NOT IN MY NAME, ROLY-POLY

There comes a moment in the life of any self-respecting nation when its leaders, having exhausted the usual repertoire of excuses for incompetence, discover that nothing quite concentrates the public mind like the prospect of sending other people’s sons to be blown to pieces. Britain appears to have reached that moment with the quiet efficiency of a man discovering a forgotten bottle of sherry and deciding it will do for breakfast. 

The decision, we are told in the more elevated tones of Whitehall, has already been taken somewhere in the digestive tract of the British establishment: direct conflict with Russia is on the cards. The only remaining task is to frighten the rest of us into regarding this as either a jolly good idea or, at the very least, the sort of weather one simply has to put up with.

It is the old march to 1914, only this time the brass bands have been replaced by solemn briefings and the recruiting posters feature fewer moustaches and more PowerPoint slides. Then, as now, a surprising number of those who once called themselves the left will discover an unexpected fondness for the national colours. Patriotism, it turns out, is the last refuge of the progressive who has run out of progressive things to say. 

They will go along to get along, muttering about solidarity while the generals, the arms manufacturers and the perennial products of Eton prepare to play their favourite game: the one in which young men from the housing estates and the schemes are invited to demonstrate their civic virtue by becoming pawns.

These young men, it must be conceded, have been admirably prepared for the role. Looking out from their estates upon a future that consists largely of the absence of one, they present the authorities with a ready supply of willing volunteers—or, if willingness proves insufficient, of young men who can be persuaded that refusal is somehow unpatriotic. Conscription, whether formal or the softer kind that arrives by way of economic desperation and relentless messaging, has always relied on this convenient coincidence of hopelessness and hierarchy. The system that has created far more problems than it could ever solve now finds itself in need of a war to keep the lid on. 

Eduardo Galeano put it with characteristic economy: the marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters. Putin’s Russia has been cast in the role with all the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Once upon a time parents warned naughty children that the bogeyman would come; now the same service is performed by politicians who assure us the Russians are coming unless we do as we are told.

The enemy without, of course, is useful chiefly for the control it offers within. It is not Moscow that truly keeps the establishment awake at night so much as the low, persistent murmur of domestic discontent. War fever has the great advantage of turning that murmur into a more manageable roar of martial enthusiasm. 

We have been here before. They lied to us about Yugoslavia. They lied to us about Iraq. They lied to us about Libya. They lied to us about Syria. The pattern is so consistent that one begins to suspect it is less a series of unfortunate errors than a governing principle. To believe the current version of events requires a capacity for selective amnesia that would be impressive in a goldfish.

Siegfried Sassoon, who knew something about the difference between the recruiting office and the trench, described war as the hell where youth and laughter go. The observation has not aged. The fight that matters now is the one that prevents the youth of this generation from being packed off into the same hell that claimed the youth of his. 

Conscription—whether by legal instrument or by the quieter coercion of narrative and necessity—is the mechanism by which that packing is achieved. It takes young men who have already been short-changed by the economy and invites them to settle the remaining debt with their lives. The generals will speak of duty; the manufacturers will speak of readiness; the politicians will speak of inevitability. The young men themselves will be expected to speak very little at all.

There is a certain dry comedy in watching a political class that can scarcely organise a reliable train service suddenly discover the moral clarity required for continental war. The comedy, however, is of the sort that ends with someone else paying the bill. Never again is not a slogan for the history books; it is a practical instruction for the present. 

The young men on the estates and the schemes have already been offered a future of no future. They should not be asked to improve upon that offer by dying for it.

MUSK'S CAR FLIES WHILST BRUSSELS TETHERS US

The Tesla Roadster now hurtling through the void is not, strictly speaking, flying. Flying implies purpose, control, and the faint possibility of landing somewhere useful, preferably with the wheels still attached. What Elon Musk achieved in 2018 was rather more ambitious and considerably more American: he took a perfectly good electric sports car, bolted it to the business end of a Falcon Heavy rocket, and flung it into interplanetary space with a mannequin in a spacesuit at the wheel, tuned permanently to David Bowie. The car is currently somewhere between Earth and Mars, doing laps of the solar system like a bored millionaire who has run out of private islands. It is the most expensive piece of space junk in human history, and the most elegant.

One must admire the sheer theatricality of the gesture. While lesser nations debate the precise angle at which a yoghurt pot lid should be recycled, Musk simply decided that the cosmos needed a cherry-red convertible and made it so. The Roadster’s trajectory is eccentric in every sense. It will, according to the orbital mechanics people who still have jobs, spend the next few million years looping past Earth and Mars, occasionally coming close enough for future generations to wave at it through telescopes, provided they still have telescopes and have not been required to tether them to the observatory for safety reasons.

The humour of the enterprise is pure Musk: a mixture of engineering bravado and adolescent showmanship. Starman, the dummy driver, sits there forever in a posture of studied nonchalance, one hand on the wheel, the other presumably scrolling through the universe’s least useful playlist. The car’s battery will eventually die, the paint will fade under unfiltered solar radiation, and the whole ensemble will become a silent monument to the proposition that if you have enough money and enough rockets, the laws of taste can be temporarily suspended. Clive James once observed that the English talent for understatement was matched only by the American talent for overstatement; here the overstatement has achieved escape velocity.

And this, of course, is the real point. Such magnificent absurdities arise only from the particular soil of American free-market capitalism, that unruly garden in which billionaires are allowed to plant rockets the way other people plant hydrangeas. The same system that produces Silicon Valley’s more tiresome excesses also produces the occasional spectacle of a car doing what cars were never meant to do: leave the planet altogether. One may disapprove of the concentration of wealth, the cult of personality, the tweets that read like unfinished ransom notes. One may still find oneself smiling at the image of a Roadster out there among the asteroids, its headlights permanently off, its radio forever silent, embodying the principle that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing in a manner calculated to annoy the European Commission.

Contrast this with the European Union’s crowning technological achievement of recent years: the tethered bottle cap. After years of deliberation, impact assessments, stakeholder consultations, and the solemn weighing of plastic against planetary survival, Brussels succeeded in ensuring that the lid of your mineral water can never again be lost under the car seat. The cap remains attached by a thin plastic hinge, flapping about like a broken wing whenever you try to drink. It is an innovation of pure negation—an improvement that makes the original object slightly worse while congratulating itself on moral progress. One can almost hear the collective sigh of bureaucratic satisfaction as the directive was signed: another small victory for the precautionary principle, another small defeat for the ordinary human desire to open a bottle without a fight.

The same institutional temperament that gave us the tethered bottle top is incapable of producing a car in space. They can’t even take the top off a biro without commissioning eight separate environmental reports to discuss the implications, and even then they would only come to the conclusion that the top needs to be tethered to the pen, making it impossible to write with. The biro itself would then be subjected to a life-cycle analysis, a carbon-footprint audit, and a public consultation on the ethical implications of ink. By the time the process concluded, the pen would be illegal and the only permitted writing instrument would be a recyclable stylus permanently attached to a government-approved tablet that refuses to turn on unless you have completed a GDPR compliance form.

There is something almost poignant in the comparison. America, for all its chaos and inequality, still retains the capacity for grand, slightly ridiculous gestures. Europe, for all its civilisation and social protections, has perfected the art of the small, slightly ridiculous regulation. One launches cars into the heavens; the other makes sure you cannot lose the lid of your lemonade. Both, in their way, are expressions of national character. One dreams of Mars while arguing on Twitter. The other dreams of a perfectly sorted recycling bin while arguing about the precise definition of a single-use plastic. Musk’s Roadster will, in the fullness of geological time, either collide with something interesting or continue its lonely circuit until the sun expands and swallows it. By then the tethered bottle caps of Europe will have long since been replaced by some even more ingenious form of mandatory attachment—perhaps bottle caps tethered to the user, or users tethered to the European Parliament. 

In the meantime, the car sails on, a silent rebuke to caution, a chrome-and-leather reminder that sometimes the most civilised thing a civilisation can do is waste a perfectly good sports car on a cosmic practical joke. The rest of us are left down here, struggling with our hinged lids, wondering whether the next great leap for mankind will require planning permission.

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.