Luck and Politics

Bagehot in The Economist

Monday june 19th was a typical day in British politics insofar as it involved a series of humiliations for the Conservative Party. mps approved a report on Boris Johnson condemning the former prime minister for lying to Parliament over lockdown-busting parties. Rishi Sunak skipped proceedings for a fortunately timed meeting with Sweden’s prime minister. On the same day, the invite emerged for an illegal “Jingle and Mingle” event at the party’s headquarters during the Christmas lockdown of 2020. A video of the event had already circulated, with one staffer overheard saying it was fine “as long as we don’t stream that we’re, like, bending the rules”. Labour, through no efforts of their own, had their reputation comparatively enhanced.

Luck is an overlooked part of politics. It is in the interests of both politicians and those who write about them to pretend it plays little role. Yet, as much as strategy or skill, luck determines success. “Fortune is the mistress of one half of our actions, and yet leaves the control of the other half, or a little less, to ourselves,” wrote Machiavelli in “The Prince” in the 16th century. Some polls give Labour a 20-point lead. Partly this is because, under Sir Keir Starmer, they have jettisoned the baggage of the Jeremy Corbyn-era and painted a picture of unthreatening economic diligence. Mainly it is because they are damned lucky.

If Sir Keir does have a magic lamp, it has been buffed to a blinding sheen. After all, it is not just the behaviour of Mr Johnson that helps Labour. Britain is suffering from a bout of economic pain in a way that particularly hurts middle-class mortgage holders, who are crucial marginal voters. Even the timing helps. Rather than a single hit, the pain will be spread out until 2024, when the general election comes due. Each quarter next year, about 350,000 households will re-mortgage and become, on average, almost £3,000 ($3,830) per year worse off, according to the Resolution Foundation. Labour strategists could barely dream of a more helpful backdrop.

Political problems that once looked intractable for Labour have solved themselves. Scotland was supposed to be a Gordian knot. How could a unionist party such as Labour tempt left-wing voters of the nationalist Scottish National Party (snp)? The police have fixed that. Nicola Sturgeon, the most talented Scottish politician of her generation, found herself arrested and quizzed over an illicit £100,000 camper van and other matters to do with party funds. The snp’s poll rating has collapsed and another 25 seats are set to fall into the Labour leader’s lap thanks to pc McPlod and (at best) erratic book-keeping by the snp.

It is not the first time police have come to Sir Keir’s aid. He promised to quit in 2022 if police fined him for having a curry and beer with campaigners during lockdown-affected local elections in 2021. Labour’s advisers were adamant no rules were broken. But police forces were erratic in dishing out penalties, veering between lax and draconian. It was a risk. Sir Keir gambled and won.

Luck will always play a large role in a first-past-the-post system that generates big changes in electoral outcomes from small shifts in voting. Margins are often tiny. Mr Corbyn came, according to one very optimistic analysis, within 2,227 votes of scraping a majority in the 2017 general election, if they had fallen in the right places. Likewise, in 2021, Labour faced a by-election in Batley and Spen, in Yorkshire. A defeat would almost certainly have triggered a leadership challenge; Labour clung on, narrowly, and so did Sir Keir. If he enters Downing Street in 2024, he will have 323 voters just outside Leeds to thank.

Sir Keir is hardly the first leader to benefit from fortune’s favour. Good ones have always needed it. Sir Tony Blair reshaped Labour and won three general elections. But he only had the job because John Smith, his predecessor, dropped dead at 55. (“He’s fat, he’s 53, he’s had a heart attack and he’s taking on a stress-loaded job” the Sun had previously written, with unkind foresight.) Without the Falklands War in 1982, Margaret Thatcher would have asked for re-election soon afterwards based on a few years of a faltering experiment with monetarism. Formidable political talent is nothing without a dash of luck.

Often the most consequential politicians are the luckiest. Nigel Farage has a good claim to be the most influential politician of the past 20 years. He should also be dead. The former leader of the uk Independence Party was run over in 1985. Then, in 1987, testicular cancer nearly killed him. In 2010, he survived a plane crash after a banner—“Vote for your country—Vote ukip”—became tangled around the plane. Smaller factors also played in Mr Farage’s favour: when he was a member of the European Parliament he was randomly allocated a seat next to the European Commission president, providing a perfect backdrop for viral speeches. (“They handed me the internet on a plate!” chortles Mr Farage.) Britain left the eu, in part, because Mr Farage is lucky.

Stop polishing that lamp, you’ll go blind

Too much good luck can be a bad thing. David Cameron gambled three times on referendums (on the country’s voting system, on Scottish independence and on Brexit). He won two heavily and lost one narrowly. Two out of three ain’t bad, but it is enough to condemn him as one of the worst prime ministers on record. “A Prince who rests wholly on fortune is ruined when she changes,” wrote Machivelli. It was right in 1516; it was right in 2016. Labour would do well to heed the lesson. It sometimes comes across as a party that expects the Conservatives to lose, rather than one thinking how best to win.

Fortune has left Labour in a commanding position. Arguments against a Labour majority rely on hope (perhaps inflation will come down sharply) not expectation. Good luck may power Labour to victory in 2024, but it will not help them govern. The last time Labour replaced the Conservatives, in 1997, the economy was flying. Now, debt is over 100% of gdp. Growth prospects are lacking, while public services are failing. It will be a horrible time to run the country. Bad luck.

The Difference between Bullshit and Lying

We have suffered both. Some never speak the truth because they don’t know or care about it. Others know the truth but lie anyway wrires Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

I

llustration: Ben Jennings/The Guardian 

 
Sometimes it falls to an old book to tell us what’s new, to a white-bearded philosopher based far from Westminster or Washington to clarify the shifts in our sharp-suited politics. So spare yourself the annual round-ups in the newspapers or the boy-scout enthusiasm of podcasters. To understand the great political shift of this year, the work you need is a piece of philosophy called ­– what else? – On Bullshit.

I offer it to you this Christmas because surely no reader of mine can resist an essay that begins: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this.” Statements like that made it a bestseller upon re-publication in 2005 and turned its then-75-year-old author, Harry Frankfurt, from a distinguished moral philosopher at Yale and Princeton into a chatshow guest.

But to open the book now is to get a blast of something quite different, in a climate that just didn’t exist two decades ago. Read today, On Bullshit taxonomises an entire style of government. It foretells the age of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

The task Frankfurt sets himself is to define bullshit. What it is not, he argues, is lying. Both misrepresent the truth, but with entirely different intentions. The liar is “someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood”. He or she knows the truth or could lay hands on it – but they certainly aren’t giving it to you. The bullshitter, on the other hand, “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshitters couldn’t give two hoots about the truth. They just want a story.

In that distinction lies an explanation for this era of politics. Commentators have struggled for years to coin the phrase for now. “Populist” doesn’t work. Too often, it merely denotes what the author and their friends dislike, throwing together clowns such as Beppe Grillo with social democrats such as Jeremy Corbyn. A similar problem bedevils “strongman”, a label stuck on Xi Jinping and Jair Bolsonaro alike. But “bullshitter” – that sums up just how different Trump and Johnson are from their predecessors.

‘Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames.’ Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Some enterprising future editor of a dictionary of political terms will carry the word “bullshit” and cite as examples: writing two opposing columns on Brexit, claiming the NHS will be £350m a week better off and affecting a hurt expression when asked the whereabouts of your promised 40 new hospitals. Come on! Those little-doggy eyes beseech the hard-faced TV interviewer. Didn’t everyone know that was bullshit?

Socially, there is little to distinguish Johnson from David Cameron: both are Bullingdon boys manufactured at Eton. In policy, too, there is a fair carryover between George Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” and Johnson’s “levelling up”, or between Cameron’s vow to get net immigration down to the tens of thousands and the pledges made by Johnson’s home secretary, Priti Patel. The great divide is in rhetoric: how Johnson talked to voters and the promises he made us. They were never meant to be taken at face value.

Among the media class’s artisanal industries of the past few years has been trying to find a thread that runs through Johnson the journalist, the globalist mayor of London and the Brexit prime minister. Frankfurt furnishes that link: it is bullshit.

Bullshit is where newspaper stories about Italians demanding smaller condoms meet plans for an airport on an island in the Thames meet promises of an “oven-ready” Brexit deal. They are electioneering fables rather than manifesto commitments, grand gestures over small print, cheerful dishonesty in place of lawyered mendacity. In other words, they are all just careerist bullshit.

Much the same goes for Liz Truss, although she was clearly not as good at it. Looking back, this summer’s Tory leadership contest can be seen as a final hurrah for the “anything goes” era. And it certainly applies to Trump. “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” Bullshit. “Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest.” Bullshit. A “sea of love” at his inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Frankfurt’s book offers a theory of a generation of politicians who now appear to be leaving the stage.

‘A ‘sea of love’ at Donald Trump’s inauguration that broke all records. Bullshit.’ Photograph: Saul Loeb/EPA

Lies can be shown up: Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. But there is no point factchecking bullshit, as parts of the British media still do over Brexit or the New York Times did with Trump. For a bullshitter, facts are beside the point – the real aim is to produce a story that erases the line between truth and falsehood. It’s why the philosopher concludes: “Bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

We all lie sometimes, and around millions of tables there will be much bullshit spoken over the Christmas turkey. In British politics, the era of bullshit followed on naturally from a long spell of lies. Before Johnson, the most effective Tory of the post-Thatcher era was Osborne.

He blamed Labour and Gordon Brown for the banking crash, only later admitting that was untrue. He declared Labour’s 2008 package to bail out the banks would spark a run on the pound, before confessing: “Broadly speaking, the government did what was necessary.”

Most of all, he claimed that slashing benefits was essential to bring down borrowing and was being done fairly. Remember “we are all in this together”? Except a study at the end of the coalition by the late John Hills, of the LSE, alongside other leading academics, showed that the coalition’s tax and benefit changes had “a net fiscal cost” – which meant they increased the deficit. Not only that, but “the poorest 30% [of Britons] lost or broke even on average and the top half gained”. Heading the Treasury, Osborne was in charge of a machine that could calculate the effects of his policies. He would have or should have known the truth as he laid out each budget. And yet voters were fed something entirely different.

One might see these as common or garden political lies – falsehoods that could be checked and that aimed at nothing more than establishing a poll lead for Osborne’s team. They were not the alternative reality of Vote Leave. But if the currency of truth is sufficiently debased, voters may eventually choose the altogether more entertaining humbugger. In that lies a warning for both Rishi Sunak, the down-to-earth multimillionaire, and Keir Starmer, the man who said he was Corbyn before revealing himself to be Tony Blair meets Gordon Brittas, the TV sitcom manager whose words never match results or deeds.

One topic Frankfurt doesn’t address is the audience for bullshit. Why do people buy it? To which we might add another question. Why have swathes of the political establishment and the press spent the past few years claiming Brexit is a success or that levelling up is serious or that any alternative to the most venal dishonesty is just impossible? Answers would be welcome but were we to press for any, I suspect we’d be told to drop the bullshit.

Striking workers are providing the opposition that Britain desperately needs

Andy Beckett in The Guardian

In Britain, more than in most democratic countries, going on strike is a risk. Your employer, the government, most of the media, much of the public and often the opposition parties are likely to be against you – or, at best, unsupportive. Your loss of income is unlikely to be made up by strike pay. Your behaviour on the picket line will be subject to what Tony Blair described approvingly in 1997 as “the most restrictive” trade union laws “in the western world”.

In very public ways, you will be breaking the rules of the modern economy: refusing to work, inconveniencing consumers, acting collectively rather than individually, and making demands for more money openly – rather than in private, as more powerful people do. If you are on the left, you are likely to be told again and again that your strike is politically counterproductive.

Such are the written and unwritten laws that have constricted British strikes for approaching half a century, ever since the walkouts of the 1978-79 winter of discontent inadvertently did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher to power and to provoke the counter-revolution against workers that still continues today. Many voters have long got used to the idea that strikes are a minority pursuit associated with a bygone age to which the country must not return. Boris Johnson’s government, with its especially strong intolerance of dissent, aims to demonise and marginalise strikes even further.

Yet this summer, more and more Britons are striking or considering striking regardless. From railway workers to barristers, firefighters to doctors, Post Office workers to teachers, nurses to civil servants, council workers to British Telecom engineers, an unusually large potential strike wave is building. Its social breadth, the range of occupations affected and the atmosphere on some picket lines all suggest that something politically significant may be happening.

At the first barristers’ protest, outside the Old Bailey in London this week, an already excited crowd of advocates in courtroom wigs and gowns burst into prolonged applause when they were joined by a few activists in shorts and jeans from the RMT. It’s not every day that you see such camaraderie between self-employed professionals who rely heavily on trains and striking transport workers carrying a banner that calls for “the supersession of the capitalist system by a socialistic order of society”.

The cost of living crisis, and the refusal of the government and other employers to raise wages accordingly, is the immediate reason for this summer’s “wave of resistance”, as Mick Lynch of the RMT union calls it. Yet the causes go deeper: more than a decade of stagnant or falling wages; the long Conservative squeeze on the public sector; and the whole transformation of the British economy since the 1970s, which has effectively taken money from workers and given it to employers, shareholders and the wealthy.


Public dissatisfaction with this model has been growing for years. In the latest British Social Attitudes survey, 64% agree that “‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth” – up from 57% in 2019, and far greater than the support for any party. As Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn tapped into this discontent. But the end of his tenure, and Keir Starmer’s apparent lack of interest in its redistributive ideas, has created a vacuum where a movement with a radical economic agenda ought to be.

It’s possible that the strike wave could become one such movement. While support for the strikes has been stronger than expected - the pollster Savanta ComRes found that even 38% of Tory voters considered the highly disruptive rail strikes “justified”; among younger people this attitude was particularly prevalent. In the same survey, 72% of under-35s backed the strikers. Since few of them have ever been on strike themselves – less than a quarter of trade unionists are under 35 – then the likely explanation is not shared experience but shared disenchantment. Young people, like many of the strikers, have been particularly badly served by the status quo.

Many young people supported Corbyn for the same reason. And there are other similarities between the two movements. Former Corbyn advisers such as James Schneider, Corbyn himself, and the parliamentary Labour left all support the strikers. Green activists, once an important part of Corbyn’s coalition, have joined RMT picket lines. Like Labour’s 2017 election manifesto, Lynch uses clear, populist language – “every worker in Britain” should get a much better pay deal, he told Question Time – and its effectiveness has taken the media by surprise. Support for the RMT strike rose after his TV appearances.

Could the strikers succeed, not just in getting fairer pay deals but in beginning to change how the economy works? It’s an immense task, which Labour under Corbyn sometimes talked about compellingly but never came close to carrying out. And as the strikes widen and lengthen, public opinion may turn against them. Walking to work because of a train strike will seem less of a novelty and more of an imposition if that dispute drags on into the autumn. One of the obvious but often forgotten lessons of the winter of discontent is that voters often hate strikes in cold weather.

Excited union talk about building new mass movements has proved over-optimistic in the past, for example during David Cameron’s government. The proportion of British employees who are union members has stabilised in recent years, after decades of decline, but by historic standards it is still low: less than one in four. And the fact that Starmer is not prepared to support the strikers removes one of the main means by which their campaigns could be amplified.

Yet for almost a decade now, British politics has not followed the expected paths. It may be that an economy built on poor wages was politically and socially sustainable only while inflation stayed low. That relatively stable and docile era may be over. Recently, the leftwing website Left Foot Forward listed some of the pay rises already won this summer by the increasingly assertive trade union Unite: “300 workers at Gatwick get 21 per cent”, “300 HGV drivers win 20 per cent”. In post-Thatcher Britain, such transfers of wealth to the workers – not just matching but far exceeding the rate of inflation – aren’t supposed to happen. But they are.

Unlike in the 1980s, when the iron lady beat Britain’s last big wave of strikes, unemployment is low and the supply of labour is short. If strikers don’t like a pay offer, sometimes they can threaten to go and work for someone who pays more. You could call it an example of something the Tories talk less about these days: market forces.

Desmond Tutu, Keir Starmer & The Friend of Jeffery Epstein