From Donald Trump to the Brexit campaign, outrageous untruths are almost a matter of course. How did we reach the point where ‘falsehood flies’?

Steven Poole in The Guardian


 

A Vote Leave battle bus, rebranded outside parliament in London by Greenpeace last month. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images



Donald Trump announced last week that Barack Obama was the “founder of Isis” and its “most valuable player”. Earlier he had hinted that gun activists might want to assassinate Hillary Clinton to prevent her appointing liberal justices to the Supreme Court. In Britain, meanwhile, calls for the moderation of violent political language after the death of Jo Cox have not resulted in much reduction of the gleeful talk of “stabbings” and “traitors”, and did not discourage Nigel Farage from exulting that the Brexit vote had been won “without a shot being fired”. In what some call an era of “post-truth politics”, public discourse seems more abusive and angry, and further from the ideal of reasoned conversation about social goods, than ever before. Is our political language broken?

Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself.

Nor is flat-out lying in politics anything new. There is a marvellous 18th-century pamphlet usually attributed to John Arbuthnot, friend of Swift and Pope and founder of the Scriblerus club. It describes a yet-to-be-written book, The Art of Political Lying, in which the author will show “that the People have a Right to private Truth from their Neighbours ... but that they have no Right at all to Political Truth”.

The coinage “post-truth politics”, indeed, implies that there was once a golden age of politics in which its elevated practitioners spoke nothing but perfect truth. The sun never dawned on such a day. But perhaps what feels new to us now is the shamelessness of the lying, and the barefaced repeating of a lie repeatedly debunked. Arbuthnot cautioned that the same lie should not be “obstinately insisted upon”, but he did not live to see this strategy work so brilliantly during the EU referendum, with the Leave campaign’s claim that we sent £350m a week to the EU.

Shameless, too, was the haste with which this lie, having done its work, was disowned on the morning of the referendum result. It was a “mistake”, muttered Nigel Farage, before carefully lowering his snout back into the EU trough that continues to pay his MEP’s salary. This rather called to mind Paul Wolfowitz’s candid admission that the issue of Saddam’s alleged WMD was chosen as the justification for the Iraq war “for bureaucratic reasons”. The surprise, perhaps, is that you can show how the magic trick works, and people still believe it next time.

Champion of ‘free speech’: Donald Trump at a campaign rally last week. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Not so long ago it was “soundbites” that were thought to be corrupting political debate by reducing complex ideas to slogans. The 1988 US presidential election was called the “soundbite election” by some commentators, the most famous example being George HW Bush’s promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” (Two years later Bush agreed to a bipartisan budget that did increase taxes.) It was a mysteriously brilliant piece of verbal engineering. Why would you have to read Bush’s lips when you could hear what he was saying on the TV? But the surprising image and arresting rhythm made it stick.

Soundbites and slogans (“Take Back Control”) still work. Trump, too, has a conventional campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again”. (Great how, exactly? By doing what? Don’t ask.) But he gets most publicity for his antic, apparently off-the-cuff remarks that rhetorically perform an absence of rhetoric. His real genius might be read as a satirical absolutism about the first amendment. If speech is genuinely free, there should be no consequences to speech whatsoever. And, to the mystification of the commenting class, this is what Trump repeatedly finds to be the case.

After the media furore surrounding Trump’s claim that Obama founded Isis, he tweeted: “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?” Thus he rows back from any outrageous claim dreamed up by a brain that works like a cleverly programmed internet meme-generator. “I don’t know,” he says, all innocence, “that’s what some people are saying.” (No one was before he did.) Yet the idea Obama is the founder of Isis will stick in at least some voters’ minds come polling day, as will the imaginary Mexican wall (though they will probably have forgotten its “big beautiful door”) – just as the “£350m a week for the NHS” promise did for many Leave voters.

Trump is not a perversion of the tradition of political campaigning; he is the logical culmination of it. It doesn’t matter what you say, if it helps you get elected. Trump is not a liar, exactly, but a bullshitter. According to the canonical definition by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, a liar still cares about the truth because he wants to conceal it from you. A bullshitter, on the other hand, simply doesn’t care what is true at all.

Trump is merely the most energetic current exploiter of a fact that modern politicians have long known: the media is broken, and you can mercilessly exploit its flaws to your own benefit. (That, after all, is what “spin doctors” are for.) If you repeat a lie often enough, then that claim becomes the story, and it’s what most people remember. And a structural confusion between “impartiality” and “balance” undermines the mission to inform of institutions such as the BBC. To be impartial would be to point out untruths wherever they come from. But to be “balanced” is to have a three-way between a presenter and two economists on opposite sides of some question. Never mind that one economist represents the views of 95% of the profession and the other is an ideologically blinkered outlier: the structure of the interview itself implies to the audience that the arguments are evenly divided.

In the age of social media, moreover, dubious political claims are packed into atomised fragments and attract thousands of enthusiastic retweets, while the people who help to redistribute them are unlikely ever to see a rebuttal that comes later or in someone else’s timeline. We’ve all moved on.

Social media is less a conversation than it is a virtually distributed riot of “happy firing” (a term for the celebratory shooting of assault rifles into the sky). That lies can go viral more quickly than the truth is another old observation. In 1710 Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” But what is certain is that Twitter and Facebook now help it fly faster and further than ever before.

Nigel Farage proved the power of powerful slogans and images during the EU referendum campaign. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Because attention is the currency of social media, public figures are incentivised to use outrage to vie for visibility, which further coarsens the public discourse – as when the American shock-journo Ann Coulter lately defended Trump by calling him a “victim of media rape” who is being blamed for “wearing a short skirt”. Any such outburst these days, along with the wave of overt post-Brexit racism in Britain, may be defended as a healthy refusal to kowtow to “political correctness”, a term that originally denoted the careful use of language so as not to needlessly upset people, and now just means common decency.

What, then, is to be done? The modern bullshitting demagogue succeeds because he says arresting and often amusing things that cut through the anomie of those who feel left behind by politics as usual. Exquisitely reasoned liberal conversation is exactly what turns those voters off. Lately it has been notable that Hillary Clinton, not previously considered the wittiest person in US politics, has used an impressive array of scripted zingers to put down her opponent. What the bullshitters do so well is define the rules of the game, so perhaps their opponents will have to play it at least to this extent, while trying to keep the moral high ground by still caring about what is true and what isn’t.

It’s not an edifying thought, but if the insurgent right is to have its Trumps and its Farages, maybe the centre and the left need their own versions too.

BCCI, Katju and Cricket in India

Suhrith Parthasarathy in The Hindu

The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s decision last week to appoint a former Supreme Court judge, Justice Markandey Katju, to “interact with the Justice Lodha Committee” and to “advise and guide” the BCCI on its affairs is, at best, an effort at prevarication, and, at worst, a subversion of the Supreme Court’s authority. Exacerbating the tension, following his appointment, Justice Katju, rather indecorously given his stature as a retired judge, on August 6 released what he termed as a “first report,” with “more reports to follow,” in which he declared the Supreme Court’s judgment appointing the Lodha Committee as illegal and unconstitutional.

It is one thing to critique the court’s judgment as an outsider; for instance, it is plausible to argue, even if incorrectly, that the court ought to have exercised greater restraint in interfering with the board’s affairs. But to do as Justice Katju has, to advise a party to openly disregard the Supreme Court’s verdict, presents a dangerous proposition, one that is far more threatening than any act of judicial overreach. What’s more, in any event, given the peculiar facts and circumstances surrounding the BCCI’s structure, Justice Katju’s assertion that the court has exceeded its brief also fails to pass muster. If anything, these developments exemplify precisely why the Supreme Court’s intervention in this case was justified.

Why we play sport

To understand why the Supreme Court thought it fit to appoint the committee presided by the former Chief Justice of India, R.M. Lodha, to inquire into, and to recommend changes, to the BCCI’s organisation, we must confront a few fundamental questions. Too often, amid the chaotic world of modern sport, we tend to lose track of why we play sport, why we watch games, why we revel in them, and why we invest so much of our emotions into seemingly pointless pursuits. We must first ask ourselves, therefore, what the abiding purpose of cricket is. What do we want from it? Is the sport meant for pure entertainment? Can it be commercially exploited by a band of the elite owing no responsibility to the public? Or do we want the sport to represent a higher, more virtuous purpose? If so, how are we to achieve these ends?

To take any sport seriously, and to ask such questions, seems to represent, in some ways, an incongruity in terms. In fact, many commentators considered the adjudication of the dispute concerning the BCCI and allegations of spot-fixing as a waste of the Supreme Court’s precious time. The public, they warned, was according more importance to cricket than it really deserved. But the danger, contrary to such counsel, is not that we are taking sport too seriously. It is that we are not taking sport seriously enough.

As the American academic, Jan Boxill, has argued, sport serves to establish a moral function for society. It is “an unalienated activity which is required for self-development, self-expression, and self-respect”; or, put differently, it is morally important because it is “the art of the people,” one that ought to be included in what Marx termed as the “realm of freedom”. In India, where cricket plays such a pervasive role, the sport would therefore have to necessarily be seen as a primary cultural good, one which, to borrow from another American, the philosopher John Rawls, is critical to the fulfilment of a person’s conception of a good life. In that sense, access to cricket has to be considered as an end in and of itself, and as not in any manner subservient to some other veiled purpose, especially entertainment or business. In his marvellous epic, Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James argued that cricket allows us a grasp of a more complete human existence, where social justice is a legitimate aim. To seize ownership of the game we must, therefore, hold cricket’s administrators answerable to standards of public law, a check that would help in bringing about within cricket’s province a more equal distribution of resources.

When it sat in judgment over the various shenanigans of the BCCI and its management of the Indian Premier League (IPL), the Supreme Court recognised some of these values inherent in cricket. For years, ever since its inception, the BCCI had functioned as its own master, as a sovereign whose diktats were decisive and unquestionable. As this dominion began to extend beyond India into a global clout, the inability to hold the board publicly accountable became graver still. Governments came and went, but legislative intervention has never been on the horizon.

A private society?

Until the Supreme Court intervened last year, every time the courts were approached, judges too vacillated, as the board bandied about its customary defence, one that Justice Katju has also invoked in his report: that the board is merely a private society, to which conventional standards of public law are simply inapplicable. Indeed, the BCCI, which was originally formed in 1928 as an unregistered association of persons, is now enrolled as a private body, under the Tamil Nadu Societies Registration Act of 1975. Today, more than 30 members, including public sector undertakings such as the Railways and the Services, subscribe to the board’s Memorandum of Association, which includes, among its objects, the promotion and control of the game of cricket in India, the encouragement of the formation of State and regional cricket associations, and, most significantly, the selection of the Indian national cricket team.

At first blush, the BCCI’s argument might appear to make sense. Traditionally, private societies are responsible only to their members, and it is for these clubs to determine for themselves what best represent the interest of their associates. Therefore, for any of the board’s decisions to stand the law’s scruples, all that is required is the concurrence of its members, which is to be secured through a procedure that the memorandum provides. When people outside the BCCI’s membership enter into independent relationships with the board — such as employment contracts or purchase of TV rights — those relationships would also, according to the board, remain purely in the realm of private law.

Yet, before the Supreme Court intervened last year, the BCCI, emboldened by this status as a supposed private body, consistently diluted the underlying values in cricket, viewing these as somehow inferior to the board’s grand project of commercially exploiting the sport. When, for instance, incidents of conflicts of interest within the board have been questioned, the board’s arguments proceeded on these lines: if the BCCI’s members are satisfied that a person who owned an IPL team could also contest and hold office as the board’s president, the courts, including the Supreme Court, simply lacked the authority to judicially review such decisions.

But in its judgment, delivered on January 22, 2015, which resonated amongst cricket fans around the world, the Supreme Court rebuffed these arguments. Not only did it haul up the BCCI and question the body’s standards of governance but it also explicitly ruled that the board was amenable to public scrutiny. “Such is the passion for this game in this country that cricketers are seen as icons by youngsters, middle aged and the old alike,” wrote Justice T.S. Thakur (now Chief Justice of India) on behalf of the court. “Any organisation or entity that has such pervasive control over the game and its affairs and such powers as can make dreams end up in smoke or come true cannot be said to be undertaking any private activity.”

A clear purpose

Or in other words, what the court was really telling us is this: that cricket is a basic good, the access to which is critical to the fulfilment of a good life. When the court appointed the Lodha Committee, its intention, therefore, was to create a structure through which the sport can be made more accessible and more equal. The committee’s report, which was released on January 4, 2016, seeks to do just this. It recommends, among other things, that each Indian State would only be entitled to a single vote within the BCCI, a mandate that is likely to damage a coterie of power held by Maharashtra and Gujarat that have three associations each. What’s more, it directs the establishment of an apex council of nine members, overseen by a reputable chief executive officer, comprising three independent persons, with two from a newly constituted “players’ association”, and at least one woman, to conduct the day-to-day administration of the sport in the country; the institution of lucid norms within the BCCI’s constitution to regulate conflicts of interest, including the reduction in involvement from politicians; and, most critically, a more reasonable division, if not a complete separation, between the BCCI and the IPL.

The argument today, made in Justice Katju’s report, is that any change to the BCCI’s structure must come either from within or through legislative intervention. But neither of these, as history tells us, is conceivable. In bringing about a change in the board’s structure through the Lodha Committee’s recommendations, the Supreme Court isn’t making law. It is merely making accountable a body that enjoys a virtually state-sanctioned monopoly, which allows it to alter the fundamental nature of a property that it holds in trust for the public. It is astounding that the board would object to these recommendations, for all they do is establish a basic framework for good governance.

In the final analysis, we must ask ourselves this: do we want to see cricket as constituting an end by itself, as a sport that is both ethically and morally significant? If the answer to this question is yes, we must not only cause the BCCI to embrace the Lodha Committee’s recommendations but also push towards an even more revolutionary process of reform; one through which the game can eventually be brought closer to the common Indian public, where the sport’s ownership is reclaimed from those who have tarnished it beyond recognition.

Poor little rich kids – the perils of inheriting vast wealth

Emine Saner in The Guardian

It is reported that when the 6th Duke of Westminster, who died this week, realised at the age of 15 that he was heir to his family’s immense fortune, he dreaded it – the responsibility, the knowledge that he hadn’t earned it, the isolation it would bring him. He would have prepared his son for the eventuality of becoming duke, although neither would have wanted to think it would happen as early as it did. On Tuesday, Gerald Grosvenor died suddenly at the age of 64; his son Hugh, now the 7th Duke of Westminster, is just 25 and inherits the family’s £9.3bn fortune.

Aside from the trauma of losing a parent – having money does not ease the pain of bereavement – the 25-year-old finds himself in both an enviable, and unenviable, position. On the one hand, he becomes one of the richest men in the world; on the other, money didn’t bring happiness to his father, who appeared to find his title and wealth a burden. “Given the choice I would rather not have been born wealthy, but I never think of giving it up,” he said once. “I can’t sell it. It doesn’t belong to me.”

The Duke of Westminster



It is, however, very difficult to feel sorry for the rich, which is, in itself, a problem for many of them. “They know that others have no sympathy for them, and no understanding of the situation they’re in,” says Thayer Willis, author of Navigating the Dark Side of Wealth: A Life Guide for Inheritors, who runs a counselling business helping the rich deal with the psychological challenges of wealth. “They know not to go around whining and expecting people to feel sorry for them.”

But there are serious challenges that come from inheriting vast fortunes, she says, particularly at a young age. Willis knows many of them herself – she was born into the family that started the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, a timber company worth billions. “I stumbled through my 20s and made a lot of mistakes,” she says.

“For all of us, our 20s and 30s are the ‘building years’, when we’re meant to get out in the world, figure out who we are, what we like to do, who we like, who we like to date,” she says. “Having a tremendous amount of financial wealth come into your life at that point really messes with motivation. All of a sudden the question becomes: ‘What do I need to do to manage this wealth?’ instead of: ‘How do I identify and clarify who I really am?’ People’s motivation to be around you becomes questionable. Are they attracted to me or to this wealth?” These are “definitely first-world problems, but it certainly messes with the psychological development of that young adult”. In her 30s, Willis settled down, trained as a psychotherapist and became a wealth counsellor.

If it’s so awful – an obvious question – why not give the money away? “Some people think of that, usually to the horror of the family. Older family members understand what this money can do in terms of providing a resource for any kind of emergency, or starting a business, or philanthropy.”

For inheritors of wealth going back generations, there is a sense, as Grosvenor said, that they are mere custodians and the money isn’t theirs to give away or lose. “I’ve seen some quite young heirs who really understand the dynastic vision of a family from a pretty early age,” says Julian Washington, head of intermediary relationship management at RBC Wealth Management. “They don’t want to be the weak link in the chain when the family story is told. In my experience, when you deal with old-money families, if you want to call them that, they tend to be pretty good at educating their next generation, because typically they’ve been doing it for centuries.” And when someone – a male member of the family, thanks to outrageous primogeniture – comes to inherit, “more often than not they’re in a pretty good place because they come to it with all that tradition and they understand the nature of the shoes they’re stepping into”.

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg have decided to give away 99% of their fortune – but their daughter, Max, could still inherit $450m. Photograph: AP

Plenty of members of the super-rich have already decided not to burden their children with vast, unearned fortunes in the first place – it is enough that they have had expensive educations and all the opportunities of a privileged start in life. Warren Buffett’s famous take on inheritance is to leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing”. It has been reported, though not confirmed, that Bill Gates plans to leave his children a meagre $10m (£7.7m) each from his $76bn fortune. Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg have pledged to give away 99% of their $45bn pile(although it’s all relative – this still leaves them, and their daughter, with $450m). Not quite on the same financial scale, Nigella Lawson has said she isn’t planning to leave her children anything: “It ruins people not having to earn money.”

Sam Roddick, the daughter of the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, didn’t know that her mother, who died in 2007, had planned to give away her entire £51m fortune. “We found out when it was published in a Daily Mail article,” she laughs. It wasn’t entirely a surprise – her parents were socialists, rather than socialites, and their business was famous for its fair-trade principles. And it wasn’t personal. Cutting one’s child out of your will can, to some, seem like “a deep act of abandonment. I never had that abandonment because I had a healthy relationship with her. I know other people who haven’t been given money and it has been a huge act of aggression.”

Duke's £9bn inheritance prompts call for tax overhaul



Roddick was also unusual among the children of the rich in that she hadn’t grown up surrounded by wealth. She was largely brought up by her working-class grandmother, “and working-class values – you work hard, you earn your keep and you contribute to society. Entitled people from inherited wealth are all about other people being in service to them.”

She has observed the very wealthy people she has met over the years. “They are isolated from normal society,” she says. With the extremely wealthy, “relationships become transactional, and that is something that is extraordinarily emotionally damaging. A lot of very wealthy people are not accountable to their community, they’re not accountable to the people they love, they show their power and control through transaction and they are unhappy, from what I can tell. The people I know who are very wealthy and are happy are all contributing something to society.” Until we sort out the rules that allow vast fortunes held in trusts, as the Grosvenor estate is, to avoid hefty death duties and be passed down the generations, it’s something for the new Duke of Westminster and his future male heirs to bear in mind.

The economic argument against neoliberalism

Owen Jones interviews Ha Joon Chang

Trusts keep wealth in the hands of the few. It’s time to stop this tax abuse

Richard Murphy in The Guardian

If there is a name that is synonymous with tax avoidance in the UK, it is that of the Duke of Westminster. The duke in question was, admittedly, the second duke, who in 1936 won an infamous tax case that permitted him to pay his gardeners in a way that avoided a tax liability. He achieved abiding fame as a consequence of the opinion of Lord Tomlin, who in his judgment on that case said: “Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so that the tax attracted under the appropriate act is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.”

That statement has, to a large degree, been both the foundation of and justification for all tax avoidance activity in the UK since. That this activity continues is evidenced by the fact that the sixth duke is said to have left an estate worth £9.9bn upon his death this week to his son and yet, despite the fact that inheritance tax is supposedly payable on all estates on death worth more than £325,000, it has been widely reported that very little tax will be due in this case. It seems that the sixth duke has put the second to shame: his forebear saved a few pounds on his wages bill while the sixth has avoided something approaching £4bn. He may in the process have even outdone the fifth duke, who argued the fourth duke died of a war wound 232 years after he suffered it to escape all charges on the estate in the 1960s.

His likely motives for doing so can be easily summarised: there may be greed involved; a belief that the duke’s heirs are better entitled to this property than anyone else; and a hostility to any claim that the state might make on property that has been apparent in the UK aristocracy since the time of the Crusades.

The English legal concept of a trust is believed to have been developed during that era, when knights departing the country with no certainty of returning wanted to ensure that their land passed to those who they thought to be their rightful heirs without interference from the Crown. Trusts achieved that goal and the concept has remained in existence ever since, representing the continual struggle of those with wealth to subvert the rule of law that may apply to others but that they believe should not apply to them.

Recent political challenges have not ended the resulting abuse. Labour tried to introduce effective tax charges on inheritance in the 1970s, the Conservatives undermined them a decade later, and every subsequent attempt to tackle tax abuse using trusts (and Gordon Brown made many), has by and large left existing arrangements intact, only seeking to prevent abuse in new arrangements. As if to add insult to injury, the 2013 general anti-abuse rule, which was introduced by the coalition government and supposedly negated the decision by Lord Tomlin noted above, cannot be applied retrospectively: anything done by a duke before that date is outside of its scope.

So why has this tax avoidance been allowed to continue? First, it’s because no one in the UK has, since 1980, had the political will to tackle the use and abuse of trusts – even though continental Europe has shown it is perfectly possible to run an economy without them. Second, it’s down to the continuing power of the aristocracy and their chosen professional agents (lawyers, accountants, bankers and wealth managers) who have been willing to compromise themselves in exchange for fees to perpetuate the situation. And third, it’s because the Conservatives, in particular, have been keen to let the situation continue unchanged as they support the largely unfettered inheritance of substantial wealth. 

Another issue is that we know so little about trusts even when they are at least as powerful as companies and are even more commonly used for tax abuse. This is because of a mistaken perception of privacy, which should only be due to individuals and not artificial arrangements created by law, which trusts are. This can be corrected: we need transparency and that means a full register of trusts and their accounts on public record above modest financial limited, as for companies.

What can be done about this? In addition to the points already noted, the obvious solution is to abolish the inheritance tax reliefs that permit this tax avoidance, whether that be for trusts themselves or for those who own private companies and agricultural land. Inheritance tax assumes that the children of the wealthy are the rightful best next generation of managers of these assets and so lets them be passed on to them tax free, perpetuating wealth concentration in the process.

To put it another way, 800 years of claims by an elite to be above the law applicable to everyone else so that wealth can remain in the hands of the few has to be brought to an end. And if now is not the time to do it, I am really not sure when it will be.

Think loneliness is about single people looking for love? Think again

Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian

It’s hard to feel alone inside a long and happy marriage. But it’s easier than it looks, perhaps, to feel lonely. Last week, Italian police officers responding to reports of screaming and crying inside an apartment in Rome found something unexpected behind the door. Jole and Michele were a devoted elderly couple who had ostensibly got themselves worked up over a sad story on the TV news, but some gentle questioning elicited the fact that both were struggling with terrible loneliness. After 70 years of apparently loving marriage they still had each other, and yet that clearly was not enough.

This being Italy, the officers rather charmingly cooked them a meal of spaghetti with butter and parmesan and stayed to chat, before doing the washing up and posting a flowery account on Facebook of how loneliness can suddenly sweep over you “like a summer storm”. The story went viral because it’s so heartwarming, and yet on second reading it’s also rather unsettling. The lonely are not quite the people we think they are.

It will be 20 years ago this summer that the first Bridget Jones novel was published, a timely reminder to ignore the spectacularly awful sequels and remember just how neatly the original skewered some of the myths about lonely singleton life.

Bridget was famously terrified of dying alone and forgotten, but ironically the one thing she wasn’t was lonely: she was riotously surrounded by friends and family, even if they did all keep harping on about her getting a proper boyfriend. It’s smug marrieds who can all too easily collapse in on themselves, severing old friendships they will come to regret in the process. (Anyone who thinks that having a baby means you’ll never feel alone again, meanwhile, has yet to find out how it feels to be home with a howling infant, desperately trying to engage the postman in conversation because he’s the only sentient adult you’ll see for hours.)

It’s all too easy to become consumed by family life and then wake up in middle age, ostensibly at the centre of a rich and busy life, struggling to remember your last meaningful conversation. That feeling may not be loneliness yet, but it’s a first step on the road.

For while the cavernously empty feeling endured by the bereaved or unwillingly single can indeed be a terrible thing, and life-shortening to boot, it’s not the only kind of loneliness. A recent University of California study found that while almost half of its elderly subjects confessed to feeling lonely at times, only 18% of them actually lived alone.

Unhappy marriages, atrophying into long silences and separate lives, might have something to do with that, but the story of Jole and Michele suggests something else: a distinct kind of loneliness stemming not from the absence of significant others but from a feeling of disconnection with the wider world, a sense that you’re no longer part of something shared and human. Is it just a coincidence that the Italian couple’s crisis seems to have been provoked by a run of news stories – violent attacks, abuse at a kindergarten – revealing human nature at its coldest?

Fleeting loneliness comes to all of us occasionally, but it solidifies into something deeper and darker for those who start to perceive the world as a harsh and hostile place, one that wouldn’t welcome efforts to connect even if you try. It’s that nagging feeling of rejection, of not belonging or standing somehow apart from others, that is the true hallmark of feeling lonely in a crowd, and it’s by no means the preserve of the old.

Interestingly, a recent Brunel University study of over-50s found more than half of those identifying themselves as lonely had been that way for over 10 years, suggesting the feeling had become part of the fabric of their lives. (The same study, by the way, found levels of loneliness had barely changed since the second world war; so much for the idea of a modern epidemic, caused by fragmenting and hectic modern family lives.)

The future of loneliness



So perhaps it’s not so surprising that this week’s obituaries of the fabulously wealthy Duke of Westminster, a father of four, should describe him as “lonely”. Immense wealth can of course be isolating – although the money clearly didn’t make the duke unhappy enough to get rid of it, or indeed to eschew the family tradition of minimising inheritance tax liabilities – but in Gerald Grosvenor’s case something else seems to be going on. What emerges is a picture of a man struggling all his life with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety, worried that he had done nothing to live up to the reputation of those ancestors who built his unearned fortune. Bullied at school, he reportedly left Harrow without one proper friend.

And if you can’t bring yourself to feel sorry for a billionaire, the blunt truth is that not all lonely people are lovable old grannies who tug at your heartstrings. An unhappy few have pushed others away with their self-destructive behaviour and are now paying a high price for it; some have struggled bitterly all their lives with the art of making friends, never quite mastering social norms. How much of the late-night bile spewed on social media simply reflects the envy and frustration of those who see other people happily connecting all around them and just don’t quite know how to join in? Loneliness has its dark side, one not so easily solved by more visits from the grandchildren or well-meaning volunteer “befrienders” popping in for chats over coffee.

For Jole and Michele, at least, perhaps there will be a happy ending. Now their story has been made public, perhaps surviving relatives or old friends will rally round, and if nothing else the knowledge that strangers worldwide are now asking how they can send letters or visit must do something to restore their faith in human nature.

Yet while a little kindness goes a very long way, it’s too easy to pretend loneliness can all be solved by a few more companionable plates of spaghetti. It makes for a less heartwarming story but the truth is that, like the poor, the lonely may to some degree always be with us – even, perhaps, when they’re ostensibly with someone else.

Satire - Labour is using members’ money to ban them from voting

Mark Steel in The Independent

It’s marvellous how they manage it, but every week the people running the Labour Party election perform a stunt even more spectacular than the last.

Next week Margaret Hodge will kidnap John McDonnell, which she will claim is in accordance with the Labour Party Constitution, Rule 457. (Shadow Chancellor Chained to a Radiator in the Basement Clause (14 B iii).) Peter Mandelson will reveal he has met Vladimir Putin to request he cuts off the oil supply to Jeremy Corbyn’s office, and Hilary Benn will announce he has hired a fleet of Tornados to bomb a Momentum branch meeting in Exeter.

Labour must be bold and ambitious, and never before can an organisation have illegally banned its own members from voting in an election it promised them a vote in, then spent the money it took from those members on appealing to the High Court to try and keep the ban.

The argument of those who brought in the ban was that, although the new members were promised a vote in Labour elections, they didn’t mean the next election, but at some unspecified one in the future.

What a boost this method would be if it was adopted by British business. Comet would never have gone bankrupt if anyone buying a washing machine handed over their money and was then told they wouldn’t actually be given a washing machine, but the money they had paid would be used on appealing to the High Court for the company’s right to not hand over a washing machine.

And this is from the wing of the Labour Party that insists it can be trusted on the economy.

It would be entertaining if it ran the country like this: Angela Eagle would announce: “We’ve spent the education budget wisely, on an appeal to the High Court that no one in Wales should be allowed to eat bananas.”

Because Labour must be modern, and to prove how modern it is, the plotters are furious at how democratic they are ordered to be by High Court judges. Maybe this is how it plans to win a General Election – by appealing to the High Court to only allow someone to vote if they’re called Kinnock or Eagle.

But these extreme measures are essential because, as Tom Watson explained, the Labour election has been undermined by “Trotsky entryists twisting arms of young members”. This explains why Corbyn is expected to win again, because the 300,000 new members of Labour are powerless before the arm-twisting might of Britain’s 50 Trotsky entryists.

Some people may wonder why these arm-twisters never overturned Tony Blair during the 15 years he was leader. That is because the Trotsky entryists were living in a city under the ground guarded by men in yellow boiler suits, perfecting their evil arm-twisting machine, cackling “soon we will unleash our power on Ipswich Constituency Labour Party then nothing can stop us… mwahaha”.

Now the worry is what other votes they are influencing by arm-twisting. We should watch out for this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, when Will Young comes second to Alf Barnshaw, the central committee member of the Trotsky Entryist group the Revolutionary Movement for Extremely Violent Workers’ Anger.

The whole strategy of the anti-Corbyn plotters appears to be random fury. Every vote that goes against them is a result of “bullying”, and one MP, Conor McGinn, told the press that Corbyn “threatened to call my Dad”. This suggests their aim to win a general election is to go after the toddler vote. They are going to campaign for the voting age to be reduced to three, then issue a manifesto that goes: “It’s not faIr becoos I wozent doing anyfink and Treeza MAy kAlld my daD just like jErmY and thats wie I want to b pie minister.”

But they don’t appear to have any desire to work out what might be taking place. Because, like a married couple who scream at each other for hours about who left the ironing board in the wrong place, clearly there is something more to this disagreement than the rows they have about who sent a nasty message on Twitter.

The anti-Corbyn plotters complain Corbyn’s policies make him unelectable, so their strategy appears to be to have no policies at all. They make no effort to explain why the support for Corbyn is an English version of what has happened across Europe and America. Presumably they think Bernie Sanders won millions of supporters because he borrowed Corbyn’s arm-twisting machine, and the SNP won in Scotland because Nicola Sturgeon threatened to call Ed Miliband’s dad.

And none of them attempt to assess why thousands turn out to hear Corbyn in town centres. They must be the only people in political history to see huge crowds coming into the streets to support their party and think “We’ll ban that lot for a start”.

So Owen Smith’s campaign insists he will continue with many of Corbyn’s radical ideas but do it more competently. If you were cynical you might wonder how strongly he backs Corbyn’s ideas, when the people backing Smith most fervently are Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, and everyone else who hates everything Corbyn stands for. It is like standing for the General Synod of the Anglican Church when your campaign manager is Richard Dawkins.

The result is their campaign amounts to a series of unconnected exasperated attempts to force him to stand down, by all resigning or appealing to a High Court for the right to rig the vote, making them look like Wile E Coyote chasing the Road Runner.

Next week, at a Corbyn rally, Stephen Kinnock will hide above him waiting to drop an ACME piano, but the balcony he is on will collapse and he will land on Laura Kuenssberg.

Then Tom Watson will try to shoot him through a hole in a tree, but the gun will bend back through another hole and he will shoot himself in the face, so he will issue a statement that this proves Corbyn must stand down – he simply isn’t competent.