As is tradition, here is a brief round-up of recent pieces.

The post about James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages was my second most read ever. (Number one is a piece about the global fertility crisis, and number three about Dutch sounding amusing to English speakers).

There were lots of things I had to cut out of the piece, for space. I especially like where Marriott mentions one…

… significant craze that erupted while I was writing this book was for videos in which AI-generated animated characters with vegetables for heads enacted brief soap-operatic (and sometimes faintly pornographic) emotional dramas. The inanity of these videos is surely unprecedented in human culture. The curvaceous Mrs Strawberry-head has an affair with the handsome and expensively-suited Mr Banana-head. In another, a bulkily muscled homophobic character with a tangerine for a head expels his gay son (also with a tangerine head) from his house. The tangerine family scream at one another. Windows smash. At the end of it all President Abraham Lincoln appears in the bathroom snogging Mr Tangerine-head’s wife. Such stuff makes a Salvador Dali canvas look like an oasis of rationality and order.

On the subject of television shows spelling everything out to viewers:

In a scene in the number one ranking Netflix film Irish Wish Lindsay Lohan’s character informs her lover that, “We spent a day together … I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” To which he replies: “Fine. That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.” It would be churlish to deny the dramatic possibilities of endangered tree lizards but the imperative of holding a distracted audience seems to be degrading much of the entertainment industry to an almost Primary School level of artistic sophistication. It is hard to sustain interiority or nuance in a film in which every action must be clearly sign-posted and explained to a half-focused audience. Of course, not every Netflix film needs to be a Chekhovian masterpiece of insinuation and subtext. But we do need to worry about the prospect — and I think it is an increasingly plausible one — of basic grown-up complexity draining out of our culture entirely.

Marriott argues that illiteracy tends towards despotism, because:

Print puts the voices of ordinary people on a more equal plane with those of their social superiors. If you get into an argument in court you are likely to defer unquestioningly to the point of view of a well-dressed cousin of the king. In a newspaper the smart and witty opinion of a merchant or a craftsman can trump the dim-witted musings of a well-connected dignitary. One of the important features of the public sphere was what Habermas called the “authority of the better argument”. The emotional, pre-rational and mystical visual language of power was being replaced by a critical literate language. Hence a clever philosopher like Voltaire could influence government policy just by writing about it.

I suppose the counter to that argument is that AI is going to hugely reduce the power of certain clerisy groups, such as civil servants, who can now be challenged by intelligent outsiders. There may be both a tendency towards large swathes of the population becoming numb, while a significant minority becomes better informed via an information revolution; the debate over welfare and social housing has already been hugely influenced by this trend.

My own view is that the decline of Protestantism partly explains the state of literacy as much as its rise did. A year or so back, there was a video going around in which pro-Palestine protesters were asked what ‘from the river to the sea’ referenced, to which none of them could answer. I imagine that a century ago, a more Biblically literate public would have known.

In his critique of Marriott’s book, Henry Oliver made the point that ‘it is my suspicion that what a lot of people who agree with The New Dark Ages’ description of modern culture really regret is not the death of print but the winnowing of upper-middlebrow culture: BBC documentaries, intellectuals on talk shows, Kenneth Clark, Melvyn Bragg, that sort of thing.’

In my case that is absolutely true, but one might also argue that the two things are linked: that the high-minded documentary making of the 1970s was written, produced and commissioned by people who had grown up in a print culture, and this is not true of the generations that followed. As print declined, so television came to serve a population that had adopted a more oral culture, lacking the ability to follow content with the same depth. The decline of reading, and the decline of high-minded, quality television - what Oliver calls the ‘passive high-brow’ - are part of the same trend.

I wrote about the new Charles de Gaulle film. The French do valour with a certain élan, and I’ve long thought there’s a huge market for paperback non-fiction or documentaries about France’s equivalent of the SAS.

I also liked the sense of deep history the film evoked, with the General referencing Clovis twice. There is a sense that the Franks had not just laid the foundations for France, but saved western Christendom, and would do so again, famously two centuries later at Tours.

De Gaulle, incidentally, has the record for the number of assassination attempts.

I also wrote about what the world would look like if France had won in 1940. I imagine the scenes in Paris in 2026 might look rather different.

I wrote about 9/11 and the ‘frontlash’. It’s something I thought about a couple of years back while watching Come from Away, the heartwarming comedy musical about passengers stranded after 9/11. If you didn’t come out of it beaming with goodwill, you’re a sociopath.

I wrote about Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In his book, he compared the two great mid-century dystopias, and it’s worth mentioning that George Orwell conceived his during wartime Britain, when it looked like the future was Soviet, whereas Aldous Huxley lived in California, which actually was the shape of things to come. Pleasure would be our downfall, not pain.

Postman actually opposed quality television making, since it ‘serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse – news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion – and turns them into entertainment packages. We would all be better off if television got worse, not better. “The A-Team” and “Cheers” are no threat to our public health. “60 Minutes,” “Eye-Witness News” and “Sesame Street” are.’

This seems rather Leninist for my tastes, and, as mentioned, the decline of high-quality documentary making has only made the culture worse. As it is, television drama got much better afterwards, and the 2000s proved to be its golden age.

I wrote about protests, in Portsmouth and Piddington. About how most moral panics are quite accurate. I also wrote about the mistake of thinking the underdogs are always right, for which Star Wars must shoulder much of the blame.

I don’t think the British have a natural tendency to support the underdog, although a belief in ‘fair play’ is a more accurate description of our national characteristic, in the sense that the British developed neutral institutions divorced from clan influence, without which it is impossible. This was also the reason for Britain’s growing power.

I did a round-up of the good news from September 2026, and also wrote about how the migrant crisis threatens liberal democracy. I wrote about Lee Kuan Yew, here and here, and about how the Russian threat can send some people a bit doolally.

I also wrote about the nature of political alliances in multicultural societies.

One of our most thoughtful and intelligent MPs today is Adnan Hussain, among the five independents voted into Parliament in 2024. Hussain has recognisably moderate conservative views on a range of issues, including law and order, economic growth, property rights and the vexed subject of Englishness, but the nature of politics in a multicultural society means that he is destined to be an opponent of the Right, just as socially liberal ‘homonationalists’ are to be their allies. In another timeline, where immigration policies had been more prudent and the electoral calculus very different, it might have been otherwise.

Finally, I was very impressed by the quality of thinkers cited by Kemi Badenoch in her new booklet The Right Way. The piece she cited originally appeared here, so if you want to find out the future thinking of centre-right politics, subscribe to the Wrong Side of History in time for my return at the end of the year. This was sent to me by someone, by the way - I wasn’t searching up my name. Honestly.

Thanks to all those who have subscribed, shared, recommended and tweeted the substack. I’ll be back.

A Putin loyalist is in his office listening to The Rest is Politics. His friend is appalled that he chooses to follow enemy propaganda, and asks him ‘how can you listen to that rubbish?’ He explains how depressing it is being a Russian, concluding ‘…but when I listen to British centrists, I find that we Russians control the media and rule the entire world.’

I think of that old Jewish joke whenever I read or hear about ‘Russian interference’ in British politics, most recently the claims of the current Prime Minister that the Kremlin played a significant part in the Brexit vote.

The comparison doesn’t quite work, of course, because the Moscow newspapers are not full of depressing news, Russia being an authoritarian state where critics of the regime have an unfortunate habit of falling out of windows. But it’s still true that a certain type of Englishman credits the Kremlin with a degree of global power that veers into conspiracy theory.

The British and Russians have a history of mutual suspicion that verges on the hysterical, dating back to the 19^th century rivalries of the Great Game. Even at the time, some British critics thought their countrymen’s fears of the Russians washing their boots in the Indian Ocean slightly absurd.

Looking back, we might have been a bit unfair to Ivan at times. While British Liberals saw the tsar as the worst of all autocrats, Russian rule was sometimes quite benevolent, at least to minorities such as the Baltic Germans. It was certainly better than what followed. It’s also true that a Russian victory in that Great Game might have been better for the Middle East’s Christians, whereas British involvement in the region was disastrous for their co-religionists.

For their part, Russian commentators and politicians today seem to have an absurdly exaggerated idea of Britain’s power, the puppet-masters behind American global domination, still pulling the strings, rather than a country run by naive humanities graduates who place our ‘international standing’ above national interests. Rabid threats to nuke London by tipsy Russian politicians are the last crumbs of dignity and self-respect we have left, for which thank you.

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Singapore led the way in becoming the first truly multicultural democracy, but this entailed sacrifices. Because segregation was a major driver of inter-communal tension, so the new Housing and Development Board, as well as providing much needed homes, brought with it the revolutionary idea of neighbourhood quotas. This meant the vast majority of Singaporeans being allocated a flat, on which they had a 99-year lease, in purposefully desegregated housing blocks. The city would never again suffer from race riots.

Parliamentary seats were also reorganised to ensure that every constituency had a representative from each group. ‘Without this arrangement, the Chinese majority in all constituencies would most likely return Chinese candidates’, he wrote. Voters ‘preferred one who empathised with them, spoke the same dialect or language and was of the same race. All candidates who have campaigned know this only too well. It was going to be difficult if not impossible for a Malay or Indian candidate to win against a Chinese candidate.’

Lee had a hard-headed approach to multiculturalism, as only someone who was truly multicultural could. As one of the Straits Chinese elite, English was his ‘master language’, but he spoke Malay well, more like a peranakan - a local-born Chinese - rather than a totok, a recent Chinese immigrant. For his annual speech, which could take up to two hours, Lee would address the audience first in Malay, then Hokkien, and finally in English. Hokkien would later be replaced by Mandarin, even though ‘for many Chinese Singaporeans, dialect is the real mother tongue and Mandarin a stepmother tongue’.

Lee’s view of multiculturalism also directed his approach to the law. An early experience of defending rioters in 1951 during the ‘Jungle Girl’ disturbances had left him sceptical of the jury system, and he had it abolished in 1969, except for murder trials. Lee saw juries as incompatible with a multi-racial society, but he also believed that many people were too irrational to make such a decision.

He wrote how ‘a Straits Times court reporter who had watched many jury trials gave evidence… that superstitious beliefs and a general reluctance to take responsibility for severe punishment, especially the death sentence, made Asian jurors most reluctant to convict. They preferred acquittal or conviction on a lesser charge. The reporter said he could predict that whenever a pregnant woman was a member of the jury there would be no conviction on a murder charge, for otherwise her child would be born cursed. After the bill was passed and jury trials were abolished, there were fewer miscarriages of justice arising from the vagaries of jury sentiments.’

Singapore’s tough approach to crime became world famous, and curiously this was partly inspired by his experiences of the Japanese occupation, after which ‘I did not accept the theory that a criminal is a victim of society.’

He wrote how ‘punishment then was so severe that even in 1944-1945, when many did not have enough to eat, there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective. The British used to have whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails or rattan in Singapore. After the war, they abolished whipping but retained caning (with rattan). We found caning more effective than long prison terms and imposed it for crimes related to drugs, arms trafficking, rape, illegal entry into Singapore, and vandalising of public property.’

Perhaps the most famous controversy involved Michael Fay, a 15-year-old American schoolboy who in 1993 rather foolishly went on a vandalising spree with friends, spray-painting more than 20 cars. Fay was condemned to be caned, causing uproar among American journalists and politicians, who placed huge pressure on the city-state to let him off. Singapore refused to budge, and although they reduced the number of lashes, they felt that they should not be bullied into giving special privileges to the children of the imperial power.

Lee writes with satisfaction how polls showed the American public, fed up with crime and disorder in their own country, largely supportive of the punishment. Soon after the story became international news, his daughter Ling was pulled over by a police officer in New Hampshire. After she told him that she came from Singapore, and that he probably disapproved of her because of the Fay case, ‘he said the boy deserved the caning, drove her back to her car, and wished her good luck.’

Lee also bridled at ‘American liberal academics’ who ‘began to criticise us for our attitudes to the Western press circulating in Singapore. We were not following their pattern for development and progress, that as a country developed its free-market economy and enjoyed prosperity, it should become more like America, democratic and free, with no restrictions on the press. Because we do not comply with their norms, American liberals will not accept that our government, which Singaporeans have repeatedly voted for, can be good.’

Lee had on occasions censored newspapers, initially with those he saw as provoking racial unrest, but also foreign-owned publications he believed to be projecting foreign interests. Some of the western criticism clearly rankled with him, and he noted that ‘to show their disapproval the American press describes Singapore as “antiseptically clean” or “soullessly efficient.”’ He seemed especially annoyed that Samuel Huntingdon compared ‘clean and mean’ Singapore with ‘filthy and free’ Taiwan, and noted the grip of Triad gangs on Taiwanese politics.

His disdain for American criticism was heightened by an increasing sense among Singaporeans, and Asians more broadly, that the west was becoming decadent, a fear certainly heightened by the Vietnamese experience of American troops. He especially disliked hippies – a common antipathy in the region – and started a campaign against long hair in 1971; some young men even had their locks forcibly cut. Later, in the 1990s, the city-state moved towards embracing ‘Asian values’.

On top of this, Lee always found the Americans harder to deal with than the British. In 1961, after one of many disputes, he told his staff that ‘remember all the time that we are not dealing with an enemy, but the bloody stupidity of a friend’. He also came to believe that, in their promotion of liberalism, ‘Americans have become as dogmatic and evangelical as the communists were’. Their foreign policy could be very naïve, whereas the British had been ruthlessly realistic about communal conflict, and used it to their advantage.

He wrote how ‘many American leaders believed that racial, religious, and linguistic hatred, rivalries, hostilities, and feuds down the millennia could be solved if sufficient resources were expended on them.’ For someone raised in the ethnic cauldron of south-east Asia, this was bizarrely utopian.

Despite this, and what he saw as their unprincipled dealing with the South Vietnamese leadership, Lee supported the Americans’ anti-communist mission in nearby Indochina: ‘Had there been no US intervention, the will of these countries to resist them would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist. The prosperous emerging market economies of ASEAN were nurtured during the Vietnam War years.’

While Britain had disappeared as a significant power in the region, the bonds between the countries remained strong. In August 1965, Lee’s wife Choo needed life-saving surgery, and his lobbying of the US government failed to entice the country’s world-leading specialist to treat her. He then went to the British, who immediately sent their top surgeon, ‘expressing understanding for my not wanting her to travel abroad when I could not leave Singapore. This incident reinforced my gut feeling that I would find it difficult to work with the Americans whom I did not know as well as the British.’ The treatment was successful, and she lived to 89.

Lee mourned the decline of the former imperial power, and the sad ‘malaise of the British people’, led by much diminished figures. Old British friends from the military ‘described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk.’ The country had taken a wrong turn, with a health service that was a failure in his view and a welfare state that had become ‘debilitating’.

‘We noted by the 1970s that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of a family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance. People did not have to work for their families’ well-being. The handout became a way of life. The downward spiral was relentless as motivation and productivity went down. People lost the drive to achieve because they paid too much in taxes. They became dependent on the state for their basic needs.’ One wonders what Lee would make of Personal Independence Payments and the Motability scheme.

He also saw Britain as too class-bound and inflexible, and contrasted their labour relations with the ascendant Japanese. On one occasion he asked a Japanese manager why local workers were less productive, and was given the answer that they, the Japanese, were more multi-skilled and flexible; managers were willing to undertake work that soiled their hands, seeing themselves as all grey rather than white or blue-collar workers, a mindset which contrasted with Britain’s class structure.

‘Without empire, Britain needed a meritocracy to retain its position as the leading nation of Europe, not a ruling class that distinguished itself from the working class by its accent, social manners, and habits, old boy network, clubs, and old school ties.’ The Japanese said they found it hard to get engineers in Britain to start at the bottom, because the classes rarely fraternised.

These relations with the Japanese were complicated. Lee needed their help, but the Japanese inability to say sorry for war time atrocities was a thorny issue, and still a source of bitterness after the occupation. Lee didn’t push for compensation but instead sought investment, which turned out to be mutually beneficial. Eventually, despite what he had endured as a young man, he came to respect and even admire them.

Lee’s memoirs are filled with anecdotes about foreign politicians, and his relationships with British leaders features prominently: ‘Harold Macmillan was of my father’s generation, an Edwardian grandee in appearance and manner with a deceptively languid air and a lofty approach to young colonials like me. Sir Alec Douglas-Home was the nicest of them all — a real gentleman whose manner on television belied the shrewd geopolitical thinker he was.’ Wilson was ‘the most politically skilful.’

Perhaps surprisingly for British readers, he concludes that ‘If I were asked to choose one person from among the British prime ministers and ministers who I knew to accompany me on a dangerous mission, I would choose Ted Heath. He would stay to the end to accomplish what he had set out to do.’ He found Heath ‘reliable and steadfast’.

By the 1980s, Lee was a highly-respected figure in the old imperial capital, with a number of politicians seeking out his wisdom. In 1982 he was made a Freeman of the City of London, where he gave a speech in front of the great and the good, telling them how: ‘When I was a schoolboy 50 years ago in Singapore, my teachers held this truth to be self-evident, that London was the centre of the world. It was the centre of high finance and banking, as well as of the arts, the theatre, the centre of literature, of music, of culture. It was the centre of gravity of the world…’ But even this special day was marred by the British disease, and he noted that ‘part of the ceremony was a drive from Westminster to the Guildhall in a horse-drawn carriage. It had to be cancelled because a rail strike had caused traffic congestion. Industrial problems continued to bedevil Britain.’

He was also made a Knights Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael and St George, as well as a Companion of Honour, and while he received many similar titles from other countries, he writes ‘they do not carry the same emotional connotation’.

‘Although old ties with Britain continued even as we widened our links and established relations with these important new centres of wealth and power, it was nevertheless sad to see Britain’s gradual economic displacement by Japan, Germany and France’.

Lee turned down an invitation to speak at a Tory conference in 1980, due to his lingering loyalty to the Labour Party, but he hugely admired Margaret Thatcher, and under her rule economic ties between the two countries were strengthened: by the 1990s Britain was the fourth largest investor in the country. He mentions with satisfaction that there are now more British people in Singapore than ever, with new schools opening to cater for 10,000 British families resident there. There aren’t many post-colonial societies of which that can be said.

The exchange goes both ways, and by the 1990s, 5,000 Singaporeans were studying in British universities and polytechnics, and Oxbridge graduates still dominate the elite, more so than those with Ivy League educations. Britain is still, just about, the most popular choice of overseas universities for Singaporeans, although Australia briefly overtook it.

After largely skipping over John Major, he ‘was struck by the youthful energy of Tony Blair’ when he and Peter Mandelson visited in May 1995. He met Blair again in London and there ‘was an endless flow of questions over dinner’; Blair remains a big fan.

Of American leaders, Gerald Ford was especially friendly and even allowed him to use his private restroom when Lee became unwell. ‘I could not imagine any European, Japanese, or Third World leader bringing me to his private bathroom to freshen up. He was just a friendly man, happy to have me as his guest and grateful that there was one person from Southeast Asia who spoke up for America as its stocks went down with the hasty evacuation of Saigon. He was not out to impress me, but he did – as a solid, dependable man.’

Jimmy Carter comes out rather less well, and Lee describes with bemusement how the president gave him a leather-bound copy of his autobiography Why Not the Best inscribed with the words: ‘To my good friend Lee Kuan Yew - Jimmy Carter’. He writes dryly that ‘I was surprised as we had never even met.’

The world leader who impressed him most of all, however, was Deng Xiaoping, and the latter third of the book focuses heavily on his relationship with China and the other Asian countries who followed his economic lead. Vietnam, once a hostile communist power, sought his advice, a relationship which bizarrely began when he learned that his speeches had been illegally translated and were being read by its politicians.

He became something of an unofficial economic adviser, and concluded that Vietnam would join the rich countries within 20 to 30 years, due to their high human capital – a very accurate prediction. China, which once denounced him as an imperialist running dog, also looked to the tiny city-state as a model for economic growth, the results of which are for all to see. Whether Lee’s idea of governance becomes the dominant model for the 21^st century is an open question: Singapore’s success is dependent on very low levels of corruption, something no state as authoritarian or as party-dominated as China has ever managed to achieve.

As well as a memoir, From Third World to First is a guide, and China has quite clearly already taken it on board. It’s also something of a warning to the young people of his country, and there is anxiety about the future among this celebration of past success: ‘We cannot afford to forget that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, are not the natural order of things, that they depend on ceaseless effort and attention from an honest and effective government that the people must elect.’

He begins the memoir by explaining how ‘I wrote this book for a younger generation of Singaporeans who took stability, growth, and prosperity for granted. I wanted them to know how difficult it was for a small country of 640 sq km with no natural resources to survive in the midst of larger, newly independent nations all pursuing nationalistic policies.’

Lee died in 2015, aged 91, now celebrated as one of the great modern statesmen, a major influence on countries as distant as the United Arab Emirates and Rwanda. He’s also gained something of a cult following in Britain, where a succession of leaders have taken us in the opposite direction. Singapore isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s hard not to feel great admiration at the end of this memoir, even if Lee is a rather stern figure. He was a serious man, not one for banter, and very devoted to work; he even gave up on golf because it was not time efficient. While he reflects that they were maybe too strict on their children, ‘it has served them well’ and he worries that they are too lenient with theirs.

He clearly loved his family, and it’s rather charming that this highly effective, hard-working Asian statesman chooses to conclude his book by boasting about his children’s educational achievements. His eldest son Loong, he feels the need to point out, obtained ‘50% more alpha marks than the next first class candidate’ at Trinity College, Cambridge, the largest gap between first and second place ever recorded. What could make a Chinese father happier, aside from turning a third world country into a first?

What would Stamford Raffles have made of all this, reading the life story of a young Asian lawmaker who went to the school that bears his name, and made the colony he founded the richest country on earth? No doubt he would be sad about Britain’s decline, yet at the same time immensely proud of Lee, his heir and successor.

Yet retreat was inevitable, and when the day came British forces were given a ceremonial send-off, Lee writes in his memoir, the withdrawal carried out with ‘good intentions, goodwill and good faith’. After 150 years in the Strait, the British were gone, handing over the airbase to the colony they created for the symbolic fee of one dollar.

Lee had cut his teeth in the independence movement, but the city-state could not survive without protection. As with many small countries which had depended on the British, Singapore now shifted its allegiances to its successor state, the United States of America.

The imperial retreat presented a huge financial headache for the former anti-colonial activist, but increasingly a more personal sense of unease. ‘I feared that slowly but inexorably British influence would decline,’ he writes: ‘and American influence expand. For my generation born and bred in empire, it was not an easy change. I had to come to terms with American power without a British buffer. The British had enforced their will with a certain civility. The Americans were different, as I could see from the way they dealt with South Vietnamese leaders, and even with Thai and Filipino leaders who were not in as parlous a position as those in Saigon. America was a power on the ascendant, with bulging muscles and a habit of flexing them.’

Lee had built up a good relationship with both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, and used this to delay the withdrawal for as long as possible. He had less luck in getting the British to help Singapore train their army, something they had done with Malaysia where the threat of communist insurgency necessitated it. Neither were most of the other newly independent states willing to help: Egypt’s Nasser recognised Singapore and sent good wishes, but ignored his requests for military aid. India’s prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri also said no, so he turned to another small post-colonial nation surrounded by hostile neighbours. When a small group of Israelis arrived in November 1965, they had to keep their existence a secret to prevent unrest from the Malay minority. ‘To disguise their presence, we called them “Mexicans”’, he recalls: ‘They looked swarthy enough.’

The Chinese here traditionally shunned military service, ‘a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China’. As trading people they looked down on the military as a career choices, and he quotes the Chinese saying ‘a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails’.

Lee also had to negotiate the problem of ‘representation’ which mars all multicultural societies. Under the British, the city had been policed by Malays, often recruited from Malaysia itself, as well as the more neutral Gurkhas. Now ‘we had to find some way to induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect their population mix,’ otherwise they would not be accepted as legitimate. ‘We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors – a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion’.

Conscription, unpopular under the British, was reintroduced, and the authorities even set up military cadet corps in all secondary schools, although his colleague Goh Keng Swee reflected that ‘the Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling’. As with Israel, another small state formed by a market-dominant minority, they were forced to adapt their way of life to survive; yet rather than become the new Sparta, Singapore focussed on becoming the new Corinth, a commercial centre where great fortunes could be made. When the British finally withdrew, RAF Changi Air Base became Changi Airport, a transport hub which came to epitomise the city’s commercial success.

Lee lobbied hard to make their airport a refuelling stop between London and Australia, and writes with pride that civil servant Sim Kee Boon, ‘as a head of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore… made Changi into a world-class airport, winning top ratings in travellers’ magazines almost every year.’ People who endure the long flight to Sydney could at least enjoy its swimming pool, fitness centre and showers – or even take a stroll through the butterfly garden.

Lee visited a number of countries during his time as PM and came to place great importance on how things looked to visitors; if it was dirty, or if basic things didn’t function, like the baths in Moscow which had no plugs, it was a warning sign to investors.

He recalls how ‘for the Commonwealth prime ministers conference set for mid-January 1971, I rallied our officials to make that extra effort and give visitors a better impression of Singapore. We briefed the service industry, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, and workers in hotels and restaurants to exert themselves to be courteous and friendly.’ The feedback was positive.

With this in mind, he also set about a campaign of greening Singapore, driven by his belief that a country which looked rich would soon become rich. This was a ‘dramatic way to distinguish ourselves from other Third World countries’, and so the first Sunday of November would become Tree Planting Day. It’s likely that no other politician planted more trees in his life.

He also started a campaign to eradicate the Chinese habit of spitting. Singapore is now so famous for its sense of order that it’s worth remembering that this was not always the case. Once notorious for vice and organised crime, it also had lots of typically ‘third world’ social norms, not just spitting but the keeping of farmyard animals inside the city. Cracking down on corruption had been the first priority, and his party cadres wore white to illustrate their purity; he took the lead by having corrupt friends imprisoned. These habits would all have to change, and as he put it: ‘We are an immigrant people who have uprooted ourselves from our ancient homelands and are prepared to abandon old habits to make good in a new country.’

On his travels, Lee also came to see how other post-colonial states were progressing, or not as the case may be. His generation was unique, a group of leaders who had all been raised within a certain culture, often taught with the same British school books, speaking with similar accents. Yet they went down different paths, and he was often not impressed.

He described visiting Malta in 1967 and being ‘astounded’. Because Suez had closed, the British had covered the day-to-day costs and ‘this nurtured a sense of dependency, not a spirit of self-reliance.’ He noted how ‘dockworkers on full pay were playing water polo in the dry dock which they had filled with water. I was shaken by their aid dependency, banking on continuing charity from the British.’

He was highly critical of third world rulers who lobbied for aid, blaming the former imperial powers for their continuing poverty, while doing nothing to tackle the rampant corruption which held their countries back. He noted how Bangladesh’s leader turned up at a conference in a full-sized passenger jet, leaving it on the tarmac for the whole week when it could have been in service, a baffling waste of money. He also began to feel increasingly threatened by the global anti-colonial movement, and its implications for the Straits Chinese. After one conference on the Rhodesian crisis, he reflected that ‘like the peoples in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, I was a settler. If all immigrants were racists, then the world was in for a difficult time.’

Singapore had also lined up on the anti-communist side of the Cold War. After Britain’s withdrawal, the independence movement had split between the communists and anti-communists, and Lee reflects with sadness how he had to have so many communists arrested. I’m not entirely convinced that he was that sad about this, but he felt that what he did was necessary. He also points out – entirely accurately – that if his opponents had won, they would not have been so merciful.

He mentions the lamentable story of one communist, Lim Chin Siong, who was detained in 1963, tried to hang himself two years later, and then fell out with his comrades as he lost faith. In 1969 he requested permission to leave, and ‘I readily agreed and wished him well in his new life in London. He had wasted the best years of his life, ending up disgusted with his former comrades and bitter at their blinkered and unthinking refusal to face reality’. Lim was expelled by the communist party and denounced as a ‘spineless and barefaced renegade traitor’. When he died in 1997, the prime minister wrote an open letter of condolence to his wife.

Lee’s battle against communism further complicated his already complex relationship with his Chinese heritage, since many Chinese clubs, colleges and newspapers were overrun with ideologues. He arrested the editor of one Chinese-language newspaper for communist activities, and made a Chinese-speaking university switch to English for a similar reason.

He also enforced the use of English as the language of education, something which provoked huge resistance from Chinese parents, ‘deeply attached to their language and culture.’ For Lee, English was not just a neutral language but offered better job prospects, even if ‘it did seem to deculturise our students and make them apathetic.’ He also accepted that Chinese schools were often better, and was ‘impressed by their vitality, dynamism, discipline, and social and political commitment.’

Lee was elitist by nature, believing that the health of society depended on a small minority with brains and dynamism, while much of the population needed clear guidance. With this in mind, he was very astute in understanding that a globalised world would see states competing to attract a small and mobile talent pool, a competition which grew tougher once the US and other English-speaking countries opened up to Asian immigrants. The Singaporeans sought out entrepreneurs and highly skilled workers, and he notes with satisfaction how many of his people marry foreigners, both other Asians and westerners, and ‘their children are valuable additions to our talent pool’.

‘The old clear-cut barriers to interracial marriage have been breached by the intermingling of people as they travel to and work in countries not their own. We have to change our attitudes and take advantage of what was once considered foreign and not assimilable talent. We cannot allow our old prejudices to hamper our development as an international centre for trade, industry and services.’

If this makes Lee sound like the sort of progressive you’d happily invite to the proverbial north London dinner party, some of his other comments would have the guests choking on their sourdough. His talent search was driven by a view of genetics that western elites now see as taboo, and he cites The Bell Curve on more than one occasion. As Singapore’s wealth increased, and its fertility declined, he began to express fears that highly-educated women were not having enough children; his attempts to reverse this through a policy of eugenic child benefit was perhaps his one major failure, proving deeply unpopular with the electorate.

These changing attitude in the West were already clear in the autumn of 1968, when Lee had taken a sabbatical at Harvard. He had been in office for nine years ‘and needed to recharge my batteries, get some fresh ideas and reflect on the future.’ The Kennedy School of Government made him an honorary fellow and arranged breakfasts and dinners, as well as seminars. It was a useful education, one lesson being that American elites had adopted all sorts of wacky beliefs about the world.

At Harvard he picked the brains of ‘highly intelligent people who were not always right. They were too politically correct. Harvard was determinedly liberal. No scholar was prepared to say or admit that there were any inherent differences between races or cultures or religions. They held that human beings were equal and a society only needed correct economic policies and institutions of government to succeed. They were so bright I found it difficult to believe that they sincerely held these views they felt compelled to espouse.’ (Perhaps they didn’t.)

Even the prevailing economic beliefs within academia were, in his view, totally misguided. ‘The accepted wisdom of development economists at the time was that MNCs [multinational corporations] were exploiters of cheap land, labour, and raw materials. This “dependency school” of economists argued that MNCs continue the colonial pattern of exploitation that left the developing countries selling raw materials to and buying consumer goods from the advanced countries. MNCs controlled technology and consumer preferences and formed alliances with their host governments to exploit the people and keep them down. Third World leaders believed this theory of neocolonialist exploitation, but [deputy PM] Keng Swee and I were not impressed. We had a real-life problem to solve and could not afford to be conscribed by any theory or dogma.’

This form of neocolonialist exploitation was meanwhile making his country increasingly rich. Singapore attracted factories, became a major hub for revolutionary new super-containers that transformed shipping after the war, and then moved up the value chain to financial services. None of this would have been possible without aircon, a major innovation that Lee insisted on every branch of government using.

‘If I have to choose one word to explain why Singapore succeeded, it is confidence’, he writes at one point, by which he means investor confidence. His city-state would be an oasis of financial and legal stability in a turbulent and uncertain region. When the oil crisis hit in 1973, Lee informed the petroleum companies that he would not stop them taking their oil out of the country. This was a risk, but ‘if we blocked export from those stocks, we would have enough oil for our consumption for two years, but we have shown ourselves to be completely undependable.’ Their deferred gratification was rewarded, and by the late 1990s Singapore was the world’s third largest oil refining centre, after Houston and Rotterdam, and the third largest oil trading centre behind New York and London.

Lee was successful because he understood the basic problems that afflicted badly-run states: short-termism, sentimentality, second-order consequences, and what he called ‘ostentatious egalitarianism’. He wanted the most talented people in government, and believed that attracting the best meant paying them competitively.

‘In Britain or the United States, most successful people are too busy and doing too well to want to be in government,’ he writes. In the US, top earners from the private sector are appointed by presidents for a couple of terms, ‘then they return to their private sector occupation as lawyers, company chairpersons, or lobbyists with enhanced value because they now enjoy easy access to key people in the administration. I thought this “revolving door” system undesirable.’

In 1994, having handed over his duties as prime minister to become ‘senior minister’, a sort of advisory role, he proposed a formula that the pay of ministers, judges and top civil servants were to be automatically linked to the income tax returns of the private sector, which had been growing by 7-10 per cent a year for two decades. Before this change, litigation lawyers were making up to S$2 million Singapore a year, while the judges ruling over them were paid less than S$ 300,000.

He was unsold by the argument that the ‘honour of high office’ was enough of an incentive for people to sacrifice their income: ‘I believed this high-minded approach was unrealistic and the surest way to make ministers serve only briefly, whereas continuity in office and the experience thus gained have been a great advantage and strength in the Singapore government.’

Lee wrote that ‘Singapore will remain clean and honest only if honest and able men are willing to fight elections and assume office. They must be paid a wage commensurate with what men of their ability and integrity are earning for managing a big corporation or a successful legal or other professional practice.’

Such a move would have been highly controversial, indeed hated, in most countries, but the people paid those large sums have overseen decades of consistent economic growth. They have also overseen a country which remains clean and honest, now measured as one of the least corrupt on earth.

Such was the city-state’s success that, by the end of his term of office, Lee was increasingly being sought out as an advisor by other Asian countries hoping to escape the Third World, most consequentially of all by his old enemy, China.

Concludes tomorrow…

Is the West a doomed civilisation? Are you a genuine long-term pessimist or do you really believe we can turn ourselves around and find spiritual, social and economic contentment?

- Richard Ferguson

I’m a cultural pessimist, techo-optimist, to use my friend Paul Morland’s phrase. Technology will free us of everything except our tendency to make bad decisions. I don’t know about contentment - I think a huge amount of spiritual malaise is down to an oxytocin deficit caused by leading lives contrary to our communal nature, especially when it comes to exercise and ritual.

I suppose you could argue that the West no longer really exists as a civilisation, or at least, it’s not really the same civilisation as the one my parents were born into. If you look at most characteristics of a ‘civilisation’, such as sexual morality or sacred issues, they are two totally different cultures - and a visitor from before this great shift would find our entire worldview baffling. Even with the practice which archaeologists usually use to differentiate cultures – how they bury their dead – you would find a complete transformation between the old and the new. (A century ago, 99.4 per cent of people were buried; last year it was less than 17 per cent.)

The buildings are mostly there, and the institutions still carry the same names, but they aren’t really the same thing anymore. In some cases the huge change has left odd anomalies, like the Church of England’s theoretical position. As one anonymous WSoH reader observed, England is the only country where it’s a crime to proclaim the teaching of the established religion. When the older generation dies out, this will change become even starker.

On the other hand, technology is now speeding up at such a rate that it’s really hard to know what will happen. I would also add that, while I’m sceptical about a ‘quiet revival’ of religion in Britain, I think it may be happening in France, the most important country in Europe.

Does the UK have a long-term future?

Yes, I’m just not sure about its short or medium term future. I don’t think we’re going to get invaded anytime soon, so there will still be a ‘United Kingdom’ at the UN, and I don’t think Scotland will break away. Britain is not uniquely hopeless, and other western countries are in worse situations, but I think the current order, however you define it, has run out of road. We cannot continue on our current trajectory.

‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’. Somewhere out there is a politician or political force that has not yet come to the fore but will when our current travails turn into a full-blown crisis. Who or what might that look like?

I think I broadly agree with the great man of history theory, that some developments were not at all inevitable but for one individual. France’s history may have looked very different without Charles de Gaulle. Singapore might well have had a bleak future without Lee Kuan Yew, although the counterpoint is that the other two non-communist states with Chinese majorities, Taiwan and Hong Kong, also became rich.

Most politicians go with the grain; Tony Blair had a tremendous impact on the liberalisation of British society, but he was riding the wave of social changes that had already occurred. He was immensely popular for that reason. Others arise out of periods of crisis, often wartime, when the system has been found wanting.

There is obviously an opening for a politician who can articulate discontent against a failing system - it just depends on whether than consensus is broken by the left or the right. The fact that the state has run out of money severely restricts what the former can do, while the latter will have the tailwinds of continental populism behind them.

A major problem with British politics is that many people still act and behave as if this is the Britain of the 1990s. Conservatives talk of a civic patriotism in which British heroes of the past will be venerated in London schools, which might have worked very well in 1996 or even 2006, but not today. Labour can barely stomach welfare reform, when we’re faced with an information revolution which makes the old system obsolete.

I think that we will see someone emerge, someone who is perhaps around 30 now, who sees the problems facing the younger generation but hasn’t stepped into politics yet. Whoever they are, they will be articulate and telegenic, but the most important quality he or she will need to possess is courage, both moral and physical. Perhaps they are even a subscriber to this substack.

****

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Berlin is a wonderful city, even if its hipster vibe is a bit much for a square like me. The decadence is part of the charm, and the Germans, or at least the Prussians, are good at it, having enough sense of order that it can feel squalid without feeling unsafe.

When I most recently visited the German capital last year, there seemed to be quite a bleak mood. The politics of sustained boredom that characterised the successful post-war Federal Republic had run out of road, and a mindset which had worked for so long now seemed to be pushing the country to the brink of disaster. As someone who loves Germany and admires its culture, I find this very sad, although at least it provides a brief distraction from my own country’s woes.

That mood will not have been improved by two recent elections, the first of which brought Alternative für Deutschland to the brink of power in Saxony-Anhalt and the second seeing a spectacular result for Die Linke, the successor party of the East German Communists, in Berlin.

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There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.

While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: ‘There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies…’ It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.

It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.

The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: ‘Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.’

Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight - and roughly the same shape - it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.

Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.

Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.

The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as ‘the last Victorian’ and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.

Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.

Yet the arrival of the Japanese impressed on him that there was always something worse around the corner. The conquerors murdered up to 50,000 ethnic Chinese, and Lee almost became part of that statistic: among a group told to assemble in a stadium, he developed a bad feeling, made some excuses and snuck out - the people who assembled were never seen again. The Japanese occupation left a bitter legacy, but it also set in course the wheels of decolonisation. When the British returned in 1945, they were a weakened force and even the ordinary soldier seemed a much-reduced figure.

‘The Japanese occupation filled me with hatred for the cruelties they inflicted on their fellow Asians,’ he writes. It ‘aroused my nationalism and self-respect, and my resentment at being lorded over. My four years as a student in Britain after the war strengthened my determination to get rid of British colonial rule.’

He studied first in London and then Cambridge, where he cultivated the persona of an English gentleman, drank Scotch and played golf; his British friends called him Harry, as they would throughout his life. As an anti-imperialist, he became a supporter of the Labour Party and would remain loyal throughout his life, even as his policies came to be diametrically opposed.

Like many colonial elites who stayed in the imperial capital, Lee developed mixed feelings, so that while a passionate anti-colonialist he also admired the British, for their system of law and justice, their sense of fair play and their lack of corruption. As he got older, he felt an increasing sense of sadness at the country’s declining fortunes.

Called to the Bar in 1950, Lee returned to Singapore, joined a union, formed the initially centre-left People’s Action Party and, with the withdrawal of the British, at 35 became the first Prime minister of an independent Singapore in 1959. Yet the end of empire is always a precarious times for minorities, especially merchant peoples, and a majority Chinese city surrounded by majority Malay regions found itself very vulnerable, both from outside and within. As he put it: ‘We inherited the island without its hinterland, a heart without a body.’

It was widely believed that Singapore could not make it alone, and under Lee’s rule the city went into union with Malaysia in 1963. Just two years later, and with the federation hit by race riots, Singapore was forced out. Although partly motivated by resentment at Lee’s success among ethnic Malays, the fundamental problem was demography: a united Malaysia would have included a Chinese minority close to parity with the Malays – 43 v 41 per cent - making the country dangerously unstable.

Singapore’s prospects looked bleak, and many experts predicted its collapse. Lee writes how ‘foreign press comments immediately after independence, all predicting doom, added to my gloom. One writer compared Britain’s withdrawal from its colonies to the decline of the Roman Empire when law and order collapsed as the Roman legions withdrew and barbarian hordes took over… I shared these fears but did not express them. My duty was to give the people hope, not demoralise them.’

Lee is often described as headstrong and uncompromising, but among his many qualities was a willingness to listen to useful advice. A key role was played by Dutch economic adviser Albert Winsemius, who had led a UN team looking into Singapore’s industrial potential and ended up working with their prime minister for 25 years. ‘I remember his first report to me in 1961 when he laid two pre-conditions for Singapore’s success: first, to eliminate the communists who made any economic progress impossible; second, not to remove the statue of Stamford Raffles.’ The communists were all powerful and ‘I laughed at the absurdity of his simple solution.’ Yet the point about the statues was equally important.

‘My colleagues and I had no desire to rewrite the past and perpetuate ourselves by renaming streets or buildings or putting our faces on postage stamps or currency notes. Winsemius said we would need large-scale technical, managerial, entrepreneurial, and marketing know-how from America and Europe. Investors wanted to see what a new socialist government in Singapore was going to do to the statue of Raffles. Letting it remain would be a symbol of public acceptance of the British heritage and could have a positive effect. I had not looked at it that way, but was quite happy to leave this monument because he was the founder of modern Singapore.’

He writes that his own great-grandfather wouldn’t have come from Dabu county in Guangdong Province without Raffles, and ‘the British created an emporium that offered him, and many thousands like him, the opportunity to make a better living than in their homeland which was going through turmoil and chaos as the Qing dynasty declined and disintegrated.’

Winsemius and Lee developed a close working relationship. ‘He once told me he could not explain why he felt a great affinity with [finance minister] Sui Sen and me and could only conclude that there was a “congruence of the Calvinistic and Confucian philosophy of life.” Whatever the reason, it was Singapore’s good fortune that he enjoyed working with us.’

As any good Calvinist would agree, Lee desperately needed his countrymen to acquire wealth, while avoiding what he saw as the curse of aid; he despised idleness, and once warned his own workers that ‘the world does not owe us a living. We cannot live by the begging bowl.’ He came to see that when political systems encouraged people into a life of idleness, it could be crippling for their morals and self-respect; for whole nations, it was catastrophic.

A word that Lee uses a great deal is ‘soft’. In one broadcast he declared that: ‘If we were a soft society then we would already have perished. A soft people will vote for those who promised a soft way out, when in truth there is none. There is nothing Singapore gets for free, even our water we pay for… There will be a throbbing and humming industrial, commercial and communication centre long after the British have gone.’

In October 1967 he told a group of businessmen in Chicago that Singapore had grown from a village of 120 fishermen in 1819 to a metropolis of 2 million because their philosophy was to provide goods and services ‘cheaper and better than anyone else, or perish’. The Americans had been expecting requests for aid, as they had received from every other third world leader, and were pleasantly surprised by his promise of profit.

Singapore’s situation was then quite desperate, and ‘in the early years any factory was welcome’. He describes visiting London in January 1968 to discuss the British military withdrawal, yet another economic blow for the country, when ‘Marcus Sieff, the chairman of Marks & Spencer’s, saw me at my London hotel. He had seen me on BBC television. He suggested that as the Chinese had nimble fingers, Singapore could go into making fishhooks and lures for trout fishing…. His retail networks could help market the goods. I must have looked forlorn on television for him to have taken the time to see me. I thanked him but nothing came of it.’

There’s something poignant about this scene, a British businessman taking his time to offer help to a third world leader in a state of desperation. This is the point of the story arc that scriptwriters call the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, when all seems lost. Not long after, Lee recalls with relief that a Norwegian fishhooks manufacturer set up a factory, creating hundreds of jobs in a city facing severe unemployment. It was a start – but the greatest battles were yet to come.

I often think of this when I read about various politicians expressing anxiety about the crisis of liberal democracy, with all those danger signs warning of trouble ahead: sharply declining trust in institutions, increasingly aggressive street protests and radicalisation, widespread fears of political violence. All of these are related in some way to the issue of uncontrolled immigration, as well as falling standards of living, but illegal migration in particular causes huge reputational damage to the system. ‘The boats’ are the Spanish ulcer of status quo politics.

As of the end of September, the metre is running at 211,806 illegal arrivals since 2018, 83,000 since the last election, larger than the size of the entire British armed forces. Only 4 per cent have been removed, most of those Albanians.

A total of 781 migrants crossed the English Channel on September 24, the highest this year. Based on estimated lifetime costs, that day alone will drain British taxpayers of £273 million, with each asylum grant costing up to £400,000. The total cost of illegal migration is enormous, and a rational centrist politician who wanted to save their worldview and fight off the allure of nativism would act in a way totally different to their current behaviour.

But I don’t want to save liberal democracy. I want to have infinite immigration.

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This will be the last round-up for a couple of months, as the substack will pause next week; I meant to do so earlier but I’ve been delayed by writing a complicated piece on Singapore, which I want to put out before the break.

The English Miracle

England’s education reforms have been a remarkable success, as reflected by the recent PISA scores - and unlike on the continent, the children of immigrants outperform here.

Daisy Christodoulou wrote a thread on why the ‘knowledge-based curriculum’ works, and why people refuse to acknowledge the evidence, while Ian Leslie wonders why the Left is bad at education.

I visited a school last week where, like most comprehensives, their five or six core values were displayed in bold lettering, one of which was EQUALITY. That’s a nice idea, but it sort of rubs against the purpose of education, which is excellence. If your central aim in politics is to reduce inequality, as it is with many politicians, you’ll inevitably enact a cost on standards. Teaching unions must be another factor, a huge influence on the Labour Party, and whenever a teacher gets up to speak at one of their conferences my heart sinks.

In contrast, Fraser Nelson wrote about the disaster that is Scottish education, another product of Britain’s Wuhan Lab of Political Ideas.

On the same subject, everyone has been talking about New York Times writer Nikole Hannah Jones and her decision to send her daughter to a local sink school, which didn’t turn out well. Rob Henderson gave her credit for at least not indulging in luxury beliefs, and as I wrote recently, some people really do walk the 60s as well as talk it.

It’s not even about money, since the school in question is well funded. Indeed, those institutions serving ‘low-income and non-white communities’ get more money per pupil than other American schools, and staggering levels compared to most western countries. But none of that matters if you don’t have order.

School choice is game theory, the idea being that if enough People Like Us opt for the local comprehensive, then social cohesion will improve and have a positive effect on disadvantaged children. Progressives have the right idea – I think it’s good for schools to mix social classes - but the problem is that these schools, and not just the worst ones, are held hostage by the behaviour of the bottom decile.

The main attraction of going private is not the connections or facilities or even the teaching, even if these tend to be better, but that you pay to avoid your child having their education – and general wellbeing – ruined by the troublesome tenth.

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One marker of my arriving at middle age was the realisation that Star Wars is actually something that people should grow out of around the age of 12. I now tend to share Malcolm Tucker’s view of the whole thing, and see a fondness for the space opera as a major red flag in any politician. I didn’t even watch the last one, and will happily skip Episode X, announced late last week.

All films reflect the recent historic memories and prejudices of the creators. Described as ‘Romans in Space’ by Ian Hislop, the sci-fi mega-franchise mixed elements of the American War of Independence, the Nixon administration, but more than anything else - our Trojan War and Paradise Lost - the rise and fall of the Nazis.

Most of all, Star Wars extolled rebellion and the cult of the underdog, the plucky band of rebels against the uniformed forces of cruel order. This is not new, obviously, and Robin Hood is among many stories that celebrated local outlaws, while national mythologies often have a similar dynamic - but George Lucas’s work projected it onto international (indeed intergalactic) conflict, as only someone of his generation could. Just as a bucolic love of the countryside only emerged once people had escaped its grim reality in the 19^th century, so a veneration of rebellion became far more appealing among those who had grown up with America acting as the world’s policeman.

Empire and rebels, the powerful against the powerless: when I was a child this dynamic actually existed in real life, in my own country. In one corner were a plucky band dressed in surplus clothes, a group of volunteers who had once taken on the greatest empire in history. Opposing them the masses of paid-up uniformed troops from the imperial power, driving technologically advanced, menacing military vehicles, and led by men who sounded like Peter Cushing.

If you got on the wrong side of these forces of the empire you might be arrested, interned or even roughed up. In the hands of the plucky rebels who fought them, you would probably be tortured and shot through the head - if they thought you were an informer, or just came from the wrong neighbourhood. Or they just might massacre you in acts of straight-up ethnic violence.

More recently, and I’m certainly not the first to observe this hackneyed point, Osama bin Laden’s battle against the Great Satan has a striking resemblance to this modern-day epic. An old wizard living in the rocky hills, surrounded by Sand People, he battles against a technologically advanced empire in possession of awesome weapons, given support by his unwavering religious belief. Even this is not a new tale, and when Tom Holland wrote Persian Fire during the War on Terror era, he astutely retold the conflict between east v west to show the parallels between the Persian Empire and the Americans, facing a band of fanatics at the edge of civilisation. East was west, and west was east.

For the Persians, as for later empires, Russian, Ottoman, French or British, they gave the gift of order and civilisation to the people they ruled. When the world’s great empires fell, what followed was often massacre and exodus, yet in a post-imperial age Star Wars popularised the idea that empires are necessarily malign and those who rebel against the idea are plucky underdogs.

In real life most underdogs are morally ambiguous at best, and the track record of rebels in the post-war era is often one of appalling cruelty, yet this cult of the underdog inspired intellectual sympathy for gruesome anti-colonial murderers.

There are exceptions, of course, small plucky bands defying great empires. I remember being quite moved by the Lithuanian struggle for independence when I was 12 (yes, I was quite weird), but even the much-maligned Russians were not always obvious villains. The western-backed Afghan rebellion against Soviet rule, fought in the most Star Wars-like of human societies, was partly triggered by Russian attempts to enforce female education and to suppress cruel traditional practices, as they had in central Asia.

Perhaps Slovenia’s brief revolt against Yugoslavia, around the same time, might also fit the Star Wars moral dynamic, yet one didn’t need to look too deep into the Balkan horror to see that the story became morally ambiguous very quickly once Slovenia exited. As elsewhere, the underdogs committed fewer atrocities than the Serbs for the same reason, as P.J. O’Rourke put it, that a dog licks his own balls - because he can.

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This was odd, in some ways, since crime and hooliganism did rise significantly in the late 1960s, a reversal of centuries of progress which Steven Pinker called the ‘de-civilising process’. At the extreme end, the murder rate in American cities such as New York and Chicago trebled in just over a decade, but all forms of offending rose significantly across the English speaking world. In Britain, sociologist Stuart Hall described mugging as a moral panic, even though street robbery rose at an astounding rate in the late 20th century, from just a few hundred a year in the 1930s to around 100,000 in the early Noughties.

Perhaps ‘moral panic’ was an example of a term which spread because it provided a mental shortcut for people who wanted to dismiss their opponents, by becoming vaccinated against their ideas. If someone was engaged in a moral panic, you didn’t really need to look into the data; you could just dismiss them as a hysteric.

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With the tragedy of the commons, everyone individually gains from damaging or exploiting a shared resource but, as a group, everyone loses. In order to counter the problem, societies develop mechanisms such as public shaming, internalised guilt or a deliberately cultivated attachment to the community, most commonly in the form of nationalism. Anti-littering campaigns have used all these emotional pulls to encourage people to make personal sacrifices for the good of wider society. Because human beings are unusually susceptible to memetic influence, these tend to work.

One modern variation of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ might be Rob Henderson’s concept of luxury beliefs, whereby everyone individually benefits from proclaiming their support for ideas which have a corrosive effect on society. In this case the resource being damaged is social capital, the long-established sense of trust that others are doing what is right for the wider community.

‘Abolish the police’ is the quintessential example Henderson often cites, an idea that is literally lethal when put into practice but which raises the social status of the people who support it. From an individual’s point of view, they would maximally benefit if only a small number of people soiled the commons with this destructive meme, therefore giving them prestige without consequences; if everyone does it, and politicians respond accordingly, their lives get significantly worse - or in some cases, end.

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It’s the perfect time to speak to Louise Perry for one of our occasional bad news Britain podcasts (paid subscribers can listen to the episode below the paywall). Last year Louise interviewed academic David Betz, a professor of war studies who warned of future civil conflict in Britain akin to the Troubles of Northern Ireland. I’m sceptical that things will get that bad, or at least my view of the future is generally ‘the same, but a little worse’, as Michel Houellebecq said of life after lockdown, but there is certainly widespread public anxiety about political violence in the future.

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Homer Simpson: go back to Massachusetts, pinko!

As a child, my relationship with television was not unlike Homer Simpson’s. I watched hours of it, especially in the summer holidays, when we would sometimes sit in front of the box at the crack of dawn waiting for programmes to begin. Yes, kids, and television would turn off at the end of the day too, on BBC1 with the national anthem - like a subtle pre-Nudge Unit way for the government to tell you to go to bed. Luckily, ITV put an end to this authoritarianism in the late 1980s by becoming the first 24-hour channel.

I loved the television so much that I vaguely remember feeling insulted by the kid’s show Why Don’t You?, with its exhortation that we go and do something useful instead. But I don’t want to do something useful. Then cable television arrived when I was 14, heralding a new world of endless music videos on The Box, which always seemed to be on a loop of Snoop Dogg and ‘What’s Up’ by 4 Non Blondes, as well as thousands and thousands of hours of Premier League football, and such broadcasting innovations as ‘Topless Darts’ on Live TV.

The anti-television lobby always seemed lame, the maiden aunts who would rather we spent our boring Sundays reading the bible or something. They were indeed lame; they were also correct.

In the past couple of years one book I’ve repeatedly heard mentioned in conversation, both online and in real life, is Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argued that television was impoverishing American culture, eroding concentration spans, turning politics into a branch of entertainment, and in doing so making it more corrupt.

Now that concerns about screen use have become widespread, the late cultural critic’s work has enjoyed a small renaissance, much of it driven by James Marriott, who has become Postman’s great evangelist and cites him as a prophet in his own book on the decline of reading. Marriott argues that this trend has all sorts of negative effects on our culture, democracy and ability to think analytically; and while the problem accelerated with the smartphone, it began with the arrival of another sort of screen.

Television was one of the most quickly adopted technologies in history. Its impact was revolutionary in cultural, social and political terms. It also had a quite immediate impact on the number of hours people spent reading, so ending the supremacy of this medium after centuries.

Although seen as the home of trash culture, Postman’s homeland was historically an unusually literate and high-minded society, at least in its dominant northern colonies, a legacy of their Puritan origins. As he noted, records from between 1640 and 1700 show male literacy in Massachusetts and Connecticut to be 89 per cent and 95 per cent respectively, the highest ever recorded at the time. Even among women in New England in this period, almost two-thirds could read, an astonishing figure.

From 1650 onwards, almost every town in the region passed laws requiring maintenance of a ‘reading and writing’ school, and perhaps the majority of homes had books by the end of the century. One Boston bookseller imported 3,421 volumes from an English dealer between 1682-1685, at a time when the northern colonies had a population of only 75,000. They didn’t need to import them for long; Harvard helped establish the first American printing press in 1638, and presses were soon set up in Boston and Philadelphia.

Protestantism drove these high rates of literacy, and for many centuries America’s bestseller was the Bay Psalm Book, printed in 1640. This was eclipsed, on the eve of the Revolution, by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense – which sold 100,000 copies in January and February 1776 alone. As Postman points out, this would translate as eight million copies in the 1980s if adjusted for population, although some place total sales at 300,000 or even half a million. Postman reflects that ‘the only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today’s America is the Super Bowl.’ (Paine, in a patriotic move that nonetheless as a writer I find inexplicable, handed over his royalties to the Continental Army. He died in poverty, largely shunned and despised by American society for his unorthodox views. Never give up your royalties.)

In 1690 came America’s first newspaper, Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, established in Boston by one Benjamin Harris, whose previous scoops back in England included exposing a non-existent conspiracy by Catholics to burn down London for his paper Domestick Intelligence, which gives some indication of the tone. In 1730 there were seven regular papers in four American colonies; by 1800 there were 180 in the new United States. As Postman pointed out, 18^th and 19^th century America was ‘perhaps the most print-orientated culture ever to have existed.’

Reading was common across social classes, and in 1829 the New York Apprentices Library housed 10,000 volumes, from which 1,600 apprentices drew books. By the middle of the following decade, there were more than 3,000 Lyceums across 15 states, and English theatre manager Alfred Bunn wrote in 1853 during a visit that ‘practically every village had its lecture hall.’

Literacy was fundamental to American democracy. Historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager noted that while voting restrictions against those who owned property were frequently overlooked, the reading requirements were taken very seriously. A man who didn’t read could not take part in political life.

The Republic was founded by intellectuals, for as historian Richard Hofstadter wrote: ‘The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.’ Postman adds: ‘We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.’

That all changed in the 20^th century, although Postman sees the first signs of rot as early as the 1850s, when ‘the photograph and telegraph had been invented, the advance guard of a new epistemology that would put an end to the Empire of Reason.’ He writes that ‘under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now — generally coherent, serious and rational … under the governance of television, it has become shrivelled and absurd.’

Literate people are better suited to democracy, in large part because their attention span is longer, and he cites the debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas on August 21, 1858 in Ottawa, Illinois to highlight how alien the 19th-century is to us. During this debate, Douglas spoke for one hour, then Lincoln took an hour and a half to reply; Douglas then had another half an hour, and ‘this debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed to.’

Indeed, on October 16, 1854, during a previous election cycle in Peoria, Douglas had delivered a three-hour speech; when Lincoln’s turn came he observed that it was 5 pm and he would need as much time, so they agreed that the audience would go home for dinner and return for four more hours. And they weren’t even presidential candidates.

This is certainly a testimony to the audience’s concentration span, but in a small town before the invention of radio or cinema, there really wasn’t much else to do: it is hardly surprising that modern audiences could never endure such an event. We are never bored, even when confined to our homes during the 2020 lockdown, when most people were able to access an almost infinite number of films and television shows to pass the time; had the pandemic taken place when I was growing up, the choice would have been between Hale and Pace or Watchdog or, dare I say it, a book. Imagine if we only had the Bible to entertain us?

Postman observed that television presents a world of instant, changing distractions, moving from one subject to the next without time for reflection. His most hated phrase was ‘now this’, used ‘as a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly – for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening – that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying. “Now… this.”’

It suggests ‘that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.’ And then it’s off to a commercial, of which the average American will have seen a million by the age of 40.

Everything is fast moving, distracting, ephemeral. He notes that ‘The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see.’ And television at the time he was writing was far slower than it is now. I once tried introducing my teenage daughter to the Sherlock Holmes series I watched as a child: the opening scene seemed to last well over ten minutes, and she reflected that her ‘Gen Z brain’ couldn’t handle it.

One of the common refrains from the anti-television brigade of my youth was that it coarsened the culture; ‘moronic’ was one of my dad’s favourite words, although he loved the television as much as anyone, even if choosing to spend his time watching cricket. Postman is very much of this ilk, expressing distaste at talk shows where the host insults ‘callers whose language does not, in itself, go much beyond humanoid grunting’. He was writing in the mid-1980s, but by the following decade things had got notably coarser, with the age of Jerry Springer and then reality TV. Britain, in particular, became a great exporter of trash television that was often notably cruel as well as coarse; I suspect that the Great Awokening, and its turn towards an incoherent new puritanism, was a reaction to this era.

Television turned every aspect of life into entertainment, even religion, personified by the rise of televangelists, so that ‘everything that makes religion as historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma, no tradition, no theology, and above all, no sense of spiritual transcendence. On these shows, the preacher is tops. God comes out as second banana.’

Postman’s warning about the effect that ‘entertainment’ had on American democracy seem especially prophetic. The election of a former actor epitomised this decline in his view, and one wonders what he’d make of his country being ruled by a reality TV star who has most likely never read a book.

The Founding Fathers were both men of the Enlightenment and also possessed of a pessimistic streak about human nature, warning that the Republic depended on a moral, high-minded people. As politics has become entertainment, so it has become more corrupt: ‘Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment – and cares. How delighted would be all the kings, czars and Fuhrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.’

Postman looked at two visions of the future, two famous dystopias of the mid-20^th century which are so often compared, one of which predicted a world of pain and the other an equally dangerous world of pleasure. For him, there was no doubt that Aldous Huxley painted a more realistic picture than George Orwell.

‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.’ Or Italian brainrot, for instance.

Television is not suited to the forms of brute authoritarianism portrayed in Nineeteen Eighty-Four, ‘not congenial to messages of naked hate. For one thing, you never know who is watching, so it is best not to be wildly offensive. For another, haters with reddened faces and demonic gestures merely look foolish on television, as Marshal McLuhan observed years ago and Senator Joseph McCarthy learned to his dismay.’

Yet, while comparing the idiot box to Huxley’s soma, with its pacifying effect on the population, he suggests that a low-attention span society inevitably makes political culture more venal and dishonest: ‘Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensitive to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions.’ Lying in politics became far more normalised as attention spans shortened the news cycle; the public are too distracted, too entertained, to care, and with Trump it has become endemic.

Postman accepted that the march of entertainment was relentless, and he recalls the story that ‘some years ago the Lapps postponed for several days their annual and, one supposes, essential migratory journey so that they could find out who shot J.R.’ He might also have mentioned the Portuguese coup that took place while all the leadership were engaged in watching Eurovision.

Of course, the problem is not just that one cannot roll back the march of technology, but that it is often genuinely life-enhancing. Imagine, after all, a world without The Simpsons? When Postman died in 2003, in fact, television was in the midst of a golden age with The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and while this era has now ended, there is still much that makes our world richer. Just this past week I’ve been watching the new series of Fauda, which is superb.

Postman deliberately avoided making the argument that television was making us stupider, stating that ‘I don’t claim that changes in media bring about changes in cognitive capacities’, although one suspects that he believed it. We now see evidence of declining IQ across the West, and more recently widespread downturns in PISA scores, although there may still be disputes about the ultimate cause. Certainly the evidence for the decline of reading is ubiquitous, although linked to the introduction of smartphones, the concentration span crack to TV’s cocaine. It’s odd to think that parents in the 2020s find themselves begging their children to get off their phones and watch television instead - although I suspect that Postman wouldn’t have been amused.

Among my children’s generation, France seems to have almost zero cultural influence; they don’t watch any French television, they don’t listen to any French music, and I’m not sure many could name a French novelist more recent than Albert Camus. Indeed, very little of what my own children consume comes from continental Europe at all. In contrast, I’d say about 10 per cent of their overseas cultural diet stems from Japan or South Korea, both of which have become global youth culture superpowers despite only having about 23 young people between them. The other 90 per cent, of course, is American: American television, American music and American politics.

I thought about this while watching Resistance, the newly-released Charles de Gaulle biopic, which can realistically show the General inhabiting British elite circles without having to master the language. While the brilliant Simon Russell Beale’s French is apparently just right for Churchill, Anthony Eden (played by Tom Mison) speaks French fluently. Indeed, Eden used French to communicate with Chinese leader Zhou Enlai in the 1950s while trying to negotiate peace in Indochina. (Zhou is the one who famously said of the French Revolution that it was ‘too early to tell’, although he was actually talking about the protests of 1968, not 1789 - it just seemed like the perfect ‘wise old Chinese man’ sort of comment and so was misinterpreted.)

Eden also spoke German, as did de Gaulle, one learning from a governess and the other in a prisoner of war camp, which reflected changing Teutonic approaches to spreading their cultural influence. The General famously had trouble with the English language, though, and in one amusing scene in the film, when asked whether he speaks it, replies with indignation: ‘No, I am French.’

The way that British ministers and military officers converse in French in the film is a reminder of a lost world where it was the language of elites across Europe, a world one can’t help but mourn when one hears the children watching the latest prog drivel produced by Netflix.

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Twenty-five years ago the President of the United States issued his famous declaration that the country was at war. Following the murder of thousands of his countrymen, George W Bush announced that ‘this enemy attacked not just our people, but all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy. We will rally the world. We will be patient, we will be focused, and we will be steadfast in our determination.’

The ‘War on Terror’ had begun, an awkward name for what President Bush had accidentally called a ‘crusade’ five days after 9/11. It’s not ideal to embark on a mission without being able to name your enemy and the War on Terror - which everyone understood to be a War on Islamist Terror - did not turn out to be a great success.

What should have been a punishment raid on the Taliban turned out to be a nation-building exercise that defied history or anthropology. That was at least understandable, considering Afghanistan’s role in the murder of thousands of Americans. Less so was the adventure in Iraq, targeted at a regime unconnected to the atrocity, and which led to all sorts of unintended consequences: the replacement of a secular regime by sectarian gangs, the increasing power of theocratic Iran and the near destruction of the country’s Christian minority. The chaos in Iraq would also inspire a wave of suicide bombings in the West, including in London.

Unintended consequences occur because of the variety of actors and factors involved, but also because humans react in sometimes irrational ways. One of the now-well known unintended consequences of 9/11 was a sharp rise in passenger fatalities – among drivers.

This makes it very hard to predict future events, and journalists and commentators are notoriously bad at doing so. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was widely expected that American Muslims would suffer persecution, or at the very least unbearable stigma and isolation. That Americans would learn to hate Muslims. In fact, their opinion of Muslims improved, across the political spectrum, and immigration from that part of the world steadily increased - so that today the American Muslim population is more than twice as large as it was in 2001. The same thing happened in France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, although in this case returning to its baseline not long after.

9/11 may have changed the world, but it didn’t change public opinion.

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The 1821 Greek War of Independence. The Portuguese Civil War, also known as the Liberal Wars. The First Carlist War. The Uruguayan Civil War. Crimea. The Shimonoseki campaign. The Cretan revolt. The Boxer rebellion. The First World War, Russian Civil War and Second World War. The War in Vietnam (1945-6). The Korean War. Suez (the less said, the better). The 1991 Gulf War. Kosovo. Afghanistan. The Boko Haram insurgency. The Libyan Civil War. And the War in Iraq (not the main one, but the 2013-2017 conflict with ISIS).

That country, of course, is France, which since the Battle of Waterloo has been Britain’s closest ally, a remarkable record of military co-operation considering that for the previous 130 years the two had done almost nothing but fight each other. France and England were also famously at war for long stretches of the Middle Ages, beginning in 1337 and then tailing off after 1422 when the records dry up.

Despite this, blood has been shed by friends, perhaps most notoriously with the sinking of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, with the loss of almost 1,300 sailors. Faced with the prospect that the ships would fall into German hands, Churchill felt that he had no choice but to make this ‘hateful’ decision.

A low point in relations which added to French bitterness towards their allies, the attack is depicted in the recently released Charles de Gaulle biopic, a two-parter that has already taken France by storm, with 5 million tickets sold. The first film, Resistance, opened in Britain last month, with the second instalment arriving next week.

The film has been widely praised, in particular for the performance of Simon Abkarian, who captures de Gaulle’s courage and unflappability but also his vulnerability and prickliness. It also depicts his qualities as a family man, and his faith. In God, but just as much in France.

Resistance has a powerful message: even when the odds seem overwhelming and hopeless, it’s never over. De Gaulle is exiled to an alien land, unable to speak the language, isolated and despised by most of his countrymen. He’s reduced to living in meagre accommodation, and without supporters; the film invents the comedy character of a Polish plumber-turned-secretary to illustrate that he would have accepted anyone. Yet he overcame and helped to rescue his country, through courage, energy and an unshakeable belief in his country. He’s a hero with a sacred cause, and for British audiences it may present a new angle on our great civilisational story.

Arriving in London, de Gaulle gives his famous radio broadcast of June 18, urging that the flame of resistance must not be extinguished. Few people actually heard the speech, certainly fewer than later recalled, and as Julian Jackson wrote in his biography A Certain Idea of France, on which the film is based, almost no one had even heard of the general, and many thought that his name must be a pseudonym.

Dejected and abandoned, at one of his lowest moments de Gaulle walks out of his London flat to see dozens of Breton fishermen who have sailed from their homes and sworn to fight for him, just as every able-bodied man from the Île de Sein did indeed turn up at Free French HQ in London after hearing his address.

If the main focus of the film is the character of de Gaulle, and his often comically difficult relationship with Churchill - played by the superb Simon Russell Beale - an attractive theme is the redemption of French military honour. This is paid for with the heroic sacrifice of the Free French at Bir Hakeim in the North African campaign, where they held off a far larger German contingent.

As Jackson recently argued in Engelsberg Ideas, the battle’s depiction is not a distortion, for it ‘is a film about the Free French. For de Gaulle, it was the first time that his men had been able to fight directly against the Germans since 1940. This David vs Goliath moment was massively important for the international prestige of de Gaulle’s movement. A pinprick in the wider history of the war, it was in some sense the France Libre’s Stalingrad.’

It was certainly refreshing to watch a historical film and know that there wasn’t going to be some outrageous Hollywood anti-British distortion. Indeed, the film may even be accused of being unduly harsh on the Americans, whose government is shown to be dismissive of allies who have endured the Nazis for far longer than they have. But then, one might ask, how else could a Gaullist film see the world?

At one point, towards the end of Resistance, the Free French leader warns Churchill that his country is turning into a vassal of the United States, a point that won’t be lost on many British cinema goers. This is a view which has become ascendent among a younger generation of conservatives in this country, much cooler towards the Great Satan than their parents. While there is much contention about what ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ may entail, a scepticism towards the ‘special relationship’ is fundamental, and with it a sense that the General was correct about our vassalage.

The film could hardly avoid echoing contemporary concerns, especially when, as Jackson points out, director Antonin Baudry previously worked as a diplomat and civil servant for the French foreign ministry. He served under foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, who in 2003 had made a speech in New York opposing the Iraq War, a time when the Simpsons joke about ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was taken up unironically by American journalists. The French were proved right about the adventure; Britain was humiliated.

The jibes preceding the Iraq disaster played on a more established stock joke about a Gallic lack of military prowess, and a very lame one too. France has historically been the most belligerent country in Europe, from the time of the Franks to the age of Napoleon. Jokes about French tanks that only have a reverse gear are part of the love/hate relationship that characterises British attitudes to the French, but it is their very glory as a military power that makes any victory so worth marking. It is also the case that for a certain type of Englishman, of which I am definitely one, French military grandeur and pomp is enchanting.

After the death of French Resistance hero Daniel Cordier in 2020, Dan Jackson (no relation) wrote about his funeral at the ‘austere grandeur’ of the cour d’honneur in Les Invalides, attended by President Emmanuel Macron.

Here, ‘under an unsmiling bronze statue of Napoleon (itself made from Russian and Austrian guns captured at Austerlitz), a grand republican liturgy was conducted with Macron as the chief celebrant. To the slow beat of the black-clad-drums of the Garde Republicaine, Cordier’s tricoleur-draped coffin was borne into the square by ten officer cadets of the St Cyr Military Academy, whose vivid Second Empire uniforms and pantalon rouge recalled the glories of the army of Napoleon III, from the Malakoff to Solferino, and the countless fallen of Guise, and the Marne in 1914, when officers “thought it chic to die in white gloves”.’

Jackson described ‘the whole spectacle — and the nearby tombs of Turenne, Bugeaud, Foch and Leclerc’ as ‘a rebuke to the tedious Anglocentric view that French military history is merely a litany of defeats. The deeds of Cordier and his confrères in redeeming the ignominy of 1940 are a refutation of that calumny alone. As was the record of those who fought under the Cross of Lorraine, from Bir Hakeim and Monte Cassino to the French First Army that crossed both the Rhine (capturing Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) and then the Danube in 1945.’

No other country can do military grandeur with quite the same style or élan, nor get the tone quite right. While we’ll all be pleased that Germany is now rearming at a steady rate, and will play an increasingly crucial role in protecting European democracy, for some reason their whole military look still doesn’t quite have the same inspiring vibe.

Earlier this year it seemed that France was emerging from the Gulf crisis as the military protector of Europe, maybe dare I say it leader of the free world. Maybe this is to project my own hopes, but at any rate their Instagram content was very impressive, and that’s a start. Certainly, almost the entire French Navy was on the move, while Britain’s military is now completely emasculated.

I’m aware that everyone in France seems to hate Macron, but on the international stage he comes across as impressive, and his speech at the time - ‘To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful’ - reassuring to those who want a strong France. What made it even more French was that the speech was made at a nuclear submarine base, after which the assembled worthies sung La Marseillaise. It’s enough to make a grown Englishman cry.

Just a reminder that I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months starting later in September: payments will automatically go on hold, so if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not pay anything during this period.

Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

I wouldn’t call the book ‘urgent’ because I usually take that to mean ‘worthy scolding by an ideological ally’; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.

James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.

‘Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.

‘We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).’

Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. ‘The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities,’ he writes: ‘I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry).’

Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s ‘the phones’). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

‘Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.’

Having collapsed at the end of antiquity, literacy rates began to show an uptick from the 12^th century, initially in the urban centres of northern Italy but then rapidly rising with the invention of printing; even then, however, the nascent books trade overestimated how keen the public were, and he recalls the case of ‘two hapless Roman publishers who wrote to Pope Sixtus IV at the end of the fifteenth century asking for help because they had printed 20,000 books in a fit of over-enthusiasm and were unable to sell any of them.’

Then came Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading the Bible - in Sweden the Lutheran Church even banned the illiterate from marrying - and the Enlightenment, of which Marriott is a great fan. This produced both a republic of letters among our continent’s intellectual elite, but a much broader spread of empathy, enabling many people to see beyond the categories of social class, sex or race, into the soul and mind within.

‘In a book you can find yourself paying close attention to someone you might have very easily dismissed had you encountered them in real life. The wealthy male readers of Pamela spent hours with the innermost thoughts of a serving girl, a kind of person many of them would not have given so much as a second thought to had they encountered her in the street.’

Likewise, with readers of Olaudah Equiano’s memoir The Interesting Narrative, now able to see life through the eyes of a slave in a way that was transformative: ‘what it was like to be stolen from one’s home by slave traders, packed onto a slave ship and sold like an object.’ In as much as reactionaries felt a ‘moral panic’ about the dangerous effects of reading, Marriott thinks they were right: literacy would indeed undermine a hierarchical society and bring about a more egalitarian, democratic spirit.

Marriott identifies the peak of literacy sometime in the early to mid-20^th century, and ‘by 1944, a survey found that “nearly two-thirds of skilled workers and almost half of unskilled workers grew up in homes with substantial libraries”.’ Yet already the great change was coming. In 1948, only 1 per cent of American homes owned a television; by 1954, over half did. Britain was a bit behind, but the idiot box began to take off after Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953, fondly remembered as a great communal event because so few people owned a set. Soon, however, television would become the least communal of activities

‘All of life seemed to be reorganising itself around television’s centrifugal attraction. In living rooms across the world, armchairs and sofas were shifted around so that they no longer faced each other (as they had in most houses for most of history) and were directed instead towards the corner that contained the screen.’

Social life turned inward, and television had a zombifying effect on many; Marriott notes that ‘in 1956 when a technical error delayed the broadcast of ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium, a third of the audience had simply continued staring blankly at their empty sets until programming resumed.’

Television came to ‘devour’ our leisure time, and by 1995, as Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone, 40 per cent of it was spent staring at the screen. While Putnam was writing about the United States, its effects were seen everywhere; in the Netherlands, which possesses some of the best data, the introduction of television saw a decline in the average time spent reading, from five to three and a half hours a week between the 1950s and 70s.

The number of channels exploded with the arrival of cable television, and the number of brain cells fell. Western countries began to see the ‘reverse Flynn Effect’, across-the-board IQ declines, and a natural experiment helps us to identify the culprit:

‘Because Norway is a long, narrow inaccessible country of mountains, fjords and forests, the roll-out of cable TV was staggered by region. Not everywhere got cable at once… This, plus Norway’s policy of military conscription for men, presented an interesting opportunity for social scientists. By measuring the compulsory intelligence tests taken by all military conscripts the economist Øystein Hernæs was able to map the effect on test scores of cohorts of soldiers as cable TV arrived in their areas. What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability”.’

And then things only got worse, in 2007, with the arrival of the smartphone. As Marriott points out, television has its ill effects, but it also produces something recognisable as art, and requires some degree of concentration. And whereas most people like television, they often hate their phones, seeing the terrifying power they hold.

If your household is anything like mine, it will feature parents repeatedly nagging their children to ‘get off your phone’, only for them to reply: ‘but you’re on it, too!’ (It’s for work, I lamely reply.) Indeed, many adults struggle to limit their use of these maddeningly addictive devices, which the average person checks 144 times a day; Marriott’s own battles are comical.

‘In my early adulthood I must have spent hundreds of futile and faintly tragicomic evenings attempting to improve my reading by hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards. I have shoved in into the stale and musty depths of laundry baskets. One particularly desperate (though I also thought, rather ingenious) strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture thus making it impossible to retrieve without laboriously hunting for it. I went through a phase of locking my phone up like an evil genie in a “smartphone prison”, a sort of miniature safe with a timer.’ Nothing could stop him succumbing to the Ring’s great power, until he got rid of the device and bought a ‘dumbphone’ instead.

The impact on writing was not initially apparent. As late as 2017, a short story in the New Yorker was read by a million people and became the subject of widespread discourse. Just nine years later the very idea seems absurd, and far more attention is given to the likes of ‘James Donaldson, the world’s most popular YouTuber and in the apt description of the writer Mark O’Connell, “the Mozart of the attention economy’’.’ His videos ‘take the form of stunts or accelerated miniature gameshows’ with titles such as ‘I Spent 50 Hours in Solitary Confinement’ or ‘Would You Sit in Snakes for $10,000?’

For those who can’t manage 30 minutes, there is always TikTok, ‘which has justly been described as the “crack” of the smartphone. It has been estimated that the average TikTok user may scroll through as many as 260 videos in the space of about half an hour.’

As our attention spans have declined, ‘statistical analysis shows that even pop songs are becoming simpler and more repetitive’, while television dialogue has become less complex, all subtext or insinuation gone as characters spell out the plot to attention-depleted audiences.

Marriott admits that ‘making this kind of argument is apt to make you sound like a reactionary bore — the kind of armchair-bound windbag who would have droned on about cultural decline all the way through the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell. I acknowledge that some readers have already made up their minds that this is precisely who I am and what I am doing. But it’s worth pointing out that the idea that culture is becoming more simple or stagnant and repetitive is not one of history’s recurring moral panics.

‘As the journalist Adam Mastroianni has neatly pointed out, for most of the twentieth century people tended to worry about the exact opposite problem: that there was too much novelty and too much pretentious difficulty. Traditional ways of doing things seemed to be continually, terrifyingly being exploded or reinvented or displaced. Art, literature, philosophy and fashion simply could not stay still.’

Today, even scientific studies are becoming ‘less disruptive’, according to one prestigious journal, ‘increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions.’ The culture is becoming more conservative in a way that oral societies tend to be – repetitive, static, lacking innovation.

As literacy has declined, politics has become stupider. Reading Hansard from the 1970s, and comparing it to the level of Parliamentary debate today, is a painful exercise. Classical allusions are gone; metaphor is treated literally, often provoking dim-witted outrage; speaking times continue to shrink as MPs compete in the attention economy.

Marriott contrasts Harry Truman, who ruled America during the peak of literacy, with the current incumbent. Truman ‘was the son of a livestock dealer in Independence, Missouri. And yet as an earnest and bespectacled schoolboy he spent great tracts of his time in the local library. “Watched over by a plaster bust of Benjamin Franklin,” Truman made his way past all the familiar landmarks of a twentieth century autodidact self-education: The Bible (which he claimed to have read through twice by the time he was twelve), Plutarch’s Lives, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato’s Republic, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Eventually, he read every single one of two thousand volumes stored in Independence’s library — including all the encyclopaedias. It’s an inspiring story but not at all a unique one.’

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is so averse to reading that aides recall that he cannot even make it through one-page memos; his speeches are notably repetitive and characterised by taunting and braggadocio, a reversion to the norms of the oral age. He is an almost Homeric figure, perhaps the first post-literate western leader.

In the new media ecosystem Marriott sees a reversal of the Enlightenment, epitomised by the likes of Candace Owens, who has ‘more followers on YouTube alone than the entire subscriber base of the New York Times’, a ‘one-woman nonsense machine’ who declares that ‘Stalin was Jewish, science is a “pagan faith” and the French Revolution was started by Jews to “bring down Christian empires”.’ He acknowledges, however, that at least she is no longer a flat earther although, as she has stated, ‘I’m not a round earther either’.

‘Well, it’s a start.’

For Marriott, ‘there is nothing inevitable or eternal about modern civilisation in all its desirable complexity and comfort’, nor is it written that it may survive ‘a world filled with demons, anti-vaccine conspiracies and “ways of knowing”’. Democracy followed the rise of literacy, and it may struggle to function in a world where the analytical way of thinking that comes with reading is alien to many voters.

While much of the most unenlightened rhetoric comes from the populist Right, the more mainstream cultural Left is terrified of appearing ‘elitist’, a charge often made to Marriott in interviews. To which, his only answer is: yes, I suppose.

‘Many of us are suspicious of hierarchies of cultural value,’ he writes: ‘To suggest that it is “better” to spend your day reading War and Peace than watching TikTok carries the dangerous ring of elitism. I was once reprimanded by a writer in a British magazine for my “belief that some writing is simply ‘better’”; a view, I was told, that is “inherently damaging, and marginalising”… A recent report issued by Britain’s most important cultural funding body, the Arts Council, warned against the use of “terms like excellence” which may promote “unhelpful hierarchies about what kinds of work are valued”.’

It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20^th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy. As reading has declined, so the social gap has widened: iPad children tend to come from the poorest backgrounds, while many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access, and screens at the dinner table have become very non-U. Hierarchies grow starker when elites fail to promote high culture.

Yet the most startling thing about this book is how far even the nominally well-educated have fallen, so that ‘by the end of the twentieth century a college graduate born after 1969’ read less than someone born before 1950 with a basic level of education. Indeed, ‘nowadays many rich and highly educated people are much less well read than many members of the least privileged classes had been in the middle of the twentieth century.’

To me, that is the most salient and worrying trend: that people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture. I suspect that the crisis of faith in our institutions is driven not just by a sense that they are corrupt or biased, but that the people running them are not very smart. The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.

I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months starting later in September: if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not pay anything during this period, so please don’t end your subscription, otherwise I will have to go back to pushing trolleys at Sainsbury’s.

I’m taking the time out to concentrate on longer writing projects, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I will also be travelling around Britain a bit, although I’m still vague about dates; as I mentioned a few months back, this will include Birmingham, Leicester, the Manchester and Leeds areas, so if you’re from those parts of the world and want to meet, let me know.

I hugely enjoy writing a substack, but I think a break is probably necessary from time to time. In the distant past East Asian administrators would sometimes leave their positions to spend time contemplating in a monastery, a tradition which Lee Kuan Yew sort of followed by taking a sabbatical at Harvard (where he learned the valuable lesson that American elites believe all sorts of wacky stuff about the world).

I will post a few more articles before the pause, including a couple about Lee and Singapore, as well as the decline of literacy (I highly recommend James Marriott’s new book on the subject). I will also publish that long promised Ask Me Anything post, so if you have any more questions, you can send them by email, by messaging on substack, or in the comments, or via direct message on Twitter, or WhatsApp, Signal or carrier pigeon. (Not LinkedIn, though).

Over the summer we holidayed in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, which was lovely, apart from the endless queuing at borders, often for two hours at a time. Considering that they all speak the same language, have these countries ever considered joining into some sort of federation?

The last time I visited Dalmatia was in 1989, aged 11, too young to understand the danger the country was now in. This time around I read Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia, which describes first-hand the horror that followed. He recalls the menacing bonhomie of Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić when he went to interview him at his headquarters in Knin, close to where I was staying.

It is mid-morning, but as is my wont from the first morning following my arrival in a town like Knin, I am suffering from a slight hangover. Mladić, never quite able to discard a roguish smile, commands a minion to fetch coffee and refreshment. A few minutes later, the minion pours a coffee while Mladić distributes his homemade rakija. As he does, one of my companions, also still coming up for air from last night, issues a polite refusal. The general is momentarily perplexed and then humorously angry. For a moment, he booms, “I thought you were going to refuse my homemade, which is very funny because nobody refuses my homemade.” Our hangover is thus forced into oblivion. We raise our glasses and down what is undoubtedly one of the best homemades I’ve ever swallowed.

Mladić died last week, while serving a life sentence for war crimes; he and his compatriots committed terrible atrocities during the conflict, although the Serb enclave he inhabited was then effectively ethnically cleansed (having said that, please don’t start arguing about the Balkans in the comments - it will never end, and I don’t have strong opinions either way).

The coastline is beautiful, the sea perfect for swimming, but visiting inland Mostar was a particular highlight. The city attracts huge numbers of visitors from both the west and the Middle East, some of them enjoying a cheeky beer away from the view of the mosque. It must have the highest rate, per square metre, of Instagram girls anywhere on earth, all aiming at the perfect pout from the iconic bridge. If town planners followed my idea of basing architecture designs on Instagram usage, much of the world would look like the Bosnian city.

Mostar was famously damaged in the fighting between Muslims and Croats, and while the bridge has been replaced, many of the buildings are still empty shells riddled with bullets. It was lovely to hear the call to prayer as I ate delicious Turkish-influenced food on the terraces, pondering whether to start my future travelogue with ‘where east meets west’, but the surrounding area feels like it has quite a Northern Ireland vibe, with flags and graffiti making it clear whose villages it is.

I watched the first De Gaulle film this week, a two-parter that has taken France by storm. I absolutely loved it, finding it both moving and at times very funny, in particular the relationship between the French and British leaders, played superbly by Simon Abkarian and Simon Russell Beale (mostly in French). But then, I am extremely sentimental about French patriotism and military dash, like many of my countrymen. I think this all stems from my parents forcing us to watch Casablanca as children, where they cried throughout the scene where ‘La Marseillaise’ is sung in Rick’s Café. Vive La France!

It’s coming home

The lamest xenophobic joke in the world involves the theme that the French are ‘surrender monkeys’ and inept at war, bizarre considering that they are historically the most belligerent people in Europe. Why do you think all our military terms come from French? It’s because they successfully conquered England and formed a violent aristocracy for centuries.

On that subject, the Bayeux Tapestry has arrived in London and opens to the public next week. I saw the tapestry - strictly speaking, an embroidery - in Normandy in 2022, but if you don’t manage to get a ticket, there is a replica in Reading.

Most likely made in Kent, the tapestry remained in obscurity in Bayeux cathedral until its discovery by historians in the 1720s. It was twice almost destroyed during the Revolution, first by soldiers who wished to cut it up in order to cover an ammunition wagon, then by local zealots who planned to use it as confetti in some demented ‘festival of reason’; a courageous local official intervened and saved it.

Later, Napoleon became interested, seeing as it portrayed a successful conquest of England, and had it brought to Paris. Interest in the tapestry continued to grow and in 1816 Charles Stothard, a draughtsman for the Society of Antiquaries in London, was commissioned to make drawings and write a commentary. This he did; he also stole a bit and took it home, this chunk ending up with the Victoria and Albert Museum, who handed it back in 1871 (however, by that stage, the segment had been replaced so it was never sown back in).

The tapestry contains many strange scenes. Where William takes Harold to the hall in Rouen, below them is a naked man wielding a tool and working on a wooden object, perhaps a coffin. In another, a woman named as Elfgifu appears with a priest placing a veil on her, and beneath them is another naked man with an erection mimicking the priest’s action. It’s some sort of in-joke which will remain lost forever.

In the 1880s a group of British women, led by one Mrs Elizabeth Wardle, set out to make a replica for England, but because sexual mores had changed somewhat in eight centuries, one of the naked men had his genitals removed, and the other had some underpants helpfully put on.

Since the last round-up, I’ve written about the problem with prosecuting people just for supporting Palestine Action. I wrote about how social cohesion would be helped by not allowing violent men to be at liberty (it was later revealed that large numbers involved in the Henry Nowak disturbances had been reported for domestic abuse).

I wrote about the Greatest Norwegian, Harald Hardrada (free), and about the relative improvements in airline safety vs public safety. I appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast talking about Ann Widdecombe, and I wrote about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (also free).

I wrote about the Riddle facing new prime minister, and speculated as to why Manchester and Liverpool both have such strong musical traditions. Some of the replies make the plausible argument that in Manchester’s case it’s simply down to Tony Wilson, an interesting example of the Great Man of History theory.

It’s notable that, as much as I loved heavy metal as a teenager (okay, I still do), Birmingham has produced nowhere near as much popular music; maybe its car domination reduces the development of an urban music culture, and that’s just another downside we can blame on the automobile menace. (You can’t be a proper commentator until you can shoehorn all social ills into one of your pet obsessions).

On a similar note, I wrote about the historical North-South divide in England (free), and the overwhelming economic pull of London. I wrote about aircon during Britain’s intense heat wave, and apparently more deaths were recorded in Wallonia during the peak of June’s heat wave than on any day during the pandemic. I know that I have a slight tendency to pessimism, but I do find this all fairly alarming, especially after seeing wildfires in Croatia. And before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, yes we all cycled to the Balkans, obviously. Anyway, let’s hope those electric aeroplanes can be expanded rapidly.

I wrote about the fraying of the social contract, global migration in the 2020s, Ben Mcintyre’s Colditz, and the link between communication revolutions and the political variety.

I also wrote about Denmark, a country I hugely admire (free), although I should also give a shout-out to the marvellous Norwegian countryside. The view from the Oslo-Bergen train on its final approach really is heavenly.

Finally, August was dominated by the Jason Arday affair; in my piece I mentioned Marie Sophie Hingst, the German blogger who faked a Holocaust memoir, but she was not alone: many ‘misery memoirs’ turned out to be fraudulent, including two other Holocaust tales, one of which had the improbable story of a child being raised by wolves. From what I remember, many other books in that genre turned out to be rather expansive with the truth, so Arday’s story can be placed in that tradition.

People handle this sort of humiliation in different ways, but in an age where public shaming is the preferred method of moral enforcement, rather than any internal guilt mechanism, shamelessness is a bit of a superpower. The ability to ignore unwelcome attention and not abide by fickle and inconsistent public morality is an incredible strength; that in part explains the success of Donald Trump.

Elsewhere

Alice Evans on what Indian women made of life in Victorian England, and how much freedom their sisters had. She also wrote about non-western travellers and their views of how European treated women.

Fred Sculthorp on CourtNewsUK.

For instance, who can forget the recent story that broke courtroom containment concerning the pair of illegal migrants from Afghanistan, who raped a woman by knifepoint as she and her boyfriend lay stargazing in a park in Barking? Here’s another: “son murders mother in Haringey” would barely bat an eyelid as a headline. But what if you found out that after he had beaten her to death, he continued to paint her toenails, turned the decomposing body in the master bedroom into a dedicated shrine and used her credit card to see Tina: The Tina Turner Musical?

Many of you will have followed the discourse about ‘Woke 1’ being crazy, so it’s worth resharing this classic NS Lyons post about why it hasn’t gone away.

Henry Jeffreys on why alcohol is civilisation. I think the idea that bread and cities are a by-product of people trying to make beer, rather than the other way around, is very plausible. He also wrote about one of the greatest things in the world – French supermarkets. Vive Carrefour! Vive E. Leclerc!

Roger Moorhouse talks about life on board U-boats on the Subject to Change podcast. Riveting stuff, and terrifying. Perhaps the worst job in history.

Derek Hopper on how Thailand resisted colonisation.

In 1868, Mongkut extended invitations to British and French officials to observe a solar eclipse. This was a grand affair with pavilions and accommodation prepared for the attendees, the goal of which was to showcase Mongkut’s commitment to science. Mongkut accurately predicted the timing and location of the eclipse using a combination of traditional Thai timekeeping methods and Western astronomical techniques. According to some stories, his calculations were so precise that they trumped those of the French astronomers present.

The Siamese court knew what to perform to whom. France had long considered science to be the true marker of civilization, while Britain championed international law and free trade. Mongkut demonstrated Siamese civilization through measures that European powers used to justify colonization elsewhere

Will AI discover animal language? I’m sceptical, but a very interesting idea.

The new cancer vaccine looks very interesting. Jonathan Leaf writes about it here.

Nine out of 10 of Britain’s bestselling paperback novels feature the murder of a woman.

I only recently learned that Americans are still using purple hearts minted for the invasion of Japan. It’s why I didn’t find Christopher Nolan’s last film, Oppenheimer, that compelling, and felt that Harry Truman was the real star.

Alan Macfarlane, author of the immensely interesting The Origins of English Individualism as well as The Savage Wars of Peace, is a big social media figure in China.

How to build tunnels like Norwegians.

And how to act generously like Swedes: ‘In 1959, Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin developed the modern three-point belt, and on August 13 of that year, the company sold the first car fitted with one, a PV 544, to a customer in Sweden. The invention is credited with saving more than one million lives, and Volvo later opened the patent to every competitor, rather than charging for it.’

I wrote about land acknowledgments last year and completely missed that the Goethe Institute did one for the ancient Slavic tribes of what is now Berlin.

A thread of prominent university architecture departments. Yep, as you’d expect.

A nice way of visualising Columbus’ voyages, literally into the unknown.

Finally…

Neil O’Brien on German idioms and terms, among them:

Verschlimmbesserung: an improvement that actually makes things worse

Fremdschämen: the cringe you feel on someone else’s behalf when they embarrass themselves.

Kummerspeck: “grief bacon”, the weight you put on from comfort-eating through emotional distress.

Torschlusspanik: “gate-shut panic”, anxiety, often about life milestones, that time is running out and the doors are closing.

Kopfkino: “head cinema”, the involuntary film your imagination screens for you, usually anxious or embarrassing scenarios playing on a loop.

Have a great day - and don’t forget to not unsubscribe!

Britain has always been famous for its comedy and political stability, an image we’ve done much to shed in recent years. As Fred Sculthorp wrote in a characteristically excellent report on Clacton in Essex, the country has become strange and unrecognisable in many ways, and not just due to demographic change. Fred was covering the recent by-election, which Nigel Farage called for the not very coherent reason that this would clear his name over allegations that he didn’t register donations. All the other parties boycotted the seemingly pointless contest, leaving comedy figure Count Binface to win over a quarter of the vote.

Binface, who has a manifesto full of ‘wacky’ proposals, is in the tradition of Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Party, but the tone is different, as is the target. For many on the Right, he’s a court jester who exists for the amusement of the political class, the ‘living avatar of Bloody Bonkers Brilliant Britain’, as Mary Harrington put it. Yet, as James Marriott argued, you don’t need to oppose the centrist-vibed politics to find Count Binface tiresome.

It has often been remarked that this tendency to unseriousness is connected to post-imperial decline. A nation that can’t be taken seriously shows itself superior to the world by laughing at it. I tend to agree. Certainly, self-deprecation often betrays inner unease. Britain resembles a star athlete gone to seed uncomfortably making jokes about his weight.

Worse, our national humour is increasingly laced with an unconvincing strain of smugness. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously over here in Britain!” is the message. “What must they make of this in America!”, someone will invariably chortle at election-time footage of a cabinet minister sharing a platform with a man in a fox costume. (Being funnier than an American is dubious grounds for self-congratulation.) I suspect that what we imagine looks like eccentric good humour to the rest of the world seems rather more tragic from the outside.

For the Pimlico Journal, Binface is pure nostalgia, a comfort blanket that allows people to avoid the reality that it’s no longer the 1990s and London doesn’t look like a Richard Curtis film. Peter Cook once said that ‘Britain is in danger of sinking giggling into the sea’, and my instinctive objection to this whimsical style - what one writer lovingly called ‘silly sausage Britain’ – is the air of helplessness in the face of very serious (but not hopeless) decline. This is not a game of cards, this is your life and mine.

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