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.

Westminster politics is simply stupid. That’s one inference we should draw from the latest Mandelson scandal.

If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description; you’ve not asked “what’s the shape of the hole we want to fill and who is that shape?”. One of the most prestigious jobs in government seems to have been filled with less care than an investment bank would take over the hiring of a junior analyst.

This, however, is by no means the only way in which political decisions fall far short of basic professionalism. Here are some others:

- The government ignores opportunity cost. For example, in funding Sizewell C or Transport for City Regions, in supporting the expansion of Heathrow, or in wanting to increase the share of GDP spent on the military, it doesn’t say what is being cut, or not being done, to pay for these projects. We can’t therefore know whether these are good ideas or not. That’s a failure of basic project appraisal. And opportunity cost is not the only basic economic idea of which the government seems unaware: there’s also regulatory capture, transactions cost economics and the tragedy of the commons for example.

- Shabana Mahmood claims that 350,000 “low-skilled” workers and their dependents qualifying for settlement in the UK over the next five years represent a £10 billion cost to the taxpayer. This is not only almost certainly false in its own terms, but misunderstands economics: “low skill” is the product of ideology and a low level of economic development, not just individual characteristics.

- Sir Keir Starmer seems not to understand the basics of what the job of Prime Minister should be. It should be to set out a basic strategy (”vision” if you like) for government and to resolve conflicts between departments. But observers agree that he is terrible at both of these.

- Starmer thought there were “policy levers” which he could pull and easily achieve results, only to discover that there weren’t. This is a double failure: to not appreciate history (many ministers before him made the same mistake (pdf)); and to fail to understand that policy-making isn’t a simple engineering issue but is more like gardening, an exercise in guided emergence.

- Labour’s promise not to raise tax or national insurance rates makes intelligent tax reform more difficult - for example by lumbering us with the £100,000 pa “tax trap” which deters people from working more, changing job or getting promotions.

- The government’s fiscal rule that the current budget should be in surplus by 2029-30 means that fiscal policy depends upon a forecast that is inherently volatile, with the result that policy itself is unstable. If that’s not daft enough, targeting net financial debt means that the government considers only one side of its balance sheet and ruling out the acquisition of potentially lucrative assets: a household with such a rule, for example, would never take out a mortgage.

- There’s great concern with opinion polls, without anybody asking: how is public opinion formed and changed? and is it really a reliable guide to what people really want or to good policy-making?

None of these examples are merely of individuals mis-speaking in a throwaway remark. They are instead fundamental to how the government operates, and are examples of a basic failure to understand social science and government. No sane person would run a household or business with the lack of care or intellect that the government devotes to its affairs.

And this is with the “grown-ups” in charge. If we could bear to look beyond Labour, we’d see the LibDems and Greens wanting to over-ride the price signal of high oil prices; people of all parties drivelling about the benefits system without having endured applying for PIP; and whatever nonsense comes from Reform.

Politics, then, is fundamentally stupid.

Why have things sunk so low?

It could be that what’s happening is incentivized stupidity. Just as bankers had no incentive to spot risk in the run-up to the financial crisis, so politicians have no incentive to act intelligently. Voters are woefully ignorant about basic social facts, and the media ensures that they remain so. Politicians have an incentive to pander to this ignorance. And many on Labour’s right, it seems, would rather “bash the Trots” and get a well-paid job after leaving parliament than actually win the next election.

This, however, is only part of the story. It doesn’t explain why Starmer was willing to risk losing so much political capital appointing Mandelson as US Ambassador. And anyone wanting a job outside parliament surely has an incentive to give the impression of not being an idiot. What’s more, the media was more powerful in the 90s and early 00s than it is now (at least if power is proportionate to circulation) and yet Blair and (especially) Brown managed to govern intelligently.

Something else, then, is going on.

Partly, it’s a part of a general dumbing down: just compare the BBC’s output now to (say) Civilization or the Ascent of Man. In particular, what Simon Wren-Lewis calls the “knowledge transmission mechanism” (pdf) has broken. Academics, perhaps because of pressure to publish, have retreated from the public realm to be replaced by junktanks and newspaper columnists. Whereas Thatcher would regularly refer in her speeches to Friedman, Hayek or Popper, her epigones cite nobody of comparable standing.

There’s something else. We’ve lost the conception of politics as a discrete profession in which trade-offs and conflicts of interest are managed by our representatives. Instead, politics is seen as just another retail experience where we leave bad reviews if we don’t get what we want. The public sphere has suffered from a tragedy of the commons, leaving a wasteland with no place for politicians wanting to do anything other than fulfill the orders of billionaires and shadowy donors.

Whatever the reason, the fact is the same. Westminster politics is something which no intelligent person can look upon with anything other than revulsion. We are in the position described by Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue: how to build communities to sustain intellectual life during our new dark age.

Name the deadliest of sins – cruelty, deceit, avarice – and Trump will both exhibit them and celebrate them

It’s no accident that the figure emerging as the global challenger to the might of Donald Trump is a priest in white, known as Pope Leo XIV. In recent weeks, the pope has issued a string of barely coded denunciations of the US president, unfazed by the insults that have come his way in return. It’s no longer fanciful to imagine that what an eastern European pontiff, John Paul II, did by confronting the Soviet empire in the 1980s, an American-born pope may do in the 2020s by daring to speak truth to the would-be emperor in the White House.

Of course, several heads of government have stood up to Trump too. Canada’s Mark Carney has done it most explicitly, while his European counterparts have taken a stand by refusing to join the president’s reckless, wrong-headed war on Iran. But none has the global reach of the leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Peter Mandelson’s flaws were mistaken for credentials to represent Britain in the court of a rogue president

You can’t kill something that is already dead. New details about Peter Mandelson’s disastrous appointment as Britain’s ambassador to Washington can trigger more paroxysms of outrage in Westminster. They can sharpen the pitch of opposition calls for the prime minister to resign. They can reinforce the view among Labour MPs that Keir Starmer shouldn’t lead them into a general election. But they can’t produce consensus around a replacement, or invent a way to choose one without self-destructive factional feuding.

Labour MPs’ craving for better leadership has been finely balanced with fear of holding a contest and emerging with someone worse. There is no final straw yet to come because the camel’s back was broken months ago.