DAS FEUER UND THE FIREWALL

The morning after the night before in Saxony-Anhalt, one can almost hear the sound of well-upholstered chairs being scraped back across expensive floors in the better parts of Berlin, Brussels and a dozen other capitals. The voters have spoken, and the people who usually speak for them are now engaged in the delicate business of deciding how loudly to pretend they did not hear. A follow-up note is therefore in order, not so much a prophecy as an exercise in watching the machinery of respectability begin to whir.

It is an ancient and reliable pattern. When the electorate shows an inconvenient preference for parties that treat certain subjects as discussable rather than radioactive, the established order does not immediately retire to the country with a good book. It reaches first for the milder instruments of exclusion. The famous firewall is already in place, of course: a political cordon sanitaire so solemnly maintained that one half expects it to come with its own ceremonial guards and a visitor’s book. Coalitions will be constructed with the architectural ingenuity once reserved for cathedrals, the sole purpose being to ensure that the largest party in the room remains standing outside it. This is presented, with a straight face, as the defence of democracy. The irony is almost too perfect to improve upon.

Beyond the polite ostracism lie more energetic measures. Intelligence services will continue to classify inconvenient regional branches with the sort of bureaucratic thoroughness once applied to the classification of butterflies. Media organisations, many of them already predisposed to regard any deviation from the approved narrative as a form of moral failure, will intensify the moral framing until the average reader begins to feel that voting the wrong way is only a few degrees short of a public health hazard. Legal challenges, funding inquiries and procedural roadblocks will appear with the regularity of seasonal allergies. None of this requires a secret cartel meeting in a smoke-filled room; it requires only the ordinary reflexes of people who have grown accustomed to managing outcomes and are mildly affronted when the managed object.

How far might such reflexes extend? History suggests that elites under pressure rarely stop at the first available lever. One has seen, in various European settings, the quiet expansion of surveillance justifications, the creative interpretation of hate-speech provisions, the pressure on platforms to adjust the visibility of certain voices, and the occasional attempt to place entire political formations under a form of administrative quarantine. The language remains elevated—democracy, values, the lessons of the past—while the practical effect is to make the expression of majority sentiment on immigration feel slightly illicit. The danger, as always, is not that these efforts will succeed completely, but that they will succeed just enough to convince a larger portion of the public that the game is fixed. Nothing accelerates the growth of the very parties being restrained quite like the spectacle of restraint itself.

There is a particular comedy in the far-left contribution to this performance. Having spent years arguing that institutions are irredeemably captured by the powerful, they now discover a sudden and touching faith in those same institutions whenever the powerful happen to share their own aversions. The globalist tendency—less a cartel than a shared set of assumptions among people who attend the same conferences and read the same briefings—operates with a similar lack of self-awareness. It treats national electorates as temporary inconveniences to be educated rather than permanent facts to be accommodated. When education fails, management follows. When management frays, the tone grows sharper.

None of this is to claim that every critic of the AfD is a conspirator, or that every institutional response is illegitimate. Parties with radical edges invite scrutiny, and democratic systems are entitled to defend themselves against genuine threats. The concern lies in the proportionality, and in the temptation to treat electoral inconvenience as existential emergency. The more the centre and the left lean on extraordinary measures to remain in effective control, the more they risk confirming the central charge against them: that they prefer the appearance of consensus to the reality of consent.

Saxony-Anhalt has provided the latest reminder that consent can be withdrawn. The response now unfolding will tell us whether Europe’s political class has the wit to adjust, or whether it will prefer the older, more comforting strategy of tightening the rules until the voters finally notice the cage. The latter course has a long and undistinguished history. It tends to end not with the restoration of order, but with the order itself looking faintly ridiculous—and the voters, once again, declining to laugh on cue.

A LAMENT FOR THE CALLOUSED HAND

Ah, the romance of honest toil—how it glints in the rear-view mirror like a miner’s lamp in a long-abandoned seam. One pictures those sturdy forebears of ours, the miners, the shipbuilders, the factory hands, the farmers, bent double under the weight of actual achievement. They didn’t “facilitate stakeholder synergies” or “curate content strategies.” They dug coal, welded hulls, turned lathes, and coaxed crops from reluctant soil, all while the nation they were building quietly got on with the business of existing. Their hands told stories in calluses the way our palms now tell only of repetitive strain from scrolling. And yet here we are, heirs to their sweat, wondering why the inheritance feels so suspiciously like a participation trophy wrapped in student debt.

It is a truth universally acknowledged by anyone who has ever tried to assemble flat-pack furniture without swearing that manual competence has been quietly airbrushed from the national portrait. We speak of “deindustrialisation” as though it were a polite meteorological event rather than the collective decision to swap forges for focus groups. The miner who once emerged blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of productivity on his face has been replaced by the graduate emerging from three years of media studies, blinking into the daylight with the honest grime of overdraft on his soul. Both are covered in something, mind you. Only one of them built anything that could still be pointed to with pride decades later.

I confess—and here the self-deprecation must intrude, for I am hardly the man to lecture on the nobility of labour—I possess all the practical skills of a particularly indolent house cat. My attempts at DIY tend to end in tactical retreats to the pub, where I can at least philosophise about the shelf I failed to put up. Give me a hammer and I become a minor health-and-safety incident. The thought of spending a day down a mine, or wrestling with the rivets of a ship, fills me with the sort of awe one reserves for Olympic athletes and people who can parallel park on the first attempt. What must it have been like, I wonder, to finish a shift knowing you had added something solid and measurable to the world? Not “value” in the vaporous sense beloved of management consultants, but actual, tangible stuff: a ton of coal shifted, a hull strengthened, a field ploughed. The satisfaction must have been almost indecent.

Instead, we have perfected the art of training an entire generation to be unemployable in any weather that doesn’t involve Wi-Fi. Universities, those cathedrals of deferred adulthood, continue to churn out degrees in subjects so ethereal they make medieval angelology look like hard science. The students emerge blinking, diploma in one hand, loan agreement in the other, ready to compete for jobs that consist largely of attending meetings about the next meeting. Meanwhile the shelves in the supermarket still need stocking, the lights still need keeping on, and the drains—dear God, the drains—still need unblocking by someone who actually knows which way a spanner turns. These are the quiet heroes who prevent civilisation from descending into a particularly fragrant apocalypse, yet we speak of them, if at all, with the faint condescension usually reserved for people who still listen to vinyl.

There is something almost comically masochistic about a society that celebrates the abstract while quietly depending on the concrete. We lionise the “knowledge economy” as though knowledge could power a hospital during a blackout or keep a tractor running. The office class, of which I am a reluctant and underachieving member, has convinced itself that thinking about things is superior to doing them. We write reports about productivity while the people who actually produce things get treated as picturesque relics, suitable for heritage documentaries and little else. One almost admires the audacity of it all. It’s rather like a man standing on the roof of a building he didn’t build, complaining that the foundations are terribly old-fashioned.

And yet one wonders—what if? What if, instead of stumbling through a series of arts degrees and journalistic misadventures, one had learned to lay bricks, or weld, or coax machinery into reluctant obedience? There is a dignity in that sort of competence that no amount of LinkedIn endorsements can replicate. The quiet pride of the craftsman who knows his work will outlast him; the farmer who understands that nature doesn’t do focus groups; the engineer whose mistakes announce themselves with alarming immediacy rather than hiding politely in a spreadsheet until bonus time.

Perhaps the greatest satire of our age is that we have managed to make uselessness expensive and usefulness slightly embarrassing. We pay fortunes to be taught things that nobody needs while paying rather less to the people we cannot do without. A strong nation, as the original observation had it, honours its working people, not merely its office class. Until we remember that, we shall continue our elegant decline, tweeting furiously about sustainability from buildings whose plumbing was installed by men who never needed a wellness app to tell them when they were tired.

The lamps may still be on, for now. But one suspects the chaps who keep them that way aren’t checking their notifications while they do it. More’s the pity. And more’s the wonder.

ABBOTT GOES FROM CALAMITY … TO CLAIRTY?!

There comes a moment in every thoughtful person’s life when the universe stages a practical joke so exquisite that one is forced to question not merely one’s political compass but the very integrity of one’s sense of smell. Mine arrived, as these things tend to do, while scrolling through the usual digital slurry and encountering the latest pronouncement from Diane Abbott. The Russian threat, she declared with the serene confidence of someone who once calculated the annual salary of a policeman at roughly the price of a decent sandwich, is a “Nato fiction.” The war in Ukraine, she has elsewhere observed, amounts to little more than a Nato campaign against Russia. And here I sit, a man who has spent decades regarding Ms Abbott’s public utterances with the same wary fascination one reserves for a distant relative who insists on demonstrating card tricks after three glasses of wine, forced to murmur, against every instinct of self-preservation: she may, on this particular point, be onto something.

Let us first pay proper respects to the long and distinguished record that makes any such agreement feel like an act of intellectual self-harm. Diane Abbott has, over the years, perfected the art of the political stumble with a consistency that borders on the athletic. There was the immortal 2017 radio performance in which the cost of recruiting ten thousand extra police officers floated freely between three hundred thousand pounds—thirty quid a head, if one is feeling generous—and eighty million, a figure that would still have left each officer roughly on the financial footing of a Victorian chimney sweep. One half expected her to revise it further downward until the entire force could be paid in bus tickets and kind words. Then there was the serene suggestion that Chairman Mao had, on balance, done more good than harm, a claim delivered with the air of someone reviewing a particularly ambitious restaurant rather than a regime whose body count would have given even the more industrious twentieth-century monsters pause. 

Add the taxi tweet, the Finnish nurses who had apparently never met a black person and were therefore unsuitable for multicultural Hackney, the private-school decision for her own son after years of denouncing such choices as indefensible hypocrisy, the mojito on the Overground (a moment of pure proletarian solidarity with the tinny), the mismatched shoes on election day, and the letter in which Jewish, Irish and Traveller experiences of prejudice were briskly filed under the same heading as the tribulations of redheads. One could almost admire the range. Most politicians specialise in one or two reliable howlers; Abbott treats the entire spectrum as her personal playground.

And then, of course, there is the romance. In the late 1970s, while the rest of Britain was discovering the joys of inflation and punk, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn embarked upon what can only be described as the least erotic political liaison since John Major decided he rather fancied a late night Currie. She has herself recounted how their great romantic outing consisted of a drive to Highgate Cemetery so that Jeremy might proudly display the tomb of Karl Marx. One pictures the scene: a young woman dressed for what she fondly imagined might be a wine bar, only to find herself standing in the drizzle before a monument to dialectical materialism while her suitor beamed as if he had just presented her with the Koh-i-Noor. There was, apparently, a motorbike tour of East Germany as well—because nothing says passion like the German Democratic Republic in winter. The relationship, she notes, eventually collapsed under the weight of Jeremy’s discovery that politics occupied ninety-nine per cent of his available attention, leaving her the unenviable one per cent. One struggles to imagine the domestic conversation. “Darling, shall we go out?” “Yes—Highgate, and bring a notebook.” It is the sort of courtship that makes one grateful for the invention of the dating app, if only so that future generations might be spared such ideological package holidays.

All of which brings us, by a route as circuitous and poorly signposted as one of Abbott’s own statistical explanations, to the present discomfort. For years I have watched the Ukrainian conflict with the growing suspicion that the official narrative has acquired the same self-sealing quality once reserved for certain theological disputes. Nato’s eastward expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, the transformation of a brutal regional war into a quasi-existential crusade complete with moral blackmail and escalating weaponry. Abbott’s formulation is characteristically blunt and lacking in diplomatic polish; she has never been accused of excessive nuance. Yet the insistence that every expression of caution about endless escalation, about the wisdom of treating a nuclear-armed power as a cartoon villain, or about the domestic cost of perpetual rearmament constitutes “Kremlin talking points” that somehow synchronises perfectly with American electoral cycles and presidential preferences, a certain scepticism is not only permissible but obligatory.

I do not suggest for one moment that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood agrarian reformer, nor that the corpses in Bucha and Mariupol are optical illusions. Reality is under no obligation to be tidy. But the spectacle of Western capitals discovering, rather late in the day, that Russia constitutes an existential menace precisely when budgets need inflating and political capital needs harvesting, has a familiar odour. Abbott, for all her habitual clumsiness, has simply refused to pretend that the emperor’s new strategic concept is anything other than a rather threadbare set of underpants. In doing so she has, against the odds and against her own considerable body of previous work, momentarily aligned herself with the awkward, unfashionable observation that great-power rivalries are rarely as pure as the press releases claim.

It is a deeply unsettling sensation. Agreeing with Diane Abbott feels rather like discovering that the relative who cannot count change has correctly predicted the winner of the Grand National by studying the horses’ names for Star Trek references. One wants to check the calculation three times, then four. Yet here we are. The woman who once reduced police recruitment to the price of a takeaway coffee has, on the matter of Nato’s Ukrainian entanglement and the convenient inflation of the Russian peril, managed to sound more lucid than half the commentariat currently demanding that we all dig deeper for the next tranche of munitions. 

The universe, as I say, has a sense of humour. It is not always a kind one, and it rarely bothers with punchlines that flatter the listener. Still, one must occasionally tip one’s hat to the absurd. Even if the hat in question was last seen on the wrong foot.