Reflections on the Turquoise Revolution in England

Wrong Side of History Newsletter #62

Good morning, and welcome to the era of Leo XIV - the first Anglophone pope since Adrian IV, and that was so long ago that the English he spoke was Middle English (in fact, Nicholas Breakspear grew up in an England where Old English could still be heard).

Remarkable to think that, God willing, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday with an American pope in Rome and an American Caesar in Washington. On that topic, since the last round-up, I’ve joined the ‘resistance’ with some posts on Donald Trump: on the zero-sum thinking behind his trade policy, on my own Trump Derangement Syndrome, and how’s he’s damaging right-wing parties elsewhere.

I began another series, this time on the end of the western world’s cultural revolution – part one, two, three and four. It will resume next week. I think.

I wrote about how the transgender movement failed to produce its own Rosa Parks, because that’s how you win. I wrote about the normalisation of MPs openly showing loyalty to other countries, and about how Labour was losing the ‘green wall’ - the 18 year old who wanted to end ‘free mixing’ was subsequently elected.

I wrote about the Beatles, Bards of the Second Reformation.

This week I wrote about Germany again, and how the ‘extremist’ claim that it is an ‘American vassal’ are not entirely untrue. The German authorities have since blinked, withdrawing their ‘extremist’ designation of the AfD, which may well be due to US pressure, ironically.

On a similar subject, and 80 years after the war ended, I wrote about Harald Jähner’s excellent Aftermath.

My mini-book on the Battle of Tours is on sale for 99p on kindle, although if you’re on Amazon Prime you can get it free anyway, I think. I wrote about the subject back here, if you want a TLDR version.

The news in Britain was dominated by local elections, which have left the Conservatives in a desperate state. Reform are now favourites to win the next election and seem to be replacing the Tories, as I warned about in September (I should have made that bet). Then again, Britain’s fragmented political system means there will be some incredibly close votes at the next election, so the outcome is hard to guess. Incidentally, the ward with the highest Reform vote, 65 per cent, was in Tony Blair’s former Sedgefield constituency in Co. Durham. This is how the current polling would translate into seats.

Alfred (Liberal Democrats) agrees to share his kingdom with Guthrum (Reform) From @ElectionMapsUK

Meanwhile, there were some fantastic English council ward names: Mincinglake and Whipton; Bedside and Kitty Brewster; Flamstead East and Turnford. This is the sound of deep England, the land of Bill Bryson travel guides, an England which seems to be disappearing in a country overcome by dark pessimism.

As well as their victories in the local elections, Reform won the Westminster by-election of Runcorn by six votes, close to a record (non-British readers might not know that the election came about because the previous MP punched a member of the public.) Runcorn was not an especially promising seat for Reform, which reflects how popular they are, and the sense of malaise in the country. As Gus Carter wrote in the Spectator, this was in part due to ‘Goat Man’.

In one ward in Runcorn… residents found that no one would listen when a neighbour filled his derelict house with goats and burned the animals’ manure in his garden. Despite repeated appeals to authority, no action was taken. If the council had dealt with this flagrant, unsanitary, anti-social behaviour, one campaigner told me, Labour might just have scraped those extra six votes.

Goat Man’s particular style of contempt for public order may not be widely emulated, but every neighbourhood has its examples of anti-social behaviour going unaddressed. My local nemeses are the car thieves. I watch them from my London balcony as they make their way down the road, smashing through side windows and grabbing whatever they like.

Fewer than one in 100 car break-ins in London result in a charge. Such statistics don’t shock us any more because they’re so common. Shoplifting is at its highest recorded level; fly-tipping is up 50 per cent over the past decade; there’s a burglary every three minutes yet 96 per cent go unsolved; most people say they’re seeing more anti-social behaviour but the number of incidents recorded by police has fallen to a historic low. Everywhere we look, Britain appears grubbier and more unpleasant. Welcome to Scuzz Nation.

Similarly, as Janan Ganesh put it a few weeks back:

If not abundance, then, what is it that might defang the west’s rebellious voters? Which abstract noun should guide liberals in politics? I can give you one syllable less than the authors. Order. Whether it is the order of national borders, or the order of being able to walk unaccosted through cities, there isn’t enough of it for public tastes.

Realistically, no raucous western democracy can build things like Marina Bay with such eerie smoothness. But a world in which retailers don’t have to keep humdrum toiletries behind lock and key shouldn’t be so exotic a dream. The authors of Abundance trace urban disorder back to scarcity, which is fair up to a point, but also a bit of an intellectual knight’s move. The more direct question of law enforcement is still awkward to bring up in polite company.

It is no wonder that British people feel that everything is falling apart, and another problem is that local government is a mess. As Sam Ashworth-Hayes wrote in the Telegraph, this is going to get worse.

As costs continue to rise, bin collections will become less frequent, street maintenance will be done on the cheap – more street scars, more potholes – libraries will close and the efforts made to make the public realm look good will be cut to the bone.

Britain’s equal pay rules certainly do not help.

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On that theme, Fred Skulthorp continued his amusingly bleak tour of Britain with a look at supporters of the Liberal Democrats in Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Greg’s life before Woodbridge, in the England he left behind, is recalled as one long regret: a purgatory of drabness. Stuck in lorries and delivery vans orbiting Birmingham, Leicester, Newcastle. A life punctuated by motorway stations, Wetherspoons and random acts of extreme violence. In Sparkhill, his delivery van was attacked by a gang of ski-masked youths. Two years ago, he broke down outside Woodbridge, “the safe haven” as he calls it. He hasn’t left since.

The town council here reflects a mix of Greens and Liberal Democrats who dominate local politics in the area. It’s a progressive ascendency that has coincided with an influx from London, dramatically reshaping the standard fare of provincial politics. Out have gone the stuffy cabal of port-coloured county solicitors, replaced by middle-aged Gore-Tex progressives. One disgruntled local describes it as nothing less than a “woke coup”. Overnight came climate emergency declarations, bee cafes in rewilded fields, and a Black Lives Matter banner hung on the 16th-century shire hall (the latter lasted just two days before being torn down by assailants in a white van).

Yet as Greg’s eagerness for a safe haven implies, Woodbridge is no less reactionary against the state of modern England than the Reform vote set to dominate the headlines. The New Middle England Ed Davey has said he wants to win over — one formed of Lib Dems and Tory turncoats — share the same concerns around the scale of immigration as the rest of the country. The local party machine, built around Nimbyism, is the scourge of Labour radicals set to arm themselves with new planning powers. But it’s also an effective expression of mistrust and paranoia over further encroachment of what increasingly feels like a different polity altogether, squatting in Ipswich and the growing London swell.

Polls suggest that Lib Dem voters are pretty anti-immigration, but they have too much of a sense of themselves as decent people to ever vote for someone who will do anything about it; Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey has mentioned Trump 16 times in Parliament already this year, which says a lot. Instead, local activists channel their energies into preserving their corner of England by blocking developments.

And Woodbridge is an exceptionally lovely part of England, worth visiting if you’re over here. Among other things, it’s close to Sutton Hoo; I recall a very wet family summer holiday years back where everyone refused to leave the house and I trampled among the ancient Anglo-Saxon graves by myself in the pouring rain, which is my idea of fun.

Skulthorp also wrote a similar - although darker - piece on the London/Essex border.

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A sense of anarcho-tyranny combines with a deep mood of anxiety about identity, as Aris Roussinos noted two weeks back on St George’s Day.

‘Today, the country is in an unhappy state, the air heavy with the pressure of a storm about to break. Mild-mannered Telegraph columnists write anxious premonitions of approaching civil war, while the nation’s second city slips beneath the basic expectations of First World governance. Civil war may be unlikely, but that the very idea can be seriously entertained by credible people demonstrates a growing fissure entering British life, one which will take serious political reform to avert disaster: requiring a capacity, and appetite to undertake that the Government does not appear to possess. Translating the nation’s febrile atmosphere to an American audience, the writer Dominic Green observes in the Wall Street Journal that “The mood in England today is eerie. The government can’t govern. The police menace law-abiding people for speaking their minds. The borders are open. The country feels as if it is one Islamist bombing away from eruption.”

‘Just as with Easter, marked this year by booming church attendance and a perceptible new air of politicisation, the day when the English people take stock of who they are has taken on a new political salience. Politicians now both chase, and attempt to pre-emptively shape, a public mood very different from that of our recent past. A close reading of St George’s Day political messaging, ahead of the Government’s inevitable drubbing in next week’s English local elections, reveals a population increasingly ruled by Westminster as a sullen and borderline rebellious tribe.

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Elsewhere, on a lighter note (demographic implosion), how contagious are children?

Simply put, the more people you know who have children, particularly peers, friends and siblings, the more likely you are to have a child yourself. Interestingly, the effect is at its strongest if the friend or family member’s child is aged under 3, and potentially negligible after that. The effect works the other way too: the fewer peers you know with children, the less likely you are to become a parent.

Even someone we might be much less close to, like a co-worker, can influence the decisions we make around parenthood. A 2024 study looked at data from 11 million Italians to investigate the peer effects of people’s fertility decisions on their colleagues. They found that a 1 percentage-point decrease in average co-worker fertility led to a reduction in the individual probability of having a child of 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points.

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David Goodhart (new to substack) writes a love-letter to Germany, an ancestral land but also a place that brought him on his own journey.

I have many reasons to feel grateful to Germany. Reporting on a world historic event in my early thirties made me aim for something higher than a comfortable berth at the FT for another 30 years, it led me to take the risk of setting up the political monthly Prospect magazine in 1995. Germany, as noted, opened my eyes to some of the failings of modern liberalism, and also to just how quickly political euphoria can turn to disappointment as East Germans came to feel like second class citizens in the united Germany.

Living in a foreign country for a few years and trying to master another language was also a blessing. I will never be a fluent German speaker having arrived without even a German O level to my name. But thanks in part to travels in East Germany, where people spoke little English, I picked up enough. By the time I left Germany in 1991 taxi drivers mistook my German for that of a Dutchman which I took as a compliment.

The FT had been understandably reluctant to send me to Germany in 1988 as I knew no German and had no German connections, but the number two job in Bonn was considered the most boring on the whole foreign correspondent circuit and no one else applied. And it turned out that I did have a German connection. It was not one that I knew much about when I went, until reminded by my own father’s discomfort that I was returning to the land his great-grandfather had left in the mid-19th century.

Being mistaken for a Dutchman is as good as it gets for English people trying to attempt foreign languages.

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Zoë Bernard in Vanity Fair on Christianity in Silicon Valley

Of course there have always been Christians in Silicon Valley; they just knew better than to advertise their faith. This is to say: The Christians were effectively in hiding. And one specific place they were hiding was, according to Tan, on a spreadsheet made up of Christians in tech, which was passed around for years among a dozen or so of the techno faithful. One of them was Trae Stephens, cofounder of the defense tech company Anduril and a partner at Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel. Stephens, like Tan, has lately been speaking publicly about his faith in the context of Silicon Valley. He has hosted a Bible study reflecting on the teachings of René Girard, a French philosopher popular in certain libertarian-leaning tech circles; spoken at his church about the connection between Christianity and innovation; and written, in what seems a slightly contorted interpretation of the gospel, about how basic venture investing principles are an exemplar of divine forgiveness.

Interesting. I have no idea if this reflects a genuine trend; I have seen a couple of articles about Christianity’s revival, but what happens in Silicon Valley always affects the rest of us.

On a similar subject, I especially liked Steven Pinker being interviewed attempts to come up with secular humanist substitutes for religion:

‘Probably the rationalist solstice in Berkeley, which included hymns to the benefits of global supply chains. I mean, I actually completely endorse the lyrics of the song, but there’s something a bit cringe about the performance.’

Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to take off, even if, like Pinker, I support the sentiment.

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Ian Leslie on post-literate politics.

‘Beginning with a discussion of Homer, an oral storyteller, and ranging from papyrus to print to electronic text, Ong shows us how writing made the modern man. While our brains are not specifically evolved for decoding written symbols - it’s a relatively new technology - reading and writing remoulded human cognition and society. They changed the very texture of individual experience, making us more reflective and analytical, and generating new forms of culture. Shifting from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate one enabled philosophy, science, democracy, and literature.

‘As Ong put it, literate human beings are "beings whose thought processes do not grow directly out of simply natural powers, but out of those powers as structured, directly or indirectly, by the technology of writing.” We are cyborgs of the script. A corollary is that the retreat from writing will rewire our brains and reshape our societies; indeed, it’s already doing so: longstanding trends in politics and public discourse are rooted in it.

Ong cites a study of the Gonja people in Ghana. Early in the early twentieth century the British made a written record of the Gonja’s oral history of their own state. It was said that the founder of the state had seven sons, ruling seven territories. Sixty years later, after two territories had disappeared due to boundary shifts, anthropologists found that the traditional story had changed: it was now said that the founder had five sons. Ong call this “structural amnesia”: the reshaping of history to fit present-day needs. We’ve always done this to some extent, but once we stop anchoring ourselves in written texts, we will no longer feel encumbered by any need for historical fealty.

Certain notable podcasts aside, we are already seeing a turn away from history. Fewer students are studying history at university. Humanities departments, from literature to philosophy, have been colonised by theorists with little interest in thinkers prior to Judith Butler. British politicians mix up our history with that of America. Podcasters pretend to be interested in history, when what they really want to do is ignite cultural firestorms. When fewer people read history, history becomes pure story, divorced from empirical data, and subordinate to present-day politics.

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At Aporia, on non-linear ethnic niches:

This phenomenon isn’t unique to criminal enterprises. Chaldeans control 90% of the grocery stores in Detroit. 40% of the truck drivers in California are Sikh, and about a third of US Sikhs are truck drivers. About 95% of the Dunkin’ Donuts stores in Chicago and the Midwest are owned by Indians, mostly Gujarati Patels. In New England and New York, 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts storesare operated by Portuguese immigrants. 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimoreare owned by Koreans. I am not the first, the tenth, or even the hundredth person to notice this

Cambodians run about 80% of the donut shops in Southern California (despite being only 0.17% of the state’s population). The Cambodian donut empire got its start with refugee Ted Ngoy, who first learned the trade thanks to an affirmative action program to increase minority hiring at Winchell’s Donuts. The Cambodians were able to completely dominate this traditional American culinary sector through a mix of extended family credit and the use of tong tines, an informal lending club.

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Why are so many Latin American women murdered, asks Alice Evans. Despite some depressing examples of social groups where domestic violence is normalised, this part of the world scores highly for gender equal attitudes and there is little correlation between sexism and femicide. It’s not just that lawlessness leaves women as well as men dead, but the ubiquity of violence encourages a mindset where the strong can victimise the physically weak.

Latin Americans are more likely to approve of a man who beats his wife if they also justify vigilanteism. In societies where extrajudicial killings are commonplace, men learn that it’s perfectly acceptable to project dominance. Prevalence and acceptance of intimate partner violence is lower in more pacified countries, like Uruguay.

Back in the 1970s, some feminist anthropologists and archaeologists blamed patriarchy on states. Anti-statist discourse persists - even in top journals. More broadly, academic literature on gender rarely takes a comparative perspective, so omits underlying drivers. My globally comparative, political economy analysis suggests a rethink: if feminists want to protect women, we need general security. Building on Stephen Pinker, as well as Acemoglu and Johnson, it’s vital to strengthen inclusive growth, effective policing and feminist activism so as to ensure everyone’s safety.’

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Ben Sixsmith in praise of Tom Skinner. I’m pro-Skinner because, without getting too pretentious, life scripts are very important for people, and Skinner’s message is a good one: work hard, be involved with your kids and take a positive attitude. Bosh!

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Post-Liberal Pete on Fierce Communitarianism

The economic rationale for fierce communitarianism no longer exists, at least in countries like the USA and the UK. However, because we evolved to live in close-knit social groups, the need to connect with others, and to belong to groups, still remains. The evidence is very clear: the more time we spend on our own, the more likely it is that we become anxious and miserable. Hence Robert Burton’s admonition to ‘be not solitary.’ To repeat, the evidence on this is very clear. Gatherings are an essential part of human functioning. Their relative absence from modern life has detrimental consequences to well-being. The more integrated we are with our community, the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death of all sorts. Loneliness triggers stress responses, impacting inflammation, metabolism, repair, and brain function. Just going from being friendlessto having one friend or family member to confide in has the same effect on life satisfaction as a tripling of income.

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Elsewhere

Will Solfiac on folk beliefs of the upper normie. Recommended reading.

How brain drain can kill – from a new paper.

Algeria was the biggest wine producer in the world in the early 1960s.

Neil O’Brien on the new Schools bill.

Apparently, ‘22-29 year olds favored Democrats by ONLY 6.4 points. But kids of college age, 18-21, lean Republican by almost 12.’ Is this possible? 18-year-olds tend to be more right-wing than 24-years-olds, but that’s a big leap.

Examples of America’s hyper-tribalism

Why this generation of jihadis aren’t as clever as past ones; I wonder if the brightest were killed off in the ISIS War, the flower of jihad cut down, or if it’s just gone down in status. This is what happened to crusading, to some extent.

Improvements in survival over time for the most common childhood cancers.

‘There are approximately 12,000 Quakers in Great Britain, according to the Religion Media Centre (so about 0.02% of the population). Yet there are at least three Quaker MPs.’ A huge overrepresentation. I’ve been keeping a folder of Quaker-related stuff for some time, both their history and their outsized influence on British politics even today. A fascinating group.

Germany’s Boomerdämmerung illustrated.

Fun thread on one Edinburgh address and the people who lived there

Since 2016 some 1.2 million Indians have migrated to the UK. On the one hand, I feel that immigration is out of control; on the other, India is now my fifth largest market in terms of subscribers so, obviously, I welcome this, dear readers. In fact perhaps now is a time to visit - there seem to be a lot of holiday deals to India going, especially in the north-west.

Illustration of local government in the 1930s.

Martyn’s Law eroding civil society, as predicted by many. As I wrote a while back, it was an incredibly stupid and cowardly response.

Road safety with electric cars is looking very good.

The centre of the global Catholic population, by year

So much cringe in the at the National Theatre. The cultural establishment is brave when it comes to shocking the ghost of Mary Whitehouse, but shy away from anything actually subversive in any way.

Britain seems to have the highest percentage of LGBT legislators. I wonder if it just reflects identification more than anything else.

Poles in Britain now earn more than the natives. I don’t know what the latest data is but I get the impression that a lot of Poles have left, in part attracted back by their homeland’s continual growth. Migrants from ex-communist states are a bit of a rocket fuel for an economy, since they will work for much less than their true worth (and an extra bonus if they are from a highly assimilable group), but it runs out eventually.

Metro systems in east Asia. Britain really ought to have more than three (or four, if you count Liverpool)

What do people consider rich? Interesting answers.

Finally, this question – why is television documentary-making so poor compared to the 1970s? - got a lot of responses. I fear that the real answer might be the obvious one: we’re all just getting stupider.

On that positive note, have a great weekend and thanks for subscribing!