Potters and Malfoys

Wrong Side of History newsletter #56

Good morning. Firstly, the UK edition of my book 1066 is now available. You can read it instantly on Kindle, or order a paperback which should arrive in a week or so. Please buy it, so that the book can temporarily feature as an Amazon bestseller in a history sub-category for a few hours - it’s hugely important for my ego.

A few weeks back I wrote about the lasting legacy of the Norman Conquest on class:

Yet the political idea of the two nations, Saxon and Norman, remained powerful. Walter Scott might have written anti-Norman propaganda, but even the Harry Potter series follows the tradition, setting the Anglo-Saxon named Potter and Weasley against the very Norman-sounding Voldemort and Malfoy. The Normans have become synonymous both with snootiness and Frenchness, which to many Anglo-Saxons are the same thing

….

But there is an argument to the class theory. In The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark observed that, even in 1800, people with Norman surnames were eight times as likely as the general population to be Members of Parliament, although that has narrowed since. Research published in 2011 found that people with Norman surnames are still richer than the population as a whole, by some 10 per cent on average. Of course the effect shouldn’t be exaggerated - the Grosvenor family have been especially astute at managing property and making well-chosen dynastic matches down the years, and the late duke was simply employing the self-effacing humour typical of the English aristocracy.

Among Clark’s findings was that Englishmen with Norman surnames were especially prominent in the military even four centuries after the Conquest, playing a prominent role in the later stages of the Hundred Years’ War, and they certainly remained so afterwards.

Since my last newsletter, I’ve also written about how the Norman conquest led to the near eradication of English names, although some made a return (such as my own). I also wrote about names more generally and how they have become more dispersed over the past few years.

I had to take out a section on the growth of Irish names, which I’ll save for another day: English speakers, try to guess how to say Gráinne, Siobhan, Aoibheann, Oisin, Sadhbh, Aine, Aoife, Saoirse, Caoimhe, Fiadh, Clíodhna or - one of my middle names - Maoilisa. Even I’m not entirely sure how it’s pronounced.

I also wrote about the sensitive issue of immigration and crime (paywalled, obviously) and whether the Tories can take advantage of Labour’s fantastically disastrous honeymoon.

I wrote about the Meiji Restoration and Japan’s rise to greatness (part one here and part two here). Thanks to Feyi Fawehinmi for putting me onto Mark Ravina’s book before my trip to Japan (his review is here.)

For at least a year I’ve been meaning to write a piece on what a ‘Reverse Meiji’ could mean - were Britain to send some politicians to the Far East and see what we could learn from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. I’m not exactly sure whose idea the Reverse Meiji was, but if it ever happened I’d like to volunteer to join the fact-finding mission.

I also wrote about a groundbreaking new essay, Foundations, which sets out why Britain is so poor; I wrote about Trump’s funniest moments; on the Labour freebies scandal and what Lee Kuan Yew called ‘ostentatious egalitarianism’ in politics, and on why middle-class parents avoid comprehensive schools.

Elsewhere

A long history of Marvel Comics. I was obsessed with them from about 11-13 and still have a few old comics left. One of the benefits of having children is that I get to watch the films, switch my brain off for a couple of hours, and not feel like some sort of bugman for taking an interesting in superheroes.

****

Ian Leslie on learning from Charles Darwin.

Darwin developed his instincts into a method of thinking that today we call “T-shaped”. T-shaped learners are specialists in one field but take time to learn about a range of other subjects. Everything in the top of the T feeds into the stem, making the specialist’s thinking richer and more original. Darwin’s speciality, of course, was biology (‘natural history’) but he was also deeply interested in geology, and took from his friend Charles Lyell the insight that large changes could occur in tiny increments over thousands or millions of years. He read about economics, and applied Thomas Malthus’s ideas about how people compete for survival to the animal world. He was an investor in industry, and married into a family, the Wedgwoods, who pioneered factory production lines. From there he took the idea that there was a division of labour in nature; that different species might evolve to exploit different niches.

****

N.S. Lyons on the Total State.

In part, this was the inevitable outcome of technological and economic change following the industrial revolution, which made it necessary to expand the ranks of people schooled in managing large, complex organizations. But, as MacIntyre demonstrates, it was also the result of a deeply misguided urge, pioneered by early progressives, to de-risk and “depoliticize” politics by handing over decision-making to technocratic “experts.” The hope was that these experts could rationally and neutrally administer government and society from the top down, through the same principles and processes of “scientific management” first applied to the assembly line.

****

Tom Jones on Italians in Britain. We lived in Clerkenwell until I was two, in what was London’s own Little Italy; my brother was baptised at the Italian church there and we continued going to Mass in the area for many years after. Curiously, as Jones writes, many Italians now migrating to Britain are Bangladeshis by origin, almost 15,000 in total.

****

Churchill has come under renewed attacks in recent weeks, although this time from an unusual angle. Nathan Pinkoski, who has recently joined substack, wrote on the decline of the Churchill myth

In the years after the war, Churchill was too successful in playing down the true source of his greatness. Only one of two wartime national leaders to write memoirs, Churchill published his shortly after the war, beginning in 1948 and finishing in 1953. From the “Five Days in May” episode to his quarrels with Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Churchill’s memoirs conceal how tenuous his position was. They hide the fissures and divides that nearly toppled him in his first month in office and demonstrated Britain’s growing impotence as the war went on.

Churchill had his reasons. One was magnanimity toward defeated opponents. Contrary to many enthusiasts of the Churchill mythology, he didn’t want to adopt the base tactic of smearing Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain as pro-peace and pro-Hitler. The second, more important task was to emphasize the perennial importance of Anglo-American cooperation. Churchill taught that when the English-speaking peoples stood together, there was no obstacle they couldn’t overcome. This was a message for his American readers. If Americans heeded Churchill, they wouldn’t retreat into their own hemisphere, but rather brace themselves for the Cold War and for the global struggle against communism. The final task was perhaps the hardest of all. Churchill wrote to reassure the English that they were still a great nation. They had performed great deeds during the war and were capable of more in their partnership with the new American empire. Churchill papered over the extent of Britain’s decline.

****

Megan Gafford on why America was supposed to be art deco.

Like the jazz music that scored the rise of New York City's earliest skyscrapers — the style was often called Jazz Moderne in its own time, and only became known as Art Deco during its resurgent popularity in the ‘60s — Art Deco was a syncretism of many older traditions, reimagined during the dynamism of the early 20th century. While Modernist architects of the day were following Bauhaus orthodoxy of “starting from zero” by liberating buildings from ornamentation and historical influence, Art Deco upheld art traditions from across the world — Greek, Egyptian, Mayan, Japanese — and merged them with new, industrial materials and methods.

I’ve said, many times, that America in the mid-20th century was the peak of western civilisation, and some of its early skyscrapers reflect that. Personally, I’d love to see some more gothic high rises in London (here, as imagined by Grok).

Inquisitive Bird on the case for prisons.

A natural experiment in Italy provided further evidence of the efficacy of incapacitation (Barbarino & Mastrobuoni, 2014). Eight collective pardons between 1962 and 1990 led to a large fraction of prisoners being released. The releases led to a large increase in crime, confirming that many crimes were otherwise being prevented while these criminals were incarcerated.

The exact number of crimes prevented by incapacitation is difficult to estimate. It requires inferring a counterfactual, namely the number of crimes the person would have committed if he or she were free. One estimate by Sweeten & Apel (2007)suggested that 1 year of incapacitation prevented 6.2 to 14.1 offenses for juvenile offenders, and 4.9 to 8.4 for adult offenders. Another estimate comes from Levitt (1996), who exploited exogenous variation in state incarceration rates induced by court orders to reduce prison populations. His estimate suggests that the incarceration of one prisoner reduces the number of crimes by approximately 15 each year.

In Britain, meanwhile, released prisoners benefitting from a decade of underfunding are already getting arrested again.

****

A totally insane story from Andrew Doyle about David Wootton, who dressed as an Islamic terrorist, ‘complete with Arabic headdress, and a t-shirt bearing the words “I love Ariana Grande”.’

To top it all, he carried a rucksack with “TNT” and “boom” written on it. This was in reference of course to the horrendous terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 that killed twenty-two people, including many children, and injured a further thousand.

Bad taste? Offensive? Juvenile? I would agree with all of these assessments. But the partygoers understood the rules of the game, and Wootton later claimed to have been awarded the prize for Best Costume. Once his image was posted online, however, it became a police matter, and he was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty and now faces up to two years in prison. He has also relocated and changed his name.

As I’ve written before, Britain is not a free country.

****

On a vaguely similar note, Hannah Barnes on free speech in decline in every institution.

Edward Skidelsky, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Exeter, launched the Committee for Academic Freedom in February 2024. He was alerted to a new censoriousness in 2019, when a student told him about an incident: “He had been on his own in his room talking on the phone to a friend, in the course of which he had said… ‘Veganism is wrong’, ‘Gender fluidity is stupid’, and a few others. His next-door neighbour had overheard all this through the wall and reported him to the university authorities.” The student, Robert Ivinson, was found guilty of harassment and put on a “behavioural contract”, which put him at risk of expulsion.

Imagine being the neighbour who reported him.

****

Meanwhile, at the Spectator, Matthew Scott on attempts to enforce more politics into the law.

But the Bar Standards Board, the body that regulates – and disciplines – the profession wants to go much further and add a further positive duty to tackle ‘counter-inclusive misconduct.’ To this end it has proposed that individual barristers should have a duty to ‘act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion.’

Once adopted – and I have little confidence that the Board’s consultation process will prevent its adoption – barristers will be under a professional duty to become social engineers.

Failure to act in a way that advances equality, diversity and inclusion will be a disciplinary offence, for which we could be fined or have our careers destroyed.’

But remember folks, the culture wars are over!

****

And on that topic, Kristian Niemietz on culture war denialism.

On the one hand, progressives insist that there is no such thing as “wokery”. It is all just a figment of the febrile imagination of mad right-wingers. Chill out, Gammon! Nobody is attacking your values, your lifestyle, or your history. It’s all in your head. You’re just watching too much GB News, getting yourself riled up over nothing. You’re being played like a fiddle by the capitalist class, who are conjuring up a phony Culture War in order to distract you from the economic mess they are creating. 

But at the same time, they will triumphantly crow about how their side is winning the Culture War, and how there is nothing their opponents can do about it. It’s over, Gammon! You’re on the wrong side of history! Your outdated views are becoming increasingly irrelevant in modern Britain, which is getting more progressive by the day. You are a dying breed. The equivalent of the last Roman Pagans.

****

Dominic Lawson on Azerbaijan’s sportswashing.

Should you be one of those watching the fuel-fest known as the Formula 1 grand prix taking place in Baku today, consider this: within half a mile of the drivers hurtling around the streets of Azerbaijan’s capital is the state security service headquarters. And languishing in its cells are — among many other political prisoners — several who were ministers of the former Armenian government of Nagorno-Karabakh, now unlawfully held hostage after being captured last year when Azerbaijan invaded the disputed territory.

Greg Maffei, head of Liberty Media, which owns the F1 business, has criticised the holding of one of its races there, but said that such events were in “places like Baku” because they had paid such large sums for the privilege — a succinct description of what has become known as “sportswashing”.

****

What’s it like to be face blind?

Scientists are now finding that the variety of ways people experience being awake and alive is, frankly, mind-boggling. Your best friend, your spouse, your boss: Their perceptions and inner lives might be completely different from yours. And—chances are—you have no idea.

If you don't believe me, start asking them questions like: When you’re reading a novel, do you “see” the characters in your mind’s eye? (If so, lucky them! I see nothing but words on a page.)

Or: Are your memories in color or black-and-white? Do you experience them in the first person or third? (All I remember of my past are the stories I tell about myself—all words, no pictures, and muted emotions.)

I find this subject fascinating because I don’t think I was aware that certain people were face blind until well into my late 30s, when I read Lawson discussing it. I just can’t imagine what it’s like.

****

Jonathan Wilson on the great Brian Clough, that enormous figure from old English football.

Clough clearly idolised his mother who, at least in his telling of the story, prioritised academic achievement over anything else. Failing his 11-plus clearly hurt, and he seemed never quite to forgive his brother Bill for mocking him over it on the day he got his results. The “immaculate” Bill, he said, “was Mam’s favourite son. I never was. Perhaps it was because he won the teapot in a ‘lovely baby’ competition and I didn’t. Still… I had a reasonable consolation prize by winning the European Cup — twice.”

****

Sebastian Milbank on the government’s anti-industry strategy.

The Ockham’s Razor of politics is that the most brutally cynical explanation is generally the right one. In the 2015-17 parliament, an LSE study found that though nearly half of the country’s graduates have a degree in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subject, only 17 per cent of MPs did. A 2014 report revealed that the majority of MPs don’t understand basic economic questions such as how money is produced in the economy, and a 2012 survey showed that a majority of MPs were unable to understand equally simple questions about mathematics. In the 2019 parliament, over a third of MPs had studied either Politics, Law or English as undergraduates. 

The average MP doesn’t know much about that 23 per cent of our economy that is based in science and technology, and doesn’t know many people who work in it. But they are surrounded by people who have links to the public and service sectors. 

****

Morgoth on The Shooting Party.

The rich symbolism throughout the film suggests that the paternalistic and thoughtful Sir Randolph, not Hartlip, has the correct instincts. The Shooting Party refuses to do your thinking for you; there are no rants or exposition dumps to guide you along and direct you to a message. Like the passengers on the Titanic, which sank the previous year, the guests at Sir Randolph’s pheasant shoot are unaware that their world is also drifting toward an iceberg.

Elon Musk, invent a time machine and kill Gavrilo Princip please.

****

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok on Britain’s Equality Act. It’s good that the absurdities of British law are making us an international laughing stock.

On the Twitter

America has the best managers in the world. A paper drew on 11,000 interviews in 34 countries, and showed ‘that over 30% of the productivity advantage of US firms comes from better management’. I have to say that my experience of working with Americans has always been good, perhaps because they seem to have so much positive energy. Or maybe it’s because they pay far more. No, it’s definitely the positive energy I care about.

***

For the first time in American history, young men are as religious as young women.

Well, to be more precise, men are as likely to follow the old religion. Women are overwhelmingly more devoted to the new.

****

The new paper from David Reich's lab regarding evolution in Europeans in the last 10,000 years is very interesting. (Also illustrated here.) So, contrary to popular belief, our distant ancestors really weren’t as bright as we are. I wrote about Cochran and Harpending’s fascinating book last year.

****

Meanwhile, neurotic men are having far fewer children than they used to.

****

The North of England’s economy v the Netherlands, a comparison.

****

In areas of Switzerland where people have been historically self-governing, conditional cooperation is much more common.

****

How often do men and women think about Rome?

****

Researchers have compiled a list of every Anglo-Saxon whose name was recorded.

****

‘Capital cities in dictatorships are on average more than 30 percent larger than capital cities in stable democracies’.

***

Albania is planning a Sufi Muslim version of the Vatican City. Here is more on the scheme. (Via Aidan Barrett)

Thanks for reading, and for subscribing. There are now 32,000 of you, and in the words of Martin Prince: ‘More friends! More allies! More, I say.’