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In our society and social theory, there is a fine line between a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ decision. While society uses moral justifications to determine a right or wrong choice, social theory relies on adaptive preference formation, the ‘unconscious altering of our preferences in light of the options we have available’.[1] Adaptive preference formation argues that individuals make decisions based on the options made available to them, thus if they have limited options, they may be less capable of making an informed or ‘correct’ decision. This debate often takes place within the realm of education, where adaptive preference adherents argue that an individual without a formal education simply does not have the option of education available to them. Moreover, those who lack the desire to be formally educated are categorised as having low aspirations, a low sense of achievement, or a limited set of options that do not highlight the benefits of education.[2] This perspective assumes that education is the ‘correct’ choice, and if that choice is not made, it is because education is not available, or the individual has an inherent deficiency. In both scenarios, there is a moral argument being made—one that champions education as ‘right’ while simultaneously looking down upon the individual who is either wanting, but incapable of accessing education, or apathetic and incapable of acknowledging the benefits of education.   When the focus is placed so heavily on an individual’s capacity to make the ‘correct’ choice, we lose sight of the true problems. Government entities and international organisations, for example, often intervene in communities to change the desires of individuals (ie, enticing them to desire formal education) without addressing the root causes of systemic injustice (ie, formal education is exclusive). When these interventions are held to change individuals’ desires while the root of the problem is never addressed, true deprivation becomes apparent. Increasing a population’s desire for education, for example, does not automatically make education more affordable or equitable. Instead, it creates a plethora of people who desire education but cannot be absorbed within a fragmented and exclusive education system.[3]   The focus should, therefore, be shifted from an imposed idea of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ via adaptive preference formation to the endogenous desires of a population through the cultivation of public emotion. The cultivation of public emotion is a movement in which a person or persons of influence shift the public consciousness by tapping into people’s endogenous desires and enabling them to identify their own needs. It mobilises a community around their own beliefs and can be used to combat the impositions by adaptive preference adherents. But how can we be sure that the cultivation of public emotions does not simply change the consciousness of the people without changing the situation that oppresses them?[4]   In this paper, I examine how the cultivation of public emotions can challenge the impositions of adaptive preference adherents who claim to know what is best for a community. I argue that adaptive preference is best challenged when the cultivation of public emotions is used to express a community’s endogenous desires, thus being conscious and supportive of the community’s needs. As such, a sense of agency is bestowed on a community which enables them to identify their own desires, advocate for themselves, and acknowledge the power structures that impede access to those desires. Moreover, I argue that by addressing the inadequacies of a power structure, rather than the ‘deficiencies’ of the people it governs, the cultivation of public emotions can mitigate the root cause of adaptive preference formation. I begin this paper by examining adaptive preference formation, the assumptions embedded in the ‘correct’ choice and the impact it can have on target populations. I then assess the cultivation of public emotions as a necessary tool for change and how this change should stem from the desires of a community, not via foreign interventions. Finally, I assess the Civil Rights struggle for voting rights and subsequent voting campaigns in the United States today to analyse how endogenous and agentic desires have a greater capacity to overcome adaptive preference.     The ‘suboptimal’ choice   In its most rudimentary state, adaptive preference formation (APF) is the preference a person adopts based on their current circumstance. A student, for example, may prefer to study abroad if they receive funding, whereas if funding is not provided, the same student may prefer to forego studying abroad. Through circumstantial preferences, people make choices on how best to live their lives and determine what values they want to shape their identity. It can be assumed that, to some extent, all people are subjected to APF because all people acquire preferences and make choices within a specific context. Within economic, social, and moral theory, however, APF is used to analyse the so-called deprived choices of marginalised communities. In this section, I examine the use of APF as a judgement and value-based critique of the ‘suboptimal’ choices made by marginalised groups. I argue that by establishing what is right and wrong for a community to desire, we fail to acknowledge a community’s true needs and values.   Within economic theory, APF is seen as a driver of irrational decisions. Theorists argue that unbeknownst to them, marginalised people do not experience free choice; instead, they adapt ‘to the limited options set by their circumstances’.[5] The individual is thus blind to the institutions that limit their choice and is incapable of claiming agency when making decisions. Similar sentiments are expressed by Amartya Sen, who asserts that,   Deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible.[6]   Likewise, Martha Nussbaum argues that because of their environment, marginalised groups adopt ‘deformed’ preferences and begin to subject themselves to welfarism, thus embracing their disadvantaged position and making it ‘impossible to conduct a radical critique of unjust systems’.[7] Within both Sen and Nussbaum’s critique of APF, the focus (and blame) is placed on the ‘deprived’ individual who passively and ignorantly succumbs to their disadvantaged state. Moreover, these scholars argue that marginalised people make the ‘wrong’ decisions which hinder their capacity to demand true freedom.   One of the freedoms that Sen, Nussbaum, and numerous policymakers acknowledge as being underutilised by marginalised communities is participation in formal education. During the early 2000s in the UK, for example, countless initiatives were implemented to increase participation in education among people from ‘non-traditional backgrounds’. Initiatives were premised on the belief that the UK must become ‘economically competitive in the knowledge economy’ by increasing its human (and academic) capital.[8] After securing nearly 100% of middle-class recruits, the UK government set out to enrol school-aged children from Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and working-class communities only to find that these groups were not interested in further education.[9] This lack of desire for education was categorised as these communities having ‘low aspirations’ and ‘low achievement standards’ as a result of APF. ‘The requirement,’ as David Bridges argues, ‘[was] then to intervene in the interest of changing these…aspirations and…to challenge choices…that [would] not take them on the pathway through higher education’.[10] A moral and social hierarchy was thus established which presumed that education advocates were rational actors who knew what was best for the marginalised communities. These beliefs and interventions continue today as academics and policymakers undermine decisions that lead people away from higher education. Mainstream discourses maintain that preferences that defy the status quo are ‘restricted by ignorance and/or a failure of rationality’ which then impedes people from living in a ‘truly human way’.[11][12]   But if not as a human, in what way have people in marginalised communities been living, and who is given the authority to discern how a human should live correctly? Critiques of Sen, Nussbaum, and Bridges highlight the fundamental arrogance of APF within economic, social, and moral theory—a belief that an elite social group can determine for all others the ‘correct’ way to live and the ‘correct’ things to desire. This belief has many consequences, but the two of significance for this paper are the impact of institutions on APF and the question of agency amongst marginalised groups. As argued by Elaine Unterhalter, ‘the rhetoric of aspiration ultimately serves as a diversion from the reality of increasing social exclusion and inequality’.[13] This is evidenced within the UK education system, where education is lauded as a necessity for local communities and economic growth, yet education budgets have been cut by more than £3.2 billion since 2010.[14] Though the UK government continues to raise aspirations for education, they simultaneously make education more inaccessible and blame the working class for their low aspirations and low standards of living.[15] By refusing to acknowledge the role that institutions play in making education inaccessible, policymakers force marginalised populations into worse-off positions when trying to raise unrealistic aspirations for education. Moreover, because the desire for education is imposed—as opposed to being endogenously identified as a need of the community—there is minimal to no effort made by officials to match the increase in desire with an equal number of educational opportunities. Instead, there is an influx of desire that cannot be absorbed by the fractured education system as resources are allocated to changing people’s desires and not the institutions that leave them deprived.   Instead of championing the capacity for all people to make diverse and informed decisions, policymakers question people’s agency and rationality, which then invites ‘coercive forms of intervention’.[16][17] To combat forms of coercion, it is imperative to acknowledge that marginalised groups have agency and adhere to rational thinking when choosing what they should and should not value. Marginalised communities, HE Baber argues, are not passive receivers of APF, but are rational actors who assess the risk of choosing to follow the status quo.[18] If a government heavily promotes education, for example, but access to education remains precarious, an individual has every right to not desire education, nor should they be forced to desire it. Marginalised communities do not need a rise in consciousness or a boost in self-esteem—they need factual information from which they can make an informed decision about what they ought to value.[19] By acknowledging the agency and rationality embedded in the decisions of marginalised groups, we can become aware of multi-dimensional aspirations and the ways that people determine their own needs.[20]   Within APF theories, the inadequacy of an institution to provide necessary services and the agency of marginalised communities to determine what should or should not be valued is often left out of discussions. This shifts the blame from the institution itself onto the ‘deprived’ communities who require interventions to change their desires. These changes can do more to harm a community when an increase in desire does not equate to increased opportunities or greater accessibility to services. An imposed desire thus does not benefit a community because it is not reflective of a community’s true needs and dismisses the needs and values that a community has already identified. When institutions are held more accountable, however, and marginalised groups are acknowledged as rational actors, there is a greater capacity to challenge APF. In the next section, I analyse how the cultivation of public emotions around the endogenous desires of a community can help to overcome APF.     The importance of emotion   APF theorists are keen to acknowledge the depravity and passivity of marginalised communities, which they claim can be rectified by imposing foreign desires and interventions. Though I argue against the imposition of desires, inciting interventions, and identifying marginalised groups as passive, it is imperative to acknowledge that material deprivation can and does exist within these communities. Material deprivation, or the inability to afford basic, negatively affects the social, psychological, physical, and financial components of a person’s life, thus it is necessary to combat deprivation that is linked to APF.[21][22] The question, however, is who should determine and lead this change? In this section, I assess how marginalised groups cultivate public emotions to combat APF and material deprivation, thus becoming agents of social change.   Emotions, James Jasper argues, ‘accompany all social action,’ thus they play a significant role in society.[23] These emotions, however, can be hard to control and are often critiqued for their precarious and irrational nature. Moreover, it can be difficult to cultivate unified, public emotions that propel societies towards a specific goal. Gerlie Caspe-Ogatis asserts that human beings can be ‘greedy, anxious and selfish,’ which can hinder privileged classes from caring about the material deprivation faced by marginalised groups.[24] Caspe-Ogatis, therefore, questions how privileged groups can be made  to care about the plight of marginalised communities to solve their APF and material deprivation. Though Caspe-Ogatis aims to mobilise emotions productively, I argue that more attention should be given to the emotions and care that already exist within marginalised communities. As such, we should spend less time forging emotions amongst privileged classes and more time mobilising the fears, desires, and motivations present within marginalised groups. By focusing on marginalised groups’ emotions, we become privy to what these groups identify as unjust within their society, such as unequal educational opportunities, discriminatory work practices, or over-policing within their communities. This helps to acknowledge what needs are not being met and what desires are being formulated. Moreover, this begins a process of marginalised communities determining for themselves the best path towards social change.   As marginalised groups begin to identify their collective grievances, they become more cognizant of the role that institutions play in inciting material deprivation. This enables marginalised groups to shift the blame from themselves and, instead, work to rectify the structural inequalities that have affected their community. If a community is over-policed, for example, they may determine that police officers are not productive in their society and thus ban the institution of formal policing within their community.[25] Though this ban may not align with the status quo, it reflects the specific needs of the marginalised community involved, thus making it an appropriate solution that increases the community’s freedom. This freedom is contingent upon identifying the endogenous emotions of a community and acknowledging that these emotions inform the experiences and beliefs of marginalised groups.[26] Once these emotions are acknowledged, community leaders can begin to cultivate public emotions that reflect the context-specific grievances of a community, the structural barriers that impose these grievances, and the actions necessary to provoke social change. The cultivation of public emotions around endogenous desires is thus necessary to begin solving APF.   Martha Nussbaum acknowledges that the cultivation of public emotions should be undertaken by actors who understand a population’s cultural context.[27] During the Civil Rights movement, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. adopted many of Gandhi’s strategies, yet King did not copy and paste Gandhian norms onto a US context. Instead, King merged Gandhi’s practices with American perspectives to enable anti-racism, Christianity, love, and anti-discrimination to be embedded within Gandhian forms of peaceful protest.[28] The cultivation of public emotions thus necessitates a cultural awareness that is best derived from endogenous actors, grievances, and desires.   When APF theories overestimate the importance of elites or foreign ideologies to enact social change, they become ‘problematic because [the]…interpretation either neglects or misconceives the principally bottom-up dynamics of social movements’.[29] For people’s lives to be changed for the better, they need to be acknowledged for determining their own needs and desires, as opposed to being expected to passively receive imposed desires and interventions. The capacity for marginalised groups to rectify structural injustices should never be undermined nor should the presence of emotions within social action be misconstrued as irrational.[30][31] The endogenous cultivation of public emotions is a powerful tool through which rational and agentic actors can identify a grievance, assert a desire, and demand change from the prevailing social structure. Moreover, the APF that is experienced by marginalised groups can be better addressed when blame is not being placed on the communities themselves, but on the institutions that restrains a community. In the next section, I examine how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions during voting rights struggles not only helped to solve APF during the Civil Rights era, but propelled voting campaigns today to provide more access and opportunities to marginalised groups.   From grievance to change   The Civil Rights movement encompassed a range of goals to ensure that Black citizens were no longer treated as lesser than their white counterparts. By enacting campaigns to dismantle racial segregation, demand decent housing, and end police brutality, civil rights organisers cultivated public emotions that acknowledged the collective grievances of marginalised communities. The cultivation of public emotions not only changed the consciousness of Black people but also the national and global consciousness which helped to formalise laws and policies that favoured the movement’s agenda.[32] In this section, I examine how the struggle for voter registration during the Civil Rights movement cultivated public emotions that continue to help solve APF for marginalised groups today.   Taeku Lee’s study of the US Black Insurgency between the 1940s to the 1960s highlights how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions helped solve APF.[33] After decades of experiencing voter suppression, Black Alabama residents identified the right to vote as a key component in overcoming their status as second-class citizens. This desire to vote, however, was met with extreme violence from state and federal governments, in addition to the violence carried out by many white civilians who opposed the Civil Rights movement. The violence eventually culminated in the Bloody Sunday march on 7 March 1965, where over 600 Black residents gathered to walk from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights. Marchers, however, were unable to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before state troopers began to massacre protestors.[34] Footage of the brutal attacks sent shockwaves throughout the country, but nothing spoke louder than the desire for Black people to gain voting rights.   The massacre incited public outrage and by 15 March 1965, President Johnson proposed a voting rights legislation that countered any legal barriers to voting such as literacy tests and poll taxes. For many scholars during the 1960s, the success of the Civil Rights movement and the accumulation of voting rights was attributed to the elites and politicians who helped pass the voting legislation.[35] As Lee argues, however, the change in federal policy and public opinion was largely due to the Black population that mobilised, against all odds, to demand the right to vote. The Black Insurgency was more than a mere disturbance within US social life; it was the product of endogenous grievances (ie, being treated as second-class citizens), and the subsequent desires borne out of those grievances (ie, accessing the right to vote) that enabled the cultivation of public emotions for social change (ie, legislation that combated voter suppression). In cultivating these emotions via endogenous desires, Alabama’s Black population was able to expand their participation in the political sphere, thus overcoming their limited choices and APF. Moreover, their voting power enforced more accountability among policymakers who could alleviate the material deprivation faced by marginalised groups. This exemplifies how the endogenous cultivation of public emotions is essential to solving APF within marginalised communities. But what makes community organising more effective in solving APF than outside forces, and how are these endogenous practices reflected in today’s voting campaigns?   Though it has been over 55 years since the Voting Rights Act was passed, racialised voter suppression has persisted, making it increasingly difficult to mobilise Black voters to the polls. Through repressive legislations, such as Georgia’s SB202 bill, policymakers have imposed stricter requirements on absentee ballots, limited the use of drop boxes in ethnically diverse areas, established earlier closing times for polls in Black and Brown communities, and have criminalised individuals who give food and water to those standing in notoriously long polling lines.[36] In 2021, US policymakers introduced over 360 restrictive voting bills mimicking many of the suppression practices enforced in the Jim Crow era.[37][38] These efforts have not only limited Black and Brown people’s capacity to vote but have invigorated community organisers who refuse to have voter suppression prevail. Organisations such as Black Voters Matter and Black Girls Vote are two of the many organisations that have led impactful community campaigns to mobilise disenfranchised voters.   Black Voters Matter (BVM) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to engaging voters by disseminating political information to underrepresented groups, marching in solidarity with suppressed voters, rallying communities to increase voter turnout, and organising campaigns with college students.[39] The organisation is run by Black women, known to be the most ‘effective organisers on the ground because they are trusted voices ’.[40] During BVM campaigns, such as their Freedom Bus Tour, organisers travel to different communities around the nation to ‘hear the challenges faced and solutions imagined’, thus giving community members the space to acknowledge their grievances.[41] As Janell Ross argues, ‘Black citizens’ concerns are often ignored [and] treated like a fallout of character flaws rather than policy failure,’ thus it is impactful when organisations treat Black voters as though they matter. BVM is as effective in their mobilisation efforts because they understand how it feels to have their voting rights negated, and for those who do not understand first-hand, they sympathise. The cultivation of public emotions and the mobilising efforts enacted by BVM ‘requires an understanding of Black life and culture’, thus it is necessary to understand the cultural context of a community before APF can be solved.[42]   Community, trust, and understanding are found within many local organisations that mobilise Black and Brown voters. Within Black Girls Vote, for example, organisers create and deliver locally themed engagement boxes that cultivate ‘a spirit of celebration about voting [and] capitalises…on Black attitudes about the power of the vote’.[43] This is achieved by understanding Black behavioural norms during election time, and the barriers—both legal and emotional—that may impede someone from voting.[44] Likewise, political organising committees that are housed in Black churches levy their social bonds to help mobilise voters, whilst Black political leaders use their established trust in communities to increase voter turnout.[45] In some cases, organisations provide transportation and food during election season so that voters are prepared to withstand any polling challenges.[46] These personalised touches enable community leaders to mobilise Black and Brown voters more effectively by being respectful of a community’s cultural context. This respect furthers the cultivation of public emotions around endogenous grievances and desires which are then used to change social structures and overcome APF within marginalised communities.     A conclusion beyond passivity   APF theories often conceptualise disadvantaged groups as being passive and deficient actors in need of direct intervention. Direct intervention assumes that disadvantaged groups are responsible for their suboptimal position, thus elite rational actors are needed to intervene on the group’s behalf. These assumptions place blame on marginalised communities and fail to recognise the role that institutions play in imposing APF. Because APF has significant consequences, such as material deprivation, APF must be solved, but it is also important to acknowledge that it cannot be solved by just any actor. When desires are being imposed upon a community by foreign actors, more effort goes into changing the community’s consciousness as opposed to changing their oppressive condition. This can result in more harm than good when a community’s needs are not being met. However, when a community’s endogenous needs and desires are acknowledged as legitimate reasons for mobilising, then the capacity to solve APF by changing social consciousness and structures increases. APF is, therefore, best challenged and solved when the cultivation of public emotions derives from a community’s endogenous desires, which enables a community to identify its own needs and fight to demand justice accordingly. Donari Yahzid Donari Yahzid is a Gates Cambridge Scholar and PhD candidate in the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar and MPhil in Development Studies Graduate (Cambridge), through which she began her work on researching Indigenous land rights movements throughout the globe. Now as a PhD candidate, and in addition to working as an editor for the CJLPA , Donari researches land rights for Quilombo and favela communities in Brazil.  [1] Ben Colburn, ‘Autonomy and Adaptive Preferences’ (2011) 23(1) Utilitas 52, 52. [2] David Bridges, ‘Adaptive preference, justice and identity in the context of widening participation in higher education’ (2006) 1(1) Ethics and Education 15-28. [3] John E. Craig, ‘The Expansion of Education’ (1981) 9 Review of Research in Education, 151-213. [4] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed . (Continuum 1970). [5] Bridges (n 2) 16. [6] Amartya Sen, Development as freedom  (Oxford University Press 1999) 63. [7] Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge University Press 2000) 116. [8] Bridges (n 2) 16. [9] ibid 17-18. [10] ibid. [11] ibid 20. [12] Nussbaum (n 7) 74. [13] Elaine Unterhalter, James Ladwig, and Craig Jeffrey, ‘Decoding Aspirations: Social Theory, the Capability Approach and the Multiple Modalities of Education’ (2014) 35 (1) British Journal of Sociology of Education 133, 140. [14] Nick Wragg, John Robert Stoszkowski, and Aine Macnamara, ‘The Absurdity of Aspiration within Further Education in England: Where Much is Said but Little is Done?’ (2020) 11(9) Journal of Education and Practice 106. [15] Richard Adams and Sally Weale. ‘Ministers’ loan plans could stop poorer students in England going to university’ Guardian (London, 22 February 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/feb/22/fears-that-minimum-grades-for-student-loans-in-england-could-narrow-access > accessed 27 January 2024. [16] Catriona Mackenzie, ‘Responding to the Agency Dilemma’, in Marina A. L. Oshana (eds),  Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression: Philosophical Perspectives  (Routledge 2015) 49. [17] Serene Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment  (Oxford University Press 2011). [18] HE Baber, ‘Adaptive Preferences’ (2007) 33(1) Social Theory and Practice 105. [19] ibid. [20] Caroline Hart, ‘How Do Aspirations Matter?’ (2016) 17 (3) Journal of Human Development and Capabilities 324. [21] Anne-Catherine Guio and Isabelle Engsted Maquet, ‘Material deprivation and poor housing’ (2006) Draft paper for the conference ‘Comparative EU Statistics on Income and Living conditions: issues and Challenges’. [22] Richard Wilkinson, Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality  (Routledge 1996). [23] James Jasper, ‘The Emotions of Protest: Affective and Reactive Emotions in and around Social Movements’ (1998) 13 (3) Sociological Forum 397. [24] Gerlie Caspe-Ogatis, ‘Cultivating Constructive Civic Emotions: Why Compassion Matters in Human Survival During the Covid 19 Pandemic’ (2020) 8 Mabini Review 150. [25] Rachel Abrams, ‘Police Clear Seattle’s Protest ‘Autonomous Zone’’ The New York Times (New York, 1 July 2020) < https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/seattle-protest-zone-CHOP-CHAZ-unrest.html > accessed 27 January 2024. [26] Amy Winans, ‘Cultivating Racial Literacy in White, Segregated Settings: Emotions as Site of Ethical Engagement and Inquiry’ (2010) 40(3) Curriculum Inquiry 475. [27] Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice  (Harvard University Press 2013). [28] ibid. [29] Taeku Lee , Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era  (University of Chicago Press 2002) 6. [30] Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of the Black Insurgency, 1930-1970  (University of Chicago Press 1982). [31] James (n 23). [32] Joyce Ladner, ‘A New Civil Rights Agenda: A New Leadership Is Making a Difference’ ( Brookings , 1 March 2000) < https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-new-civil-rights-agenda-a-new-leadership-is-making-a-difference/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [33] Lee (n 29). [34] Christopher Klein, ‘How Selma's ‘Bloody Sunday’ Became a Turning Point in the Civil Rights Movement’ ( Sky History , 18 July 2020) < https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement > accessed 27 January 2024. [35] Lee (n 29). [36] Zack Beauchamp, ‘Georgia’s restrictive new voting law, explained’ ( Vox , 26 March 2021) < https://www.vox.com/22352112/georgia-voting-sb-202-explained > accessed 27 January 2024. [37] Janie Boschma, ‘Lawmakers in 47 states have introduced bills that would make it harder to vote. See them all here’ ( CNN , 3 April 2021) < https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/03/politics/state-legislation-voter-suppression/index.html > accessed 27 January 2024. [38] Brandon Tensley, ‘America's long history of Black voter suppression’ ( CNN , May 2021) < https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/politics/black-voting-rights-suppression-timeline/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [39] ‘Our Purpose’ ( Black Voters Matter , 2020) < https://blackvotersmatterfund.org/our-purpose/ > accessed 27 January 2024. [40] Jessica Washington, ‘‘Whatever it takes’: how Black women fought to mobilize America's voters’ Guardian  (London, 12 November 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/12/black-women-voters-mobilize-georgia-elections > accessed 27 January 2024. [41] Janell Ross, ‘A radical way to mobilize black voters in 2020: Work on issues, not voting’ ( NBC News , 20 October 2019) < https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/radical-way-mobilize-black-voters-2020-work-issues-not-voting-n1068681 > accessed 27 January 2024. [42] ibid. [43] Ashley Daniels et al., ‘Party at the Mailbox: Mobilizing Black Voters with Celebrations of Community’ (2020) American Government and Politics < https://preprints.apsanet.org/engage/apsa/article-details/614e0b9387a02d089d475063 > accessed 2 February 2024. [44] ibid. [45] Baodong Liu, Sharon D. Wright Austin, and Byron D'Andrá Orey, ‘Church Attendance, Social Capital, and Black Voting Participation’ (2009) 90(3) Social Science Quarterly 576; Christopher Clark, ‘Collective Descriptive Representation and Black Voter Mobilization in 2008’ (2013) 36(2) Political Behavior 315; Seth E Masket, ‘Did Obama’s ground game matter? The influence of local field offices during the 2008 presidential election’ (2009) 73(5) Public Opinion Quarterly 1023; Tracey Osborn, Scott D. McClurg, and Benjamin Knoll, ‘Voter mobilization and the Obama victory’ (2010) 38(2) American Politics Review 211. [46] Chelsea Floyd, ‘Nonprofit Organization Encourages Black Voters, Provides Transportation to Polls’ ( Spectrum News , 8 October 2020) < https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/triad/news/2020/10/08/nonprofit-organization-encourages-black-voters--provides-transportation-to-polls > accessed 27 January 2024.

As a theorist, economist, politician, author, and co-founder of two transnational democratic and progressive movements, Yanis Varoufakis is a political Renaissance man who has captured some of the main social, political, and economic movements of our times. He catapulted to fame as Greek finance minister in 2015 where he displayed a strong opposing voice to European powers in a time of turbulent financial crisis. Varoufakis has continued to be a leading voice for change. In 2016, Varoufakis co-founded the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), and in 2020 he co-founded the international organisation Progressive International. Currently, Varoufakis is a member of the Hellenic Parliament in Greece representing MeRA25, The European Realistic Disobedience Front, an electoral branch of the DiEM25 movement.   In this interview, Varoufakis provides an honest and enlightening account of the shortcomings of today’s politics, the rise of techno-feudalism, and the challenges and achievements that he has encountered while leading and participating in new democratic movements.   CJLPA : Could you perhaps talk a bit about your personal trajectory, and how you got to where you are today?   Yanis Varoufakis : I moved to England when I was 17 to study mathematics and economics. I tried to abandon economics for mathematics, but then eventually ended up doing a PhD in Economics, so I was dragged back into the mire of the dismal science. I taught for decades in Britain, in Australia, in the United States. You would never have heard of me—unless you wanted to read esoteric stuff on game theory and political philosophy—if it wasn’t for the fact that the 2008 global crisis spearheaded the bankruptcy of the Greek state and the sequence of bankruptcies across the Eurozone, because as a commentator, I kept saying that all the European Union was doing was extending the bankruptcy into the future, reproducing it and magnifying it. At some point, my counterproposals were sought out by a young man who was going to become Greece’s Prime Minister [Alexis Tsipras], who then said, ‘You’ve got to put your money where your mouth is and you’ve got to be finance minister’. Thus, I spent six months being the finance minister of the most bankrupt European country, saying no to more loans, the purpose of which was, again, to extend and pretend the crisis.   CJLPA : What would you say is the main motivation behind your work, or has it changed across your career paths?   YV : Curiosity. Not taking epiphenomena for granted. Not accepting that the way things look is how they are. As the Royal Society’s motto has instructed us, not to take anybody’s word for it, to keep searching for deeper causes and to discover that those in power have a vested interest in creating a narrative that obfuscates rather than enlightens us regarding the circumstances in which we live.   CJLPA : Do you think there was a moment when this became clear to you, or is it something you have had since the very beginning?   YV : It was something I had since the very beginning. I was blessed and cursed by a highly political life from a very young age, because I grew up in a tempestuous period for Greece’s history. Mind you, Greece has this capacity of stirring up a lot of tempests. But, I was only six when the secret police broke down our front door to abduct my father. And then I was nine when my mother’s brother was sentenced three times to death by a military court during the military dictatorship. If you have that kind of environment, it doesn’t take too much to start querying power, sources of authority, and what constitutes the difference between democracy and oligarchy. At the same time, it wasn’t that terrible. It was, as a boy—I think it would have been different for a girl because of patriarchy—all very exciting, never a dull moment.   CJLPA : You have commented a lot on the happenings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What is the biggest misconception that political commentators, observers, even some of your followers, have of you and your perspectives?   YV : It depends on who you are talking about. The misconception on the right wing of politics is that I am an unreconstructed Marxist-communist who wants to see the transition to a state-run system. I consider myself to be a liberal, even libertarian, who is as scared of the state as I am of Google, Microsoft, and ExxonMobil. The misconception on the left is that I’m a stooge of the establishment who is peddling left-wing ideas only in order to ensure that the status quo is reproduced.   CJLPA : Have you attempted to mediate or address these misconceptions through dialogue, or do you continue to progress and express your views?   YV : I think dialogue is everything. This is constantly what I’ve been doing, and I never say no to an opportunity to have a vigorous debate with my worst critics, whether they come from the right or the left or the centre or wherever. I’m very proud of one thing that I’ve managed to maintain: a very civilised, even friendly exchange with people both from the left and the right. There aren’t that many politicians, economists and so on, who count amongst their friends both Lord Norman Lamont, former finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Tory government under [John] Major—he’s a friend of mine and we have wonderful debates about everything—and Julian Assange, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador, the left-winger. It’s wonderful to be able to have these relationships and not to allow them to fall prey to differences of opinion.   CJLPA : You wrote in your book The Global Minotaur  that politicians can’t be theorists for three reasons: they are rarely thinkers; their frenetic lifestyle does not allow them to give them time to think big ideas; and because theorists have to admit the possibility of being wrong. How have you been able to translate these features of a thinker and a theorist into your role as a politician?   YV : By being a bad politician. I think it’s important to be a bad politician. I take pride in being an awful politician. And what do I mean by this? The beauty of an academic environment is that what you do, whether you’re writing an essay, or presenting a talk in a conference, is you are putting forward a hypothesis and your audience has a job to shoot it down, to find its weak spots. That’s what you do in a lab as a physicist: you have a hypothesis and you allow nature to take shots at it. If nature does not bring it down, it means that there is something to this theory that it is useful. So similarly, whether it is anthropology, literature, or whatever, you put forward a hypothesis, you have the best minds in the audience (you hope), and they try to bring it down. If they don’t completely destroy it, it means that there is some merit to it. But if they bring it down, it’s also very pleasing to say, ‘See I was wrong. My hypothesis was interesting, but it wasn’t up to it.’   In politics, by definition, you’re not allowed to do that. Think of BBC Question Time. I’ve been in that environment or similar environments many, many times, whether it’s in parliament or in a studio. So you’re representing the Labour Party or the Tory Party or the Libs, whoever, and you have the opposite side, and you put forward a hypothesis: your theory, your position, is a hypothesis. Could be right, could be wrong. Now, imagine for a moment that your opponents this week think, ‘Oh my God! They’re right.’ If you say so on air before the programme is over, you’ve been thrown out of the party. You have to resign as minister or shadow cabinet. This is what really suffocates me in politics: that whenever I am sitting around the table with political opponents, I know that even if I convince them, they cannot say so. As Upton Sinclair once said, it’s very hard to convince people whose salary depends on not being convinced. How do I manage that? By admitting it when somebody says, ‘by the way, this is a bad point’ and they can prove it. I constantly struggle not to fall into the trap of defending a position just because it is our party’s position, which means that I’m a terrible politician, because there have been many times when I confessed to the other side having a point.   CJLPA : What can be enforced so that politicians who are perhaps afraid to admit that they are wrong can do so without their livelihood depending on it?   YV : That’s up to you. It’s up to the vote. To vote out anyone who wants to be a minister. This is, of course, highly utopic. What we’re trying to do in DiEM25 and MeRA25, my party here in Greece, we have this saying that if you want the position, you’re disqualified from having it. If somebody really wants to be a Member of Parliament, it means that there’s something wrong with them, because nobody in their right mind should want to be a Member of Parliament. There’s nothing more boring, believe me. It’s mind-crushingly boring. So, anybody who really wants to do it—they have a screw loose. There’s a problem. But of course, it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it. I keep using the awful analogy of taking the rubbish out at night. If a friend of yours really loves taking the rubbish out, you should ask them to go and see a psychiatrist, a psychologist, to reconsider their ways, because there’s something wrong with them. But of course, they have to do it. So you’ve got to treat politics, electoral politics, as a chore. It’s up to voters to ensure that they do not vote for people who are keenly eager to be politicians. It should be public service. It should be something that you do as a sacrifice.   CJLPA : You mentioned the DiEM25 movement that you founded in 2016. First of all, what is the main motivation behind the movement?   YV : Beginning with the realisation that the crisis we have in Europe is not a crisis of Greece, of Germany, of France, of Italy, but it is a pan-European crisis. It’s got to do with the architecture of the EU. So, if the problem is EU-wide, the solution must be EU-wide. The problem with our governments is that they are all elected on the basis of nation-state-specific parties, who go to the voters with an agenda that is completely pie in the sky because they are all nation-centric agendas that can never be realised by a nation-state government. We don’t have the levers, at the level even for Germany, to do that which German political parties are proposing. So you have fake politics in a sense, you have democracies at the nation-state level that do not have the power to do that which they promise, and you’ve got EU-wide political decision making which is not democratic.   Once we had that analysis, the obvious thing to do was to create a pan-European political movement, a unitary transnational political movement. We’re not talking about an alliance of a Greek party, a Polish party, a Dutch party, and so on, because those alliances really don’t work like confederacies. They don’t have a common programme. They just share jobs in Brussels, and that’s neither here nor there. We’re the first movement that doesn’t have a Greek chapter or a German chapter, and on our Coordinating Committee we don’t have the Greek representative, or the German representative, or the Dutch representative. We are all elected by all of the members, independently of our nationalities. Some of us happen to be Greek, German, and Italian, but we’re not representing Greece, Germany, and Italy on the Committee. We’re representing the whole membership across Europe. To run electorally, for example, we created the Party in Greece. But all the decisions regarding the Party, the manifesto—ie what is our policy regarding refugees in Greece? What is our policy regarding VAT in Greece?— are voted for by everyone, including the Germans and the Dutch, not just the Greek members. That’s never been tried before.   CJLPA : What does it take to create such a political movement? How does one go about it? What are its challenges?   YV : It’s very hard. It’s very hard work, let’s face it, because of the geography as well. Europe is vast, so before COVID-19 we were always in an airplane running around, having meetings and so on. But the way we did it was, when we started the movement in 2016, we booked a very nice theatre in central Berlin, the Volksbühne theatre, and we invited people who come from all over the place. We had the website, and we said: join. From that moment on, we decided the process of policy-making: on the one hand, at a pan-European level, a lot of which was digital of course; the local campaigns; and then the setting up of local committees—we call them DSCs, ‘DiEM25 Spontaneous Collectives’—in Poland, in Greece, and so on and so forth. It’s been hellish trying to organise that and then running the elections. In the European Parliament elections in May 2019, we ran in eight countries, which was hard, especially for a movement that had no money. We had five euros here and five euros there from our members, and that’s why you don’t see us in the European Parliament. We got very close to getting MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) elected in Greece, in Germany, and in Denmark, but we just missed out by very little. But still, we got one and a half million votes across Europe—which is not that much, but at the same time it’s not negligible—and we’ve influenced many other people. It’s a constant struggle. We have not succeeded, but we have not withered. The fact that we are alive and kicking is a great success for us.   CJLPA : What would you say is DiEM25’s biggest achievement? Would you say it was the electoral prominence that it had?   YV : No. The biggest achievement is the Green New Deal for Europe—our policy agenda—which fills us with a great deal of pride, because we all talk about the green transition and green politics, how to combine the social with the environmental, and about green new deals, but we were the first ones to actually come up with one, and one that is comprehensive, radical, and realistic at the same time. And also the way we did it. Back starting in 2016, we had a committee of about 20 economists, environmentalists, and experts who put together a questionnaire, just questions, which we distributed across Europe and beyond Europe, amongst our friends in America and elsewhere, which were very specific. Key questions like: how much should we spend on green energy? Figures, not pie-in-the-sky stuff. Where is this money going to come from? Which part of it will be public finance, which part of it will be taxes? How will it be distributed? What will it be spent on? What about public debt, which is a huge issue especially the European Union and the Eurozone? What about private debt? What are we going to do with the banks? How do we regulate the banks? What about universal basic income? Do we want it? And if we want it, how do we pay for it? I’m just giving some examples. These were all questions, and it was a logistical nightmare because we’ve got, as you can imagine, thousands of answers, and had to sift through all of them. From all of those answers, that committee of 20 people had to put together a draft Green New Deal proposal, which then went out for consultation. More answers came, we fixed it again and we brought it back together, and then we put it up for an all-member vote across Europe. That was voted in. Then we formed the alliance with which we stood in the May 2019 European Parliament elections, so we brought in other parties that had not been party to this European Green New Deal and they had to contribute themselves, so that changed the game. Now we have a document which, if you compare it to what comes out of the European Commission—the Green Deal of Mrs Von der Leyen—I’m very proud of, because what they have is really not worth the paper that it is written on, I think, compared to ours. I mean, of course, there are things that could be improved and will be improved and are being improved because we are constantly adapting it to the post-COVID-19 era.   That’s a major success in the sense that the worst enemy of progressive politics is the belief deep down, even of progressives, that [Margaret] Thatcher was right, that there is no alternative to what is being carried out. Even progressives, even people who demonstrate on the streets, deep down they worry that maybe the adults in the room know what’s best, that maybe we don’t like what we see but maybe we don’t have an alternative to what’s going on. This Green New Deal for Europe is the alternative. You read it and you think, ‘OK, now we could implement this tomorrow.’ It’s not like, ‘In another world, in a better world, we could do this’, no, because part of our blueprint is what you can do this week, in six months’ time, in 12 months’ time, in five years, and ten years. Maybe we’re wrong, but at least we thought, ‘OK, we put this on the table’, and we say to others, ‘Come and tell us where we’re wrong’, in an academic kind of fashion. ‘Come and shoot it down, tell us what your ideas are.’ Whenever we had political parties from Italy, from France, and so on saying, ‘Let’s collaborate’, and we say, ‘OK, let’s collaborate, but look, we have a program here for Europe, tell us where we’re wrong’, at that point we realised that most political parties, if not all, said, ‘No, let’s agree on how we’re going to stand together and who’s going to become a Member of Parliament.’ But we are not interested in that. We want to agree on what needs to be done. If we are in office, then we discuss who will be in office. We are trying to change the direction of movement from talking about who is going to get what position to, say, what needs to be done if we get the position. This is not very appealing to the existing political system. Not even to the left, or even to the Greens.   CJLPA : You mentioned this inevitability that Thatcher was right. You recently said that we’re entering a post-capitalist world—what you termed ‘techno-feudalism’. Could you perhaps elaborate on, firstly, how we finally reached this post-capitalist society, and then on this new concept of ‘techno-feudalism’?   YV : When I was your age or even younger, I remember being schooled into the great schools of thought that were clashing with one another. And the main two at the time—it was, of course, the Cold War back then—were the liberal democratic capitalist school, harking back to Adam Smith, with elements of Friedman and von Hayek, who were representing capitalism as the ideal system, on the basis that you have a minimal state providing security and everything else is left to individuals. These individuals are free, through the market, to pursue their own private interests, with the market operating as if by an invisible hand behind our backs—a kind of divine providence—synthesising our greedy individual self-interests into the good of society. As nobody can know what people want or what people are capable of, certainly not the state, allowing this decentralised decision-making process to progress is the best way of combining private liberty with the public good. That was one view. According to that view: the state is there, it is minimal; investment is private, and comes out of savings; households save; firms borrow and invest; and you let a Darwinian process decide who survives and who dies with a state playing a minimal, safety-net kind of role. That was one view.   The other view, which was the socialist view, the left-wing view, even the communist view—from the side of those who were in favour of central planning Soviet-style—the view was that capitalism and the market fails, it creates inequality and injustice, and you need a state representing the public will to coordinate both incentives and constraints so that you achieve the public good. That was a big clash, and I was very interested in this clash. The pro-capitalist view versus a kind of socialist view. This is irrelevant now, and it has definitely become irrelevant after 2008. In 1991, the socialist tradition collapsed because the Soviet Union collapsedand with it social democracy collapsed as well, even though the Social Democrats were very anti-Soviet. The left lost its mojo, so to speak, in 1991.   In 2008, the Thatcherite School, the liberal, libertarian tradition, had its comeuppance because the private capital combusted and dissolved. Since then, what we have had is the state keeping capitalism alive. So the central bank—the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve—keeps on pumping money, giving it to the private bankers who are completely bankrupt otherwise, who are giving it to companies that would be completely bankrupt otherwise. So you have the zombification of the private sector by the states. It’s no longer the clash between the private and the public. The public is keeping the private zombified, in a state of being undead—not alive, but not dead either—because if the Bank of England pulls the plug, the whole thing collapses. If the Fed pulls the plug, it’s all gone. It’s no longer this juxtaposition between the state and the private sector. The state is producing the fuel that keeps corporates alive. At the same time, the old story that households save and corporations borrow to invest has died as well. Now you have a situation where corporations are saving. Apple has $220 billion of savings. Every large corporation is saving. Why do they have savings? Because they are too scared to invest. They are scared to invest because they look at you and say, ‘She will not be able to buy stuff from me at a price that will give me profits, so I’m not going to invest.’ They don’t invest, they don’t create good quality jobs, and they instead create crap jobs. Crap jobs means that people like you then don’t have enough money to buy their stuff, so that confirms their decision not to invest. But how do they keep themselves alive? They get huge loans from the private banks that get the money from the central bank. What do the large corporations do with the huge loans they get from the private banks? They go to the stock exchange and buy their own shares. Share prices are very high, bonuses to the members of the board of directors are very high because they are linked to the share price, so they are doing really very well. Financial markets are booming, but profits are zero. This is a complete disconnect between the financial world and capitalism. That’s not capitalism. The model of capitalism, and the heads of those who supported capitalism when I was growing up, has gone.   Now what you have is certain companies like Tesla, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on, based on remarkable new technologies—and they are remarkable, I love them—that creates huge power for them. Those companies are no longer operating within a capitalist framework: the moment you go into amazon.com, you are outside capitalism, and you are inside a platform that provides everything for you. It’s equivalent of walking down the high street only to discover that every shop is owned by the same man, every product sold is distributed by the same company that owns the shops. The tarmac is owned by the same company, the air you breathe is owned by the same company, and what your eyes see is directed by the same company. This is what happens on Amazon. What you see on Amazon right now is directed by the company. That’s not a competitive market. That’s not a market at all. This reminds me of feudal times, because if you were a peasant and you lived in some estate, in a Downton Abbey-like estate, you lived in a place which belonged to one family. You had a dwelling, you ploughed the land, you went to festivals, but it was all within a fiefdom owned by one person. That’s more or less where we’re moving now, where we already are. If you combine that with the fact that all the money comes from the state, from state printing presses—the Bank of England, or the Federal Reserve—and it’s all technologically kept together and promoted, I think that we can’t talk about capitalism anymore. ‘Techno-feudalism’ is a better term for it.   CJLPA : Seeing as the state essentially funds this techno-feudalism, how can we maintain democracy and accountability when it is already tough to maintain it between the public and the state, let alone the public and the corporations?   YV : Through a series of steps. The first thing we need to do is to cut out the middleman, and I’ll be very specific here. I already described how the central bank prints money, gives it to Barclays, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, or to Deutsche Bank. They then pick up the phone. They don’t call you. If you go and ask for a loan, you won’t get it because they don’t trust you to pay it back. So what they do is they pick up the phone and they call a large company and say, ‘I’ve got these millions here. Zero interest rate. Do you want it?’, and they give it to them for zero interest rate because they themselves pay negative interest rates. In other words, the central bank pays them to take the money, so even if they give it away for free to the large corporations, as long as they take it back, they’re laughing. So the large corporation which is too scared to invest because little people do not have the money to buy stuff, then take this money and goes to the stock exchange and buys back its own shares. Their shares go up. But this is wasted money. It’s not feeding economic activity, especially the green transition, investment in renewables, and so on. So we need to cut out the middleman. Imagine if whenever the Bank of England printed £100 billion, instead of giving it to Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland, imagine if they credited every bank account in Britain with £5,000. Then you would go out there and buy stuff, and suddenly there would be economic activity. Businesses would start saying, ‘Hang on a second, she can buy stuff now. I’ll produce things. I will employ people.’ So this is one step. It’s not the only one, but it would be a significant step to cut out the middleman. That’s the summary.   The second step is that we need public investment in the green transition, because the market cannot be relied upon to do that which is necessary in order to save the planet, because the market can never price things that don’t have prices. The air we breathe doesn’t have a price, so it can never be rationed through the market. It has to be done by us, by a political process. For that, we need a public investment bank that soaks up excess liquidity in the financial sector and presses it into the service of the green transition. Britain used to have one when I lived in Britain a long, long time ago. It was called the Post Office Savings Bank. Jeremy Corbyn had this programme in his manifesto in 2019, for creating a national investment bank. Boris Johnson talked about it again recently, but I haven’t seen what they’ve done or whether they’ve done it. The Germans have it: it’s called KFW, and it’s a very good investment bank. Imagine you have a national investment bank. They issue bonds—in other words, they borrow—they soak up liquidity from the financial sector, the Bank of England can guarantee those bonds and say, ‘If their price goes down, I’ll buy them’, so suddenly everybody who has money will want to buy those bonds because the Bank of England is standing behind them, and then you create a kitty from which you pay for the Green Industrial Revolution. I’m using those terms because they were first used by Jeremy Corbyn, but Boris Johnson has taken it now and he talks about the Green Industrial Revolution. So, go spend the money, go and create the green technologies. And what are they? We need to invest in hydrogen, to take over diesel. We need more renewable energy, from windmills and so on in the North Sea. We need batteries, because the Chinese are completely monopolising the battery technology. I’m not against them. Good on them, except Europe is not doing it, and we’re going to increasingly rely on battery technology coming from China. Other technologies are already being experimented with elsewhere, like compressed air, so you use renewable energy to compress air so its decompression can be used during peak times when other renewables are not available. There’s some artificial intelligence. These are some things that you can direct the investment to.   Those two steps, they’re not even that radical, they’re just using existing institutions and existing tools and weapons against the common problem. So you create good quality jobs. People have more money to spend. You’ll be able to end the constant humiliation of needy people who have to go through the wringer of Universal Credit and all those mechanisms that crush their soul to give them a penny. If everybody gets it, the Bank of England credits everybody with £5,000, and then the rich people can be taxed on this money at the end of the year anyway, so their money goes back to the state.   But finally, if you really want to democratise the economy, you have to rethink the whole notion of tradable shares. My view is that that’s a very bad idea. It started in 1599 in London with the British East India Company, where you had the notion that you take the ownership of a company and you break it down into little shares that are anonymous and that can be traded like confetti. We need to rethink that, because in the end what we’re saying is that somebody who has money can effectively own all the power of the large corporations. We would not tolerate that when it comes to politics. We would not have tradable votes in politics. Why do we have them in the general assembly of shareholders? But this is a much longer-term and a more radical rethink that I am proposing.   CJLPA : You mention that these two steps are not that radical. Do people in influence or in power know this? And if they do, why is it so hard for them to implement it?   YV : Of course they know. It’s not hard for them. They don’t want it because they make a lot of money at the moment due to the fact that it’s not being implemented. When I say cut out the middleman, I’m effectively saying cut out the commercial banks. Commercial bankers understand the importance of that, but they would rather die than see it happen. They will do anything. They will kick and scream and threaten us with blue murder if we dare do it. So the question is: who is running the show? Is it the bankers, or society? At the moment, it is the bankers.   CJLPA : I was wondering if we could turn just for a brief moment to your home country, Greece. You are a politician in the electoral branch of DiEM25, MeRA25. What do you think we—as Europeans or just as world citizens—should know about Greece at the moment, and are there any opportunities or challenges that you think Greece will face in the future?   YV : The challenge is never-ending. We are now in the eleventh year of our long winter of discontent, our Great Depression. Greece went bankrupt in 2010 and is more bankrupt today than it ever was. What I think is quite instructive, especially for young students of political economy and politics more generally, is: why don’t you hear about this anymore? Because up until a few years ago, Greece was front-page news. Its bankruptcy was almost on a daily basis on the front page of every newspaper around the world. Everybody considered it to be insolvent and a threat to the global financial system. That is no longer the case. It’s no longer appearing on the front page. Does this mean that it has been mended, as the powers that be claimed the case to be? No. We are even worse now than we were in 2010. You can ascertain this very easily. When we went bankrupt, we had a debt of, say, 300—forget the zeros. Now we have a debt of 380. Our income then was 240, now it’s 165. We are far more bankrupt today than we were in 2010, which proves that politics determines who is considered insolvent and who not, that insolvency is a political issue in the end, especially when it comes to countries. When I was finance minister, we were being discussed left, right and centre every day—on the BBC, everywhere—because I was putting up a struggle against our official lenders, the European Union in particular, who wanted us to take another credit card to pretend that we were repaying the previous credit cards. And I was saying no to that. They shut down our banks in order to force us to do it, and that was big news. It’s like a riot in an awful prison camp: when prisoners have had enough of awful conditions and they stage a riot, that becomes big news. Television vans arrive and you’ve got all the shots of the fracas in the prison. When the riot is put down by riot police, the television cameras leave, but that doesn’t mean that the situation in the prison is good. It means that it is no longer newsworthy. This is the same thing.   The lesson, I think, is that it’s not a technical question, the bankruptcy of a state. It’s a political question, and that has repercussions for Britain, it has implications for the United States. In the 1970s, Britain had to go to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) for a loan, and everybody said Britain was bankrupt. But Britain was not bankrupt. It was a political decision to go to the IMF. Britain had no reason to go to the IMF. There was no obligation to go to the IMF. The government at the time was a Labour government, the James Callaghan government, and they decided that they wanted to keep the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar steady. If you have an outflow of money, you can’t keep it steady unless there is an inflow. If you put, above all else, the maintenance of the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar, then you go to the IMF and you declare yourself bankrupt. But that was a political choice. There were losers and there were winners as a result of that. Those who had reason to be able to convert their pounds into dollars and not to lose money, especially large companies or Brits that had investments in the United States or outside Britain—they benefited from the declaration that Britain was bankrupt. Workers and weaker people suffered immensely without getting any of the benefits of having declared Britain to be bankrupt. These are, I think, especially talking to students in an academic environment, the lessons from Greece. When it comes to a corner store, bankruptcy is more or less a technical problem. If the corner store’s revenues are not up to it, then of course at some point you have to close down. It’s an inevitability. It’s a technical point. But when it comes to the bankruptcy of a nation, and therefore the questions about public debt, and deficits, and austerity, and whether Rishi Sunak is right to say that we will have to start repaying now because otherwise we will be in trouble—none of that is a technical issue. All of it is political. It is a question of which social groups’ interests those in authority are prioritising.   CJLPA : Are we already seeing this sort of politicisation with the pandemic at the moment?   YV : Absolutely, we already see it. You already see that, including the pandemic, as a result of the process of creating money that I described before—where the central bank prints money for the banks and the banks give money to the corporations—you have a gigantic increase in inequality because little people suffering from COVID-19 or COVID-19-related ill effects on their economic circumstances are absolutely desperate. They’ve lost their livelihood. Their revenues have gone down by 80%. They’re worried about furlough: is it going to end? When will it end? But those who are in receipt of wealth injections, as a result of the Bank of England’s money printing, they’ve seen their income and their wealth multiply at ridiculous   levels. The Swiss bank UBS came out with a report that, only in the United States, since the beginning, between March and December of 2020, during the first nine or ten months of the pandemic, the richest Americans increased their income and wealth combined by $1 trillion as a result of doing nothing. Just by sitting there, in their sleep. So yes, we’ve already seen that. Now that Britain, due to a rather decent vaccination process, is facing exit from the pandemic and the opening up of the economy and so on, austerity is coming back as the chosen policy of the Conservative Party. And austerity is just another form of class war, and it is more plundering of the victims of a crisis on behalf of those who benefited from it.   There will be a post-pandemic. Maybe we’ll have another one later on, but this one is going to die. The Spanish flu died after 1918 even though there were no vaccines. Now we have vaccines as well, so it will go. But what will be left behind? If you think about it, we do have some recent evidence. 2008 was a catastrophe for global capitalism, especially Western capitalism, and it got its effects. Those who caused the crisis, the bankers, exited the crisis with more power than what they had before the crisis, and the little people were even weaker than they were before.   CJLPA : I wanted to quickly ask you about Progressive International. I wanted to specifically ask: why does Progressive International believe that the time is now to create a collective, international, progressive front?   YV : I think the time was in 2008. We are late, and the reason why I think that is because, as I mentioned before, 2008 was our generation’s 1929. It ended capitalism as we know it, or as we knew it, and created a new regime which I call techno-feudalism. This is the result of regressive international coming together. This is, if you want, the G20 decision of April 2009 under the chairmanship of Gordon Brown, when all the bankers, central bankers, finance ministers, prime ministers, and presidents got together and decided to save capitalism. The way they did it—I’m not criticising it, just describing it—was to create huge solidarity between bankers. The bankers of the world got together and saved each other by transferring their losses onto the public ledger. That was a clear demonstration that internationalism works for the bankers, and then once this was combined with austerity for everybody else, you had discontent. And discontent breeds populism, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, all those things that come out of humiliation and deep-seated discontent, just like it happened in the 1930s. We saw that with the success of Brexit, of Donald Trump, of Bolsonaro, of Modi, of Le Pen, of Salvini, of the Alternative für Deutschland, and so on. The bankers got together, created their international, and worked. Then the fascists got together and internationalised, and they’re a huge power around the world, even if they lost the White House. Trump is gaining strength, as far as I’m concerned, in America. Fascism is solidifying, if anything, under Biden even more than it did under Trump. The bankers and the fascists internationalised. It’s time for progressives to internationalise. That’s what Bernie Sanders and I thought in November 2018. We met in Vermont and asked, ‘Will anyone join us?’ So we started.   CJLPA : Have there been any challenges or any achievements thus far with Progressive International?   YV : The problem was that we had the American presidential campaign intervene between November 2019 and now, which meant that Bernie could not be part of it for legal reasons. Senators cannot participate in international [organisations], especially candidates for the presidency, so that went into abeyance for a while. Then Bernie’s involvement with Joe Biden—and he was running his economic policy through the Senate—meant that he could not be part of it. So we were delayed by this. Then we launched about a year ago properly, and we did this on the basis of bringing together people. The organisations that are part of the Progressive International have about 200 million members around the world. Our first major campaign was called ‘Make Amazon Pay’. It started on the day of Black Friday last December. It’s a beginning. I’m very proud of what we did. We had a rolling strike in warehouses of Amazon pushing for better wages and conditions for workers around the world, and it started in Bangladesh, it moved to India, shifting time zones, then to Germany, then to New Jersey, then to Seattle, then to Australia. This was the first attempt to do anything like that. It had never been done before, and we’re very heartened by that. Now, we need to bring in consumers with boycotts, not just against Amazon. The philosophy is this: we need local action in support of communities that need it, with a global perspective and global solidarity. This combination is hard and essential at the same time.   And also, we have gone from the model of campaigns and collective actions of the nineteenth century, where you combined maximum private personal sacrifice by participants with minimal personal benefits, [to a system where you have minimal  private personal sacrifice and maximum  personal benefits]. If you think about it, a gold mine going on strike back in the nineteenth century was a maximum sacrifice because it meant no food on the table, no wages. It meant that some of them were victimised, some of them were beaten up, arrested. It is like asking people to sacrifice themselves. What was the benefit to themselves individually? On average, very low. Even if they got a wage rise, everybody got it, including those who didn’t strike and those who broke the strike. This cost-benefit analysis at the private level of early reforms of action has been very detrimental to the common cause. Maybe we need to do things differently. So we have minimal personal sacrifice, especially if it’s a global campaign like, for example, don’t visit amazon.com for a day—it’s a tiny sacrifice for you, I don’t want to say never buy from Amazon, but, for a day or a week—with maximum impact. As well as campaigns, we were represented in Bolivia during the election campaign, now in Ecuador. We are running a campaign in Turkey against the banning of the third-largest party and the torture of Members of Parliament. We are being active everywhere, as far as we can.   CJLPA : In the introduction you wrote for the Communist Manifesto , you poignantly wrote that a dilemma faces young people today, similarly to that faced in the time of Marx and Engels. The question is: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing, and living together? In light of this, what piece of advice would you give to young people today who will likely set foot in positions of influence or who seek change?   YV : Make this choice with a clear understanding that you are making this choice. Don’t allow yourself to drift into a kind of lifestyle by default. I’m not a moralising kind of guy. [George] Bernard Shaw, I believe, put it like this: there are people who try to adapt themselves to the world, and there are other people who try to adapt the world to their view of what the world should be like. The latter, of course, means sacrifice. It means that the world is not going to take kindly to being told by you that it should be different. But you’ve got to make this choice consciously, you’ve got to weigh up the pros and cons and know what kind of deal you are ending up with. If you choose to go against the grain, you are probably not going to make a lot of money, you are probably going to have quite a lot of heartache, maybe threats and so on, if you go against the insiders as I say. But at the same time, you will have the immense satisfaction that you are autonomous, that you are not simply reflecting the terrain around you like a chameleon. On the other hand, I’m not going to be sitting in judgment of somebody who says, ‘There’s only one life, I’m not going to be struggling all the time, I want to get a cushy nice job and I want to have the money and the time to go travelling or go skiing.’ I highly respect that too. But make that choice consciously. Don’t simply drift into the default position. This interview was conducted by Teresa Turkheimer, a final-year undergraduate in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, working towards an MSc in European and International Public Policy at the London School of Economics in the 2021-22 academic year. Her interests lie in European politics, European Union foreign and security policy, and political philosophy.

Nancy Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer from the Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward PA, and an Associate Tenant with Doughty Street Chambers, London, UK. The inspiring story of her efforts in freeing Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantanamo Bay, where he was held from 2002 to 2016 without charge, were recently captured by the legal drama film The Mauritanian , in which she was played by Jodie Foster. CJLPA : Welcome today, Nancy. I’d like to begin by thanking you again for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , to discuss your career as a human rights criminal law defence lawyer. Throughout your career, you’ve been involved in the most high profile of cases, representing clients in a wide range of criminal cases, involving white collar crime, drug trafficking, murder, and terrorism. Equally, you are a highly respected and renowned lawyer in international human rights law, having represented clients before the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Inevitably, there are many legal topics to discuss based on your work, but in the interests of time I thought that in today’s interview we could focus specifically on your work in defending terrorism, and in particular the implications protecting human rights, or really the lack thereof in such cases. Based on that, I’d like to begun by asking you why you think it is that when dealing with the crime of terrorism it is treated so fundamentally different in a court of law compared to other barbaric crimes such as murder, rape, or kidnapping. Nancy Hollander : The fundamental difference between terrorism and other crimes, and why I don’t think we should have the crime of terrorism, is that it always looks at a community, either a racial community, an ethnic community, or some other community. It’s not a crime involving one person, so even if one person is charged with terrorism, it tends to include the whole community. That to me is the difference. It is a crime on top of another crime; It’s vague and it’s unnecessary. There has never been an international definition of terrorism and I doubt that there ever will be because no one can agree on exactly what it is. CJLPA : That’s interesting. Do you think you have this perspective in retrospect after working on terrorism cases or is that a thought that you had before taking on the cases? NH : Before I took on the cases I did not really think about it to tell you the truth. I was asked to talk about the history of the crime of terrorism at some seminar I was at in the Hague, and I looked into it and realised that my thoughts are not new on this. People have been saying for many years that we should have never had the crime of terrorism and I started looking into it more and I realised…You know you’ve heard people say one man’s terrorist is one man’s freedom fighter. Well, there is truth to that! And if you look at history, who is a terrorist and who is not? The founder of the US, George Washington, was considered a terrorist. Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist. Jerry Adams, Yasser Arafat, I mean how many more do we need who were considered terrorists at one time but at the same time became heroes. So if you just charge people with what they’re accused of you don’t get into that issue. CJLPA : I’d like to get more specific in some of the cases that you have worked on, beginning with the Holy Land case. In this case you defended Shukri Abu Baker, who was charged with terrorism alongside other co-defendants. Could you briefly walk me through the main ways where justice and the rule of law were denied in this case? NH : There was no justice in that case. It’s the worst case of my entire legal career as far as I am concerned. Shukri and one of his co-defendants, Ghassan Elashi, are each doing 65 years in jail for the crime of feeding children. That is essentially what they were doing. The Holy Land case…I can send you an article I wrote, if I haven’t already sent it to you; which really outlines the whole history. It was a talk that I gave, that I made into an article. But they’re a case where they are charged with material support for terrorism. There was never any accusation that Shukri and any of his co-defendants committed any what we would call even ‘terrorist acts’. They didn’t blow up anything. They didn’t bomb anything. They were not accused of making antisemitic remarks, even. They were just accused of providing charity to people in Palestine and other countries and according to the government, by providing that charity they were somehow assisting Hamas. It was vague, there was never any allegation of them being related to Hamas. It was simply that they were changing the hearts and minds of the people, by the people they were feeding. It’s a tragic case and it’s an example of how they were accused of something that other people did. So during these trials, I can’t tell you how many times it showed the same bus being blown up. The same American flag being trampled on. But they were never accused of doing those things and during the trial it was clear that they didn’t do those things. Other people did those things. And that’s an example of how terrorism has become so broad that under an American case, humanitarian law, I can’t even assist some organization or individual who’s been designated as a terrorist on how to change that, how to come into the democratic process. By assisting them, I’m committing acts of material support. It’s a terrible case and other things happened in that case. It’s the first case in American history, US history, where an expert was allowed to testify in secret. Basically, we were not allowed to know his real name, we were not allowed to know who he was, we were told we couldn’t research him and yet he was supposedly an expert on Hamas. And that meant that there was no right to real cross examination and certainly no right to confrontation, which is something that is required in the US Constitution. The Sixth Amendment says everyone has the right to confrontation. Well, you can’t confront someone if you are not allowed to know anything about them. CJLPA : Based on what you have just mentioned about not being able to cross-examine the expert and also the video of the bus being blown up but there being no actual linkage to the defendants, how and why was that even admissible and what would you do in those situations when it is quite clearly against the law, but the judges are enabling it. Is there any way around it? NH : You can only do what you can do. You can try to convince the jury that the government is wrong; which we did in the first place. We got a mistrial. But then the government came back with four, maybe five, different pieces of evidence that were clearly more prejudicial than probative. That the appellant court said should not have been admitted, but then said it was a harmless error, which probably was a political decision on the part of the court. How do you confront that? I don’t know. You know, we will never give up on this case, we’ve gone everywhere we can with the courts but we can just hope for a miracle, clemency or something that happens, where they get out eventually. CJLPA : Further to how you said that this case seemed to be more political, does this experience make you feel that some legal decisions are pre-determined when the government gets involved, despite lawyers’ best efforts? And do you think there the rule of law can still prevail in such circumstances? NH : I don’t think the cases are necessarily predetermined, but throughout the process, the decisions that prosecutors make, judges make, are weighed against the defendants, certain defendants. Certainly Muslims in the US now, black people as far as we can remember, Native Americans. The US has never been a democracy for all the people. It’s a misnomer. People believe that at one point it was a great country and we have to get back there. Well, when was that? When was the rule of law applied to everyone? Native Americans were slaughtered, genocide. We started with slaves. It’s very hard to accept that the rule of law really exists for everyone in the United States. It’s true in other countries too. What we want to do and what we have to keep doing as defence lawyers is keep pushing, so that the rule of law does apply to everyone. And so in the case of the US, the US legal system does become a justice system, which it isn’t now. It’s not a US justice system, it’s a US legal system that provides justice sometimes and sometimes doesn’t. CJLPA : Based on that, how does a lawyer operate in a justice system where they cannot always trust it, because as you said the rule of law is not always going to be applicable to everyone? You take on a case and the case process that is occurring in the courts is going to be prejudiced. Decisions are going to be made that aren’t necessarily reflective of the justice system that the US is meant to embody. How does a lawyer take on that case knowing that that’s what’s going to happen? NH : There is always a point because there is always the possibility of a miracle, and I don’t mean miracle in a spiritual sense or religious sense. I mean that there are people within the legal system on both sides who are good people and want to do the right thing. I represented a woman for many years in New York and the way I got her out of prison was through the help of the prosecutor. Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a good example of the assistance of the prosecutor. There are people on both sides in the criminal legal system who do want to see justice prevail and there are judges who want to see justice prevail. And when you don’t have those, you just have to keep fighting, and when you do have those you fight together to do everything you can to provide for the rule of law, and that’s what we have to do. You know, fortunately, in the US system, everyone is entitled to a lawyer. Everyone is entitled to have at least one person stand with them and fight against the power of the government. And that person can make a difference. It happens, it doesn’t always happen. Doesn’t happen enough, but we have to keep pushing so it will happen more and more, in the international system as well. CJLPA : Transitioning to a different high-profile case that you worked on, Mohamedou Slahi. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration promised to find the terrorists responsible, no matter what the costs. Mr Slahi was arrested and was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay Detention camp in 2002 and you got involved in 2005, I believe, to defend him. What prompted you or what intrigued you to take on this case specifically? NH : I wanted to do a Guantanamo case and I wasn’t really looking for one specifically. But this one fell into my lap when a lawyer in France, whom I knew, wrote and said he been requested by a lawyer in Mauritania to look into this case and was I interested. And I said yes. I knew virtually nothing about Mohamedou when I started. I knew what he was accused of and that was it. But this was the one that came to me, so this is the one I took. CJLPA : What would you say, when you began this case, were the key elements in your case strategy to prove his innocence? NH : You’ve got to remember he was never arrested, he was captured. There was no legal process happening here. There was no legitimate US court happening here. He was captured in Mauritania. He was taken to Jordan, where he was tortured for seven or eight months. Then rendered to Jordan, rendered to Afghanistan, rendered to Guantanamo, tortured in Guantanamo, interrogated in Guantanamo, and ultimately the court said that he and others could file petitions for writs of Habeas Corpus. But the government’s position was, well they can file them but we are never going to answer them. And it wasn’t until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled in the Boumediene case that the government actually had to answer these petitions. And then we at least had a legal forum in which to conduct the case. But there was never a real one; other than the Habeas case, which we won in 2009, there was no legal process happening here. CJLPA : As you said, it was based on the Habeas Corpus, that you were able to take on this case and essentially go to court because the US actually never charged Mr Slahi for the crimes that they alleged. Do you believe that, based on that, it was irrespective or irrelevant whether or not, particularly Mr Slahi but also other detainees in Guantanamo Bay, do you think it was irrelevant in such circumstances when such due process was denied? NH : Yes, it became irrelevant and it’s still irrelevant. There are still thirty or thirty-one of them in there. Seventeen of whom I believe are already cleared for release and all but five, six, seven, eight maybe have never been charged with any crime. They have been there since 2002. That’s not a legal process. That is not the rule of law being carried out. If some American/US citizen is in a foreign country and being held for 20 years without being charged, the US government would go crazy. And yet that’s what it is doing and has been doing and people have been tortured. We were able to get a number of those people out and people were tried. One person has been tried, convicted, his case reversed. Another one pleaded guilty, his case was reversed. I have another one there who is facing the death penalty and there are 9/11 guys that are there and are a couple of others who are facing charges in this military commission. But the military commission is not like any court that is structured under US law; it’s under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for Soldiers. It’s not under the federal rules for the US. It’s a made-up court, and due process doesn’t apply. How do you have the rule of law when due process doesn’t apply? CJLPA : Why do you think, after everything is exposed in Guantanamo Bay, that this prison system still exists and how does the US government get away from that? NH : The US is the bully of the world. The US has troops on over 150 of the 200 odd countries on this planet, on the ground. So the US gets away with whatever it wants, basically. And that’s how it has gotten away with this. The US stands up and talks about the human rights violations in China, the torture of the Russians, Cuba, and yet the US is as guilty or more guilty than any of these other countries but it just can get away with it because of its power. Of its economic power, of its strategic power, and that’s how it gets away with it. Empires rule. That’s been the history of the world. CJLPA : So in terms of the next steps for Guantanamo Bay and supposedly shutting it down. Do you think it means more lawyers needing to get involved in these cases and trying them or is it more starting at the root of the problem and trying to work with the politicians and putting more pressure on them? Where would you see the ultimate change factor? NH : Everyone in Guantanamo who wants a lawyer now has one and has had one for many years. And these lawyers keep fighting and that’s how we end up with one or two getting out once in a while. President Biden promised to close Guantanamo, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo. Neither one took decisive action. President Obama is responsible for Mohamedou spending another seven years in prison, because we won this case, A lot of people were winning the Habeas at that time and all the government had to do under Obama, Obama’s Justice Department, Obama’s Attorney General was just not appeal. They go home. They wouldn’t have to worry about what country they go to or where they go. They would get out, And yet most of them were appealed and so Mohamedou sat there for another seven years. And even after he won the second thing which was not a court, the Periodic Review Board, which was six intelligence agencies that found unanimously that he was not a significant threat to the US or its allies, it took several more months to get him out. And then he did not get a passport for three years because the US, as it did with all the countries, told Mauritania they couldn’t give him a passport. So, the US just has its claws everywhere and all you can do is keep fighting and that’s what we continue to do. I fight for my other client, Ibrahim Al Nasiri, in the international court and the Commission lawyers fight for him in his criminal case. The other lawyers who represent the defendants in the criminal cases or in the Habeas cases continue to fight for them. We continue to try to find places that will take them under these strict US rules. And you know there were a number of, and still are, Yemenis in Guantanamo. And they at one point were beginning to go home. And then a Nigerian guy tried to light his underwear on fire in an airplane over Detroit. And he had been recruited and got the equipment that he had from a Yemeni guy. So President Obama said, no more Yemenis go home. Well, that’s collective punishment. And that’s what happened and they got stuck there. And now there is almost no Yemen for them to go home to. They have to go to other places. CJLPA : Despite the disappointing outcome with Mr Slahi and how the Obama administration appealed it, how do you remain motivated in those circumstances? What did you learn from that case and defending Mr Slahi that you can now apply in these current cases where you are continuing the same fight, where you are working for a system that does not always respect the due process and the justice system? NH : I learned a long time ago, in the law, that you just keep going and hope for a miracle, as I told you. With the woman I represented, Precious Paddel, all of a sudden we had a different judge and the prosecutor said now we have a chance and we did. In Mohamedou’s case, all of a sudden he was called up to the Periodic Review Board, one of the last ones called up. After years of thinking what we going to do, we’ve run out of things to do. Something appeared. That’s always possible. So you just keep going, and that’s what I tell lawyers, you just keep going. You keep thinking of new things, thinking of something else. What else can we do? How can we do something that brings this to people’s attention? In Mohamedou’s case, I believe his book, Guantanamo Diary , helped get him out. And the film, The Mauritanian , we now hope will help others get out because it gets the conversation back. People are speaking about it, thinking about it, talking about it. In all criminal cases, which is what I have been involved with, internationally or domestically. You just do everything you know to do, you investigate every corner. You do everything you have the time, energy, finances to do, so that you don’t miss anything. And it won’t work all the time. It won’t work a lot of the time, but it will work sometimes and you’ve got to keep pressing for it. You know, we recently celebrated the anniversary of a case called Gideon v Wainwright. Gideon was a guy in Florida who wrote a handwritten letter to the Supreme Court of the US and said ‘I didn’t have a lawyer’ and as a result of that case, everyone who is charged with a felony in the United States is entitled to a lawyer. Anyone who is going to go to jail, even for a misdemeanour is entitled to a lawyer. But that wasn’t the case before. Before Brown v Board of Education said separate is not equal and said there shouldn’t be segregation in the US schools; there was segregation. So people have to fight that fight. People still have to fight to make sure that a lawyer means a breathing lawyer, an awake lawyer, a not drunk lawyer. So those cases keep happening. But you just keep building on them and fighting for due process in the rule of law and that’s what lawyers do. That’s what we do. It is hard and it is depressing sometimes, often, and its dispiriting but you just keep doing it. CJLPA : Is there a way to also increase accountability of the US government? So to, say, sue certain officials in such circumstances? NH : Yes, there is a way to increase accountability through lawsuits and civil cases against police departments and against police, but those cases are also very difficult. I don’t do them but those are cases where things do change. Police departments have been forced to change through pressure. Pressure on politicians. Getting a politician who is on your side, to focus on those. Electing different people can make a difference. And in the case of Mr Al Nasiri the accountability that he wants, for people to know what happened to him because he was tortured in the CIA black sites. We had to go to the International Courts. And we have had a success. We won two hundred thousand euros for his family, through the European Court of Human Rights. We have a case in front of the International Criminal Court, a case in the UK, a case in front of the UN working committee on arbitrated detention and that will never get him out, but it will get accountability, where other organisations, people, politicians in other countries will see what happened to him. The US is never going to answer to any of those courts. Recently we heard that there was an arrest warrant against Putin from the ICC and I was reading quite a bit about it. And I noticed, they didn’t say ‘well, Russia doesn’t acknowledge this court’. Well, they also didn’t say that the US doesn’t acknowledge this court either… CJLPA : Why do you think it is that the US would never sign to these courts and these Treaties? NH : Because the US is afraid that that will bring out things that happened which the CIA did. That the US will find itself getting arrest warrants for individuals in the US who have committed war crimes. In fact, there is a law in the US that is euphemistically called the Hague Invasion Act and it is a law in the US that says if any American is locked up in the Hague as result of an ICC arrest warrant, US soldiers can go in and get them out. The US worked very hard to get the Rome Statute passed and then said ‘not for us, doesn’t apply to us’. CJLPA : On that point then, what do you think are the implications of the way the US currently operate in outside the international law by committing torture. Could this impact Americans that are currently wrongly detained in other countries such as Iran, where there is also torture? NH : Of course it can apply to other Americans and it has. We’ve seen other countries say ‘the US does this, so we can do it’. There have been numerous amicus briefs written by former admirals, former generals, saying this is dangerous for Americans in other countries. And of course it is because if the US can do it, why can’t others do it to Americans? And yet that argument doesn’t seem to ever get anywhere because the US is the world police and there is a lot of arrogance that goes with that. CJLPA : I’d like to also talk a bit about a common theme that comes up in criminal law, amongst lawyers about innocent versus guilty and I think this is a question that often comes up from, I suppose, academics and people when they ask a criminal lawyer, defense lawyer ‘what if you know your client is guilty?’. How do you, from your perspective as a criminal defense lawyer, explain this, even in the context of defending the most barbaric crimes? NH : It is not my job to decide who is guilty and who is not guilty. It’s never my job to prove someone is innocent. The concept is, is the person guilty or not guilty and it’s up to the government in the US to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the standard in most places: proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that’s the government’s burden. My burden is to defend my client zealously against the government. If, in the end, if the government uses fair tactics, follows the rule of law, provides for due process, and the defendant is convicted, then we will argue about sentencing. But my job is not to be the jury. That’s not my job. My job is to, in the US, essentially defend the US Constitution for everyone, because if it doesn’t apply to my client, it might not apply to someone else, and I don’t think anyone can ever say they won’t be accused of a crime. Someone can say they would never commit a certain crime; they can never say they won’t be accused of committing it. So, that person wants to have the same protection that my client has. I had a client once who I was defending, he was a Republican, who was an oil and gas man and he called me and said, ‘I pulled the lever on the voting booth straight Democrat because I was scared you would find out’. And I said well, the quickest way to turn a Republican into a Democrat is to get him accused of a crime and all of a sudden, ‘What? What is the judge thinking?’. Now you know. You have to approach it that way. I tell people who say, ‘well I could defend certain crimes but not others’, that they’ve got to a really rethink whether you can be a criminal defence lawyer. There are clients I don’t want to defend and I have; I can make that choice. But public defenders don’t get to make that choice. They shouldn’t, they have to represent everyone and everyone the same. And that’s the way it must be. Just because you represent someone who commits a murder, or child abuse, or fraud, doesn’t mean that you did it. It just means that you are providing what the Constitution requires and making sure that there is a rule of law in the country. If we don’t have a rule of law at all, we have a police state. CJLPA : Absolutely. I think inevitably, it doesn’t matter guilty or innocent, every individual has the right to his protection and the right to be treated with human dignity. And that goes back also to Guantanamo Bay. I think a lot of people spoke about the prisoners, whether or not they did it or were they involved. From my point of view, and from what I have read about Guantanamo Bay and the cases, it doesn’t matter if they did do it or they didn’t do it. You read into the torture that they have endured, that the government was responsible for. It’s despicable. No human, no matter what they have done, should ever endure that treatment and they should have had that protection and the justice system failed them because that ever occurred. And so on that point then, I thought it was quite interesting, watching The Mauritanian , which I thought was a fantastic film, I did notice as well that there was a lot of discussion of innocence versus guilt and did he do it, did he not do it. Do you think that was important in the film? NH : I think it was important in the film. It was never important to me. Teri [Duncan] actually, is a death penalty lawyer who represents people on death row and would never have cared in real life whether someone was guilty or not, but the role she took in the film was kind of to be a proxy for the audience. We know that is what the audience is thinking at that point and that’s when I kick her out, you have to leave. Which never happened by the way. There was another lawyer involved who quit but not Teri. But Teri agreed to do this for the film’s sake, to combine these people, so that the audience would have someone to identify with. That whole scene is really interesting because I really would tell someone who took that position, you need to rethink whether you want to be a criminal defence lawyer and you are not on this case anymore. That would have happened. I wouldn’t have been as rude as Jodie was. Jodie has said she was much meaner than I am and ruder. But I did say the last words that are in that scene and those were my words and I must have said them to Jodie when we were talking at one point because she mouthed them. ‘You’ve gotta believe your own shit’, and it’s something that we call trial psychosis. When you get into it you really got to believe, wow, I can really win this. Even when you know you can’t. You’ve got to believe it, you’ve got to believe it and work towards it. And in Mohamedou’s case, there were overwhelming allegations against him that we had to fight one after the other and it turned out that they were all made of nothing. But if you read the police, the first reports you would think he was guilty. Which is true in all criminal cases, if all you do is read the police reports you would think everyone is guilty. And then you got to start parsing it. But I did think it was important for the audience to see how that debate worked out. CJLPA : Reflecting back on your work in that case, today, what would be your advice to present-day lawyers defending a client in a similar situation, not necessarily Guantanamo Bay case, but cases where they are accused of terrorism and confined in the most inhumane prison? Would you have approached the case differently now, thinking back of how it worked through all those years? NH : I don’t know what I would have done differently in Mohamedou’s case, other cases where I have re-thought what I did. But in that case, I think we did everything we knew how to do. I wish we had done some of the investigations that we weren’t able to do, that we didn’t have the funds to do. And maybe things would have moved a little faster. And I am not sure anything would have made a difference at that point at that case. But you know, my advice to people is just don’t give up, turn every corner, be a lawyer, take care of your client. Clients’ stories are the most important and most crimes that are committed by people are the worst five minutes of their lives and they would never do it again. Everyone should be treated with human dignity. And that is the bottom line. Treat your clients the same way you would treat everyone else and care for them, listen to them, listen to what they have to say and do everything you possibly can to win the case. As long as you do it ethically. CJLPA : You mentioned that in Mohamedou’s case you wouldn’t have done something different, but potentially in other cases. Could you expand a bit more on that? NH : Yes, in my first cases. I tried a whole bunch of felony cases when I was a brand-new lawyer. And I know, if I looked back and I did those cases, the ones I lost, and most of them as a public defender, I would say ‘wow, why didn’t I think of this’, ‘why didn’t I think of that’. I didn’t really have very many people to help me at that time, I had some. I went in, I was thrown in and there are other cases where I just feel like I missed something along the way, and I wish I could go back and do them again. CJLPA : What was the most memorable case you have done and why particularly it is that one? Not necessarily the most important, but the most memorable that stuck with you over the years. NH : I really thought about this question, Nadia. There are cases that no one knows about, and I suppose they might be the most memorable, because people know about Mohamedou’s case, they know about Chelsea Manning’s case, they know about Precious Padel’s case, they know about other cases I have won. Lots and lots of high-profile cases, but I was thinking about it. I represented people where we were able to get the charges dismissed and no one ever knew about it. And isn’t that really the best for the client. I remember representing a lawyer who was charged with child abuse. Two people who were charged with child abuse. In both cases they were completely innocent, completely innocent and the cases were dismissed after investigation, and no one ever knew that they were charged. It was the end. Came and went. There was this other guy who was accused of 13 murders and that case people did know about because he got arrested. So it was really high profile, so that case was dismissed. The ones where no one ever knew about them I think are the best. Because that’s where I did my job, because that’s where the criminal legal system worked. Somebody is charged with a crime and then the case goes away because it should and to me those are the most memorable. CJLPA : Do you think that also corresponds with the fact that there was a less of a public eye on it, which in a way offered it more of a due process, having the media cut out of it and the politicians not involved? NH : I do think that matters, a lot. I know that the child abuse cases that I was involved in twenty years ago were a lot different than if I were to be involved in the same case today. The press would be all over it. And it would be a real tragedy for both the complaining witness, who needed some psychiatric care, and for my client, who needed not to have to go through this in the public eye. So I think in many cases that would be different. And that is unfortunate because, you know, there is so much, so much news now about things we never used to know about. We have amber alerts, which we never used to have. We have twenty-four-hour news. We have draconian sentences. And so all of this goes against in many ways the rule of law. Yes, of course we need to protect real victims of rape, real victims of child abuse. But there are times where you don’t know who the real victim is, when the case starts. Is it the defendant or the complaining witness and who is the real victim here? And that is often true in the sex related cases. And those are the ones where they keep the complaining witness’s name and you don’t get to know who that person is, if it is a child. But you know who the defendant is and maybe they shouldn’t, maybe neither one be public until we know where these cases are going. The news is different now than it was twenty years ago. And in many ways that is unfortunate. We don’t have more crime, I keep telling people this. I tell people who say ‘well, it was safer when your son was young’, that, no, it wasn’t, it was actually less safe in the eighties in the US than it is now. Except for murders which went up in the US, during the pandemic, and nobody quite knows why. I mean if you leave the pandemic and the peculiarities of that time out of it. Crime is down, but we never hear more about it. So you’ve got these helicopter parents who won’t let their kids go outside alone. And yet, they are safer than when I let my son go out alone, forty years ago. CJLPA : What would you say is an appropriate balance between having that privacy in the courtroom and the trial taking its course and then equally the public also having awareness of what’s going on around them and their surroundings and the crimes occurring in their neighbourhoods? NH : Well, it is a balance and the public has right to know, and that also benefits someone who is accused because you want the public to be aware, you don’t want to have trials in private, and so there is a balance. But in the balance the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to protection in favour of confrontation, in due process, the right to a fair trial, always has to be the balance that you look for, always, that balance has to be the one that tips the scale. CJLPA : It would be interesting to know from your experience as a lawyer and working with various other lawyers, what have you noticed makes a good lawyer or a distinguishing one? NH : A good lawyer, in my view, and I tell this to people coming out of law school and people I have been about to hire over years, is someone who is for lack of better words a full-service lawyer. If my client is going to jail and my client says ‘but there is nobody home to take care of my cat’, it’s my job to make sure that the cat gets taken care of. Whenever people go into prison to meet to the client, talk about the crime, talk about the defence, but also make sure that the client is okay, make sure that the client is getting the medicine, and getting the visits he needs, or she needs, make sure that everyone is alright all the time, and listen to the client, listen to the client’s stories and make sure you understand who they are, go visit the crime scene but also visit the family, talk about the history, talk about who this person is, get to know that person, and just be everything that person needs, because the lawyer is ultimately the only person between the defendant and the accused and the world and the government. It’s pretty simple. CJLPA : Absolutely. One more question, just to wrap everything up: in your legacy of defending human rights law throughout your career, how would you want this fight to continue by your successors and what do you hope is going to improve over the years in the justice system? NH : If I were starting today, I’d be figuring out how to represent migrants and refugees around the world. There are people in refugee camps all over the world that we don’t know anything about. Hundreds and hundreds of people who were born, live, die in camps where they get no services, no UN services, no NGO services, they don’t even know they exist. They’re huge, they’re all over the place. And that’s where I think that’s where I would devote my time if I were starting now. I work in an organisation, I’m on its advisory board at the International Bridges to Justice and a goal is to provide lawyers to everyone, and making sure that people who are in prison in countries that have very few lawyers get lawyers, to make sure lawyers are trained all over the world, make sure that the world understands why we need lawyers, and why people who think they will never commit a crime need to make sure that everyone has a lawyer to protect them, and their families, and the rule of law for everyone. But I tell lawyers now when they say ‘what would you do?’, I say I would do immigration law and migrant law, refugee law, because that to me is becoming the biggest issue around the world. CJLPA : Absolutely. I agree on that. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024.

The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a great collective with a single collective notion of the public good, and treat dissent as antisocial, even treasonable. It will be less accepting of the idea that there are islands of human life in which, extremes apart, individuals are entitled to make their own decisions irrespective of the wishes of the state. The defining feature of totalitarian societies is a model of the relations between the state and the citizen in which individuals are first and foremost instruments of collective policy. This once distinguished them from democracies. The distinction will become less important, as formerly liberal societies move closer to the totalitarian model.   The first symptoms of this change were apparent well before anyone had heard of either Brexit or COVID-19. The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time, especially among the young, and particularly in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The UK has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. Only in Bulgaria and Greece is it higher. Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey 54% of respondents agreed that ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’, and only 23% disagreed. As many as 42% thought that the government ‘shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament’.   These attitudes are closely correlated to economic performance. People who are dissatisfied with the economy, people who feel economically left behind or pessimistic about the future, are more likely to reject democracy. This is not altogether surprising. Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the nineteenth century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion, and European supremacy. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history has been more chequered, but the trajectory has generally been upward. In the life of any community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to autocracy in much of Europe. Three-quarters of a century have passed since 1945, years marked by rapid economic growth and exponential improvements in standards of living. But today, the outlook is darker. Most Western democracies face problems of faltering growth and relative economic decline, of redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality, most of them the legacy of past successes. These trends are likely to be aggravated in the UK by Brexit, and nearly everywhere by COVID-19. Climate change is a future challenge the implications of which are only beginning to dawn on people. Most of the measures proposed for dealing with it involve curtailing economic growth. Economic pessimism generates feelings of disempowerment which tend to discredit democratic institutions.   Against an unfavourable background like this, what will Brexit and COVID-19 contribute to these trends?   The Brexit crisis proved to be a watershed moment for British democracy. The first task of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens, so that they can live together in community without the systematic application of force. Democracies operate on the basis that although the majority has authorised policies which the minority rejects, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is legally and constitutionally possible for a bare majority to take all the political spoils without engaging with the minority. But a democracy which persistently did that would not accommodate differences, but brutalise them. It would cease to be a political community, and could hardly function as a democracy.   For this reason, thoughtful democrats have always recognised that too much democracy is bad for democracy. They have been able to avoid the self-destructive tendency of democracy by spurning the direct decision of contentious issues by the electorate, and opting for representative politics instead. Representative politics are essentially an institutionalised system of compromise. The rigidity of party discipline in the House of Commons means that compromise is rare across the House. But it happens indirectly because political parties have to accommodate a broad spectrum of opinion and interests if they want to be elected. People are naturally averse to compromise about issues on which they feel strongly. They prefer not to engage with the views of those with whom they profoundly disagree. Parliamentary systems force them to do so. Although political parties can exploit a single issue in a moment of national emotion to carry them to power without compromise, in the medium and long term they cannot afford to become ideological sects. If they did, they would move to the margins of politics where they would have limited influence and no prospect of power. This is what nearly happened to the Labour Party in 1983 and again in 2019.   The Brexit referendum of 2016 was adopted as a way of circumventing the Parliamentary process. The theory is that once the answer has been supplied by the majority, it is the answer of the entire community. This notion is both false and profoundly damaging. It is false because the minority still exists and has no reason to alter its opinion simply because it is a minority. It is damaging because it creates a sense of entitlement in the majority, which dispenses them from the need to engage with those who disagree. Referenda have often been used as the tools of tyrants. Napoleons I and III, Hitler, and Putin have all used them as a license to institute authoritarian governments. In Britain, the effect of the Brexit referendum was more subtle. It did not bring a tyrant to power. What it did was to undermine representative politics and prevent it from accommodating differences among our people on one of the most contentious issues of modern times. Since an ability to do that is essential to the long-term survival of a democratic constitution, this has impoverished our politics and destroyed the tolerant conventions by which we had previously been governed.   The natural consequence has been the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak, characterised by a resentment of opposition and dissent. At what earlier stage in our history would the Attorney General have told the House of Commons, as Geoffrey Cox did in all seriousness in September 2019, that it was ‘unfit to sit’ because it would not allow the government to leave the European Union until it had made satisfactory alternative arrangements? This was not an isolated event, but part of a consistent pattern. Other symptoms of the rejection of our pluralist traditions include: the brutal political purge of the once-dominant Europhile element in the Parliamentary Conservative Party; the threat of revenge against the Supreme Court for its temerity in insisting, in the two Gina Miller cases, on the constitutional authority of Parliament; the overt hostility to the BBC for its alleged failure to share the government’s outlook, coupled with a threat to destroy its financial model; the insistence on filling positions in the government’s gift from the Cabinet to the Trustees of the British Museum with loyalists and placemen regardless of their qualifications for the job, or lack of them; and the contempt for civil servants who dare to give expert but unwelcome advice. These have all been attacks on national institutions which stand for a plurality of opinion. They represent something new and unwelcome in our political culture.   The constitutional baggage carried over from the Brexit debacle proved to be the starting point for the government’s response to the next crisis.   At the root of the problems generated by the pandemic was the public’s attitude to the state and to risk. People have remarkable confidence in the capacity of the state to contain risk and ward off misfortune. An earlier generation regarded natural catastrophes as only marginally amenable to state action. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–21 is the event most closely comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It is estimated to have killed 200,000 people in the United Kingdom at a time when its population was about two thirds what it is now. The UK government took no special steps to curtail its transmission, apart from isolating the infected and the sick, which had been the classic response to epidemics from time immemorial. No one criticised it for this. COVID-19 is a somewhat more infectious pathogen than Spanish flu, but it is significantly less mortal. It is also easier to deal with because it mainly affects those with underlying vulnerabilities due to age or certain underlying clinical conditions. A high proportion of these people are economically inactive. By comparison, Spanish flu had a particularly devastating impact on healthy people aged under 50. Yet in 2020 Britain, in common with most Western countries, ordered a general lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support.   In the intervening century, something has radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself. Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. If one can imagine a hypothetical world in which every community had a sterile space into which it could withdraw at the onset of disease, humanity would have become extinct. It would have no natural immunity and would simply be wiped out the next time that a new pathogen struck too quickly or silently for flight.   COVID-19 is a relatively serious epidemic but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence. In Britain, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Internationally, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe and North America. The average age at which people die with COVID-19 is 82.4, which is not significantly different from the average age at which they die without COVID-19. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks that we face.   In the first of my 2019 Reith lectures, I drew attention to the implications of our aversion to risk for our relationship with the state. I referred to what I have called, then and since, the Hobbesian bargain. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings surrendered their liberty completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably to an absolute ruler in return for security. Hobbes was an apologist for absolute government. In his model of society, the state could do absolutely anything for the purpose of reducing the risks that threaten our wellbeing, other than deliberately kill us. Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms for security. To resist this tendency requires of us a collective restraint and self-discipline, an appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of human affairs, and a willingness to resist the empire of fear. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to COVID-19 has taken that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.    Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings and answerable to the police for the ordinary activities of daily life. In a now-notorious interview in February 2021, Professor Neil Ferguson explained what changed. It was the lockdown in China. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could ‘get away with’ doing the same thing here. As I write this, the British government has published an ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ which identifies China as presenting a ‘systemic challenge to our values’. Liberty and personal autonomy are surely among our most fundamental of those values. They are also essential conditions for human happiness and creativity. Yet we have been willing to jettison them in favour of the Chinese model. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s authority over its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.   This is not, as many people appear to think, a phase which will pass when COVID-19 disappears (if it ever does). Governments rarely relinquish powers that they have once acquired. Wartime controls were kept in being for years after the end of the war. Some wartime powers continued to be exercised right up to the 1990s. But the problem is more fundamental than that. The government has immense powers, not just in the field of public health, but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint which made it unthinkable that they should be used in the intrusive and abrasive manner in which the government has used its public health powers. Before 2020, it was only culture and convention which prevented us from adopting a totalitarian model. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.   In the circumstances, we can hardly be surprised that this fundamental change has been accompanied by a deliberate and persistent attempt on the part of the government to limit Parliamentary scrutiny or any real political accountability. It has issued ‘guidance’ going well beyond its legal powers, and issued ‘orders’ at press conferences which had no legal basis. It has rammed complex legislation through Parliament without serious debate. It has absolved itself from any real Parliamentary control over public expenditure. It has evaded statutory requirements for advance Parliamentary approval on grounds of urgency which are difficult to justify. It has deliberately waited before making supposedly urgent statutory orders until Parliament was not in session. It has taken steps to prevent activities which its own regulations expressly permit, such as visits to doctors and dentists. In many respects, Parliament itself has not been willing to live up to its high constitutional calling.   However, at least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The pandemic has generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. It tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.   There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. Social controls can become unpopular. There is an analogy in the fate of food rationing after 1939. It was necessary during the Second World War and enjoyed general public support. Belief in the efficacy of social control was an important part of the appeal of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 which brought it to power with a huge Parliamentary majority. But people wearied of it over the following years. The insistence of the post-war Labour government on retaining it indefinitely cost it its majority in the general election of 1950 and put the Conservatives in power in 1951. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future of my country. The changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people. The Rt Hon Lord Sumption   Jonathan Sumption, The Rt Hon Lord Sumption, is a retired Supreme Court Justice and was the first to be appointed from outside of the judiciary. He is renowned for his lucid and methodical judgments.

Introduction COVID-19 should not have struck us so unawares: similar viruses, SARS and MERS, had emerged within the last 20 years, and global pandemics had been widely discussed. So why were even rich countries so unprepared? It’s because politicians and the public have a local focus. They downplay the long-term and the global. They ignore Nate Silver’s maxim: ‘The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable.’   Indeed, we’re in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent threats to our interconnected world, that could be devastating. Pandemics and massive cyberattacks, for instance, are immediately destructive. Their probability may seem low, but they could happen at any time. The worst of them could be so devastating that one occurrence would be too many. And their probability and potential severity is increasing. Indeed, I fear we are guaranteed a bumpy ride through this century. COVID-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us—and our governments—that we’re vulnerable.   Humans are now so numerous, and have now such a heavy collective ‘footprint’, that they can transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. The world is growing, and a more demanding population puts the natural environment under strain. Our collective actions could trigger dangerous climate change and mass extinctions if ‘tipping points’ are crossed—outcomes that would bequeath a depleted and impoverished world to future generations. We’re familiar with these threats, but fail to prioritise countermeasures, because their worst impact stretches beyond the time horizon of political and investment decisions. It’s like the proverbial boiling frog—contented in a warming tank until it’s too late to save itself. We have endured a ‘plague year’, and it remains unclear when, or indeed if, the world will revert to anything close to its ‘old normal’. The ‘global spasm’ that we have collectively experienced—a spasm that is, at the time of this writing, far from over—shows clearly that the ability to make wise decisions based on science has a direct impact on survival—not just personally, but collectively. Because our entire world is so interconnected, a catastrophe in any region can cascade globally, making our society vulnerable to breakdowns. But well-directed, internationally deployed science and technology can offer salvation.   The potentials of biotech and the cyberworld are exhilarating—but they’re frightening too. We are already, individually and collectively, so greatly empowered by rapidly changing technology that we can— by design, or as unintended consequences—engender global changes that will resonate for centuries.   Climate and environment   There are some things we can confidently predict. For instance, there’s firm evidence for climate change. Even within the next 20 years, regional shifts in climatic patterns, and more extreme weather, will aggravate pressures on food and water, and enhance migration pressure. Moreover, under ‘business as usual’ scenarios we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic global warming, and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. But even those who accept these statements have diverse views on the best policy response. These divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics—in particular, in how much obligation we should feel towards future generations.   The Danish campaigner Bjørn Lomborg has bogeyman status among environmentalists—somewhat unfairly, as he doesn’t contest the science. But his ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ of economists downplays the priority of addressing climate change in comparison with shorter-term efforts to help the world’s poor. That’s because he applies a ‘standard’ discount rate—and in effect writes off what happens beyond 2050. But if you care about those who’ll live into the twenty-second century and beyond, then, as economists like Lord Stern and Professor Martin Weitzman argue, it is worth paying an insurance premium now, to protect those generations against the worst-case longer-term scenarios.[1]   So, even those who agree that there’s a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence, will differ in how urgently they advocate action today. Their assessment will depend on expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But, above all, it depends on an ethical issue—in optimising people’s life-chances, should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth?   That the world will get warmer is a confident prediction. And with similar confidence we expect that it will get more crowded during this century. 50 years ago, world population was about 3.5 billion. It’s now about 7.7 billion. The growth has been mainly in Asia and Africa. The number of births per year, worldwide, peaked a few years ago and is going down. Nonetheless, world population is forecast to rise to around nine billion by 2050. That’s partly because most people in the developing world are young. They are yet to have children, and they will live longer. The age histogram in the developing world will become more like it is in Europe. By mid-century, Africa will have five times Europe’s population. Lagos and other megacities could have populations of around 40 million.   Population growth seems under-discussed. That’s partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts in the late 1960s—for instance, by the Club of Rome and by Paul Ehrlich—proved off the mark. Also, some deem population growth to be a taboo subject—tainted by association with eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi, and more recently with China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it’s turned out, food production and resource extraction have kept pace with the rising population. Famines still occur, but they’re due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.   To feed nine billion in 2050 will require further-improved agriculture—low-till, water-conserving, and GM crops. It may also require dietary innovations—converting insects, highly nutritious and rich in proteins, into palatable food; and making artificial meat. To quote Gandhi—enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.   Demographics beyond 2050 are uncertain. It’s not even clear whether there’ll be a continuing global rise, or a fall. Urbanisation, declining infant mortality, and women’s education trigger the transition towards lower birthrates—but there could be countervailing cultural influences.   If, for whatever reason, families in Africa remain large, then according to the UN that continent’s population could double again by 2100, to four billion, thereby raising the global population to 11 billion. Nigeria alone would by then have as big a population as Europe and North America combined.   Optimists may note that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But the potential geopolitical stresses of runaway population growth are deeply worrying. As compared to the fatalism of earlier generations, those in poor countries now know, via the Internet etc, what they’re missing. And migration is easier. Moreover, the advent of robots, and ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing, mean that still-poor countries won’t be able to grow their economies by offering cheap skilled labour, as the Asian tiger economies did. It’s a portent for disaffection and instability—multiple megaversions of the tragic loads of boat people crossing the Mediterranean today. Wealthy nations, especially those in Europe, should urgently promote prosperity in Africa, and not just for altruistic reasons.   And another thing: if humanity’s collective impact on land use and climate is too deep, the resultant ‘ecological shock’ could cause mass extinctions. We’d be destroying the book of life before we’d read it. Already, there’s more biomass in chickens and turkeys than in all the world’s wild birds. And the biomass in humans, cows, and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals.   Biodiversity is a crucial component of human wellbeing. We’re clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle to extinction. There are plants in the rain forest whose gene pool might be useful to us. And insects are crucial for the food chain and fertilisation. But for many environmentalists, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans. To quote the great ecologist EO Wilson, ‘mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for’.   Prospects for technology   It would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young scientists and engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems—and sustainable, humane agriculture—for the entire world. Nations should accelerate R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation, and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage (batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, flywheels, etc) and smart grids. If carbon-free energy gets cheap enough, then India, for instance, can leapfrog to it. The health of the poor is jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. Likewise, public health should be a global priority.   But we need wisely directed technology. Indeed, many are anxious that innovation is proceeding so fast that we may not properly cope with it—and that we’ll have a bumpy ride through this century. We’re ever more dependent on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. Unless these networks are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns that cascade globally—real-world analogues of what happened in 2008 to the financial system. Air travel can spread a pandemic worldwide within days.[2] And social media can spread panic and rumour, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.   Biotech offers huge prospects for enhancing health and food production. But there are downsides, from both ethical and prudential perspectives. It offers, for instance, the ability to modify viruses. In 2012, experiments done in Wisconsin and in Holland showed that it was surprisingly easy to make the influenza virus more virulent and more transmissible. This seemed a portent, and in 2014 the US federal government ceased funding these ‘gain of function’ experiments. Similar manipulations can be carried out on coronaviruses. There is of course no suggestion that COVID-19 was malevolently engineered, though there is an ongoing debate about the possibility that it could have been an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is known that gain of function experiments were being done.   The new CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing is hugely promising, but there are already ethical concerns—for instance, about Chinese experiments modifying embryos—and anxiety about possible runaway ecological consequences of ‘gene drive’ programmes to wipe out species as diverse as mosquitos or grey squirrels.   Governments will surely adopt a stringent and precautionary attitude to the applications of biotech—and even to the kinds of experiment that can be legally pursued. But I’d worry that whatever regulations are imposed can’t be enforced worldwide, any more than the drug laws or tax laws. Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.   An atomic bomb can’t be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities. But biotech involves small-scale dual-use equipment. Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals), by bio-as well as cyber-technology, will pose an intractable challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. These concerns are relatively near-term—within ten or 15 years.   By mid-century we might expect two things: a better understanding of the combinations of genes that determine key characteristics of humans and animals; and the ability to synthesise genomes that match these features. If it becomes possible to ‘play God on a kitchen table’, our ecology (and even our species) may not long survive unscathed.   And what about another transformative technology: robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)? DeepMind’s ‘AlphaGo Zero’ computer famously achieved world championship level in the games of Go and chess in just a few hours—it was given just the rules, and learnt by playing against itself over and over again. Its processing speed allowed it to complete several games every second.   Already AI can cope better than humans with complex fast-changing networks—traffic flow, or electric grids. It could let the Chinese gather and process all the information needed to run an efficient planned economy that Marx could only dream of. And in science, its capacity to explore millions of options could allow it to discover recipes for better drugs, or a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature. Computers learn to identify dogs, cats, and human faces by ‘crunching’ through millions of images—not the way babies learn. They learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text—EU documents, for instance (their boredom threshold is infinite!).   The implications for our society are already ambivalent. If there is a ‘bug’ in the software of an AI system, it is not always possible to track it down. This is likely to create public concern if the system’s ‘decisions’ have potentially grave consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery, or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us, and contestable by us. If such decisions were delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.   AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our health, and our financial transactions, will be in the ‘cloud’, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons (for instance, for medical research, or to warn us of incipient health risks), but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.   There will be other privacy concerns. Are you happy if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant or on public transportation can, via facial recognition, identify you and invade your privacy? Or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted? Or if a machine knows enough about you to compose emails that seem to come from you? The ‘arms race’ between cybercriminals and those trying to defend against them will become still more expensive and vexatious when drones, driverless cars, etc proliferate.   Many experts think that AI, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible innovation’. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner), think that for many decades artificial intelligence will be less of a concern than real stupidity. And machines are still clumsy compared to children in sensing and interacting with the real world.   The incipient shifts in the nature of work have been addressed in several excellent books by economists and social scientists. Clearly, machines will take over much of the work of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: routine legal work, accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics, and even surgery. Many ‘professionals’ will find their hard-earned skills in less demand. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest jobs to automate.   The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a healthy society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. It is better when all who are capable of doing so can perform socially useful work rather than receive a handout.   Indeed, to create a humane society, governments will need to vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young, and the sick. There are currently far too few, and they’re poorly paid, inadequately esteemed, and insecure in their positions. Such work is more fulfilling than a job in a call centre or Amazon warehouse. I can foresee this benign redeployment happening in Scandinavia, though there might be ideological barriers in some other nations. We surely hope, when old, to be cared for by someone with real, not synthetic, empathy. We want young children to be told stories by real people who can share and understand their emotions. It is likely that society will be transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be idiots savants  or display superhuman capabilities.   If robots become less clumsy in interacting with the world, would they truly be perceived as intelligent beings? Would we then have obligations towards them? Should we feel guilty if they are underemployed or bored? Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines , even foresees that humans could transcend biology by merging with computers. In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would ‘go over to the other side’. We then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity. If your brain were downloaded into a machine, in what sense would it still be ‘you’? Or are the input into our sense organs, and our physical interactions with the real external world, so essential to our being that this transition would be not only abhorrent but also impossible? These are ancient conundrums for philosophers, but practical ethicists may soon need to address them.   Not even Kurzweil thinks this will happen in his lifetime, so he wants his body frozen until immortality’s on offer, and he can be resurrected into some posthuman world.[3] But of course research on ageing is being seriously prioritised. Some think it’s a ‘disease’ that can be cured. Dramatic life extension would plainly have huge ramifications, for society and population projections.   It’s certainly credible that human beings—in their mentality and their physique—may become malleable through genetic and cybernetic technologies. Moreover, this future evolution—a kind of secular ‘intelligent design’—would take only centuries, in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution. This is a game changer. When we admire the literature and artefacts that have survived from antiquity, we feel an affinity, across a time gulf of thousands of years, with those ancient artists and their civilisations. But we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us, even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved.   Prospects in space   And now I turn briefly to another technology: space. This is where robots surely have a future, and where I‘d argue that these changes will happen fastest and should worry us less.   We depend every day on space for satnav, environmental monitoring, communication, and so forth. These are in large part now commercially funded, though projects with a focus on scientific research and planetary exploration are bankrolled by national or international agencies.   During this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniature probes, far more advanced than the probes that have beamed back pictures of Saturn’s moons, of Pluto, and beyond—20,000 times further away than the Moon. Think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s, when these probes were designed, and realise how much better we can do today. The next step will be deployment in space of robotic fabricators, which can build large structures under zero gravity—for instance, solar energy collectors, or giant telescopes with huge gossamer-thin mirrors   What about manned spaceflight? The practical case gets weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation. Were I an American, I would only support NASA’s un manned programme. And I certainly wouldn’t support a manned programme done by the European Space Agency. I would argue that private ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—should ‘front’ all manned missions. They can impose higher risks than can a Western country on publicly funded civilian astronauts, and thereby slash costs. There would still be many volunteers—some willing to accept the risk of ‘one-way tickets’—driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like.   By 2100, courageous thrill-seekers may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk says he wants to die on Mars (though not on impact). But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. There’s no ‘planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.   But those pioneer adventurers who escape the Earth could be cosmically important. This is why. They’ll be ill-adapted to their new environment, and beyond the clutches of our terrestrial regulators. They will use all the resources of genetics and cybernetics to adapt. They will change faster and could within a few centuries become a new species. Moreover, if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligences, they won’t need an atmosphere. They may prefer zero-G. They’ll also be nearly immortal. So it’s in deep space—not on Earth, nor even on Mars—that non-biological ‘brains’ may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine.   This raises the question that astronomers are asked most often: is there life out there already? Or is a sterile cosmos awaiting our progeny? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. We don’t know what triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolise and reproduce. Moreover, even if simple life is common, it is not clear whether it’s likely to evolve into anything intelligent or complex.   Maybe we’ll one day find ET. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere could be unique. But it’s important that this wouldn’t render life a cosmic sideshow. That’s because there’s abundant time ahead for posthuman life seeded from Earth to pervade the Galaxy. We’re the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, but the Sun is less than half way through its life. And the universe may continue for ever. To quote Woody Allen, eternity is very long, especially towards the end.   But even in this ‘concertina’ed’ timeline, extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past, we’re living in a special century. The century when humans could jump-start the transition to entities that far transcend our limitations, and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth. Or—to take a darker view— the century where our follies could foreclose the immense future potential and leave an anarchic and depleted planet.   On our future, this century   Zooming back closer to the here and now, one can offer some tentative hopes, fears, and recipes.   Technologies offer huge promise. But our society is brittle, interconnected, and vulnerable. We fret unduly about small risks— air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, etc. But we’re in denial about some newly emergent threats that could be globally devastating. Some of these are environmental—the pressures of a growing and more demanding population. Others are the potential downsides of novel technologies.   And, of course, most of the challenges are global. Coping with potential shortage of food, water, and resources—and transitioning to low-carbon energy—can’t be achieved by each nation separately. Nor can regulation of potentially threatening innovations. Indeed, a key issue is whether nations need to give up more sovereignty to new organisations along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, etc.   Scientists have an obligation to promote beneficial applications of their work and warn against the downsides. Universities and academies need to assess which scary scenarios—eco-threats, or risks from misapplied technology—can be dismissed as science fiction, and how best to avoid the hazards that cannot be so dismissed.   The trouble is that even the best politicians focus mainly on the urgent and parochial. They do not focus on long-term global issues, or on averting possible catastrophes that haven’t yet happened, unless such policies feature sufficiently prominently in the press and in their inboxes that they are confident they won’t lose votes by endorsing them.   So concerned scientists must enhance their leverage—by involvement with NGOs, via blogging and journalism, and by enlisting charismatic individuals and the media to amplify their voices. Here are two recent instances:   The Papal encyclical Laudato Si’  had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015. There’s no gainsaying the Catholic Church’s global reach, long-term vision, and concern for the world’s poor.   And I doubt that we in the UK would have legislated against non-biodegradable plastic waste had it not been for the BBC’s Blue Planet II  television programmes fronted by our secular pope, David   Attenborough. The images of albatrosses returning to their nests and regurgitating plastic debris are as iconic as the polar bear on the melting ice floe was in the climate debate.   It’s encouraging to witness more activists among the young, who can hope to live to the end of the century. Their vocal commitment is welcome. It gives grounds for hope.   I’ll end with a flashback, right back to the Middle Ages. For medieval people, the entire cosmology—from creation to apocalypse—spanned only a few thousand years. They were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences, and prone to irrational dread. Large parts of the Earth were terra incognita .   But they built cathedrals, constructed with primitive technology by masons who knew they wouldn’t live to see them finished—vast and glorious buildings, that still inspire us centuries later.   In contrast, our horizons in space and time are now vastly extended, as are our resources and knowledge. But we don’t plan centuries ahead. This seems a paradox. But there is a reason. Medieval lives played out against a ‘backdrop’ that changed little from one generation to the next. They were confident that they’d have grandchildren who would appreciate the finished cathedral. But for us, unlike for them, the next century will be drastically different from the present. We can’t foresee it, so it’s harder to plan for it. There is now a huge disjunction between the ever-shortening timescales of social and technological change and the billion-year time spans of biology, geology, and cosmology.   ‘Spaceship Earth’ is hurtling through the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life-support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns. But there is too little planning—too little horizon-scanning. This ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we’re its stewards at a specially crucial era. That’s an important message for us all, whether or not we’re astronomers.   We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term. We need to be ’good ancestors’, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide. Professor Lord Rees Professor Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS, is the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College. He is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of many foreign academies. His research interests include space exploration, high energy astrophysics, and cosmology. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University (CSER), and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control, and international collaboration in science. In addition to his research publications he has written many general articles and ten books, including most recently  On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (paperback version due in October 2021). [1] I’d note that there’s one policy context when an essentially zero discount rate is applied: radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years. This is somewhat ironic, since we can’t plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead. [2] Pandemics also cause far more societal breakdown than in earlier centuries. English villages in the fourteenth century continued to function even when the black death halved their populations. In contrast, our societies would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals were overwhelmed– which would occur before the fatality rate was even one percent. (And there’s likewise huge societal risk from cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc.) [3] I was surprised to find that three academics back in England had gone in for these ‘cryonics’. Two had paid the full whack; the third had taken the cut-price option of wanting just his head frozen. I was glad they were from Oxford, not from my university. For my part, I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator.

Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist. In 2014, she was abducted from her hometown in Iraq, Kocho, by the Islamic State, as part of the Yazidi genocide. After her escape, she founded Nadia's Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Denis Mukwege for her fight to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflicts. CJLPA : Throughout history and to present day, we see that whenever armed conflict arises, rape and brutality against women and girls follow. Just recently, we see it repeat in Palestine, Israel, and Ukraine. Outside of war, we see it embedded in society with high rape crimes, forced marriages, inability to choose what we do with our body (whether wanting an abortion or the force of FGM). We expect more for women’s rights. Despite acclaimed efforts from the UN, NGOs, and Member States, in your opinion why does inequality remain a leading global crisis to combat?   Nadia Murad : This is a really interesting question, and you are right because women, wherever in the world they live, are still not afforded true equality.   This inequality is historical, systemic, and cultural. It exists because no one in power has ever felt the want or need to change it. Why would they?   To truly combat inequality, we need to completely rethink the way we approach society.   From their earliest years, children need to see gender equality modelled at home. Both boys and girls should have access to secondary schooling, where the curriculum promotes equality, and the infrastructure of the school building allows girls privacy when changing for sports lessons and access to facilities and necessary products when they have their periods.   Additionally, equality needs to be built into our systems. That begins with basic rights like bodily autonomy and equal pay—but carries on into meaningful female representation in politics, the judiciary and in policy work.   I think we need to look very carefully at our world and ask if it is working well as it is—or do we need to change the way we think?   CJLPA : Further to the above, what are the biggest disappointments from the international community and their responses in respect to helping the victims of sexual violence from armed conflicts? This could be inaction during the conflict, perhaps enabling it (funding state actors responsible), or the response in helping victims after.    NM : I am always disappointed when survivors, like me, give so much of ourselves to tell our stories on a public platform, just to be met with kind words but little meaningful action. From the earliest records of history to the first written stories and poems, women have been used and abused in wartime. For thousands of years it has been accepted. As we saw in Iraq, this abuse is not a momentary loss of morals in the midst of battle on the part of the perpetrators. It is a tactic deployed to break not only the women, but their communities as well. In Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used rape as a weapon of genocide. I have been calling for 9 years for the ISIS militants who raped my friends and family members in Iraq to be tried for their crimes. Thousands of Yazidi girls have given testimonies to investigators—at personal cost. Yet only 3 militants have been to court on the charge of genocide. I am disappointed that the international community and the Iraqi government isn’t moving faster here. After all, unless we start showing the world that these kind of heinous crimes will not be tolerated, then sexual violence in conflict will continue with impunity for perpetrators.   This perhaps feeds back into your first question about inequality. Perhaps the international community doesn’t see rape and the ensuing lifelong trauma as problematic enough. It still accepts rape, which mainly happens to women, as simply a side effect of wars begun by men.   CJLPA : What has been overshadowed and not emphasized enough in our world and yet is fundamental for our understanding in helping the victims of the targeted violence against the Yazidi women, and victims from all armed conflicts?   NM : I don’t believe enough emphasis is placed on survivor-centred policies. Only survivors know what they need and what is best for them and their communities for the long term. That’s why Nadia’s Initiative works with and for survivors in Sinjar to rebuild infrastructure like schools and hospitals, but also run educational and economic programs and projects. A photo from Nadia's recent trip to Sinjar. She is embracing a mother at the cemetery at Kocho (Nadia's village). The mother told Nadia that she is terrified she will die before she can be reunited with the bodies of her sons. 400 men were murdered in Kocho in August 2014. I think that authorities and organizations are often not practical enough in the help they give the victims of conflict related sexual violence. These survivors, who are often stigmatized, need meaningful reparations to rebuild their lives. This could come in financial form, but also in psycho-social support or help with housing.   There is also another dimension to the support we can give survivors, and that is how they are treated by investigators and reporters. These vulnerable women are at risk of retraumatisation every time they re-tell their story. This is why I happily put my name to the Murad Code, which is a code of conduct that investigators and reporters should adhere to when speaking to survivors. It allows them agency and control whilst promoting honesty and safety throughout the process.   CJLPA : For you, what is the meaning of ‘justice’?  Can we ever find ‘justice’ for even the most grotesque crimes against humanity such as those inflicted on the Yazidi women and girls? If so, how?   NM : I am often asked this question and I have come to believe that justice is multifaceted. For my community it is certainly judicial; our attackers must be held accountable in court for the evil crimes they committed against us. However, justice can also be more practical; we must rescue the missing women and girls so families can be reunited and reparations can be granted so lives can begin again. Justice can also be more emotional; it can be having a space to grieve for our lost loved ones and it can be found in the acknowledgment of our pain. And, justice can also be found in healing and surviving, in showing the ISIS militants that they did not succeed in eradicating the Yazidi community.   CJLPA : How would you like to see the perpetrators held accountable for these crimes?   NM : My counsel, the barrister Amal Clooney, and I, have been advocating for the implementation of a hybrid court. It would be an internationally supported tribunal which would sit in Baghdad and act as a continuation of UNITAD (the UN team which is investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq). There are a vast number of fighters to process, more than any national court could process at scale, so there would have to be international cooperation and financial backing. This hybrid court would need to be operated in tandem with another country which could then hold homegrown and foreign fighters accountable for the crime of genocide. At the moment they are charged with ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ which is far more anodyne than the genocide charge of which they are also guilty.   CJLPA : Can you walk us through what happened to the Yazidi women and children upon their escape? What reparations did they receive and to what extent were they supported psychologically and financially?   NM : Everyone has a different story. I lived in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp with survivors from my family and then was taken to Germany as a refugee. Thousands of other girls like me are still in camps, without access to privacy, education, or employment. Although the Iraqi government promised reparations—and I am pleased that some Yazidis have benefitted—it has been increasingly hard for many survivors to access them.   It is worth saying though that at least two thousand Yazidi women are still in captivity and we also need to work hard to get them home.   CJLPA : Further to the above, can you speak about the support that is missing for victims currently?   NM : I think that policymakers are often fixed on the short-term and the quick fix for survivors. However, rebuilding communities sustainably requires long-term vision and planning. That's why my initiative plans for decades rather than days. We run economic empowerment and educational programs. We help women set up businesses and then give the support they need to succeed.   Survivors need to know they have a long future in which they can be safe, active, and equal participants in their communities.   Nadia at the Yazidi Genocide Memorial in Sinjar, opened October 2023 and built using funds from her peace prize and USAID. It was a project led by Nadia's Initiative and the International Organization on Migration. More details available at . CJLPA : How can the international community help prevent sexual violence from occurring in conflicts? Are there countries currently that you have seen have begun an inspiring change in their policy that other countries should follow?   NM : The international community must start prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict so that it is universally acknowledged that it is not acceptable in any country, in any instance. Germany has led the way in prosecuting its ISIS citizens—but much more needs to be done globally.   CJLPA : You have devoted your life to combat the sexual violence occurring in conflicts and to help save women and children falling victim to these inhumane crimes. You are constantly meeting with policymakers, NGOs, the UN, and going before the courts. How has this experience been to date? Do you find they are responding with the urgency needed?   NM : There is never enough urgency. When I wrote my book, which details the horror of my experience, I said that I wanted to be the last girl this happens to. But I haven’t been the last. There have been so many more which is heartbreaking. It’s not due to a lack of political will, but a lack of political action. I don’t advocate at the UN and with other policy makers just for Yazidi girls, but for all girls. And if we want to keep our girls safe, there has to be a stronger framework.   CJLPA : Further to the above, what laws—domestic and international law—do you think need to change in order to ensure accountability? Inaction is a crime in itself. It is one thing to hold the perpetrators accountable, but what about the countries that are able, but unwilling to help?   NM : I believe that you are right when you say that inaction is a crime in itself. I often think of the governments who looked the other way when my community was under brutal attack. One of the first steps they can take now is to officially recognise the murder of Yazidis in 2014 as a genocide. The second step is to adopt universal jurisdiction so that more foreign fighters can be prosecuted. Beyond that I would advocate for reparations for survivors to be put into law. I have been advocating for reparations for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), not just in Iraq, but in other countries where sexual violence has been used in conflict, including in Ukraine, where I asked the President of Ukraine to consider passing a law that will enable survivors of CRSV to receive reparations.   CJLPA : You created The Murad Code Project which is a set of guidelines aimed at building a community of better practice for, with, and concerning survivors of systematic and conflict-related sexual violence. Can you briefly walk us through what prompted you to this initiative and your hopes for how it will be used moving forward? NM : When I first started telling my story, I was interviewed by many investigators and reporters. Some of them had my best interests at heart and treated me with kindness and gave me agency. However, many did not.   I was not always aware of how my story would be used and I was subjected to questioning that was heartless. Therefore, I wanted to lend my name, experiences, and expertise to a code that worked to protect other survivors from this.   The Murad Code lays out the bare minimum of standards that interviewers should adhere to when they speak to traumatised survivors. It has also been translated into a number of different languages so that survivors know how they should be treated by their interlocutors.   I hope that eventually it will be put into policy frameworks, as well as newsrooms, so that survivors are treated as people with agency, not a walking headline.   CJLPA : What is a final message you would like to send to the reader, in the name of spreading awareness and inspiring hope?   NM : There is always hope. Even when the world seems dark, there are good people working for justice, peace, and a stable future. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is a qualified lawyer in England & Wales specialising in public international law.

Abstract Expressionism emerged amid a tense post-war climate, as a new genre of art that seemed so devoid of representational form or meaning that it could not be political. However, it was precisely this apparent apoliticality that made it so intensely political. Historiography on the topic has followed what I am inclined to call a ‘top-down’ trend. As outlined by Eva Cockcroft and Frances Stonor Saunders, those in power consciously used the art of the Abstract Expressionists as a means of cultural diplomacy or propaganda to influence the opinions of both Western and Russian intelligentsia. In this sense it provided a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.[1] It is important to note that this view was precipitated by the 1967 exposé which revealed the CIA’s political involvement in the Cultural Cold War, and it has been supported since.[2] By contrast, revisionist interpretations, such as Kozloff’s Artforum  piece, have sought to present the parallels between ‘American Cold War rhetoric’ and the individualistic philosophy of Abstract Expressionism as purely coincidental. They cite the lack of evidence of political manoeuvres and agreements between arts institutions—such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—and the US government.[3]   To evaluate the extent to which Abstract Expressionism was an ideological weapon, one must explore the intentions of the actors involved in the structure of the cultural-diplomatic operation— if that is how one characterises the movement. It is necessary to analyse the objectives of artists within the movement, as well as subsequent interpretations by critics and those at the forefront of the American conservative backlash. It is more plausible that the political significance of Abstract Expressionism was created by those with influence—such as art critics and the heads of cultural institutions, whose opinions carried intellectual weight—than by artists. MoMA enthusiastically supported Abstract Expressionism through exhibitions abroad, and there were suspicious links between its leadership and that of the CIA, as highlighted by Louis Menand and David and Cecile Shapiro. These facts further endorse this view.[4] Abstract Expressionism was in many ways a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism, but the discourse between these two movements is beyond the scope of this essay, which instead interrogates the institutional processes behind this politicisation of the American art movement. Although individuals at all levels of influence had the political agency to engender combative ideology, those in the upper echelons of the political structure were markedly energetic in their promotion of art as a tool of war. They ensured Abstract Expressionism was rendered a weapon in the Cultural Cold War.   In many cases, artists did not produce work with a political purpose in mind. Art critics were largely responsible for constructing the combative personality of Abstract Expressionism. ‘Abstract Expressionism’ encompassed such a wide range of abstract art that those within it were reluctant to label themselves a collective. Yet, a common feature of Abstract Expressionist works was the absence of distinguishable or referential subject matter, and therefore any apparent political leaning. However, if one were to emphasise the significance of the artist’s agency, as Stonor Saunders does in her view that it is ‘hard to sustain the argument that the Abstract Expressionists merely “happened to be painting in the Cold War and not for the Cold War”’, then the artist’s political affiliation would become of interest to the historian.[5]   Harold Rosenberg, an influential art critic and outspoken supporter of Abstract Expressionism, proposes an argument from individualism for the artist’s personal agency. However, this interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is flawed. Rosenberg asserts that the new ‘American Action Painters’ were distinct because of their ‘consciousness of a function for a painting’, tacitly implying the possibility of the politicality of Abstract Expressionists.[6] However, his argument that the ‘act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence’ contradicts this. It suggests that the artist’s work is inextricable from biographical influences, and therefore that one is incapable of creating work with a meaning or motive different from those of their artistic upbringing.[7] Furthermore, when applied to Abstract Expressionism in the context of the Cold War, the argument invalidates that of Stonor Saunders. The infamous Jackson Pollock had previously worked in the workshops of Communist-sponsored artists. He had also collaborated with Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican Communist Party member and supporter of Stalinism. Had Pollock’s artistic life been truly inseparable from his work, his art could be read by Rosenberg as ‘communistic’. Cockcroft believed that the alignment between American Cold War ideals and ‘the way many Abstract Expressionists phrased their existentialist-individualist credos’ was ‘consciously forged’. This is unconvincing, yet so is Max Kozloff’s argument that it was coincidental.[8] New York School artists were more probably concerned with creating the first internationally influential American artistic movement than with using their art as a propaganda weapon. This was instead done by those in power. We must therefore view the artist and the influencer as working within individual yet intersecting spheres.   The compelling rhetoric of American freedom that critics and officials applied to Abstract Expressionism engendered a pugnacious artistic climate. There was debate between art critics such as Alfred Barr and American conservatives on the movement’s ‘communistic’ leanings. This debate demonstrates how art was not merely ‘for art’s sake’, but was viewed as a propagandistic battleground. Barr countered conservative assertions, such as those of Representative Dondero, in a 1952 New York Times  piece. It exemplifies the rhetoric of individualism that both critics and state figures repeatedly used as a riposte to Socialist Realism and the oppressive nature of Soviet totalitarianism.[9] Barr stated that ‘the modern artist’s non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictators’ propaganda’. These statements dismiss the ‘communistic’ leanings of Abstract Expressionism and reframe it as a symbol of political freedom.[10] Moreover, Socialist Realism came to be included in the US artistic sphere, for example with MoMA’s 1946 retrospective exhibition of the Lithuanian-born American Socialist Realist artist Ben Shahn, strengthening the US’s philosophy of freedom. Giants of capitalist business, such as Rockefeller, appeared open to funding art like that being displayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Although the US government itself exported art, without critics such as Barr and Rosenberg, as well as the actions of MoMA, Abstract Expressionism would have been a futile and apolitical ‘weapon’.   MoMA’s economic connections exemplify how a Manhattan-based oligarchy used Abstract Expressionism to further the political interests of American capitalism. MoMA’s funding, leadership, and very foundation were supported overtly by American financiers, and covertly by the CIA. The establishment of MoMA in 1929 was enabled by the support of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Nelson Rockefeller controlled it throughout the 1940s and 1950s—the peak of its cultural-diplomatic ventures. Cockcroft compellingly asserts that one must look to patronage and the ‘ideological needs of the powerful’ when analysing the success of an artistic movement.[11] It is difficult to maintain that MoMA would have had free rein without its Rockefeller benefactors. As giants of American capitalism, the Rockefellers would surely have supported the exhibition of a movement which advertised the US’ rhetoric of freedom. One might disregard the connection between a person’s wealth and their politics. Nonetheless, it is not a far-fetched possibility that Nelson Rockefeller, a high-profile Republican and one-term Vice President, would have supported US cultural-diplomatic ventures against the Soviet intellectual threat. The US arts sector was privatised, unlike its European counterparts. This let what David Caute describes as ‘the pantheon of ever-ready demons of patronage’ influence American psychological warfare, and thus Cold War politics.[12]   MoMA’s International Council energetically displayed Abstract Expressionism abroad, demonstrating how the movement was used as cultural propaganda directed at Western European intellectuals. MoMA’s purchase of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and subsequent curation of its exhibitions there between 1954 and 1962, was the first time a Biennale pavilion had been autonomous from government ownership and influence. However, much like for Abstract Expressionism itself, the apparent apoliticality of this was more likely a front. MoMA’s leaders had vested interests in the fight against communism. Abstract Expressionism already had a support base in Venice at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo—she had given Pollock one-man shows in 1943, 1945, and 1947. MoMA exhibited Willem De Kooning’s work in a US pavilion at an international event in 1948. Cockcroft argues that its private ownership made this pavilion free of ‘the kinds of pressure of unsubtle red-baiting and super-jingoism applied to official governmental agencies’.[13]   MoMA aggressively exported Abstract Expressionism across Europe through exhibitions in the late 1950s. ‘Modern Art in the United States’ toured Europe in 1956. The largest of its five sections dedicated to ‘Contemporary Abstract Art’ comprised 28 paintings by 17 Abstract Expressionists. In 1959, ‘The New American Painting’ was shown in eight European countries. The tour would have exposed Western European intellectuals, many of whom might have been Soviet travellers, to an artistic movement which stylistically promoted American ideals of freedom of personal expression. It ran contrary to the Socialist Realism of the USSR, an explicit form of propaganda.   The US government passionately endorsed cultural diplomacy through art, both covertly and overtly. As mentioned, there is evidence, albeit dubious, of CIA influence on MoMA’s leadership. Thomas Braden, executive secretary of MoMA in the late 1940s, went on to join the CIA as Supervisor of Cultural Activities in 1951. Braden enthusiastically supported the export of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the ‘propaganda war’.[14] He defended this in his 1967 article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’: given that the Cold War was ‘fought with ideas instead of bombs’, ‘to choose innocence [was] to choose defeat’.[15] Furthermore, René d’Harnoncourt and Porter A McCray, both from Roosevelt’s Center of Inter-American Affairs, later joined MoMA. McCray, described by Cockcroft as a key figure in the history of ‘cultural imperialism’, joined as director of the museum’s international programmes.[16] However, state intervention was more direct in some instances, with open government sponsorship of exhibitions. In 1946, the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs curated ‘Advancing American Art’, an exhibition which used $49,000 of government money to purchase 79 paintings. Although its art was not exclusively abstract, the collection was overwhelmingly Modernist, providing an apt riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.   The most explicit and successful example of Abstract Expressionism’s deployment as a Cold War weapon was at the American National Exhibition’s visit to Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in 1959. Its open sponsorship by the USIA (United States Information Agency) is significant. The USIA helped censor the work of ‘avowed communists … or persons who publicly refuse to answer questions of Congressional committees regarding connection with the communist movement’.[17] David and Cecile Shapiro assert that almost anything was a potential target for ‘congressional pot-shots’. This supports traditional interpretations that emphasise the role of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the Cold War. Critics had so successfully fostered a connection between Abstract Expressionism and the ideals of the American psyche that the State was willing to promote it. Marilyn S Kushner asserts that despite Pollock’s Cathedral  (1947) and Lachaise’s Standing Woman  (1932) being seen   as ‘grotesque and mocking’, the art at the exhibition was seen as a ‘manifestation of a free society, much as was originally intended by the USIA’.[18] Pollock’s brash handling of paint, his cold colour palette, and his non-representational subject matter may have contributed to Soviet disdain. They were antithetical to the vibrant colours used by artists such as Taslitzky, and the highly naturalistic scenes, frequently of a political subject matter, painted by Gerasimov.[19] This display of American values in the heart of the Soviet world sparked questions of political freedom, particularly from young Soviets who were interested in what forbidden ideals they had been sheltered from. It was an aggressive form of propaganda.   Abstract Expressionist works were not, therefore, inherently weapons of the cultural Cold War. Harold Rosenberg, in ‘American Action Painters’, said that Abstract Expressionists created an ‘environment not of people but of functions’, that ‘his paintings are employed  not wanted ’ (my italics).[20] Abstract Expressionism was not   created with the purpose of being a psychological weapon against communism, but those with intellectual influence politicised it and made it such. It was this ‘middle stratum’ that engendered and buttressed cultural diplomacy through art. I have taken a hierarchical approach to analysing the impact of different strata within the cultural-diplomatic structure—from the artists, to the critic, to the museum, to the state. This approach demonstrates that critics created the weapon through politicising the apolitical Abstract Expressionism and aligning it with American ideals. Furthermore, MoMA, allied with the state, physically exported and mobilised art as propaganda, using the weapon created by critics. First came the fashioning of a culture that was anti-communist, and thus anti-Socialist Realist. Along with this came the dissemination of a belief among US art critics that Abstract Expressionism was the superior movement. Second came the aggressive physical exportation and touring of the artworks across Europe, including to Moscow in the late 1950s, in an attempt to woo Western intellectuals with the ‘benefits’ of capitalism. These currents were mutually supportive, bolstering the idea that art could be political. Regardless of whether the US government was successful in its psychological war against the Soviet Union, the argument that Abstract Expressionism was used as a weapon in the Cold War is persuasive. Mina Polo   Mina Polo is a second-year undergraduate in History at University College London, interested in cultural history. In 2021, she hopes to take further her research on jazz diplomacy and its impact on the American Civil Rights Movement. [1] Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War. Pollock and   After: The Critical Debate  (Harper and Row 1985) 125-33; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War  (Granta 1999). [2] In March 1967, Ramparts Magazine  exposed links between the CIA and the National Students’ Association (NSA), revealing the extent of the alleged Operation Mockingbird. In May of that year, Thomas Braden’s Saturday Evening Post article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ unveiled the   connections between the CIA and US cultural programs. [3] Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War’ in Francis Frascina (ed), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Routledge 2000). [4] Louis Menand, ‘Unpopular Front: American Art and the Cold War’ The New Yorker ; David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, ‘Excerpt from “Abstract   Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting” Part 3’ in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique  (Yale University Press 2005). [5] Stonor Saunders (n 1) (as quoted in David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford University Press 2008) 546). [6] Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (first published 1952) in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press 1959) 24. [7] ibid 28. [8] Cockcroft (n 1) 126. [9] Alfred H Barr, ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’ The New York Times  (New York, 14 December 1952). [10] ibid 22. [11] Cockcroft (n 1) 125. [12] Caute (n 5) 541. [13] Cockcroft (n 1) 129. [14] Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 441. [15] Thomas W Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ The Saturday Evening Post  (20 May 1967) 14. [16] Cockcroft (n 1) 127. [17] As quoted in Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 339-40. [18] Marilyn S Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’ (2002) 4(1) Journal of Cold War Studies 19. [19] See the paintings The Strikes of June, 1936 (Boris Taslitzky 1936), and Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin  (Aleksandr Gerasimov 1938).   Gerasimov won the Stalin Prize in 1941 for this painting. [20] Rosenberg (n 6) 38.

Introduction   The principle of parliamentary sovereignty has been a long-held tenet of the UK’s unwritten constitution. AV   Dicey outlined its features in 1885. However, 87 years later, the UK became a member of the European Economic Communities, with the European Communities Act 1972 providing the domestic legal basis for EU law in the UK. Lord Denning described EU law as ‘an incoming tide […] [that] cannot be held back’.[1] However, others, such as Professor Phillip Norton, likened the relationship between the UK and EU as a ‘patchwork quilt’, with the UK consistently being in a position of ‘playing catch-up of trying to make sense of the constitutional consequences of different treaties negotiated since membership’.[2] This is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between EU supremacy and the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty.   As a result of membership to the EU, the UK became subject to the extensive doctrine of EU supremacy, firmly established by the CJEU in Costa v Enel  in 1964. In 1991, the House of Lords (in Factortame ) were required to set aside primary legislation which was found to be incompatible with EU Law provisions.[3] The ruling in Factortame  gave rise to numerous arguments that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the doctrine of EU supremacy were incompatible. This argument was a significant driving force behind the UK leaving the EU. This essay explores two questions. Firstly, the position of parliamentary sovereignty while the UK was still a member state of the EU, and in particular whether or not EU supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty were in fact incompatible. Secondly, whether leaving the EU helped to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty, by examining the role and development of the courts in Miller  (No 1)[4], devolution and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022.    While the primary focus is the legal effect that the UK’s EU membership and subsequent withdrawal had on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, discussions regarding Brexit, Parliament, and the constitution are inherently influenced by politics. In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor argued that the UK is ‘as a nation notoriously uninterested in our constitution’, due to the nature of the constitution. As such, he notes that ‘constitution’ has two meanings. Firstly, it can refer to ‘a selection of the most important legal rules regulating the government and embodied in a document promulgated in a particular moment in time’.[5] Regarding the second meaning of ‘constitution’, Bogdanor asserts that ‘anyone living in an organised society must certainly possess a constitution’.[6] It is in this category of constitution that the UK falls. However, since conversations around the UK leaving the EU began, the UK’s constitution and parliamentary sovereignty in particular have been brought to the forefront of parliamentary debates, which have consequently been amplified by the media.[7] This has shaped public opinion on the relationship between EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty and brought the topic of the UK’s constitutional arrangements to a more prominent position compared to the suggestion of Bogdanor in 2009. Furthermore, while the question of devolution and its effect on parliamentary sovereignty is undoubtedly an important one, it is nonetheless a complex area within the UK’s constitution. In light of this complexity, and constraints on space, this essay will focus on devolution in Scotland.   This essay ultimately puts forward the view that EU membership was not incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and that sovereignty was still able to operate in a meaningful way following Factortame . This is on the basis that while EU membership undoubtedly resulted in a move away from the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, this change resulted from a natural evolution of an uncodified principle rather than a single revolutionary change. In light of this natural evolution, it is argued that the act of leaving the EU alone cannot amount to the restoration of the traditional interpretation of sovereignty in the nineteenth century.   The Position of Parliamentary Sovereignty throughout EU Membership   Following the Treaty of Rome (1958), the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. The initial member states were comprised of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. The EEC, therefore, formed the basis for the EU. The EU expanded from a body solely focused on the economic integration of member states, into a complex and sophisticated legal system, enacting legislation throughout a large range of policy areas.[8] With the EU enacting significant amounts of legislation, in such an extensive range of areas (in addition to various requirements as to how it should be integrated into domestic law), the question arises as to how this legislation is followed uniformly and consistently throughout the member states. This question was first raised in Costa v Enel .[9]   In Costa , the issue was whether pieces of national legislation could prevail over community law where the two were in conflict. The Italian government argued that community law had been ‘transposed into the Italian legal order by national legislation’.[10] However, the CJEU, in their preliminary ruling, reasoned: ‘By contrast with ordinary principles of international treaties, the EEC treaty had created its own legal system, which on entry into force of the treaty, became an integral part of the legal systems of that member state and which their courts are bound to apply’.[11] The CJEU stated: ‘The transfer by the states from their domestic legal system to the community legal system of rights and obligations arising under the treaties carries with it a permanent limitation on their sovereign rights’.[12] The decision was a clear statement from the CJEU in regard to the doctrine of EU law supremacy—where domestic law and community law are in conflict, community law will take precedence.   The subsequent German case of Internationale Handelsgesellschaft [13] demonstrated how far the doctrine of EU supremacy could extend. At issue was whether or not EU law can take precedence over the fundamental rights enshrined in the German constitution where the two were in conflict.[14] The CJEU held that the government could not take recourse to the legal rules or concepts of national law in order to judge the validity of community law.[15] Costa  and Internationale Handelsgesellschaft demonstrate the wide-reaching effect that the doctrine of EU law supremacy has upon the domestic legal systems of EU member states. This brings us to the question of how the doctrine of EU supremacy has been received within the UK’s unwritten constitution and legal framework.   In 1972, the UK became a member of the EU. This was facilitated within domestic law via the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA 1972).[16] The UK constitution is unwritten, meaning that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty is not codified formally. Nonetheless, the principle has historically been written about and defined by writers such as A V Dicey. In 1885, Dicey outlined three key elements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Firstly, parliament can make or unmake any law that it chooses. Secondly, parliament cannot bind its successors. And finally, no other institution can set aside or override an act of parliament.[17] The first significant UK case concerning the potential conflict between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty came in 1991 in Factortame .[18]   The Factortame  case arose following the implementation of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. S 14 required vessels to register in order to be able to fish in British waters. However, to do so, the vessels were required to either be British-owned or be managed from within the UK. Therefore, any vessel which did not meet these requirements was unable to be re-registered under the new provisions. 95 (predominately Spanish-controlled) vessels were unable to re-register under the act.[19] The Spanish vessels sought a judicial review, claiming that this provision infringed on their rights granted by EU law. A key question arose as to whether the appellants could be granted interim relief. While the House of Lords agreed that the appellants would ‘suffer irreparable damage’[20] if they were not granted interim relief by temporarily suspending the provision, they held that the national courts did not have the power to grant such a measure[21] and sent the case to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling.   Regarding this, the CJEU held that ‘the obligations on national courts to apply community law having direct effect and to protect rights which the latter confers on individuals includes the obligation to consider whether interim protection of rights claimed against the authorities of a member state should be granted in order to avoid irremediable damage and, where appropriate, to grant such interim relief’.[22] It has often been suggested that the ruling demonstrates how the UK’s membership in the EU, and therefore the acceptance of EU supremacy, was incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty since an institution other than Parliament was obliged to suspend the enforcement of a provision from an Act. Therefore, the Parliament of 1988 had been bound by the Parliament of 1972.   This was the view taken by William Wade. Writing in 1996, following the Factortame  decision, Wade states: ‘While Britain remains in the community, we are in a regime in which Parliament has bound it’s successors successfully, and for which it is nothing if not revolutionary’.[23] Wade goes on note that while the 1972 Act was being passed by Parliament, there was much debate as to whether entering the EU would bind Parliament’s successors. However, ultimately, ‘members were assured that the sovereignty of Parliament would remain intact because it was legally indestructible’[24] on the basis that any provision made under the Act could be repealed and that Parliament remained free to repeal the 1972 Act whenever it chose. While recent history has demonstrated the latter remained true throughout the UK’s period as a member state, Wade nevertheless ultimately argues that ‘Parliament’s powers had suffered a seismic change’ following Factortame .[25] However, the extent to which this could be considered to be true has been subject to debate.   In the House of Lords ruling on Factortame ,[26] Lord Bridge asserts that there was clear jurisprudence surrounding the doctrine of EU supremacy prior to the UK joining the EU. Therefore, ‘whatever limitation of its sovereignty when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary’. Furthermore, Lord Bridge goes on to state that ‘similarly, when decisions of the CJEU have exposed areas of UK statute law which have failed to implement Council directives, Parliament has always loyally accepted the obligation to make appropriate and prompt amendments. Thus, there is nothing in any way novel in according supremacy to rules of community law to those areas to which they apply’.[27]   The statements of Lord Bridge therefore give rise to the suggestion that parliamentary sovereignty was not drastically changed as a consequence of the UK being a member of the EU. While some change to parliamentary sovereignty did occur, the changes were not as ‘seismic’ as Wade asserts. Mark Elliot notes that the constitutional significance of disapplying an Act of Parliament ‘was reduced to little more than background to the litigation’. Furthermore, Elliot highlights that while it was only Lord Bridge who spoke about such issues in his judgement, this was only insofar as to highlight that, as noted earlier, Parliament voluntarily accepted a limitation on its sovereignty by enacting the ECA 1972. However, Elliot also notes several ways in which the domestic courts could have responded to Factortame . Firstly, the House of Lords could have held that ‘the primary responsibility of the UK Courts is to give effect to the most recent expression of Parliament’s will’ and consequently enforced the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 in question, regardless of their compatibility with EU Law. However, as Elliot notes, ‘such a response would have implied a very rigid understanding of the domestic constitutional order and notion of parliamentary sovereignty’, notwithstanding the difficulties which would arise as a consequence of the UK breaching its international obligations. The second approach explained by Elliot highlights that the approach adopted by the House of Lords was more ‘intermediate’ in nature. Thus, instead of the UK constitution being fixed and unmoving, it is, ‘flexible enough to accord to EU law some degree of priority over incompatible domestic legislation’.[28]   Upon this view, it can be suggested that Wade’s approach fails to consider any form of flexibility in domestic constitutional law. Paul Craig highlights that Wade’s analysis of the traditional view of sovereignty is based, in part, on the reasoning that ‘Parliament is sovereign in the sense there depicted because it accords with the reasoning of Coke, Blackstone and Dicey’.[29] While this accords with Elliot’s rigid interpretation of how Factortame  could have potentially been decided, this ultimately was not followed by the Court. Therefore, Wade’s strong adherence to the traditional notion of sovereignty fails to consider the possibility of flexibility and, consequently, any degree of a natural evolution of sovereignty and how this may affect its operation.   At the time of the Factortame  case, Dicey’s writing on parliamentary sovereignty was already over 100 years old. In addition to this, sovereignty, alongside other principles of the UK constitution, remains formally uncodified. Due to the uncodified nature of parliamentary sovereignty, it is impossible for it to not be subject to change or evolution as society evolves. While membership to the EU has changed Dicey’s traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, such a change ultimately highlights the existence of the ability for sovereignty to evolve and adapt to the needs of modern society. In Factortame , sovereignty was shown to be flexible enough to encompass the doctrine of EU supremacy. Consequently, Wade’s strong assertions that sovereignty suffered a ‘seismic change’ in the wake of Factortame  and that this was ‘nothing short of revolutionary’ seem diminished.[30]   NW Barber arguably takes a more extreme view than Wade and states that parliamentary sovereignty no longer existed following Factortame . Barber asserts that ‘when the pre-1991 interpretations are considered, it is clear that the rule ceased to be a feature in the British Constitution after Factortame ’.[31] However, the role of the courts under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998) can be seen as evidence to challenge this view. The HRA 1998 was enacted to give effect to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) within domestic law. However, in situations where courts cannot give effect to a provision in a way which is compatible with convention rights, courts do not have the power to strike down incompatible legislation. Section 4 only allows for higher courts to make a declaration of incompatibility. However, such declarations do not ‘affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of the provision in respect to which it was given’.[32] It is therefore the decision of Parliament to amend any provisions deemed incompatible with convention rights. Although Lord Hope notes that the court’s ability to interpret legislation under s 3(1) is ‘far-reaching’,[33] the fact that the courts cannot strike down legislation and such power remained with Parliament suggests that parliamentary sovereignty did in fact continue to operate following Factortame . This is on the basis that powers granted to the courts under s 4 ultimately respects that Parliament is the ultimate law-making body.   Overall, concerning the question of whether EU Membership infringed on parliamentary sovereignty, it can be shown that while there was a move away from the traditional interpretation of sovereignty as a result of EU membership, the principle was nonetheless still able to operate while the UK was a member of the EU. This is on the basis that this represented a natural development of a long-standing uncodified principle. Therefore, sovereignty was able to adapt and change to fulfil the requirements of EU membership while still being able to operate meaningfully.   The Courts and Parliamentary Sovereignty    The case of Miller  (No1)[34] arose amid the Government’s attempt to use prerogative powers in order to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU),[35] which enables member states to begin the process of leaving the EU. Article 50(2) requires that the member state notifies the European Council of their intention to withdraw. Once this notice has been given, a two-year period begins in which a withdrawal agreement must be negotiated between the member state and the European Council.[36]   Following the 2016 Referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May’s government attempted to use prerogative powers to trigger Article 50. Gina Miller, alongside other applicants, challenged this use of prerogative powers. The case was brought on the basis that once notice had been given it could not be reversed. Consequently, the use of prerogative powers would ‘pre-empt the decision of Parliament on the Great Repeal Bill’ which would amount to ‘altering the law by ministerial action […] Without prior legislation’.[37] Delivering their judgement in January 2017, the Supreme Court highlighted the comments of Lord Denning in Blackburn v Attorney General , which outlined the general position of treaty negotiations: ‘The treaty making provisions of this country rest not in the courts but the Crown […] When ministers negotiate a treaty […] They act on behalf of the country as a whole’.[38] However, despite recognising this general position, the court noted that withdrawing from the EU would ‘constitute as significant a constitutional change’[39] as joining the EU in 1972. Accordingly, ‘it would be inconsistent with the long-standing and fundamental principle for such a far-reaching change to the UK constitutional arrangements to be brought about by[…]ministerial action alone’.[40] Additionally, it was noted that EU law created a distinct source of law and legal rights which had become ‘inextricably linked’ with domestic rights and obligations from other sources of law.[41] It was the view of the majority that the government could not trigger Article 50 using prerogative powers and instead required the consent of Parliament via an Act of Parliament in order to do so.[42] This led to the passing of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017.   The reasoning of the majority has been criticised. Mark Elliot puts forward the view that the majority’s assertion that major constitutional changes can only be made by legislation ‘lacks support in authority, imports into law a novel and highly imprecise criterion by which prerogative powers are delimited and rests upon normative powers that are unarticulated and notably absent’.[43] Despite this, there has been support for the court’s ruling, suggesting that it essentially accords with existing common law principles.[44] An example of such a principle can be seen in the Fire Brigades Union case in 1995, where Lord Browne-Wilkinson stated: ‘It would most surprising if, at present day, prerogative powers could be validly exercised by the executive as to frustrate the will of Parliament […] and to an extent, pre-empt the decision of Parliament’.[45] Therefore, for Barber, Hickman, and King, the decision upholds the sovereignty of Parliament.[46] In this light, the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent the Government from using prerogative in Miller (No. 1)  can be seen as the Court maintaining Parliament’s sovereignty and it’s law-making power, albeit in what has been considered an unorthodox way.   Throughout the UK’s membership to the EU, the nature and role of the domestic courts have undoubtedly developed and altered.[47] However, this is in no way novel, as there have also been instances of the courts developing in order to meet the circumstances and challenges of the time. One historical example of this is the development of the Court of Chancery in the Middle Ages. Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the legal system in England was fragmented and varied depending on the area, with no official records.[48] The common law system which subsequently developed during this period comprised of very rigid and inflexible principles which would often lead to unfair outcomes.[49] Individuals could petition the King to adjudicate on their issue. Sir John Baker highlights that as far back as King Alfred, coronation oaths referred to a ‘clear royal duty of ensuring equitable judgements’.[50] This function of the King was in time delegated to the Lord Chancellor and eventually led to the development of the Courts of Chancery. The Court of Chancery was much more flexible than that of the Common Law courts, having powers that the Common Law courts did not.[51] The two courts operated separately alongside one another until the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, removing the Chancery and Common Law courts and replacing them with the High Court (which was split into the Chancery, King’s Bench and Family Divisions)[52] which are still seen today.[53]   The above illustrates that the development and evolution of the Constitution and other similarly important areas have arisen when needed to address areas of the law considered deficient. While membership to the EU can be considered a catalyst for some of the developments seen in recent decades, the evolution of constitutional principles can nonetheless be shown to not be limited to the period in which the UK was a member of the EU. On this basis, as the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty cannot be solely attributed to EU membership, the act of leaving the EU alone cannot restore a traditional notion of sovereignty due to other factors which may influence development.   Devolution and Parliamentary Sovereignty   Another significant constitutional development which has had a more direct impact on parliamentary sovereignty, is the implementation and development of devolution. In 1973, the Kilbrandon Commission recommended that devolution of some powers should occur, with Scotland and Wales having their own elected assemblies. Professor Norton highlights that there are both political and economic benefits to devolution: it allows individuals in devolved regions to have ‘a greater sense of attachment to the [political] process’ and resources can be more easily allocated where needed.[54]   Despite support for devolution in the early 70s, devolution in Scotland was not facilitated until the late 1990s with the Scotland Act 1998. While Scotland was already considered to have a significant degree of ‘administrative devolution’, the 1998 act nonetheless developed this in two distinct ways. Firstly, by ‘conferring legislative competence on the Scottish Parliament’, and, secondly, ‘create[ing] new institutions for political representations in Scotland’. These developments allowed Scotland to have a greater degree of control over law and policy and has been said to have created a greater divide between Scotland and Westminster in this regard.[55] The subsequent Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016 further widened the powers of the Scottish Parliament.[56]   The implementation of devolution has given rise to a debate on whether the UK has developed into a ‘Quasi-federal’ state. Nicholas Aroney highlights that while the UK has traditionally been considered a ‘unitary state’, the development of devolution has ‘given creditability’ to this debate. Furthermore, Aroney notes that while devolution has created a degree of federalism in the UK (due to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland having their own elected legislatures), there are important differences between the UK and traditional federal systems. Firstly, due to the powers of the devolved legislatures being granted by virtue of the Westminster Parliament, instead of a written constitution binding the two. Secondly, due to the level of asymmetry fundamental to the system. Aroney argues that this is because while Wales, Scotland and Northern Island’s devolution frameworks are ‘tailored’ to each territory, England does not have a corresponding devolved institution and is instead governed solely by the Westminster Parliament.[57] With the above in mind, it can be argued that devolution does not strictly accord with Dicey’s traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to an institution other than the Westminster Parliament having the power to make laws. While the Westminster Parliament does retain the ultimate law-making power in the UK and therefore remains sovereign in that sense, devolution can nonetheless be shown to represent another development away from Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   The potential side-effect of quasi-federalism on parliamentary sovereignty can be seen in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill) 2022. The bill seeks to sunset all retained EU law by the end of December 2023, unless explicitly specifically saved by a Minister. However, in regard to retained EU law that falls under a devolved competence, the bill allows a Minister of said devolved legislature to save it from being sunsetted. However, it has been noted that the powers under the bill have been drafted so widely that ministers of devolved nations could potentially save all retained EU law and devolved competence from being sunsetted.[58] In regard to Scotland specifically, the 2016 Brexit referendum saw the majority of Scotland voting to remain in the EU. In light of this, the Scottish Parliament may elect to save all retained EU law which falls under its competence. A consequence of this would be a greater divergence of laws between Scotland and Westminster which would have further impact on the operation of parliamentary sovereignty. Furthermore, this course of action also does not align with Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   Overall, the implementation of devolution in the UK represents a further development in the operation of parliamentary sovereignty away from Dicey’s traditional interpretation of it. Therefore, in light of such a significant constitutional development, an attempt to restore the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty can be shown to be a far more complex endeavour than simply withdrawing from the EU.   EU Withdrawal and Parliamentary Sovereignty   The European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018 sought to deal with the ‘wide-ranging impact upon the law of the United Kingdom upon exit of the European Union’. Its primary aim was to create a framework whereby the roughly 20,000 pieces of EU-derived legislation could be preserved in domestic law upon the UK’s exit from the EU.[59] While the Act makes wide-ranging provisions for various types of retained EU law (REUL), this essay will focus on the continuation of EU supremacy and the extensive powers given to ministers to correct ‘deficiencies’ left behind by EU law.   S 5 of the EUWA outlines the circumstances in which the principle of supremacy continues to operate. While s 5(1) states that supremacy does not apply to legislation made on or after completion day, s 5(2) states that ‘Accordingly, the principle of supremacy of EU law continues to apply on or after [IP Completion] day so far as relevant to the interpretation, disapplication or quashing of any enactment made on or before [IP completion] day’.[60] While Elliot and Tierney note that limiting the scope of EU supremacy to pre-exit legislation was a sensible course of action, the continued use of the word ‘supremacy’ was problematic.[61] This issue was explored by the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in their report on EUWA when it was still in bill form.[62] Despite the committee agreeing with the policy aims behind the provision[63] they highlighted several issues with how the government sought to achieve it. Firstly, they expressed concern with the ‘vagueness and ambiguity’ of the provision, in particular in regard to the types of retained EU law the principle is to continue to apply to,[64] in addition to ‘which forms of domestic law […] are intended to yield to retained EU law because of the supremacy principle’.[65]   However, the most significant issue highlighted by the Constitution Committee was the question of how EU supremacy could be ‘meaningfully’ maintained following exit day,[66] saying that the continuation of supremacy ‘is a fundamental flaw at the heart of the bill’.[67] While the Committee made several suggestions as to how to remedy this, the Government declined to make any changes and the bill was enacted with EU supremacy still operating post-exit from the EU. S 1 of the EUWA expressly repeals the ECA 1972 upon exit day. Therefore, the continuation of a fundamental EU-derived principle (especially as one as strongly contested as supremacy) without its domestic legal basis seems somewhat nonsensical. Moreover, it strongly suggests that leaving the EU has been unable to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty.   Another significant provision of the EUWA is Section 8, which provides: ‘A Minister of the Crown may by regulations make such provision as the minister considers appropriate to prevent, remedy or mitigate (a) any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively, or (b) any other deficiency in retained EU law, arising from the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU’.[68]   The passing of secondary legislation into law is a very different process to that of primary legislation and can be done in several ways. For example, an affirmative procedure requires the approval of Parliament before it is passed into law whereas, with a negative procedure, a draft of the SI is laid before Parliament and will automatically come into force unless a motion is passed to annul it within a fixed period.[69] It has long been recognised that while the use of secondary legislation has increased, along with the importance and complexity of its contents, the parliamentary time dedicated to its scrutiny has decreased. Additionally, Philippa Tudor highlights that there is a ‘Scarcely acknowledged […] democratic deficit in the current parliamentary scrutiny arrangements for domestic delegated legislation’.[70]   The issue of a ‘democratic deficit’ is still relevant to s 8 of the EUWA: the provision contains an extensive Henry VIII power. Such powers are defined as a ‘clause in a bill which enables ministers to amend or repeal provisions in an Act of Parliament using secondary legislation, which is subject to varying degrees of parliamentary scrutiny’.[71] In their report of the (then) bill, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution highlighted a number of concerns with the inclusion of such a wide-ranging Henry VII power. An initial concern related to some of the language. In particular, the use of the word ‘appropriate’, which the committee stated was ‘subjective and wide’. The Faculty of Advocates stated that the use of the word meant that any changes made would be ‘in essence a matter for the minister’s opinion’.[72] Furthermore, concern was also expressed as to the open-endedness of the provision.[73] While it was noted that some Henry VIII powers were needed to facilitate withdrawal, it nonetheless recommended that the use of these powers should be limited. While s 8(7) does contain some restrictions on the use of the power, the committee concluded that they were not sufficient to ‘minimise the delegation of excessive powers to the Executive’.[74]   The most significant area of concern related to how delegated legislation made under the Act was to be scrutinised. Scrutiny procedures are outlined under schedule 7. The vast majority of regulations would be subject to the negative procedure,[75] whereas only a limited number would be subject to the affirmative procedure.[76] Examples of the types of instruments which would require an affirmative procedure include ones creating a new public authority, or transferring new powers to said authority.[77] However, the most worrying was the ‘made affirmative’ procedure, which allows a minister to create and approve a statutory instrument without parliament’s approval in situations that the minister considers to be urgent.[78] In order to remain in force, the regulation must be approved by both houses within 28 sitting days.[79] Concern for this procedure was expressed by several groups and individuals providing written evidence to the committee. The Public Law Project stated: ‘The potency of powers that could be exercised in ‘urgent’ cases is hard to overstate. Ministers could deprive people of their liberty and Parliament could do nothing about it’.[80] Furthermore, Professor Alison Young noted the practical effect of the procedure, stating that regulations would ‘remain lawful even if the measure itself is not approved within a month and new regulations, can be made, presumably, if still urgent through the same procedure’.[81] The EUWA 2018 ultimately provided the executive with wide-ranging legislative powers, while also providing parliament with limited opportunity to effectively scrutinise the legislation being made. Despite this, s 8(8) did place a limitation on the use of s 8 to two years after exit day, seemingly limiting the long-term impact of the provision on parliamentary sovereignty.   However, this may not be the case following the enactment of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023.[82] The bill published under Liz Truss’s government, and was taken forward by Prime Minster Rishi Sunak with the principal aim of the bill is to sunset ‘all EU-derived subordinate legislation and retained direct EU legislation’.[83] It also changes the name of retained EU law to ‘assimilated law’.[84] The effect of the bill has been described as a ‘reversal of the natural order’[85] as large amounts of EU-derived legislation will automatically be sunsetted by the end of 2023 unless chosen by a minister to either be saved, or preserved until 2026 at the latest, instead of individual pieces of legislation being chosen to be sunsetted. It is thought that there are over 2,000 pieces of retained EU legislation, spanning over 30 different policy areas.[86] The bill encompassed important EU-derived legislation such as the Working Time Directive,[87] but not primary legislation such as the Equality Act 2010.   Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society, has highlighted several concerns arising from the bill. Fox notes that automatically sunsetting such a large volume of retained EU law would be an ‘abdication of Parliament’s scrutiny and oversight role’.[88] Furthermore, she has noted that the bill moves democratic oversight of retained EU law away from Parliament.[89] This is evident in the extensive powers given to ministers, in clauses 12, 13,14, and 15, to revoke or alter retained EU law. Clause 15 (now s 14 of the Act) arguably contains the most extensive powers—giving ministers the power to either revoke secondary REUL without replacing it[90] or make an alternative provision that they deem to be ‘appropriate’.[91] However, as noted by George Peretz KC, the alternate provisions do not have to match the ones that they’re replacing.[92] Similar to s 8 of the EUWA, the bill grants considerable law-making provisions to the executive, while simultaneously limiting parliament’s ability to scrutinise legislation and assert its sovereignty. During its second reading in the House of Commons, the bill was strongly opposed by opposition MPs—being labelled a ‘vanity project’, ‘not fit for purpose’, and that it would result in ‘chaos and confusion’.[93] Some changes were made to the Bill prior to its enactment although the content and aims have largely remained the same. Most notably, instead of the automatic revocation of all retained law, any legislation that it to be revoked is listed in schedule 1. While this does provide for greater legal certainty, this is still affects a significant amount of legislation across a broad range of policy areas. Furthermore, the Act still removes parliamentary oversight over assimilated law and places it with ministers instead. Therefore, the Act can be shown to remain problematic for the operation of parliamentary sovereignty and its traditional interpretation.   Regardless, taken together, s 8 of the EUWA, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, represent a significant shift in the balance of law-making powers away from Parliament and towards the Executive. Consequently, Parliament’s ability to effectively scrutinise and control what legislation is passed has also been significantly curtailed. Therefore, both the way in which Brexit was facilitated in Parliament and the way in which retained EU law has been dealt with following exit day has meant that a traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty has not been restored by leaving the EU. This is on the basis that Parliament’s legislative powers have been significantly weakened by the substantial powers granted to the executive. It is difficult to determine for certain what the future holds for the operation of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, however recent years have undoubtedly shown several attempts from the executive to diminish its power.   Conclusion   Traditionally, discussions into the precise nature of the relationship between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty have been portrayed has being relatively clear cut, in the sense that they were either compatible or incompatible with one another. However, such portrayals have been rooted in nineteenth-century interpretations of sovereignty, and consequently fail to take into account the degree of flexibility which is intrinsic to the UK’s unwritten constitution. In light of this, while membership to the EU can be shown to represent a move away from this traditional interpretation, it cannot be said to be completely incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty due to the latter’s inherent ability to evolve. Similarly, the act of leaving the EU has not been able to restore this traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to other factors external to EU membership which have shaped and influenced parliamentary sovereignty into the form which operates today. While the UK leaving the EU has closed one avenue of constitutional evolution, it is by no means the end. Katie Ann Twelves   Katie Twelves graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Hull. During her time at Hull, she developed a particular interest in UK public and constitutional law. In February 2023, Katie was invited to present the above paper at the 15 th  Trinity College Dublin Law Student Colloquium. She is currently studying for a Master of Laws in Legal and Political Theory at the University of York, with a dissertation project examining reform of the House of Lords. [1]  HP Bulmer Ltd v J Bollinger SA  [1974] CH 401 at 418 per Lord Denning MR. [2] Phillip Norton, Governing Britain  (Manchester University Press 2020) 167. [3]  R v Secretary of State for Transport ex parte Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1991] AC 603. [4]  R (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5. [5] Vernon Bogdanor, The New British Constitution  (Hart Publishing 2009) 6. [6] ibid 8. [7] See eg Nicholas Watt and Rowena Mason, ‘EU Deal: Cameron vows to put Commons sovereignty “beyond doubt”’ Guardian  (London, 3 February 2016) < https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/03/eu-deal-david-cameron-uk-parliament-sovereignty-beyond-doubt-boris-johnson > accessed 3 August 2023. [8] Paul Craig, ‘Development of the EU’ in Catherine Barnard and Steve Peers (eds), European Union Law  (3rd edn, Oxford University Press 2020). [9] Case 6/64 Costa   v Enel  [1964] ECR 585. [10] Robert Schütze, ‘Constitutionalism and the European Union’ in Barnard and Peers (n 8) 78. [11]  Costa (n 9) [593]-[594]. The court also stated that, ‘The integration into the laws of each member state of provisions which derive from the community […] make it impossible for the states, as a corollary, to accord precedence to a unilateral and subsequent measure over a legal system accepted by them on the basis of reciprocity’.  [12] ibid. [13] Case 11/70 Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH   v Einfuhr-und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel [1970] ECR 1125. [14] ibid [1]. [15] In its reasoning, the court stated: ‘The validity of such measures can only be judged in the light of community law. In fact, the law stemming from the treaty, and independent source of law, cannot because of its very nature be overridden by rules of national law […] without it being deprived of its character as community law and without the legal basis being called into question. Therefore, the validity of a community measure or its effect within a member state cannot be affected by the allegations that it runs counter to whether the fundamental rights as formulated by the constitution of that state or the principles of a national constitutional structure’ (ibid). [16] European Communities Act 1972. Of particular relevance is s 2(1) which states: ‘All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time, created or arising by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties and all such remedies and procedures from time to time provided for or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties are without any further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced, allowed and followed accordingly; and the expression ‘enforceable Community right’ and similar expressions shall be read as referring to one to which this subsection applies’. [17] AV Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Macmillan & Co. 1885) 3. [18]  Factortame (n 3). [19] Case C-213/89 R   v Secretary of State for Transport, ex p Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1990] [1]. [20] ibid [10]. [21] ibid [11]. [22] ibid [66]. [23] HWR Wade, ‘Sovereignty – revolution or evolution?’ (1996) 112 LQR 571. [24] ibid 573. [25] ibid 574. [26]  Factortame (n 3). [27] ibid per Lord Bridge at [659]. [28] Mark Elliot, ‘sovereignty, Primacy and the Common Law Constitution: What has EU Membership Taught Us?’ (University of Cambridge Legislative Research Paper series, Paper No. 24/2018). [29] Paul Craig, ‘Sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament after Factortame’ (1991) 11(1) Yearbook of European Law 222. [30] Wade (n 23) 574. [31] NW Barber, ‘The afterlife of parliamentary sovereignty’ (2011) 9(1) International Journal of Constitutional Law (2011) 152 [32] Human Rights Act 1998, s 4(6)(a). [33] Lord Hope, ‘The Human Rights Act 1998: The Task of the Judges’ (1999) 20(3) Statute Law Rev 185. [34]  Miller (n 4). [35] Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Article 50. [36] Mark Elliot, ‘The Supreme Court Judgement in Miller: In Search of a Constitutional principle’ (University of Cambridge Legal Research Paper Series, Paper No. 23/2017). [37]  Miller (n 4) [36]. [38]  Blackburn v Attorney General  [1971] 1 WLR 1037, at 1040. [39]  Miller (n 4) [81]. [40] ibid. [41] ibid [86]. [42] ibid [101]. [43] Elliot (n 36). [44] Nick Barber, Tom Hickman, and Jeff King, ‘Pulling the Article 50 “trigger”: Parliament’s Indispensable Role’ ( UK Constitutional Law Association , 27 June 2016) < https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2016/06/27/nick-barber-tom-hickman-and-jeff-king-pulling-the-article-50-trigger-parliaments-indispensable-role/ > accessed 5 January 2023. [45]  R   v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex parte Fire Brigades Union [1995], 2 AC 513, per Lord Browne Wilkinson at [552]. [46] Barber, Hickman, and King (n 44). [47] See Steven Gow Calabresi, ‘The United States: Creation, Reconstruction, the Progressives, and the Modern Era’ in The   History and Growth of Judicial Review, Vol 1: The G-20 Common Law Countries and Israel  (Oxford University Press 2021). [48] Sir John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History  (5th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 12 [49] Graham Virgo, The Principles of Equity and Trusts  (4th edn, Oxford University Press 2020) 6 [50] Baker (n 48) 12. [51] Virgo (n 49) 6. [52] ibid 7. [53] A more recent example of the courts developing and having a lasting impact can also be seen in the development of Wednesbury Reasonableness. First outlined in Associated Provincial Picture House Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223, which developed a test to assess whether a decision of a public authority can be considered reasonable. Outlining the principle, Lord Greene stated: ‘A person entrusted with a discretion must […] Direct himself properly in the law. He must call his own attention to the matters which he bound to consider. He must exclude from consideration matters which are irrelevant to what he has to consider. If he does not obey these rules, he may truly be said to... be acting unreasonably. Similarly, there may be something so absurd that no sensible person can ever dream that it lay within the powers of the authority (per Lord Greene at 229)’. The test still constitutes an important element of judicial review; see comments of Mrs Justice Lang in Worthing Borough Council v Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities [2022] EWHC 2044 (Admin) [37]). [54] Norton (n 2) 168 [55] Aileen McHarg, ‘Devolution in Scotland’ in Jeffrey Jowell and Colm O’Cinneide (eds), The Changing Constitution  (9th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 271. [56] Norton (n 2) 169. [57] Nicholas Aroney, ‘The formation and amendment of federal constitutions in a Westminster-derived context’ (2018) 16(1) Int J Constitutional Law (2018) 41. [58] Monckton Chambers, ‘Webinar on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( YouTube , 30 September 2022) 58:00 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5gQlkRadKA&list=FLAkDukVPOfZCvrVhx-lBhrA&index=3 > accessed 5 January 2023. [59] Mark Elliot and Stephen Tierney, ‘Political Pragmatism and Constitutional Principle: The European Union (Withdrawal) Act’ (University of Cambridge Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 54/2018). [60] European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018, s 5(2). [61] Elliot and Tierney (n 59). [62] House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2018, 9 th  report of Session 207-2019. [63] ibid, para 79. [64] ibid, para 81. [65] ibid, para 84. [66] ibid, para 88. [67] ibid, para 89. [68] EUWA (n 60) s 8(1) [69] ‘What is Secondary Legislation?’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/secondary-legislation/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [70] Philippa Tudor, ‘Secondary Legislation: Second Class or Crucial?’ (2000) 21(3) Statute Law Rev   149. [71] Henry VIII Clauses’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/henry-viii-clauses/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [72] House of Lords Select Committee (n 62), para 163. [73] ibid, para 187. [74] ibid. [75] ibid, para 214. [76] ibid, para 216. [77] Ibid [78] EUWA (n 60) s 7, para 5(2). [79] ibid s 7, para 5(4). [80] ‘The Public Law Project—Written evidence (EUW0034)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/71272.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [81] ‘Professor Alison L Young, University of Oxford—Written evidence (EUW0003)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/69634.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [82] Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, HC Bill, Session 2022-23, 204. [83] ibid 1(1). [84] ibid, clause 6 (1). [85] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 10:20. [86] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022’ ( UK Government ) < https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill-2022 > accessed January 5 2023. [87] ‘Directive 2033/88/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 November 2003 concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time’ OJ L 299. [88] Ruth Fox, ‘Five Problems with the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( Hansard Society , 24 October 2022) < https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/publications/briefings/five-problems-with-the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill > accessed January 5 2023. [89] ibid. [90] Retained EU Law Bill (n 82), clause 15(1). [91] ibid, clause 15(3). [92] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 24:40. [93] Layla Moran MP, HC Deb, 25 October 2022, Vol 721, Col 229.

Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English ‘history and culture’, no elaboration needed.[2] Others, such as podcaster Konstantin Kisin, appeal to broader ‘British values’—freedom of expression, women’s rights, equitable treatment of minorities, and the like.[3] These abstract principles, largely indistinguishable from the liberal ideals of, say, France or Germany, prove in turn an easy target for those further right, for whom Englishness can only be grasped as a racial category.[4] Indeed, Kisin himself seems to have had a change of heart in this regard, rebuffing ex- Spectator editor Fraser Nelson’s insistence that Rishi Sunak is English on the grounds that the former PM is a ‘brown Hindu’.[5] In their strident delineation of who is and is not English, these civic and ethnic nationalisms reveal an insecurity about the possibility of a positive account of Englishness in the manner of Orwell or his contemporaries.[6] Today’s talking heads offer an essentially apophatic definition of Englishness, approaching it through what it is not. Instead of naming features of a shared and self-evident cultural repository, they focus on those—migrants, criminals, Muslims—who allegedly fail to make the cut. This negative definition easily slides into a political programme: simply remove all offending groups and the mythic unity will return as if by magic. On the shortest-sighted model of this chronology, it is only the increased migration under recent governments, catalysed by the concurrent excesses of ‘woke’ theory, which has consigned English identity to oblivion. Talk of a ‘crisis of Englishness’ is, however, far from new. Casting our eyes for the moment only as far back as the turn of the millennium, when the threats of Scottish and Welsh devolution loomed large, we find a glut of books and television series taking the nation’s vital signs. In the manner of an anatomical dissection, Albion’s dismembered parts—the countryside, grammar schools, aristocracy, or Anglican church—are hoisted aloft for a rapt audience. Roger Scruton, in the introduction to his England: An Elegy  (2000), joins over a dozen authors pacing round England’s grave.[7] The tenor of such works varies, from the cosmopolitan excitement of Andrew Marr’s The Day Britain Died  (2000) to the all-encompassing despair of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain  (1999). Yet we owe the most interesting artefact of this media explosion to someone born not in Old England but in Trinidad, and who is not generally judged a fusty reactionary. Darcus Howe arrived in England in 1961, soon pivoting from legal study to journalism and political activism, becoming a member of the British Black Panthers and long-standing editor of Race Today . He rose to prominence in 1970 as one of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, arrested, tried, and acquitted for protesting against police raids at The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, a legal proceeding which saw the Metropolitan Police formally admit to racist behaviour. Seven years later, as his biographers Paul Bunce and Robin Field recount, he was again arrested and tried without charge. Whilst pointedly celebrating African Liberation Day rather than the Silver Jubilee, he had performed a citizen’s arrest on a police officer who was shouting racist abuse and locked him up in a basement.[8] Howe’s radicalism can then hardly be questioned, and one might be forgiven for expecting him to condemn Englishness entirely, as a malignant discourse of chauvinism and racial superiority. This was the tack taken by the so-called Parekh report, published in 2000 by the Runnymede Trust under the title ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’.[9] But Howe has a habit of surprising, especially in his later career as a broadcaster. For his first documentary on the topic, 1988’s England, My England , Howe personally selected arch-conservative Peregrine Worsthorne to be his co-presenter.[10] Later, in the 2004 production Who You Callin’ a Nigger? , he focused on violent tensions between ethnic minority populations—a controversial topic, and one which might seem to provide grist to the mill of those opposed to migration and multiculturalism. His relationship to England and Englishness was fiercely dialectical. As he put it: Although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign ‘Motherland’ of my parents’ vision.[11] It is this dual perspective which makes Howe’s three-part television series White Tribe (2000), freely available at the time of writing on Channel 4’s website, such compelling viewing.[12] In an inversion of the colonial travelogue or ethnography, Howe roams the highlands and lowlands of England, interrogating those he finds about their self-conception, their shared rituals and practices. White Tribe  is grounded in the belief that English identity both exists—or at least existed in recent memory, for Howe can fondly recall it from the 1960s—and is, when expressed without prejudice, essentially good. Its interviewees might be arranged in a simple matrix: they are either possessed of a meaningful, historically and geographically informed sense of identity or not; and they are either racist or not. He sets off with optimism. * From the outset, the former criterion seems in distinctly short supply. The first episode opens with Howe quizzing bemused pedestrians about the content of white culture. He is met with a mixture of genuine befuddlement—‘I haven’t got a clue really’—and pessimistic historicization: ‘We set the standards for the rest of the world. Well, we used to’. But this is nothing to be gloated over, for Howe knows well the unstable mixture of melancholy and agitation which results from such loss of self. ‘Until I made this journey’, he reflects, ‘I thought white people were certain of themselves and knew who they were’. No, ‘these are people who are in a crisis. Something is finished, there’s nothing in its place’. In Howe’s Brixton neighbourhood, this sense of an ending is illustrated by way of contrast. On one side of the street presides a church, that bastion of Englishness, whose flock now consists almost entirely of immigrants. On the other swells a nightclub peopled until the early hours by partying whites, whom Howe, dipping into the register of social conservatism, disdains as ‘hedonistic in behaviour, licentious’. This opening juxtaposition is reprised as Howe speaks to Simon, a young white man living in majority-Asian Southall. Simon’s minority status invites the question of identity more pressingly than elsewhere, but it is not answered convincingly; he unfavourably compares a white population which takes little pride in their Christian religion with the Sikh community seen celebrating a festival in the streets. Blame for this inertia is placed not on migrants, or even on mass migration as a phenomenon, but on the enervating effects of consumer capitalism: ‘you buy an Easter egg, it’s done’. The Sikhs, whom Howe agrees are ‘full of certainty, full of bounce and colour’, represent a source of both envy and potential inspiration, an instructive case for a population losing its global self-evidence. In Newcastle, listless ennui makes way for pandemonic intensity. Howe encounters a group of football fans, again branded ‘licentious’, pasty faces swarming the camera as they gyrate their bodies and swig from cans of lager. There is, he admits, a ‘carnival spirit’ at play, but with a crucial proviso. ‘We had something to celebrate: freedom from slavery’, whilst this is merely a ‘celebration of nothingness’, grounded in no deeper cultural convictions than football and beer. Casting aspersions on the authentic Englishness of football may seem implausible, though here too Howe is echoing nineteenth-century critiques of the sport which condemned its violent disorder, sensationalistic media coverage, and increasing professionalization as betrayals of the properly English value of ‘fair play’, thought to be embodied by cricket. Most everything now deemed archetypally English has previously been presented as its mortal enemy. But the important point is a socioeconomic one. This hedonistic furore may, Howe speculates, be all that remains of white working class culture ‘when you take the work away’, replacing the heavy industry of shipbuilding and coalmining with a night-time economy of bars and clubs.[13] A yet more dystopian confirmation of this thesis is found at a post-industrial estate in Grangetown, North Yorkshire. As the steelworks have closed down, a mass of unemployed remain, ensnared by crime or drugs and surveilled all the while by omnipresent cameras. No Englishness survives in this ghetto, no past or future, only a terminal, degrading present. Who is to blame for this? For Howe, the culprits are clear: all those proponents of Thatcherite neoliberalism whose destructive war against trade unions and old industry saw the replacement of working class English culture with foreign capital. Quite by chance, at a Conservative party annual dinner in Skegness, he runs into a chief architect of this transformation, Norman Tebbit, delivering a speech on—what else?—the fate of Englishness under the threat of devolution. Laconic as ever, Howe points out the hypocrisy in mourning, just when it becomes politically expedient, a ‘little England which he himself wiped out’. His verbal joust with Tebbit returns us to the question of who exactly can be classed as English. Tebbit’s line is unwavering, and he insists to Howe that ‘clearly you’re not English, but you are British’, despite recognizing that on this logic the Union’s disintegration would leave Howe and millions of others in no man’s land.[14] The former Conservative Party Chairman’s argument is not just echoed by Kisin nowadays, but also—more uncomfortably—by the Parekh report, in which Englishness is deemed an inappropriate identification for ethnic minorities in Britain, too laden with ‘systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations’. Better, the report suggests, to describe oneself as British, though even this is ‘not ideal’.[15] From today’s vantage point, such reasoning seems worryingly at risk of appropriation by ethnonationalists—‘see, they don’t want to integrate anyway’. Howe wisely takes a more strident strategy, not ceding language but claiming it for himself. He bluntly maintains that being English would be ‘no problem with me’, a perfectly coherent position provided one views identity in terms of cultural consciousness rather than unflexing bloodline. Ironically, Howe’s desire to be English sets him apart from a substantial segment of his interviewees, whose primary wish seems to be to divest themselves from their own Englishness. Birmingham is becoming a ‘Yankee town’, its inhabitants enjoying basketball and barbecue food in vast shopping centres. Globalization has killed the old high street and installed in its place a never-ending strip mall. Through it roams ‘Thatcher’s working class’, linked by nothing but the relentless desire to exercise their consumer choice. In the bourgeois Cotswolds, ‘the England that I dreamt about in Trinidad’, Howe uncovers a virulent strain of Francophilia. Participants at a wine-tasting see their spiritual home over the Channel, promising a therapeutic journey into the past since, as one tippler avers, ‘France now seems to be as England was in 1955’. One can just as easily imagine Howe prowling Brick Lane, interrogating diners about whether they prefer curry to pie and mash. Viewed cynically, multiculturalism’s appeal is revealed as merely a chance for the bland British middle classes to liven themselves up a little, experimenting with new colours and flavours. Echoes of more distant regions reverberate in Yorkshire’s Todmorden, where the cotton industry has been phased out in favour of health food shops replete with advertisements for holistic medicine, reflexology, shiatsu, aromatherapy, and the like. A castle in the area is now inhabited by some forty Buddhists living in a community of meditation. Evoking Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘Western Buddhism’—the optimal ideological fetish with which to claim inner peace whilst participating in a frenetic neoliberal capitalism—Howe elegantly observes that ‘the mills have gone to the far east and the far east has come to the castle’.[16] So inspiring for early 2000s authors like Zadie Smith, all this anarchic play of hybrid identities seems to make him distinctly uneasy. Howe has some strange bedfellows in this suspicion. In White Tribe ’s second episode, focused on those self-avowedly proud to be English, he speaks to adherents of an orthodox church modelled on the pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon population. For one gentleman, who advocates for a distinctly English parliament, the ‘coming of the Normans was something like the arrival of the Nazis and Pol Pot combined’. Yet he is not, he claims, opposed to diversity—on the contrary, this is a struggle ‘against the monoculture of globalism’, epitomized by ‘McDonald’s and Coca Cola’. This logic, whereby the false difference of consumerist globalization represents an annihilation of true ethnic difference, is—as Miri Davidson has shown—often found on the far right as a tactical appropriation of the language of left-wing decolonial theory.[17] Does Englishness deserve protection as an indigenous identity? Howe is unconvinced. For one, asserting identity’s immutability would deny the possibility of meaningful acculturation to which his own life is a testament. Despite a period of fascination with his Afro-Caribbean heritage, during which he took on an African name, he is forced to admit that he is ‘more English than [he] could ever be African’. Not only is the idea that the saints of pre-Norman religion could provide a meaningful identity after the turn of the millennium far from credible, England is a ‘mongrel nation’ of irreversibly mixed genealogies. Should Tebbit, who recalls that his family came over from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, be excluded from Englishness just as firmly as Howe? Belonging, on these grounds, is either a milestone which can never be reached or one which falls victim to precisely the arbitrary flexibility its proponents are trying to evade. Defences of ‘cultural relativism’ or the ‘right to difference’ stop short of overt racism. Not everyone Howe speaks to is so subtle. Playing bingo with retired workers in Todmorden, he is initially enchanted. ‘Full of confidence and dignity’, this is ‘the last of the good England, the best of it’. Yet this sentimentality soon evaporates when one, speaking to a cameraman, proclaims the white English a ‘superior race’. Nor can Howe be accused of oversensitivity to minor slights or jibes. Indeed, he perhaps unexpectedly defends the existence of comedian Bernard Manning’s controversial Embassy Club, its humour a kind of racial war of all against all, himself stifling a chuckle at more than a few wisecracks. Learning that Manning’s son would soon take over, with a plan to turn the venue into an ‘alternative comedy club catering for the metropolitan elite’, Howe confesses that he doesn’t want to see ‘another bit of traditional English culture wiped out by political correctness’. If racially provocative humour, provided it is doled out equally, can form a healthy part of English identity, the line must be drawn at genuine hatred, the ‘mark of the beast’. This Howe encounters in both Dover and on a deprived housing estate in Oldham. His excursion to the south coast could easily have been filmed in 2025: fuelled by the tabloid press, locals fear an onslaught of swarthy, moustachioed, Eastern European interlopers arriving in lorries by night with vast wads of notes, bringing disease, muggings, and disorder. The Folkestone Road, their alleged stomping ground, is deemed a ‘no-go area’, though Howe merrily parades up and down the street and—not for lack of trying—can find no migrants there. All he manages to stump up are three mild-mannered students sitting in a local park, teenage refugees from Kosovo who politely deny having harassed any local residents. The point is not that the number of asylum seekers crossing the channel—still a central preoccupation for Fleet Street and Whitehall alike—has not increased, nor that such migration is entirely without issue. Rather, these parallels serve as a reminder that the underside of arguments against the mass movement of the 2010s and 2020s, their nostalgic projection of a prelapsarian utopia free of worries about violence, instability, or social disintegration, would hardly have been recognized as such by the inhabitants of those past times. This case is made particularly effectively by Geoffrey Pearson in his Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears .[18] Published in 1983, Pearson’s book sought to throw into question the dominant narrative that a ‘permissive revolution’ in the prior two decades had precipitated an unprecedented decline in public morals, an explosion of disorder and criminality ending centuries of peaceable stability. As Pearson shows, this supposed stability, a substantial part of the ‘British way of life’, would have been news to earlier commentators, who complained of a similar malaise not only ‘before the war’ (so often a nostalgia-infused hinterland) but back well into the eighteenth century and beyond. The 1950s Teddy Boy, Victorian garrotter, and unruly Georgian apprentice step into line as earlier incarnations of the violent, ‘invading’ migrant nowadays. Of course, the existence of prior moral panics does not automatically invalidate contemporary ones. But, given its apparent survival across more than 300 years of crisis, one suspects that the British (or English) ‘way of life’ is either considerably stronger than generally thought or in many instances just a rhetorical tool whose chief utility consists in providing an ahistoric, idealized foil to the undesirable present.[19] In Oldham, an equal sense of crisis prevails. Residents are convinced they have been made ‘second class citizens’, viewing themselves as ‘ethnic minorities’ on an estate where ninety percent of inhabitants are white and only a tiny fraction Asian. Support for the National Front and ‘Third Position’ is widespread, and a ‘racial war’ eagerly awaited. This is hatred in its most insidious form, and Howe is utterly horrified. But as unpleasant as such exchanges are, they are nonetheless instructive. For one, they reveal the emptiness of the residents’ identifications. As White Tribe ’s producer Narinder Minhas reflected: I wanted to see whether it was possible for people in places like Oldham to be white and proud but not racist—after all, it is possible for me to be Asian and proud, and for Darcus to be black and proud. But sadly, there is a thin line between English nationalism and racism. People struggle to describe their Englishness in positive terms. They often resort to negatives. Uncertain of themselves, they attack others.[20] A strong identity is a tolerant one, uncowed by the presence of the Other. Not here: overflowing aggression plasters over an Englishness almost wholly denuded of content. A similar tension characterizes the imperatives they seek to place on recent immigrants. Where one resident complains that their Asian neighbours rarely speak English, another insists that the estate must remain wholly ethnically English in makeup. Are migrants expected to integrate—‘into what?’, Howe might ask—or to segregate? Whilst seamless integration is often touted as the apotheosis of the migrant experience, this has not always been the case. Consider the verdict delivered by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson in 1964: The ordinary white citizen generally accepts his place in society and makes no attempt to gate crash places where he would not only feel out of place but is clearly unwelcome. Not all immigrants have the ability to do this and for the most part they are hypersensitive over race and colour.[21] Is this not inviting precisely the ghettoization deemed nowadays the worst possible result of migration? The twin anxieties of contamination, disrupting a prearranged social order, and isolation, refusing to enter into it, place the new arrival on the horns of a dilemma. Those migrants on that estate in Oldham, never seen but much discussed, were only those most violently impaled. Howe, for his part, strove always to escape this contradiction, advocating an ‘integration on our terms’. In this way, he asserted the right to self-definition against a presumptuous, paternalistic rhetoric which framed integration as the continuation of Britain’s imperial ‘civilizing mission’.[22] After so many failures and false starts, one wonders whether Howe will award anyone with the stamp of true Englishness. But we are in luck; there is a winner after all and her name is Mary, a member of the long-standing landed gentry in Tynedale. Joining Mary on a fox hunt, Howe is enraptured—finally, people who know who they are! This enthusiasm would hardly be surprising for a conservative like Scruton,[23] but in the case of an urban radical like Howe it surely is. And yet much connects the unlikely pair. For one, their sense that any moral objection to animal suffering is outweighed by the value of tradition. Then there is the family model Mary espouses, according to which everyone should be ‘within striking distance’, rooted rather than scattered. But their closest affinity is a shared love for butter, which ‘Blair and his olive oil crew’, as Howe puts it, are trying to sacrifice at the altar of ‘health and safety’. Butter is one symbol for identity, resisting the corrosive torrent of post-industrial capitalism. The hunt is another. Howe praises the tender detail with which it is organized, the historical care and attention to ritual which has gone into every aspect. Yet this care exists alongside the spontaneity of birthright; it is somehow unthinking, automatic, and thus—unlike so much else he has seen—wholly authentic: English. * Soon enough, the olive oil brigade had its way. Fox hunting was outlawed in England and Wales in 2004. Howe’s view of the Blairite project remained dim in the extreme. Interviewed the same year, he offered a Janus-faced view of the prior four decades: The England that I came to was the England of the patrician Tory. There was a consensus between the Tories and the working classes that was rooted, in my view, in the war, when the courage of the working classes had been immense. Margaret Thatcher wiped that away. She destroyed the working classes at their best and most powerful, and all we’re left with is office boys and girls. Mrs Thatcher worked in an office with a few people. So did Tony Blair. If you work in a factory, you work with thousands of people. If you are one of the landed gentry or you own a business, you are responsible for masses of people. Mrs Thatcher and Blair know nothing about anything. Blair never met anybody, never travelled anywhere before he started travelling as Prime Minister. And now these people are in charge.[24] If 1941’s The Lion and the Unicorn  was, as his wife Eileen Blair suggested, Orwell’s answer to the question of ‘how to be a socialist whilst Tory’, White Tribe plays a similar role for Howe.[25] But whilst one is an exhortation, a stoking of the fires, the other is an elegy oscillating between tragedy and farce, its lone positive note resounding like a trip to see the last of an endangered species behind bars at the zoo. Howe plays a man out of time, a belated modernist—a belated Englishman —finding everywhere he goes a nation which cannot live up to the promised ideal of his childhood in Trinidad. In this he is far removed from today’s left-liberal discourses around race and identity. There is nothing ‘woke’ here, no call for allyship, recognition, or education. Howe endorses the idea that one could (and perhaps even should ) be ‘proud to be white’, albeit lamenting that in practice this is often accompanied by execrable racism. Yet there is also little impression given that this prejudice might be the expression, product, or engine of any systemic privilege, buttressed and emboldened by structural advantages. Rather, a desperate, last-ditch racism appears all that a beleaguered white working class has left, having been gutted by the ‘office workers’ Thatcher and Blair—another incarnation of the ‘professional managerial class’ often blamed for an occlusion of class politics by identitarian struggles. On this framing, it is easy to see Howe’s potential allure for the populist right or the anti-woke, workerist left. This has been the fate of his lifelong friend and mentor CLR James, held up in the pages of UnHerd and Spiked  as the ultimate Marxist opponent of identity politics, a staunch admirer of ‘Western civ’ for whom issues of race never outflanked those of class.[26] It is nonetheless hard to imagine the political right of the 2020s taking much joy from a viewing of White Tribe . For one, there is a pointed historical rejoinder: any collapse of English identity must be traced back far further than the so-called ‘Boriswave’, as young rightists have taken to dubbing the surge in immigration after 2021.[27] It is surprising to recall that, just before the turn of the millennium, German political sociologist Christian Joppke was able to describe Britain as a would-be ‘zero-immigration country’.[28] So perhaps we have Blair to blame for opening the floodgates and drowning Englishness alive. But the buck does not stop there. If Thatcher succeeded in harnessing the anxieties of the petty bourgeoisie—her ‘nation of shopkeepers’—and turning them against spectres of crime, disorder, and unfairness, an approach aped to great effect by Reform UK’s Nigel Farage,[29] Howe sees the disaster beneath. This frenzy of negative identification gave cover to the erosion of the industrial working classes’ communal traditions and the elevation across society of empty ‘consumer choice’ to the primary vessel of identity and freedom. It is hard to see how the comparatively tiny population of migrants in Britain at that time can be blamed for this. One could go yet further back. Take the reactionary modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from DH Lawrence and WB Yeats to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, all labouring under a pervasive Nietzschean influence.[30] The contemporary far right often borrows from this discourse, rehashing its prognoses of decadence and degeneration, its mourning of a martial valour and nobility ostensibly replaced by mediocre equality. Yet this inevitably remains a partial ventriloquism. For earlier elitists, the great antagonist is not the migrant but the masses: the vast industrial proletariat unmoored by capitalism and progressively given political voice by democracy. It is not that these thinkers never applied a racial lens—quite the opposite—but the idea that shared English birth could meaningfully smooth over the immense hierarchical divisions within the population would have been ludicrous to them. Thus the proletariat was itself  racialized, its emergence experienced as the mass immigration of an alien species whose proliferation and empowerment would, if unchecked, destroy the very possibility of culture. On this token, the masses are scarcely human, let alone ‘English’. Clearly, Howe’s pessimistic threnody in White Tribe  cannot be placed in this tradition. The man was, after all, a socialist, a ‘black Leveller’,[31] for whom the working classes had a heroic, liberatory role to play in history. Yet his account of Englishness as a cultural repository of traditions, rituals, and relics, something embodied and lived out rather than innately but accidentally possessed, and therefore wholly at risk of historicization, is distinctly modernist in character. With it comes an implicit riposte to nationalists of every stripe: merely claiming fealty to Englishness or ‘Western civilization’ is not enough—you need to prove it. Such a challenge is now provocative in its untimeliness. Populism has come to dominate in politics over recent decades, playing off a supposedly organic whole tied inextricably together by nationhood or race against malicious forces: shadowy international ‘elites’ in league with racial or sexual minorities. Riotous, miscegenating ‘chavs’ à la Little Britain have been replaced in public discourse by a downtrodden but dignified and ethnically specific ‘white working class’. For this mass politics to succeed electorally, conditions for in-group belonging must be as inflexible as they are minimal; the focus should always be on the barbarians at the gates. Whether those in the citadel can figure out who they are is less certain—their interest lies in deferring this reckoning. An early scene in White Tribe  is illustrative. We find Howe interviewing clubbers in his Brixton neighbourhood. Under pressure, one reveller essays the idea that he is English simply because he and his parents were born in England. What is presented by Howe as an impotent cop-out has become in contemporary politics a rallying cry of generational birthright. Now, it may be an explanation for citizenship, but the incidental fact of where one was born hardly implies active belonging to culture or identity. Likewise, a piece of paper showing one’s genetic lineage is in itself just another arbitrary and worthless tautology, which tells us next to nothing about people’s ideals and behaviours. For those on the new right, however, it is the be-all and end-all of identitarian thinking, in turn forming the bedrock of their proposed immigration policies. They recurringly note, as in a recent article in the Pimlico Journal , that if following the discourse of ‘British values’ one is ‘logically forced to deny that the vast majority of British people born prior to the ’70s’ are British, and to ‘disclaim many contemporary people we intuitively know’ are British, giving the example of members of the far-right British National Party.[32] For one, such a framing drastically diverges from the historical tradition of conservative cultural pessimism, which liked nothing more than denying Britishness to those it found wanting—usually the white working class masses whose identity we are here expected to ‘intuitively’ recognize.[33] But there is another, more pressing, question: even if we leave these endogenous differences to one side, why exactly should one care about shared ethnic status? At risk of yet again vindicating Godwin’s law, let us compare—as a paradigmatic case of racial identification—Nazi Germany. Genocidal and scientifically absurd though it was, Nazi race science and its predecessors at the very least strove to be convincing. It constructed a continuum of Germanic culture stretching back through millennia and taking in a dazzling variety of influences, from Teutonic tribes to ancient Greece, Nordic territories to the Roman Empire. It established revitalizing rituals in the present, whether so-called Thingspiele  or sporting celebrations of the body and physical prowess, epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia . And it anchored all this within a teleological model of history which predicted the Aryan race to emerge necessarily victorious over its despised antagonist, establishing a ‘thousand year Reich ’. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it demonstrates well the central point: that race or nationality alone , bereft of any positive cultural or historical buttresses, is but an empty shell. We have seen the clearest example of this already, in Jenrick’s mealy-mouthed evasions. It is likewise telling that, on the page of Reform UK’s manifesto titled ‘Reform is Needed to Defend and Promote British Culture, Identity and Values’, the lone bullet point which could be seen as identifying any affirmative feature of Britishness is that which proposes to make St George’s and St David’s Days public holidays. The rest of the recommendations are purely critical: ‘reject’ the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation; ‘oppose’ cashless society; ‘scrap’ DEI and the BBC licence fee; ‘stop’ de-banking, cancel culture, ‘left wing hate mobs’, and ‘political bias in public institutions’.[34] We are, it seems, expected to believe that British culture and identity will simply spring back into existence once these pernicious influences are removed, a reassuring deus ex machina . Others veer into absurdity or kitsch when attempting to answer the question of what cultural identity they are promoting or defending. Carl Benjamin, a right-wing influencer better known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, has gushed on social media: ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration […] People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’.[35] The stimulus? A music video from 2001 of American rock band Alien Ant Farm performing their song ‘Smooth Criminal’. Remarkable for its bizarrely twee sentimentality, the post is also a good illustration of the USA’s outsized influence on contemporary discourses of identity. If Englishness is evaporating, hope is placed in the broad tent of ‘whiteness’ or ‘white culture’, deemed more likely to survive the much-lamented ravages of wokeness and neoliberalism. Alongside endless posts of Gothic cathedrals and marble statues, impressive enough but decontextualized online into empty simulacra, we are presented as zeniths of ‘white culture’ professional figure skating[36] and celebrity conductor André Rieu.[37] Such posts are perhaps easy targets, though, as Sam Adler-Bell has outlined, this mood of vague yet aggressive nostalgia is constitutive of the entire Trumpian project.[38] With notable exceptions—we hear increasing talk of ‘Anglofuturism’, a fusionist combination of technological progress with traditionalist aesthetics, drawing on historian Alan Macfarlane to paint the Englishman as the economic individualist par excellence[39]—this applies to the UK as well. It is not, however, a cause for relief. On the contrary, as Theodor Adorno observed in the wake of Nazism, ‘it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character, precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance’.[40] Where the reliable commonplaces of pre-1945 English culture have been uprooted, populists have turned to a fetishized concept of racial identity aimed at plastering over this sense of loss and quelling an incumbent nihilism. Yet we need be neither as distrusting of identity as, for example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, for whom identification of any kind seems a sure path to fascism,[41] nor as utterly pessimistic about Englishness as Howe, nor again as militantly but superficially fixated on it as the new right. It need not—indeed, it should not—form the basis of our politics. That it is no longer wholly ‘automatic’ does not mean it cannot be cultivated; that this process is challenging is no excuse to scapegoat others for one’s own failure. After all, there is no right to identity, though it can be a privilege. Jack Graveney Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Orwell quoted in Ben Clarke, ‘Orwell and Englishness’ (2006) The Review of English Studies 57(228) 103. [2] ‘Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick says ‘woke culture’ threatens ‘English identity’’ ( YouTube , 20 September 2024) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-xovmIxyg > accessed 15 March 2025. [3] See the attached video at Richard Tice MP, ‘Superb by @KonstantinKisin on British values. If you don’t like them or accept them, please do enjoy living somewhere else, because you would not then be welcome here’ ( X , 19 December 2024) < https://x.com/TiceRichard/status/1869695514268336189 > accessed 15 March 2025. [4] See eg Harrison Pitt, ‘Diversity, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Problem’ ( The European Conservative , 6 April 2024) < https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/diversity-not-multiculturalism-is-the-problem/ > accessed 15 March 2025. [5] See ‘Konstantin Kisin Says Rishi Sunak Isn’t English’ ( YouTube , 20 February 2025) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_P9IMe5vw > accessed 15 March 2025. [6] Compare Jenrick’s reticence with TS Eliot’s summation of English culture, quoted in Clarke (n 1) 90: ‘It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list’. Can he any longer? [7] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico 2000) viii-ix. [8] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Jubilee 1977’ (2022) 44(11) LRB < https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/robin-bunce-and-paul-field/jubilee-1977 > accessed 15 March 2025. [9] See The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report  (Profile Books 2000). [10] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography  (Bloomsbury 2015) 243-4. [11] Quoted in ibid 2. [12] At < https://www.channel4.com/programmes/white-tribe/on-demand/26974-001 > accessed 15 March 2025. [13] The work of photographer Martin Parr traces a similar trajectory—compare The Non-Conformists  (Aperture 2013), black and white photographs from the 1970s of traditional and religious life in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, with The Last Resort  (Dewi Lewis Publishers 2009), 1980s colour snaps of Merseyside’s working-class seaside resort New Brighton. What distinguishes Parr from Howe is that the former has since managed to find great joy and beauty in postmodern kitsch and consumerism, albeit without entirely dispelling the suspicion of an underlying mockery. [14] Here, a yet stronger standard is applied than the infamous ‘Tebbit test’, which required of immigrants support for the English cricket team to qualify as sufficiently integrated. [15] Quoted in Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Multiculturalism and the new face of Britain’ (2003) < https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/fortier-multiculturalism.pdf > accessed 15 March 2025. [16] Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism’ ( Cabinet , Spring 2001) < https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/zizek.php > accessed 15 March 2025. [17] Miri Davidson, ‘Sea and Earth’ ( NLR Sidecar , 4 April 2024) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth > accessed 15 March 2025. Compare in a similar vein ‘Great Replacement’ theorist Renaud Camus’s denial that he is a ‘nationalist’, drawing on Orwell’s distinction in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) between patriotism—a wholly defensive posture, believed deeply but without any wish to ‘convert’ others—and the aggressive imperialism of nationalism, as embodied by Nazism. See Renaud Camus, ‘May be the word “nationalist” does not have exactly the same meaning in French and English. In French a Nationalist is somebody who thinks that his nation is the most important thing in his life, who cherishes the army and everything national, who thinks his country is better than all the other countries, etc. That is not at all my case […]’ ( X , 18 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913326907246231593 > accessed 14 October 2025; Renaud Camus, ‘Voilà. Thank you, Sir.’ ( X , 19 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913501782967230720 > accessed 14 October 2025. [18] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears  (Macmillan 1983). [19] Nor is Howe innocent in this respect, given his nostalgic contrasting of the atomized capitalist structures at the turn of the millennium with supposedly tighter-knit local communities in the 1960s. See Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England  (Oxford University Press 2023) for a possible corrective. [20] Narinder Minhas, ‘Look on the white side’ Guardian (London, 10 January 2000) < https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/jan/10/channel4.broadcasting > accessed 17 March 2025. [21] Quoted in Camilla Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’ (2023) 34(3) Twentieth Century British History 534. Compare Mary Ellen Chase’s 1937 suggestion that the ‘Englishman has no objection to foreigners’ provided that ‘they remain what they are and do not attempt any approximation to him’—quoted in Clarke (n 1) 95. [22] Bunce and Field (n 10) viii-ix. [23] See Roger Scruton, On Hunting: A Short Polemic  (Yellow Jersey 1998). [24] ‘Let’s Be Reasonable’ (2004) 27(9) Third Way 18-9 or at < https://highprofiles.info/interview/darcus-howe/ > accessed 17 March 2025. [25] Quoted in Gustav Jönsson, ‘George Orwell Was a Temperamental Conservative and Ideological Radical’ ( Jacobin , 22 October 2023) < https://jacobin.com/2023/10/george-orwell-class-britain-spanish-civil-war-nineteen-eighty-four > accessed 17 March 2025. For an equally evocative duality, consider Howe’s modification of CLR James’s statement that ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’ to ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain ’—quoted in Bunce and Field (n 10) 1. [26] Benjamin Schwarz, ‘Marxists against wokeness’ ( Spiked , 28 September 2018) < https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/marxists-against-wokeness/ > accessed 20 March 2025; Ralph Leonard, ‘CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics’ ( UnHerd , 11 October 2018) < https://unherd.com/2018/10/clr-james-rejected-posturing-identity-politics/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [27] See Rachel Cunliffe, ‘The “Boriswave” problem’ ( New Statesman , 11 February 2025) < https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/02/the-boriswave-problem > accessed 20 March 2025. [28] Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Britain  (Oxford University Press 1999) 100. [29] See Dan Evans, ‘Reform won’t save Britain’ ( UnHerd , 19 March 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/03/reform-wont-save-britain/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [30] See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber & Faber 1992). [31] Bunce and Field (n 10) 5. [32] Rhodes Napier, ‘No to Fraser Nelson, no to Steve Laws: towards a “third way” on British national identity’ ( Pimlico Journal , 25 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/no-to-fraser-nelson-no-to-steve-laws > accessed 5 April 2025 [33] See Carey (n 30) and especially Pearson (n 18) for countless examples of this. [34] Reform UK, ‘Our Contract with You’ ( Reform UK Policy Documents , 2024) 22 < https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371 > accessed 25 March 2025. [35] Carl Benjamin, ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration, widespread racial and gendered guilt activism, and before bankers had totally screwed the economy for their own gain. People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’ ( X , 20 January 2024) < https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1748688352365228139 > accessed 25 March 2025. The video is now missing as the initial poster’s account has been suspended, but the replies make the content clear enough, and a screenshot of the original can be provided on request. [36] ‘E’ [Elijah Schaffer], ‘White culture is beautiful. This is what they hate. Save it at all costs’ ( X , 24 December 2024) < https://x.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1871377665166569937 > accessed 25 March 2025. [37] ‘The General’, ‘White Culture’ ( X , 3 November 2024) < https://x.com/1776General_/status/1853100332768714923 > accessed 25 March 2025. Now, there is nothing wrong with André Rieu—my grandparents watched his New Year’s concerts on TV with enthusiasm—but there is no small irony in presenting such a middlebrow, commercial endeavour as a cultural climax. As one X   user commented, himself seemingly a proud neo-reactionary: ‘This is not white culture. This is Andre [sic] Rieu, he presents a bastardized kitsch variant of classical music to tasteless boomers. Idiot’. [38] Sam Adler-Bell, ‘The Music Man: Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point’ ( Intelligencer , 20 October 2024) < https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-town-hall-dj-set-was-perfect-for-his-nostalgic-fans.html > accessed 25 March 2025. [39] See Aris Roussinos, ‘Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?’ ( UnHerd , 25 January 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/01/could-anglofuturism-liberate-britain/ > accessed 4 April 2025; Lucien Chardon, ‘Why post-liberalism failed’ ( Pimlico Journal , 18 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/why-post-liberalism-failed > accessed 4 April 2025; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition  (Basil Blackwell 1979). [40] Quoted in Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C Williams, ‘From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations’ (2022) 18(1) Journal of International Political Theory 37. [41] See Franco Berardi, ‘The obsession with identity fascism’ < https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo3.htm > accessed 4 April 2025; Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015).

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression?   When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was not merely iconoclasm but an ‘iconoclash’, a concept discussed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour. In cases of iconoclasm, Latour notes, the act of breaking is unambiguous, its motivations and contexts clear. In iconoclashes, on the other hand, ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’—or, for that matter, both.[1]   In the weeks following Colston’s felling, protests continued in cities across the UK and the US. This clash played out over social media and the periodical press as the world tried to work out what exactly it had witnessed. No consensus emerged. At least on the surface, the debates seemed to turn on the ambiguous axis of ‘history’. Following damage to the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned what he saw as attempts to ‘edit or censor our past’ and ‘pretend to have a different history’. Across the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that ‘the Republic won’t erase any name from its history’.[2]   On the other side of the disagreement, the Museum of London expressed its support for removing a statue of the slave-trader Robert Milligan at London’s West India Docks, associating the monument itself with an ‘ongoing problematic regime of white-washing history’.[3] Similarly, the British journalist Ian Cobain pointed out that the misrepresentation and erasure of historical reality has been a ‘habit of the British state for decades’, most evident in the illegal concealment and destruction of hundreds of thousands of records evidencing its colonial barbarisms.[4] Advocates for retention and for removal point the finger at each other, trying each other for crimes against the past. No surprise, then, that Professor Richard J Evans’ treatment of the subject in the New Statesman was titled ‘The history wars’.[5]   Yet Clio, the Greek muse of history, stands to one side of this symmetrical standoff, confused and, one imagines, more than a little offended. In this conflict, the stakes are not historical but above all iconographic, representational. These are not the history wars but rather the image wars, into which the past has been hastily and rather clumsily press-ganged. Only by recognising this and dispelling the projection of ‘history’ can a path out of this impasse be traced. Statues aim not to memorialise history but to escape from it, striving to transcend contingency and reach the universal. Yet under the conditions of secular modernity this attempt has become futile. The logic on which it rests is riddled with contradictions and incoherencies. Ultimately, if cultural memory is to regain legitimacy, it will have to take the opposite approach, focusing on suffering rather than ‘success’, the mass over the individual.   *   Statues are in and of themselves historical artefacts, but their subjects are extrinsic to history. Historicity is not suddenly conferred if a sculptor chooses to fashion Churchill’s face rather than any other individual’s. Calls to take down statues therefore signify not an assault on the past ‘itself’, as suggested by Johnson and Macron, but justified opposition to a particular conception of it. Juggernauts of Churchill, Colston, Milligan, and the like stand as icons of a model of the past which holds individual subjecthood and action in the highest acclaim. The individuals elected as prime movers are elevated above faceless socioeconomic forces. Overwhelmingly, they are white, male, and upper-class. The Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle pioneered this approach in a series of lectures from 1840, grouped together in print under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History . Carlyle concluded that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’.[6] Although the historical profession has largely overturned this false and discriminatory view of the past, the public are yet to do the same.   The literal concretisation of historical figures into statues epitomises deceptive attempts to reduce history to a shallow agent of culture. Statues do not preserve but annihilate the past. They remove their objects from the course of history and enlist them as representatives of an ahistorical culture. Change over time is the essence of history, but culture aspires above all to stability and constancy, so that it can entrench itself within individuals. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno repeatedly sought to show, this hunger for permanence can have disturbing consequences. In the 1960s, he diagnosed within the post-war German population an alarming case of ‘verdinglichtes Bewusstsein’ (‘reified consciousness’). For Adorno, this malaise is characterised by a blindness, intentional or otherwise, to ‘all insight into one’s own contingency’ and to the ultimate contingency—and therefore changeability—of the world at large.[7] In the earlier work  Dialektik der Aufklärung  (1947), written with his friend Max Horkheimer, Adorno expressed this idea in an unrelenting aphorism: ‘all reification is a forgetting’, an erasure of history in the form of an unquestioning acceptance of the present.[8]   Recent insistence on the immutability of statues, along with outlandish attempts to ensure it, strongly suggest that the symptoms identified by Adorno persist today. June 2020 saw men in baggy jeans and camouflage jackets gather around a statue of the writer George Eliot in Nuneaton, ostensibly in its defence. One of these ‘defenders’, an army veteran, informed reporters without a hint of irony that ‘I’m purely here to protect our history’.[9] The content of this undifferentiated ‘history’, its twisting and turning contingency, is rendered utterly irrelevant. History becomes a scapegoat, a hollow justification. The statue itself is exposed as a simulacrum, parading the deceptive appearance of the historical but possessing nothing of its substance. In a case yet stranger, Ashbourne in Derbyshire saw a racist bust of a black man’s head moved under mysterious circumstances from the town centre to a secret location, suspected to be the garage of a local Conservative councillor.[10]   These cases are revealing precisely because of their absurdity, which drags the cultural logic of reified consciousness to its perverse and dangerous extremes. Here, a morbid fear of change reveals itself, reminiscent of the underlying assumption of Christian providentialism that ‘everything is as it should be’. Items of the utmost insignificance are hastily made into religious icons whose violation is a mortal sin. In particular, they come to resemble secularised acheiropoieta . Acheiropoieta  are Christian icons, generally of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, believed to have come into being miraculously, without human involvement. The corresponding perception of statues as immaculate conceptions of history is quickly shown to be inaccurate. After removing Colston’s statue from the Avon, the museum M Shed discovered within it a furled 1895 edition of Tit-Bits  magazine, with the scrawled names of the statue’s fitters.[11] It is hard to imagine a better illustration of appealing to the bulwark of history whilst refusing to peer beneath its bronze façade.   *   Statues are problematic and contested for reasons that extend far beyond the individuals they represent. Firstly, they attempt to smuggle individuals out of history, allowing them to escape their own time. Then, building on this, they contrive to ensure reverence and hero-worship for them. As the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed, ‘the medium is the message’. Reverence is not an emotion about which one hears a great deal nowadays. It is associated above all with the religious, with veneration and sanctity. Crucially, it is an emotional state which functions only when it is unqueried and accepted as absolute, without deconstruction or interrogation.   When it is undertaken, this interrogation delivers alarming results. No coherent moral calculus or set of ‘rules and regulations’ can justify reverence. No clear ethical boundary can be drawn which, if overstepped, would prevent one’s memorialisation. Take the example of Churchill. Much of the discussion around his ‘worthiness’ for preservation as a statue has concentrated on the extent of his racism. Defenders argue that his undeniably racist views and actions were justifiable in context, whilst critics like Professor Priyamvada Gopal stress that Churchill’s stance on race was actually ‘deeply retrograde even for his time’, such that ‘even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking’.[12]   Professor Gopal is correct, but unfortunately this is irrelevant in this context. Even engaging on the terms of retrospective moral evaluation means being drawn into a dangerous and abyssal logic, which presupposes a coherent moral calculus according to which ‘worthiness to remain’ might be established. Discussing the moral facts of any individual’s life is only useful here if we believe there is a genuine possibility of establishing whether they were a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person. Framed in the most extreme terms, we could imagine a tribunal aimed at determining whether a person’s opinions and actions crossed a clear moral threshold, sorting the sheep from the goats. Such thought experiments are, of course, absurd, and their parallels with a kind of divine judgement are no coincidence. They function only if the body making the judgement has both perfect moral knowledge and complete access to a person’s life and thoughts. Yet the fundamental prerequisites for this hypothetical tribunal are the same as those that would be needed to indict Churchill’s character. They are also the same as those necessary to sustain the reverence for which the statue form calls.   The ideal of any society is that its moral structures remain constant for such a long time, or are enforced with such completeness and efficacy, that they begin to appear absolute and extrasocietal, their contingent emergence having been masked and repressed. As this takes place, morality is de-historicised, extricated from the skein of time. Consciousness becomes reified, in line with the emphasis of providentialism on preserving existing states of affairs. Only under these conditions—in which an unquestionable transcendent standard is established and allowed to reign—can reverence be deserved and heroism possible. It is for this reason that Christian sainthood is irrevocable. Nonetheless, the Catholic church did carefully vet all candidates until the time of Pope John Paul II. It employed a genuine ‘Devil’s advocate’ and enforced a pre-sanctification waiting period of 50 years after the individual’s death, during which any untoward information about them ought to come to light.   Sainthood is, however, a decidedly pre-modern phenomenon. So too is heroism, in the form of Herculean labours, military leadership, or charismatic state formation. No longer can reverence be sustained by religious or teleologically nationalistic metanarratives. The speed and chaos of life in the twenty-first century does not admit of such lasting simplicity. As early as 1967, the French thinker Guy Debord argued that a decisive shift had occurred: social life in its authentic form had been superseded by its virtual double, a spectacle of pure representation.[13] This shift obliterated any chance of heroism in its established form, but the hero survived as an icon on the screen or a series of pixels on the television, continuing to exist only as an unreal representation. Building on Debord, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi in his text Heroes  traced the consequences of this disappearance into the virtual, finding them to be no less than murderous. Berardi writes of school shootings and murder sprees as tragic occurrences ‘at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality’.[14] Discussing 2011’s Utøya massacre, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard writes similarly that the perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik ‘acted like a figure in a computer game, but the act of heroism he thought he was performing, and the carnage he brought about, did not belong to the world of images’.[15]   The world of images, connected with the world of numbers and the world of profits, is also a means of transcending and escaping historical reality, a world with neither past nor future. A statue stands in a public square, an avatar floats on a screen. As the former becomes impossible, the latter pervades society ever more deeply. One can be toppled, the other cannot.   *   Despite all of this, the need for cultural memory to be represented in some concrete form remains strong. Discussions are already underway as to whose statue should replace that of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College, Oxford.[16] The philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African American elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, is an understandable suggestion. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the dangerous incoherence of statues is intrinsic to their form and cannot be overcome simply by choosing a preferable subject. Is there an alternative? Supplementing existing monuments with contextual plaques enumerating the misdeeds of their subjects creates an unbearably perverse tension. A critical statue is a contradiction in terms. Rather, we must look towards a means of commemoration which is not celebratory but fundamentally negative: the memorial in its true form. Recognising that one person has suffered at the hands of another presents its own challenges and complexities, but is fundamentally legitimate. Its tether to reality is unbroken. Pain and death bear a visceral authenticity which society, for all its efforts, can never fully extinguish.   Where memorials are established, they must be porous, offering the possibility of fluid interaction with the public. The German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz is right to suggest that ultimately ‘the places of remembrance are people, not monuments’.[17] The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for example, is imbued with a distinct, personal significance by each mourner who looks upon it. Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism in Harburg, developed with Esther Shalev-Gerz and initially erected in 1986, took a more direct approach to interactivity. The Monument invited Harburg’s residents and visitors to commit to opposing fascism by inscribing their names on a 12-metre-high stele, which was then lowered into the ground until it disappeared. In doing so, it embodied a concept of remembrance in stark opposition to unchanging statues, embracing and encoding its own violation and historicity. It served as mirror and conduit, rather than opaque fortification.   Achieving real change in the symbolic representation of memory will not be an easy task. A 1957 competition announced by the International Auschwitz Committee to design a monument for the end of the Auschwitz-Birkenau rail track led to such difficulties that no memorial could be agreed upon. The English sculptor Henry Moore, who chaired the competition’s jury, was forced to admit that only ‘a very great sculptor—a new Michelangelo or a new Rodin— might have achieved this’.[18] This, as James E Young observes, is an ‘extraordinary statement’, since Moore ‘seems to concede that the project was doomed from the start, that none on the jury could imagine a winner, that, hypothetically, there might be no winner’.[19] Jochen Gerz, striving for a way out of this apparent dead end, turns Moore’s admission on its head. He invites the public to be the architect of its own memory, constructively and destructively. At the site of the now-sunken tower, a sign offers hopeful realism: ‘In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice’. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art  (The MIT Press 2002) 16. [2] Boris Johnson, ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack…’ ( Twitter , 12 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1271388181343145986 > accessed 18 March 2021; Reuters Staff, ‘Macron says France won’t remove statues, erase history’ ( Reuters , 14 June 2020) < https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-macron-stat/macron-says-france-wont-remove-statues-erase-history-idUSKBN23L0QP > accessed 18 March 2021. [3] Museum of London, ‘Robert Milligan statue statement’ (9 June 2020) < https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/news-room/press-releases/robert-milligan-statue-statement > accessed 18 March 2021. [4] Ian Cobain, ‘Lying about our history? Now that’s something Britain excels at’ Guardian  (London, 18 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [5] Richard J Evans, ‘The history wars’ The New Statesman  (London, 17 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [6] Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History  (first published 1841, Yale University Press 2013) 41. [7] Theodor Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit   Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969  (Suhrkamp Verlag 1970) 104. Translation the author’s. [8] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung  (first published 1947, Fischer Verlag 2007) 244. Translation the author’s. [9] Aaron Robertson, ‘Defenders of a George Eliot statue had no idea what they were doing and I’m here for it’ ( Literary Hub , 16 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [10] Archie Bland, ‘How “racist” bust “hidden by Tory councillor” divided Derbyshire town’ Guardian (London, 12 June 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/12/ashbourne-derbyshire-racist-black-bust-tory-councillor-petition > accessed 18 March 2021. [11] M Shed, ‘After careful cleaning and drying we found someone had handwritten the names…’ ( Twitter , 11 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/mshedbristol/status/1271124618091401216 > accessed 18 March 2021. [12] Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?’ Guardian  (London, 17 March 2021) < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill > accessed 19 March 2021. [13] See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (first published 1967, Rebel Press 1994). [14] Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015) 5. [15] Karl Ove Knausgaard, The End  (Vintage 2019) 839. [16] See Ann Olivarius, ‘Rhodes must fall, but who should stand in his place?’ Financial Times  (London, 15 June 2020) < https://www.ft.com/content/336d57a8-fb23-4ec8-8333-bb8e6bc36c98 > accessed 18 March 2021. [17] Jochen Gerz, ‘Rede an die Jury des Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas’ (14 November 1997) < https://jochengerz.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Rede-an-die-Jury-des-Denkmals_Jochen_Gerz.pdf > accessed 18 March 2021. [18] Henry Moore quoted in, for example, Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Ohio University   Press 2003) 157. [19] James E Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning  (Yale University Press 1993) 135.

Applause in the executive boardroom. Hands pound backs, mouths twist into smiles. A round man with a stain of indecipherable grease on his shirt collar rises to speak, gesturing inanely at an electronic display. His hands twitch with glee as he highlights data points and maps out forecasts. ‘Returns for this quarter are exceptional, a threefold uptick on last year. Our customer base has expanded markedly. Any number of substantial brand deals. And a few bookings of particular extravagance brought in half a million single handedly. Simply put, they’re dropping like flies’. Uproarious cheer breaks out once more. They had indeed sown a good harvest. Fulfilling their customers’ most neurotic requests gave the assembled board members and lesser functionaries a perverse satisfaction. In a sense, they did genuinely care. But this care was delightfully finite. After the moment of successfully facilitated self-termination, it could freely evaporate. The business model at Blaze of Glory™ ensured that client relationships never lasted too long. It had all begun with Dignitas. Geographical localization of euthanasia laws created an inevitable concentration of demand. Desperate and despairing men and women flocked to Switzerland and Belgium in the hope of outpacing the future. But something strange happened. The allure of death began to take a hold beyond those ‘expected customers’—the terminally ill, irrecoverably deformed, or incurably paedophilic – and exert an almost inexorable pull on the rest of society. Its rapturous theatricality, devil-may-care vibe, and (above all) resplendent finality proved appealing to those wishing to retroactively cement their social status or claim Warhol’s promised fifteen minutes of fame. Minor mutilations did the rounds on social media—for a time, the ‘Stigmata Challenge’ dominated TikTok—but for the real deal, the whole hog, dedicated corporations sprung up, boutique experiences which promised an extinction like no other. Centuries of media satirising bourgeois decadence promptly exited the sphere of fiction. It was a matter of months before four Chinese businessmen found themselves sat in a French villa around a fine wooden table, loaded with all manner of delicacies: quail eggs, dripping churros, a trough of bœuf bourguignon, a monumental Yorkshire pudding drenched in the thickest gravy, consuming and devouring and fucking their brains out with three supine street urchins and a buxom schoolmistress until they slowly wound up dead, gorged with fat and cream atop the table lengthways, faithful to the good old Grande Bouffe down to the smallest detail. Newspaper obituary columns burst their banks and were replaced by dedicated magazines. Martyrdoms were orchestrated with such conviction that sanctification seemed almost guaranteed; terror attacks dropped accordingly. Advertising slogans commanding people to ‘Die doing what you love!’ (or the even less savoury ‘Go out with a bang’) brought hordes of lascivious old men to the doors, swallowing handfuls of Viagra as they waited for their chance to expire as close to the moment of orgasm as possible. Countless weddings were called off after stag nights got out of hand. Television channels offered a round-the-clock programme of self-murder, a source of envy and inspiration in equal measure. This was more than an industry. Suicide had become an art, an ecstatic unity of swansong and encore. It was the chance to be, in death, all which one had not been in life. Enough. That is, I think, enough atrocity for the moment, sufficient verbal bombast. Carry on like that much longer and my thought experiment won’t have any legs to stand on. Since that’s all it is, a thought experiment, a little game to play with myself and string out in words. Think of the untapped riches that remain, from psychologizations of the workforce to population crises, government interventions to ideological counterblasts, here in particular the scope is almost endless, with pleas for a return of suicide to its former authenticity, teenage nihilists unable to cope with the realization of their nocturnal insincerities, class strugglers pressing for the industry’s nationalization and lamenting its domination by the rich, even in death the poor can’t get themselves heard, on and on it goes! Yet at the same time it goes nowhere, nowhere at all. What do I know of suicide? What, indeed, do I know of the world beyond its reconstitution as a mass of tensions and forces, concepts given tortuous names and flagellated in writing? What will this achieve? What, in short, is my right? Seek to reduce your guilt by attempting to include others within it. Turn to critique. And generalise. Raise the conceptual stakes as high as possible. The influence of a writer like Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace seeps out of the above sketch like mustard from an over-filled sandwich. The same over-stylized form and sprightly ironic tone, the same central motif of a contradiction or minor perversity magnified and drooled over ad absurdum . Spellbound by form, that glossy coat and empty shell. The prose is infected by the same sickness as its protagonists. In this respect, at least, it tells us something we already know, without hinting at the possibility of change. It appears as a monument to the inescapability of our condition. In face of such impotence, we have no choice but to laugh. We revel in it. Infinite Jest is the brick-sized proof of this; Foster Wallace observed that he set out to write a sad book and ended up with a funny one.[1] After that, he set out to write a boring one and pathetically succeeded. And then, at the age of 46, he killed himself. (DeLillo lives on, thrashing out works of increasing mediocrity.) Blame modernity: perhaps it isn’t possible to write a sad book any longer. Here, there is no tragedy, only farce. Theodor Adorno took a dim view of representational art. For him, it inevitably involved the possibility of sadistic identification on the part of the ‘audience’; even the ‘sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment’.[2] Years later, conservatives argued that kids playing violent video games would learn to associate happiness with violence, and we all laughed at them. But the issue runs deeper than this merely representative function; the status of art itself appears dangerously entangled with its offering of enjoyment. I exit a cinema showing of Schindler’s List thinking ‘what great art I have just been privy to’, caught in a terminal spiral of self-satisfaction and fawning praise for Stephen Spielberg. W. H. Auden admitted that no single line of his managed to ‘save a single Jew’, since ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] Art imposes itself over the reality it seeks to depict. This is the ambivalence of aestheticization, the trapdoor lurking in the movement from reality to art to audience, in the fundamental artificiality of everything which secures art’s necessary difference from the world. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them’.[4] The lyric poet who confines himself to the nooks and crannies of his own swollen consciousness is a minor offender. Autofiction is arrogant and indulgent, but it knows its place. That Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, the most notorious project of this kind, resulted in nothing more than an angry uncle and some mundane Norwegian family drama makes clear that the exploitation at work here is trivial. Far more shameless is the appropriation of the suffering of others—thousands, millions, impersonal and uncredited—as grist for the aesthetic mill. Look above: suicide isn’t the point. What the piece wants to articulate is a certain feeling for the grotesque nature of modernity. But suicide is traduced, forced to play along in this garish masquerade. ‘The Sunday edition of the Kärtner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills”’.[5] So begins Peter Handke’s novella Wunschloses Unglück ( A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ); it is his mother who has taken this overdose. Here is no dissimulation; the quoted banality of a regional newspaper report drives home the act’s horrific reality. This is not to say that Wunschloses Unglück is anti-literary. Handke notes that ‘as usual when I am engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine’—writing as self-reification, mechanisation of the mind.[6] The artist has the privilege of separation from the world, they can write or paint themselves out of a situation and look upon it anew as something transfigured. In the case of Handke, egoistic abstraction is, however, necessarily bound by a filial adherence to the facts of his mother’s life and death. All the same, an unavoidable step is taken by the translation of experience into language, wrestling bodies and minds in motion into the inky strictures of text. For this, form is required – the true engine of prose, that which generates its meaning. Indulgence and alienation loom in this choice also. Selfishness is the inevitable outcome. Claire-Louise Bennett protests that ‘experimental’ prose is not experimental for her , but honest, the product of a background which does not correspond to the literary mainstream.[7] She makes much of being, along with Ann Quin, a working-class female writer who deploys decidedly unusual prose forms in her attempts to make sense of the world. Quin killed herself, in 1973, at the age of 37. Bennett recounts, in Checkout 19 , finding a corpse hanging from a tree on a visit to Yorkshire.[8] This may or may not be relevant. Formally, writing appears the opposite of suicide. It is the affirmation of life—even if only one’s own. But is not suicide also an act of self-authoring? Why else would we leave suicide notes? The critic often strikes me as a kind of cuckold, jerking off in the corner of the literary dancefloor. But ‘creative’ writing itself bears an essentially masturbatory character. Events, people, and feelings are co-opted in the interests of stimulating the self, fantasised about at length, and carefully fiddled with before being splurged onto the page. Autofiction, merely the most explicit variety of this, becomes autoeroticism. The same is true of reading and reception: the way in which I’m able to take such joy from a perceptive line of thought or sublime turn of phrase, without it having the slightest impact on my social or political behaviour; the impotence of the beauty I detect within argumentative and aesthetic forms alike, their incisive and interlocking geometries, motivating no single scrap of action aside from buying and reading yet more books to bask on my shelves and dehydrate in the desert sun. The miracle involved in this is that such an apparently selfish activity can not only sublimate the writer’s dysfunctional emotions but also resonate for others. Bernard Mandeville thought that private vices generated public virtues.[9] The more a decadent aristocracy gambled and luxuriated, the more money circulated, allowing all and sundry to reap the rewards. Self-consciously virtuous action could hope for no such inadvertent benefit. The Dutchman’s model is more applicable to aesthetics than economics. Through some perverse transubstantiation in the mind or on the page, the selfish scribbles of those deluded enough to call themselves writers generate a universal benefit. A scrap of daily suffering leavens and nourishes. They slice their own wrists so all can drink. ------- P.S. A retrospective confession: ‘Keep trying, try everything. And if all else fails, say that it is an essay’ (Kurt Tucholsky).[10] Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Cf. Stephen Burn (ed), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University Press of Mississippi 2012) 55. [2] Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’ (1974) I/87-88 New Left Review 85. Originally published in German as ‘Engagement’ in 1962. [3] Auden quoted in Beth Ellen Roberts, ‘W. H. Auden and the Jews’ (2005) 28(3) Journal of Modern Literature 87. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (first published 1886, Reclam 1988) §161. Translation the author’s. [5] Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (first published 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974) 3. [6] ibid 5. [7] Cf. Moore Institute, ‘Experimental Fiction: Rob Doyle and Claire-Louise Bennett’ ( Youtube , 25 November 2021) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJaHD6mHKdc > accessed 22 June 2022. [8] Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 (Penguin 2021). [9] Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (first published 1714, Penguin 1989). [10] Ignaz Wrobel [Kurt Tucholsky], ‘Die Essayisten’ Die Weltbühne (28 April 1931) < https://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-essayisten.html > accessed 22 June 2022. Translation the author’s.

Marcus did not know what to expect. The man with whom he had spoken on the phone made little sense. A number of names had been mentioned, people he had never heard of, and at times Marcus thought the voice on the other end of the line must have been speaking in a foreign language, unfamiliar noises which were sometimes guttural and heavy and sometimes airborne and breathy, and sometimes somewhere in the middle. All he had been able to make out was a time and address, which he scribbled down in his pocket notebook, a present from his mother. He mentioned the phone call to his colleagues at the firm afterwards and they had laughed and told him to ignore it. Marcus got the impression that they knew the precise identity of the caller; they cast each other and him a withering glance, one of exhaustion with acts of naïve moral charity. This glance and all it contained failed to dissuade Marcus. It was his first year working as a tree surgeon, a job he had obtained thanks to no small hardship on the part of his mother. School had not been for him, and he had left glad to see the back of the place but with the impression of stepping out into a great black void, a world which held precious little for him. He enjoyed being at home with his mother, helping around the house, tending the allotment down the road. Whilst he worked the family’s small plot, the world came alive and spoke to him in a voice he could understand. It radiated an energy which he greedily harvested, inhaling dirty gulps of wisdom. When rain fell, he lay there and felt dirt turn to mud underneath his skin, droplets pitter-pattering against one cheek as the other pressed down into the soil. In the corner of the allotment stood the carapace of an old oak tree. From time to time, Marcus would crawl into its cyclopic orifice, mummified in a cocoon of bark, and summon thoughts of regrowth. After a while, the tree would be whole again, his twisted legs rooted deep and gorging themselves on water, his rigid torso elephantine and stark upright, his fractal of arms and digits craning outwards to a thousand ripe eyes enthralled by a feast of light. Each time, Marcus murdered this resplendence. He had no choice. When the hollow birthed him into the sunken night, he would feel a death within him and hear a groan of ancient mortality reverberate between his bones. He could sustain but one being at a time. Marcus found himself winding his way along a country lane, towards the address he had been given on the phone. Bordering the lane was a ribbon of deep-set and seemingly impenetrable hedgerow, adorned with protuberant knuckles of red. Tarmac soon gave way to gravel, gravel to agitable dust, and a thatched cottage came into view. Densely packed behind strabismic windows Marcus could make out piles upon piles of books, blotchy embossed spines of deep burgundy and myrtle. Reading had always been a struggle for him; his aptitude for languages extended only to those of nature, of incremental growth and seasonal change. Words on the page seemed too deeply engraved, too inarguably fixed and unamenable to care. In the instant between Marcus opening his van’s door and stepping out onto the shoddy earth, the cottage’s occupant had appeared outside and was waiting expectantly for him. This transition was noiseless. It was as if the occupant, a bald and elderly man of slender proportions but penetrating gaze, had intangibly passed through his wooden door. Marcus hollered an abrupt greeting and gestured to the logo glaringly emblazoned on the van behind, as if to assure him that the visit was legitimate and well-meant. The man, whose name he would later discover was Reginald, remained silent until Marcus had almost reached him. Then, softly, he spoke: ‘Would you show me your hands?’ The request’s ambivalent innocence captivated Marcus. Its tone was that of an infant, yet it lacked any hesitation. It was conscious of its own importance but would not deign to insist. Marcus’s hands rose and presented themselves, palms up, to Reginald, who fixated upon them as on a ritual totem or unearthed relic. His mien was that of a primitivist artist stopped dead, undone in all pretensions by a deep-set nobility tantalizing close and yet utterly alien. Darting eyes inventoried their particularities, caressing each crease, mentally untangling the knot of palm lines. Each grope for understanding teetered on wonder’s precipice. The older man’s eyes widened, and his breathing deepened. After a time, Reginald took Marcus’s hands in his. These were immaculate, as if smoothed to marble over decades by the desert’s swirling sands. They were luxuriously, almost grotesquely unblemished. Conjoined with Marcus’s torn and callused digits, they evoked a coupling of the sacred with the profane. Suddenly, the old man broke off and, in a manner now sprightly and invigorated, pulling books from shelves, grandly gesticulating at framed images, almost dancing now upon his feet, indicated for Marcus to follow him inside. Marcus understood little of what was said, but he picked out names, names which evidently bore weight and yet floated, floated daintily through the room, weaving and darting between the stacks of books as if making for the exit, as if possessed of a life of their own, yet dragged inexorably back in by Reginald’s orbit, by his intimate need for them and them for him. Names like Calvino, like Petrarch, like Havemann, Joyce, Gass, like Améry or Handke, Swinburne, Enzensberger, or De Quincey, names which meant nothing to Marcus, nothing at all, yet whose pace and structure and rhythm, whose atmosphere, entranced him. Behind this cosmos of names hung a painting, a painting of a large room, large and empty, devoid of furniture, chopped in half at the waist as if looked down upon, empty that is save for three men, prostrate on their knees with their arms extended before them, their heads bowed and tilted, their hands hard at work, for they are scraping the floor, hard at work scraping the floor, and the product of their labour is curled around them in ringlets like snakeskin. Reginald finally halted and drew breath, but the atmosphere which now thronged throughout the room survived his voice. It seemed to take on mass and effervescent direction, carrying the two men out of the backdoor and into the garden. Here Marcus set about to work, unbidden, unable to hold himself back. His hands grew into tools, his fingers became sharp and incisive, tweaking and upending, his palms moulding and sifting through material. He held nothing, it was part of him, it was all part of him. And as he worked Reginald read, perched in a rocking chair which tumbled gently back and forth, his fingertips resting against the delicate gold lettering of the work’s spine, his thumb and forefinger darting forward to turn each page, his voice – his voice breathing magic into every word, magic which poured into Marcus’s ears as he worked. The young man bathed in these words, they supported him like a hammock tied between two trees, and though still he could make neither head nor tail of most sentences they upended him all the same. The saplings tilted their nascent trunks in hope of finding the voice, and the sun itself leaned back and listened as it sliced its way through the sky. In this ecstasy, this synaesthetic rapture, Marcus laboured deeper into the garden. Beyond the saplings, the hedgerows, the beds of flowers, he emerged into a glade. At the centre of this clearing stood – and here his spine tingled with sublime excitement – the carapace of an old oak tree. It could not be the same as that in the allotment, but to Marcus it seemed a homecoming nonetheless. Down on hands and knees he went, pulling himself inside, the dead and dying wood coyly scratching his skin, until he was sealed within, his thoughts focused on one end: resurrection. Spurred on by the undulation of Reginald’s voice, its variant speed and rhythm, as if he were a shaman summoning up some forest sprite or more ancient chthonic brute, this came quickly. In what felt like a matter of instants, this symbiosis of word and plant and man was complete. From his sumptuous vantage point, Marcus surveyed the garden, the house, the small smooth figure of Reginald, a smile woven across his face, his hands still clasped around the book from which he was reading. The sun was setting by now, leaving him alone in the sky. When night fell, he saw the old man rise from his rocking chair and re-enter the cottage, which also settled into sleep. The idea of returning to his prior state, of slaughtering what he and Reginald had wrought, was a sin too great for Marcus to consider. The intermingling was too narrow, the metamorphosis irreversible. He was a stylite and this tree his pillar. It was with the contentment of radical and unremitting self-sacrifice that he finally rested. The next morning, he awoke to music. Raindrops dabbled against his branches. Reginald’s words rang loud and clear. Their harmony left nothing to be desired. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA .