WHAT IS THE NATIONAL INTEREST?
Frank Furedi executive director, MCC Brussels; author, In Defence of Populism
In the aftermath of the US-Iran war, British politics heard an old phrase for the first time: national interest. The term was used to justify Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s standoffish relationship to the US attacks. But the term certainly sat oddly in Sir Keir’s register – Starmer being the consummate defender of international interests over the national, whether from his opposition to Brexit to his championing of Davos as a more important place than Westminster.
More broadly, the British political establishment seemed to have spent a couple of decades jettisoning the idea of the national interest. As Gus O’Donnell, formerly the UK’s most senior civil servant, famously claimed: ‘I think it’s my job to maximise global welfare, not national welfare.’
This discussion asks what happens when the state no longer knows how to put the country first. The British state’s own institutions no longer seem capable of thinking in terms of the national interest at all. A Civil Service that should exist to defend the country now often appears absorbed by internal process, managerial fads, diversity schemes and therapeutic bureaucratic rituals. The machinery of state remains vast, intrusive and expensive, but its animating purpose has become obscure. It governs constantly, yet struggles to say whom it governs for.
Can a state that thinks first in terms of ‘global welfare’, ‘international law’ and bureaucratic process still claim to represent the demos? What would it mean, in practical terms, for Britain’s Civil Service, foreign-policy establishment and political class to put the national interest first again? Is the national interest merely a rhetorical phrase to be invoked in moments of crisis, or is it the only legitimate foundation on which a democratic state can act?
COMING APART: AUTHORITARIAN STRATEGIES FOR A FRACTURED SOCIETY
Chris Bayliss, contributing editor, The Critic
The contemporary state seems stuck in a bind. Having pursued policies that have fractured society and hollowed out cohering institutions, it now struggles to maintain order. Britain increasingly resembles a society riven by ethnic, religious or social conflict. At the first sign of any social disturbance, state institutions immediately act to try and calm ‘community tensions’. Rather than asserting a common legal and social framework, the police and other social services often turn to ‘community groups’ to keep the peace. This is not restricted to ethnic or religious minorities – British governments are clearly terrified of the prospect of more Southport-style riots. Whether dealing with native Brits or newly arrived asylum seekers, the state appears less like Leviathan and more like a colonial administration.
Faced with these challenges, the state is often forced to become more authoritarian. Whether turning to the military to help house illegal migrants or passing yet more laws to restrict online speech, it seems that a lack of genuine authority is forcing ever more radical measures to hold the line.
Can we reverse the sense of social atomisation and provide a basis for a wider sense of social solidarity? With state institutions still so determined to fracture society into a series of distinct ‘communities’, what prospect is there for a wider basis of shared identification? As the state runs out of authority, can it keep the peace?
HOLLOW MILITARIES AND REAL SECURITY
Andrew Fox writer, commentator, former paratrooper; co-host The Brink podcast; author, Andrew Fox Substack
Britain, like most of the West, appears to be in the grip of a rhetorical military panic. Barely a week goes by without a new assessment of the profound threat posed by states like Russia or China to our national security. Yet the rhetoric is not matched by state action. Infamously, in the event of a serious conflict, Britain would be unable to mass more than few thousand troops at short notice, would run out of munitions in days, and even the Navy struggles to put together enough ships to deploy an aircraft carrier. As was evidenced by the debacle around a base in Cyprus during the US-Iran war, Britain is unable to protect its own military bases abroad.
Despite a seemingly endless succession of defence reviews, and promises of more funding, actual change seems to founder against the reality of limited resources and short-termist decisions. In June of this year, Defence Secretary John Healey resigned in dramatic fashion, accusing the prime minister and chancellor of being ‘unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats’.
What explains the gap between the reality and the rhetoric? Some argue that the UK simply refuses to take tough decisions. Others argue that Britain simply lacks the willingness. One might point to the way that military discussions, like those around Ukraine, have become a site for moral grandstanding rather than tactical consideration. Whatever the root cause, and whatever one’s feelings about the likelihood of conflict, the hollowing out of the military deserves discussion.
WHAT REMAINS? ART AND MEMORY IN THE POST-CULTURAL STATE
Lola Salem Oriel College, Oxford; author, Artless (Polity, forthcoming); contributor, The Critic, Engelsberg Ideas, Telegraph
What is a state that nominally preserves culture while emptying it? The post-cultural state maintains institutions that handsomely fund the arts and coordinate programmes. However, those favour a certain type of ‘safety’ and ‘consensus’ that derails art’s symbolic power and the custodian role traditionally held by the state. Ultimately, this produces boring content at best and harmful propaganda at worst. Over time, audiences turn away from this art, yet continue to fund the system that produces it through their taxes. This lecture explores how the post-cultural polity betrays the arts, and what becomes of collective memory when culture suffers under bureaucracy, marketing, and illiberal ideology.
ISLAMO-LEFTISM AND THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY THIRD-WORLDISM
Tim Black books and essays editor, Spiked
Many social commentators warn of a new and virulent political alignment: radical leftism and radical Islamism. Sometimes called ‘Islamo-leftism’, this alliance is said to be marked by both international issues like Palestine and domestic ones like migration. Left-wing antisemitism and its age-old Islamist form come together in a particularly toxic mix. In Britain, the rise of the Green party is said to be emblematic of this mix of middle-class leftism and radical Islamism.
What are the roots of this political arrangement? On the face of it, it seems a strange combination, as the ridiculousness of ‘Queers for Palestine’ lays bare – sexual minorities supporting a religious fundamentalism that would put them to death.
But the cohabitation has both contemporary logic and historical roots. In the contemporary world, many leftists are in fundamental agreement with the Islamists: the West is the source of the world’s evils. Historically, radical Islam often borrowed from revolutionary leftism. More broadly, this alliance seems to fit a moment where a variety of international powers, notably Russia and Iran, position themselves as actively against the decadence and hypocrisy of the West.
How to untangle these strange bedfellows? And what are the historical factors that gave rise to it? Is the contemporary love-in between the radical left and radical Islam a passing phase, or does it have staying power?
ECHOES OF THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR?
Paul Lay senior editor, Engelsberg Ideas; author, Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate; co-host, 1666 and All That
There are regional and national divisions, a collapsing state, administrative breakdown and a political class increasingly unable to command obedience.
The echoes of the English Civil War and its aftermath seem to be everywhere among us today. Brexit made visible divisions that long predated it – divisions of class, region and nation. Whilst we may not be literally at each other’s throats, as during the Civil War period, the state today also struggles to command widespread obedience or trust. New forms of sectarianism and esoteric belief have entered public life.
This lecture revisits the Civil War, not as a settled constitutional milestone, but as a crisis in the relationship between state and people. It will explore the battle over Parliament and the written constitution of 1653, the contested meaning of common law, the role of the state as guardian or enforcer of liberties, and the repeated fracture and reassembly of English political life: Roundhead and Cavalier, Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative, revolutionary or reformist. Behind these conflicts lay the deepest political question of all: where does legitimate authority come from?
THE BOOKS THE ELITE NO LONGER READ – BUT SHOULD
Nicholas Tate educationalist, commentator, author, What is Education For? (2014) & The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current (2017)
Session scheduled Friday evening. To attend, book a ticket with a Friday night room
It’s widely agreed that those who rule us seem less competent, less cultured and less reflective of society’s values than in the past. The education of elites used to be serious business, grounded in classic texts that society considered foundational. These texts underpinned assumptions about how leaders should behave, justify their power and relate to society. While few rulers lived up to these ideals, the common assumptions allowed society to critique them when they failed.
Today, however, as elites have become more detached from wider society and wider society has lost its common moral and intellectual touchstones, it seems harder to hold leaders to account. The scandal around Peter Mandelson shows that deciding who’s fit to rule is now outsourced to ethics committees or security clearances.
Nicholas Tate will draw on his recent book, Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does, to argue that a grounding in classic texts is essential for cultivating responsible and legitimate rulers. He examines how society once relied on books like Cicero’s On Duties or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives to instil a sense of public ethos among leaders.
Can changing what society educates its leaders affect how they exercise their power? Is returning to the great, but now unread, books of the classical canon the way to bridge the gap between the elite and society? What books should form the core of who we are, and what we expect people to read?