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Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Cryo-liberals are still dishing up deranged delusions
Occasionally, I come across something that captures the very essence of cryogenic liberalism. Cryo-liberals, for those not in the know, are perfectly frozen political specimens from the 1990s and its end-of-history dreamland, when the answer to every problem was open borders, open markets and open arms. Their heyday coincided with Blairism: sharp-suited social liberalism combined with the post-Thatcherite free market settlement. Since then the world has changed, but the cryo-liberals are still with us and, in many areas, still running the show. Cryo-liberals are at their best when they're full of data and thoughtful examples from history to make their case. They're at their worst when engaged in such delusional denials of fact that it takes your breath away. Here's the Platonic example that popped on to my radar this week, like many unwelcome things, on X. 'Races and ethnicities don't exist,' tweeted John McTernan, the Blairite political strategist. • A tinderbox of disconnection and division threatens our democracy I'm going to write that out again: 'Races and ethnicities don't exist.' Not just 'race and ethnicity have been misused' or 'races and ethnicities are not useful policy categories' or 'race and ethnicity don't mean what your prejudices say they do'. They simply 'don't exist'. McTernan was engaging with a topic that obviously makes him uncomfortable: the question of whether there is any ethnic component to English identity. The answer is quite obviously yes, in the sense that you can plot the population of England on a genetic chart, which measures the frequencies of particular mutations in the genome, and distinguish a cluster, formed from a mixing of various other groups, that has populated the southern British Isles for most of the last three or four thousand years. And I say that as someone whose genome, if plotted, would not appear in that cluster. It is simply a fact, like the fact that there are different models of Barbie. Now I can understand why many people may feel queasy that this sort of fact is entering our political discourse. A new era is upon us, in which voters are rejecting the ideology of universal cultural compatibility. This change brings risk. There is a lot of vile race-baiting rising up social media feeds, promoted by racists and grifters. But the right response is not to deny the reality that there are different ethnicities — clusters of identifiable genetic sameness and difference. Truth, as we learnt from the trans debate, does not care about your feelings. And lying or denying the truth doesn't make you nice or better or cleverer than other people. It makes you a delusional, dangerous dinosaur. • Emma Duncan: Division, decline, decay? What a load of rot Geneticists sequencing the DNA of a man found buried in a pot in Ancient Egypt have found that a fifth of his lineage was from Mesopotamia. This was a period in which both regions were home to civilisations that were starting to develop writing and taking great leaps forward in architectural and political sophistication. Perhaps their development was related to interbreeding and population exchange. There. That wasn't so controversial, was it? I mentioned in my last column that lettuces are used in Chinese new year rituals to symbolise future prosperity, via a pun. The Chinese word for 'lettuce' and for 'growing wealth' are similar. This prompted a reader to send me some lyrics from Guys & Dolls in which the word 'lettuce' is used to mean cash: 'There are well-heeled shooters everywhere/ And an awful lot of lettuce/ For the fella who can get us there.' I can only assume this is because greenbacks might seem salad-like when leafed through in wads. And it rhymes. The response to the news that the Bank of England may replace Winston Churchill on our banknotes with an array of wind farms was utterly predictable. It's almost as if someone is sitting inside our institutions trying to think of the best way for them to sabotage themselves. What's next? Replace the King with Glastonbury Tor?
Spectator
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The Tate Modern has lost its sense of purpose
Twenty-five years ago today, the Tate Modern first opened its doors to the public. The main attraction: a nine metre-high steel sculpture of a female spider which towered over visitors to the Turbine Hall. In its first year, the Tate Modern saw twice its projected number of visitors. London's first museum of modern art was an unmitigated success. Say what you will about contemporary art, but it is undeniably true that the Tate Modern succeeded where others failed. While Manchester's Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and Centre Georges Pompido struggled, the Tate Modern thrived. Riding the wave of Blairism, Britpop and pre-crash confidence, the thematically organised gallery, housed inside a derelict site on the banks of the Thames, attracted five million visitors in the millennium year – doubling the numbers of the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco combined. Today, that story could not be more different.
The Guardian
05-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
What the Labour left should learn from new revelations about Starmer's path to power
It was clear from the outset that Keir Starmer's Labour would win the election by default, then prove a fiasco in power. Starmer's ratings are now worse than Rishi Sunak's at his nadir, and Nigel Farage's Reform – a party with just five MPs – appears to be edging ahead of the party of government in the polls. So far, this government has spent its time clobbering pensioners, being showered with freebies by well-heeled donors and damaging economic confidence with ill-judged post-election doom and gloom, followed by a panicked 'growth above all else' reverse ferret. Just months after securing power, the prime minister's own staff briefed two Times journalists that they had no idea what he really believed, and that he wasn't really running the country – that he'd been deceived into thinking he was 'driving the train', when he's really been sat at the front of the driverless Docklands Light Railway. It's almost enough to make you pity Starmer – imagine publicly humiliating the prime minister you are paid to work for just months after winning power? – until you remember that he appointed this backstabbing rabble in the first place. The published excerpts from Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's new book, Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, lay out the strategy of this rightwing faction. 'Occasionally they even spoke of their leader as if he were a useful idiot,' they write. 'Keir acts like an HR manager, not a leader,' his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is quoted as saying. They saw Starmer as a convenient empty vessel, whom they could deceive a Corbynite Labour membership into voting for, then use their yes-man to permanently bury the left before replacing him with a true believer, the ultra-Blairite Wes Streeting. Alas, the Tories managed to implode and the man they see as a useful idiot sits in No 10, pretending to drive a train. Let me mount a defence of Starmer, the scapegoat of these rightwing factionalists, who are ridiculing him for doing literally everything they asked him to do. To be successful, a government needs purpose. Purpose gives it coherence, provides backbone to survive crises, prevents it from being buffeted by events, leaves ministers understanding what goals they're working towards, and allows voters to understand what their rulers are trying to do. Whatever you thought of them, the Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair governments had purpose, and succeeded, but the administrations of Gordon Brown and Rishi Sunak did not, and collapsed. Purpose does not deliver inevitable success – no one can accuse Liz Truss of lacking vision, yet she was famously outlasted by a lettuce – but it is a precondition. The political project of Starmer's aides is a crude replication of late-stage Blairism, lacking that crucial ingredient of purpose. Whatever I may think about New Labour, it wasn't a cheap rip-off, and the party's current masters are political and intellectual minnows by comparison. New Labour's project was straightforward: accept the Thatcherite settlement, but humanise it using the tax revenues flowing from an unsustainable economic model centred on the City of London. That model went bust in 2008, never to recover, and the Labour establishment couldn't think up anything new. Their cupboard was empty, which is why Corbynism – which offered a clear alternative narrative – usurped them in 2015. The problem isn't Starmer per se: it's a faction with no answers to the crisis-afflicted Britain of 2025. That Starmer has many personal traits that make him unsuitable as leader is undeniable. The new book notes that he used to text me rather peculiar reprimands when I criticised him in this column or on Twitter (now X). For example, when I wrote a column criticising Starmer for ordering Labour MPs to abstain on a Tory bill that allowed MI5 agents and police officers to commit crimes if it prevented a more serious crime or threat to national security, he texted me to say I was better than that, like a disappointed schoolteacher. You might wonder whether he had better things to do. I would agree. The point is: he is thin-skinned, and the faction around him weaponised that to crush the left. That emphasises why this is a caricature of New Labour. Blair used to telephone leftwing firebrand Dennis Skinner for advice, and invite him for tea. Starmer would probably have purged him. The problem is that Starmer's team always knew what they opposed – those ghastly lefties! – but not what they stood for. In opposition, Starmer assailed the Tories for their mantra of 'cut the green crap'; his flailing government now has a growth strategy dependent on expanding Heathrow, to the distaste of even a parliamentary Labour party largely handpicked for blind loyalty. The suggestion that this government is in thrall to vested interests is underscored by the book's claims that wealthy donor Waheed Alli, who showered Starmer with clothes and spectacles, blocked proposals to ban foreign political donations, opening the way for Elon Musk to try to help bankroll Farage into Downing Street. Here's the problem. Our economic model has stopped offering sustained rises in living standards and improvements to the public realm. Two possible outcomes flow from this. Either voters are offered an alternative, which means challenging the concentration of wealth and power in the bank accounts of a few. Or voters may simply conclude that democracy no longer delivers, and be susceptible to messages that blame migrants and other stigmatised minorities for decline. The latter is now on the ascendant across the west, because the former is missing in action. That's where the left comes in. As well as a need for the timid Greens to find their voice, the Labour left should stop being the punch bags of the soulless hacks using Starmer as their hapless puppet. Seven of those MPs were suspended for voting against keeping Tory benefit cuts that drive children into poverty. Some may never be let back in; others only if they pledge slavish obedience – and then what's the point of being there anyway? Call the bluff of your assailants: leave, and form an alliance with the Green and leftwing independent MPs. There are other leftwing Labour MPs who haven't been booted out – such as Clive Lewis – who would be a good fit. Such an alliance, with the right strategy, could suddenly put formidable pressure on Labour from the left, and force a conversation about redistributing wealth and power that would force Labour, Tory and Reform UK alike on to the defensive. Alas, these MPs have an ingrained loyalty to Labour, one that is not reciprocated by the leadership. But if they don't make a difficult but courageous jump, what beckons? They will be condemned to irrelevance. If and when Starmer eventually goes, the vultures circling him – that is, his aides – will replace him with someone who does the same thing, but with more gusto. Farage will dictate the terms of our national conversation, until he plausibly secures power. This is not inevitable: the appetite for an alternative exists, but lacks direction and leadership. If it remains untapped, whoever is driving this train, it will plunge into the abyss, taking all its passengers with it. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
