THE INCONVENIENT AWAKENING

We stand, dear reader it seems, on the threshold of a great collective realisation. Not the sort of epiphany that arrives with trumpets and a change of government, but the quieter, more embarrassing kind in which large numbers of people look up from their phones and notice that the scenery has been painted on cardboard all along. The European Union, we are about to discover, has been industriously feeding the war in Ukraine. The climate crisis, upon closer inspection, turns out to be communism wearing a recycled anorak. And Covid was the most ambitious confidence trick in recorded history. After these successive illuminations, the anger will be terrible, and the responsible parties will be chastised without pity. Or so the forecast runs. One can only hope the chastisement arrives before the public’s attention is diverted by the next series of whatever is currently being streamed.

Consider first the European Union’s alleged role as quartermaster to the Ukrainian conflict. It is a curious charge, since the Union’s most conspicuous martial achievement to date has been the solemn issuing of strongly worded statements from Brussels. One pictures the generals in Moscow poring over these communiqués by candlelight, trembling at the prospect of another round of targeted sanctions on luxury handbags. Yet the accusation persists that the EU somehow prolonged the agony by a combination of moral posturing, arms shipments that arrived after the relevant tanks had already been destroyed, and an unshakeable belief that history could be negotiated into submission by committee. There is a certain sardonic justice in the idea. An organisation designed to prevent wars by making everyone fill out the same forms has instead discovered that forms make excellent kindling. The bureaucracy, having spent decades perfecting the art of delay, has now applied that talent to the matter of peace. The result, we are invited to believe, is a conflict that continues not despite the EU’s efforts but because of them. One almost admires the efficiency.

And now, as if the previous revelations were insufficiently rich in irony, we are treated to the spectacle of Andy Burnham, the newly elevated Prime Minister, embarking on what can only be described as a rather forlorn campaign to unpick Brexit by discovering, at this late hour, that the Russians did it. Having asked the question upon entering Downing Street—rather in the manner of a nervous new boarder inquiring whether the school bully had already stolen his tuck—he received the “clear answer” that yes, Moscow had interfered. One imagines the relief with which this intelligence was received. At last, an explanation for the referendum result that does not require accepting that large numbers of British voters simply preferred to leave. 

Burnham does not quite say the vote was invalid; that would require a degree of conviction he has never quite managed. Instead he offers the weaker, more pathetic formulation: the result remains “legitimate,” of course, yet somehow tainted enough to justify a fresh round of closer ties with the very club the country chose to quit. It is the political equivalent of accepting a divorce settlement while still turning up at the former marital home with flowers and a tentative suggestion that the whole thing might have been the neighbour’s idea. The desperation is almost touching. Here is a man who, after years of watching the national argument from the relative safety of Manchester, now finds himself in the top job and immediately reaches for the oldest excuse in the book: foreigners meddled, the people were misled, and therefore the awkward democratic outcome may safely be revisited. One almost feels sorry for him. Almost.

Then there is the climate crisis, revealed at last as communism in green face-paint. This is an elegant diagnosis. For years the more devout advocates of net-zero have spoken with the unshakeable certainty once reserved for dialectical materialism. The science is settled, the models are beyond question, and anyone who notices that the models occasionally forecast ice ages or tropical paradises with equal confidence is simply a denier. The proposed remedies have a familiar ring: central planning of energy, the reallocation of resources according to ideological purity, and the quiet suggestion that individual freedom is a luxury the planet can no longer afford. Carbon credits circulate like the old industrial quotas, only with better branding. The faithful speak of “just transitions” in the same tone earlier generations reserved for the withering away of the state. One need not deny that the climate is changing to notice that the solutions on offer frequently resemble a five-year plan written by people who have never balanced a household budget. The sardonic observer is left wondering whether the real emergency is the temperature or the opportunity it provides for rearranging society along more obedient lines.

And Covid. Ah, Covid. The greatest scam in history, according to the emerging orthodoxy of the newly awakened. Here the irony is almost too rich to bear. An entire civilisation agreed, with remarkable speed, to treat a novel virus as an existential drama requiring the suspension of ordinary life. Governments discovered that populations would accept almost any restriction if sufficiently alarmed. Scientists discovered that certainty was more useful than data. Pharmaceutical companies discovered that emergency authorisation was a remarkably efficient business model. And the public, having been told that two weeks would flatten the curve, eventually discovered that the curve had developed a life of its own and rather liked the view from the top. Masks became talismans, vaccines became loyalty tests, and dissent became a form of social death. When the official narrative began to fray—when the origin stories multiplied, when the efficacy claims required constant adjustment, when the excess deaths stubbornly refused to follow the approved script—the response was not humility but amnesia. The whole episode is now treated as an awkward interlude best forgotten, rather like a dinner party at which everyone got spectacularly drunk and said things they now regret. To call it a scam is perhaps too neat; it was more like a collective hallucination in which the principal beneficiaries kept remarkably clear heads.

What follows, we are assured, will be terrible anger. The public, having been patient beyond the point of absurdity, will finally demand accounts. The responsible will be chastised without pity. One waits with interest to see the form this chastisement takes. Will the architects of endless European summits be made to sit through their own previous speeches? Will the climate commissars be required to heat their homes with the same intermittent energy sources they prescribe for the rest of us? Will the public-health officials who discovered authoritarian talents they never knew they possessed be subjected to the same level of scrutiny they once applied to the unvaccinated? History suggests that the truly responsible have a gift for being elsewhere when the bill arrives. Anger, however terrible, has a short half-life. It tends to dissipate into new distractions, new crises, new opportunities for the same people to offer the same solutions with only slightly altered vocabulary.

There is a melancholy comedy in all this. Societies that pride themselves on rationality appear capable of remarkable periods of collective self-deception, followed by equally remarkable periods of retrospective outrage. The pattern is almost comforting in its predictability. We believe the experts until the experts are proven wrong, then we believe a different set of experts who explain why the first set were compromised, until those too are found wanting. The cycle continues, and the one constant is that someone, somewhere, is writing a strongly worded statement about it. The coming awakening, if it arrives, will no doubt produce its own literature of recrimination, its own committees of inquiry, its own solemn promises that such things must never happen again. And then, with any luck, we shall all be distracted by the next emergency, which will of course be entirely different and require entirely new sacrifices.

In the meantime, the dry observer can only note that the human capacity for delayed recognition remains one of our more reliable traits. We notice the cardboard scenery only after the play has run for several seasons and the actors have begun to look tired. The anger that follows may indeed be terrible. Whether it proves effective is another question entirely. History, that most sardonic of chroniclers, has seen this performance before.

LABOUR'S DIGITAL DOUBLE-STANDARD

It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least widely tweeted, that a government in possession of a large majority must be in want of consistency. The latest illustration arrives with characteristic understatement from the Prime Minister’s office. From next year, should you wish to open a fresh account on Instagram, TikTok or the platform formerly known as Twitter, you will be invited—politely, of course—to upload a form of identification or submit to a facial age scan. The stated purpose is the protection of the young from the perils of the infinite scroll. 

Fair enough. Children should not be left unsupervised in the digital sweetshop. Yet the same administration, under the energetic leadership of Andy Burnham, is simultaneously advancing legislation that would allow a voter to stroll into a polling station armed with nothing more photographic than a bank card. The card need not even display a full name in some interpretations; initials will apparently suffice. One is left wondering whether the electorate is considered more trustworthy than a teenager with a smartphone, or simply less inconvenient.

The irony is almost too neat to be accidental, social media, that noisy agora of the age, is to be placed under a regime of verification so that the under-sixteens may be kept out. The polling station, by contrast, is to have its existing photo-ID requirement diluted in the name of accessibility. The Representation of the People Bill, we are told, is being hurried along with a speed that suggests either profound confidence in the purity of the democratic process or a certain anxiety about the calendar. Bank cards are to be admitted as proof of identity. The Electoral Commission has expressed reservations about the reduced security of a document that carries neither likeness nor, necessarily, unambiguous personal details. These reservations have been noted and, in the classic manner of governments everywhere, filed under “concerns that will be addressed in due course.”

One need not be a conspiracy theorist of the more florid variety to observe that identity checks at the ballot box were introduced precisely because personation—voting in someone else’s name—is not an abstract theoretical risk. It has occurred. It has been prosecuted. The previous requirement of photographic identification was imperfect, as all human arrangements are, yet it raised a modest barrier against the more casual forms of abuse. Replacing that barrier with a plastic rectangle that can be obtained, lost, or, in less scrupulous hands, acquired with relative ease is presented as an act of democratic expansion. The native British working class, whose grandparents built the Labour movement in the mills and the mines and the union halls, might be forgiven for wondering whether the expansion is aimed in their direction. Those voters still tend to possess, or at least to understand the value of, a passport, a driving licence or a pensioner’s travel pass. The new dispensation appears more solicitous of those for whom documentary formality has historically been optional.

There is a certain historical poignancy here. The Labour Party was founded by men and women who believed that the franchise should be guarded as carefully as the rights it conferred. They fought for the vote; they did not fight for the right to treat the vote as a casual convenience. To dilute the safeguards while simultaneously tightening the screws on online anonymity looks less like progressive modernisation and more like selective vigilance. One set of rules for the digital commons, where the young must be protected from themselves; another for the polling booth, where the integrity of the count is apparently robust enough to withstand a lighter touch. The suspicion inevitably arises that the lighter touch is preferred not because fraud is impossible, but because a certain elasticity in the electoral roll may prove useful should the government’s mandate require a little artificial reinforcement.

Burnham’s defenders will insist that bank cards are ubiquitous, that the change merely removes an unnecessary obstacle for the poor and the transient, and that any talk of fraud is the fever dream of reactionaries who prefer fewer people to vote at all. The argument has a surface plausibility. Yet the same government that frets over the possibility of a fifteen-year-old creating a TikTok account shows a remarkable nonchalance about the possibility of an ineligible person casting a ballot. The asymmetry is instructive. Algorithms must be policed with biometric thoroughness; the ballot box may rely on the honour system, supplemented by a piece of plastic issued by a bank that has no particular interest in electoral purity.

One detects, beneath the language of inclusion, a quiet abandonment of the party’s original constituency. The native working class—those who still live in the towns that once returned solid Labour majorities, who pay their taxes, who send their children to the local comprehensive, and who notice when the rules seem to bend more readily for newcomers than for themselves—are offered the consolation that democracy is being made more accessible. They may be excused for feeling that accessibility is being redefined in a manner that dilutes their own hard-won voice. A false mandate, after all, need not be fabricated through overt criminality. It can be assembled through a series of small administrative adjustments that make verification less exacting and the electorate more elastic.

The late Miles Kingston, were he still with us and still inclined to comment on the passing political carnival, might have observed that the British genius for hypocrisy has rarely been displayed with such bureaucratic elegance. To demand a face scan before one may post a cat video, while accepting a debit card as sufficient warrant to help choose a government, is a performance of priorities that would have delighted the more satirical corners of the old television review columns. It is not that electoral fraud is being openly invited. It is that the obstacles to it are being courteously lowered, while the obstacles to anonymous social-media mischief are being raised. The working-class founders of the Labour Party, one suspects, would have recognised the difference. They understood that the franchise is not a consumer service to be made frictionless; it is a trust. Treat it as the former, and it ceases, gradually but inexorably, to function as the latter.

In the end the policy reveals more about the government’s hierarchy of anxieties than any press release ever could. Children must be protected from the internet. The integrity of the vote, apparently, can look after itself. Or at least it can be trusted to look after the interests of those currently holding the levers. The native British working class, who once formed the backbone of the movement, are left to contemplate the spectacle of a party that remembers their history mainly as a decorative slogan while adjusting the practical machinery of democracy in directions that may not favour them. 

It is a curious form of progressive politics that makes it harder to open a social-media account than to cast a ballot. One can only hope the irony is not entirely lost on those responsible for it.

ZELENSKY: SABOTEUR-IN-CHIEF

There comes a moment in every long-running international farce when the leading man, having milked the audience’s sympathy for all it is worth, overplays his hand and reveals that the tears were never quite real. Volodymyr Zelensky has arrived at that moment with the grace of a comedian who has forgotten the punchline and now stands blinking in the spotlight, wondering why the laughter has turned sour. The notion that this former television actor was simply the plucky steward of a distressed fledgling democracy always required a certain suspension of disbelief. One bought the ticket, of course; the alternative was to look like a brute. But the performance has gone on rather too long, and the props department has begun to look threadbare.

He has treated successive attempts at settlement with the petulance of a child who discovers that the birthday presents are not quite up to the standard advertised in the brochure. Peace deals arrive, are examined, and are then rejected with an air of wounded virtue that would have done credit to a Victorian governess. The allowance, naturally, must continue. Why, after all, would a man who has suspended elections, placed certain churches under the official frown, and arranged the political furniture to suit a more permanent occupancy, suddenly decide that peace is in his interest? Peace would require him to face the electorate again. Peace would require him to explain why the war that was meant to end last year, or the year before that, has somehow become a lifestyle. Dictators, even the telegenic variety, tend to find the prospect unappealing.

Into this prolonged theatrical run has stepped a piece of unexpected pragmatism from an unlikely quarter. The arrangement between Trump and Putin concerning diesel supplies—reached after repeated American requests that Ukraine cease striking Russian refineries had been met with the usual theatrical deafness—has the distinct smell of realism about it. Global markets do not care for the finer points of moral posturing; they care for the price of fuel. When those prices begin to inconvenience voters in the United States, even the most high-minded rhetoric starts to look expensive. The deal does not, of course, end the war. It does something more useful: it removes one of the incentives for prolonging it. By reducing the leverage that energy disruption provided, it makes further escalation less attractive to those who had grown rather fond of the disruption. In the arid language of diplomacy, this is what passes for a peace-preserving measure. One notes it without needing to break into applause; the mere fact that someone has finally noticed the cost of the performance is itself a small mercy.

Meanwhile, across the Channel and beyond the Rhine, certain European leaders have been conducting their own quieter calculation. The war has offered a convenient distraction from the awkward business of domestic accountability. Conscription talk, or the threat of it, has floated about the corridors of Brussels and various national capitals with a regularity that suggests more than pure military necessity. Young European men—particularly those of the demographic that still forms the statistical backbone of several electorates—have been invited to contemplate the possibility of becoming cannon fodder in a conflict whose strategic aims have grown increasingly elastic. The phrase “phony war” may be unkind, yet it is difficult to escape the impression that the conflict has served some as a useful holding pattern: a way of postponing the day when French and German voters must be faced with the ordinary questions of governance, prosperity, and demographic reality. Endless solidarity with Ukraine has the useful secondary effect of postponing the more awkward solidarity with one’s own taxpayers.

That particular hope is now under strain. Once the American side has demonstrated a willingness to deal directly with Moscow over matters that affect its own electorate, the European posture of permanent moral elevation becomes harder to maintain. The leaders of France and Germany, who have grown accustomed to treating the war as a kind of external morality play that conveniently excuses them from explaining their own domestic arrangements, find the stage lights suddenly turned upon themselves. There is nowhere left to hide. The electorate, that eternally ungrateful audience, has a habit of noticing when the script has run out of plot.

An end to the war in Ukraine is not a romantic aspiration; it is a practical necessity. Prolonged conflict has a way of consuming the very societies that claim to be defending civilisation. The Trump-Putin diesel arrangement, whatever its other imperfections, has the modest virtue of introducing a note of economic realism into a drama that had become addicted to pure gesture. If it helps to shorten the fighting, so much the better. The alternative is to continue indefinitely in the service of a narrative that has already outlived its usefulness, while European governments quietly hope that the demographic and political consequences can be deferred a little longer. History, as usual, is not in the habit of granting such extensions.