THE USEFUL ENEMY

It has become the received wisdom of our time that Russia, that perennial bogeyman of the European imagination, is the party itching for a wider war. One hears the pronouncements from Brussels and the various national capitals with their carefully calibrated notes of alarm, and one is invited to picture Vladimir Putin as a man who spends his evenings polishing bayonets while muttering darkly about the restoration of the Tsars. The truth, as usual, is both simpler and more embarrassing. Russia does not particularly want a war with Europe. Europe, or at any rate those portions of it that still believe themselves to be in charge, rather does. The reason is not strategic genius or historical destiny. It is that the political and ideological model under which large parts of the continent have been labouring has reached the end of its shelf life, and everyone concerned knows it.

There is an old observation, attributed variously and never quite pinned down to a single source, that the problem with socialism is that you can vote your way into it, but you have to shoot your way out of it. The phrase has the rough elegance of a frontier proverb, and it has rarely felt more apt. What we are witnessing is not the confident advance of a coherent system but the final, slightly frantic manoeuvres of people who sense that the experiment has failed and who would prefer almost any catastrophe to the simple admission of error. The rhetoric directed at Russia has taken on a peculiar intensity precisely because the domestic alternatives look so unpromising. Better a distant enemy whose motives can be painted in primary colours than a long, honest look at the books.

The difficulty with the particular strain of narcissism that thrives in modern European politics is that it cannot relinquish power without also relinquishing the flattering self-image that power supplies. To step back would be to concede that the grand project—call it democratic socialism, social democracy, progressive governance, or whatever soft synonym is currently preferred—has not delivered the promised combination of prosperity, cohesion and moral superiority. Multiculturalism, that most sacred and least examined article of the faith, has proved especially divisive, producing not the harmonious tapestry of official literature but a series of parallel societies held together by the thin glue of official optimism and the occasional riot. Rather than adjust course, the stewards of the project prefer to double down. History offers no shortage of precedents for this preference. When the ideology falters, the enemy abroad becomes indispensable.

One notices, of course, that large numbers of ordinary citizens have begun to notice the gap between proclamation and result. They have begun, in that awkward modern phrase, to “wake up.” Yet the conditioning runs deep. Marxism, or the diluted, academic, bureaucratic version of it that has soaked into institutions for decades, has a talent for producing people who resemble drones more than citizens—shells of human beings whose critical faculties have been carefully trained to operate only within the approved narrative. They can recite the latest orthodoxy with impressive fluency and genuine sincerity, but the moment the script is interrupted they look faintly panicked, as if someone has switched off the teleprompter mid-sentence. This is not a conspiracy in the usual sense; it is something more mundane and therefore more durable: the cumulative effect of education, media and professional incentives all pointing in the same direction for a very long time.

The result is a curious inversion. The side that talks most loudly about peace and European values is the one that appears least able to tolerate the possibility that its own model might need revision. Russia, for all its many and obvious faults, has no particular interest in conquering the suburbs of Lyon or the business districts of Frankfurt. It has its own difficulties, and wars of choice are expensive. Europe’s political class, by contrast, finds the prospect of heightened tension useful. It supplies distraction, moral clarity of a crude sort, and a ready explanation for why living standards feel sticky and social trust continues to fray. The psyop, if one may borrow the vernacular, is less a secret plot than the natural consequence of people who cannot afford to be wrong.

One is left, then, with the unedifying spectacle of a civilisation that would rather risk escalation than confront the possibility that its governing assumptions have passed their sell-by date. The leaders do not plot this outcome in smoke-filled rooms so much as drift toward it, sustained by the conviction that any alternative would be unthinkable. The rest of us are invited to accept the invitation to panic. It is an invitation best declined. The shelf life of ideology is finite, even when those who stocked the shelves refuse to check the date.

DOOMSCROLLING THROUGH THE GOLDEN AGE

As we continue to hurtle into an uncertain and dystopian future, it’s important to take the time to enjoy the present. Even though things could be, and have been, better, it’s very likely that at some point you will remember this time period as 'the good old days.' Enjoy the now. There. That’s the sentiment, delivered with the forced cheer of a hospice nurse trying to brighten a terminal ward by suggesting a game of cards. It’s the sort of advice that sounds almost wholesome until you notice the blood seeping under the door. We are, after all, living through a period that future historians—assuming we still have historians and not just algorithmically generated content summaries delivered via neural implant—will almost certainly look back on with the same misty-eyed fondness currently reserved for the 1990s, or the Blitz, or any other era that involved slightly less sophisticated methods of making people miserable.

Consider the present carefully. We scroll endlessly through carefully curated despair, pausing only to argue with strangers about whether the latest atrocity is slightly more or less important than the previous one. Our phones buzz with notifications that someone, somewhere, has been cancelled for a joke they made in 2014, or that a new strain of something unpleasant is making the rounds, or that the weather has once again decided to behave like a poorly written villain in a disaster film. The air is thick with the low-grade anxiety of knowing that the systems holding everything together are held together by the digital equivalent of chewing gum and crossed fingers. And yet, in a few decades, some grey-haired survivor will sit in what remains of a pub—probably a VR recreation of one, with the faint smell of hops added for authenticity—and sigh about how simple it all was back then. “Remember when you could still pretend the climate was mostly fine if you just didn’t look at the charts? Remember when the AI only hallucinated mildly and didn’t yet run the government? Those were the days.”

This is the cruel joke at the heart of human nostalgia. We are hard-wired to sand the edges off the past until it becomes a soft-focus commercial for a product that never existed. The 'good old days' are always the ones that weren’t actively trying to kill you in ways you fully understood. People once fondly recalled the trenches of the First World War once enough time had passed and the mud had dried. They missed the rationing and the blackout curtains once the immediate threat of being flattened by a bomb had been replaced by the more abstract threat of nuclear annihilation. The pattern is consistent: whatever fresh hell we currently inhabit will, given sufficient temporal distance and a selective memory, acquire a certain rustic charm. Future generations will romanticise the era of performative outrage, of algorithmic radicalisation, of people filming themselves crying in their cars for engagement metrics. They will speak of it the way we speak of vinyl records—warm, imperfect, somehow more authentic than whatever sterile nightmare has replaced it.

We live in a time when you can order a meal with a few taps on a glowing rectangle, have it delivered by a stressed stranger on a bicycle, and then complain about the packaging while simultaneously fretting about the collapse of civilisation. We have more information at our fingertips than any generation in history, and we use it primarily to confirm that everything is falling apart and that the other side is to blame. We have medical advances that would have seemed miraculous to our grandparents, and we spend our evenings doomscrolling through lists of new ways those advances might be weaponised or monetised into irrelevance. Progress, it turns out, is less a straight line and more a drunken stagger in which we occasionally trip over our own innovations and land face-first in a fresh puddle of absurdity.

And still the advice stands: enjoy the now. Not because the now is particularly enjoyable, but because the alternative is to spend your remaining functional years in a state of permanent low-level panic, which is both exhausting and, frankly, a bit passé. The dystopia is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed and packaged with free next-day delivery. The uncertain future is not some distant horizon—it’s the next software update, the next election cycle, the next heatwave that makes the previous heatwave look like a mild inconvenience. To 'enjoy the now' is therefore less a lifestyle tip and more a form of grim stoicism. It is the decision to notice the small, temporary consolations while they still exist: the taste of coffee that hasn’t yet been synthesised from algae, the absurdity of a viral video that briefly unites strangers in shared ridicule, the brief illusion of control that comes from deleting an app only to reinstall it three days later.

There is something almost touching in the way we cling to the idea that this particular stretch of history might one day be missed. It suggests a residual optimism so deeply buried it borders on the pathological. Yes, the systems are fraying. Yes, the discourse has the intellectual coherence of a bar fight. Yes, the planet is running a temperature and the adults in the room appear to have left for a long lunch sometime around 2016 and never returned. And yet the human capacity for retrospective romanticisation remains undimmed. One day, someone will look back on the great pandemic years, the culture wars, the slow-motion technological upheaval, and decide that it all had a certain rough-hewn integrity. They will miss the freedom of still being able to log off, even if most of us never did. They will miss the relative simplicity of a world in which the machines still needed us more than we needed them.

So by all means, enjoy the now. Pour yourself a drink. Watch something frivolous. Argue with a stranger on the internet if that’s what passes for connection these days. Take a walk while the air is still, for the most part, breathable. Do it with the full knowledge that this moment—this messy, anxious, over-connected, underwhelming moment—is already being prepped for the nostalgia treatment. Future you, or more likely some distant descendant with fewer illusions and better implants, will look back and shake their head fondly. “They had no idea how good they had it,” they’ll say, conveniently forgetting that we had every idea and simply chose to doomscroll through it instead. The present is a joke told in real time. The punchline is that we’ll miss it.

THE RANTING BRUMMIE REVIEWS: "70 UP" (2026)

The melancholy that settles after watching 70 Up is of a particular, refined sort: the kind that arrives not with a bang but with the quiet certainty of a man who has just realised the party ended several hours ago and the host has been politely stacking the chairs around him. We always knew the ending, of course. That was the entire point of the exercise, launched in 1964 with the Jesuitical certainty that the child at seven would reveal the man. What we did not quite bargain for was how thoroughly the man—and the woman, the few of them they allowed in—would eventually reveal us.

Asif Kapadia, stepping into the enormous shoes left by Michael Apted, has the good sense not to try filling them with anything flashy. He simply walks the same path, more slowly this time, and lets the archive do most of the talking. The result is less a new instalment than a long, elegiac retrospective of an experiment that has outlived several of its own subjects and one of its principal architects. Lynn Johnson is gone. Nick Hitchon, the farmer’s son who became a nuclear scientist and once wanted to know about the moon, filmed his final contribution three days before departing the planet entirely. The screen notes the fact with a restraint that is almost British in its refusal to make a scene. One almost applauds the decorum, then feels slightly ashamed for doing so.

They start as innocent kids believing in happy ever after. That much is true, and the early footage still has the power to wound precisely because it is so unselfconscious. Little Tony wants to be a jockey. Little Neil wants to be an astronaut. Little Suzy does not much care for her expensive school. The intervening decades have performed the usual acts of quiet sabotage. Some of the dreams were simply revised downward into something workable: cab-driving, fostering more than a hundred children, sitting in a French house full of books and mild loneliness. Others were abandoned with the weary pragmatism of people who have discovered that life is less a narrative arc than a series of administrative appointments. The illusion falls away, as the original post observed, before their eyes and ours. The difference is that we have the luxury of watching it happen to other people first.

Kapadia understands that the real subject was never class mobility or the predictive power of the age of seven. It was the slow, democratic erosion of hope. The series has always been most interesting when its participants refuse to cooperate with the hypothesis. Neil’s trajectory—bright boy, homelessness, local politics, solitary contentment in exile—remains the most stubbornly human. Symon’s late flowering as a foster parent of heroic proportions feels like a quiet rebuke to the notion that the die is cast early. Even the ones who more or less fulfilled the expectations of their seven-year-old selves look faintly surprised to find themselves still here, still being asked the same questions by a new director who has the good manners to stay mostly out of shot.

There is something almost comically English about the whole enterprise. A nation that invented the stiff upper lip decided to film its own slow collapse into pensionable reflection every seven years, then sat down politely to watch. We did not turn away. We returned, decade after decade, like relatives who cannot quite bring themselves to miss the funeral. The second half of 70 Up even allows the remaining participants a certain amount of meta-complaint about the process itself—the intrusiveness, the framing, the way Apted’s silences could feel like moral judgements. Fair enough. After sixty-odd years of being national case studies, a little resentment is the least one can expect. The series was always a “little pill of poison,” as one of them once put it, and the patients kept swallowing it anyway.

What remains is the melancholy of recognition. These people are not especially representative, not especially diverse, not especially anything except themselves. Yet they have become our mirrors by the simple, brutal method of ageing in public at regular intervals. The childhood belief in happy ever after did not so much shatter as quietly dissolve, the way a coastal path dissolves under successive winters. We watched it happen to them so that we would not have to admit it was happening to us. Now the cameras have been packed away for good, and the rest of us are left alone with the knowledge that the experiment is over, the data is in, and the results are, on the whole, rather ordinary, which is, of course, the most devastating result of all.