Snippets: populism's second coming, assisted dying, Chinese philosophy & the strange case of JonBenét Ramsey

Meditations on the stories, words and conversations that have captured my attention in recent days

On Thursday I attended the latest Reform press conference, which has caused quite the stir in Westminster. It was not simply the headline-grabbing moment, which saw the latest Tory defector to Reform Dame Andrea Jenkyns taking to the stage, that captured the attention of hacks.

It was also the generalised sense that Reform is shedding much of its amateurism. There was much grudgingly impressed muttering at the glitziness of the venue, a velvet-draped space in the five-star May Fair hotel, built on the site of what was once the Duke of Devonshire's London pile. 

Everything from the obligatory branded wrist bands upon entry to the oat milk option at the tea station assiduously tailored to millennial food restrictions contributed to an atmosphere of almost corporate professionalism. 

Andrea Jenkyns looked splendid in a duck green gown even if she was extremely nervous and stumbled several times during her speech. All the while Nigel Farage beamed from his seat onstage wearing eye-popping Union Jack socks; of course, this made for the perfect media shot.

There is no doubt then that Reform is blossoming into a meticulous media operation. The Westminster media bubble is a strange thing for a populist movement to reckon with, scrupulously polite and skilled at talking their prey into a corner. Nigel Farage is now seasoned at dealing with this, having perfected a public face that is both jovial and frank but can like a flash, when met with a hostile question, take on a tone of reprimanding exasperation.

Even among media outlets that are unconvinced by Reform, the story of its rise is becoming irresistible. Just in the last couple of days, the Times has run a piece speculating about whether Elon Musk could propel Nigel Farage to No 10 and The Economist has written about how mundane issues like potholes could fuel Reform’s popularity. It should be a source of serious disquiet at the Conservative HQ Press Office that ‘rise of Reform’ stories are steadily becoming more interesting to national media than ‘return of the Tories’ stories, even with Kemi Badenoch at the helm.

True, many of my fellow London hacks are drawn to the Reform story out of a kind of delighted horror, like motorists slowing down to take in the full hideousness of a motorway crash. But for Reform, getting consistent national attention that takes the movement seriously as a political force is key; whether the coverage is hostile or friendly is by the bye. 

But of course a slick media operation will not be enough if Reform is to replace one of the major parties.

At the press conference, the party’s chair Zia Yusuf, who has been put in charge professionalising and scaling the Reform Party, provided a brief update on the strategy to improve the party’s ‘ground game’. This seems to draw much inspiration from the Lib Dems’ ‘pavement politics’, perfected since the years of Paddy Ashdown.

During the print media huddle I asked Nigel Farage whether Reform is working on a ‘brain game’ to complement its ‘ground game’ — that is whether it has a plan to nail the art not just of pavement politics but also populist policy making. In his response, he said that tackling social care is a particular area of interest.

Reform cannot afford to neglect policy detail. Populism needs to get over its credibility deficit. One of the factors that deterred disillusioned Tory and Labour voters alike from jumping ship and backing Reform at the last election was the suspicion that many of Reform’s plans — from one-in-one-out immigration to drastic tax cuts — are unfeasible.

Part of the problem is that, amid the failures of technocratic politicians, we have come to think that super-wicked problems like border control and stagnation are ‘impossible’. In fact they are actually perfectly surmountable, even if they require painful trade offs and tough decisions.

But an even bigger problem, I think, is that the whole policymaking ecosystem on the Right is basically brain-dead. 

Getting the ‘policy stuff’ right

True, if the Tory’s disastrous run in government proves anything it is that reforming the Blob requires not just radical ideas but a velvet glove and a knack for identifying and encouraging heretical insiders. It is notable that the only instance in which the Tories managed to convince the Treasury to alter the text in their sacred Green Book in their favour was semi-insider Rishi Sunak, when he challenged its bias against investment outside of London as Chancellor.

The person who has done more than any other to compel the Blob to question its assumption that mass immigration is unequivocally good for the economy is the paradoxical free-thinking establishment figure Sir David Miles of OBR (whom, one might recall, Liz Truss refused to work with during her brief stint as PM!).

Nevertheless, unless the Right can come up with a robust and realistic agenda for change, Whitehall will continue to call the shots, and any reformist wins will be isolated and tokenistic. Nor are there enough David Miles figures in the system to bring about a revolution from the inside.

If Reform is to become a credible major party then, it needs to demonstrate that it has sharper policy solutions to bread and butter problems like NHS reform and worklessness than its opponents. It also needs to show that it is more intellectually curious about epic, neglected questions such as how to solve the “productivity puzzle”, and how to harness the potential of AI.

Reform donors, if they are really serious about reviving Britain, need to think about financing some kind of spin-off reformist think tank ecosystem. The big problem at the moment is that, on the Right, the latter is divided into legacy institutions that derive from the Thatcher era, and newer outfits that are narrowly focused on trying to ‘understand’ the Red Wall voter through intense polling. 

There is a clear need for a think tank ecosystem to fundamentally challenge Treasury/OBR hegemony. This ecosystem would interrogate the Treasury’s myopic first principle that the worst case scenario that faces Britain — and Whitehall must strain to avoid at all costs — is a crushing interest rate crisis redolent of the Truss experiment. In fact, as the welfare bill continues to rise, Britain is heading for that fatal point where it  risks defaulting on its debt — unable to raise more revenue through increasing the tax burden, or muster the political will to push through massive spending cuts. 

With a focus on tackling Britain’s productivity stagnation, encouraging more high-skill jobs in former manufacturing centres, and ensuring the country is at the forefront of AI innovation, this ecosystem would also seek to overturn the outdated neoclassical economic view that wealth originates from material sources (land, physical labour and capital) and asset accumulation occurs in a static world through trade and war. In reality wealth derives from creativity, and asset accumulation is driven by discoveries and innovation.

Put simply, there is a need for an economic think tank or community of think tanks that start from the first premises of Schumpeter, rather than Hayek (as is the case with the IEA). This fundamental shift in economic thinking is vital; without it, any attempt to come up with the kind of policy interventions that will encourage the creation of high-skilled, decently paid jobs in areas still reeling from the collapse in manufacturing will fail. Underlying bad policy is always bad theory.

As Reform continues to gather momentum, a second populist upset in Britain looks increasingly likely. Whether the next ‘earthquake’ will actually yield a breakthrough for Britain largely depends on how much effort the populist Right puts into not just building a populist election-winning machine but also upping its intellectual game. 

Assisted Dying legislation passes Commons vote

In recent days, MPs have voted to pass a bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill adults. This ought to be welcomed as a rare triumph for freedom at a time when our liberties are being steadily eroded and the West’s philosophical commitment to individual human autonomy is collapsing.

A lot of the conservative reservations about the legislation are, in my view, narrow and misguided.

The slippery slope argument is dubious on many levels. Canada has witnessed a relatively rapid widening of legislative scope within a highly different context and constitutional framework. In Canada, it is the courts that have led the charge, after the country’s Supreme Court found that the current situation violated Canadians’ constitutional rights. In the UK, only Parliament would be able to sanction a broadening of the legislation to apply to more people, such as those living with chronic, crippling illness.

I’ve also heard quite a few half-digested ‘libertarian’ arguments about how assisted dying signals a chilling power grab by the state.

Any libertarian discussion of assisted dying should take account of the long-view that, in the modern era of medical advancement and mass welfare, the sovereign’s power is no longer epitomised — as it was in the age of public execution — by its ability to take away life; the bureaucratic-medical establishment’s power now primarily lies in its ability to make us live — even when we may not wish to. 

That the libertarian Right has not grasped this basic reality betrays their refusal to read the heretical texts of Michel Foucault. 

The long-view state power that I worry about is the kind of state power that will nudge humankind towards eking out a shapeless, pointless, dependent existence beyond their natural biological age span, irrespective of their preferences.

This prospect is particularly troubling to me in view of the new elite morality evolving out of the ‘life extension’ industry in Silicon Valley. Championed by entrepreneurs who are necking over a hundred pills a day to ‘defeat death’ and deem eating a cookie as an ‘act of violence’, this sunny Californian worldview seems to hinge on the notion that it is humanity’s responsibility, not to live a particularly meaningful life, but to live as long as possible. 

The assisted dying legislation is a small but important step towards challenging such disturbing trends.

Can we learn anything from China about freedom?

This week I also popped by the LSE for the launch of Professor Hugo de Burgh’s new book – Who Are We? And how will we survive in the Age of Asia? – which calls for a Sixth revolution in the Western political and economic spheres.

It brought to mind a question that has percolating at the back of my mind for some time but I have yet to seriously pursue the answer to:

Political repression aside, do the Chinese possess a concept of freedom that is actually in some ways better suited to the challenges of the modern age and might in fact serve them rather well in the age of technological innovation?

Sir Vince Cable, who introduced the book at the launch, noted his observation from his extensive travels to China that economic decision-making is a lot more decentralised there than it is in many Western countries, not least over-centralised Britain. In many ways an entrepreneur in Beijing with an outlandish business idea faces less cultural scepticism and red tape than someone seeking to launch a startup in London. 

Of course, whether there is anything we might learn from Chinese ‘freedom’ on a more general philosophical level, is more controversial. As the philosophy professor Peimin Ni explains:

“In the Taoist philosophy, we find a strikingly different idea of freedom [compared with the West]….Instead of focusing on an absence of external constraint or coercion, the Taoist focuses on modifying the self that can be in conflict with external constraints. Instead of being critical of the external environment and requesting the environment to give room to the individual's desires or will, the Taoist requires the individual to be critical of him/herself, and to be in harmony with his/her environment.”

In other words, the Taoist concept of freedom seems to demand, quite dangerously, that the individual give up the self and meld seamlessly into the collective in order to achieve ‘real freedom’. This smacks of an interpretation of liberty conveniently well suited to a conformist, oppressive surveillance state. 

On the other hand, more intriguing is the Confucian attitude — that freedom is not something that humans are born with but rather perfect and earn as they grow into purposeful, self-directing individuals. As the juris doctor Zejian Zhou argues: 

“Confucian freedom requires one to gain freedom through gradual efforts in one’s entire life. Moreover, Confucian freedom is a layered process, which includes practice, morality, and responsibility. Practice and morality help a person achieve individual freedom, while responsibility brings communal freedom.”

At a time when the West is reeling from a cultural understanding of liberty that emphasises human rights at the expense of personal responsibility, perhaps there is something in Confucianism worthy of our attention. 

Bland binaries about Western individualism versus Eastern collectivism preclude us from appreciating this.

The best thing I watched this week

Cold Case: Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey on Netflix 

They say post-truth began with Trump. It didn’t. Some time in the 1990s The culture of modern mass delusion began with 24/7 media coverage of high-profile crimes. When OJ Simpson was put on trial for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, the African-American attitude to ‘The Truth’ seemed to operate on two planes; while many might have tacitly accepted that he was probably guilty on a literal level, they refused to entertain it on a symbolic level, insisting on his ‘innocence’ as some kind of perverse payback for the countless occasions when the black man has gone down for a crime he didn’t commit.

Another 1990s high-profile crime that epitomised the birth of the post-truth era was the coverage around the killing of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey. 

The new Netflix documentary is a fascinating blow-by-blow account of how America became convinced that her parents were guilty of her murder — even though police were aware of a DNA report that seemingly cleared the Ramseys a mere few months after the killing.

It also casts light on how moral disgust at JonBenét’s participation in beauty pageants fuelled popular condemnation of the Ramseys. 

Child beauty pageants are weird. A subculture that has thrived in the American West and Deep South, they are a toxic collision of liberalism and conservatism — a commercially fuelled industry that rewards little girls for their looks, and puts the perfect children of perfect families on tawdry display, amid blather about female agency and boosting self-esteem.

That doesn’t make the Ramseys murderers. JonBenét’s parents had her participate in child pageants. Child beauty pageants are creepy. It doesn’t logically follow that JonBenét was murdered by her ‘creepy’ parents. It is frightening that such fundamentally dumb ‘logic’ is prevalent in our society.

The best prose I read this week

Paul Murray on poetry:

“People imagined poems were wispy things, she said, frilly things, like lace doilies. But in fact they were like claws, like the metal spikes mountaineers use to find purchase on the sheer face of a glacier. By writing a poem, the lady poets could break through the slippery, nothingy surface of the life they were enclosed in, to the passionate reality that beat beneath it. Instead of falling down the sheer face, they could haul themselves up, line by line, until at last they stood on top of the mountain. And then maybe, just maybe, they might for an instance see the world as it really is.”

From The Bee Sting

And a random discovery…

On the topic of China, at an Asian fusion restaurant in London a waiter advised I pair a chicken dish with a Chinese cabernet sauvignon called Chateau Changyu Moser. I wasn’t even aware that China had a wine industry, but apparently it has a thriving viticulture region in its north-central corner called Ningxia. I must admit I was sceptical to try it but it was actually a real treat, fizzing with black fruits and vanilla flavour. Mentioning it here ahead of the festive season as I think it would serve as a zippy accompaniment to any turkey roast on Christmas Day. Price isn’t bad for a special occasion at £16.99 online.