime minister, left or right, is the evacuation of settlers.
This “huge stumbling block,” he believes, “is more of an obstacle
than Jerusalem or the refugees.”
But Beilin’s ideas have many critics, on both the left and right.
The Hebron settlers’ spokesman Yishai Fleisher sees no need for
a negotiated agreement “permitting” the settlers to stay. “Why
should we waste our time talking about this? I have to tell some of
my leftist friends that there are 600,000 settlers, we have a right-
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
wing government and a right-wing Knesset. We have waged a
long struggle, and we’re winning.” On the other flank, the soldier-
turned-anti-occupation campaigner Shaul, who describes him-
self as a “two-state extremist,” is convinced that the settlers have
created a myth about the power—and supposed immovability—
conferred on them by the recent expansion. The biggest growth in
settler numbers, he points out, is in Beitar Illit and Modiin Illit—
around 100,000 residents in all—which are both communities
bordering the green line, so it would be easy enough to resettle
them in Israel itself or—by trading land—to draw a future border
incorporating them in Israel.
T
hose numerous settlers in Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit are
principally there not for ideological reasons, but for cheap
and effectively subsidised housing. Indeed all the settle-
ments depend on Israeli government subsidised utilities, educa-
tion and other services provided—at formidable taxpayer cost—by
Israel under laws and military orders which could, if the politics
changed, easily be reversed. Convinced the settlers can indeed be
evacuated if the will exists, Shaul rejects Beilin’s plan for a set-
tler right to remain “because it legitimises the settlements,” and
potentially does so ahead of negotiations with the Palestinians.
Most fundamentally, he is convinced it is a “fantasy.” “Do you
really see a scenario when Israel leaves its citizens living there
without its protection?”
“If Israel doesn’t have an incentive
to end the occupation, or a
disincentive to continue, why
would Israel give it up?”
Shaul, like many frontline Israeli anti-occupation activists, is
no fan of the alternative of a binational state, in which an Arab
majority would be wholly possible, effectively spelling the end
of Israel’s existence as we know it, a prospect he thinks his com-
patriots would never accept. “For 50 years you couldn’t remove
Israel from the occupied territories,” says Shaul. “Now you
think you can dissolve the state. Are you nuts?” Unlike Beilin,
the crucial obstacle for Shaul is not the evacuation of the set-
tlers, but rather Israel’s continuing stubborn reluctance to offer
the Palestinians a fully-fledged state. Even Rabin never made
an offer like that, but—Shaul thinks—under him the dynamics
were pushing that way. Today’s central problem, he insists, “is
a lack of political will by Israel to end its control over Palestini-
ans. If Israel doesn’t have an incentive to end the occupation, or
a disincentive to continue, why would Israel give it up?”
Back in Susiya, Nasser Nawaja, as a refugee, no doubt
dreams of a single, if binational, Palestine, stretching from “the
river to the sea.” But he says bluntly: “It won’t happen; Israel
doesn’t want it. And it doesn’t matter what I want but what the
Palestinian people will accept.” He does believe that they would
buy “a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel.” And so they
might, but only if the world gives Israel a formidable “incen-
tive” to agree to it too. Western politicians repeatedly assert that
“time is running out” for the two-state solution. Without action
as well as words, they are willing that warning to become a self-
fulfilling prophecy.
Donald Macintyre is the author of “Gaza: Preparing for Dawn” (Oneworld).
The paperback is out in October
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BREAKING
NEWS
How Metro beat the red tops
to become the most-read
newspaper in Britain
jane martinson
S
oon after moving into Downing Street, Theresa May
hosted a private dinner for the editor-in-chief of the
Daily Mail, Paul Dacre. Not long after, the then-for-
eign secretary Boris Johnson was snapped, in shorts,
running alongside the editor of the Sun, Tony Gal-
lagher. If asked to think of a successful tabloid editor, most peo-
ple would think of a man (yes, probably still a man) like one of
these two—at one and the same time thoroughly plugged in with
the powerful, yet also obsessed with retaining a populist touch.
Yet the editor of the most-read newspaper in Britain is a man
called Ted, a man you probably haven’t heard of, and certainly
not a man in the habit of popping into Downing Street for a téte-
a-téte with the prime minister. Ted Young was appointed Editor
of Metro, the freesheet distributed around all UK cities, in 2014
when it still lagged behind the far better known paid-for rivals,
the Mail and the Sun.
You can sneer at its seemingly apolitical, even bland, mix of
news and celebrity, and yet in March 2018, Metro was confirmed
as the UK’s most-read newspaper—bigger than its more famous
stablemate, the Daily Mail, bigger even than the Rupert Mur-
doch-owned Sun, which has topped the list of most-read daily
titles since 1978. Just reflect on the myriad of ways that newspaper
has enlivened, coarsened and pushed to the right Britain’s politi-
cal discourse during its long decades at the top, and you’re likely
to judge that the new occupant of the No. 1 spot is worth getting
to know.
As for those of us on the inside of the media industry, swotting
up on Metro should be a higher priority—not only because of its
reach, with 1.5m copies of Metro distributed every day via trans-
port networks in cities, but also because of its bottom line. Despite
an existential crisis in the print advertising market, it turned up an
£11m profit last year.
S
hort, balding and with the slightly bulldog expression
of someone most often to be found reading proofs at an
hour when most of us are getting ready for bed, Young has
worked for every tabloid newspaper in the UK and one, the Daily
News, in New York. A former editor of MailOnline and survivor
of the freesheet battle which raged in London during the nough-
ties as editor of London Lite, he has also been night editor of the
Sun and executive editor of the Daily Express, where he ended up
in a legal dispute with the controversial owner Richard Desmond.
Young is already waiting on the top floor of Northcliffe House,
the Kensington headquarters of DMG Media, which owns Metro,
in a room done out in what could be called executive chintz when
I arrive for our interview. With a set of papers spread out before
him on the mahogany table, Young says that the Metro office sev-
eral floors lower is currently being renovated. “We don’t usually
get this treatment,” he says, picking up his china teacup.
Despite his long and storied career, I’d never so much as
clapped eyes on him during my years as a media journalist.
Young rarely gives interviews or attends industry gatherings.
“I’m very hands on and I don’t get out much,” he says. “I would
much prefer to go for a pint with my team than gallivant around
posh media parties.”
Young typically travels in from his home in Richmond for
a 12-hour day, five days a week and lists his professional inter-
ests “outside of his passion for news” as rugby and being a “long
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURESFEATURES
BREAKINGBREAKING
NEWS
suffering supporter of Newcastle United.” He is good
company, coming alive as he talks about how England’s
World Cup campaign (at its height when we meet) has
affected headlines and deadlines. So far, so Fleet Street
central casting.
Yet one of the first things Young did after his appoint-
ment was to assemble an editorial team dominated by
strong older women. He insists that the first of these, his
deputy Ruth Baillie, attend our interview. The two make
a brilliant double act, sparking off each other and occa-
sionally finishing each other’s sentences.
After Young mentions that the senior members of his
50-strong team include not just Baillie (a former pro-
duction editor of the Evening Standard) but a female
news editor, night editor and chief sub, Baillie says,
“We’ve got a core of older women, which is interesting.”
“I tell you where it’s interesting, it’s interesting in confer-
ence,” says Young.
When I ask how, Baillie adds: “We’re all terribly sen-
sible… You know it’s a lot of fun but we don’t want any-
thing tacky.”
Not sexist? “God, no, not sexist,” she demurs. The
Metro team are not averse to pictures of scantily clad
Love Island contestants (“There are certain images of
women without many clothes on which are fine…”) but
women are taken seriously, she says.
So, no “Legs-it”? I ask, referring to the controversial
Mail front page in which a discussion between the prime
minister and Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon,
over Brexit was reduced to a blown-up picture of their
lower halves.
“Oh no, that was unbelievable!” begins Baillie, “I
could not believe it.” Young starts to sound uncomfort-
able and mutters some dissent. “No, no, no Ted it was
not acceptable,” says Baillie, until her boss says sternly,
“We are not here to slag off the Daily Mail!” I start to get
an idea of what their conference is like.
Whereas George Osborne, the editor of Metro’s rival
freesheet, the Evening Standard, gives great attention to
his paper’s editorials, relishing in needling May, Metro
runs no leaders at all—its closest equivalent is called
“Metro Talks,” which is more like a letters page. It is all
about a quick and easy read on the way to work, and has
taken a bet that readers don’t want to be told what to
think. That could be shrewd: while Metro turns a profit
the Standard was recently reported to be in the red.
Unlike the Standard, which has consistently given
its support to Conservative politicians, Metro has
never backed a political candidate. But even disa-
vowing a position can be a position in polarised times
like this. During the last general election, Metro ran
interviews with every party leader with the exception
of Ukip leader Nigel Farage. He declined an invita-
tion after accusing the paper of being biased against
his party.
“We are a very broad church… People pick us up
as they’re running for the tube and they know what
they’re going to get, which is a fair report of the
world,” says Young. “We just don’t want to have politi-
cal bias,” says Baillie, while Young says, “We give eve-
rybody a hard time.”
NEWS 33
On the Monday after the EU referendum in 2016,
Metro’s front page showed a night-time picture of par-
liament with the headline: “The lights are on but
nobody’s home.” The chancellor was the subject of
“Hammond Egg on his face,” the day after his U-turn
on a taxes for the self-employed. The paper has criti-
cised Diane Abbott, but it hasn’t campaigned system-
atically against the newly left-wing Labour Party in the
way that much of Fleet Street has. The day after the last
election, Metro put a beaming Labour leader giving a
thumbs up on the front page with a headline which read
“Stormin’ Corbyn.”
“With only five London
reporters, the emphasis
is on giving wire copy
the Metro treatment”
Young and Baille suggest a commercial logic to the
lack of bias: advertisers respond warmly to it. So do
readers. Young, with a French wife and two adult chil-
dren, says, “I won’t go into the political views that bang
around in my family because they’re every political
shade.” But the editor and his deputy admit to voting
differently at elections. Although they don’t tell me how,
talking to friends and former colleagues suggests that
Young is more “right of centre” and more likely to back
Brexit than his deputy. Yet reticent about his views as he
is, it is apparent that he is more interested in running a
successful newspaper than using it to shape the public
debate. Metro has been critical, but rarely vitriolic, about
all sides over the past two years, mostly sticking to “facts
not opinion” coverage.
If it is money, rather than the editor’s prejudices, that
talk with Metro, he sees to it that it does so in an even-
handed way. The paper received 300 complaints in the
run-up to the 2016 referendum for publishing a front-
page cover-wrap advert on behalf of the “Leave” cam-
paign. Then, the following day, it published the same
cover-wrap on behalf of Remain. Young refused to run
one without the other, making a combined £500,000 for
the company in the process. They were so determined to
balance out the coverage that Baillie says they literally
did a lineage count with “Boris and the bus” on one side
and “Project Fear” on the other.
As for political hobnobbing Young says he has been
invited to Downing Street but has only agreed once.
Typically, he sends a political reporter. After the cabi-
net’s weekend at Chequers, he is scathing about politi-
cians “briefing their pals.”
For all its proclaimed neutrality, some discern in
Young’s paper a certain social liberalism, for example
the way it covered the abortion vote in Ireland. There
were lots of pictures of those supporting a change—
Young insists that it was simply reporting the story.
“We reported the celebrations—and when people came
back, we reported that.” Although Metro runs stories
about immigration fears, the team will typically try to
34 FEATURES BREAKING NEWS
balance that with quotes from an NHS worker talking about the
medical staff needed. It doesn’t, as some tabloids do, feel like the
newspaper of a country under siege.
Young and his deputy suggest that this desire for straight
news, or as close to possible, comes from a desire to serve their
readers, who do not want anything else. Referring to her own chil-
dren, Baillie says, “Our kids don’t want stuff shoved down their
throats.” Essentially Metro’s editors want the paper to reflect their
readers’ views, or lack of them, rather than influence them.
With only five London-based news reporters, the 50-strong
staff are largely production based, essentially taking wire copy
and giving it the Metro treatment. But Young, the son of two jour-
nalists who worked for the Guardian and Manchester Evening News,
talks about wanting to “return to old-fashioned values.” He may
be an admirer of the legendary campaigning journalism of the
Hugh Cudlipp-era Daily Mirror, but admits his paper is unlikely
to ever enter, let alone win, a Cudlipp Award for campaigning tab-
loid journalism. “We never enter awards. We just think it’s a waste
of time. My award is £11m profit and revenues up 6 per cent.”
“There’s a huge problem
with fake news and people
know they can trust us”
Metro’s core readership—with an average age of 39—is 20 years
younger than those reading the Mail, Telegraph and Express, and
also more likely to be educated and in work. One Mail executive
called this “a demographic to die for.” The most popular papers
produced—evidenced by the lack of any returns at all, the empty
bins which suggest that all 1.5m copies have been picked up from
all locations—were those marking the death of music legends
Prince and David Bowie.
The rejection of overt spin has found an echo in a digital age in
which digital fakery has escalated doubt about the veracity of all
journalism. “I think there’s been a huge problem with fake news
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
and people know they can trust us…” says Young. “People are say-
ing newspapers are dead but we seem to be bucking the trend.”
T
he apolitical nature of the paper goes back to Metro’s launch
in March 1999, and the idea had one surprise backer: Paul
Dacre. The Daily Mail Group’s editor-in-chief told SJ Tay-
lor, the Mail’s authorised biographer: “I knew the young hated
heavy politics and so Metro could have no ideology. It would be
a politically free zone, a class-free read... This paper had to be
totally different from our different products, but have the indis-
putable signature of Associated Newspapers.”
Keeping politics out of Metro was also, of course, a way of
ensuring that the paper did not cannibalise the paid-for papers
Dacre had edited. Metro had been the brainchild of the current
owner’s father, the Third Viscount Rothermere, who had been
impressed by a freesheet called Metro on a visit to Stockholm. His
son, Jonathan, was 30 when his father died, suddenly, in 1998,
leaving him with a new title—and instructions to launch Metro
quickly before the Swedes could bring it to the UK. “He loves
Metro,” says someone close to the current Lord Rothermere. “It
was a big, big bet he took early on in his tenure at the head of the
company and it has delivered more than anyone expected.”
Rothermere allowed Metro to be run from a separate site to the
Mail in the early days, allowing the editorial and commercial team
to develop some independence from suspicious colleagues else-
where in Northcliffe House.
One of the earliest executives, Mike Anderson, realised that the
paper had somehow to be sold as a high value rather than valueless
or “free” product. He promoted the idea of a “Metro Moment,” an
undivided 20 minutes reading time on the way into work every
day. This moment, as Anderson puts it, saw commuters thinking
“I hate my job, I hate my boss, I want to set up a bar in Thailand.”
As a freesheet Metro didn’t qualify for industry circulation fig-
ures, such as the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), but that
spurred it to develop in-house analytics. It could soon show, for
example, that its promotions had high take-up rates: this was
lapped up by advertisers, particularly in fields which might help
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES BREAKING NEWS
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JANE FOX
Left: Ted Young commuters daydream: travel, technology and entertain-
peers out from ment. Metro was “pretty much an instant hit,” accord-
behind a recent ing to Anderson. It is said to have broken even in just
issue; David over a year, an impressive feat; the Group’s last newspa-
Bowie and per launch, the Mail on Sunday, took 14 years to do that.
Prince adorn Within eight months of launching in London, which
the most still accounts for 900,000 of its read copies, Metro had
popular issues. expanded to Manchester. By 2001, Metro was being pub-
Above: Ruth lished in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds and
Baillie ponders Birmingham too.
a pun This expansion into the local newspaper market
was also marked by bitter legal disputes, starting with
Manchester where the Guardian-owned Manches-
ter Evening News owned the right to the name Metro.
When the Swedish group that launched the original
Metro finally published its first UK-based newspaper
in Newcastle, the Mail Group sued them over the use
of the title.
This open warfare only ended when the chief exec-
utive of Trinity Mirror, still the largest regional news-
paper publisher in the UK, came up with the idea of
a franchise agreement. The idea was a simple one: by
agreeing to print and distribute Metro, local papers
effectively received a share of national advertising reve-
nue in return for local distribution and printing.
That seemed like a win-win. But just one of these
franchise agreements remains (in Manchester), which
might be a first indication that Metro’s financial model
is running out of steam, or else further evidence of the
decline in local newspapers. The truth is probably a
bit of both.
For Metro’s ability to withstand the slump in print
advertising is showing signs of fatigue; profits have
fallen from the £15m reported in 2017. Threatened by
the expansion of Wi-Fi on the tube as well as rising news-
print costs, the future is not assured for a paper with no
control over its own website, which is run by an entirely
35
different part of the Mail Group. It might be Brit-
ain’s best-read paper, but—for one commentator who
declined to be named—“Metro is a tired brand with zero
traction and zero future.” Last year, there was talk of the
Mail Group selling up.
T
he argument used two decades ago—and today—
is that Metro’s audience does not read existing
papers, so could not harm paid-for rivals. Its
owners might have hoped that these younger readers
would graduate to proper paid-for titles but since the
advent of smartphones they have all graduated online.
And in an economy getting the jitters over Brexit,
Metro is now having to work harder for commercial suc-
cess. Newspapers have seen their share of display adver-
tising plunge, and newsprint has soared in cost—up by 8
per cent, from £330 to £360 per tonne, since the pound
fell after the EU referendum.
Pressures have mounted and the Standard, 24 per
cent owned by the Mail Group since 2009, recently
became embroiled in a cash-for-content scandal, with
Osborne denying the charge of letting corporates buy
favourable stories. Young looks shocked when asked
if they would consider writing favourable stories for
financial reward, saying, “Readers are not stupid!” he
says. “It would be suicide.”
Newspapers have traditionally been at least as much
about power as profit. After the referendum, when the
editor of the Sun dismissed the theory about print being
dead, he was referring to its political influence. The
Standard may have lost £10m in the year to Septem-
ber 2017 but it’s still written about, not least because
of its high-profile editor. Metro insiders like to say, “The
Standard is talked about, the Metro is read.”
But for how much longer? Almost 20 years after its
launch, Metro is at a turning point. It foretold the dom-
inance of “free” ad-funded information targeted at
readers, and continued to defy the gloomsters by prov-
ing that some newspaper readers, specifically those of
busy commuters, value a basic print product.
It is the antithesis, not just of politically-motivated
tabloid journalism, but also of the sort of campaigning
investigative journalism published by the Guardian and
Times here, and the New York Times and Washington Post
currently thriving in Trump’s America. But in less than
two decades, Metro has transformed from something
described to one executive as a “shitty little freesheet”
into a successful paper with a young audience who
appreciates its basic news coverage. Whatever its future
prospects, Metro has shown that there is a market, per-
haps even still growing, for a newspaper based on facts
in a world that increasingly seems to be anything but.
Jane Martinson is a media commentator and professor of
financial journalism at City University
Download and listen to Prospect’s free podcast at:
prospectmagazine.co.uk, iTunes, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Jane Martinson talks about
Britain’s biggest newspaper—it’s free, it’s got no
opinions, is that what people really want?
36
The truth about Ruth
She has a reputation for being a different kind of Tory—
but just how far can Ruth Davidson go, asks Dani Garavelli
B
efore Ruth Davidson went for
her new job, she had her hair
cut very short. Looking back
at 2011 and her audacious bid
to lead the Scottish Conserv-
atives after just a few months as a mem-
ber of the Holyrood Parliament, she now
sees the gesture as over the top. After all,
no one in the party had made her sexuality
an issue. But at the time, she felt she was
making an important point: elect me, and
you’ll know what you’re getting. I will not
change to suit your purposes.
That directness is the core of Davidson’s
appeal. There are other ingredients: her
effervescence, her bawdy humour and the
counterbalance she provides to the stuffy
ranks of Tory men. But it’s her unshakea-
ble sense of her own identity, an insistence
on being “out and proud”—whether it’s in
Prospect Portrait
relation to being a Church of Scotland-
going lesbian, or a Tory in post-Thatcher
Scotland—that is her unique selling point.
That same authenticity is the rea-
son why Davidson, the newbie, beat her
more experienced rival, Murdo Fraser, to
become leader of the Scottish Conserv-
atives. And seven years on, it is also why,
even without a Westminster seat, moder-
ate Tories are latching on to her as a poten-
tial future prime minister, an ambition she
denies perhaps a little too forcefully. So,
after successfully resuscitating the Tories
north of the border, could Davidson really
offer her party, and Britain, a brighter
tomorrow, beyond the Brexit storm?
Davidson’s determination to do things
on her own terms was in evidence again
earlier this year when she revealed her
IVF pregnancy. She was, party sources
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
say, determined it should not be presented
as some big “gay moment.” But David-
son has an instinct for publicity, and the
announcement received a good deal of
respectful attention.
The thrust of her message, reiterated at
a recent gender summit, was that she and
her partner Jen Wilson were just ordinary
women who would juggle the demands
of childcare and a busy working life. But
now, as all her Tory counterparts at West-
minster sink into the quagmire of Brexit,
Davidson’s forthcoming spell of absence
on maternity leave looks serendipitous.
She’ll quit the scene in October, allow-
ing her to sit out the next six months and
return in the spring, just after Brexit is
supposed to be done.
In the meantime, the 39-year-old
Remainer is energetically ensuring that
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
she is not forgotten in her absence. This
summer she stuck her neck out by loy-
ally backing Theresa May’s unpopular
Chequers White Paper, but also reached
out across the Brexit divide by launching
Onward, a new Tory think tank that’s sup-
posed to help the party reach out to the
next generation. And in September she
will publish a none-too-subtly titled book,
Yes She Can: Why Women Own the Future.
Rather like Profiles in Courage, the book
John F Kennedy wrote about the giants of
US history three years before running for
the White House, Yes She Can’s focus on
© LESLEY MARTIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, ILLUSTRATION BY TIM MCDONAGH
inspirational women is surely intended to
borrow a little of her subjects’ stardust.
Equality campaigners who still trench-
antly oppose the Tories will point out that
they were until recently the party of Sec-
tion 28, which restricted teachers’ ability
to talk positively about gay people. David-
son’s personal critics also suggest that she
wasn’t willing to stand up against the so-
called “rape clause,” a rule that requires
some mothers to prove their pregnancy
was the product of assault in order to qual-
ify for certain benefits. Even so, her new
book will ensure that, amid what could
be the ugliest Conservative conference in
recent history, there in the newspapers will
be Davidson: heavily pregnant, putatively
progressive and one of the few Tories any-
where with something to smile about.
How did she take Scotland from being
the lost Tory cause to the party’s last
source of comfort? What sort of path did
this state-educated lesbian take to get
into the Conservative Party, which was
so deeply out of favour across Scotland?
And what were her origins? The answers
to these questions highlight a good many
misunderstandings about modern Scot-
land in general, and about Davidson
in particular, especially regarding the
degree to which her Conservatism veers
from the mainstream.
T
he Davidson parents were from tra-
ditional working-class stock. Her
father Douglas, who was at one
time a professional footballer with Partick
Thistle, was the son of a factory worker and
auxiliary nurse. He was brought up in Cas-
tlemilk on the south side of Glasgow and
left school at 16. Her mother, Liz, came
from a neighbouring estate.
By the time Ruth was born in Novem-
ber 1978, however, the family had already
moved to Selkirk, in the rural Borders
where Douglas became a junior man-
ager for the textile company Laidlaw and
PROSPECT PORTRAIT RUTH DAVIDSON
Fairgrieve. Russell Fairgrieve, the former
owner, was an old-guard, patrician Tory
MP and, notably, a staunch Europhile.
The Davidsons upped sticks again in 1983,
when Ruth was five, moving to Lundin
Links on the coast of Fife where Douglas
had a job in whisky exports.
Compared to the early lives of David
Cameron, Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-
Mogg, her childhood was certainly run-
of-the-mill: not for her Eton, or anything
like it, but a comprehensive school, Buck-
haven High. While the young Nicola Stur-
geon has said she was politicised by the
Proclaimers song, “Letter From Amer-
ica,” Davidson was educated in the shadow
of one of the many Scottish places it
lamented: Methil, a town where the power
station is now demolished and the docks
have been in remorseless decline.
Winning smile: the Scottish Tories reaped
the benefits of the independence vote
But the Davidsons owned their own
home, which was near The Old Manor
Hotel. Lundin Links—with its then-seg-
regated men’s and ladies’ golf clubs—was
a far cry from Castlemilk where Doug-
las had started out. Stand on the shore-
line facing south towards Leven, you can
see the wind turbines and oil platforms of
Scotland’s energy sector. As children pad-
dle in the rockpools, all that industrial
hubbub seems far away. The village itself
is pretty and well ordered; there are homes
with names like Birch Tree Cottage and
flowerpots on the doorstep. A notice out-
side the volunteer-run library advertises an
amateur production of The Winter’s Tale.
Inside there is an exhibition of old photos,
some of the beach thronging with visitors.
“Lundin Links was always about tour-
ism,” says one man, whose daughter was in
37
the same school year as Davidson’s sister.
“I reckon most people here would think of
themselves as middle class.” “They call this
‘the Bubble,’” adds a white-haired woman
walking her dog along the sands. “You can
see why. Over there, there is activity,” she
said, pointing towards the yellow oil plat-
form bases at the BiFab fabrication works
at Methil which were themselves recently
threatened with administration. “But in
Lundin Links nothing much changes.”
The Davidsons still live in Lundin Links
and everyone knows them, though not eve-
ryone knows Ruth is their daughter. One
girl looked it up on Wikipedia just to check
I was right. It’s a friendly village; every sin-
gle person I pass smiles and says hello,
and it occurs to me that it’s here Davidson
developed her easy-going public persona.
It’s also a part of the world that voted Con-
servative until the second half of the 1980s,
and where the values of community, coun-
try and church are well embedded. That,
combined with her parents’ work ethic, has
given Davidson a blue-collar Conservatism
that believes in striving, personal respon-
sibility and social mobility; it’s a “no one
owes you a living” Conservatism that was
once—pre-Thatcher, pre-poll tax—com-
mon enough across Scotland.
But long before she was in a position
to air any such political vision, Davidson’s
future was almost cut short. When she
was five years old, she was run over out-
side the family home, crushed by a lorry,
which broke her leg, fractured her pelvis
and severed her femoral artery. “I remem-
ber feeling someone put a blanket over me
on the tarmac,” Davidson recalled in an
interview. “Then I remember opening my
eyes in the ambulance and my mum being
there… then I blacked out again.” She
was given a 50/50 chance of survival and
spent months in a full-body cast. But after
reconstructive surgery, the future would-
be voice of Scotland’s strivers fought back
to become the only girl on the boys’ foot-
ball team.
Davidson and her older sister, now
a doctor in Newcastle, were the first in
their family to go to university. At Edin-
burgh, she felt uneasy among the public
schoolboys. “I remember her as quick-
witted and a ferocious swearer,” recalls
the political journalist Alex Massie, who
first met her on the university debat-
ing circuit, where she was “good, but not
world-beating.” She hadn’t come out back
then, which may have added to her sense
of dislocation. But mostly it seems to have
been born of the same distaste for the
38
elite that has much more recently been on
show in her scarcely-disguised dislike of
Boris Johnson.
This first became plain when she went
up against him in the BBC’s Brexit debate
at Wembley Arena. It has been evident
ever since. When asked about Johnson’s
likening of the Irish border to the line
between the London boroughs of Camden
and Westminster, Davidson was wither-
ing: “This is a serious and technical issue
that requires serious minds to give it the
correct amount of thought. It’s not really
one for casual disregard.” In August, she
again took the former foreign secretary to
task over his inflammatory comments on
the burqa.
Her disdain is perhaps rooted in the
fact that, unlike Johnson, Davidson had to
make it for herself, and—as she might see
the contrast—where the entitled Etonian
is always finding ways to use the country
to further his ambitions, her politics are
born of conviction.
Like many a Tory hero of the past,
Davidson wanted to join the armed forces,
but her childhood injuries ruled that out.
She joined the Territorial Army instead,
but in 2006 she sustained service-ending
injuries jumping through a window dur-
ing training. (It’s hard to imagine Johnson
doing the same, at least without the cam-
eras present.) She went on to become a
journalist on the Glenrothes Gazette, King-
dom FM and then the BBC. Though her
ideology was already formed, she wasn’t in
any political party in her twenties. It was
in 2009, when she quit journalism to do a
masters in international development at
Glasgow University, that she finally joined
the Tories.
At the time, the Labour government
in London was looking exhausted. But in
Scotland the Conservatives were as unpop-
ular as ever: in the 2010 general election
Gordon Brown took 41 Scottish seats to
David Cameron’s one. Offering her ser-
vices to a party where volunteers were in
short supply, Davidson soon ended up
working for the Scottish leader Annabel
Goldie, a moderate with a charismatic per-
sonality. She immediately saw in David-
son an opportunity to change the party’s
dynamic. “The first thing that strikes you
when you meet Ruth is her positive aura,”
Goldie said. “She has an enthusiasm and
vibrancy tempered by common sense and
a real practical grasp of priorities.”
Most Scottish political journalists’ first
memories of Davidson’s Tiggerish zeal date
from the Glasgow North East by-election
PROSPECT PORTRAIT RUTH DAVIDSON
Target in sight: is Ruth Davidson
gunning for the Tory leadership?
of 2009. The young Tory, who had made
the journey from new-blood to candidate
in no time, threw herself at the solidly-
Labour seat as if it were a marginal. She
knocked on doors that had been ignored
by Conservatives for years and was met, as
often as not, with grudging respect.
She lost, of course, but her show of
energy and determination helped get
her on to the candidate list for the seat of
Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, which had
fallen vacant in the wake of the expenses
scandal. She didn’t get selected—but
this dalliance with an English seat was
an early signal that we shouldn’t assume
that her ambitions stop at the border. As
it turned out, in the 2010 Westminster
election she fought—and lost—in Glas-
gow North East again.
“She knocked on doors
that had been ignored
by Conservatives for
years and was met with
grudging respect”
Though safely ignored by the outside
world at the time, the Tory Party in Glas-
gow at the time was a hotbed of intrigue.
There were accusations of internal vote-
rigging, and dark mutterings about new
members suddenly appearing at selec-
tions to vote on party lists. Among all this,
just weeks before the 2011 Scottish Parlia-
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
© MARK RUNNACLES/GETTY IMAGES
mentary elections, Malcolm Macaskill,
a Tory stalwart who topped the party’s
Glasgow list, was deselected amid a bitter
row over his business history. He was later
paid a five-figure settlement by the Scot-
tish Conservative Party over its decision to
remove him.
Amid that turmoil, Davidson was a
breath of fresh air. And helped by her asso-
ciation with Goldie, she replaced Macaskill
at the top of the Glasgow list. Overall, the
Scottish Conservatives fared badly that
year, losing two seats as the SNP cleaned
up with an overall majority. But under the
Scottish electoral system Davidson still got
a Holyrood seat. She had made it to the
Scottish Parliament.
When, soon after, Goldie announced
her resignation as leader, Davidson
emerged as a potential successor. Where
her main rival, Murdo Fraser, had big
plans to detoxify the Scottish Tories
by splitting from the national party,
the “kick-boxing lesbian,” as she was
tagged, didn’t just talk about change—
she embodied it. It hardly mattered that,
beyond LGBT issues, her views were tra-
ditional: church-going, pro-military,
with robust views on crime and punish-
ment. Her conventionality came wrapped
in a feisty, no-nonsense package that
somehow looked modernising. Even
though Fraser had been regarded as
favourite from the start, she won in a nar-
row final vote.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
She had done it. But there were teeth-
ing problems. She lacked experience,
and support from the small parliamen-
tary party, and was often trounced by
Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Ques-
tions. Initially too, she guarded her pri-
vacy, becoming defensive if she was
asked about her faith or sexuality. But
that changed when she started receiving
letters from young gay men telling her
she had inspired them. She grasped her
responsibility—and perhaps her potential
appeal—as a role model.
The 2014 independence referendum
marked the beginning of Davidson’s
real rise. Suddenly the Scottish Tories
had something to campaign on, and for
the first time in decades they sensed
they were on the winning side. Labour,
the main opposition, led the rather dull
“Better Together” campaign, but it was
the Scottish Conservatives that reaped
the rewards from its success. By the 2015
General Election, Labour’s decision to
fight for No alongside the Tories meant
“Red Tories” graffiti was being daubed
all over their former strongholds. Mean-
while Davidson’s grin was ubiquitous, as
she was photographed pulling pints, and
sitting on tanks and buffaloes.
She also had a knack for attracting new
recruits. Adam Tomkins, a professor in
constitutional law and now a Conservative
MSP, met Davidson in 2012 while working
on devolution. “Though I had never in my
life voted Tory, the more time I spent with
Ruth, the more I realised that we had a lot
in common… Then I went to the Scottish
party conference and Ruth was making
her leader’s speech. She joked: ‘It’s hard
to come out... as a Scottish Conservative,’
and when she said it, she looked at me. I
thought: ‘Yes, that is probably what I am.’”
More and more people have undergone
similar conversions. At the 2016 Scottish
Parliamentary elections, Davidson dou-
bled the number of Conservative seats
and knocked Scottish Labour back into
third place, becoming—astonishingly—
the leader of Scotland’s main opposi-
tion. Whereas Scottish Labour struggled
against the separatists, she presented
her party as the bulwark against a rising
nationalist tide and pulled off the personal
coup of winning the seat of Edinburgh
Central. She campaigned as a Tory, but
seemed happy to put a distance between
herself and the party. Theresa May tried it
last year with her “strong and stable” slo-
gan—only in Davidson’s case it worked.
The leaflets read: “Ruth Davidson for a
PROSPECT PORTRAIT RUTH DAVIDSON
A path to power?
Even if Ruth Davidson wants to be prime
minister, the road from Holyrood to No 10
is long and winding.
Find a Westminster seat before the next
leadership election
Timing is Davidson’s first problem.
Assuming the Tories dump May before
2022, Davidson will need to be in
the Commons in order to stand. That
means a Tory MP, ideally Scottish,
standing down and Davidson winning
the by-election. Will an MP be willing
to sacrifice his or her seat? And will the
electorate be happy about voting in a
by-election foisted upon them for such
transparent reasons?
Persuade enough MPs to vote for her
The liberal, “Remain”-backing caucus in
the parliamentary party is small, which
means Davidson will have to win the
votes of those who disagree with her.
Not impossible, but it could be tough to
make the MPs’ top two.
Win the membership vote
In the final vote the wheels are likely
to come off. The elderly, Leave-sup-
porting, socially-conservative member-
ship—which probably numbers around
120,000—has the final say. Will they
plumb for Davidson or an arch-Brexiteer?
Strong Opposition.” The Conservative
brand was somewhat muted.
In 2016, for the second time in two
years, she had a good referendum—this
time as an energetic spokesperson for the
lacklustre “Remain” campaign. She lost an
ally when David Cameron quit, but soon
enough threw her weight behind May.
Though not a Westminster candidate
last June, Davidson reprised her “strong
opposition” line to even greater effect. The
SNP was pushing Brexit as a justification
for a second independence referendum,
but Davidson tapped into a widespread
public weariness. Having travelled across
the country during each campaign from
2014 on, I was surprised to see once fired-
up SNP voters switching allegiance on the
grounds they couldn’t face another trip
to the polling station. The SNP lost 21 of
its 56 seats in the Commons, while the
Tories won 13, their best result since 1983.
39
And now Davidson’s appeal was assuming
UK-wide importance: without those extra
MPs, May wouldn’t have had the numbers
to govern.
D
espite her ascent, there are those
who see Davidson as “policy-lite.”
She’s not devoid of ideas—some
of her thinking on education has been
co-opted by the SNP—but she is perhaps
better at defining what she doesn’t want
Scotland to be rather than what she does.
That’s bound up with the symbiotic rela-
tionship between the Tories and the SNP.
Davidson needs the threat of a second
independence referendum to kick back
against, which is why she talks about it
endlessly while simultaneously urging the
SNP leader “to get back to the day job.”
So how far can she go? Her confidantes
hesitate at that question. Some maintain
that Scottish First Minister is the extent of
the ambition of a forceful woman who is
not yet 40, and that might be plausible if it
© CINDY ORD/GETTY IMAGES FOR IWHC
were not still so hard to see how the Tories
could win a majority at Holyrood. Despite
their recent strides, they’ve not won the
popular vote since the 1950s, and various
structural factors, such as the large pub-
lic sector workforce, probably limit their
appeal. So it is hard to imagine that her ear
is entirely deaf to all the Westminster chat-
ter over who will succeed May—the Scot-
tish Tory leader, untainted by the rolling
catastrophe of Brexit, looks an ever-more
appealing option.
But is she a realistic one? After all, she’s
not even an MP. History shows that it’s
possible for an ambitious Scottish Tory to
become an MP, leader of the Westminster
party and PM all in one go—Alec Douglas-
Home did it when he renounced his peer-
age back in 1963, and found a pliant MP to
step down and create a by-election.
The comparison with that grouse-
moor grandee is not one that Davidson
would necessarily welcome, and—besides
(see box) the obstacles are formidable. It
could very well be that a Brexit-obsessed
UK Conservative party is not in the mood
for her brand of common sense. But
British politics has entered an uncer-
tain period, in which the big parties are
unloved, narrow and fractious, but also
unpredictable. If the Conservative Party
is interested in reconnecting with the
country as a whole, then just maybe it will
look at Ruth Davidson and see in her a
winning candidate.
Dani Garavelli is a columnist for Scotland
on Sunday
 The dark side of
early diagnosis
For years, patients have been told that an early diagnosis
can save their life. What if this advice is wrong?
michael blastland
W
hat can add five years to your life without
lengthening it by a single day, improve the
performance of the NHS while wasting its
resources, and make people grateful for
unnecessary suffering?
The answer is early diagnosis.
Early diagnosis sounds like a no-brainer. The NHS has targets
for speedy diagnosis and treatment of cancer, and offers screen-
ing for a wide range of conditions, in babies, children and adults.
Private medicine and charities offer even more.
Much of this early diagnosis can, without doubt, be a very good
thing. What’s surprising is that in the wrong hands or the wrong
circumstances, it can also be a very bad one. To make matters
more complicated, sometimes it can be hard to tell the good early
diagnosis from the bad. The story of our attempts to put the logic
of early diagnosis into practice is a hard lesson in the human costs
of failing to communicate that uncertainty, and the dangers that
lurk in the intuitively obvious.
To see how easily we can be misled, start with a definitional
trick that makes early diagnosis appear a good thing, simply by
moving the goalposts. Imagine your cancer is diagnosed at a late
stage, aged 66, and you die from it four years later aged 70. Your
cancer might have been sitting unrecognised for years. If only you
had known.
Then, in another life, your wish is granted. This is the parallel
world which, in a recent speech about how AI would soon tackle
cancer, Theresa May held up as her vision of the future. “Every
year, 22,000 fewer people will die within five years of their diagno-
sis compared to today.” So thanks to screening, you get your diag-
nosis earlier at, say, 62.
But now suppose that’s all it is—an early diagnosis. And
suppose there’s no treatment for it or the treatment is unsuc-
cessful (as we’ll see, this turns out to be a common scenario).
You still die at 70, having lived not a day more. But fear not;
because you become one of those who do not “die within five
years of their diagnosis,” you can still be counted as someone
who lives longer.
By moving the diagnosis forward, but leaving the date of death
unchanged—hey presto!—the five-year survival after diagnosis
goes up. “Lead-time bias,” as this is known, means that claiming
success for cancer detection programmes with unadjusted rates of
five-year survival after diagnosis is, to put it mildly, an inappropri-
ate use of statistics. Some people—in Public Health England, for
example—are aware of the problem and take pains to avoid it. Oth-
ers—including some doctors and health organisations that have
promoted screening—are less careful.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani used the lead-time
trick to denigrate the NHS: “I had prostate cancer five, six years
ago,” he said in 2007. “My chance of surviving prostate cancer, and
thank God I was cured of it, in the United States? Eighty-two per
cent. My chance of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44
per cent under socialised medicine.” In fact, in England, deaths
from prostate cancer are about 19.4 per 100,000 of the popula-
tion (according to Cancer Research UK); in the US, about 19.5
(according to the National Cancer Institute)—about the same.
The difference is that US men tend to be diagnosed earlier so
their five-year survival appears better.
One issue, then, is that we can be fooled by the data. The next
is the more substantial question of the date of death itself. If early
diagnosis through screening doesn’t change that, then much of
its promise is false, and any claimed improvement in the statis-
tics would be a lie. Does it have any effect? As that cross-Atlantic
comparison of prostate cancer suggests, the answer is “not neces-
sarily.” In truth, all some people gain is more years knowing they
have cancer. The earlier diagnosis and treatment has no clear
effect overall on the age they die.
And yet, the logic of “catching it early” suggests that it must
make a difference. The chance of stopping cancer, for example,
is genuinely greater if it’s detected earlier and more amenable
to treatments, above all surgery, which we know often become
less feasible after it has spread. What’s more, many thousands
of women and men affirm, with all the authority of personal
experience, that they were themselves saved because screen-
ing ­discovered their illness. It’s hard to argue against that sort of
 FEATURES THE DARK SIDE OF EARLY DIAGNOSIS
testimony. Not so very long ago, an American leaflet
advising women about breast cancer screening could
say that if you didn’t go, “you need more than your
breasts examined.” UK advice could be similarly bullish.
But that confidence now looks awkward, to say the
least. Although there have always been critics in an
often-acrimonious debate, screening programmes face
growing scepticism. A recent conference, co-hosted by
Cancer Research UK’s Early Detection Centre, con-
cluded as follows: “Decades after their implementa-
tion, cancer screening programmes carry the burden
of unresolved ethical issues and questionable out-
comes… Expert consensus is that these programmes
should be reconsidered as they are not up to date with
our knowledge of the natural history of disease.”
“Many patients have been
exposed to harm of which
they had no inkling, to no
purpose, and then—of all
cruelties—felt grateful”
It’s a startling position, and will seem sudden and
inexplicable to some who remember the old cam-
paigns. What does it mean to say these programmes
should be “reconsidered”?
This shifting opinion has unsettling implications
for how people make sense of evidence, especially the
evidence of their own intuition and experience. It also
suggests that for decades many hundreds of thousands
of patients, and many thousands of doctors were mis-
sold screening using the shaky logic of early diagnosis.
Many will have been exposed to harm of which they had
no inkling, to no purpose, and then—of all cruelties—
felt grateful.
There’s a vital distinction here. If you have symp-
toms—a lump, say, or a bleed—you don’t need screen-
ing, you need a proper examination and diagnosis, and
soon. That’s a type of early diagnosis that makes abun-
dant sense. Similarly, if you have a strong family history
of a disease, it pays to watch out.
Screening, on the other hand, attempts early diag-
nosis of people who are symptom-free. Unsurprisingly,
it is not perfect. Interpreting white marks on a mam-
mogram for example can be an uncertain art. How
those white marks will behave in future is in some cases
unknowable. All this means that early diagnosis also
entails early misdiagnosis—both by telling people they
are well when they’re not, and by telling them their con-
dition is more serious than it will really turn out to be.
With the latter comes the possibility of unnecessary
anxiety, treatment—and harm.
The diagram overleaf shows the outcomes for women
@ REX SHUTTERSTOCK
who are and are not screened for breast cancer. These
are now reported in the latest NHS breast screening
leaflet—a big improvement on the past. Only by com-
paring the outcomes like this do we see how both ben-
41
efits and harms play out for everyone. The bottom-line
benefit of screening seems clear. In the screened group,
three in 200 die of breast cancer; in the unscreened
group, four.
But the harm is less obvious. To see it, focus on the
unscreened group on the right, where three women are
shown as “unaffected.” These are women who have can-
cer that will never develop and never hurt them. Often,
it’s carcinoma in situ—the “in situ” meaning that it stays
put in the ducts where it begins and never affects the
rest of the body. If they are not screened, they never
know, never worry, never have treatment—and they’ll
be fine. But if these women are screened then, since
we don’t know if it’s carcinoma in situ, or a cancer that
could kill, they’re likely to be treated—including with
mastectomy surgery. In some cases, then—and there’s
no knowing which—early diagnosis will be harmful.
One way of summarising these group-level statistics
is to say that screening saves one from breast cancer but
treats three unnecessarily. Is it worth it? Many will still
say yes, unequivocally. Better the chance of living, even
with the risks of over-diagnosis.
But it is not clear how we should weigh-up potential
benefit and harm, especially as the benefit—one in 200
saved—also needs qualifying: one in 200 is saved from
dying of breast cancer. When comparing mortality from
all causes, however, even that benefit is questionable. It’s
not clear if either group—screened or unscreened—lives
longer on average. Why not is uncertain—but it seems
that the screening itself carries a risk of causing other
kinds of harm. We can speculate that treatment that
would otherwise have been avoided, or even the screen-
ing itself, is taking a toll on other aspects of health.
A
ll of which leaves a dilemma: if breast cancer
screening saves some, while harming others—
the net effect on all-cause mortality more or
less cancelling out—what do we do?
David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at Cambridge, was
part of the team that changed the breast cancer leaf-
let to make it more balanced. Last year, he set up the
Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication
partly inspired by that experience and a sense of the
need for good evidence without persuasion.
“Earlier diagnosis of a serious disease might be ben-
eficial for patients,” he told me, “but this should not be
a foregone conclusion. There is a need to consider the
overall impact on everyone affected, including those
that would normally not have been detected, and those
for whom earlier diagnosis simply means more time
knowing they have the disease. Unfortunately, none of
these people can be directly identified.”
At the end, a sceptical account of the balance in this
case of screening might read: a life saved, a life lost, a
great many needless treatments, a whole programme
at great cost, the dedication of many professionals for
many decades, the anxieties of many women… for what:
a shuffling of fates, a lottery?
Faced with such uncertainty, we need to under-
stand why some of this evidence tends to be heard,
and some isn’t.
42 FEATURES THE DARK SIDE OF EARLY DIAGNOSIS PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

To see how, go back to the chart (right) and the group on the Outcomes for women who are
left—the 200 screened women—and the 12 who are treated and
survive: we instinctively attribute their survival to the screen-
and are not screened for breast cancer
ing—and so do they. I had cancer; I was screened; they found it; Women aged between 50 and 70 Women aged between 50 and 70
I was treated; I lived. who attend screening who are not screened
Then look at the unscreened group. Eight are also treated
and survive, perhaps because they find a lump themselves, while
another three have cancer which is never found, but are unaf-
fected, as we heard.

SOURCE: THE WINTON CENTRE FOR RISK AND EVIDENCE COMMUNICATION, BASED ON NHS DATA
So, 11 of the unscreened group with cancer (8+3) come
200 attend screening 200 don’t attend screening
through fine, while 12 of the screened group do (three of them
having unnecessary treatment for cancers that wouldn’t have
affected them).
But what do these people say about their experience? All 12 of
the screened group might say screening saved them. If they did,
all but one would be mistaken, while three might think they were
saved when in truth they were harmed unnecessarily.
15 develop 185 never have 15 develop 185 never have
By looking at the chart and asking what story each person breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer
might tell, we see how every story about early diagnosis will
seem to confirm its worth, how no stories are told to doubt it,
how even bad outcomes are interpreted favourably. It’s known
as the popularity paradox: “The greater the harm through over-
diagnosis and overtreatment from screening, the more people
there are who believe they owe their health, or even their life, to
the programme.”
None are 3 die 12 are 3 are 4 die 8 are
Will any of those unnecessarily treated ever ask: “Would I unaffected from breast treated and unaffected from breast treated and
have been fine if left alone? Would I have avoided the needless cancer survive cancer survive
pain and anxiety of this whole procedure?” This will be the real
story for some, but never heard. No one knows if it is theirs. But it would also catch some healthy people by mistake: “23
This is the recurring pattern, everything in favour of one side: other people would be told they have dementia when they do not
experience, intuition, real individuals—celebrities perhaps—with [a false positive]. This is not just bad medicine, but harmful med-
names and captivating narratives, tragic or inspiring, full of con- icine…” she said.
viction, but often wrong. On the other side, group-level statis- If we add the four accurate positives to the 23 false-positives—
tics, anonymity and silence. Is it any surprise which dominated? and remember we’ve no idea which is which—that’s 27 out of 100
people who a legally-nervous doctor might feel obliged to warn of

I
s breast cancer a special case? Not necessarily. It’s a problem
that’s characteristic of treatment for all manner of condi-
tions: the intuitive but not-always reliable habit in those who
get better—and those who treat them—to thank the treatment.
Underlying all these problems is another; the simple fact of
uncertainty. As we become more aware of screening’s untold sto-
ries, this increases the uncertainty about which story might be
yours. Well, I say uncertainty is a simple fact, but in a letter to the
London Review of Books in 2015, a professor and director of a uni-
versity dementia services centre had no time for it. “The sooner
someone sues a GP for failure to diagnose [dementia] as early
as possible, the better,” she said. She wrote after it emerged that
there were widely varying rates of diagnosis for dementia in dif-
ferent parts of the country. It was outrageous, she said, that pub-
licly-funded professionals could withhold such “information”
from their patients. Amen to that, you might say.
But in reply, Margaret McCartney, a Glasgow GP who writes
about evidence-based medicine, called the professor’s view dis-
turbing. The UK National Screening Committee recommended
that screening should not be offered for dementia, she said. Why
not? “Because false positive rates”—when an uncertain test tells
you that you have an illness when you don’t —“are rife.”
Imagine 100 65-year-olds. Typically, you might expect to see
six cases of dementia. “If the background rate of dementia for
65-year-olds is 6 per cent, screening would find four of the six,”
she says. That is, being imperfect, it wouldn’t catch everyone.
possible dementia; 23 of these 27 would be misinformed. The anx-
iety for them and their families, the changes they might make to
their lives—do they continue driving? Do they feel safe alone?—are
awful to contemplate.
Some professors it would seem, just like their patients, might
think in terms of hard information and wonder what could be
wrong with demanding it. They might imagine compelling sto-
ries. The power of these narratives, the degree of conviction they
inspire—“sue the GPs!”—is in one sense impressive, but equally it
is alarming: a one-eyed story that sees only benefit, but fails to see
potential harm, or the uncertainty in both.
Not all screening is as hit and miss as for dementia. Differ-
ent types have different potential harms, and different balances
of harm and benefit. The repeated point is that the intui-
tive benefit of “catching it early” does not apply equally in all
circumstances.
Is there also another bias lurking here: that in response to a
problem we must do something? Wherever this something seems
to have an intuitively plausible rationale, arguments quickly fall
into place, evidence is selectively advanced, stories that confirm it
predominate; stories that don’t are often untold.
In early May, it was announced that 450,000 women had failed
to receive letters inviting them to breast cancer screening. Jer-
emy Hunt, the then-Health Secretary, said that up to 270 could
die early as a result. He might have been premature. His own esti-
mate has reportedly now fallen from up to 270 deaths to up to 74.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES THE DARK SIDE OF EARLY DIAGNOSIS 43

(An unusual example of a minister rushing to highlight bad news,
before checking if it stacked up.) No matter. Charities called it
“distressing,” “devastating,” an “appalling error.”
But amid understandable public alarm, there was, perhaps,
one good to emerge: the full balance of the potential benefits
and harms—the group-level statistics—broke through into pub-
lic argument.
“Facing up to the limitations of
our knowledge leaves us feeling
vulnerable. But we always
were, we just weren’t told”
“I believe that the furore over the NHS Breast Screening
Programme error has resulted in unnecessary worry for those
women who may not have received a breast screening invitation,”
said Paul Pharoah, an epidemiologist at Cambridge.
“Breast cancer screening has both harms and benefits and so,
if some people have not been invited for screening they will have
avoided the harms as well as missing out on any benefits.”
For the particular women concerned, aged around 70, he
added that we have little good evidence of the overall effect of
missing one final check-up. This is the measure of our commu-
nication failure: that a great many people feel justifiably fright-
ened and some feel outraged because we led them to believe
that an inviolable practice had been violated—but it is a practice
whose effects we never understood.
M
y partner, Katey, is in her early 50s. “So, what am I
supposed to do?” she said, as we discussed this article.
“Should I go or not?”
Alas, there is no “should.” I’m in no position to make the
decision for anyone else—and the data doesn’t tell us.
“I know… that’s what I don’t like,” she said.
The early campaigns, said Spiegelhalter, “were deliberately
aimed to increase the number of people going for screening, and
were designed at a time when screening was seen as an unal-
loyed ‘good thing.’”
Now that over-diagnosis and over-treatment have become
recognised problems, he says, the ethos has changed—at least
in places—towards encouraging an informed choice.
“Technically, we might say that the decision problem has
entered a “preference-sensitive zone”—meaning that two rea-
sonable people, faced with the same information, could come to
different decisions about going for screening.” Hunt’s successor,
Matthew Hancock, could take note.
We tell stories to make sense of life, or maybe to pretend
that life makes sense. But we’re often tempted to make clearer
sense of the data than the data contains, as we’ve done with the
numbers on screening. Facing up to the limitations of our knowl-
edge leaves us feeling vulnerable.
But we always were; we just weren’t told. The choice—for it is
a choice—is not black and white. The intuitively-obvious—“go or
you need your head examined”—has been a damaging delusion
through which medicine has again proved capable of hurting and
misleading people on a huge scale.
Michael Blastland is an author and member of the advisory board of the
Winton Centre

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CALL€D TO
ACCOUNT
The single currency’s design isn’t perfect. But what’s really
hampered its first 20 years are decisions freely taken
by power-hungry men in Frankfurt
Adam Tooze

I
n the two decades that the euro has been around it has been branded as hopelessly
and inherently flawed, a failure, and a tragedy for Europe. Its critics have blamed
it for many things—from soup kitchens in Athens, to wild gyrations in the markets,
and the arrival of angry populists in Rome.
Yet for all the charges, Europe’s single currency, and the European Central
Bank (ECB) which manages it, are still here. No other institution has more influence on
Europe’s future than the ECB, and there is no obvious alternative to it. For better, or—
very often—for worse, it has dictated the single currency’s story since its creation. You
can’t fairly appraise the euro—which Britain never joined, of course, but whose fate will
have important consequences for us even after Brexit—without taking a view on the cen-
tral bankers who manage it. And those central bankers, especially Jean-Claude Trichet,
who headed the bank from 2003 to 2011, must shoulder much of the blame for Europe’s
sluggish recovery, and the disturbing rise of nationalism.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES CALLED TO ACCOUNT
IN THE B€GINNING
Central banks take time to establish themselves, and—at 20—the
ECB is young. Today the world’s markets hang on every word of
America’s Federal Reserve, which seems as permanent as any-
thing in the world of finance. But the Fed’s birth, in 1913, was
mired in controversy; when it turned 20, in 1933, the US econ-
omy was in the grip of the Great Depression, which makes today’s
eurozone look like a picture of health. Indeed, if one goes fur-
ther back, the rows surrounding the First and Second Bank of the
United States—which were respectively railed against by Thomas
Jefferson and Andrew Jackson—are a reminder that institutions
charged with the governance of money always court controversy.
Capitalism and democracy can make difficult bedfellows and
central banks are caught in the middle.
As the issuer of currency, central banks are the lender of last
resort both to high street banks and, at least normally, to govern-
ments too. They are thus expected to manage not only money, but
also—effectively—exchange rates, public debt, the stability of the
banking system and inflation. Furthermore, since wage inflation
is linked to employment, they also have to monitor the labour mar-
ket. Any action or inaction creates winners and losers. They may
declare themselves “independent” of elected government, but
central banks are inescapably political.
In the case of the eurozone, the difficulties are all the greater
because it is the central bank for an economy the size of a conti-
nent, made up of regions as diverse as Belgium, Bavaria and Basil-
icata, without the fiscal or administrative apparatus of a nation
state to back it up. The ECB rests atop a network of national cen-
tral banks whose loyalties are inevitably divided between the euro-
zone and their national financial systems.
But that is only half the story. The euro was initially designed
to contain the dominant influence that Germany’s central bank
used to wield. To maintain their pegged exchange-rate against the
mighty Deutschmark, the other central banks often had to march
interest rates up and down in line with the Bundesbank. So they
saw an obvious attraction in pooling control in a transnational
institution. For the Germans, the formation of a European mon-
etary system reduced the upward pressure on its currency, which
could otherwise have threatened the trade surpluses on which
Germany prides itself.
The ECB was placed—from the beginning—in the crossfire
of European national identities and conflicts. The single cur-
rency was born out of a compromise between France and Ger-
many. Chancellor Helmut Kohl wanted to bind Europe irrevocably
together, limiting the scope for nationalist politics at home in Ger-
many and elsewhere. François Mitterrand’s France wanted not
only to dilute Germany’s dominant role over monetary policy, but
also create an economy on a scale that would allow some wiggle
room for domestic social policy in an era of globalised capital. The
national horse-trading was built into this transnational entity: if
the ECB was going to be based in Frankfurt, argued France, then
it needed to have a French boss. They agreed on Wim Duisenberg,
a Dutchman, only when it was promised that a Frenchman would
follow him.
The ECB opened for business on 1st June 1998, seven months
before the member currencies were irrevocably locked together
to create the euro in electronic form, and three and a half years
before the notes rolled off the presses. From the off, political con-
flict shaped the new bank. In pursuit of a dream of an ever-closer
European union, many economists warned, member states were
45
abandoning the sometimes useful option of national devalua-
tions. The alternative to reducing a currency’s value is to adjust
the economy to competitive pressures—in practice, that typically
means wage reductions. It is pretty toxic for bankers to be seen as
imposing those—especially if those bankers are German. Rather
than bringing the Europeans together, as was the plan, a common
currency that imposes asymmetric adjustment costs can thus
descend into an orgy of mutual recrimination.
These are the dangers that lie deep in the structure of the euro-
zone, frailties that would make it an ambitious project under any
circumstances. But the organism of the single currency at 20 years
old has been shaped at least as much by its environment, as its
original nature. What knocked the eurozone off its growth path
10 years ago was not the chronic lack of competitiveness in Greece
or Italy, or the difficulty of adjusting to that, but rather the global
financial crisis of 2008. And how the eurozone reacted to that chal-
lenge was a matter of political choice—decisions made by national
governments, and above all the ECB. And the ECB’s performance
was shockingly bad. We cannot blame this on unfortunate institu-
tional structures. It was a matter of deliberate choice.
SHOCKING D€CISIONS
When the first shocks struck in August 2007, the ECB offered
Europe’s banks a huge injection of liquidity—and then began
pointing fingers. The ECB blamed the Fed and the Bank of Eng-
land (BoE) who were in charge of the markets where the worst
risks had been taken. Trichet, the conservative French Treas-
ury bureaucrat at the head of European monetary policy, was
incredulous that the Americans had allowed Lehman Brothers to
fail. But Europe had nothing to crow about. Its own banks were
even more oversized, and their balance sheets full of even greater
risks. Under the so-called Basel II banking regulations, Europe
indulged in an absurd faith in the self-insurance and the risk
management of the private banks.
In 2008 it fell to national governments to bail out the banks,
and they took the flak. But the liquidity support that the ECB
pumped in was no less crucial. The cash Trichet provided flowed
back into the coffers of national governments as the banks used
it to purchase supposedly safe government bonds. Trichet’s cri-
sis-fighting in 2008-2009 thereby tied Europe’s banks and gov-
ernments closer together, even while preserving the appearance
of normality.
It was when the sovereign debts themselves threatened to go
bad in 2010 that the game changed. Faced with a fiscal crisis first
in Greece, then Ireland and Portugal, with Spain and Italy loom-
ing in the background, the ECB swung into action. From 2010,
it became an aggressive and assertive actor in the struggle over
the politically charged question of Europe’s future financial
constitution.
One might well ask how very small countries like Greece and
Ireland could have such a disproportionate impact on the euro-
“
zone’s giant economy. “Contagion” in the bond market is the
standard answer. But epidemic metaphors are misleading. Bond
market contagion is not a natural phenomenon. It can only spread
if the central bank for some reason refuses to do what the Fed,
the BoE and the Bank of Japan have always done as a matter of
course: stand behind the debts of the sovereign. Despite issuing
trillions in new debt, none of these countries suffered a bond mar-
ket panic. The difference in the eurozone was the ECB’s refusal to
play that essential stabilising role.
46 FEATURES CALLED TO ACCOUNT
True, the ECB was, to calm Germany’s historic fear
of inflation, by design barred from directly buying newly
issued debt. But in 2010 new debt was not the problem.
What the ECB needed to do was to manage the giant
market for outstanding bonds. Rather than putting a
floor under that market, Trichet dipped in and out. It
was a deliberate tactic. When the eurozone governments
took steps towards fiscal discipline, Trichet backed
them up in the market. When they appeared to be back-
sliding, he pulled out and let the markets rip.
The ECB often deals with critics by pointing to its
limited mandate. But in responding to this crisis, Tri-
chet far overstepped those bounds. His aim was nothing
less than regime change. He was trying to use the cri-
sis to force the completion of the still-incomplete con-
stitution of the single currency zone—on conservative
terms. He wanted Europe’s politicians to agree to bind-
ing fiscal rules, to establish a bond market stabilisation
fund independent of the ECB, a fund that would keep
the ECB forever clear of any obligation to stand behind
public debt. Until the politicians fell into line, he would
support the market only in extremis. Playing with fire,
the ECB unleashed a conflagration.
When in the spring of 2011 Greece’s centre-left Pasok
government suggested that it might be safer to write
down or restructure some of its debt, Trichet did not just
stonewall—he sought to silence the debate by threaten-
ing that if Athens publicly broached the issue, the ECB
would cut off the funding lifeline to its banks. In the
name of protecting the reputation of Europe’s sover-
eign borrowers, Trichet made himself into an intransi-
gent defender of creditor interest.
And when market pressure was not enough, Trichet
did not hesitate to step across the boundary that notion-
ally separated the central bank from national govern-
ments; he issued instructions to the governments of
Ireland, Spain and Italy, demanding spending cuts, tax
increases and changes to labour law that reached deep
into their internal affairs. Trichet used the ECB’s “inde-
pendence,” and the threat of the bond market, to dictate
terms to elected governments.
No such tough medicine was dished out to Europe’s
banks, which should, like their American counterparts,
have been forced to recapitalise in 2008-2009, even if
that meant shareholders had to suffer. When the debts
From big vision to small minds: the story of the euro
1969
European leaders agree on the France, Italy and the EU Commission
ambition of montetary union,
paving way for the 1970 against Margaret Thatcher
Werner report on the
locking of exchange rates
1929 1979
Gustav Stresemann proposes a European Monetary
single European currency System is created
at the League of Nations
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
of Ireland’s banks threatened to tip its government
over the edge, Trichet still refused point blank to coun-
tenance “bailing in” their private creditors to sharing
the pain.
Was Trichet driven to do all this by the Germans? It
will be some time before the archives are opened. The
evidence certainly suggests that he was constrained by
the German members of his board. Jürgen Stark, his
chief economist, is widely blamed for the extraordinary
decisions both to raise rates in 2008 and then again in
2011. And whenever Trichet did enter the bond market,
he could count on protests from the Bundesbank, an
institution that retained some clout, even after most of
Europe’s central banks had been reduced to conveyor
belts for ECB policy.
But the Germans are just one voice: as the next gov-
ernor, Mario Draghi, would later demonstrate, the ECB
does not have to genuflect to them. Besides, Angela
Merkel needed the ECB to fix the European problem, as
much as the ECB needed Berlin. So German opposition
could have been finessed. But rather than counterbal-
ancing, Trichet tended to amplify German conserva-
tism. On debt restructuring, the roadblock was the ECB,
not Merkel or her finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble,
who were far more willing to broach the question than
Trichet. They wanted discipline all around—for bankers
and reckless investors, as well as taxpayers. The euphe-
mism de jour was “Private Sector Involvement,” which
meant a “haircut” for bondholders. Germany’s political
leaders had a solid democratic mandate for demanding
that. The German public hated the bailouts and wanted
the bankers to pay, even their own. Trichet, by contrast,
was soft on bankers and creditors, while egging on the
markets to discipline national governments and their
citizens. This unappetising mixture was no mistake or
miscalculation. It was a deliberate, high-stakes gam-
ble, by a group of conservative technocrats that has left
Europe scarred.
After an autumn of crisis that claimed the scalps of
the elected Prime Ministers of Spain, Italy and Greece,
in December 2011 the European Fiscal Pact gave the
conservatives the institutional win they wanted. On his
way out of office, Trichet had helped Berlin to hardwire
austerity into the circuit board of the EU. It was a politi-
cal victory that has curbed fiscal policy as an active tool
1988 1992 1998
Maastricht Treaty ECB opens in Frankfurt, with
back monetary union— enshrines the plan Wim Duisenberg as President
1995
The name “the euro”
is adopted
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES CALLED TO ACCOUNT
of economic governance. It thus contributed to Europe’s agonis-
ingly slow recovery and low rates of public investment.
WHAT€VER I SAID
With his MIT training, Trichet’s Italian successor, Mario Draghi
has more expansionary, freewheeling instincts than Trichet. But
Draghi’s fiscal instincts are conservative. He co-signed Trichet’s
fateful missive to Berlusconi in August 2011. If he was free to adopt
a more interventionist stance, it was in part because Trichet had
done the dirty work of beating Europe’s governments into line.
When Draghi made his dramatic pronouncement in July 2012,
promising that he would do “whatever it takes,” he turned the
ECB from the villain into the saviour of the euro. He spoke against
the backdrop of a renewed crisis in Spain, and fears about Italy
and Greece. But Draghi made those remarks to hedge fund inves-
tors in London not so much out of desperation as exasperation.
As he remarked to a friend, the Anglosphere’s incurable obsession
with the end of the euro, “sucked.”
The doubters in the City of London did not understand how
far Europe had come. Not only had Europe agreed to a banking
union, but—however bruising the negotiations, and however defla-
tionary the result—it had also managed to hammer out a fiscal
framework. So Europe was evolving, and the commitment of its
governments was far too large to be wound back, even in the face
of the long period of ECB intransigence.
Of course, the price paid for the ECB’s victory was huge. The
shock of 2010-2011, followed by a severe dose of austerity, tipped
the European economy into a prolonged second recession. No one
doubts there are many unproductive businesses in Italy and Greece
that are plagued by chronic underinvestment, but their current
misery and acute sense of helplessness owes more to the way their
economies have been run with anaemic demand. Even if market
liberalisation really is required, that would be far easier to pull that
off if the economy is humming and labour markets are tight.
The trans-Atlantic contrast is painful. Ben Bernanke’s Fed wel-
comed Obama’s second presidential term in November 2012 with
a huge surge in bond buying: Quantitative Easing 3—aka “QE to
infinity.” America’s central bank announced that it would not even
consider raising interest rates from zero until unemployment had
been brought down to 6 per cent. By contrast, the ECB allowed its
own balance sheet to collapse. Credit and investment contracted.
Bad debts piled up. As a generation of school leavers and grad-
uates found themselves locked out of the labour market, youth
unemployment in the hardest-hit eurozone countries soared
Growth without 2002 2008
growth Euro notes and coins Global financial crisis: ECB
The eurozone has often enter circulation provides liquidity support,
stagnanted but more but perversely twice raises rates
countries have kept
joining the original 11.
Flags indicate when
1999 2010
The non-physical euro is 2003 Fiscal crisis in Greece, then Ireland,
launched, and starts trading Jean-Claude Trichet Greece and Spain. Bailouts
at $1.17 takes charge at the ECB for Greece and Ireland
47
towards 50 per cent. The political scene was in uproar, with left
and right-wing critics of the euro and the ECB on the march.
It was not until 2015, when the risk of outright Japanese-style
deflation hit, that the ECB finally put the foot on the monetary
accelerator. In March 2015 it embarked on QE on a massive scale,
more than doubling its balance sheet by 2018. Most immediately,
this surge in liquidity provided some modest support to Europe’s
recovery. But its political ramifications, by way of the bond mar-
ket, were far more dramatic. QE insulated the eurozone against
any contagion from the renewed Greek debt crisis in 2015. As
Syriza took Greece to the edge of disorderly default, in the rest of
Europe it was as if nothing had happened. There isn’t much risk
of “contagion” when the ECB is draining the markets of availa-
ble bonds to buy. Here is proof that the entire sovereign debt crisis
of 2010-2012 could have been avoided if Trichet had not chosen,
deliberately, to take Europe to the brink.
Even under Draghi, ECB protection comes with conditions. To
qualify for ECB purchases, sovereign debt has to have an invest-
ment grade credit rating. Thus even as it dominates the bond mar-
ket, the ECB allows its own conservatism to be ventriloquised by
the ratings agencies. Portugal’s left-wing coalition government
hangs by the thread provided by one solitary investment grade
rating. Italy will be subject to the same pressure if its new cabinet
deviates any further from the path of respectability.
FLAWED P€OPLE, FLAW€D POLICY
Reviewing this remarkable history one is forced to the question:
Why can the ECB exert such influence over Europe’s destiny? The
answer is that, to all intents and purposes, joining the eurozone is
irrevocable. The UK is slowly discovering to its cost what “taking
back control” entails. A departure from the euro would be more
immediately disruptive of day-to-day life than even the hardest
Brexit, because it would make itself felt at every cash machine,
and money can move faster than patterns of trade.
Economists continually second guess the euro’s survival, but
few politicians in Europe will seriously discuss it. And when they
do, it does not prove popular with the public. When shown the
exit in 2015, the Greeks chose to remain. Though they voted to
reject the unreasonable terms set by the eurozone creditors in a
referendum, when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras nonetheless cut
a deal to keep Greece in the club, far from being punished, he was
returned to power with an identical share of the vote. The alterna-
tive is simply too horrible to contemplate. The turmoil in Rome,
which has handed power to the unpredictable Five-Star and the
2011 2015
A first bailout for Portugal, a second Alexis Tsipras wins Greek election,
for Greece. ECB raises rates amid a and then referendum against Europe’s
second slump. Ireland’s governing austerity demands, but still ends up
party collapses, then PMs tumble in signing a stringent third bailout. Greek
Portugal, Greece and Italy voters stick by him in a second election
2012
The newish ECB governor Mario Draghi
vows to do “whatever it takes” to
save the euro, soothing the markets
48 FEATURES CALLED TO ACCOUNT PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

Fed, is only tasked with controlling inflation? If Bernanke and

Jean-Claude Trichet: his successor Janet Yellen could also target employment, why
the creator of the should the ECB not be expected to manage a similar feat? If Chi-
euro chaos? na’s regime understands the link between growth, jobs and legiti-
macy, and sets credit policy accordingly, why does Europe persist
in denying the obvious?
Institutions matter, but people make policy. The story that
posterity will eventually write about the ECB’s first 20 years will
depend on the next moves. Draghi is coming to the end of his
term, as are others on his team, like Benoit Coeuré. Who replaces
them is key. With the conservative Bundesbank president, Jens
Weidmann, in the running, it is possible to imagine a drift back

© LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

towards the Trichet line, with all the old tensions rising again.
Nor is this only a matter for Europe. With the increas-
ingly nationalist tide in American politics, it seems fair to won-
der whether the Fed would be able again to serve as a stabilising
anchor for the global financial system, as it did during the last cri-
sis by providing foreign central banks with the dollars they needed
to keep the system in business. Many ordinary Europeans may be
content with a euro managed by Draghi. But at some point, the
chauvinist League, has more to do with immigration than the sin- whole world may need Europe to act as a more assertive and cre-
gle currency, which—by two to one—most Italians still want to stay ative force on global monetary policy too. After the travails of its
in. Outside the areas of immediate crisis, the Eurobarometer poll first two decades, it may very well doubt whether Europe and its
records 80 per cent approval ratings for the euro. central bank are up to that global challenge.
This ought not be surprising. Even at the height of the crisis, Adam Tooze's new book on the financial crisis is “Crashed” (Allen Lane)
across the eurozone 87 per cent of adults were in work, mostly
enjoying modest increases in income. The Germans and the
Dutch have done very nicely. Hot spots like Paris are still bask- Download and listen to Prospect’s free podcast at:
ing in the afterglow of a real estate boom. Since 2006 seven addi- prospectmagazine.co.uk, iTunes, or wherever you get your
podcasts. Adam Tooze talks to Duncan Weldon about the
tional members have sought the protection of the world’s second
financial crisis. It didn’t quite happen how you think.
most important currency—Slovenia, Slovakia, Malta, Cyprus and
all three Baltic states. With the UK on the way out of the EU, Brus-
sels makes no secret of its aim to make the euro the common cur-
rency of the entire EU. And when Europeans glance at the travails
of neighbours who have kept their own currencies, pre-eminently
just now Turkey, this pro-euro sentiment is likely to be reinforced.
Meanwhile, misery has been concentrated in pockets of chronic
unemployment, on the “southern periphery,” above all among the
young. Their votes have impelled the rise of protest parties. But
those that have come to office have so far flinched from the ulti-
mate confrontation. There is simply too much at stake. Cultural highlights of
Even if there is no alternative and the only way out really is cat-
astrophic, this does not mean that there are no choices. What the the UK and Europe,
first 20 years of the euro show is that choices matter a great deal; it accompanied by
is just that most of those choices are concentrated in the hands of first-rate speakers
the central bank. If the description of the euro as a tragedy is over-
blown, the insistence that it is a tragedy which flowed inevitably Power & Patronage in Florence
from its design flaws is even more so. The financial crisis in 2008
Trips in February & October 2019
was the result of very real failures, but failures of governance com- Includes accommodation in a central
mon to western capitalism as a whole. The disastrous European 3-star hotel, breakfasts, a welcome
reaction that followed was a matter of choice. The ECB leader- dinner and lectures.
ship chose to exploit the crisis to force the pace of fiscal consolida-
tion. Whatever the euro’s design flaws may have been, it was this Find out more:
aggression that produced one of the most serious derailments of
+44 (0)20 3370 1988
economic policy in modern history.
Under Draghi, things have been more tolerable, because he has info@culturaltravel.co.uk
offered substantial monetary relief and—with conditions—been www.culturaltravel.co.uk
ready to protect governments from the bond markets. But the
ECB’s fundamentally conservative constitution remains in place.
Part of the Martin Randall Travel group.
Why, given Europe’s sluggish demand and need for investment, AITO 5085 | ABTA Y6050
are Europeans willing to accept a central bank which, unlike the
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 An Elizabethan
F
A break with Europe, an economic
crisis, and a government on the brink
of collapse. Today’s crisis bears an
uncanny resemblance to that facing
Elizabeth I in the late 16th century
matthew dimmock
illustration by ben jennings
acing a clamour of demands for a vision of post-
Brexit Britain and its place in the world, the belea-
guered prime minister might find instruction in her
favoured period of England’s past. When asked by
the Observer 13 years ago which historical figure she
most identified with, Theresa May chose the indomitable Tudor
queen Elizabeth I, a woman “who knew her own mind and achieved
in a male environment.” More recently, the press have been quick to
invoke Shakespearean ideas of a sceptered isle and the defeat of the
Spanish Armada, and more diffuse golden-age mythologies, all of
which will rouse cynicism in suspicious minds. But the late Tudor
age really does have deeper lessons to teach us about the dark arts
of Brexit.
Elizabeth I did, after all, come to the throne facing her own
Brexit moment. In reconstituting the Protestant Church of Eng-
land, she reinstated the break with Rome and papal authority that
her father Henry VIII had initiated earlier in the 16th century,
but which her sister Mary had bloodily sought to reverse. This
move rendered her heretical for the Catholic bulk of Europe. At
a stroke, England was once again severed from the community of
European Christendom.
New strategies were needed. In 21st-century Britain, the imper-
ative is somehow to open up new markets, to boost exports; in
16th-century England, the same drive was given added urgency
by a seething conflict with Spain, the dominant Catholic power
and the standard-bearer for an aggressive Christian imperial-
ism. By the 1580s a creeping embargo was initiated to cut off Eng-
land’s continental trading partners, generate internal dissent and
­governmental collapse. Elizabeth needed new allies, and fast.
The way all this played out seems remarkably prescient. It sug-
gests five Elizabethan lessons for Brexit:
I: Division in government
doesn’t end well
T
he cabinet and the wider Conservative Party
are of course currently deeply divided over the
nature of Britain’s future relationship with Europe,
a split which was—until he flounced out of the For-
eign Office—focused on the opposition between prime
Brexiteer Boris Johnson, and the Chancellor Philip
Hammond, a cautious remainer.
If it is any comfort to May, the late-16th century
Privy Council was similarly split over England’s role
in the world. The queen was often forced to arbitrate
between two groups. The first advocated getting aggres-
sively stuck into Europe, clustered around the charis-
matic and ambitious royal favourite Robert Devereux,
Earl of Essex. The second sought to make the most of
their isolation while preserving royal funds, promoting
peace and cordial diplomatic and commercial relations,
focused on Elizabeth’s Principal Secretary Robert Cecil.
One can argue the toss about whether the Brexiteers
are more in the tradition of the tub-thumping belliger-
ents or the isolationists, but another parallel is harder
to miss. At times, this division completely paralysed the
business of government.
Today’s warring factions might reflect on how it all
ended: Cecil triumphed. Essex followed a disastrous
misadventure in Ireland—whose handling was a run-
ning sore for London then, just as it is amid the Brexit
discussions today—with a failed coup against the queen,
and he was beheaded at the Tower of London in Febru-
ary 1601.
 II: Don’t expect too much III: Selling weapons doesn’t endear
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 FEATURES AN ELIZABETHAN BREXIT 51

from your new allies you to the neighbours

F acing diplomatic isolation from mainland Europe and a
freeze on trade—the 16th-century equivalent of crashing
out of the continent on WTO terms, perhaps—the English crown
had little choice but to cultivate new allies beyond the traditional
realms of Catholic Christendom. By the end of her reign, Eliza-
beth had made overtures to Muslim Morocco, Ethiopia, the Otto-
man Empire, Persia, India, Java and Aceh, to Orthodox Christian
Russia, even to China. She was doing “Global Britain” before Brit-
O ne thing the English could—and still can—produce
in large quantities was guns. Technological advances
and mineral wealth meant that by the late 16th century,
cheap cast-iron English cannon and shot drove a thriv-
ing trade in materials of war. Here was something the
Ottomans badly needed, following a sustained and drain-
ing conflict with Persia. There was just one problem.
Although Elizabeth was a heretic, she was still Christian,

“English trade remained resolutely dependent

ain even properly existed. and expected to abide by Christian rules. One of those—
enforced through papal decree—was that no Christian

on Europe. Elizabeth was accused of breaching

could trade in armaments with the “infidel.”

trust with ‘old allies and friends’”

The English response was to go rogue. They were pre-
pared to sell anything to anyone. Enterprising English mer-
chants, often funded by senior figures in the Tudor regime,
were exporting tin and lead to the Ottomans, and arma-
ments, metals, saltpetre and gunpowder to Russia, despite
Despatching a series of merchant-ambassadors with elabo- the protests of many European monarchs and a succession
rately crafted letters, Elizabeth offered flattery, asked for friend- of Holy Roman Emperors. One free-wheeling entrepreneur
ship and for favourable trading conditions, and darkly hinted at even exported 23 English-made cannons to Spain as Anglo-
the global ambitions of the pope, Spain and Roman Catholicism. Spanish hostilities simmered.
The strongest connections were those established with King Despite internal opposition and laws passed against the
Mulay al-Mansur of Morocco and the Ottoman Sultan Murad export of English guns—Walter Raleigh declared them too
III. Elizabeth had great hopes that both would help thwart important to fall into foreigners’ hands—
Spanish designs on England by attacking Spain and its posses- they were exported in large quantities as
sions in the Mediterranean. She also expected a rapid expan- England responded to its exclusion from
sion in English exports and intended to use the Ottomans as Europe by becoming the arms dealer of
a springboard to Indonesia and the spice trade. More than the Renaissance world. Observers con-
that, an alliance with the Ottomans offered small, marginal demned a “hateful and pernicious” trade,
England the chance to imagine itself holding court with the and came to see English gun-runners as
global powers of the age. “the troublers of all Christendom.”
Despite such potential gains, in pure PR terms this was a When confronted with the charge,
disaster—a lesson Liam Fox might reflect upon as he pursues Elizabeth simply denied everything,
shiny post-Brexit trade deals outside the EU. English trade protesting the English would
remained resolutely dependent on Europe, and her contem-
poraries lamented Elizabeth’s resolve to breach trust with
all her “old allies and friends” in favour of “professed ene-
mies to Christ.”
English polemicists decried the influx of cheap foreign
goods and their destabilising effect on a balance of trade
and national character. The English, they lamented, had
fallen under the spell of novelty. William Harrison lam-
basted the “fantastical folly of our nation” for their keen-
ness to dress in “the Turkish manner,” in “Morisco gowns
[and] Barbarian sleeves,” and he also lamented a recent
fashion for that unseemly Turkish invention, “the mousta-
chio.” Others deplored the deluge of “foreign” trinkets—
mainly jewellery, metalwork, ceramics, fine fabrics.
Diplomatically these “new confederates” promised
much but delivered little. English ambassadors were rou-
tinely frustrated in their attempts to cajole the Ottomans
and the Moroccans into conflict with Spain. The parsimoni-
ous Elizabeth can’t have enjoyed the constant demands
for presents. But the brutal truth was that a newly
lonely England had become the supplicant: the new
globalism it was initiating came at a cost.

52 FEATURES AN ELIZABETHAN BREXIT
never sell arms to non-Christians, and insisting her only
motives were peaceful and legitimate commerce, and the
safety of her citizens.
For some, the world opened up by Britain’s EU exit
is a place of similar opportunities. The new Depart-
ment for International Trade has taken charge of efforts
to promote British arms in a bid to use their sale to oil
the wheels of post-Brexit trade. Earlier this year Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, deeply
implicated in his country’s bombing and blockade in
Yemen, made a state visit to Britain to conclude the terms
of a £100m aid deal and negotiate the purchase of 48
“The English were prepared to sell anything
British-made Typhoon fighters.
to anyone... England became the arms
dealer of the Renaissance world”
Billions in arms sales have subsequently been agreed,
including to such places as Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the
UAE, Venezuela and China, hardly beacons of liberality.
Little wonder a representative from BAE Systems recently
pointed out that, for them, Brexit was “no big deal.”
No doubt the UK spies an oppor-
tunity to become a world leader in
an increasingly rule-less world. In
an uncanny echo of her idol Eliz-
abeth I, May justified her recent
arrangements with Saudi Ara-
bia by arguing that they were
in the national interest and
would “keep people on the
streets of Britain safe.”
T
IV: The promise of China is illusory
he single greatest prize of post-EU international relations for
May and the Brexiteers, as for Elizabeth I, is China. Some
are still amazed that it has become the world’s biggest economy
on some measures, but the Elizabethans would see this as noth-
ing new: in the late-16th-century China was also the preeminent
global power.
Back then it represented an unparalleled mercantile opportu-
nity, a long-established civilisation that produced sublime goods
avidly collected in the English court.
New cartographic technologies convinced the queen and
her courtiers that China was closer than anyone had ever imag-
ined—not on the other side of the world, but a short journey over
the top of the globe, through unmapped Arctic regions: “not so
far remote” wrote Elizabeth in 1602, and yet tantalisingly out
of reach.
Thirteen letters were sent from Elizabeth to China in the sec-
ond half of the 16th century in a desperate push for access. Some
travelled south and east, around the Cape and into the Indian
Ocean, others northeast or west into icy Arctic wastes. Not one
reached its destination, the English ships that carried them were
lost to inclement weather, mutiny or piracy. A diplomatic mission
to China would remain a fantasy until the late 18th century, when
George Macartney famously refused to kowtow before the Chi-
nese emperor in 1793. If Global Britain’s post-Brexit advances to
Beijing take that long to bear fruit, we need to think in terms not
of a two-year “implementation phase,” but a 200-year one.
And even once that 1793 breakthrough came, Emperor
Qianlong failed to see what the British could offer. He wrote impe-
riously to George III: “As your ambassador can see for himself, we
possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious,
and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Oh dear.
Unlike Macartney, 21st-century British diplomats are prepared
to prostrate themselves before China in the drive to secure a close
post-Brexit alliance, but it is not obvious that we’re getting much
in return. May’s trip produced fewer bankable wins than she’d have
hoped: as Fraser Howie commented, “they have all the cards…
V: You can’t keep clear
Britain has absolutely zero leverage.” To Elizabethans it would be
a familiar story.
A
of the Continent for long
fter decades of struggle to assert England’s place in the
world, Elizabeth I died in March 1603. Her successor James I
came to the throne with a very different set of priorities: by instinct
a unifier, he immediately sought to broker peace with the rest of
Europe. He therefore steered the crown decisively away from the
alliances cultivated by his predecessor, to the lasting chagrin of
English merchants and diplomats. Disgusted by Elizabeth’s trade-
driven realpolitik, he refused even to sign letters to non-Christian
monarchs and felt that dabbling in commerce would demean his
divine office. Hardly your archetypal remainer, he nonetheless
brought Britain back into the mainstream of Europe. Elizabeth’s
attempt to carve out a new role for England in the world beyond
Europe died with her. Theresa May should take note.
Matthew Dimmock is a Professor of Early Modern Studies at the
University of Sussex
The purpose of the Radical Party is to develop and promote a
Under Governments Right and Left,
modern, progressive and egalitarian vision of society, which the UK has become the 3rd most
draws on the successful northern European social market model, unequal of the OECD member states.
as a hard-headed alternative to the US inspired neo-liberalism of
the Conservative Party and the back-to-the-future Marxist
In 2016, British teenagers came
fantasies of the current Labour leadership.
bottom out of 23 OECD countries in
terms of literacy and 22nd out of 23 in
Under governments Right and Left, Britain has become the
terms of numeracy.
second most unequal of the major democracies. The cause of this
injustice is failure to modernise our discredited political system,
which has left millions of our fellow citizens economically and A boy born in Blackpool can now
politically disenfranchised. Wealth and self-determination follow expect to live 8.6 years less than a boy
born in Chelsea, and a girl born in
power: this must be the starting point for an effective agenda to Middlesborough 6.9 years less than a
eliminate poverty and exclusion and create a society of girl born in Chiltern District.
opportunity for all.
We believe in sustainable economic management and recognise Donations to political parties from
that public provision funded through general taxation is the wealthy individuals and organisations
only fair way to achieve excellent health care and education. grew from £44 million before the
2005 election to £100 million before
We stand for a strong and commensurate response to climate
the 2017 election.
change and a firm, partnership-based approach to global
defence and security threats.
With a government elected by 29%
We campaign for a judicial system which is effective, egalitarian, of the electorate and only 42% of
evidence-based and designed to promote a community that is those who voted, and no real
relationship between votes cast and
open, tolerant, values-based, trusting and humane. seats won, can Britain really claim to
be a true democracy?
We reject unambiguously the folly of Brexit and are committed to
developing a modern and positive vision of Britain’s role in the
World in the framework of our relationship with the European Research shows a clear correlation
between proportional voting and
Union and the United Nations. equality: wealth follows power. This
must be the starting point for building
Our political system has become a playground for fake news and a just, inclusive and forward-looking
self-seeking party donors, our leaders are an embarrassment, our society that is at peace with itself and
country has lost its way - but we will never progress if we don’t with the World.
know where we want to go. Join us in building a roadmap for
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© LEBRECHT MUSIC & ARTS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Arts & books
The last warrior
As a wartime general and peacetime president Charles de Gaulle fought for a
France made in his own grand self-image, finds Piers Brendon
O
n the dank evening of 22nd August 1962, a
dozen terrorists from the OAS, a paramili-
tary group opposed to Algerian independ-
ence, ambushed General Charles de Gaulle.
In a scene memorably re-enacted in The Day
of the Jackal, gunmen sprayed the French president’s Cit-
roën DS19 with automatic fire as it sped through the Paris
suburb of Petit-Clamart. They hit at least 14 times, pen-
etrating the coachwork, smashing the gearbox and punc-
A Certain Idea of turing two tyres. Amazingly, de Gaulle and his wife Yvonne
France: The Life of were unharmed, though the general cut his finger slightly
Charles de Gaulle while brushing broken glass off his jacket. Quite unmoved,
by Julian Jackson he went on to inspect a guard of honour before flying home
(Allen Lane, £35) to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. To his prime minister
Georges Pompidou, de Gaulle remarked contemptuously:
“My dear fellow, those men shot like pigs!”
De Gaulle’s courage was on display throughout his
long career. During the First World War, he showed him-
self indifferent to danger, engaging the enemy so closely
at Verdun that he was bayonetted in the thigh before being
taken prisoner. Similarly, during his march from the Arc
de Triomphe to Notre Dame on 26th August 1944 to mark
the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle ignored the rooftop snip-
ers (perhaps Germans, diehard Vichyites or anti-Gaullist
members of the resistance).
Lofty, impassive and indomitable, de Gaulle appeared
to be the embodiment of Gallic unity and strength. It was
easy, wrote one journalist, to imagine him encased in the
helmet and chain mail of a crusader. Churchill suggested
that he was “the last survivor of a warrior race.”
Manifesting himself thus to the Parisian crowds, de
Gaulle wrote in his brilliantly self-serving memoirs: “I
felt I was… an instrument of destiny.” His Olympian per-
sonality excited comparisons with Napoleon, Louis XIV,
Joan of Arc and Charlemagne. Around de Gaulle, in fact,
reality and myth were so entwined as to be almost insep-
arable. But in this superb biography, a masterpiece of
empathy as well as scholarship, Julian Jackson has prob-
ably made the best effort yet to elucidate the truth about
this awkward, opaque, vindictive and messianic man. “He
is extraordinary,” noted one member of his 1944 provi-
sional government. Back came foreign minister Georges
Bidault’s scribbled reply: “Lucifer was the most beauti-
ful of the angels.”
Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille in 1890. His sur-
name was later invested with a legendary aura, though it
had nothing to do with nobility or with Gaul but appar-
ently derived from the Flemish for “the wall.” His father
Henri, the strongest influence in his life, was a bourgeois
intellectual, deeply patriotic, conservative and Catholic.
Educated by Jesuits and then at St Cyr military academy,
where his grades were undistinguished, de Gaulle sported
a Cyrano nose and grew to be nearly six and a half feet
55
tall (at a time when the average Frenchman was 5’3”). He
was correspondingly aloof, shy and ungainly—Churchill
allegedly compared him to a female llama surprised in her
bath. But his quasi-mystical leadership style necessitated
such glacial remoteness and egotistical hauteur.
To inspire the masses, thought de Gaulle, a leader
must be iron-willed, peremptory and impenetrable. He
must keep his distance and create a void around him-
self—a feat eased in his case (though Jackson does not say
so) by his formidable halitosis. At staff college after the
First World War, he was praised for his outstanding intel-
ligence, seriousness and cultivation but, wrote one of his
instructors, he spoilt those qualities “by his excessive self-
assurance, his harshness towards other people’s opinions
and his attitude of a king in exile.”
“De Gaulle thought a
leader must keep his
distance—a feat in his
case eased by his
formidable halitosis”
In private de Gaulle revealed a softer side. He was
devoted to his wife Yvonne, an old-fashioned lady who
later tried to preserve an illusion of domesticity in the
Élysée Palace by washing his socks in a basin. He adored
his daughter Anne who had Down’s syndrome and, to his
intense grief, died aged 20 in 1948.
But during the inter-war years, he concentrated sternly
on his military vocation. He ascended the ranks, exploited
the goodwill of his patron Marshal Philippe Pétain and
wrote books that developed theories of armoured combat
and offensive warfare, which Hitler read approvingly. Con-
vinced that war was the motor of history and that conflict
with Nazi Germany was inevitable, de Gaulle advocated
an alliance with Soviet Russia, “whatever horror we have
for their regime.” He was shocked by the “terrifying col-
lapse” at Munich in 1938 and forecast that appeasing Hit-
ler would give the democracies only a brief respite, “like
the aged Madame du Barry on the revolutionary scaffold
begging ‘Just a moment longer, Mr Executioner.’”
When the Blitzkrieg began in May 1940, de Gaulle’s
tanks scored a rare initial success but, lacking wirelesses
and dive-bomber support, they were no match for the co-
ordinated German panzers. As the debacle unfolded, he
was promoted to be the youngest general in the French
army and appointed to a post in the Ministry of Defence.
To give the government time to move to North Africa,
56 ARTS & BOOKS
de Gaulle insisted that the fight should continue; but when the
defeatist Pétain took over he flew to England. He was welcomed by
Churchill, who also thought him “l’homme du destin.” De Gaulle’s
own verdict at the time—“I am here to save the honour of France”—
is endorsed in the final sentence of Jackson’s long book.
“Unable to work with other
politicians, he resigned in
1946 saying: ‘I prefer my
legend to power’”
De Gaulle’s five-minute, 400-word broadcast on 18th June was the
first public call to keep alive the “flame of French resistance.” It not
only established his legitimacy but, as Jacques Maritain wrote, enun-
ciated a kind of “heroic chivalry” that gave back hope to his com-
patriots. However, his road to Calvary was hard. Most Frenchmen
adhered to Pétain’s Vichy regime and de Gaulle’s first effort to rally
support in the French empire, at Dakar in Senegal, was so bloodily
repulsed that he contemplated suicide.
Elsewhere in Africa he fared better, and in Syria Free French
troops helped General Wavell drive out Vichy forces. He became
ever more hostile to his hosts, complaining that the only way to exit
his HQ in Carlton Gardens was through Waterloo Place. He took to
using the royal “we” and referring to himself in the third person. “Our
force and our grandeur,” he said, “reside only in our intransigence
regarding the interests of France.” Shortly before getting malaria he
quipped: “mosquitoes do not bite General de Gaulle.”
When America entered the war, President Roosevelt would
not back de Gaulle, whom he termed “an apprentice dictator.” De
Gaulle in turn decried US imperialism and tried to play the west-
ern democracies off against the Soviet Union. He was so incensed
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
© ADOC-PHOTOS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES, API/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
at not being told in advance about the Anglo-American invasion
of French North Africa in 1942 that he privately hoped that Vichy
would “throw them back into the sea.” De Gaulle was always suspi-
cious that Britain intended to annex France’s colonies, and the vic-
torious Allies’ refusal to hand power to the Free French prompted
further explosions of anger. Churchill was torn between exaspera-
tion and admiration. More rows occurred before the D-Day landings
and Churchill wanted to send this “obstructionist saboteur” back
to Algiers, “in chains if necessary.” Roosevelt was only persuaded
not to break with de Gaulle entirely by his adviser Harry Hopkins—
though he amused the president by conceding that the general was
“one of the biggest sons-of-bitches who ever straddled a pot.”
A
lthough de Gaulle was excluded, to his lasting fury, from
the Yalta Conference in 1945, he proved indispensable to
the Western Allies. Hailed as the saviour of France, he was
allowed to carry out what Jackson describes as a stealthy coup d’état.
De Gaulle became head of a provisional government, imposed order,
purged prominent collaborators (while merely disparaging Vichy-
ites in general as “a handful of scoundrels”), belittled the Resistance
(especially Communists), and savagely crushed dissent in Algeria.
When Parisians greeted Churchill enthusiastically on Armistice
Day, de Gaulle was heard to mutter: “Fools and cretins! Look at the
rabble cheering the old bandit.” Publicly he expressed gratitude to
the British prime minister, but it was plainly gratitude as defined
by Nietzsche (a philosopher he admired): “hatred wearing a mask.”
Unable to work with politicians he considered beneath him, de
Gaulle unexpectedly resigned in 1946. “I prefer my legend to power,”
he said. For 12 years he burnished that legend. He founded a party
supposedly above politics called the Rassemblement du Peuple
Français—a name which Marine Le Pen has now partially adopted
in the hope of rebranding the Front National in Gaullist fashion.
Patiently, de Gaulle sat in supposed retirement, awaiting another
national crisis. It occurred when an army putsch seemed imminent
in support of the million French settlers (pieds noirs) engaged in a
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 ARTS & BOOKS
Man of Destiny: vicious struggle against Algeria’s National Liberation
(l-r) De Gaulle Front (FLN). As France teetered on the brink of civil
rallies France war, President René Coty turned, as he put it, to “the
from London in most illustrious of Frenchmen.” The National Assem-
1940; soixante- bly invested de Gaulle with emergency powers and on 1st
huitards June 1958 he formed a government. At first, he employed
demand his his Delphic capacity for equivocation to reassure the dis-
resignation; and sidents. In Algiers he famously told a baying crowd, “Je
his body, vous ai compris” (I have understood you.) But he soon con-
wrapped in a cluded that decolonisation was the only option.
Tricolore, is De Gaulle arrested insurrectionary officers and sup-
taken on a pressed other opposition. He condoned both torture and
military vehicle murder, largely carried out by his Paris police chief Mau-
through his rice Papon, who had deported Jews to Germany during
home town the war. In 1962, according to de Gaulle’s own account,
he granted Algeria independence, though it was actually
won, as Jackson says, by FLN fighters and by interna-
tional pressure. He breezily betrayed the 300,000 native
Algerian auxiliaries who had backed the pieds noirs. De
Gaulle retained many imperialist prejudices. He trans-
formed other liberated French colonies into client
states, disliked having African leaders at the Elysée Pal-
ace, and didn’t want his village to become, as he put it,
Colombey-les-deux-Mosquées.
D
e Gaulle’s most permanent achievement in his late
years was the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958
and its later consolidation. Under his presidency
it melded popular sovereignty with charismatic leader-
ship, as Napoleon had hoped to do—and which Emmanuel
Macron, notorious for his quasi-Gaullist insistence on the
respect due to him and his office, aspires to perpetuate. The
new constitution created a political consensus, writes Jack-
son, “reconciling the left to the state and the right to the
nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.”
57
And if it could now survive just one more decade it will be
the longest-lasting constitutional settlement since 1789. Of
course it also prompted charges that de Gaulle was an auto-
crat, even a fascist—the German Chancellor Konrad Ade-
nauer found him a bit “Führer-like.” Especially after he
made his own office directly elected, through a 1962 refer-
endum. Certainly he made frequent assertions in the spirit
of “L’état c’est moi.” He plunged into crowds, it was said, like
“the king meeting his subjects.” He took decisions without
consulting or even informing his ministers. He indulged in
bitter personal caprices, denouncing the US as an octopus
throttling Latin America, keeping Britain out of the Euro-
pean Economic Community, characterising Jews as a dom-
ineering elite, and in Canada intoning “Vive le Québec libre.”
De Gaulle also stretched his executive powers to the full,
controlling television, for example, a medium he mastered
thanks in part to his elephantine memory.
But though disguised by quasi-monarchical pomp, he
was in fact a politician answerable to the people. In May
1968 they erupted: millions of striking workers joined
student demonstrators in a social movement that virtu-
ally paralysed France. De Gaulle was completely wrong-
footed. At first he wanted the students to be smacked like
naughty children. But the sheer scale of the protests seems
to have plunged him into one of his moods of apocalyp-
tic despair. He flew secretly to Germany, perhaps to seek
the support of French forces stationed there, perhaps to go
into exile. Encouraged by General Jacques Massu’s loyalty,
de Gaulle returned to Paris and held a massive conserva-
tive rally during which he cynically blamed Communists
for the disturbances. These petered out but de Gaulle may
well have concluded that France did not deserve him. On
losing a referendum over government reform in 1969, he
resigned. He died in Colombey the following year.
Julian Jackson, who won the Wolfson Prize in 2004 for
his book The Fall of France, recounts all this in authorita-
tive and superlative fashion. Pretty much everything that
can be known about de Gaulle is known, he says, and the
great strength of his book is its judicious selection and
magisterial assessment of the evidence. In particular he
shows that for all de Gaulle’s adamantine exterior, he had
a pragmatic capacity to bend and to adapt.
But though erudite, incisive and painstakingly bal-
anced, Jackson’s biography is no dry-as-dust study. He
writes with verve and wit. He even sees the funny side of
de Gaulle, who was not above clowning on occasion. The
general likened himself to Don Quixote and told André
Malraux that his only historical rival was Tintin, though
nobody realised it “because of my height.” Asked why he
had paid so little attention to a political scandal jeopard-
ising Anglo-French relations in 1969, de Gaulle replied:
“Put it down to my inexperience.” Altogether this is a
tour de force, though happily for lesser mortals its author
can be found to nod. He has de Gaulle reading “Conrad’s
Lucky Jim.”
Recalling Jean Cocteau’s bon mot that Victor Hugo
was a “madman who believed he was Victor Hugo,” Jack-
son suggests that the same conceit might be applied to
de Gaulle. Those who experienced what Richard Nixon
called his “aura of majesty” held differing views about
who he truly was. But de Gaulle himself was quite clear.
“Roosevelt thought that I thought I was Joan of Arc,” he
once said. “He was wrong. I simply thought I was Gen-
eral de Gaulle.”
Piers Brendon, formerly keeper of the Churchill Archives
Centre, is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. His most
recent book is “Edward VIII: The Uncrowned King” (Penguin)
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PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 ARTS & BOOKS
Lend me your ears
For Roger Scruton the western classical tradition reigns supreme over modern
music. But, as Ivan Hewett argues, other harmonies are available
T
here are many ways to write a philosophy of
music—but two in particular stand out. One
way is to approach music with the curious ear
of the ethnomusicologist open to all the vari-
eties of music around the world. This critic
sees them as embedded in specific forms of life—and only
really comprehensible when viewed within them—and
so is careful not to treat any musical culture as a yard-
stick against which to measure the others. The other way,
Music as an Art now seriously out of fashion, is to regard western forms
by Roger Scruton of music, especially the classical tradition, as central to
(Bloomsbury, £25) what music is, or ought to be, or could be. The problem
with this approach is that other forms of music are inevi-
tably found wanting when compared with these majestic
works. All that matters, for this kind of critic, is the inner
state of the solitary listener, communing with a long-dead
composer genius.
It will come as no surprise to learn that Roger Scruton’s
new book Music as an Art falls into the latter category.
Scruton is a doughty defender of western classical music,
a stance which is of a piece with his doughty defence of
conservative values in general. His rage against musical
modernism is very like his rage against architectural mod-
ernism. It’s rooted in his belief that evolution is always bet-
ter than revolution, and that the wisdom of ages is better
than the fashion of the moment. For Scruton it is our task
to conserve the culture bequeathed to us and pass it on to
the next generations. We owe a debt to the dead as much
as to the unborn.
“Scruton is good at
catching the essence of
the pop songs he
professes to despise”
Music occupies a special place in Scruton’s life. It is
the art to which he feels closest, and the one to which
he has a practical connection. He’s an accomplished
keyboard player, who often plays the organ at his local
church in Wiltshire. He is the composer of an opera as
well as other pieces. And he has written more about
music than any other art form. This new book comes 20
years after his vastly impressive and erudite Aesthetics of
Music, and nine years after his follow-up volume Under-
standing Music.
This new volume of essays amplifies the themes of
those two earlier books. It is divided into two parts, the
first of which tackles the nature of music’s connection
to morality and the transcendental, and whether cogni-
tive science can throw any light on the art. The second
part, which is much more entertaining, offers critical
reflections on all kinds of music, from classical quar-
tets to heavy metal and the avant-garde. Unlike many
59
philosophers with strong opinions on music, Scruton
actually has a musical ear, and an ability to catch the
expressive kernel of a piece in a pungent or witty phrase.
In his essay on Britten’s “Lyke-Wake” Dirge, Scruton
points out the way the melody sung by the tenor repeats
imperturbably, refusing to be unsettled by the surround-
ing harmonic turbulence. “The music has the quality
of a mediaeval fresco, with Christ in Majesty above the
writhing bodies in the pit below,” he says, a striking image
which captures something essential in the music. Scru-
ton is equally good at catching the essence of the pop
songs he professes to despise, so well that one wonders
whether he doesn’t get a sneaking enjoyment from them.
He remarks of Mary J Blige’s “Get to Know You Better”
that its limited melody is “emphasised by the yukky 13th
chords and droopy vamping which open the piece, with
a sound that suggests someone trying carefully to puke
into a wine glass.”
F
or the first part, though, Scruton avoids sar-
casm and vivid metaphor in favour of the careful,
burningly lucid prose that he brings to the job of
analytical philosophy. Scruton’s public persona as fox-
hunter-in-chief and right-wing provocateur means that
some people might be unaware of his considerable powers
as a philosopher. Within the world of professional philos-
ophy, Scruton takes a definite “anti-realist” stance. While
some thinkers believe that music’s qualities inhere in the
notes themselves, and that “stormy” music is in some way
literally stormy, Scruton inclines the other way. For him
all art, and especially music, is rooted in the subjective
experience of the onlooker or listener. “Music exists in the
ear of the listener, not on the page of the score, nor even
in the world of sound,” he says, meaning that it is our act
of listening that endows mere vibrations with meaning
and purpose. We hear sounds as music, just as we perceive
a weeping willow as being sad when it’s just a tree, and
are moved by a painting like The Scourging of Christ even
though what our retina literally takes in are mere patches
of colour.
It follows therefore that Scruton is suspicious of the
modernist composer John Cage, who wanted sounds to
“be themselves.” For Scruton, there is no “self” for sounds
to possess; there is only the selfhood that we as conscious
listeners give them. For the same reason, he is wary of cog-
nitive science, which now rules the roost in thinking about
how our minds approach music. It deals not with the inten-
tional notes and harmonies that listeners hear, but with the
dead vibrations that prompt them, and the grey matter
within our skulls that “processes” them. He is very good at
skewering the apparently neutral but actually deeply ten-
dentious descriptions of music offered by some cognitive
scientists. He quotes Aniruddh Patel’s description of a mel-
ody as a “tone sequence in which the individual tones are
processed in terms of multiple structural relationships.”
“But what is a tone?” asks Scruton. “Is it identical to a
pitched sound, or something that is heard in a pitched
60 ARTS & BOOKS
sound?” He follows up by writing that “even if we came up with a the-
ory about the processing of music, it would not in itself be an account
of musical understanding.”
This essay is evidence of that fearlessness in the face of intellec-
tual fashion which is perhaps Scruton’s most admirable quality. His
essay on music and the moral life insists that to be non-judgmental is
itself an act of judgment, and that listening to music is an inherently
morally charged act, because it is a form of education for one’s feel-
ings. This is why for him the essence of music’s importance lies in its
expressivity. Expression in music matters “because it is a manifesta-
tion of the moral life, a way of inviting us to shape our sympathies in
response to a character imagined in musical form.”
“Music and art make the
beautiful more beautiful, the
moving more moving, and the
profound more profound”
Later on, Scruton goes further, saying that listening to music has
the same “element of overreach” that we have in our dealings with
each other, when we intuit an “I” that lies beyond the mere appear-
ance and utterances of the person in front of us. So is Scruton identi-
fying our feelings of transcendence in music with the hunger for that
“beyond” which we can never reach? If so, that would surely colour
those feelings with pathos, even a sense of tragic insufficiency. But
that is not necessarily what we feel when faced with music, so Scru-
ton changes tack. He says that music and art “make the beautiful
more beautiful, the moving more moving, and the profound more
profound… They endow empirical emotions with the completeness
and purity that in everyday life they could never attain.” Music, it
seems, does not give us access to the transcendental, only the here
and now “in its purified and completed form. And maybe that is the
best that we can ask for.”
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A
ll this is insightful as well as moving. But Scruton’s insistence
on music’s high purpose ultimately has a debilitating effect.
He pursues height and depth at the expense of breadth and
fine-grained texture, qualities which can only be found if one low-
ers one’s gaze, and deigns to look at music’s everyday reality, amid
the muddle of ordinary human life—and beyond the west, to music
in the wider world. That stance is more and more the stance of musi-
cology nowadays, but Scruton wants nothing to do with it. And yet
even within his chosen field of classical music, his insistence on the
sovereign conscious subject can lead his critical judgments astray.
In his essay on Schubert’s tremendous unfinished quartet
known as the “Quartetsatz” Scruton points out, quite rightly, that
the overall key of C minor is constantly challenged by what he calls
its “negation,” the tonally remote key of D flat major. What he
doesn’t say is that as well as being vastly disruptive, this relation-
ship is also perfectly conventional. The harmony of D flat major,
when sounded within the key of C minor, is known as “Neapoli-
tan” and was already common by the dawn of the classical era. The
expressive effect of this harmony as deployed by Schubert is power-
ful precisely because it is both ordinary and startling, but Scruton
doesn’t want to admit that. He wants to project our hearing of Schu-
bert’s quartet on to a higher plane—the lone subjectivity against the
uncomprehending universe—but in doing so he actually evacuates
the music of its richness.
Scruton’s lofty disregard for music’s history and social circum-
stances leads him astray elsewhere. He castigates pop music for plac-
ing the performer at the centre of our attention. Has he not heard
of Franz Liszt? It was the pianist’s magnetic presence that made the
ladies in his audiences swoon, not his compositions. And for much
of operatic history the composer was ranked some way below the
star singers who drew the crowds. The great singer Gemma Bell-
incioni tells us in her memoirs that the audiences for Meyerbeer’s
Les Huguenots in Madrid in the 1880s weren’t even aware of the com-
poser’s name; for them it was “Les Huguenots by Roberto Stagno” or
whoever the leading tenor happened to be that night.
Another example: Scruton blames the invention of the “lead
sheet” in jazz for the recent downgrading of voice-leading in harmony.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 ARTS & BOOKS
A “lead sheet” is a musical shorthand useful for pop songs
and jazz standards, which gives just the melody, the lyr-
ics, and the sequence of chord changes that underlie the
melody. As such it treats harmonies as mere processions
of “vertical” aggregates, whereas “voice-leading” is to do
with the weave of melodies and subordinate lines which
constitute music’s “horizontal” element. (The combina-
tion of horizontal elements at any moment will of course
result in “vertical” chords that build upwards.)
Scruton is convinced that harmony works more effec-
tively the more securely it is rooted in ancient rules that
govern voice-leading, but it is a fact that purely vertical
considerations have played a greater role in harmonic
movement over the centuries. We see this already in the
Baroque era, when musicians playing the accompany-
ing “continuo” part made use of a harmonic shorthand
called figured bass, which shows exactly the same disre-
gard for voice leading as a jazz lead-sheet—though a good
player would be expected to keep voice-leading rules in
mind. Voice-leading survived, for another three centuries
at least, but its grip loosened as the dominance of sacred
vocal music—from which the rules of voice-leading were
derived—faded into the past.
Scruton’s fixation on the norms of classical music
means that when he stumbles across a door into a new way
Poles apart: of thinking about music, he prefers to slam it shut rather
Franz Schubert than investigate. He says of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” that
and Mary J “the chords succeed each other in exactly the arrange-
Blige ment that is implied by the shift of the hand along the
Sculptor of nightmares
David Lynch’s memoir offers a glimpse behind the curtain, says Wendy Ide
F
ans of the director David Lynch can be
divided roughly into two categories: those
who see the man and his work as a puzzle to
be solved; and those who see him as a mystery
to be embraced. Any book about Lynch—who
seems to relish being a professional enigma—is likely to dis-
appoint at least one set of his admirers. And while Room
to Dream, a blend of memoir and biography co-written by
the filmmaker, does shed some light on a man who, both
Room to Dream professionally and personally, is drawn to darkness, it is
by David Lynch unlikely to fully satisfy either camp.
and Kristine The book explores Lynch’s creative process by tracing
McKenna the threads of his childhood inspirations into the fabric of
(Canongate, £25) his adult work. However, it does little to unpick the knottier
aspects of his oeuvre. Anyone who has seen Lynch inter-
viewed in public will know that he is a master of the art
of evasion. In conversation—and in his films for that mat-
ter—he is given to making gnomic statements which could
mean anything, or nothing. His answers in person are well-
trodden paths that lead back to his safe spaces: his fond-
ness for transcendental meditation, for example. And while
writing a memoir forces him to delve deeper than he would
normally be comfortable with, the protective walls built up
over a lifetime are not easily smashed down.
Of course, Lynch’s idea of a safe space isn’t everybody’s:
in one of the early chapters about his childhood there is a
61
frets of the guitar, and in which the illogical sequence is
led by none of the voices.” Scruton’s response to a poten-
tially fruitful observation is to kill it stone dead, by bring-
ing the song before the bar of traditional voice-leading,
where of course it is found wanting. In fact, the song is a
telling example of a phenomenon of colossal significance
in world music, and of no small importance in classical
music as well. This is the relationship between the body
and the instrument, as mediated by techniques of playing,
a relationship revealed by the shapes that a performer’s
hand at the piano or West African kora naturally “falls
into” when performing.
This complex relationship between action, instrument
and perceived result has had a massive influence on the
language of music; but in classical music the influence
is subterranean, not acknowledged in textbooks, pre-
cisely because it contradicts the rules. There is a clue here
that points us towards an entirely different conception of
music—more communal, where the sovereign isolated
subjectivity of the listener is no longer the focus of atten-
tion. That ought to make it of burning interest to a philos-
opher of music, but Scruton prefers to look the other way.
And this is why his book in the end, for all its passion, feels
curiously thin. Scruton is a vastly gifted philosopher and
writer, admirably committed to the form of music that he
loves. But there are so many more things in music than are
dreamt of in his philosophy.
Ivan Hewett is the Daily Telegraph’s classical music critic and
the author of “Music: Healing the Rift” (Continuum)
jolly interlude in which he steers us through a greatest hits
of memorable animal deaths.
Elsewhere, readers might be surprised at the banality
of some of the anecdotes related by this sculptor of night-
mares. In place of wisdom about the art of filmmaking
we get him wibbling on at length about a really nice cake.
Banality has always been present in Lynch’s work, except
it’s usually juxtaposed with violence or some throbbing hint
of menace.
This kind of duality, which has been an abiding theme in
Lynch’s films and television shows, informs
the structure of the book. Co-written
with critic Kristine McKenna, for-
merly of the Los Angeles Times, it is
presented as a dialogue with two
alternate perspectives. McKenna
writes a chapter, usually anchored
to a film or television project, based
on exhaustive research and interviews
with the filmmaker’s collaborators.
Then Lynch answers with a chapter
of his own, written in a kind of folksy
stream of consciousness, where he riffs
on his memories (or in some cases his
complete lack of them) about that
same period of his life.
62 ARTS & BOOKS
The mirrored chapters are a neat device—up to a point. But while
in Lynch’s creative work the dualities are strikingly contrasted, in
this book Lynch and McKenna are too often on the same page. Lynch
circles around McKenna’s anecdotes but doesn’t always fully engage
with them. The result can, at times, be rather repetitive.
What he recalls and what he doesn’t, though, is pretty reveal-
ing. He has no memory, for example, of being offered the chance
to direct American Beauty (the 1999 film that later went on to win
an Oscar for Sam Mendes), nor the US remake of the hit Japanese
horror film The Ring. But he can remember being in Mexico City
at night and seeing “little funnel shapes of colour where the light
hit the walls.” He can also remember the quality of light in a sky
glimpsed decades earlier and the sound of a pilot’s voice as he radi-
oed ahead to air traffic control. He captures these moments beau-
tifully: vivid little flashes of memory that puncture Lynch’s usual
soothing voice.
“Lynch has an idealised view
of the 1950s—glinting with
chrome and optimism. But
there’s a corrupting rot”
Other subjects on which you might expect him to have something
to say, he ignores completely. There’s a wrenchingly candid interview
by McKenna with Lynch’s ex-girlfriend Isabella Rossellini—whom
he met after casting her in Blue Velvet—in which she talks about the
anguish of their split. She speculates about the possible reasons for
being abruptly cut out of his life (he broke off the five-year relation-
ship with a phone call telling her he never wanted to see her again)
and nearly 30 years later she wants some kind of clarification or clo-
sure. Lynch offers none, or at least not within the pages of the book.
The idea of a personal space, as the title alludes to, is central to
the book and to Lynch himself. It goes beyond the notion of privacy,
although that is certainly part of it. Lynch the artist—who is not
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only a filmmaker but also a painter, sculptor, photographer, car-
toonist, musician and dissectionist, all of which are discussed in the
book—can only function if he is somewhat insulated from the world
outside. This involves physical space: he lives in a separate building
to his fourth wife, Emily Stofle, and their daughter; and emotional
space: by his own admission, he is not exactly a hands-on parent to
his four children.
Lynch also prefers to be unmoored within temporal space—as dem-
onstrated by the indeterminate time zones in which many of his film
and television projects unfold. And it is also the reason, we learn, for his
aversion to graffiti. Artist and collaborator Anna Skarbek notes that
“David hates graffiti… it dates things. When he lived in Philadelphia
he could walk down an empty street and feel like it was 1940, and graf-
fiti erases that possibility.”
Finally, and most importantly for him, there is the spiritual space
offered by transcendental meditation. Lynch has practised this since
the early 1970s. “When I started meditating the anger went away,”
he writes. Before then, he says, inadvertently revealing his obsession
with control and detail, “If I didn’t have my cereal exactly right I would
make life miserable for [his first wife] Peggy.”
No matter how difficult this insulation might be for those around
him, McKenna suggests that it allows him the space to nurture
a purity of vision, unpolluted by other people’s ideas. It results in
skewed enthusiasms and a typically off-kilter view of everyday
objects. Here’s Lynch on curtains: “I love curtains. Are you kidding
me? I love them because they’re beautiful in and of themselves, but
also because they hide something. There is something behind the
curtain and you don’t know if it’s good or bad.” Tables, meanwhile,
he views with suspicion. They are mostly too big, too high and cause
“unpleasant mental activity.”
Keeping the rest of the world at arm’s length means that, when
Lynch does decide to engage with current affairs, he can seem out
of touch, or at least naive about the workings of the media. During
a recent interview with the Guardian, he mused that Donald Trump
could go down as one of America’s greatest presidents “because he
has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy
in an intelligent way.” After the first half of his answer was taken out
of context, Lynch issued a further comment stepping back, possibly
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 ARTS & BOOKS
Detective or the only time in a lifetime of baffling statements—artistic
pervert? Kyle and otherwise—that he has felt the need to clarify himself.
MacLachlan One area with which he does engage politically is the
with Laura environment: he worries over GM crops and industrial
Dern and agriculture. Another theme is the change in the country-
Isabella side. “When I was growing up in Boise, the forests were
Rossellini in healthy and rich and the way it smelled walking through
Blue Velvet; the woods was incredible.” Now “there’s global warming
right, David and the bark beetle... That world of nature I grew up in
Lynch as a boy isn’t really there anymore.”
and directing Lynch was born in Missoula, Montana, the oldest of
Naomi Watts in three children, in 1946. His family moved around to facili-
Mulholland tate his father’s studies in entomology and agriculture, but
Drive settled in Boise, Idaho. It was this period which, the book
suggests, seared the 1950s into Lynch’s psyche. In his films,
Lynch has a typically dualistic view of the 1950s: it’s partly
idealised—glinting with chrome and optimism; rich with
a kind of gilded innocence and boundless potential. But
draw back the curtain, and there’s a corrupting rot which
leaves shadows on his pristine Technicolor memories.
McKenna suggests that his father’s work with dis-
eased trees—nature spoiled from the inside—connected
with the young David’s fascination and fear of “the wild
pain and decay” beneath the surface of things. He talks
of being enthralled by houses in which “the lights were
dim… I’d get a feeling from these houses of stuff going on
that wasn’t happy.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lynch’s childhood memo-
ries are coloured by death and violence. He describes an
arresting incident in which he and his younger brother wit-
nessed a naked, beaten woman walk out of the darkness.
It’s a scene that lodged itself in Lynch’s memory and later
appeared in Blue Velvet, with Rossellini playing the dis-
tressed woman.
A
nother formative aspect of childhood was his par-
ents’ open attitude towards creativity. The Lynch
children were encouraged with their “projects”—
63
something which instigated a self-sufficiency evident in
Lynch’s can-do approach to everything from building a
garage for his landlord, to his (ultimately unsuccessful)
attempt at designing prosthetics for The Elephant Man.
Lynch’s first love, artistically speaking, was painting.
But he has never felt constrained to just one medium.
Writing and directing, which have earned him the kind of
celebrity that he never wished for, are only part of a cre-
ative continuum. Lynch doesn’t delineate between disci-
plines; he just makes things. The Twin Peaks actor Dana
Ashbrook, who describes him as “the truest artist I’ve ever
met,” tells how Lynch invited him back to his hotel room
after a day of filming to see a poster he was working on.
“After 12 hours of shooting, he was going back to his room
and making more art—I love that about him.”
The point isn’t laboured by McKenna but this almost
spiritual, holistic way of thinking about art as an inter-
connected realm, rather than a neatly defined collec-
tion of activities, is something that chimes with Lynch’s
transcendental meditation. Likewise, his often fatalis-
tic approach to the creative act. He is a firm believer in
what he describes as “happy accidents.” A chance encoun-
ter with the singer Rebekah Del Rio, for example, led to
a whole new scene in Mulholland Drive. And a degree of
luck might be at play elsewhere in Lynch’s career, certainly
in the celebrity achieved by a filmmaker whose work is
deemed challenging even by arthouse audiences.
Yet celebrity he is. And as McKenna observes, the level
of fame he enjoyed following Twin Peaks and Wild At Heart
had its downsides. “When you permeate popular culture
completely it responds by absorbing you, then assuming it
knows you, then assuming it has rights where you’re con-
cerned.” All of which is an anathema to someone who best
creates in his own dreaming room. Perhaps, given all the
clutter and noise that comes with being this famous, just
the act of being David Lynch is itself an artwork. It might
just be the most important work of his career.
Wendy Ide is Prospect’s new film critic
64
Rest for the wicked
A brash US talent delights in breaking taboos of all kinds, finds Josie Mitchell
O
ttessa Moshfegh is drawn to characters
unwilling or unable to keep to the rules.
They refuse to wash themselves or brush
their teeth; they binge on sex or substances;
and they conceal their dirty habits from
those around them.
In her first book, the novella McGlue, a brain-dam-
aged, alcoholic sailor rolls around in the depths of an
unknown ship, circling the possibility that he has killed
his friend and lover. Her 2017 story collection, Home-
sick for Another World, teems with “wild teens, limping
men, young mothers, kids scattered on the hot concrete
like the town’s lazy rats and pigeons.” These are people,
in Moshfegh’s words, “carrying the burden of their own
wrecked consciousness”—who, placed in brutal scenar-
ios, tend to behave in brutal ways, with selfishness, nar-
cissism or obsequiousness.
At the age of 37, Moshfegh is one of America’s bright-
est and brashest new literary talents. Her characters,
especially the women, are enemies to blind obedience
or complacency, and have no interest in decorum. The
title character of Eileen—Moshfegh’s brilliant 2015 novel,
which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize—is “furi-
ous, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a kill-
er’s.” She has reason to be livid. It’s the mid-1960s and at
24 years old, she’s stuck in her cold little hometown, living
with a drunk father in the same run-down, filthy house
where her mother died of cancer. She goes to work each
day, but hardly cleans herself, urinates in jars and gorges
on laxatives. Her ribs stick out but she feels fat and fleshy;
she chews chocolates and spits them back into wrappers—
bad habits of someone navigating life through self-denial.
“Unlike some in her
censorious generation,
Moshfegh refuses to
simplify desire”
Moshfegh shows the mind trying to escape the body, or
using the body to escape itself: bulging weight, acne scars,
pimples, colostomy bags. Her characters are either starv-
ing themselves or binging: on television or on food they
later throw up. Although not gender-specific, she shows
how this is an especially intense struggle for women. For
Eileen, living under a patriarchal system doesn’t just affect
her self-esteem—it infiltrates her sexual imagination. She
imagines her female colleagues with their “disgusting hus-
bands,” or with their hands down one another’s bras, and
wants to vomit. “I can still remember my mental pictures
of them in sexual positions, faces poised at each other’s pri-
vate parts, sneering at the smell as they extended their car-
amel-stained tongues.”
Moshfegh is as frank in person as she is in her fiction.
In an interview with the Guardian after Eileen was short-
ARTS & BOOKS PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
listed for the Man Booker, she suggested that the book
was actually a send-up of the mainstream noir novel. She
seemed amused that it had been taken seriously by the
judges. “There are all these morons making millions of dol-
lars, so why not me? ... I thought, I’ll show you how easy
this is.” Her words were reminiscent of early interviews
with other outspoken female artists—Lena Dunham, Lily
Allen, Adele—before they learnt how keen newspapers are
on sensationalism. Well actually they’re still getting in trou-
ble, partly because, like Moshfegh, they seem drawn to con- My Year of Rest
tentious opinions, and partly because our culture tends to and Relaxation
punish high self-regard in female public figures. That inter- by Ottessa
view won Moshfegh a reputation for arrogance, and (she at Moshfegh
least thinks) lost her consideration for the prize. Of course (Jonathan Cape,
we should also allow for the possibility that Moshfegh, like £12.99)
those other stars, knew exactly what she was doing—or else
didn’t care.
Moshfegh’s new novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation,
features an unnamed narrator the same age as Eileen—
though she could not be more different. “I’m tall and thin
and blond and pretty and young,” she tells us with old- “I’ll show you
money assurance. “I looked like a model, had money I how easy this
hadn’t earned, wore real designer clothing” and has just is”: Ottessa
graduated from Columbia. But despite her privilege, Moshfegh
life is not going well. Her parents are dead, hence all the
money. (Not that they were that supportive when alive).
In response, she’s sequestered herself in her Upper East
Side apartment with an “impressive library of psychophar-
maceuticals”—Trazodone, Ambien, Nembutal, Benadryl
allergy tablets, anything that will knock her out.
Contrary to what she tells her doctor, she doesn’t suf-
fer from insomnia—she voluntarily wants to spend as little
time awake as possible: “I can’t point to any one event that
resulted in my decision to go into hibernation. Initially, I
just wanted some downers to drown out my thoughts and
judgments, since the constant barrage made it hard not to
hate everyone and everything. I thought life would be more
tolerable if my brain were slower to condemn the world
around me.”
The narrator is a stranger in her own life. The only peo-
ple she sees are an old college friend Reva, whom she treats
terribly, and Trevor, a banker in his thirties, who treats her
even worse. He “would periodically deplete his self-esteem
in relationships with older women, ie, women his age, then
return to me to reboot.” Reva visits with sycophantic con-
sistency, though mostly to drink and comment enviously
on the narrator’s waning weight. With no roots in the world,
and no obligations, our narrator is free to seek total escap-
ism: so she begins sleeping for as many hours in every 24
as she can.
Moshfegh’s women are as self-regarding as they are
self-loathing. When they are able to they use the men who
try to take advantage of them: to get money, work, any-
thing of value. This doesn’t mean Moshfegh fails to note
gender oppression. Rather she shows how, despite her
character’s defiance, alcoholism, drug abuse and eating
disorders take over her life. For her friend Reva, like many
of Moshfegh’s characters, going to a bar is “therapy,”
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 ARTS & BOOKS
while at home for every sip of fizzy drink, she pours a dash of spir-
its into the can. (Moshfegh has spoken with typical candour about
her own struggles with the bottle.) But suffering does not necessar-
ily imply virtue, and pain does not necessarily entail victimhood.
Though they are coerced into damaging their bodies by societal
pressures, they are also terrible and ridiculous people, sometimes
shockingly so.
“Sexual excitement nearly always made me feel sick,” admits
Eileen, who works at a boys’ juvenile detention centre, but also tells
us about her rape fantasies. She hopes the man who does it will be
sweet, assuming this is the only way she will lose her virginity. Later,
she rests her tongue on the glass of the window in a solitary confine-
ment facility as she watches a 14-year-old boy masturbate. Such dis-
turbing details make Eileen such a vivid creature.
Moshfegh is brash and talented enough to evade the sometimes
censorious tendencies of the millennial generation—she refuses to
simplify desire. These days we are supposed to work harder to change
our culture so that it is less racist, sexist and homophobic. We police
one another regarding how we communicate and behave, challenging
structures that were previously deemed normal. It’s a long-overdue
process. And yet, the consequences are a hyper-vigilance to any opin-
ion that strays from the new orthodoxy, and a digital vigilantism that
can be swift and savage.
Moshfegh, though, doesn’t shy away from creating protagonists
who have inappropriate desires. The narrator of My Year of Rest and
Relaxation cares little for consent, preferring Trevor (who sneaks into
her apartment and initiates sex while she’s asleep) to some pathetic,
liberal guy who’s “afraid of vaginas” and likes “masturbating to Chloë
Sevigny.” Her skill lies in showing how these divisive cravings grow
from the world of today. In a recent essay, she writes of how, as a teen-
ager, she baited a much older male writer, using his sense of sexual
entitlement to get what she wanted—literary mentorship. It’s a play-
ful upending of the narratives emerging in the #MeToo era.
T
hese off-kilter perspectives invest her writing with a freedom
from received wisdom that can be plain weird, but also deeply
refreshing. Moshfegh has talked in interviews, for example,
that the “primordial” female reproductive system encourages flexi-
bility of thought in women, because the mind is “transformed without
their consent every month.” It’s not a joke. In the context of a modern
feminism that tends to downplay biological difference in the service
of equality, the idea is impish and provocative. It reminds me of Gloria
Steinem’s marvellous thought experiment, in which she argues that if
men menstruated and women didn’t, women would be barred entry
to medical schools (“they might faint at the sight of blood”) and the
priesthood (“He gave this blood for our sins”).
© REX SHUTTERSTOCK, PORTRAIT BY KIMIYA AYUBI
65
When pressed, Moshfegh will say her writing is feminist, “because
I don’t hate women, I hope.” But she resists an outright statement of
loyalty. Much like her characters, she doesn’t want to be part of a com-
munity. She resists being inducted into a female literary heritage for
the same reason: “It’s hard when people want to compare me to other
women writers. It’s like they’re only searching their mind database
for women.” Instead, “Someone once compared something I wrote
to Nabokov, and I thought that was a huge compliment. I didn’t mind
that.” If we were to imagine Moshfegh under the apprenticeship of a
master craftsman, then Nabokov it might be. She shares the author of
Lolita’s penchant for the macabre and the deranged—what he called
the “sacred danger” of the freak.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation has also been compared to Bret Eas-
ton Ellis’s American Psycho. Like Moshfegh’s narrator, Patrick Bate-
man is another numb urbanite alienated by wealth and privilege. But
whereas Bateman deals with his anger by murdering homeless peo-
ple and torturing women, Moshfegh’s narrator just wants to sleep. “I
thought that if I did normal things,” she says, “held down a job, for
example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything. If
I’d been a man I may have turned to a life of crime. But I looked like
an off-duty model. It was too easy to let things come easily and go
nowhere.” Ellis pushed at the outer limit of his reader’s capacity for
empathy, and Moshfegh does the same, though less violently.
Amid the gallows humour Moshfegh’s work has great optimism.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, with its archetypal characters—the
smart, rich model, the dickhead boyfriend—reads almost like a par-
able. If there is a moral to her tale, it’s to reject apathy and emotional
avoidance (a cowardly response to life’s vicissitudes), and instead live
courageously by looking for meaning in a world that may nevertheless
remain difficult and confounding.
As the novel progresses, one becomes sensitive to its setting (New
York, the year 2000) and the foreboding association with the Twin
Towers (where Reva works). It’s a bold conceit, and one that in the
final pages, Moshfegh executes in tender prose, puncturing the sol-
ipsism of her narrator. For all their detached humour, her books ulti-
mately condemn escapism—via substances, sleep, irony—and instead
assert the importance of “diving into the unknown… wide awake.”
Moshfegh is also unusually honest about wanting to change the world
with her writing: “Sometimes it takes a god-complex to disrupt the
status quo.”
Josie Mitchell works at Granta Magazine
66
Saving Britain: How We Must
Change to Prosper in Europe
by Andrew Adonis and Will Hutton (Abacus,
£8.99)
A common problem with arguments in
favour of continued British membership of
the European Union is that they often ignore
the underlying causes of the Brexit vote: the
disenchantment and regional disparities
that made people feel they really needed a
change. The biggest strength of Saving Brit-
ain, written by peer Andrew Adonis and for-
mer Observer editor Will Hutton, both fierce
pro-Europeans, is that it avoids falling into
this trap. It engages seriously with the under-
lying factors behind the referendum result
and recognises that a simple reversal of the
Leave decision would not be sufficient to
solve Britain’s current woes.
As you might expect, Adonis and Hutton
believe that departure from Europe is folly,
and they painstakingly take apart the argu-
ments for exit. Trading benefits will be illu-
sory; our clout on the world stage diminished.
Crucially, more power concentrated in West-
minster will not translate into more power for
deprived British regions.
Simply remaining is not enough though;
radical reform is needed on education, infra-
structure and the world of work. In fact the
whole British economy needs restructuring
to give ordinary people more of a stake. The
programme offered by Adonis and Hutton
is immensely wide-ranging, with devolution
and immigration also given serious attention.
The sheer breadth of the subject material,
coupled with the small space allowed for it—
the book is 200 pages—makes it feel a little
breathless. But the enthusiasm is infectious.
In fact it feels rather like a manifesto for the
rumoured new pro-EU political party.
Adonis and Hutton propose a new “Great
Charter”—something like a 21st-century
Magna Carta—to kickstart a new era of Brit-
ish renewal. Whether you agree with that
prescription or not, this is certainly a book
which engages with the big issues of our time.
And on the biggest of all—Europe—it is thor-
oughly convincing.
Alex Dean
Books in brief
Radical Help: How We Can Remake
the Relationships Between Us and
Revolutionise the Welfare State
by Hilary Cottam (Virago, £16.99)
You do not have to endorse every one of
Hilary Cottam’s arguments about how truly
dire our current welfare state arrangements
are to recognise that she is genuinely on to
something in this book.
Cottam, a social entrepreneur who works
on collaborative solutions to national prob-
lems, argues that it’s imperative that we
help people who in one form or another have
come to rely on the welfare state’s myriad ser-
vices—or who get lost within them—to take
back control of their own lives. It’s vital that
we help them build on their own capabilities,
create their own connections and fulfil their
own desires.
In humane and beautifully written terms,
Radical Help details a series of experiments
around the country that have done just that—
dealing with “chaotic families,” the unem-
ployed, benefit claimants and the lonely
elderly living with chronic medical condi-
tions. The solution is renewal through rela-
tionships, which will require harnessing
some very old as well as newer technologies.
It is a tale of successes and failures, and
sometimes of success followed by failure.
Existing services struggle to adapt to new
approaches, but given the right support can
do well. When the money gets tight, though,
these ideas can be abandoned: they feel too
“soft,” in more than one sense of the word.
The biggest challenge, which Cottam
acknowledges, is not so much how to “scale
up” (because the whole point here is that
the system should be very local and individ-
ual) but how to make such ideas more main-
stream. One is left with a nagging query
about how much success depends on the
exceptional individuals that Cottam seems
able to recruit to her cause. But even so there
are powerful ideas here. This book should be
required reading for every politician, profes-
sional and manager who seeks to make the
UK a better place. They should ask them-
selves: how much of this could we do?
Nicholas Timmins
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient
Wisdom Can Change Your Life
by Edith Hall (Bodley Head, £20)
It was Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can
Change Your Life which started the publish-
ing trend for taking a famous author and
mining their work for wisdom. While this
approach can seem contrived with some
authors, with Edith Hall’s subject, Aris-
totle, the form is a perfect fit. The Ancient
Greek philosopher, the student of Plato and
tutor of Alexander the Great, continually
returned to the idea that the cultivation of a
practical ethical life was the surest route to
happiness or Eudaimonia.
But as Hall, a classics professor at King’s
College, London, shows us, Eudaimonia
isn’t something passive: “it requires posi-
tive input,” and the development of self-con-
scious habit. Split into 10 chapters, whose
subjects range from decision-making to
community living to coping with mortality,
Hall’s book is an entertaining and instruc-
tive look at what a modern Aristotelian life
might look like. Although hugely influen-
tial on Muslim and Christian philosophers,
his strictures go beyond religion and don’t
require any belief in the afterlife. And while
he thought women were defective versions of
men and defended slavery, as nearly all men
of his age and class did at the time, if alive
today, says Hall, he would be open to persua-
sion that he was wrong on both counts.
His basic principle is to approach each
moral decision in a pragmatic rather than
a utopian frame of mind: ideals are less
important than results. His down-to-earth
attitude was also evinced by his work on
the natural world, where he prized obser-
vation above theory. (Hall says if Aristotle
were alive today, he would be presenting
nature programmes in the mould of David
Attenborough.) Hall’s book draws examples
from popular culture (she has a fondness
for films from the 1980s) and draws in real-
life examples from her own and her friends’
lives. This lends a conversational tone that
suits her subject—recreating the congenial
atmosphere of an Athenian symposium.
Sameer Rahim
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
The Lion and the Eagle: The
Interaction of the British and
American Empires, 1783-1972
by Kathleen Burk (Bloomsbury, £30)
Just how special is the Special Relationship?
In this compelling study, Kathleen Burk pre-
sents the relationship between Britain and
the US as a complicated dance, one of rivalry
punctuated by pragmatic cooperation. The
vantage point isn’t Washington or Westmin-
ster; it is the periphery of both countries’s
empires: places such as the Canadian border,
China, Japan and Latin America.
Burke is talking about the informal
empire of financial and military clout. This
makes for apt comparison with contem-
porary America, with its client states and
750 military installations in 130 countries.
Throughout the 19th century, wherever the
US looked, it found the British Empire. The
two countries went to war in 1812; on several
occasions in the 19th century they almost
fought again.
As its power ebbed, Britain needed the
US. We conflated our “imperial interests
with those of the rest of the right-thinking
world.” We couldn’t understand why the US
didn’t want to shore up its empire as a bul-
wark of the global order. The animosities did
great harm in the interwar years when the
US left Britain to cope with its international
responsibilities with diminishing resources.
Dismantling the empire was a key part of
American policy.
But as the US rose to its position of dom-
inance, American policymakers came to
appreciate the strategic value of what was
left of the British Empire. As the head of
CIA covert operations said, “whenever
there is somewhere we want to destabilise,
the British have an island nearby.” In 1968
an economically weak Britain announced
its withdrawal from its possessions east
of Suez. “The US administration was out-
raged,” writes Burk. “It was the ultimate
betrayal.” For Burk, this is an irony of his-
tory: the US was instrumental in bringing
down the Empire and it was not happy with
the result.
Ben Wilson
BOOKS IN BRIEF
City of Light: The Reinvention of
Paris
by Rupert Christiansen (Head of Zeus,
£18.99)
The foundation stone of the Palais Garnier,
Paris’s sparkling new opera house, was laid a
mere six months before that of Montmartre’s
imposing Sacré-Cœur. The year was 1875,
and France was a Republic once more. The
Garnier and all its lavish opulence was the
culmination of the capital’s metamorphosis.
Rupert Christiansen navigates this period
of redevelopment via the relationship of its
primary architects: Louis-Napoléon Bona-
parte III, who had been deposed in 1870, and
his fastidious Prefect of the Seine, Georges
Eugène Haussmann.
Louis’s ambition was simple. Rather
than oppressing his citizens he would awe
them, not just through modern thorough-
fares “roughly sketched out in blue, red, yel-
low and green crayons” but “in terms of sheer
spectacle, parade, pageantry and exhibition
—one big long party.” From the extension of
the banlieues to updated water conduits and
the spacious tunnels of a vastly more hygienic
sewer system—a major tourist attraction—
Haussmann also masterminded landscap-
ing projects that increased parkland from 20
hectares in 1850 to over 1,600 by 1870.
Many bemoaned the sweeping away of
cramped, romantic streets. Christiansen,
however, an opera critic and cultural his-
torian, takes a more nuanced approach:
although “an ideology of efficiency was the
impulse,” the “clogged arteries” of Paris were
in dire need of a transplant. All this came at
the cost of displacing countless families,
causing astronomic increases in rent and fur-
thering the prosperity of the rich west side.
Haussmann’s drive was relentless: the Île de
la Cité slums were attacked “with a blow-
torch”—an evocative turn of phrase from the
author who maintains the pace and energy.
After two decades of construction came
Bismarck in 1870, a siege and the hideous
semaine sanglante: but the city bounced back,
and within a few years the opera house was
opened, completing Haussmann’s legacy.
Zoë Apostolides
67
Days of Awe
by AM Homes (Granta, £14.99)
“I am a journalist not a soldier” one charac-
ter tells another in “Days of Awe,” the title
story from AM Homes’s latest collection. He
and his novelist interlocutor have sneaked off
from a genocide conference they are attend-
ing to pick apples and exchange sexual innu-
endo. The pair’s academic interest in the
pain of others is unnervingly juxtaposed with
their erotic playfulness. Homes, an Ameri-
can writer whose best-known work The End
of Alice is narrated by an incarcerated child-
killer, has long been a master of exposing the
lurid reality lying just beneath the everyday.
Here she exposes the banality of two selfish
people who play with human suffering.
Both absurdity and depredation are
woven through the rest of the collection.
In “Brother on Sunday,” a macabre atmos-
phere hovers over a group of middle-aged
friends on a beach drinking mimosa cock-
tails out of a thermos.
The pursuit of youth and how ageing
creeps up on everyone in the end is a run-
ning theme. The hacked-off breast of a
woman who has battled cancer, the sagging
flesh and the self-administration of Botox
shots before brunch—all expose an abun-
dance of misery among otherwise privileged
people. “I can’t stand it anymore, I’m miser-
able,” the husband of the woman with can-
cer says when he tells her of his decision to
divorce her. He speaks, it seems, for every-
one in the story.
In other stories, such as “Be Mine,” there
is something oddly disturbing about how an
unnamed couple exchange seemingly innoc-
uous clichéd sentences.
Homes’s novels display her power to sus-
tain terror and tension in a protracted nar-
rative; the short stories reveal her talent for
delivering the same effects in a more self-
contained form. She doesn’t describe scenes
of blood and gore; instead, in the pages of
Days of Awe, there is horror of a higher sort,
that of memory and mortality. Here there
are tenacious terrors that linger long after
you close the book.
Rafia Zakaria
68
Art
Emma Crichton-Miller
I object: Ian Hislop’s search for dissent
British Museum, 6th September to 20th
January 2019
History is written by the victors, but objects
can tell another story. Private Eye’s Ian
Hislop (above) has picked around 100 objects
from the museum’s stores to highlight an
alternative legacy of subversion. A cuneiform
tablet from 539BC gleefully details the
failures of Nabonidus, last king of the neo-
Babylonian empire. A terracotta oil lamp
shows Cleopatra riding a phallus. An Edward
VIII penny from 1913 is defaced with the
message, “Votes For Women.” And Banksy’s
prank fragment of wall art smuggled into the
museum in 2005, taunts the institution itself.
Ribera: Art of Violence
Dulwich Picture Gallery, 26th September to
27th January 2019
Xavier Bray, the curator of the revela-
tory 2009 National Gallery exhibition
The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting
and Sculpture 1600–1700, here introduces
that supreme exponent of sensual, violent
Counter Reformation Spanish painting,
Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652). Eight large
canvases, together with drawings and
prints, show how Ribera’s shocking images
of bodies in pain reflect an extended artis-
tic, religious and cultural engagement with
the depiction of bodily suffering.
Strata, Rock, Dust, Stars
York Art Gallery, 28th September to 25th
November
In 1815 William Smith published the first
geological map of Britain, transforming our
picture of Earth. With its identification of the
different strata that underlie the landscape, it
inspired not just geology but the exploitation
of the land’s treasures. For this ambitious
exhibition, artists including Isaac Julien,
Agnes Meyer Brandis, Liz Orton and Ryoichi
Kurokawa ponder our relationship to the
Earth and to the Universe.
Recommends
Theatre
Michael Coveney
Holy Sh!t
Kiln Theatre, 5th September to 6th October
The Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, north
London, has been closed for two years for
an overhaul and re-build. Now re-named
the Kiln, the venue’s distinctive scaffolded
courtyard auditorium has been removed
to provide a more flexible open stage are-
na. Artistic director Indhu Rubasingham
launches the new season with Holy Sh!t by
Alexis Zegerman, a dark comedy in which
family, faith and friendship are stretched to
breaking point as parents move heaven and
earth to get their daughter into the local
Church of England school.
The Lover/The Collection
Harold Pinter Theatre, 13th September to
20th October
Two short television comedies from the
1960s herald a six-month season of all 20 of
Harold Pinter’s one-act plays at the theatre
which bears his name. Both The Lover and
The Collection have stage pedigree as stud-
ies of sex and supremacy in the suburbs,
and director Jamie Lloyd’s season of Pinter
at the Pinter will incorporate A Slight Ache,
A Kind of Alaska and the restaurant satire
Celebration. The actors include Tamsin
Greig, Jane Horrocks, Rupert Graves, Ce-
lia Imrie, Ron Cook, Maggie Steed, Martin
Freeman and Paapa Essiedu.
Queen Margaret
Royal Exchange, Manchester,
14th September to 6th October
Shakespeare’s Margaret of Anjou is a
formidable, but marginal, character in
the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, yet
altogether she has more lines than King Lear.
Playwright Jeanie O’Hare places this queen
of curses—described as the “she-wolf of
France” and “a hateful, bitter hag”—centre-
stage, with her lines, and her rage, intact.
Jade Anouka (above) plays an avenging
political whirlwind dissatisfied with her role
as a figure of powerless feminine suffering.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Classical & Opera
Alexandra Coghlan
The Ring Cycle
Royal Opera House, 24th September
to 2nd November
Feuding gods, raging giants, scheming
dwarves and, at the centre of it all, a magic
ring: Wagner’s Ring Cycle is the ultimate
operatic work, packing love and death,
loss, jealousy and revenge into four operas
and 16 hours. Keith Warner’s production,
first seen complete in 2007, reimagines
the Gods as Edwardian grandees inhabit-
ing a Blade Runner-esque world. But it’s all
about the voices. Don’t miss young Nor-
wegian soprano Lise Davidsen sing Freia
in Das Rheingold. Die Walküre introduces
Nina Stemma’s Brunnhilde and Stuart
Skelton’s Siegmund, with Stefan Vinke’s
Siegfried and Johannes Martin Kranzle’s
Alberich bringing the cycle to its climax.
Kavakos/Ma/Ax Trio
Barbican Hall, 9th September
Violinist Leonidas Kavakos, cellist Yo-Yo
Ma and pianist Emmanuel Ax (below)
are coming together for what should be
an extraordinary chamber recital—pool-
ing their resources to perform a complete
cycle of Brahms’s Piano Trios. Together
these works offer a vivid musical biog-
raphy of the composer’s life, taking the
listener from the youthful and expansive
passion of the first trio, to the taut, almost
aphoristic third.
© J.FERNANDES/D.HUBBARD © TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM, LEE BAXTER, SONY CLASSICAL INTERNATIONAL,
Dvorak New World Symphony
Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 12th and
13th September
The CBSO’s practice of repeating concerts
with slight variations in the programme,
means that audiences have two chances
this month to hear Dvorak’s glorious, folk- NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES / ARNHEL DE SERRA, INTERFOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
infused New World Symphony, conducted
by exciting Israeli up-and-comer Omer Meir
Wellber. Each night the symphony is paired
with a different solo concerto: Gidon Kre-
mer plays Bartok’s First Violin Concerto,
while Jan Lisiecki performs Rachmaninov’s
much-loved Second Piano Concerto.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Film
Wendy Ide
The Rider
Released on 14th September
Unseated from the certainties of his life,
rodeo rider Brady struggles to come to
terms with a brain injury that stops him
from riding. This profoundly affecting
study of masculinity in crisis from director
Chloé Zhao casts former rodeo star Brady
Jandreau (below) and his real family in a
story loosely based on his real-life crisis
following a serious head trauma. The per-
formances are rough hewn and unpolished,
but wholly persuasive, and Zhao’s use of the
glowing magic-hour light of South Dakota
gives the picture a timeless, mythic beauty.
Matangi/Maya/MIA
Released on 21st September
The challenge facing documentarian Steve
Loveridge is how to reconcile the compet-
ing identities which make up one of the
most distinctive recording artists of her
generation. Pop star and political provoca-
teur MIA is a Grammy- and Oscar-nomi-
nated musician both celebrated as a vision-
ary and reviled as a terrorist sympathiser.
The scrappy intimacy of the footage reveals
that there is more to the Sri Lankan-born,
London-raised singer than her detrac-
tors—and her fans—could imagine.
Puzzle
Released on 7th September
Kelly Macdonald is quietly complex as a
woman who is as buttoned up as her floral
knitted cardigan. The route to fulfilment
for Agnes, a God-fearing housewife whose
horizons don’t extend far beyond the
kitchen and the church, is the world of
competitive jigsaw puzzles. Like its main
character, this is an unassuming charmer
of a film. And Macdonald’s lovely, low-
key turn chimes satisfyingly with a more
flamboyant performance from Irrfan Khan
as the puzzle partner who sees her potential
and her beauty.
RECOMMENDS
Television
Lucinda Smyth
Vanity Fair
ITV, 2nd September, 9pm
As summer draws to a close, ITV kicks-off
its autumn schedule with a romping ad-
aptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, star-
ring Olivia Cooke as Becky Sharpe. Social
climber Sharpe can be a hard character
to pull off, let alone seem likeable, but
Cooke’s interpretation lends her an im-
mensely watchable flair. With plenty of
acidic put-downs, Fleabag-esque looks to
camera and a stellar supporting cast, this
is a brilliantly camp take on the often drea-
ry period drama genre.  fectious, while his knowledge of the mythol-
Angela Carter: Of Wolves & Women
BBC iPlayer, until 3rd September
Speaking of acidic put-downs, the BBC’s
documentary on Angela Carter (below) is
teeming with them. In one piece of foot-
age from 1992, she snaps at an interviewer:
“OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indul-
gent prose. So fucking what?” Narrated by
Sally Phillips, this hour-long documentary
paints an extraordinary portrait of an un-
derrated, unconventional writer, and fea-
tures commentary from Salman Rushdie
and Jeanette Winterson. Illustrations and
prose extracts are also scattered through-
out, demonstrating the strangeness and
complexity of her work.
Maniac
Netflix, 21st September
This high-budget 10-piece series stars Emma
Stone and Jonah Hill as patients taking part
in a three-day medical trial. Their doctor
(Justin Theroux) claims he has created a
pill which solves any possible problems with
the brain. What could possibly go wrong?
Though Netflix are marketing this as a
comedy, it’s more in the vein of Black Mirror
than The Good Place—and all the better for it.
69
Podcasts
Charlotte Runcie
Cocaine and Rhinestones: The History
of Country Music
Tyler Mahan Coe
I love diving headfirst into a podcast on a
subject about which I know almost nothing,
so there’s a whole new world to discover. I’m
currently addicted to Cocaine and Rhine-
stones, a comprehensive study of Country
& Western music as a prism through which
you can experience the full richness of
American culture, politics and darn good
storytelling. Tyler Mahan Coe’s passion for
country, its styles and its characters, is in-
ogies behind the music is all-encompassing.
How to Fail
Elizabeth Day
In this reflective eight-part interview series,
novelist and journalist Elizabeth Day inter-
views esteemed literary and public fig-
ures, inviting them to recall three instances
in which they feel they have failed. Guests
include Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sebastian
Faulks, Olivia Laing and Gina Miller, and
the failures recounted range from broken-
down relationships to disappointing cricket
matches. The tone, however, is positive, with
an overriding theme that failures are the
times in our lives when we better ourselves
and sow the seeds of future success.
Women and Power
National Trust
Kirsty Wark, below, marks 100 years since
women won the right to vote with a his-
tory of the British suffrage movement in an
impeccably structured five-part series for
the National Trust. House stewards, cura-
tors, volunteers and academics tell the story
through the NT properties connected with
the struggle and the archives they hold,
allowing them to illuminate the past. The
cosy production of the series makes it feel
a bit like an audio tour of a stately home—a
pleasantly transportive experience.
 The Wye Work Bag

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PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Prospectlife
Home front
Robot-proofing
by Hephzibah Anderson
E
nsconced in my daughter’s menagerie
of stuffed animals and dolls is a small
wooden robot. His blocky limbs are
elasticated, giving him taunting flexibility.
He can do the splits and even swivel his head
an owlish 360 degrees. He’s made in China,
naturally, and I’m fairly certain that his blue
and yellow livery is entirely toxic. But that’s
not why he keeps me awake at night.
He is a robot, the friendly face of a future
that is hurtling towards us with ever greater
velocity, and is simultaneously almost impos-
sible to imagine if, like me, you grew up in a
world of Speak & Spells, Walkmans and Tele-
text. He represents the automation that is
already devouring sectors from banking to
law and hints at that unfathomable menace
technologists call the singularity. He also rep-
resents the fear that every parent has about
what the future may hold for their child—
and what, if anything, they can do to prepare
them for it.
Becoming a parent does weird things
to time. A night can last forever, a month
pass by in the shake of a rattle. You imag-
ine that once the shock of having to tend
to a newborn’s urgent, ceaseless needs has
passed, the hands of the clock might revert
to their former reliable pace. They don’t.
There’s a successful US parenting pod-
cast whose four-word title expresses plenty:
The Longest Shortest Time. But it’s your rela-
tionship with what’s to come that changes
most profoundly.
Nothing dates faster than the future.
Even that blameless robot belongs to a future
that’s already part of the past. Today’s robots
are mostly faceless, formless. Any inklings
Illustration by Kate Hazell
I’ve absorbed from pop culture’s crystal ball
about how tomorrow’s world might look now
seem as antiquated as, well, the old BBC
television programme.
“In some ways, my
daughter is already a
child of the future. She
was conceived by
artificial insemination
with the help of an app”
At the same time, the future is vitally
important to me in a way that it never
quite was before I had a child. This must
always have been the case, what’s different
is the speed at which the future is evolving.
A while ago, I interviewed a ragtag bunch
who called themselves “futurologists.” What-
ever their background, they all agreed on
one point: it used to be possible to gaze 10, 15
years into the future with some degree of cer-
tainty. That’s now shrunk to just five.
71
It makes the job of equipping your child
to thrive in the world that they will inherit
confounding. On nights when I don’t have
more immediate anxieties to keep sleep at
bay, I wonder what careers will be available
that the robots won’t have taken over. My
own? Robots can “write” passable scientific
reports, it’ll only be a matter of time before
they’re expanding their repertoire. Doctors,
teachers, therapists—robots are already tak-
ing their places.
My daughter, I should explain, is all of
two-and-a-half, so this is very premature fret-
fulness, but I’m not alone. Parenting experts
now speak of “robot-proofing” children,
though beyond an insistence on the impor-
tance of Stem subjects—science, technol-
ogy, engineering and maths—nobody really
seems to know what that entails. Creativ-
ity, intuition and resilience are all emerging
as buzzwords, to which you might add flex-
ibility, though not the doing-the-splits kind.
She needs to learn to code, my sister says of
her niece—she would, she’s a former artist
turned programmer who saw the light before
most of us.
72 PROSPECT LIFE PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

Meanwhile, my mum is all for buying a

parcel of land and teaching her how to grow
her own food, because there’s also climate
change and its associated food shortages to
consider, never mind apocalyptic plagues.
(Dystopian fiction is all over the place at the
moment—it’s a genre for the childless.)
In some ways, my daughter is already a
child of the future. She was conceived by arti-
ficial insemination with the help of an app,
and when I became pregnant, I used another
to track her growth on a fruit-and-veg scale—
she’d be the size of a tomato one week, an
orange the next. I’m also a single mother by
choice, so I suppose I’m chipping away at
the nuclear family, too, but this seems like
nothing compared with the rest of the social
changes that my daughter’s generation will
take for granted. She has friends whose fam-
ilies have a whole rainbow of configurations.
And that’s to say nothing of gender, which
seems to have been radically rethought while
I went about my analogue business.
A few mornings ago, my daughter began
questioning me in great detail about how
escalators work.
“Don’t you have a book all about things
like that? Let’s look together when we get
home,” I suggest.
She considers this for a moment and then during a polar night that stretched out over ous prod at too early a stage. It needs some-
announces: “Mama doesn’t know.” a month: build a low square pyre of sticks, where to go, too: a flame cannot survive for
My heart swells. Scepticism: it has to be like a Jenga tower towards the end of a long in a stack of three sticks. Build a home
up there with coding as an imperative skill game, then fill the centre with easy-burn- for the fire it will ultimately become. Work
in whatever sci-fi world it is that those robots ing tinder (curling sheets of silver birch with its natural tendencies: build up, not
are plotting. bark, or pages torn from a book). Light the out. And remember it needs space for air to
tinder, lay another layer on top, voilà. get in. It needs to breathe.
It’s a proven method, one that has served
me well on a hundred cold evenings, but for
whatever reason—bad luck, wet fuel, gale- “When the rain is
force winds—it sometimes fails. It is not hammering down and
foolproof, I suppose, and I am often a fool.
Such failures are humbling and occur at the wind is whipping
the most inconvenient moments (shivering your face, there is
in a one-roomed cabin in the dark, breath
clouding the air; far from anywhere, when another lesson: give up”
all there is to eat is raw meat), and in com-
The wild frontier
pany I want to impress. But life is hum- Things don’t always go to plan. Some-

Sparks of life bling, and every failure carries within it a

lesson, if we are willing to take it on—often
things that we once knew, but of which we
by Cal Flyn
need reminding.
In this way, the travails of lighting a fire
in the wild is an excellent allegory for pur-
suing ambitions of many kinds. Start small,
times there’s nothing for it but to abandon
the attempt, sweep the smoking embers
aside and start afresh. Accept that. Do it
right the next time. Don’t take shortcuts.
Concentrate. These are harsh life lessons in
all sorts of contexts, which are often hard
to take on board. But perhaps you stand a

T
hey say that “there’s no smoke with-
out fire,” but anyone who has spent
a furious evening poring over a damp
and discouraging firepit in the lashing rain
knows this to be untrue. One can produce
plenty of thick, dark smoke, over a long
period of time, and yet still fail to produce
flames for more than a few thrilling seconds
at a time.
Starting a fire is the simplest and yet
most exasperating of tasks. There are
many methods, each based on similar prin-
ciples, but I use one I learnt in the Arctic
for instance: that’s key. And begin with the
easy stuff—tissue or newspaper or feather-
thin shavings of wood—and work steadily
up the levels. Tissue to twig, twig to stick,
stick to branch. Only then, once the fire is
good and hot and hungry for more do you
move onto the bigger challenges. Green
wood. Heavy logs. None of these will be a
problem once the fire’s taken hold.
Firestarting reminds us of the value of
patience. At the start, the flame is delicate.
It needs encouragement, time. All your
good work might be undone by an overzeal-
better chance of getting to grips with them
in a pressing practical context—when you
are out in the wilds, and giving in to distrac-
tion or pride will condemn you to shivering
through the night.
And just occasionally, when the rain is
hammering down and the wind is whipping
your face and dragging the air from your
lungs, there is another lesson too: the wis-
dom of letting go, and giving up. Warm up
in a sleeping bag for two if you can, and try
again in the morning when you’re in a more
philosophical frame of mind.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 PROSPECT LIFE
In play
Stopping as the
season starts
by Benjamin Markovits
E
very summer when I was a kid we went to Europe to escape the
heat in Texas. At the end of August we flew back from Lon-
don, were met coming out of the air-conditioned airport by a
wall of wet heat, fell asleep on the ride home and woke up deeply
confused to the pulse of crickets and sprinklers and the smell and
sounds of our old house. My dad would carry us in from the car
before getting the suitcases. Then we tried to fall asleep again, in
familiar beds, twisting and kicking off the sweaty sheets. Heat is
like the way a place expresses intimacy—the world feels very close.
A few days later I was back at school.
One of the consolations was the fact that the school year coin-
cided with the beginning of the American Football season. On Sun-
day, after Hebrew class, I could spend most of the afternoon on the
couch, eating crisps and watching the NFL. And, with the first day
of fifth grade or seventh grade or tenth grade behind me, I could stay
up late and watch the Monday night game—with Al Michaels and
Howard Cosell, whose nasal tones I used to imitate with my friends
as a commentary to our own backyard games. “It is spring, moonless
night, in the Louisiana Superdome”—mixing in a little Under Milk
Wood as we shot hoops or threw a ball around.
The school year also brought along try-out season. I remember
once, a week after coming home, still not acclimatised, having to
run twice around campus in the four o’clock sun, which followed
you like the spotlight in a prison break, and almost throwing up and
passing out. My eyes went dark, I could hear blood in my ears. This
Premeditations by Hannah Berry
73
was to make the basketball team. At least basketball is an indoor
sport, and the gyms are mostly air-conditioned. Every year as I
got older I advanced up the class ladder of football—from YMCA
games on a Saturday afternoon, which were basically just another
form of childcare, to private club leagues, where the uniforms and
bus travel cost 500 bucks a season.
Eventually I quit. Teenagers quit a lot of things, and September
is the time to do it—the start of the school year is also when people
give up. Everybody quits playing sport in the end, unless you go pro,
but then you still have to quit in your thirties, when other people
are getting into the meat of their careers. But even if you don’t turn
pro, you probably have to quit several times before it really takes.
It’s like trying to quit smoking. The kid who plays low-level club
soccer for a few years before he realises he isn’t good enough might
end up joining some intramural team at university. Even after you
graduate, there’s the five-a-side scene for people with jobs. And
every year, after the summer ends, people ask themselves: “Am I
really going to sign up for this again?” The better you used to be,
the harder it is to continue.
“Everybody quits playing sport in
the end, and September is the time
to do it”
What’s the point of getting worse at something, my dad once
asked me. He used to be a scratch golfer but had more or less given
up by the time we were born. He used to play everything. For a cer-
tain kind of kid, that’s what childhood is—an extended ball game,
where the kind of ball just varies according to season.
Last summer, at the height of the English heat wave, I asked
him if he wanted to join me on the tennis court. I’ve started knock-
ing a ball around with a writer named Mike Mewshaw, who’s writ-
ten some great books on tennis and would kick my ass if it weren’t
for the fact that I’m 30-odd years younger than he is. He’s my dad’s
age, and my dad came along. My dad hasn’t played in two decades,
but he put on a pair of my shorts and laced up his dress shoes, and
wandered squinting into the bright English sunshine with a racket
in his hand. His first 10 shots he feathered into the net, but then he
started to get the feel of it again, and I could see the old instinct
kicking in. Which tells you, okay, all right, hit me another ball, I can
get better at this. It doesn’t completely go away.

74 PROSPECT LIFE
Classical musing
Your mob, my populus
by Charlotte Higgins
I
n the mid-1st century BC, Rome’s repub-
lican constitution, which had served
the city well for hundreds of years, was
coming under strain. The people’s assem-
bly voted military leaders such as Pompey
exceptional powers, overturning traditional
checks and balances, often because of real or
imagined threats from foreign powers. This
febrile, violent period eventually resolved
into strong-man rule under Augustus. For
history enthusiasts, it is one of the most fas-
cinating going—providing thrilling material
for Rubicon, a novelistic history of the period
by Tom Holland, and a trio of historical nov-
els by Robert Harris.
It was recorded in real-time detail by the
statesman and philosopher Cicero in count-
less letters and speeches. Reading them
you can feel that the dark arts of politi-
cal manoeuvring and skulduggery haven’t
changed all that much—except that in Rome,
the stakes were considerably higher. Forget
being the victim of a Twitter mob: in this
political atmosphere you could be the mur-
dered victim of a real mob. Cicero ended
up dead, his severed head displayed in the
Roman forum. A political enemy, the aris-
tocratic Fulvia, reputedly took out her hair-
pins and stabbed his tongue, in revenge for
his barbed wit and weaponised oratory.
The divisive question of populism was
absolutely central to the rows that pulsated
through the late republic. The adjective
“popularis”—meaning “of the people”—
could either be a term of abuse or a badge of
honour, depending on your perspective.
The aristocratic Clodius Pulcher is a case
in point: according to Cicero, he was a mob-
pleasing, power-hungry brute, who terror-
ised the streets with his militia. He had also,
allegedly, committed a gross act of sacrilege:
turning up to a female-only religious ritual
disguised as a woman, in order to steal a night
in bed with Pompeia, who also happened to
be Caesar’s wife. Clodius was acquitted in the
ensuing trial, after members of the jury were
offered “women or upper-class boys as they
preferred,” in the words of Holland.
These are great stories, and might remind
us of all kinds of modern tales of political
sleaze. The trouble is, nearly everything we
know about Clodius comes straight from Cic-
ero, his sworn enemy. But was there an alter-
native view? Clodius’s actual policies, such as
distribution of free grain in Rome, suggest he
may have been a principled, radical reformer,
operating with the people’s interests firmly
in view. A Rome for the many, perhaps, and
not the few. Clodius as a much-maligned
Momentum-style activist.
Clodius is a character in Harris’s nov-
els, which have been adapted for the stage.
Shortly after resigning as Foreign Secretary,
Boris Johnson went to the show, the first part
of which features Cicero’s famous speeches
against another populist aristocrat, Cati-
line, whom the orator accused of conspiring
to overthrow the Roman state. Some have
argued that Cicero exaggerated the danger
for his own political purposes—a view that
Johnson shares. “There are those who say
the Catiline Conspiracy was an early exam-
ple of that basic utensil of politics—scaring
the public witless,” Johnson wrote. “Other-
wise known as Project Fear.”
To which the arch-Remainer Harris
responded on Twitter, “Surprised he didn’t
recognise that the patrician cynically whip-
ping up the mob to gratify his own ambition
is actually him.” In our times as in theirs,
when you’ve got them on your side they’re
“the people,” but the moment a rival is bet-
ter at winning their hearts, they’re the mob.
The way we were
Extracts from memoirs and diaries
by Ian Irvine
Arriving at university
1805 
Lord Byron arrived at Trinity
College, Cambridge. He wrote
to his half-sister Augusta:
“As might be supposed I like a College Life
extremely, especially as I have escaped the Tram-
mels or rather Fetters of my domestic Tyrant, Mrs
Byron [his mother], who continued to plague
me during my visit in July and September. I am
now most pleasantly situated in Superexcellent
Rooms, flanked on one side by my Tutor, and
on the other by an old Fellow, both of whom are
rather checks on my vivacity. I am allowed 500 a
year, a Servant and a Horse, so feel as independ-
ent as a German Prince who coins his own Cash,
or a Cherokee Chief who coins no cash at all, but
enjoys what is more precious, Liberty.”
1890 
later observed:
Max Beerbohm arrived at
Merton College, Oxford. He
“I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford
that has made me insufferable.”
1950  Sylvia Plath arrived at Smith
College, Massachusetts. She
wrote to her mother:
“WH Auden is to come to Smith next year and
may teach English or possibly Creative Writ-
ing. So I hope to petition to get into one of his
classes. (Imagine saying, ‘Oh yes, I studied writ-
ing under Auden!’). Honestly, Mum, I could just
cry with happiness. I love this place so, and there
is so much to do creatively… The world is split-
ting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon.
If only I can work, work, work to justify all of my
opportunities.”
1960  Jeremy Lewis arrived at Trinity
College, Dublin:
“I felt hungover, underslept and ruinously indi-
gested: the long night [on the ferry], the Guin-
ness and the pork pie were taking their toll; it was
still raining; and for all its seedy elegance, Dub-
lin seemed to exude a sour smell of stale stout
and old socks. I wandered into Trinity, and the
graceful Georgian squares looked sombre and
elegant in the chilly morning light, with here and
there a broken window, and the odd unshaven
figure groping its way in a dressing gown, towel
over the arm and spongebag in hand, towards
the College Baths, where enormous enamel tubs
awaited it, like private swimming-pools, with a
claw at each corner and vast brass taps belch-
ing steam and boiling water. I bought a postcard
of Front Square—the sky a cobalt blue, the grass
a fluorescent lime—and sent home a gloomy
message to the effect that Dublin seemed quite
dreadful and that they should expect me home
within the next day or two.”
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 PROSPECT LIFE
Bad habits
And finally...
by Cathy Rentzenbrink
W
hen I was growing up I spent a lot of time with
my maternal grandparents. He was a bus driver
and she was a typist. They thought it part
of their civic duty to be informed so every night they
watched the evening news. It always ended with a light-
hearted “and finally,” before they turned off the televi-
sion and went to bed. That last bit is hard to do in the
modern world. In an era of multiple news channels and
social media how do we ever find an off switch? And how
do we re-create our own “and finally” that makes us feel a
little better about the world before we go to sleep?
A friend of mine is cross that he doesn’t fall asleep as
soon as his head hits the pillow. He spends his evening
watching news programmes on the bounce and scrolling
through Twitter and emails on his phone. When he turns
in for the night, he puts the phone on his bedside table.
He can’t turn it off because he uses it as an alarm clock.
After a few minutes of trying to fall asleep he gets bored
and picks the phone up again for another round of check-
ing. Why is he surprised that this is not a recipe for a good
night’s sleep?
75
What effect does this hyper-connectivity have on us?
There used to be an idea that anyone who said that the
news was depressing didn’t know what depression was.
I no longer think this is true. When I look back at tur-
bulent times in my own life I now see the over consump-
tion of news—the trial of Fred and Rosemary West, 9/11,
the nuclear floods in Japan—played a role in my struggle.
Perhaps this is because to stay sane I have to maintain
a faith in humanity, which is difficult to do when watch-
ing news channels compete with each other in the after-
math of a global disaster. It’s also to do with the way news
plays with our perspective on the world. Our logical mind
knows that we are being shown the extraordinary, but at
a more primal level it is hard not to start seeing risk eve-
rywhere, which means it is hard not to succumb to the
belief that the world is a dangerous and cruel place.
“My husband has deleted
his news apps. Brexit has
not improved, but his ability
to be a pleasant breakfast
companion has”
All this is amplified by social media. I never again want
to find out something horrible has happened because I’m
seeing individual people tweet things like, “Shit, no” or
little heartbreak emojis and pictures of teardrops next to
national flags. And there is something especially difficult
to process about the way social media layers a photo of a
dead child on a beach in between a picture of someone’s
cocktail and a plea from an author that you buy his book
because it’s his birthday.
The continual consumption of news certainly has the
power to render depressed those, like me, who are suscep-
tible to depression and it might not do anyone else any
favours either. My Dutch husband used to read the latest
on Brexit on his phone as he stirred the porridge. Since
he deleted all his news apps, the Brexit situation has not
improved but his ability to be a pleasant breakfast com-
panion has. It is such an easy trap to fall into, that we are
so aghast by the behaviour of our rulers, that we don’t pay
attention to the actual real people and things in our lives.
My grandparents thought informing themselves on
the issues of the day was crucial to being a good citizen
but I just don’t trust the makers of news in the way that
they did. Am I fulfilling my civic duty or am I expos-
ing myself to yet more manipulation where everything
is clickbait and I am the stupid fish who will be so dis-
tressed by being able to livestream humanity at its worst
that I will then have to drink or eat or buy stuff in an
attempt to make myself feel better.
Not consuming news is good for my mental health,
but probably living in a nunnery would be too. I don’t
want to live apart from the world so my current strategy
is to try to recreate a pre-internet way of interacting with
events. No news before breakfast and none after 7pm
gives enough of a gap for me. Then I turn everything off
and talk to a human or read a book. I’m saner as a result
of it and I don’t think the world suffers from my nightly
inattention. In the future, we will all need to find our own
off switch.
 Think Tank Awards 2018
All the results from our biggest and broadest annual contest yet
T
he global landscape is riven by fracturing alliances
and waning friendships. The post-war international
architecture is under threat, and the spirit of mul-
tilateralism is in decline. We have the White House
picking trade wars with a rising, insular China, as an
enfeebled EU looks on. Brexit is a particularly poignant example
of the old order unravelling.
In such mercurial, and sometimes frightening times, fraught
international relations can soon descend from the high politics of
diplomacy, which a few think tanks specialise in, to the day-to-
day grind and graft of domestic public policy, which occupies the
great bulk of them. From the geopolitical drama of Brexit one day,
to worrying about new technologies that might speed up customs
checks on dairy products at the Irish border, the next.
All of this ensures that think tanks everywhere have much work
to do. And this year, for the first time, in appraising their work,
Prospect took entries from right around the world. This made for
the largest ever awards ceremony, with the results adjudicated by a
stellar panel of judges including diplomats, journalists and schol-
ars. In recognition of what the best think tanks do for the public
realm, we’ve also introduced new tie-break criteria—so that, in the
case of two tanks being closely matched on points, a strong record
on transparency in funding or in training the next generation of
researchers can be taken into account.
International Awards
Prospect’s awards have long covered Europe and America, but this
year, for the first time, we have taken entries and honoured insti-
tutions from across the whole planet. In the Economic Category,
the UN University World Institute for Development Economics
was commended for its work on often strikingly successful Asian
industrial strategies. Libertad y Progreso from Argentina was the
runner-up, for its “clear and accessible work” on the folly of pro-
tectionism. But the winner this year was the African Center for
Economic Transformation, for its exceptional work on knitting
agricultural and industrial strategy together.
In Social Policy, the Carnegie Middle East Center was hailed
for data and recommendations based on the experiences of Syr-
ian refugees. Observer Research Foundation, from India, did
“excellent” work on healthcare, housing, food and water provi-
sion, and emerged as runner-up. But the winner was the Afghani-
stan Research and Evaluation Unit, which matched “top-class
research” with “plausible policy prescriptions.”
The same Afghan outfit also scored well in our International
Energy & Environment category, for its work on opium poppy
cultivation. The Council on Energy, Environment and Water, an
Indian think tank, was the runner-up. It looked at electricity and
healthcare in rural Chhattisgarh where, chillingly, 90 per cent
of state clinics experienced power cuts. But the winner was the
Beyond Zero Emissions from Australia, for its work on cement
production. That industry causes 8 per cent of global greenhouse
emissions, more than all the world’s cars put together.
In the Global Affairs category, the Observer Research Founda-
tion impressed judges. So did the Brazil-based Igarapé Institute,
which was runner-up for its campaign to reduce murder rates
in the seven most homicidal countries in the world—all in Latin
America. But the winner was the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center
for Global Policy, which has created “a useful conduit for a large
body of Chinese academics to interface with their global counter-
parts,” and speak frankly—an invaluable service.
EU Awards
In the Financial and Economic category, Bruegel did strong
work on the need to strengthen EU leadership structures, and
emerged as runner-up. But this year’s winner was Transparency
International for its work on whistleblowing—a subject of great
significance for the financial services sector, for financial stabil-
ity and also government. In Social Policy, Transparency Inter-
national again impressed with its work on corruption, and the
panel was also taken with the European Centre for International
Political Economy, who emerged as runner-up. Its “Digital Trade
Restrictiveness Index” was judged “an outstanding innovative
contribution.” But the winner was Katalys, for “topical,” “com-
prehensive” and “practical” efforts to grapple with integration,
inequality and pensions.
The energy category was extremely competitive, with a tie
between two outstanding tanks: the Centre for European Pol-
icy Studies and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. Nansen had, one
judge noted, “a strong impact on Norwegian policy” and “a depth
of expertise, backed up by interdisciplinary intellectual rigour.”
As for CEPS, it was rated as having a “strong impact” on policy,
with ideas of “very wide significance.” But there could be only one
winner, and Fridtjof Nansen’s record in fostering scholars, along
with its transparency on funding, just gave it the edge.
In the international area, the Casimir Pulaski Foundation’s
wargaming and analysis impressed, as did Carnegie Europe who
emerged as runner-up, not least for “dissecting” “Turkey’s march
to autocracy.” But the winner was the Centre for European Pol-
icy Studies, which one judge said, “has been at or near the top of
its field for many years,” and known “for its incisive, innovative
and independent research and writing.”
North America Awards
In the Economic and Financial field, The Economic Innovation
Group was commended and emerged as runner-up, for analy-
sis of US business and society. But the winner was the Peterson
Institute, who did excellent work on the eurozone. “Some of these
ideas,” wrote one judge, “will almost certainly make an appear-
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
© PAUL HEARTFIELD
ance if the political will can be found.” In Social Policy, the RAND
Corporation was rated as runner-up because of its cool-headed
work in the fraught field of gun policy. But the winner was the
Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think tank, whose
analysis of crime was “tight,” “focused” and gave rise to “ambi-
tious yet do-able proposals.”
For Energy and the Environment, the Stimson Center was
picked out as runner-up for highlighting the strain put on the
world’s fisheries. But the winner was the Global Carbon Project
for its excellent work on emissions and climate change.
In the International category, New America was saluted for
work that drew on documents spirited out of Syria to make sense
of Islamic State, work one judge called “one of the most ambi-
tious entries in the entire competition.” The RAND Corporation
was runner-up for its compelling and timely output on “Truth
Decay.” But the winner this year was the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, which did outstanding work on Rus-
sia—“as impressive as anything in the competition,” our judges
said.
UK Awards
In Economic and Financial, the Royal United Services Insti-
tute (Rusi) has, one judge said, “carved themselves out a strong
niche” for work on financial crime and sanctions. The Centre for
European Reform was also picked out for its work on the eco-
nomic trouble brewing in Britain’s relations with the continent.
The runner-up was the Institute for Fiscal Studies, for what
one judge called its “clear and cogent analysis.” But the win-
ner was the Institute for Government (IfG), which, one judge
noted have newly “established themselves as a serious source of
analysis for budgetary matters and Brexit,” with connections
in the heart of Whitehall that help them get real “traction in
government.”
77
Clockwise from upper
left: the crowd gathers
before the awards;
Prospect’s Editor Tom
Clark presents the
International Social
Policy Award to the
Afghanistan Research
and Evaluation Unit;
the Centre for
European Reform
with the Think Tank
of the Year Award
(and winner’s tank
top); David Landsman
addresses the crowd
In the Social Policy area, the Fabians have done “very influen-
tial work,” on the justice system, while Bright Blue has also had a
good year. The IfG was runner-up but the winner was the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation, with its unstinting focus on poverty, and
its particular efforts to recast the way it is discussed.
In the Energy and the Environment category, Chatham House
impressed on food security and was runner-up. But the winner
was Policy Exchange which, this year, one judge said, “paid par-
ticular attention to the economic drivers behind effective envi-
ronmental policies, especially energy policies, and demonstrated
impressive convening power” as well as grabbing media attention.
In the international section, the Centre for European Reform
was impressive. Rusi, the runner-up, was strong on Russia and its
land forces, but the winner was the UK in a Changing Europe,
which one judge called “very impressive and substantial,” adding
pointedly that their output was “far more authoritative and sub-
stantial than government policy.”
One to Watch
The Vuelio “One to Watch” award, for an innovative tank on the
up, went to an organisation from South America that is confront-
ing the deepest societal problems in the most challenging of urban
environments, and doing so with imagination and technical verve.
That organisation was the Igarapé Institute of Brazil.
Think Tank of the Year
And the winner this year stood out as uniquely timely in this hour
for its determination to keep the Brexit debate grounded in analy-
sis and fact rather than emotion and bluster. That think tank was
the Centre for European Reform.
The Awards were supported by Tata. Thanks also to Vuelio, Funding
Circle, the Financial Inclusion Commission, Octopus Energy and
Associated British Ports
Prospect will once again be putting on a series of discussions and debates at the party conferences to give delegates and
parliamentarians the opportunity to debate some of the key issues affecting the UK.
To attend our events or to find out more about our thought leadership programmes, please contact Saskia Abdoh. For sales
and advertising, please contact Adam Kinlan using the details below:
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e: saskia.abdoh@prospectmagazine.co.uk t: 0203 372 2914
Tom Clark in conversation with Vince Cable MP
Date: Monday 17th September, 7.45pm
The Parliamentary Staffer Welcome Reception
Date: Sunday 23rd September, 6-10pm
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Yvette Cooper MP, Chair, Home Affairs
Committee (invited); Chris Hulatt, Octopus
Beyond the bank: how can we advance access to
talent and capital for Britain’s SMEs?
Date: Sunday 23rd September, 7.30pm (Invite only)
Speakers: Peter Dowd MP, Shadow Chief Secretary
to the Treasury; Jonathan Reynolds MP, Shadow
Economic Secretary to the Treasury;
Stephen Timms MP, Exiting the EU Committee;
David de Koning, Director of Group Communication,
Funding Circle
Banking on Change: how can we better address the
banking needs of the financially excluded?
Date: Monday 24th September, 12.45 (Invite only)
Chair: Andy Davis, Associate Finance Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Yvonne Fovargue MP, Shadow Minister
for Housing, Communities and Local Government;
Seema Malhotra, Member, Committee on Exiting the
European Union; Rushanara Ali MP, Member,
Treasury Select Committee; Anne Pieckielon,
Director of Product and Strategy, CASS; Chris Pond,
Vice Chair, Financial Inclusion Commission
How can we support our higher education
sector post-Brexit?
Date: Monday 24th September, 12.45
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Paul Blomfield MP, Shadow Minister for
Exiting the European Union; Helen Brand, CEO, ACCA
Delivering an inclusive economy—
consumer markets for the many not the few
Date: Monday 24th September, 3.45pm (Invite only)
Adam Kinlan
e: adam.kinlan@prospectmagazine.co.uk t: 0203 372 2934
How can we preserve our trading relationship
with the EU post-Brexit?
Date: Monday 24th September, 3pm
Chair: Tom Clark, Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Anneliese Dodds MP, Shadow Treasury
Minister; Tim Reardon, Head of EU Exit,
Port of Dover; Adam Marshall, Director-General,
British Chambers of Commerce
How could a smarter approach to infrastructure
and mobility improve regional growth?
Date: Monday 24th September, 7.30pm (invite only)
Digital dilemmas: making the internet work
for everyone
Date: Tuesday 25th September, 12.45pm (invite only)
The Financial Inclusion Reception
Date: Tuesday 25th September, 5.45pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Peter Dowd MP, Shadow Chief Secretary
to the Treasury; Sherard Cowper-Coles, Chairman,
Financial Inclusion Commission; Jessica Lennard,
Head of UK Regulatory and Public Affairs, Visa Europe
Addressing the construction skills gap now
and post-Brexit?
Date: Sunday 30th September, 3.45pm
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Damian Hinds MP, Secretary of State
for Education (invited); Brian Berry, Chief Executive,
Federation of Master Builders; Senior representative,
British Property Federation
Rise of tech giants and data capitalism:
the new you on Blockchains?
Date: Sunday 30th September, 3.45pm
Chair: Jon Bernstein, Associate Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Jeremy Wright MP, Secretary of State for
Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (invited);
Grant Shapps MP, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary
Group on Blockchain; Birgitte Andersen, CEO,
Big Innovation Centre
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
Beyond the bank: how can we advance access
to talent and capital for Britain’s SMEs?
Date: Monday 1st October, 7.30pm (invite only)
Speakers: Lee Rowley MP, Member, Public Accounts
Committee; David de Koning, Director of Group
Communication, Funding Circle
Health tech and patient empowerment:
how can data save lives?
Date: Monday 1st October, 12.45pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Helen Whately MP, Chair, All-Party
Parliamentary Health Group; Chris Green MP, Chair,
All-Party Parliamentary Group on Medical Research;
Mohammad al-Ubaydli, CEO, Patients Know Best
How can we support our higher education
sector post-Brexit?
Date: Monday 1st October, 12.45pm
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Damian Hinds MP, Secretary of State
for Education (invited); Helen Brand, CEO, ACCA;
Shakira Martin, President, NUS; Pooja Kumari,
Research Manager, Policy Connect
Banking on Change: how would inclusive
banking services work in practice?
Date: Monday 1st October, 12.45pm (invite only)
Chair: Andy Davis, Associate Finance Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Kevin Hollinrake MP, Member, Housing,
Communities and Local Government Committee;
Anne Pieckielon, Director of Product and Strategy, CASS;
Chris Pond, Vice Chair, Financial Inclusion Commission
Beyond tariffs: where are our opportunities
to boost trade post-Brexit?
Date: Monday 1st October, 4pm
Chair: Tom Clark, Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Suella Braverman MP, Parliamentary Under
Secretary of State for DExEU (invited); John Howell MP,
Trade Envoy to Nigeria; David Leighton, Group Head
of Corporate Affairs, Associated British Ports;
Alan Winters, Director, UK Trade Policy Observatory
The new economy: how will automation
and AI change the future of work?
Date: Monday 1st October, 5.45pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Alok Sharma MP, Minister of State for Employment;
Neil Carmichael, Chair, Commission on Sustainable Learning
for Life, Work and a Changing Economy
Risks, governance and crisis: how can the
UK address emerging national security threats?
Date: Monday 1st October, 5.45pm
Chair: Jay Elwes, Executive Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Vicky Ford MP, Member, Science and Technology
Committee; David Jamieson, Police and Crime
Commissioner for the West Midlands Police (invited)
The Parliamentary Staffer Welcome Reception
Date: Monday 1st October, 6pm
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Brandon Lewis, Chairman of the
Conservative Party; Lisa Townsend, Octopus
How could a smarter approach to infrastructure
and mobility improve regional growth?
Date: Monday 1st October, 7.30pm (Invite only)
WWW.PROSPECTMAGAZINE.CO.UK/EVENTS 79
The Financial Inclusion Reception
Date: Monday 1st October, 7pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Guy Opperman MP, Minister for Pensions and
Financial Inclusion; Sherard Cowper-Coles, Chairman,
Financial Inclusion Commission; Jessica Lennard,
Head of UK Regulatory and Public Affairs, Visa Europe
Abuse, rage and fake news:
how Twitter is ruining politics
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 10am
Prospect’s Steve Bloomfield in conversation with Rafael Behr
Prospect Health
Innovation Programme
The Civil War without muskets:
In light of their history, can the
Conservatives reunite after Brexit?
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 10am
Chair: Tom Clark, Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Richard Graham MP, Member, Committee
on Exiting the European Union
Equality in the workplace: can the
Conservatives lead the agenda?
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 12.45pm
Chair: Stephanie Boland, Digital Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Maria Miller MP, Chair, Women and Equalities
Committee (invited); Justine Greening MP (invited); Frances
O’Grady, General Secretary, TUC
How can investment in national infrastructure
help to rebalance the UK economy?
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 12.45pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Jack Brereton MP, Member, Transport Select
Committee; Steve Double MP, Transport Select Committee; Prospect Future of
Sadie Morgan, National Infrastructure Commission Transport Programme
Going global: how can we support growth
and innovation through place-making?
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 3.45pm
Chair: Tom Clark, Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Lord Oliver Henley, Parliamentary Under Secretary
of State, BEIS;Mark Pawsey MP, Member, Business,
Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee; Adam Marshall,
Director General, British Chambers of Commerce;
Vicky Pryce, Economist, CEBR
Prospect New Economy
Programme
Tom Clark in conversation with Nicky Morgan MP
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 5.45pm
Global Britain: what does it mean?
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 5.45pm
Chair: Steve Bloomfield, Deputy Editor, Prospect
Prospect Data
Speakers: Richard Graham MP, Member, Committee on
Programme Exiting the European Union; Andrew Adonis
Delivering sustainable learning for life, work and
a changing economy—and the cost of failing to act
Date: Tuesday 2nd October, 5pm
Chair: Jay Elwes, Executive Editor, Prospect
Speakers: Anne Milton MP, Minister for Apprenticeships
and Skills; Neil Carmichael, Chair, Commission on
Sustainable Learning for Life, Work and
a Changing Economy
Building a new North
L
ike natural environments, indus-
tries shape places. Our industries
create cultures, build identities and
give birth to communities. Britain’s
regions were shaped by their indus-
tries, nowhere more so than in the North of
England.
As England’s great industrial cities boomed in
the nineteenth century, politics sought to manage
the dividends and ameliorate the often invidious
consequences of the unprecedented economic
and social change: always behind, never ahead.
The following century demonstrated that
the culture and identity of the North was not
only shaped by how and when industry grew, but
when it shrank.
The 21st century brought publicly funded
regeneration: Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester,
Leeds and Sheffield began to boom again as pri-
vate investment followed public.The success of
the region dispelled the myth of a dual ‘private’
and ‘public’ sector economy, demonstrating that
the success of both was, and is, mutual.
The renaissance of the North was brought
to a hard stop by the global crash of 2008 which
brought with it an unprecedented challenge for
the region. For an area long-used to dealing with
the consequences of a shrinking private sector,
there was little preparedness for how to respond
to the challenges of a retreating public sector.
The consequences of Brexit will test it further.
The Northern Powerhouse – a pre-Brexit
innovation – is an attempt to recalibrate the
economy as a whole by ‘rebalancing’ growth away
from the south east towards the North.
It’s still early days for the Powerhouse. Pub-
lic money is hard to come by – there simply isn’t
much of it around – and the process of Brexit has
paralysed the legislature: but to use either issue
as an excuse for failure fails to understand the
lessons of history and fails to understand what
the Northern Powerhouse is fundamentally
about.
For anyone interested in the renewal of the
North, the Powerhouse concept is surely beyond
doubt. At its heart, the Northern Powerhouse is
a partnership between the institutions of govern-
ment and the leaders, councils and businesses of
the North. Irrespective of whichever party gov-
erns in the foreseeable future, public investment
will remain hard to find.
By necessity, the Northern Powerhouse
is not simply a channel through which to fun-
nel public money, it is a vision of the North that
prioritises innovation, collaboration and part-
nership between all those who care about the
future of the region and the economy that sus-
tains it. It is an invitation to modern industrialists
and business leaders who care about place-based
growth to shape the region and its future, and it’s
a deliberate provocation: why should the vision
required to shape the economic growth of the
future be left solely to the public sector and
political processes?
The UK nuclear industry is a product of
collaboration between government, academia,
industry, workers and local communities: it’s an
illustration of how this approach works for the
long term and why the Nuclear Decommission-
ing Authority’s (NDA) Sellafield site has much
to offer. The NDA’s subsidiary Sellafield Ltd
has now taken a prominent role in the North-
ern Powerhouse. Sellafield, after all, is the original
Northern Powerhouse.
The site was created to produce the mate-
rials to help us win the Cold War, and a few
years later, was home to the world’s first com-
mercial nuclear power plant. Its core mission
now is nuclear clean-up, decommissioning and
demolishing many buildings on the West Cum-
brian site – a huge task. Some of the most diffi-
cult engineering and environmental remediation
challenges exist at Sellafield. As a result the site
has become a world leader in solving these chal-
lenges.The expertise, innovations and technol-
ogies developed can be put to good use in the
immense global nuclear clean-up and decommis-
sioning market.
Sellafield’s vision fits closely with the aims
of the Northern Powerhouse, such as improv-
ing connectivity and transport to enable future
growth, work on skills, science and innovation
leading to export opportunities.We are a major
industrial player with fantastic skills and a buoy-
ant supply chain. It’s important that we broaden
understanding of our mission and contribution
to the regional and national economy.
The Northern Powerhouse initiatives have
got to be solved on the ground, and working
in partnership with the community, like we are
doing at Sellafield, can improve education, develop
entrepreneurship and attract new investment.
Silicon Valley – today’s byword for modernity,
progress and economic opportunity – was not
created by an act of Congress. The internet – the
fuel upon which Silicon Valley runs – is the brain
child of British computer scientist Tim Berners-
Lee.The Houses of Parliament could never have
legislated for its creation.The same could be said
for the printing press, the spinning jenny and the
steam engine: inventions that brought about eco-
nomic, social and political revolutions. Inventions
that no legislature could have ever foreseen.
The future success of the North requires an
approach to partnership between the public and
private sector not yet seen in Britain. It deserves
widespread political support and it requires busi-
nesses in the region to abandon timidity and to
step forward to help shape the future.With the
right vision, business will find enthusiastic part-
ners in local government, the trade unions, aca-
demia and politicians of every hue: ‘industrial
activism’ in action.
The Northern Powerhouse will endure.The
new North will not be built over night, but with
the creation of long term partnerships between
the public and private sector, it will be built.
Jamie Reed, Head of Corporate Affairs,
Sellafield Ltd
 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 81

Policy report: Reviving the north

How can it be that the north and south of England are so unequal? In property prices, life expectancy and economic
activity, London and the south outstrip the north on every measure. Successive governments have promised to close
that gap but have so far failed. What can we do—and what is realistic?

A mayor writes But with the combination of more pow- of northern cities close enough to work
ers to local leaders, targeted investment together and put aside regional rivalries.
Ben Houchen and a modern industrial strategy, we really If the north can raise its game, it will be
can start to close that north-south divide. good for UK plc—but to achieve new jobs,
The Northern Powerhouse is at risk of Ben Houchen, Conservative Mayor of the Tees growth and investment, we need some big
being defined by its detractors. For the Valley changes.
publicity-hungry politician, there are col- Take transport. Northern commuters
umn inches in playing up the north-south and families have faced weeks of rail chaos.
divide. They forget that it’s up to us, as In search of the rich life Over one million working hours were lost,
northern leaders, to turn our fortunes and train operators warned that the disrup-
around. Home to more than 15m people, Caroline Flint tion could last until November. But until the
1m businesses, seven international air- north’s railways improve—frequency, capac-
ports and some of the world’s top univer- The north is known for industry, but we ity and journey times—increased productiv-
sities, we should not passively accept the are equally proud of its cultural heritage: ity will be out of reach.
story of decline in the north. the Brontës, Lowry and the Beatles. Our The MPs of the Northern Powerhouse
When it comes to investment, the gov- sporting heritage is equally rich. A world- All-Party Parliamentary Group will be lob-
ernment’s Northern Powerhouse Invest- wide fan-base follows the north’s Premier bying government for further rail devolution.
ment Fund has already made hundreds of League football teams; Rugby league was Transport for the North was established for
millions of pounds available to businesses born in Huddersfield; and the Great North this role. Now it needs real powers.
from Merseyside to Middlesbrough. In the Run remains the world’s most friendly And in the longer-term, we need North-
region I represent as mayor, we are making half-marathon. ern Powerhouse Rail connecting our urban
millions available to support businesses. But the UK economy is over-dependent centres to a high-speed rail network, begin-
Infrastructure is central. The rail on London—the north has lagged behind ning with a fast Hull-Manchester-Liverpool
scheduling issues that have dominated the for too long. Four years ago, the Northern line, which could be up and running before
media this summer are hugely important Powerhouse brought together a collection HS2.
to many people—myself included—but
the real question is whether the govern-
ment commits to Northern Powerhouse “In the longer term,
Rail. This project is a great opportunity to
make the most of technologies, like hydro-
we need Northern
gen-powered trains and 5G data networks. Powerhouse Rail
Devolution is the most exciting part of
the Northern Powerhouse. It is now clear
connecting our urban
that the old model of running everything centres to a high-speed
from Whitehall is broken. Devolution has rail network”
worked in London, and it’s working in
Teesside too.
For me, the Northern Powerhouse has
always been about letting people make the
best decisions for their own regions. Over
decades, under governments of all polit-
ical colours, our economy has become
unbalanced. In the north especially, we’ve
seen the excessive creation of public sector
jobs. This isn’t the answer.
Politicians are often asked whether the
Northern Powerhouse is a success, and
depending on their party, they answer yes
or no without much thought.
© ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS TILBURY

Trying to turn around a hundred years

of relative decline is not going to be easy.
The kind of structural changes required to
rebalance the nation’s economy and tackle
inequality between the north and south
will take time—no serious economist or
business person would tell you otherwise.
82
Grasping economic opportunities also
requires skills. Our recent, “Educating the
North” report revealed that disadvantaged
northern pupils are one whole GCSE grade
behind their London counterparts. We are
calling for the government to invest £300m
to ensure every child is school-ready.
Work-based education—modern appren-
ticeships—are central to our ambitions. A
well-equipped workforce is crucial to attract-
ing companies from across the globe to
choose the north to develop their business.
Our new age requires information and
data, smart production and integrated
robotics to raise productivity. The mod-
ern manufacturing worker will not just
repeat one task many times, they will be a
decision-maker getting the most from the
technology.
The north’s love of sport, culture and
music is matched by its ancient heritage
from Hadrian’s Wall to Cuthbert’s Holy
Island; from Ivar the Boneless’s conquest of
York to Wordsworth’s Lake District. Towns
and villages are rightly proud of their great
histories and community identities.
A rich life awaits anyone who wants to
be part of the north’s future success. The
region’s best days may still lie ahead. The
MPs and civic leaders of the Northern
Powerhouse are determined to make the
most of it.
Caroline Flint is Labour MP for Don Valley and
Co-Chair of the Northern Powerhouse All-Party
Parliamentary Group
Spinning wheels
Jay Elwes
Big projects invite big political talk. The
“Northern Powerhouse” is no exception. An
idea invented by George Osborne, it was a
project born of the fifty thousand feet per-
spective of No 11 Downing Street. You can
almost imagine the former Chancellor point-
ing at his map of the UK: “we’ve got lots of
economic activity here,” points to central
London, “but we need to move some of it up
here,” points to Barrow-in-Furness.
But does it really work like that? That’s a
question that goes ignored by the politicians
who promote the idea of “rebalancing” Brit-
ain. All countries have regional imbalances
and it’s not immediately clear whether any
other country has succeeded in getting rid
The future
of transport
Vive la Révolution!
CHRIS GRAYLING
Meet the controller
JOHN ARMITT INTERVIEWED
It’s time for Britain
GLORIA ESPOSITO
to plug in
SEPTEMBER 2018
In association with
10/08/2018 14:58
transport.indd 1
POLICY REPORT NORTHERN POWERHOUSE
View from the Ministry: the transport question
Chris Grayling
We’ve seen many recent technological rev-
olutions in our lifetimes—now it’s time for
the next transport revolution. We’re mak-
ing the biggest investment in the railways
since the Victorian era: a third runway at
Heathrow, and the “Road To Zero” strat-
egy which will make the UK the best place
to drive an electric vehicle.
We have made a commitment to North-
ern Powerhouse Rail and are spending
more than £13bn through to 2020 to trans-
form transport across the north. We are
investing in the Great North Rail Project
and the TransPennine Express franchise,
to double the capacity of the network with
state of the art trains, longer carriages with
more seats for passengers and more ser-
vices by 2020.
We are also investing £55.7bn in HS2,
which will become the backbone of our
national rail network—helping us to boost
jobs and growth, and improve vital links
between some of Britain’s biggest cities.
A new third runway at Heathrow will
provide benefits of up to £74bn to passen-
gers and the wider economy, as well as cre-
ating tens of thousands of jobs. Heathrow
is already the UK’s biggest airport for both
passengers and freight and the north-west
runway will almost double the airport’s
capacity for goods. Businesses across the
of them by laying new railway lines. France,
for example, has got stupendously fast trains
and has had them for decades. But it hasn’t
stopped huge swathes of la France profonde
from becoming backwaters. Italy, the United
States—in fact think of any country and
you’ll find it infested with regional imbal-
ances. Why should Britain be able to find a
solution that has eluded all other nations?
And yet government is spending a huge
pile of money on new infrastructure, the
bulk of it, as is made clear above, on trans-
port. It’s no doubt a crucial question, as our
special supplement shows. Commuters cer-
tainly like new trains.
But they also hate it when trains go awry,
as happened with the failed introduction of
new timetables across the north. That bun-
gled effort doesn’t bode well for larger pro-
jects like HS2, which as Chris Grayling says,
The future of transport
For more on the future of British transport, including an extended interview
with John Armitt, Chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, visit:
prospectmagazine.co.uk/future-of-transport
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
country—including the north—will gain
access to new customers around the world.
The coming decades are going to be
transformative for our motor industry.
The “Road to Zero” sets out a way for the
UK to become a world leader in zero emis-
sion transport. The government is invest-
ing £1.5bn in ultra-low emission vehicles
by 2021.
There are already more than 150,000
ultra-low emission vehicles on our roads
and 14,000 public charge points. Notting-
ham, Bristol, Milton Keynes and London,
which have received a share of £40m to
boost the number of plug-in cars.
It is estimated that, by 2035, the mar-
ket for autonomous vehicles could be worth
£28bn. To achieve these ambitions, we
are working alongside industry and other
groups to meet the UK’s transport needs.
But we need more engineers—the
industry faces a shortfall of 20,000 engi-
neering graduates a year. The Year of
Engineering is a government campaign.
We have joined forces with more than 1,400
industry partners to transform perceptions
of engineering among young people.
A revolution is on its way—and UK
transport is heading into the future.
Chris Grayling is Secretary of State for
Transport
will cost £55.7bn. But what will it do? Shave
20 or so minutes off train times from the
Midlands into London? People who like the
idea say it will encourage investment in the
north. People who don’t like it say it’ll sim-
ply create a new class of super-commuter—
it’ll make London more accessible.
Truth is, nobody knows. Much of Brit-
ain’s transport infrastructure is looking
tired. Better trains are a good thing, but
won’t necessarily get people out of London.
And besides, people are already leaving Lon-
don—336,000 went in 2017. Their top desti-
nation was Birmingham. They didn’t need
HS2 or the Northern Powerhouse to get
them there. The real question is, now they’re
there, what do they need? The answer to that
needs no big political branding exercise—
just competence.
Jay Elwes is Executive Editor of Prospect
for a free
market solution
to solve the
housing crisis.

Find out more at:

A Northern Soul
Special screening at the 5th Annual Joseph Rowntree Foundation & Prospect Poverty Lecture

Join Prospect and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation

on 13th September for the 5th Annual Poverty Lecture
at the screening of Sean McAllister’s award-winning
film, A Northern Soul.
Tickets are free but limited. Please register
your attendance at
prospectmagazine.co.uk/events/a-northern-soul
Following the screening there will be a Q&A with
contributions from Sean McAllister and Campbell Robb,
Chief Executive, JRF, JRHT with introductions from
Tom Clark, Editor of Prospect.
The event will begin promptly at 6.30pm,
please arrive early. There will be a drinks reception
following the screening and Q&A.
“Class and chance collide in
Sean McAllister’s brilliant Sheffield Doc/Fest
opening film, as young performers are guided
through their home’s transformational year
as UK city of culture”
Charlie Phillips, The Guardian
A Northern Soul
Director Sean McAllister, Producer Elhum Shakerifar &
Sean McAllister, Cinematography Sean McAllister,
Editing Johnny Burke, Music Terence Dunn.
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018 85

Events
prospectmagazine.co.uk/events

The Prospect Book Club meets every third Monday of the month (excluding
bank holidays) at 6.30pm at 2 Queen Anne’s Gate, London, SW1H 9AA.
To book tickets please visit prospectmagazine.co.uk/events

Monday 17th September Monday 15th October Monday 19th November

Edith Hall
Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient
Wisdom Can Change Your
Life
Aristotle is possibly the
greatest philosopher of all
time—certainly he is the
most influential. The big question he
asked was how we are to lead a
meaningful and happy life. In her new
book, Edith Hall, a professor at King’s
College, London, outlines 10 practical
lessons in life we can learn from Aristotle,
ranging from how to choose a partner to
dealing with death.
Oliver Bullough
Moneyland: Why Thieves And
Crooks Now Rule The World
And How To Take It Back
From ruined towns on the
edge of Siberia, to Bond-vil-
lain lairs in Knightsbridge
and Manhattan, something has gone wrong
with the workings of the world. Join author
and Prospect contributor Oliver Bullough
on a journey into Moneyland—the secret
country of the lawless, stateless super rich.
Meet the kleptocrats (and their awful chil-
dren), and find out how heroic activists
around the world are fighting back.
Alan Rusbridger
Breaking News: The Remaking
of Journalism and Why It
Matters Now
We are living through the
greatest communication revo-
lution since Gutenberg in
which falsehood regularly seems to over-
whelm truth. In Breaking News, Alan Rus-
bridger offers an urgent examination of the
past, present and future of the press, and
the forces menacing its freedom. He re-
flects on his 20 years as editor of the Guard-
ian, and his experience of breaking some of
the most significant stories of our time.

at Wimbledon Bookfest 2018

Prospect will be media partners to Wimbledon BookFest for the
From 4th to 14th October Wimbledon BookFest invites you to third year running, and will be taking part in the following events:
Wimbledon Common for a wide range of events encompassing Sunday 7th October, 14:45
fiction, non-fiction, film, comedy, sport and music, plus an eclectic Jon Bew chaired by Tom Clark
mix of personalities who are relevant, exciting and thought-
Tuesday 9th October, 18:45
provoking. Highlights include literary heavyweights Sebastian Faulks
Jamie and Richard Susskind chaired by Sameer Rahim
and Pat Barker, comedians Alan Davies and Adam Kay,
and historians Max Hastings and Andrew Roberts. Wednesday 10th October, 20:15
Peter Hain chaired by Steve Bloomfield
For tickets and more information see: www.wimbledonbookfest.org

Jay Elwes speaks to George Magnus

HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy
and music festival, is landing in the heart of London
for the very first time this September.
From 22nd to 23rd September, the world’s leading thinkers will
flock to the spectacular grounds of Kenwood House on Hampstead
Heath in London, sharing the stage with over 30 bands and comedy
acts in what promises to be an intellectual and artistic extravaganza.
For more information and to book tickets please visit:
howthelightgetsin.org/london
Tuesday 30th October, 6.30-8pm, Prospect offices
Join Jay Elwes, executive editor of Prospect, and George Magnus, associate at
Oxford University’s China Centre and a senior economic adviser to UBS Investment
Bank, to discuss China’s evolving economic relationships, the sustainability of Xi
Jinping’s regime, and what a conflict-happy Trump might mean for China’s future
should an all-out trade war break out.
Is the United Nations the new League of Nations?
Tuesday 4th December, 6.30-8pm, Prospect offices
There can be no doubt that over the last 50 years the United Nations has helped
to improve global living standards and spurred on international development to
new heights. However, with the return of unilateralism and the well-chronicled
rise of the strongmen such as Trump, Putin, Xi, and Erdoğan—it is worth
considering whether the UN is still fit for purpose.
Our confirmed speakers include Jay Elwes, executive editor of Prospect;
John Sawers, former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service; Clare Short, former
secretary of state for international development; and Tom Tugendhat MP, Chair of
the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

For more information and to book tickets for any of the above
Prospect events please visit: prospectmagazine.co.uk/events
Editor’s Club members go FREE to all Prospect events
 CLASSIFIED

Has education lost its way?

Today education is supposed to be about ‘empowering’
the student, but little empowerment stems from memoriz-
ing facts or mugging up process skills. Genuine empow-
erment comes from understanding others and articulating
common goals. This is supposed to be covered by teaching
the humanities, but high-pressure testing tends to turn the
humanities into yet another memorization chore.

The PER Group websites:

www.philosophyforeducation.co.uk
www.perprospero.co.uk

Q. What do Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, James Joyce
and Ivy Compton-Burnett
have in common?

A. They all received grants from

the Royal Literary Fund. To enquire about advertising here,
please contact Richard Rowe:
Helping authors since 1790.

Royal
What can we do for you?
01233 228757
Literary
Find out about what we do...
richard.rowe@tandemmedia.co.uk
Fund rlf.org.uk

eileen.gunn@rlf.org.uk
020 7353 7159
Registered Charity no. 219952

Last month’s generalist solutions

RLF_Final_Artwork_Adverts_And_Flyers.indd 2 06/02/2017 12:41

Menton, ACROSS: 1 Herculaneum, 7 Crewkerne, 12 Lebkuchen,

Côte d’Azur
Two bedroom house in grounds
of 1860s town villa. Pool and
beautiful views of sea and old
town. Charming courtyard
with lemon trees. Easy walk to
covered market, sea, train and
bus station. Off-street parking
available. This house rented with
main villa, total 10 people, is
ideal for larger groups
Now booking for 2018
13 Brandenburg, 14 Ourie, 15 Learner, 16 Exordia, 17 Humber
Bridge, 18 Cachalot, 20 Tetragon, 22/29 Gottfried von Strass-
burg, 25 Lehrstelle, 26 Gallivants, 30 Famille verte, 32 Atherton,
34 Militate, 36 Madame Bovary, 39 Game pie, 40 Rusalka, 41 Aigri,
42 She Loves You, 43 Crepitant, 44 Aberfoyle, 45 Greer Garson
DOWN: 1 Hilton Hotel, 2 Robert Mitchum, 3 Ukulele, 4 Atholl
brose, 5 Enneadic, 6 Mabinogion, 7 Chakra, 8 Eddie Mair, 9 Kin-
Tel: 07900 916729 lochbervie, 10 Roundel, 11 Edgbaston, 19 A-Team, 21 Abso-
pattiebarwick@gmail.com lute proof, 23 Venetian glass, 24 Ellen, 27 Littérateur, 28 Sonny
www.mentonsejour.com Liston, (29 Strassburg), 30 Famagusta, 31 Extremely, 33 Caulicle,
35 Lumière, 37 Ocarina, 38 Groyne
PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018
The generalist by Didymus
ACROSS
10 In Islam, a tax of 2.5%, payable
on property and used for
religious and charitable purposes
(5)
11 Veils worn by some Muslim
women in public (8)
12 City and port in Fujian province
in southeast China, lying
opposite Taiwan (6)
14 Residential and holiday town
in the northeast of the Wirral
peninsula (8)
15 Shakespeare’s term for a finger
hole in a flute (7)
16 Ancient city in Sumer, noted
for its long frontier conflict with
Lagash (4)
17 A small South American anteater
(7)
18 Its counties include Darlington,
Dorchester and York (5,8)
20 French cardinal and statesman
whose aim was to destroy the
power of the Huguenots during
the reign of Louis XIII (9)
21 Persian Gulf sheikhdom, capital
Doha (5)
22 Adelina ..., Spanish-born Italian
operatic coloratura soprano,
(1843 - 1919) (5)
25 Electronic keyboard instrument
which features prominently
in Turangalîla-Symphonie by
Messiaen (5,8)
27 Administrative centre of West
Berkshire, with Aldermaston and
Greenham Common close by (7)
29 Imitation or representation in art
(7)
31 US soprano much associated
with 8 Down’s music (8,5)
Last month’s generalist solutions can be found on the opposing page
34 Johanna ..., British tennis player
who reached the semi-finals of
the Wimbledon Women’s Singles
Championship last year (5)
35 In Scotland, prickly (5)
36 Childish, undeveloped (9)
40 English physician and writer
whose seven-volume work on
human sexuality was banned in
Great Britain (8,5)
41 City in Madhya Pradesh which is
part of the Chambral river valley
(7)
43 Sheep’s or goat’s cheese popular
in Greece (4)
44 Proclaim, articulate (7)
45 Growing in pairs -- like this
compiler, it seems! (8)
46 A tableau of Christ’s nativity (6)
47 German publisher and founder
of a series of travel guides (8)
48 French city on the Camargue
delta where Van Gogh spent his
last and most productive years
(5)
DOWN
1 Provinces such as Coclé, Colón
and Darién (10)
2 In Scotland, an old woman (8)
3 Outer casing of a flower which
protects the developing bud (5)
4 Breed of large sheep from
Northumberland, reared for their
wool (7)
5 French département in the
Midi-Pyrénées region, capital
Montauban (4-2-7)
6 South American cattle ranches
(9)
7 A variety of large sweet cherry (7)
8 Composer of the opera Antony
and Cleopatra: 31 Across sang the
role of Cleopatra in the original
1966 performances (6,6)
9 Market town in Herefordshire
associated with Leofric and Lady
Godiva (10)
13 Met Office observatory in
the Southern Uplands near
Langholm (11)
19 The 68th US Secretary of State
from 2013 to 2017 (5)
23 Paintings of rural settings,
particularly associated with
Watteau (5,8)
24 Youngest editor of a national
newspaper when appointed as
editor of the News of the World in
2000 (7,4)
26 Chief of a fictitious secret society
of free thinkers (12)
28 Urban …, 1997 album by The
Verve (5)
30 Solids with twenty plane faces
(10)
32 Informal conferences for
discussion of theological matters
(10)
33 First professional cricketer to be
knighted and who scored 61,237
runs in his career (4,5)
37 In ballroom dancing, a step
incorporating a heel pivot (8)
38 Cliff on the right-hand bank
of the Rhine near Sankt
Goarshausen, the legendary
home of a siren (7)
39 Ancient city on the Tigris,
opposite the modern city of
Mosul (7)
42 Farewell to the French about to
depart (5)
87
Enigmas & puzzles
Never odd or even?
Barry R Clarke
At Palindrome Palace in Scandanavia, the visitors must
always enter the court of King Otto walking forwards,
and leave it walking backwards. Also, since Otto takes
pleasure in feeling superior, their first and last words
must always be the cry “Dammit, I’m mad!” For anyone
who is neglectful, the penalty is eternal banishment,
however, the transgressor is traditionally offered the
opportunity of redemption if a digital palindromic
puzzle can be solved.
Unfortunately, Barc Crab has just violated the king’s
protocol: his exit was made walking sideways instead
of in reverse. So now a court official has presented him
with the task of deciphering a palindromic number,
that is, one that reads identically forwards and
backwards.
The puzzle has seven digits, to be selected from 1–9
inclusive, which satisfy the following conditions.
(1) The 4th and 6th digits differ by 2.
(2) Either the 3rd or 7th digit is even but not both.
(3) There is only one square digit.
(4) Only two positions have a prime digit.
(5) The 5th and 6th digits differ by 3.
(6) No digit appears more than twice.
What is the seven-digit number?
Last month’s solution
The ratio is 1 : 4 : 7. Let the red, white, and blue glasses be R, W,
and B, respectively. The final contents for R in units becomes
(7/24)R + (11/24)W + (1/4)B. For W we have (1/6)R + (5/6)W +
(1)B. Finally, for B we get (13/24)R + (17/24)W + (7/4)B). Taking
the B value in each case we have the answer for the ratio.
The full solution can be found at:
barryispuzzled.com/EnigmaAug18.pdf
How to enter
The generalist prize
The winner receives a copy of Living With
the Gods by Neil MacGregor, the former
Director of the National Gallery and
British Museum. Living With the Gods
focuses on the shared narratives that have
shaped societies from the stone age to the
modern world—and how believing and
rituals strengthen the sense of belonging.
Enigmas & puzzles prize
The winner receives a copy of The Colour
of Time: A New History of the World 1850-
1960 by Dan Jones and Marina Amaral.
The book offers a unique perspective
on the past as Amaral has used black-
and-white photographs as a basis for
creating full colour renditions, bringing
the images to life. Jones has written the
narrative that puts each image in context.
Rules
Send your solution to answer@prospect-magazine.co.uk
or Crossword/Enigmas, Prospect, 2 Queen Anne’s Gate,
SW1H 9AA. Include your email and postal address.
Entries must be received by 7th September. Winners
announced in our October issue.
Last month’s winners
The generalist: Tony Pearson, Croydon
Enigmas & puzzles: Werner Wiethege, London
Download a PDF of this page at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk
 88 PROSPECT SEPTEMBER 2018

Brief
First news/historical event you can recall?
England winning the World Cup in 1966. But the flour bomb-
ing of the 1970 Miss World contest left a more lasting

encounter
impression.

The book you are most embarrassed you never yet read?
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Inequal-
ity is rampant, but I need to understand more about how
global capital drives it.

One bit of advice you’d give to your younger self?

When you first go out on your own into the world, you don’t
have to experience everything all at once. Although, on reflec-
tion, I’m secretly proud of what was a valiant attempt!

What is your favourite saying or quotation?

“I subscribe to the divine right of discontent to see improve-
ments and to have a better way of life.” Jack Jones (referencing
his union movement forebear, Jim Larkin), the former General
Secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union.

Where do you want to be buried/have your ashes scattered?

I like the idea of having my ashes scattered over the sea but
I’m a wimp about cremation so it looks like a plot in the local
cemetery for me. I seem to remember a JP Donleavy story in
which the hero, fearful of accidentally being buried alive,
takes the precaution of having a telephone installed in his
final resting place—just in case he wakes up. I might take a
fully charged iPhone.

If you were given £1m to spend on other people, what would you
spend it on and why?
That’s easy—I’d spend it on union organisers to put the likes of
Uber and Sports Direct under even more pressure. Either that
or the best street party ever; we could all do with cheering up.

The talent you wish you had?

Playing electric guitar. Any woman of my age who’s read Viv
Frances O’Grady Albertine’s memoir Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music,
Boys, Boys, Boys will share that dream.
General Secretary, TUC
What have you changed your mind about?
First-past-the-post voting—as politics has become more plu-
ral, it has represented voters less well. I still have reservations
about proportional representation, but I’m more sympathetic
than I was. However, one thing is for sure, winning back public
trust in parliament will take more than an institutional fix.

What is the biggest problem of all?

Currently, the creepy occupants of the White House and the
Kremlin. But the root of almost all of our problems is
inequality.
ILLUSTRATION BY NICK TAYLOR

The last piece of music/play/novel/film that brought you to tears?

Film of the Suite for Ma Dukes Orchestra performing “Fall in
Love.” It’s a tender orchestral tribute to hip-hop legend J Dilla
and there is something about that musical fusion that is all the
more touching.
 Why are we wrong about
nearly everything?

What percentage of the population do you think

GUESS: 44% are overweight or obese? REALITY: 62%

What percentage of young adults aged 25-34 still

GUESS: 43% live with their parents? REALITY: 14%

What percentage of the population

GUESS: 25% do you think are immigrants? REALITY: 13%

‘MANDATORY The Perils of Perception

READING.’ is a ground-breaking
- Steven Pinker exploration of our
ignorance, informed by
major studies across over
‘SIMPLY 40 countries.
INDISPENSABLE.’
- Ma“hew d’Ancona OUT NOW
Data above taken from IPSOS UK survey
Open Morning 22nd September 10.00-12.30 www.mtsn.org.uk

Scholarships and bursaries available Coaches: Hampstead, Highgate,

St John’s Wood & Ealing
Tel. +44 (0)1923 845514 Merchant Taylors’ School, Sandy Lodge,
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