This week offered us a tour inside of Tony Blair’s skull. Ostensibly, it was all about Net Zero and AI and the left of the Labour party and all that. But in reality it was about the state of his mind.

Blair was one of the best prime ministers we ever had. He was wrong on Iraq and wrong on civil liberties. He was wrong on any number of things which are less commonly mentioned, like the rhetoric around asylum seekers or PFI contracts. But he was an outstanding communicator and he delivered real results while managing to keep together an extremely broad political coalition. Last week’s piece on combining vision with policy and delivery could almost have been written about him. In a very real sense, he provided the modern template for how to do the job well.

He is also one of the worst former prime ministers we have ever had.

This is a really specific and useful role, which is underrecognised. It provides a space for someone with experience and gravitas to intervene in political life. If you get it right, you can be an elder statesman, providing continuity with the past, an articulation of national values, and an assessment of the future.

Blair is atrocious at this role. Within seconds of leaving No.10, he fixated on accreting personal wealth: an advisory role at JPMorgan Chase and Zurich Financial Services, exorbitantly-priced private speaking gigs, contracts with human rights abusers. That tendency led naturally to his current situation, with the Tony Blair Institute taken over wholesale by billionaire Larry Ellison so he can use Blair as a ventriloquist dummy for his views on AI. Everyone has a price. It turns out Blair’s price was $130 million for the 2021-2023 period, and $218 million since then.

With that kind of record, there was never any chance that people would be able to take Blair’s statements seriously. At best, they were interruptions to his commercial ventures and at worst cynical mechanisms to advance them.

But the most severe problem was not financial. It was psychological. His comments were not motivated by the state of the world. They were motivated by an attempt to validate himself and the decisions he took in office.

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Blair’s 5,700 word essay this week saw commentators enter into ever-more elaborate calculations about his intentions. On the face of it, they were hard to discern. Exactly what was the purpose of all this?

He didn’t seem to be supporting anyone, it was just a scattershot attack on whoever he laid eyes on: Keir Starmer, Wes Streeting, Andy Burnham. Some people suggested he wanted to trigger a policy discussion in the Labour party. Laughable. His policy prescriptions were banal, rudimentary and utterly devoid of content. At one point, the efforts to uncover a motivation became so absurd that commentators suggested the whole essay was a ruse by Streeting, who is considered a Blairite, to be attacked from the Labour right and therefore portray himself as more left-wing. Preposterous fantasy.

The real reason Blair wrote that piece is because he needs to self-validate. The lines about the present day are not about the present day at all. They are implicit defenses of the decisions he took in office. The purpose of the essay is to demonstrate that he was right about everything.

In truth, he simply has no contact with modern British political life. On issue after issue, he seemed utterly ignorant of the present reality. “It is one thing when in opposition to indulge this perennial delusion that when we lose seats to the right the country is really signalling it wants Labour to move left,” he wrote. “It is dangerous to do it in government.”

Is there anyone else who does not know that Labour is losing votes on the left to the Greens? I don’t want to get into the question of precisely how many compared to Reform. I mean on the really basic level which literally everyone accepts and is aware of, which is that many Labour votes are going to the Greens. Blair seems blissfully unaware of this, or uninterested in it. He is still fighting the old electoral battle in which you could bank on loyal Labour voters and loyal Tory voters and the election would be won by winning over the small number of swing voters in marginal seats between them.

This is the case on issue after issue: properly embarrassing rudimentary errors on statements of fact. And the reason for these errors is that he is not actually talking about the modern world. He is talking about the early 2000s. The essay was a justification. It defended his general approach to political strategy. It defended his hazy conception of the ‘radical centre’, which he has been trying to define for three decades now to no avail. And, of course, like nearly everything he has done since 2003, it defended the decision to invade Iraq, through its resolute view that Britain must stand by America no matter what she does, even if she is led by a psychopathic fascist gorilla.

We learned nothing about the world, or the Labour party, or the leadership candidates, or any particular policy area. We learned only about Tony Blair’s mind. And all we really learned about that is what we already knew beforehand: He hasn’t changed. He cannot handle introspection. He does not have the capacity for honest self-analysis. His lack of self-doubt has become a weakness rather than a strength. His confidence is fragile, the shell of a home, something so weak and vulnerable that it dare not allow in any doubt for fear the whole edifice will crumble.

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There is another former prime minister who behaves in a similar way. It is Liz Truss.

I know that this feels like an unfair comparison. Blair is sane, she is not. He is highly competent, she is not. He is the most successful prime minister of his era, she is the least successful prime minister of hers. Even morally, where Blair has experienced a very severe breakdown in his faculties, he stands like a goddamned colossus beside her.

But there is a key similarity. When Truss intervenes it is not a comment on the objective world which exists outside her head. Her commentary, like his, is unrelated to anything which is happening in reality. It is simply a way of demonstrating she is right and always has been.

This week’s edition of the Liz Truss show, which I have just spent a half hour of my life watching, features an interview with a man called Keith Gross, who is apparently the Republican candidate for Florida’s 2nd Congressional District.

He has a perfectly pleasant face, a kind of human wallpaper, which looks like it would fit in well playing football in the park with his son, or chatting outside the school gates, or perhaps serving on the local church board. Instead, because this is the period of American history that we’re living through, he spends his time expressing various forms of white nationalism. It’s like watching Ed the Duck shoot up heroin. The man has the personality of a fucking shoebox, but he can apparently rouse himself into great streams of Mein Kampf hucksterism because that is the surest route to political success in the modern United States.

At least he looks healthy. The moral disgrace he has heaped upon himself has done nothing to corrode the quality of his skin. The same cannot be said for Truss, who looks like she is beaming in from the corner of a haunted house, blank-faced, her mouth scratched into the lifeless smile of a Joker murder victim in a DC comic book. She’s barely alive really. A rudimentary stitching together of body parts, sparked into life on a low voltage - but unfinished, defective, visibly falling apart. There really isn’t a single virtuous motive left within her.

Blair’s broad political outlook has remained relatively consistent since office. Truss’ has not. In No.10 she was a creature of the Tufton Street neoliberal think tanks, selling free market fundamentalism and general economic illiteracy. Now, she is something else entirely, exploring the most exotic peninsulas of the political landscape.

“I tried to stop the plastic straw ban here in Britain,” she said, “but unfortunately we had a Conservative government that was often conservative in name only and they wanted to virtue signal”. From there it is a simple decline to the binary abandon of the paranoid mind. Everything is a conspiracy, the crisis is coming, the final emergency is here, your opponents are the definition of evil. Swap out the ‘woke left’ for Jews or the Illuminati and you’re really getting the same story we’ve seen through history. There’s a “left wing government in Spain deliberately flooding the country with migrants,” she said, warming up to her theme. “There’s a left wing cabal that is in charge in much of Europe that’s trying to do that, they work in league with the Democrats in the United States.”

Who are these people and what is the purpose of their conspiracy? They are baddies and they want to do the baddie things. “The left has evil intentions,” she said. “What they want to do is they want to destroy our civilizations through a combination of communism, Islamism, environmental zealotry.”

Truss escaped to the MAGA movement because she really had nowhere else to go. Her credibility in British political circles was non-existent so the only safe place for her was a cultural milieu in which reason itself had been relinquished as a currency in human affairs.

But this decision was also a psychological defence mechanism. Her complete failure in power meant that she had two choices. She could accept that there were flaws in her ideas and her behaviour. Or she could create a narrative in which she was blameless but had been undermined by an elite conspiracy. She chose the second option.

Her commentary on world affairs, while infinitely more deranged and despicable than Blair’s, therefore shares the same fundamental psychological motivation. She is not really talking about the world at all. She is simply insisting that she was right. That is the true meaning behind every sentence. Like Blair, she offers us no new information about the world, but reveals a great deal about the contents of her mind.

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There is another prime minister who makes regular efforts to intervene on modern affairs and influence the direction of British political thought. His efforts are not given much coverage. Hardly anyone seems aware that he does it at all. And yet his words are full of grace, fine judgement and a profound sense of public duty. His name is John Major.

Last March, Major delivered the Attlee Foundation Lecture at King’s College London. It was a profound speech, which deserved careful attention.

This is the sort of thing which an elder statesman can do. He can issue a warning. He can speak, from experience and sound judgement, about the dangers which are facing this country and the stakes of us getting things wrong.

“At my age,” he said, “I have a limited lease on the future, but let me say with all the force I can muster: if we were to cast aside our mainstream politicians - as polls suggest we may do - then a gap would open up, and that gap may not be filled by democrats. So if you rejoice at the dire polling of Labour and the Conservatives, beware of what you wish for.”

Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. “They are careless of the strife they cause,” he said. “They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.”

He was able to change his opinion based on new conditions. He acknowledged, without seeming quite fully convinced yet, that “the democratic case for examining” electoral reform “is growing”. He conceded that “logic and common decency” suggest that an MP who changes party should face a byelection. On Iran, he suggested that he would have been tempted to support the US, but he could see the insanity of the attack for what it was. “The president demanded surrender,” Major said. “He is unlikely to get it.”

Most importantly, he did what Blair could not bring himself to do. He changed his view on America. Like Blair, he had kept the US president close during his time in power. But unlike Blair, he was capable of seeing that the current US administration is completely different to what had come before. On Ukraine, on Nato, on Putin, “this is not the America we have known”.

Major’s mind was alive, it had not ossified and stayed stuck in the 1990s. But there was something more than that to distinguish him. It was his motivation.

This was not the speech of a man who simply wished to assert that he was right and always had been. He was not excavating old wounds and satisfying old grievances. He was not talking about himself at all. He was offering public service. He was talking to the country.

The trouble is the country does not listen. Major’s speech passed largely without comment. All I can find about it online are a press release by King’s University and a single piece in the FT. No wild analysis here. No convoluted strategic daydreams about right-wing candidates enlisting him to make them seem more left-wing. No tsunamis of social media commentary or assessments on the Newsnight sofa. Just silence.

And that, really, helps explain why our prime ministers are so bad at being former prime ministers. It is because we do not ask them to be better and we do not reward them when they are.

It seems strange, all these decades later, to admire Major and despair of Blair. Back then, Blair was the light that freed us from nearly two decades of Tory rule. In power, he proved hugely accomplished, fundamentally improving the way this country is run and helping some of the most disadvantaged people in it. But politics is strange and history rings with hollow laughter. Today, it is Blair who is lost in the past and Major who is engaged, gallantly, with the present. It is Blair who is lost in his own personal fortunes and Major who speaks for the country.

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Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My piece for the i newspaper this week was on, er, the Tony Blair essay. Hypocritical? Perhaps. Although I am shitting all over it if it makes you feel better. You can read it here.

We released the second and final part of our shows on JK Rowling on Origin Story, in which we tell the tale of her descent into a myopic and brutal version of who she was before. We also step out the narrative at several points to give you a briefing on the data behind many of the issues she raises: the link with autism, male-pattern violence, assaults in bathrooms and trans people in sport. If you’ve ever felt confused by this issue and want a thorough and serious-minded assessment of the evidence-base, have a listen. You can access it wherever you get your podcasts or just watch it below.

My latest report from the UK for Late Night Live was on the failure of UK prime ministers - based largely on last week’s newsletter - and what’s going on in the Labour leadership fight. You can listen here.

I finally watched The Bone Temple - the second in a planned trilogy of 28 Years Later films - and was completely blown away by it. It is so deeply strange, so utterly committed to being itself, that there really isn’t anything else like it. This is proper red-blooded bravura auteur fucking film-making, on a vast canvass.

There is a torture scene in the film of the type which I usually detest. Pretty much the only time I’ve stopped watching horror was in that noughties period of Saw and Hostel and all that. It was to do with the directors’ view of the audience. You could tell, with those films, that they imagined a smirking guy watching at home, getting a kick out of it, satisfied by how unaffected and ironic he wa. There was something vicious and mean about them. You can see a continuation of that sensibility in the Terrifier movies, which I don’t care for.

The torture in this film comes from a completely different place. This is a movie about kindness. It is about empathy and connection and selflessness as it takes its final stand. Every moment in these two films has been precision engineered to say something about the place this country is in at the moment. This is genuine state-of-the-nation cinema.

Right, that’s the lot, I’m off to record another Origin Story. Fuck off mate.

Younger Americans have soured on the second Donald Trump presidency, but they are not protesting it.

Despite an unpopular Iran war and an even more unpopular Trump administration, college campus protests nationwide have gone silent. And at many schools, student activism is virtually nonexistent.

This silence comes in the wake of a relentless Trump administration war on campus speech that has involved lawsuits, arrests, deportations and expulsions.

Reports cite a range of complicated factors for the restraint, from apathy to technology-induced incapacity. But as public policy and law and social science experts, we believe students aren’t protesting for a very simple reason: They are afraid. They are self-censoring and disengaging from campaign activism to avoid punitive measures.

In law and social science, we call this impact a chilling effect—the behavioral tendency for people in face of a threat to self-censor and restrain their activities for self-protection.

It’s increasingly clear to us that these impacts are not incidental or ancillary to Trump administration policy. Rather, the chilling effects are the point. This is the closest thing to a consistent governing strategy in Trump’s second term.

The broader chill of Trump threats

Chilling effects can be subtle, but today they are everywhere. And it’s not just students who are chilled by Trump administration threats.

Professors are censoring themselves in lectures and rewriting syllabuses. Researchers are stripping grant applications of words that might attract federal scrutiny, or abandoning the topics entirely. Media outlets are modifying their news coverage to avoid Trump lawsuits or sanctions.

Law enforcement and regulatory agencies are refusing to investigate Trump-aligned actors inside or outside government, and major national law firms are declining cases challenging Trump administration policies.

Publishers are “stepping back” from LGBTQ+ books and other progressive subjects. Many in targeted immigrant communities are afraid to leave home to go to work or school.

In most cases, these people and institutions are not being specifically targeted or threatened by Trump. But they are afraid, and their fear is doing the administration’s work for it. They stay silent, avoid attention and confrontation, and look the other way. In other cases, they change their speech and behavior to accommodate or conform to the administration’s worldview.

Of course, there are counterexamples, such as the winter protests in Minneapolis in response to brutality by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the recent “No Kings” rallies. But even here, the broader but less visible trend—chilling effects—is evident.

For instance, in recent reporting on the latest No Kings rallies, many media outlets observed that students were noticeably missing, despite the Trump administration’s unpopularity among younger Americans.

A persistent strategy

We believe none of this is by accident.

In a new book, “Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age,” one of us—Jon Penney—explains how law, technology, and state and corporate power are weaponized to chill and repress, and the dangers this poses for the United States and other democratic societies. The other—Bruce Schneier—has extensively studied the security infrastructure enabling this.

What we see isn’t gratuitous government cruelty, chaos or vengeance. Instead, we see a persistent strategy to maximize fear and chilling effects in ways that are corrosive to freedom and democracy.

Research suggests that surveillance, personal threats, uncertainty and abuse of power are key factors in doing so. The federal government has a clear and systematic pattern of employing these very mechanisms across a number of domains far beyond campuses.

They are evident in militarized raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and in journalists being arrested and indicted for reporting on protests. They are made clear in the long list of political enemies the Trump administration has investigated or threatened, including the Federal Reserve chairman. And they can also be seen in the weaponization of technology, including ramping up surveillance to target critics and protestors.

Corrosive to freedom and democracy

History offers some guidance on impacts.

During the McCarthy era, overreaching laws, surveillance, and public and private sector reprisals ostensibly targeted alleged communists. But the real aim was often to suppress progressive journalists, trade unions and political opposition.

In the 1960s, these same tactics were reused by Southern states to chill the Civil Rights Movement. Historians have written about how the widespread fear and conformity of these periods reshaped American society in enduring ways, including the destruction of progressive political movements and both delaying and muting the Civil Rights Movement itself.

When such state threats are systematized, they can foment a broader climate of fear, self-censorship and conformity. In that climate, dissenting speech, political opposition, democratic mobilization and other checks on power become increasingly difficult, even dangerous. It is no surprise, for instance, that Trump critics regularly admit to self-censorship, fearing for their safety.

Chilling effects are thus not only repressive—causing self-censorship—but productive. They produce conforming and compliant speech and behavior, which can have longer-term social impacts. They not only undermine protected rights and suppress accountability but can promote social change—even without a popular mandate to do so.

This latter point is often missed. It explains Trump’s assaults on universities and cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center for the Arts and the Smithsonian. Often dismissed as peculiar Trump obsessions, they are fully consistent with Project 2025—the sweeping policy blueprint for Trump’s second term authored by a coalition of conservative groups and its call to target the “institutions of American civil society” and “wield federal power” to “reverse” decades of progressive cultural advancements.

In the near term, this means an increasingly weakened democratic society, with the government and its patrons enjoying freedom to pursue their objectives. Over the long term, this can mean a changed society as more conformist and compliant speech and culture become more widely accepted and entrenched.

Not inevitable

In our view, this future is not inevitable, just as the McCarthy era “Red Scare” and violent civil rights era repression were not. In both cases, fear and chilling effects were resisted in law and civil society, as they can be today.

But the central mechanisms—surveillance, uncertainty, personal threats and abuse of power—would need to be addressed. For instance, new legislation could ensure justice for lawless government actors and constrain surveillance. Courts can block abuses of federal power, including illegal arrests, detentions and mass citizen databases.

The media, lawyers and civil society can hold the government accountable. And students, teachers, universities and cultural institutions can resist the tendency to self-censor and conform.

The citizen mobilization in Minnesota and the No Kings rallies are examples of that. But to resist chilling effects and their dangers over the long term, this would have to be the norm, not the exception.

This essay was written with Jon Penney, and originally appeared in The Conversation.

Big day. We’re still very early in the process, with a minority of council seats declared. There’s lots of noise out there and very little sense. Some preliminary slapdash thoughts below.

So far, this is actually a pretty boring series of results

I know everyone’s very excited. The bond market is behaving like a child who drank too much Coke, bouncing around according to the implied probability of a Keir Starmer departure. The two party system is collapsing before our eyes - a phenomenon we’ve talked about for years but which is suddenly taking place vividly and at speed, right across the country.

And yet the results are honestly pretty boring. No surprises here. They confirm exactly what we expected. We are in an era of five party politics. Reform is out in front, currently securing around 25% across England and obviously doing particularly well in Leave-voting areas. So far - and again, everything can change - that’s basically in line with the polling. It’s impressive, they’re in the lead, but they are down from where they were a few months ago and not actually that much higher than the other parties, who are jostling around the 15-20% range.

Nothing has fundamentally altered. In fact, the story so far is a confirmation of the things we’ve said for months: Reform is leading, the Greens are doing well, the Lib Dems are chugging along, the two main parties are bleeding out, and people want change.

Most analysis at this point is basically a statement of your existing disposition

It’s far too early to get any sort of detail from the results, but of course that will not stop people insisting that it confirms their starting assumptions. This happens every election, and every election we tell people to stop it and they never do.

The crude version of this is that the Labour left will say Labour is losing votes to the Greens so it must turn left, while the Labour right will say Labour is losing votes to Reform so it must turn right. You can see this, for instance, from journalists like the Spectator’s Tim Shipman, who tweeted: “Whisper it quietly, but was Morgan McSweeney right to tell the Labour party Reform was a bigger threat than the Greens?” Incredible. That was then retweeted by Luke Akehurst on the Labour right, who wrote: “I’m shouting this as loudly as I can.”

Look at this image from Sky. When you see it, your brain will first think that Labour is losing votes to Reform. What else could explain those numbers? It is only once you think about it for a few more moments that you realise these sorts of results are possible without Labour losing a single vote for Reform. As plenty of others have now tried dutifully to explain - from John Curtis to Rob Ford to Adam Bienkov - Labour can lose seats to Reform by losing votes to the Greens, because the progressive parties cannibalise each other and Farage crashes through the middle. Was that a mixed metaphor? I suppose it was. I’m very tired.

Westminster is a very silly place indeed. People generally think it is profoundly silly but it is so much sillier than they realise. It is therefore perfectly likely that people will take away this message even though it is infantile, simplistic and demonstrably wrong.

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There is no plan to stick with

There’s a handful of ministers out there on the airwaves today - proper hospital pass, that one - insisting that Labour should stay calm and stick with the plan. But there is no plan. If there was, the party would be in a much better place.

The basic truth of the matter is that Starmer has no strategy, no vision, no agenda, no narrative, no desired outcome, nothing. Watching him govern is like watching a play staged by mannequins.

Imagine if Starmer had accepted in opposition that he would need to raise taxes. His majority would be smaller, sure. But the increased revenue to the Treasury would have helped reduce the interest rate on our debt, lessened the uniquely severe attitude towards us from the markets, provided a good breezy bit of headroom in the fiscal rules and helped stabilise the economy, providing for a more stable investment climate and all the other good stuff that comes with that.

Imagine if he had started his time in power with a big announcement on social care. Yes, all hell would have broken loose. But then, it did anyway, on stupid pointless little measures like the winter fuel allowance and welfare reform which didn’t help anyone. Right now, Labour would now be halfway through establishing that system. It could be in place in time for the next election. It would be sold as the single biggest change to our health and wellbeing since the NHS. Everyone would understand what Labour was for. It would have a story to tell. It would have something to be proud of.

Imagine if Starmer had taken one of the opportunities available to him and announced a massive expansion in our defence capacity. This could have taken place after Donald Trump attacked Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, or after the Liberation Day tariffs, or when the war in Iran broke out. At any one of these moments, he could have levelled with the British public: It’s a dangerous new world, we’re outside the EU, America is not reliable, Britain must be able to protect itself, defend its allies and project its values. This is our great national project. It will require sacrifice, but we will do it because it is necessary. Instead, he wasted every crisis, bumbling merrily along, going nowhere.

He has never taken any of these opportunities. He clearly does not have the confidence to try and convince the public of an argument. It’s not even clear if he thinks politicians have a place doing so. He is redundant. Obsolete. He secured power at a crucial moment in our national history and he squandered it. Pissed it away. It was a precious thing and a profound responsibility and he simply wasn’t up to it.

I would be much more concerned if I was Conservative than if I was Labour

Labour is having a nervous breakdown. This looks unseemly but at least it’s rational. It is a reasonable way to behave given the situation they are in. The Conservatives are equally screwed but they are calm and that is so much worse.

We read repeatedly that Kemi Badenoch is safe in her position because Tory members like her. This is in part a result of the extremely generous coverage she receives from the right-wing press, which acts as if her ability to speak in complete sentences exhibits some sort of intellectual triumph.

The Conservatives are getting hammered out there. Absolutely hammered. Badenoch has no plan to save them. In fact, the discussion around the party’s problems is so deranged that it makes the ‘Labour should break left or right’ conversation look Nobel-prize worthy.

The Tories have lost Postcard England to the Lib Dems. All those places you go to on long weekends - benign, self-satisfied areas with good tea rooms that you can’t quite work out if you want to live in or set fire to. The Lib Dems own them now. And this isn’t even really mentioned. It’s as if it isn’t happening, as if only the right-wing Reform threat is of any consequence. Half of Badenoch’s voters are Cameronite Remainers, somehow clinging on for dear life to a party which couldn’t give a damn about them. She seems as uninterested in them as she is in the voters she has already lost.

What the hell is happening with moderate Conservative MPs? Will they ever speak up? Will they ever rise from their slumber and take back their party, or will they sit there, parroting the same old tawdry crestfallen nonsense about the ECHR and leave-to-remain?

This is supposed to be the most mercenary, win-at-all-costs party in the Western world. It’s supposed to do whatever it takes, knife whoever it must, kill whomever it desires, if it will secure victory. Instead, it resembles a happy, doddery old man in a nursing home, oblivious to his surroundings, vaguely amused by what’s on the telly but struggling to follow along, going pleasantly and without much fuss into that good night.

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By the bowels of Christ, we need electoral reform

No-one reading this will be the least bit surprised by what I am saying, but these results present an immediate pressing need for electoral reform and for that reform to take place immediately. There is now no single argument against this measure, regardless of your political views or your ideological tendency. To stand against it is to stand against all sense of logic, all commitment to reason, against mathematics itself.

Look at the result in the Exeter St Loyes ward, to take one example of many. Conservatives came in third with 25.3% of the vote, Reform came in second with 25.5% and the Liberal Democrats won with 25.6% of the vote. As political scientist Rob Ford said: “Pure chaos. [First-past-the-post] fruit machine.” These kinds of results are utterly arbitrary. They remove any sense of meaning from the vote. They remove - and this should send a shiver down our democratic spines - any sense of will.

Unless we urgently change our approach, we are going to go into the 2029 election with these sorts of results all over the country. Victory on the basis of knife-edge contests decided by perhaps a few hundred people. The disenfranchisement of the vast majority of voters, with victors representing a seat on pitiful levels of public support. Thirty per cent? Twenty-five per cent? Or perhaps even less. As party support shatters, winners will pass the post with homeopathic mandates. That is a democratic abomination and a crime against maths.

It is simply not possible to support this while still maintaining any pretence of respect for the voters. Any incoming Labour leader - and I presume there will be a new one incoming - should finally accept what most other countries recognised long ago. We need electoral reform and we need it in time for the next election.

No odds and sods this week, sorry and no podcast. But I suspect there’ll be another newsletter in the next few days when the results become a bit clearer.

Freedom is once again under attack in the UK. Labour and the Tories want even more bans upon pro-Palestinian marches; the government wants to ban young people from using social media. And worst of all, Reform wants to detain tens of thousands of “illegal” immigrants - which would of course entail the creation of the apparatus of a police state and the harassment of hundreds of thousands of others; as Chandran Kukathas pointed out, controlling immigration requires the state to reduce the freedom of all citizens.

To someone of my age, whose feeble intellect was formed in the 70s and 80s, this is weird. “In our system, under our principles, the government is there to serve and satisfy the liberties of the people” said the most influential politician of my lifetime. For her, freedom and the rule of law were essential principles - ones under attack now from our main political parties. And for her and her fellow cold warriors the virtue of the west against communism was precisely that it valued freedom.

Which poses the question: why are Thatcherite values now opposed by those who live in the shadow of Thatcher and even by some who consider themselves Thatcherite?

Part of the story, I suspect, lies in the optimism bias. Politicians are selected to be overconfident about their ability to control human affairs from the top-down; you wouldn’t enter politics unless you thought you could “make a difference”. This disposes them to be heedless of Hayek’s argument for freedom:

Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunities it provides for unforeseeable and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom. Any such restriction, any coercion other than the enforcement of general rules, will aim at the achievement of some foreseeable particular result, but what is prevented by it will usually not be known....And so, when we decide each issue solely on what appear to be its individual merits, we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. (Law Legislation and Liberty Vol I, p56-57)

If we’re being generous, Reform’s desire to bang up tens of thousands of people is the reductio ad absurdam of this optimism bias. It over-estimates what James C Scott called legibility (pdf), the ability of government to read society - in this case, the ability of the state’s goons to distinguish between illegal immigrants and legal ones or British citizens*.

This over-optimism is reinforced by a nastier selection effect: politicians are selected to be psychopaths**. People who are superficially charming, willing to take risks, and who lack empathy are well-equipped to rise to power in politics (and business!), especially in a culture that values “strong leaders”. And psychopaths want to control others.

Although voters in general have only average levels of psychopathy, they too are prone to the optimism bias. “I never thought they’d eat my face says woman who voted for the Leopards eating people’s faces party” is a meme for a good reason. It describes, for example, those who voted for Brexit only to later complain about long airport queues and difficulties in owning their home in Spain. And the same applies to support for Reform’s mass detentions; the party’s supporters think it will be other people who get stopped and detained, oblivious to the fact that even the whitest of Brits cannot be easily distinguished from a Romanian or Pole.

Which brings us to another reason why people hate freedom; doing so is an expression of hatred for out-groups.

Immigrants and ethnic minorities, however, are not the only out-group. So too are young people. Why ban these from social media when older ones are just as likely (or more so) to be radicalized online? And mightn’t such a ban harm isolated youngsters - such as neurodivergent or trans ones - who can find a community online that they can’t otherwise? Who cares? Youngsters are the out group. And that’s what matters.

All this, however, runs into a question. None of these biases against freedom are new, as Hayek (perhaps partially) pointed out. Why then, did politicians at least feel the need to pay lip-service to freedom in my formative years when they don’t now?

In many cases, I suspect, it’s because their professed love of freedom was insincere. Talk of freedom was a way of trying to legitimize western governments during the cold war in the face of communist tyranny, and to legitimize hierarchy and the pursuit of profit. That’s why the right talked more about the lack of freedom suffered by Russians than that suffered by black South Africans, Chileans or Indonesians. It’s also why they were much keener on free markets when mass unemployment was forcing wages down than they are when those markets raise wages or threaten the profits of incumbent companies. And it’s why they have never been interested in people’s lack of freedom in the workplace. As Corey Robin has written:

When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.

Also, what the right today means by freedom is instead mere narcissism - the belief that they should be free from social obligations. This is why they hated wearing masks during Covid; hate speed restrictions; oppose efforts to curb carbon emissions; and want “free speech” for racists but not for supporters of Palestine.

By contrast, it is the left that is more obviously sincerely pro-liberty: wanting to legalize drugs as Zack Polanski does, and wanting more rights to protest, are libertarian policies but they are also leftist impulses.

It’d be tempting to infer from all this that it is the left, and not the right or centrists, who are now the true champions of freedom. Perhaps so: personally, I’ve long thought of myself as having a large libertarian streak. Whether there are many votes to be had in such stance is, however, questionable.

* Alternatively, of course, it might be that they simply don’t care about such distinctions.

** Of course, this isn’t to say they are all psychopaths (or even that this is always a bad thing!), merely that there’s a bias towards them.