The first Labour government and the next Labour government One hundred years of platitude?

Labour colonial secretary James Henry Thomas, prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, transport secretary John Robert Clynes and home secretary Arthur Henderson trying to look respectable in 1924. Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public Domain Please support my journalism by signing up as a free or paying subscriber. Free subscribers have access to some pieces. Paying subscribers have access to everything, and more importantly allow me to carry on writing! Upgrade to paid One hundred years ago a nervous George V, the great grandfather of our current king, swore in the UK’s first Labour government. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 had terrified his majesty. But after some wobbling the king accepted that Labour was not going to execute him, as Lenin and the communists had executed his cousin Tsar Nicholas II. It was better to accept moderate British “socialism” and hope the concession would isolate the extremists. “My grandfather [Prince Albert] would have hated it; my father [Edward VII] could hardly have tolerated it; but I marched with the times,” he is meant to have boasted. Familiarity breeds ignorance as well as contempt. A century on, we can forget what an extraordinary institution the Labour party is. The United Kingdom had seen nothing like it. The Conservatives and Liberals had roots going back to the 17th century. Each had aristocratic and plutocratic support. They were the establishment parties. Labour had its roots in the trade unions, left-wing societies and Christian socialist movements of the late 19th century. Big business and the aristocracy could not abide it. Labour’s early leaders were more likely to be Scottish than English, working than middle or upper class. In London today you can walk around the richest streets in the West End and find the gentlemen’s clubs the Georgians established for Tory politicians (such as the Carlton) or the Victorians built for Liberal politicians (such as the National Liberal Club) But there are no gentlemen clubs for Labour politicians. They weren’t gentlemen then and most aren’t gentlemen now. Ramsay McDonald, who became the first Labour prime minister, was the illegitimate son of a farmhand. Denounced to this day as a traitor (for reasons we will get to) he remains an extraordinary figure. MacDonald opposed the First World War because of the suffering war imposed on the working class. Vilified in the jingo press, expelled by his golf club in his native Scotland, he lost his seat in Parliament at the war’s end in 1918. And yet MacDonald was prime minister by 1924. At the risk of sounding like a sentimentalist, the fact that a conscientious objector could go to Downing Street tells you something good about this country. Of that first Labour government, Arthur Henderson, the Home Secretary, began his working life in a Glasgow iron foundry. “Jimmy” Thomas, the Colonial Secretary was a railway worker, Willie Adamson, the Scottish Secretary was a Fife coal miner. The 1920s are truly history now. It is not just that no one alive can remember them. Most people will not have had parents who told them about life in the aftermath of the First World War either. Stalin, appeasement and the rise of Hitler ensures that the 1930s are still with us. But the 1920s are gone. Or so it appears. ​They deserve to be remembered because the problems that confronted the first Labour government will confront the next Labour government when Keir Starmer takes power. What to do about the moribund political system? How can a party of outsiders can stop itself falling victim to imposter syndrome? These are perennial issues for Labour. For in the 2020s as in the 1920s, the British progressive movement needs to ask how to keep the Conservatives ​out of power. After 100 years, progressives still do not have a good answer. The collapse of the old Liberal party remains one of British history’s most controversial subjects for precisely this reason. Under the first-past-the-post system the anti-conservative vote needs to maximise itself by uniting behind one party. (If you want to stop Donald Trump you will not, for instance, advocate breaking up the Democrats into rival parties). In 1906 the Liberals won a landslide victory in part by making what we would now call a “progressive alliance” with the newly formed Labour party. (The Liberals stood aside to allow Labour to win 29 seats). By the 1920s, Labour and the Liberals were rivals fighting each other and splitting the anti-Tory vote. ... Writing from London © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

A serious country would face the Brexit disaster: the silly and scared UK can't do it

Lowdown interview with Chris Grey This week, as every week, Brexit enfeebled the UK. It was not a one-off disaster, like a fatal heart attack. Rather Brexit is showing itself to be a debilitating disease that never grants us a moment’s peace. In the past few days The post-Brexit trade talks between the UK and Canada collapsed. Despite all the promises of global Britain crossing the clear blue oceans and cutting deals with India, the US, Canada and China, we remain isolated. After years of being too scared to actually take control of the UK’s borders, the government promised checks on imported food from the EU. The effect, according to the food industry, will be to raise prices and produce shortages. (Romantics searching for flowers for Valentine’s Day may well have their work cut out, despairing florists are already warning.) Brexit took away the right of Brits to live and work where we pleased in the EU. For a while in 2023 it looked as if France would allow British expats to stay for longer than 90 days at a stretch. But the French courts blocked that concession to second home owners in the Dordogne. Meanwhile the Brexit inspired border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK continued to enrage Ulster Unionists, who in their hearts must now know that English Tories have played them for fools. Finally, the Guardian reported that the EU's plans to increase bulk medicine procurement across the bloc risk creating shortages in Britain. That’s just in the past few days. And yet the politicians who promised the electorate that leaving the EU would turn us into a world leader are simply not held to account. You would have to be 35 or older to remember how the BBC used to deal with politicians who failed to deliver on their promises. In 2003 Tony Blair backed the US invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t. BBC journalists tore into the then Labour government. Its ministers had taken us to war on a false prospectus, they claimed. Lied, in short. And yet in a dereliction of journalistic duty the BBC has let the false prospectus of Brexit pass without the smallest attempt to remind its authors of their false promises. Here is Daniel Hannan, the Zelig of British nationalism. For more than two decades, he popped up at what felt like every right-wing meeting and rally, urging ever more Utopian fantasies on the luckless British public. In 2016, he promised the revival of depressed British cities, a Silicon Valley in the East End of London, and falling prices and booming wages for us all. Is he or any other Conservative or Faragist politician questioned to within an inch of his life by the BBC? Of course not. Continuous funding cuts and right-wing attacks have destroyed the corporation’s ability to provide a vital news service. It’s given up on democratic accountability. Writing from London is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid I can make one argument in its defence. If a BBC presenter were in the room with me now, I am sure they would say that the Labour opposition is giving them nothing to report. It is staying silent for fear of alienating elderly voters. The Liberal Democrats shut up for the same reason. In its politicians and media, the UK is like the caricature Victorian family that puts on a show of respectability and says nothing about its dirty secrets. No one, however, can shut up Professor Chris Grey, and our culture is the better for it. His Brexit & Beyond blog is the best source of information on our national malaise, and I was delighted to have him on podcast. I will write a longer piece, which will bounce off our conversation about the purity spiral on the right Brexit set off. With a bit of luck that should be up tomorrow or on Wednesday. I am also working of a read on the lessons from the 1920s for the 2020s. For the time being please listen to the podcast and sign up as a subscriber if you can. Please consider taking out a paying subscription if you can afford to. You will have access to all articles, archives and podcast, and you will allow me to carry on writing! Best wishes, Nick Paying subsribers have hundreds of features to read. Recent examples include Elon Musk and the west’s fascist fifth column NICK COHEN · SEPTEMBER 9, 2023 Elon Musk and the west’s fascist fifth column The liberal despair of Rafael Behr NICK COHEN · MAY 7, 2023 The liberal despair of Rafael Behr A “clenching of the soul,” David Grossman calls it. The Israeli novelist’s description of the foreboding that subsumes you as your life darkens should echo with anyone who has been mentally assaulted and battered. Strength vanishes. The body aches. The brain feels like a muscle twisted by cramp. Arthur Miller, JK Rowling and the death of witch hunts Nick Cohen · 24 August 2023 Arthur Miller, JK Rowling and the death of witch hunts I love producing this newsletter, but it is a lot work! To support my journalism please click on the link below. A subscription costs £1.15 a week, and there is a free trial on offer too Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between the arts in the UK and in a dictatorship. Writing from London. © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Fear and lies in a world of fakes The weekend round up NICK COHEN JAN 28

Hello everyone and thank you so much for reading. In particular, I must thank the paying subscribers who signed up last week because you allow me to work. If you want to join them, and can afford to keep this project going, please subscribe for the ridiculously low price of £1.15 ($1.45) a week by clicking on the button below. Right then, while you fumble for your credit cards, I will talk about the rise of fakery: fake news, fake images, fake audio, fake politics. Let me begin with someone I know. I admire Michela Wrong enormously. She does what journalists are meant to do: she afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted. Her beat was Africa, and Michela spent her career puncturing the West’s illusions about its rulers. After Paul Kagame’s forces overthrew Rwanda’s genocidal Hutu regime in 1994, the world wanted to believe in a fairy story. The mass murder of Rwanda’s Tutsi population would be followed by peace, reconciliation and justice, it thought, as it threw praise and money at Kagame’s government. Rwanda became the darling of the global aid industry. Under New Labour and the Tories, Kagame was feted. Now our Conservative government declares that Rwanda is such a serene and safe country, Britain can dump asylum seekers there without the smallest concern for their safety or the faintest suspicion that corrupt officials will siphon off taxpayers’ money. It was such a compelling story. Kagame and his idealistic group of young rebel fighters overthrow a genocidal regime ushering in an era of peace and stability. Under his leadership Rwanda became the West’s donor darling, hailed as Africa’s “Switzerland” or “Singapore” The compelling story was also such balls. Michela exposed the lies, and has suffered a campaign of terrifying vilification as a result. As AI and deep fake technology advance, not only journalists, politicians and celebrities, but potentially all of us can suffer equally ferocious attacks as calumny becomes ever easier to manufacture. But first let me tell you what happened to Michela, then I will move on to the wider implications... © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Trump persuades British Tories to betray their country The MAGA threat to national security

LOL ! This guy is so full of himself ! Believe me when I say I could jump on my high horse and denounce Donald Trump. Nothing would be easier than to go on (and on) about his racism and brutality, his corruption and misogyny. I could cry with polemical indignation about how he encourages insurrection, tells lies without end, and presents a clear threat to American democracy. Of course I could. I could do it in my sleep. Instead of moralising, however, I want to offer a factual proposition no fair-minded person can contradict. Donald Trump is a threat to European security. No patriotic European conservative – or patriot of any other political persuasion –can support his return to power Trump and his followers see NATO as a globalist plot by elite warmongers to suck America into paying for Europe’s defence, and their ideology is already having consequences. At Trump’s instigation Republicans in Congress are blocking US aid to Ukraine. At first, observers thought it was just a negotiating tactic. Republicans would get tougher controls on the US border with Mexico in return for agreeing to Biden's aid package. But Trump does not want a deal. Compromise would help Biden, which he has no intention of doing, and it would help Ukraine, and he won’t do that either. If Trump wins, the US deterrent will vanish. If Russia attacks, there will be no guarantees that the US will respond, and Russia will know that. The UK and the EU will face a full-scale military crisis. Conservatives, who say that national security is their first concern, simply cannot endorse Trump without making a nonsense of their lives. Yet a nonsense is what they are making. The worst Conservatives are now prepared to put love of radical right ideology before love of country. Boris Johnson is to the fore. He declared that “a Trump presidency could be just what the world needs”. And even I was faintly shocked by this treacherous performance. Many of us who opposed Johnson, thought that, say whatever else we liked about him, he had shown courage and principle in his willingness to defend Ukraine after the Russian invasion. Now he is prepared to abandon it. Johnson covers his betrayal by wailing that “I simply cannot believe that Trump will ditch the ­Ukrainians”. It’s a worthless caveat given that Trump has said he will ditch the Ukrainians, and his supporters in Congress are indeed ditching the Ukrainians at this very moment. At no point did Johnson discuss the consequences for NATO of a Trump victory. Or warn that the UK’s Conservative government may soon need to stop thinking about lowering taxes and start thinking about increasing defence spending. Share Instead, and tellingly, Johnsondelighted in the discomfort Trump provoked in the “global wokerati”. Like so many others, Johnson is prepared to throw away Ukraine’s security and to betray the security interests of his own country for the greater good of owning the libs. Reading through the work of the pro-Trump British Conservatives one learns that hatred of progressives is their alpha and omega. They would rather see the smile spread on Vladimir Putin’s face at the news of Trump’s r​eelection than concede an inch of ground to Western progressives. Lord (David) Frost, whom Johnson appointed to negotiate the UK’s disastrous departure from the EU, was explicit on this point. In a Telegraph opinion piece that read like a love letter, Frost began by confessing his loathing of rich American liberals, who apparently believe in forcing people to use less energy and eat less meat in the interests of restricting greenhouse gas emissions. Their environmentalism may seem a mild source of irritation but it was enough to send Frost careering to the far right. (And Trump is “far right” in the proper sense of the label because he threatens democracy.) Trump’s viciousness and his sadistic desire to humiliate all who cross him is alchemised in Frost’s mind into an endearing “brashness” and “indifference to convention”. Frost has no condemnation to make of the incitement to insurrection and all the other charges against Trump. On the evidence of his writing, His Lordship cares nothing for the fate of Europe should Trump win again. Instead, Frost displays the ghoulish admiration of the wimpy kid for the muscle-bound bully. He thrills to “Trump’s humour, [and] his one-liners, cheap though they are sometimes.” He confesses “I’d love to hear it if he were ever to come up with a nickname for Keir Starmer.” There you have it. Frost’s hatred of the left is so deep, nothing else matters. Not American or Ukrainian or British security. Nothing at all. As long as the playground bully can land his punches, the weaselly boy egging him on will clap his hands in delight. In the coming months the urge to go along with the right-wing gang will consume many British and European conservatives. In a rare moment of lucidity Frost spat out the reason why. Biden and Starmer are worse than anything the right and indeed far right can offer. Progressives may look moderate, Frost says. But, once in power, “you just might find they turn out to be a woke diversity obsessional, a believer in open borders, an open-the-spending-taps socialist”. Paranoid fear and irrational hatred justify abandoning the defence of your country. It was said of the worst of the French right in the 1930s that it would rather see Hitler invade than the left in power. Today the worst of the British right would rather see Putin’s forces advance on Kyiv than a Democrat in the White House. I cannot overemphasise how the seductions of extremism are luring at least some British Conservatives from their traditions. We could be about to witness a reversal of the pattern of the late 20th century. In the 1980s I along with many other leftists became a passionate supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament. We thought we had good reasons – just as today’s Conservatives do. The Cold War was heating up. The United States and the Soviet Union were pouring medium-range weapons into Europe. It looked as if they were preparing for a “limited” nuclear war that would have reduced the continent to ashes. Although there were communists and Soviet agents in the anti-nuclear movement, most people had honest concerns. And yet our solution threatened the security of the country. The left of the 1980s proposed that the UK should remove all US bases and decommission its own nuclear weapons – while asking nothing of the Soviet Union in return. Writing from London is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid To most people watching us, we seemed insane. The UK should disarm without getting concessions from Moscow? How did that ​work? We looked as if we were collaborating with Moscow, and that hint of treason killed the movement and the wider left. When Neil Kinnock led the Labour party in the 1980s, he spent years trying to persuade it to abandon unilateral disarmament. He knew that Margaret Thatcher could use many arguments to justify her cruel rule. And defence was always high among them. Labour would leave the country defenceless, Conservatives said. It would aid the UK’s enemies because it hated Western society more than it hated the Kremlin. Now in an irony​ of history it is the right who look like the leftists of the last century. Conservatives (or as I must keep reminding myself to say the worst Conservatives) hate progressivism as we hated Thatcherism and Reagani​sm. For them, as it was for us, it is better to endanger their country and please the Kremlin than make the smallest concession to their domestic opponents. If the right does not make a decisive break with Trump, it is at least possible to imagine that it will suffer the fate of the left of the 1980s. It certainly deserves to.​ Leave a comment Share Please consider taking out a paying subscription if you can afford to. You will have access to all articles, archives and podcast, and you will allow me to carry on writing! Best wishes, Nick Upgrade to paid Paying subsribers have hundreds of features to read. Recent examples include Arthur Miller, JK Rowling and the death of witch hunts NICK COHEN · AUGUST 24, 2023 Arthur Miller, JK Rowling and the death of witch hunts I love producing this newsletter, but it is a lot work! To support my journalism please click on the link below. A subscription costs £1.15 a week, and there is a free trial on offer too Remove the preconceptions that stop you seeing clearly, and it is hard to tell the difference between the arts in the UK and in a dictatorship. Read full story Gaza has pushed the post-colonial left into QAnon-style conspiracy theories NICK COHEN · DECEMBER 27, 2023 Gaza has pushed the post-colonial left into QAnon-style conspiracy theories On Boxing Day pro-Palestine demonstrators met customers at the Zara sale in the Westfield shopping centre, in Stratford, east London. They were not there to wish them the compliments of the season. ‘Bombs are dropping while you’re shopping,’ they chanted Writing from London © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Chill out there Nick

It’s time to abandon winner-takes-all politics in Israel A two-state solution remains the only solution NICK COHEN JAN 25 ∙ PREVIEW

The Jewish Chronicle asked me to write about the chances for a settlement in the Middle East. My first thought was to cling to the received wisdom that no compromise is possible. Whatever people might say in public, the dynamic and dominant forces on both sides push against the notion that Palestinians can have their own state in the occupied territories alongside Israel. Israel has moved ever further rightwards since the failed Oslo peace negotiations of the 1990s. In the minds of most Israelis swapping land for peace is discredited. On the other side, the global left denounces Israel as a white settler state and believes it has no right to exist. (The abolition of Israel is what that tortuous label “anti-Zionism” means.) Hamas wants an Islamic state from the river to the sea. And yet the more I looked at it the more I felt that the extremists had led both their peoples to disaster, and that the old compromise of a two-state solution remained the only way forward. Here is how I argued it out. Only a desperate opportunist fighting to save his career (and to stay out of the dock) would insult his truest ally. But that is what Benjamin Netanyahu did when he rejected Joe Biden’s two-state solution. The US president and every friendly and half-friendly European and Arab government want a settlement, as does the Palestinian Authority, as do all decent people. Yet scratch the surface and the two-state solution can seem like a pious myth. It is invoked but not believed. ... © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Psycho bosses will ruin us all! How managerial viciousness undermines society

I can predict with safety that the prosecution of 700 innocent postmasters and mistresses will be remembered for decades. It was not just that when the Post Office jailed employees and drove them to suicide it presided over one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in modern British history. You can listen to the Lowdown on psycho bosses via Apple (see below) Spotify, Android and every other hosting site. Ep 26: The Post Office scandal & the curse of British managerialism with economist Chris Dillow The Lowdown from Nick Cohen 32:32 It is that the injustice will be remembered far beyond the UK. The technology said the postal workers were guilty of stealing from their tills, and everyone – judges, juries, police officers and government ministers – believed the faulty software rather than innocent men and women. As facial recognition technologies take over police work and AI determines job prospects, the story of how the Post Office computers got it wrong will be a part of 21st century folklore. But this terrible scandal deserves to be remembered for one other reason: the attitude of managers, who did not for a moment think there was something wrong in believing that hundreds of their colleagues were criminals. The notion that the accusations must be flawed because the scale of the alleged fraud and the numbers of suspects beggared belief never occurred to them. They justified their salaries and bonuses as a legitimate reward for presiding over underlings who were no better than common criminals. Chris Dillow, the author of the Stumbling and Mumbling economics blog, is one of the best critics of the managerialist ideology that drove the Post Office scandal. You can listen to my Lowdown interview with him via the links above. I thought it would be worth going through the evidence we discuss on the show as we look at the dictatorial attitude of so many managers. We are not making an argument for anarchism. Successful organisations have successful managers. They tend to be modest managers who understand that it is impossible for the people at the top of complex organisations to know all they need to know. They have genuine consultations with their staff to fill the gaps in the knowledge. They do not behave like dictators by insisting on subservience and by refusing to allow criticism. However many managers, perhaps most managers, are not like that. And here is the main reason... Writing from London © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Conservatives would rather keep the country poor and stupid than accept their failure Why the right will allow universities to collapse NICK COHEN JAN 21 ∙ PREVIEW

Conservatives would rather keep their country poor and stupid than admit they could ever make a mistake. Readers who are astonished at the lack of remorse for the suffering brought by Brexit, should consider how runaway prejudice is now threatening higher education, whose success is a precondition for economic growth. Many universities are close to going bust. Far from trying to defend successful national institutions, parts of the right welcome the possibility of their decline and, in some cases, their destruction. Please support my journalism by becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid A study by ITN in November found that a quarter of universities are making a loss. Over the entire sector losses now total £2 billion, a huge increase from the £200 million from the year before. A recent report by Price Waterhouse Cooper concluded that “there are significant risks to the financial sustainability of both individual universities and the sector as a whole.” The government has not increased fees for domestic students since 2017. They are now worth around £6,000 per student, per year in 2012–13 prices, the accountancy firms said. To put that figure another way, funding per student is at its lowest level in over 25 years. Conservative ministers will not bail out universities with grants from the central government. Meanwhile they view international students, whose full-price fees keep the academic show on the road, with a weird chauvinism. They treat them as immigrants, not as visiting scholars. A few weeks ago Rishi Sunak stopped international graduate students from bringing family members to the UK, adding that the policy was “delivering for the British people”, as if he expected a grateful nation to applaud him for stopping the advance of an invading army. The result was so predictable you might have set your watch by it. Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, which represents more than 140 universities, warned last week that large numbers of universities are at risk of falling into financial deficit because of the decline in international student numbers. Potential students listen to the UK government, realise they are not welcome here, and take their business elsewhere. I have never understood why the government classes foreign students as immigrants. I am sure most Conservative voters don’t think of them as immigrants either. Given that the government views them with suspicion, however, it could compensate for the loss of revenue the decline in foreign student numbers brings by increasing taxpayer subsidies to universities But it won’t do that. Or it could increase tuition fees British students must pay. But it won’t do that either. Advanced economies need higher education. Conservatism in its moment of failure has embraced an anti-intellectual conspiracy theory, and decided that the UK can manage with less of it. British youth are being brainwashed by woke academics, the theory runs. Far from making the nation richer, universities are producing useless gender studies graduates, who go out into society to spread their subversive beliefs. Better to keep the young ignorant and remove their chances of advancement than allow universities to continue as they are. The parallels with Brexit are striking. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Conservatives in general have given up pretending that their promises of a global Britain finding its lost glories will ever become true. Instead they say that, even if we suffer economic decline, Brexit is still morally improving. Like cold showers and long walks in the rain it is character building. We must welcome Brexit because it delivers self-government and sovereignty, even if we are poorer as a result. Likewise in education, universities can fail because the political effect would be morally advantageous to the country even as it makes the country poorer. “The collapse of our universities is one of the best things that could happen to Britain,” wrote Michael Deacon of the Daily Telegraph. We needed more engineers and doctors and fewer sociologists, he continued. Well, all right, then. How are we to find more engineers and doctors if Conservatives allow universities to collapse? The Telegraph cannot even ask the question let alone answer it. Before I go any further I do not want for a moment to deny that woke or identitarian ideology exists, I have written about it at length, and stand by what I said. It is equally true that dissident academics, in particular gender-critical feminists, face attacks on their freedom to work and argue. Upgrade to paid It is a disgraceful comment on university life that these attacks on intellectual freedom flourish. Yet they remain isolated cases. The Conservatives have created an Office for Students and a free speech tsar to protect intellectual freedom on campus. And I am pleased to say the officers and tsars do not have a great deal of work to do because, as anyone who visits universities or interviews academics knows, that while there are individual instances of injustice, there is not a woke version of the red terror running through campuses. The UK is not the US. Indeed the single fastest way to improve national discourse would be for everyone in public life to repeat “this is not America” ten times each morning before breakfast. On the contrary, for all the undoubted cruelty of cancel culture, the true enemy of freedom and prosperity ​remains the radical right. The “woke” did not deliver Brexit, after all. Liz Truss was not a critical race theorist. ​I accept it's not a competition but it remains the case that the ideas represented by the Daily Telegraph are a greater threat to the UK than the ideas represented Guardian, however avidly left-wing activists like to pose as revolutionaries who threaten the status quo. This is not a justification of the behaviour of the worst of the left but a statement of observable fact. Share Finally, Conservatives might reasonably complain that graduates are more likely to vote for centre-left parties, and that this is evidence of indoctrination. Leaving aside the interesting argument that liberal-minded people are more ​likely to apply to university in the first place, as things stand in the UK very few people, graduate or not, are willing to vote Conservative. The latest YouGov poll found that ​the party's support stood at 10 percent of people under 50​. You can walk into any office or factory and find that the working-age population is revolting against a right that has done so little for it. The right is reacting to rejection by retreating into a fantasy. The British are a pure people, it insists, and their purity must be protected. For their own good they should be denied the opportunities the EU and further education offers them. In 1937 Bertrand Russell anticipated their delusions when he wrote one of his best essays The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed. He noted that instead of accepting that oppressed people should be freed to live normal lives, politicians of all stripes imagined that their suffering made them virtuous. He explained that:... Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to Writing from London to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives. Start trial A subscription gets you: Subscriber-only posts and full archive. Debates and your questions answered. Post comments and join the community. And allow me to give free posts to hard-up readers. © 2024 Nick Cohen 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104