Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican convention in support of Donald Trump, on whose presidential transition team he served and to whom he donated $1.25 million. He has disavowed funding any presidential campaign this year.

In October he gave the Roger Scruton memorial lecture in Oxford and spoke with the philosopher and New Statesman contributing writer John Gray afterwards. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. They address the question of science – what it is, when it works, how it has been held back – and the delusions of our current cultural moment.

Read the interview

John Gray

Let’s begin to explore these deep questions that have been put before us by Peter. I think we should recognize that they are all attempts to shake us out of our distraction. There are three types of distraction here. The first is the way in which cultural debates about woke and anti-woke very often lead us to turn our thoughts away from fundamental contradictions in economic life. And this is a way in which Peter’s way of thinking has combined certain aspects of libertarian and Marxist critiques of our current economic regime.

The second is that the paradigmatic contrast which is supposed to exist – between ethics and politics as not being progressive and science and technology as being prototypically progressive – is not in fact substantiated by the evidence; that science and technology, except in a few narrow fields, have been stuck in the same categories of thinking, the same theoretical frameworks, and even the same types of technology for about 50 years.

And then the third type of distraction concerns how questions of religion, of how we ultimately think about good and evil, have been pushed to one side by wokeness, which is not at all, as some people have said on the right, a repaganization of the world but a type of hyper-Christianity emptied of transcendence and forgiveness.

And that leads to my question to you, Peter: is there some way out of this? One of the things you said tonight was that 20th century movements like fascism, or writers like Ayn Rand, or thinkers like Bronze Age Pervert today, in attempting to get back to a classical or pre-Christian view of the world – in which energy and vitality and power are what matters and victimhood is contemptible – cannot succeed in a post-revelation world.

In the same way, we can’t go back to earlier forms of science, we can’t go back to earlier forms of economic thinking, although I thought what you said about Henry George was very interesting. Are we really stuck? Is it possible to unstick us?

Peter Thiel

Well, my facile answer is always the first thing you have to do to solve problems is to talk about them. So I think that as long as we have this, as you described, Groundhog Day of wokeness, we are not going to be unstuck and we’re going to be in this zero-sum, Malthusian, ever nastier political context. I think there are ways that we could unstick ourselves in all three dimensions.

Neither pure capitalism nor pure globalism work economically. To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market. It’s very hard because you would destroy trillions of dollars in value in doing it, but the distortions have to give way at some point. Maybe it’s a technological fix. The way the problems that Henry George identified with real estate were historically solved was by having an open frontier in America, powered in the 19th century by the railroads. Then the frontier was populated and closed. And then late 19th, early 20th century, the cities start to have this Georgist runaway real estate price effect, rising inequality, and you get progressivism as a response. And then in the 20th century, in a way, another frontier was opened with the automobile and the highways and the suburbs, and that relieved the pressure on the runaway costs. But now that technology has run its course.

Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so.

Or to address science and technology, one must ask why the progress slowed. My optimistic belief is that it was not that we just ran out of ideas. It’s that there were these deformations of culture. We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences. And I think we could be making a lot more progress in a lot of areas. We don’t want to minimize or trivialize people’s fears of technology, but I think you could have a very different balance there.

And then certainly the questions about the larger meaning of life or the meaning of history are ones that I think we’d all do well to confront more.

Gray

What you’ve said implies, and I agree, that the so-called consensus that prevails between Sunak and Starmer is far more a consensus on what we’re not supposed to think about than it is on anything positive. Because the big problems you’ve mentioned, the problems of stagnation in science, the problems of real estate in London and Oxford and throughout the country, the problems of generational inequity in which young people can’t find any way to live: they’re all hardly addressed at all. There’s a bit of commentary in the newspapers and so on, but in terms of thinking about active solutions, there perhaps may be some dim subliminal awareness among these politicians that solving them would involve big losses for somebody?

Thiel

Yes, or certainly big losses for them in the election. It’s certainly not limited to the UK, but an outside perspective I would have, is that it seems to me that there’s a secret agreement between Sunak and Starmer to talk as much as possible about culture wars. And then if you have even basic economic questions like how to solve runaway deficit spending – with higher taxes or lower entitlements? – they both have a look-ahead function where if we talk about that, we’ll lose 10 or 15 percent of the voters. Maybe not quite as many for Sunak; at some point it’s hard to lose 10 or 15 percent of the voters. But when everybody does that, when all the solutions are outside the Overton window, we’re confined in this very narrow box and the Groundhog Day will continue until at some point something really breaks.

Gray

So there won’t be a Nietzschean Groundhog Day, it won’t really be eternal. It’s going to break down, isn’t it? I mean, that’s one way or the other, even if only for economic reasons, but we don’t know when or how.

Thiel

Sure. I think there certainly are all kinds of dimensions one could point to where where it is simply not stable. The demographics are not stable. The deficits are not stable. We had pseudo-stability and deficits for 40 years in the United States and much of the Western world where the deficits were too big, but the interest rates went steadily down. Something around that seems to have broken in the last year or two. So I think even something as basic as deficits financed at zero percent interest rates, it seemed like the 2010s could go on forever and that seems over.

Gray

And they haven’t. Does that bleed back into the cultural and the religious questions you discussed? Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.

Thiel

Yes, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a byproduct of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.

Gray

To adapt themselves to the Soviet and Bolshevik reality, one of the Cosmists’ slogans was, “Dead of the world, unite!”

Thiel

So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.

Gray

There’s also a nihilistic version of science, a Brave New World version, which sees itself as pacifying the spiritual and mental anguish and doubts of human beings by giving them access to drugs and pornography and all kinds of things which distract them forever from these fundamental existential questions, the religious questions. I mean what would work to exterminate religion or exterminate the need for religion would be to put everyone to sleep with drug dreams, drug highs. And of course, drugs are a tremendous feature of life at the moment, aren’t they, in many countries?

Thiel

I wouldn’t even go that far. Even iPhones distract you from the fact you’re in a hundred-year-old subway in London or New York, or the fact the environment hasn’t changed. I wouldn’t say there’s a fully intentional conspiracy, but the particular, narrow forms of technological progress that we’ve had in the last 50 years have made us oblivious to these things.

One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.

Read on

Britain’s creative industries have gone from strength to strength over the past decade. Hear from West Midlands mayor Andy Street, and content creator Patricia Bright, at our Creativity Unleashed event on why this sector is crucial for driving regional growth across the UK.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. You can adjust your settings on Substack if you would like to receive that alone.

— Harry, Will & Pippa.

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His most recent book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), tells a history of the Israel-Palestine conflict that doubles as a history of his own family and of his life. (He was born in 1948, the year in which Israel was founded.) He was living and teaching in Lebanon during the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war, and was affiliated with the PLO in press reports at the time. He advised the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid Conference of 1991, in the years leading up to the Oslo Accords.

His manner is both professorial and polemical, both friendly and stern. He speaks expressively. When he talked below of Palestinians being “locked into enclaves” after 2005 he created a cage in mid-air with sounds and gestures. His answers often gathered a strength of feeling as he unwound them, as the occasional exclamations below seek to convey.

Read on for the first half of our conversation. Click through to read in full, for more on Obama (“…from that point on we really lost touch with him”), the Arab states (“Egypt has had peace with Israel since 1979 – the Egyptian people have not accepted that”), Iran (“I think it believes Israel cannot destroy Hamas”), and how Khalidi thinks Israel should have responded after 7 October.

Read the interview in full

Harry Lambert: You set out a compelling account in your book of how Palestine was, in effect, colonised. I can’t judge that account. But given the case you make, do you think the creation of the state of Israel was legitimate?

Rashid Khalidi: I think it depends on what lens you choose. Take the Covenant of the League of Nations [1919], which said that Palestine and other provinces were independent nations, so they should have been granted self-determination. But under the Balfour Declaration of 1917 they were not, so there’s a contradiction [one conceded by Balfour in a 1919 memo]. International law called for Palestine to be independent, but it also called for the establishment of the Jewish national home and in effect excluded Palestinian statehood. The same can be said about the UN Charter [1945], which also calls for self-determination, and contrasts with the UN Partition Plan of 1947, which created a state for the Jewish minority in most of Palestine.

So you can say international legitimacy is on the side of a Jewish national home and of a Jewish state in most of Palestine, while an Arab state was never created – in fact it was strangled at birth. Or you can say, by the right of self-determination that people should have had after the First and Second World Wars, that there was no legitimate ground for creating a Jewish state in a majority Arab country. I would take the latter position.

Palestinians as a people had a right to self-determination after those wars, whatever rights should have accrued to the Jewish people after the First World War or after the Holocaust. Those [Jewish] rights were being exercised at the expense of another people that had – what I would argue were – prior rights.

The fact that racist immigration laws prevented Jewish survivors of the Holocaust from going to the United States or going to Britain, forcing them to come to Palestine – and the fact that the Zionist movement wanted to bring them to Palestine – doesn’t annul the right of a people to self-determination. The world had a problem which it chose to resolve at the expense of the Palestinians because it had a justified sense of guilt over a long period of time, from its persecution of Jews, and over a very short period of time after the Holocaust.

HL: But given these origins, it must be difficult for you to see how this conflict can be solved within today’s constraints. Because according to the position you take, this state should never have been created in this manner.

RK: That’s correct. I think Israel in the structure in which it exists has a problem. That doesn’t mean there’s no possible resolution for a problem of two peoples in one land, or for resolving the problem created by a colonial-settler paradigm. There are solutions that have been put forward in South Africa, in what used to be called Southern Rhodesia [Zimbabwe], in Kenya, in Ireland – I think you can see how you might grow towards a situation where the settler becomes a native, and is accepted as having a distinct personality. In the case of Ireland, the Protestants are no longer on sufferance. They are part of this polity with their own distinct identity. The same thing would be true of Israelis.

HL: But is the logic of what you’ve just said that the Jewish people would remain in some form settlers or colonialists until they come to sort of peace with the Palestinian people?

RK: You can see in the West Bank – day in, day out for the past 56 years [since the 1967 war] – to what extent this is and has always been a settler-colonial process. We see it with our bare eyes every single day, as armed settlers rampage through Palestinian towns and villages, chasing people off their land. The same kinds of legal processes were applied in Australia and North America, to dispossess people and squeeze them into smaller areas. That process is a settler-colonial process. Israel as a state is accepted in the international community, it has all of these aspects of legitimacy. But that process is, in my view, illegitimate.

They’re stealing land in the West Bank as we speak! They’re doing the same thing in Jerusalem. I’m afraid they’re going to try and do the same thing in the northern part of Gaza – chase everybody out and make it a free-fire zone. In many parts of the West Bank [Israel] hasn’t taken it over, they declare it a military or green zone: you can’t build on it, you can’t live; “it’s ours”, they’ll say. And it is and one day they’ll put a settlement there, or not. Anybody who is blind to that, and to the earlier colonial nature of Zionism before 1948, is missing something about the state of Israel as it was established, and operates today.

HL: You describe the Zionist movement as more well-resourced than the Palestine cause in the thirty-year period to 1948, with it being able to finance land purchases and so forth. Given that, what could Palestinians have done to resist the momentum of history at that time?

RK: They could have done one of two things. They could have tried to compromise and say, ‘OK, you can have most of our country or half of it,’ but I don’t think Zionism would have been satisfied with that. They wanted, in [Zionist politician and soldier, Ze’ev] Jabotinsky’s words, to transform Palestine into the land of Israel. And they meant all of it – they didn’t mean 12 or 20 or 8 per cent. And by 1967, they had all of it.

Or they [the Palestinians] could have resisted earlier. Look at what the Egyptians and Iraqis did. They rose up against their colonial occupiers. Britain intended to rule Egypt and Mesopotamia [Iraq] as an extension of the Indian Empire – the empire that controlled the Gulf and southern Iran and would have been extended into Mesopotamia, with Indian settlers put in. But the Iraqis rose up in 1920 and forced a feeble and unsatisfactory form of independence on the British. The Egyptians rose up in 1919 and did the same thing. I’m not saying it could have happened. It didn’t happen. But had it happened, maybe the Palestinians could have cut a better deal with the British.

HL: But was Palestine big enough to have caused those problems for Britain? Egypt was a much bigger country to try and control.

RK: This is part of the problem. These other countries were also dealing with only one colonial power. The Palestinians were up against the British, the Zionist movement, and the League of Nations. In Palestine, there was no Arab administration [unlike in other Arab countries, where the British ruled indirectly through local leaders]. The British ruled directly, and then they allowed the Jewish Agency [the body designated to represent the Jews in Palestine] to establish a sort of quasi-state under their protection. Palestinians were not allowed to have a parallel structure.

HL: You talk in the book about how your father was sent by his older brother in 1947 to see Abdullah I, the king of Jordan, in order to deliver a message from the Palestinians. There was, to your point, no formal diplomatic channel.

RK: In the 1920s, in the 1930s, the Palestinians did have a generally accepted representative: the Arab Higher Committee. But the British exiled most of the members of that committee in 1937, including my uncle and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. From that point on, the Palestinians suffered from not having a recognised central representative. And that continues until the founding of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] in 1964. Addressing the UN General Assembly in 1974 is one of the first occasions when the Palestinians were allowed to speak for themselves.

HL: Who then speaks for the Palestinian movement today?

RK: The Palestinians have a grave problem: the division of the national movement since the 1990s. There was a golden era of recognition of the PLO after Rabin became Israeli prime minister again in 1992. That was centred on its renunciation of “terrorism”, its adoption of a two-state approach, and its acceptance of Security Council resolution 242 [of 1967, which called for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories]. All of these things had grave disadvantages by the way. You accept that your resistance is terrorism, you accept the resolution that excludes you, you join negotiations on a basis that is designed to limit what you can get.

Nevertheless, the PLO represented majority opinion among the Palestinians until sometime in the late 1990s, when people begin to realise that the 1993 Oslo Accords had actually been designed to freeze and exacerbate an unfavourable status quo. Instead of ending occupation, occupation is reinforced. Gaza is blockaded starting in 1993. The first limitations on movement in and out of Gaza start then. GDP per capita falls, movement is restricted. Before 1993 you could drive with Palestinian plates to the Golan Heights, to Eilat [Israel’s southernmost point, on the Red Sea] or to Gaza with no hindrance. Suddenly the Palestinians are locked into enclaves – Bantustans [areas reserved for black populations in apartheid South Africa]. That’s Oslo.

That’s when Hamas [formed in 1987] becomes a serious challenger. The blocking off of the political horizon, which the PLO had assumed Oslo provided, was grist to the mill of Hamas. The Israelis in a sense helped to create Hamas as a counter to the PLO in the late 1980s. Israeli intelligence people have written this. Israel pulled the rug out from under the PLO, and you had the Second Intifada [2000-05]. And because the PLO don’t submit to what Israel demands, the US lifts its hands and says: ‘OK, then stay in their interim status under Israeli control and stew in your own juices.’

That’s been the American position. They weren’t willing to talk to a unified Palestinian national movement when Hamas won a plurality of the Legislative Council in the 2006 elections. [Mahmoud] Abbas had won the presidency the year before. The two sides [Hamas and Fatah, Abbas’ party] agreed on a unity government that would have allowed them to negotiate and which would have supported a two-state solution. Hamas was talking about a 100-year truce. Israel was not interested.

HL: You knew Barack Obama well, when you both lived in Chicago in the 1990s. What do you make of his approach to the issue in office?

RK: I think he understood a great deal more than his presidency ever showed. But he was a wily politician. He tried and failed to…

Read on

Thanks for reading. If this was of interest, sign up here for more Saturday Read Conversations. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. (You can adjust your settings on Substack if you would like to receive the main email alone.)

For a contrasting perspective on the conflict, here is a recent interview with Eitan Shamir, an Israeli military strategist. These interviews may also be of interest.

— Harry, Will & Pippa.

Thanks to Barney Horner.

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Lawrence, emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London, has long been an essential guide to foreign and defence policy, both in the UK and globally. (You can read him regularly in the NS.) Sam, his son, has become a vital domestic policy guide on all manner of issues, both on here and on Twitter. This conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

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Will

Lawrence, you are known for “writing” Blair’s Chicago speech in April 1999 which, as you have put it, is widely seen as foreshadowing his later decision to support the invasion of Iraq. How do you look back on it now?

Lawrence

I thought I was sending Jonathan Powell [Blair’s then chief of staff] some ideas for a speech. It only got through because they never showed it to the Foreign Office, who would have stopped it immediately. I wandered around the garden trying to think of something to say and put it down. My intent was to show why [the 1999 NATO intervention in] Kosovo should not be seen as carte blanche for the future, which was the point of the tests [he set out in the speech], which Blair turned into considerations. But I mean, I wasn’t a speech writer.

Will

Did you say to Jonathan, this wasn’t for mass consumption and also the history books?

Lawrence

I was quite happy. I listened to the radio report of the speech, and I thought “that’s familiar”. I left it at that. The Foreign Office was cross because their lawyers hadn’t had a chance to look at it, and it didn’t mention the United Nations. I did mention the United Nations, but not as an essential, decisive factor. It got leaked that I’d been responsible. One thing led to another. And I’m now known as the author of the Chicago speech. As it happened, it became a doctrine.

Harry

Can I bring you over to Ukraine. I wondered what you thought of John Mearsheimer’s recent piece on what he describes as a counteroffensive that was bound to lose.

Lawrence

John Mearsheimer should be in disgrace. I’ve known John for years. He’s a clever guy and a contrarian. He was the one arguing that after Ukraine got independence that it should keep hold of its nuclear weapons. And he’s now relying on Big Serge, who is a Russian-supporting blogger, as a source of military advice and dissing perfectly good people who are explaining what’s going on. Actually his conclusion is not that far from where many people are at the moment – that this is a long war and there’s no early prospect of negotiations, which is slightly different from him saying the Russians were bound to win, which is what he’d been saying before. My last Substack was about realists – and the one I chose, Elbridge Colby, seems to me a serious fellow who acknowledges that there may be trade-offs here. John doesn’t.

Harry

Mearsheimer’s point in that piece really was that there has never really been – apart from D-Day – a successful blitzkrieg against an evenly matched force, as he says Russia and Ukraine are.

Lawrence

The problem was all of these [pre-counteroffensive] analyses were expecting Ukraine to do something that’s very difficult. But all of these analyses miss the point that, after not very long, the Ukrainians switched tactics – to one based on attrition, knocking out Russian artillery, and using dismounted artillery. They’ve been making more progress, but it’s a much slower way of proceeding. One of the consequences of this is that the Ukrainians haven’t actually used a lot of the stuff that they’ve been given. They put a lot of people into the fight, but a lot of their equipment hasn’t yet been used.

Harry

But you have disgruntled officials, or disappointed ones, saying to the Wall Street Journal that “we built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive, and we can’t do that again. It doesn’t exist.”

Lawrence

That’s one person speaking, I think in the [US] Defence Intelligence Agency. British officials then said that’s not the case. The Ukrainians won’t do that again, in that way. They’ve learned things about the battlefield, about the role of drones. Nor can the Russians lay minefields like that [to that extent] in the future. The problem was that, from a year ago, the Russians were building elaborate defences in the area where everybody knew the Ukrainians would have to attack. The Ukrainians have suffered a lot. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, but you have to be very careful. I didn’t agree with the piece you [the New Statesman] published by Lily Lynch, which seemed to be “this is one in the eye for the liberal internationalists, and one up for realism”, as if this was a good thing, without anything at the end about what she proposes should happen.

There was also that recent profile of [the Rand Corporation political scientist] Samuel Charap in the New Yorker. In the end, the thing that everybody noticed is that he was at a loss for an answer when trying to explain to a Ukrainian why – given what is happening in the occupied areas – Ukraine should cede more territory to the Russians. Putin isn’t offering anything. The whole situation would change if Putin said to the Chinese or the Saudis, or any would-be interlocutor, “we’d like a way out of this”. The Ukrainians would then be on the diplomatic backfoot but the Russians have shown absolutely no interest in negotiation, other than one that confirms that they have more territory. The realist problem is they don’t have an alternative way out of this, other than helping Ukraine fight.

Harry

Who has the long-term advantage here: Russia or Ukraine?

Lawrence

Clearly the Russians can keep on finding people to throw into the void. But over the longer term, I think what you’re seeing now is US and European production stepping up. I think that’s the most important issue. It’s artillery, artillery, artillery, and air defences.

Harry

And planes?

Lawrence

F-16s will be helpful. I’m not sure they’re going to be a game-changer. And drones, which are being produced in mass numbers. I think the Ukrainians can now see a way through into continuing the fight next year. Part of the problem earlier in the year was a belief that this was a one-shot thing. I don’t think that’s the view now. It’s just a much more gruelling, difficult fight than a blitzkrieg – I think that was always overdone. A lot of it depended on assumptions about the Russian army. You don’t have to know much about the Russian army to know it has an in-built stoicism. The loyalty of individual Russians to the state is very high. You do what you’re asked to do. But I would say that at the end of all this – the past few months of fighting – the Russians are not in a better state than the Ukrainians.

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Will

Sam can we bring you in, and go from foreign to domestic. I was wondering how you now feel about your time as one of Michael Gove’s special advisers in the Department for Education from 2010 to early 2013.

Sam

On the academic side, I think we did some good things. I think the curriculum in England has worked much better than the curriculum in Scotland, which was introduced at the same time. I think you can see that in international comparative studies like Pisa [the Programme for International Student Assessment]. I think the changes to assessment were broadly good ones, although all of this could have been implemented better, like most things in government. There’s been a push on phonics, and we’ve seen better results for reading. I think the weakness of Gove’s strategy – which I was signed up to at the time – was focusing too much on the academic side and forgetting the importance of the pastoral and the social.

In the 2000s Ed Balls [who was secretary of state for children, schools and families from 2007-10] had created this Every Child Matters agenda, and spent a huge amount of time creating these complex New Labour structures for all the different school-related services within councils, with statutory duties. Schools didn’t like it. And our reaction was: let’s just get rid of it. Let’s focus on what schools are supposed to be for, which is education. That was too simplistic. And I think shifting to academies, again, probably helped a bit on the education side, but we cut the links to other services. Then combine this with cuts – not particularly to schools themselves, which have been relatively protected, but to all the services that sit around schools – and it has created a situation where if you go to a school now, they won’t say, “Oh, we’re worried about the curriculum, we’re worried about exams.” But they have a huge problem with mental health. They’ve got huge problems with children in poverty. We have too many kids who just aren’t able to learn because there are so many other issues going on.

Harry

Right. Gove has also said he regrets cutting the Building Schools for the Future programme.

Sam

Everybody knew that it was not going to be affordable in the form that it was in. The question was how do we end it? We jumped too quickly to that. The question should have been – OK, the Treasury is not going to give us £10bn a year, can we focus more on need? Can we simplify it? But this was the first decision we made. We were all completely new to government. It was a very steep learning curve. And I agree with Michael, it was a big mistake.

Harry

We just ran a cover on crumbling Britain. It’s a widely felt theme. Looking back now, a lot of Britain’s problems seem to date from austerity. You were part of a reforming government that wanted to do new things. But in hindsight it feels like a government that’s been quite devastating for the country. [As the New Statesman argued of austerity at the time.] How do you view the coalition?

Sam

I think education is probably the one thing that hasn’t gotten worse, right? It’s the one that you can look at the graphs and say, at the very least, the outcomes are as good as they were in 2010, probably a bit better. Whereas everything else – the NHS, the criminal justice system – it’s carnage at the moment. Austerity’s not the only reason for that. It’s also bad governance. Since 2016 there has been a total collapse of central government in trying to do anything sensible. Three years were spent on Brexit, then we had Johnson, then we had Truss, etc. But certainly those austerity budgets have proved to be a historical error. I realised that by about 2012. I remember getting an impact analysis on the latest round of welfare cuts. It might have been the benefits cap. And the impact assessment was clear. The effects were going to be dire. And they just carried on doing it anyway. It wasn’t the department I was working in – and I was a civil servant – but I just thought I can’t be connected with this government anymore.

Will

You talk about schools as a kind of all-purpose Swiss Army Knife provider of social services. Is that connected with the struggle of secondary schools to retain teachers? What could Labour do to fix that?

Sam

We’ve got a big teacher-recruitment problem. There are several things going on. It’s partly pay. It’s partly not being able to work from home, like a lot of other graduate jobs now. But especially if you’re in a school in a lower-income area, you’re doing a lot of helping to run the food bank and knocking on people’s doors to try and get absent kids to come into school. You’re dealing with huge numbers of social services cases, and abuse cases. And that is so draining if what you wanted to do is be a teacher. So I wouldn’t say it’s the number of hours worked. It’s the type of work.

Harry

With all of the issues you’ve written about – education, the criminal justice backlog, immigration, the NHS waiting list – are these fundamentally money questions? We seem to have given up on the idea that you can improve something without money.

Sam

I think money is part of it in every case. It is very difficult to reform without money. Labour shadow ministers keep presenting them as opposites, but reforms work better when you spend money. But it is also bad governance, with immigration being a good example of where the cost of immigration has simply gone up. We’re spending more on immigration because ministers have let the backlog go to two years. So they [the government] are spending [billions] a year on hotels and accommodation for asylum seekers because they let the system get that bad. If they hadn’t been so distracted by Rwanda and all the other gimmicks they’ve done to satisfy the Mail and so on over the years, they could have kept that to six months, and the cost would be much lower. But if you look at the justice system, and the NHS particularly, it’s very difficult to see how you fix those systems without more money.

Harry 

But how is Labour going to fix any of these problems without any new cash? It seems like it’s going to be governing in chains at this rate.

Sam

They’re going to be in a position where every department is asking for more money, and they’ll have a good case for most of that money. Labour have said they won’t do wealth taxes, they’re not going to raise income taxes – so they will have to raise National Insurance, because that’s the only one left to raise. [Or VAT.] But that’s only going to fill a tiny bit of the pot. Unless, to the piece you did Harry, they seriously look at wealth taxes, I just don’t see how you make the numbers add up in a way that’s going to satisfy their own MPs or supporters when it comes to doing anything on the NHS, or justice, and so forth.

Harry

Well, they expect to grow, right? But growth is hard to come by.

Sam

It’s hard to come by. And the projection is already building some growth, right? The OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] is assuming we are going to grow at 1.5-2 per cent a year, which is [already] better than we’ve done the last few years. So even if you do all of the things that Labour is saying it will do to generate growth – such as planning reform, which will be difficult in itself and take time – you might only get to where the OBR is projecting anyway. So you can’t rely on that. You’ve got to have a plan B somewhere.

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Harry

Lawrence, you mentioned Elbridge Colby, whose ideas I’ll be covering in the NS soon. Do you think his fundamental analysis – that Europe needs to pick up the bill in Ukraine, so that America can focus on Taiwan – has merit?

Lawrence

I think if you make a foreign policy commitment, which the US government did, you can’t just walk away from it. Also, a lot of the stuff on China and Taiwan [Colby fears a near-term invasion] is speculative. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and it’s certainly not going to get any easier if the US abandons Ukraine. Europeans also really are doing more and more in Ukraine. So I think it’s wrong in a number of ways. I fully understand that this is a real debate in the US. But you can’t just walk away. It’s not like a venture capitalist who backs a promising start-up and decides it’s not a good rate of return and moves on to something else. You can’t do that in international affairs. It’s also not a lost cause. There’s a long way to go with Ukraine.

Will

Do you think Trump backs away from funding Ukraine if he wins in 2024?

Lawrence

He will be campaigning from a jail cell we hope. But I wouldn’t want to assume anything about what he would do. What Trump is going to do will depend on how he thinks it reflects on him personally. The Republicans are split on the issue. A lot of Republicans don’t think Biden’s doing enough. Before that there’s going to be a big test this winter, if Russians try to take out the electricity system again. I think Ukraine is far better prepared than they were a year ago. But that came quite close to success last December.

Harry

Where does British foreign policy fit in all this? We spoke to [the former head of the Foreign Office] Simon McDonald not so long ago, and he said the game was up for Britain. But you have people like John Bew [a New Statesman contributing writer from 2013-19] who has been working in No 10 for four years, and who believes the UK has shown it can be an influential player.

Lawrence

I have great admiration for John. We were colleagues at King’s. And I think British foreign policy hasn’t looked too bad, despite it all, over the last few years. And that’s down to him. I was quite surprised by Simon. I think he was far too fatalistic, and we have played a leading role in Ukraine. Tony Radakin, chief of the defence staff, has been playing quite an influential role. The Ukrainians do talk to us a lot. I think it’s wrong to get all fatalistic and gloomy and say the game is up. Clearly, Brexit hangs over everything. There are a lot of discussions in the past we would have been directly involved with, and now we’re on the side lines. But I think people over-interpret the tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The UK has played a limited hand quite well. The interesting thing is how little difference there is between the two parties.

Sam

I think it shows that we are still capable of doing something right: on Ukraine and other foreign issues. Foreign policy has gone much better since 2019 than domestic policy – apart from Brexit – and the question is: why has there been such a difference in technical competence between one area and the other?

Thanks for reading. If this interview was of interest, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

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— Harry & Will

Thanks to Barney Horner.

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We have both been reading Matt’s writing for a long time. He has been an essential guide to American politics and policy for at least 15 years, and he was one of the founders of Vox in 2014. This conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

You can subscribe to Matt’s Substack, Slow Boring, here:

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Will

Matt, you wrote a piece on the “Great Awokening” back in 2019 in which you said the next Democratic president would have to “confront the legacy of America’s racial caste system”. You talked up the “prospects of sweeping policy change when the newly invigorated anti-racist coalition does come to power”. Have we seen these sweeping changes under Biden?

Matt

In 2018 I envisioned a future Democratic administration taking office and putting racial justice on the agenda. Instead we had this incredible wave of protests during Trump’s final year in office, and an incredible amount of non-profits and businesses doing Black Lives Matter stuff. By the time Biden becomes president, a backlash to all of that is already in place, and violent crime has gone up quite a bit in American cities.

Most of what Biden has done has been at representational level. He has put together, I think, the most diverse cabinet in history, the most diverse set of judicial nominees. He’s continuing in the trajectory that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and even Jimmy Carter started, of building a more integrated national policymaking elite.

But there was so much energy expended in 2019, and especially 2020, that most of what we’ve seen, I think, is Biden trying to distance himself from hardcore anti-policing ideas. Biden is a classic liberal integrationist. He doesn’t have a radical critique of America. Things are playing out pretty differently from how I’d anticipated because 2020 was such an accelerant.

Harry

So there has been less policy change than you would have hoped, in part because activists expended energy in 2020 in ways that turned out to be alienating?

Matt

Absolutely. A lot of energy and enthusiasm was expended in ways that were so apart from the material concerns that influence people’s quality of life that it wound up being alienating. We have gotten some big legislation from Biden that will make a big difference, in particular the infrastructure bill which is going to end up doing a lot for low-income communities of all kinds. But I had been hopeful that the diminution of racism [in public opinion data as of 2018] meant we were going to see big policy changes of the sort that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King once pushed for. Traditionally in the United States, efforts to do redistributionist class politics have been very undermined by racial antagonism.

Instead, what happened was that at a time when people on the left held very little practical national political power, we had this incredible outpouring of very identity-specific grievances that wound up locating itself really heavily in the basic operation of the criminal justice system. It’s obviously important to not have police officers doing bad things. But there’s so much more to society than that, right? And all the energy was expended in ways that ended up being somewhat counterproductive.

For instance, we had one year of an expanded child tax credit [across the US in 2021]. Tony Blair’s government did something similar in the 1990s. And it dramatically reduced child poverty in America, which does an incredible amount to reduce racial poverty gaps because child poverty here is much more concentrated in the black community. But it’s a completely race-neutral distribution policy. And unfortunately there was not enough enthusiasm to get that made permanent. Those are the kinds of changes that make a real difference in people’s lives in a sustainable way. And there was a loss of focus on those kinds of things.

Will

How has this happened?

Matt

Politics has become, I think, more symbolic for a lot of people and less material, less concrete. And I think that’s unhealthy in a lot of ways. It’s led people to deprioritise effective action. It’s also generated a lot of anxiety. It’s one thing to feel bad because an election didn’t go your way and then a programme that you rely on got cut, or your taxes went up. But a lot of people I know experienced all this psychological distress from the fact that Donald Trump was in the White House, that was not related to anything tangible happening in their lives. Just the symbolism of it wounded them. You saw a lot of that on the other [Republican] side with Obama, where you can draw a link to racism. People now see certain lifestyles as being vindicated based on who wins the presidential election. But we’re a gigantic, diverse country. You can’t have the president be like everyone. That doesn’t work.

Harry

You want people to focus on policy rather than this psychological distress.

Matt

The thing about policy is that it’s not zero-sum, right? If you make good governance decisions, you hope to have a more prosperous country, and you hope to have a fair division of that prosperity. You can have a situation where things are just better than they were ten years ago. Whereas these symbolic politics are inherently zero sum. You’re either championing the small-town people left behind, or you’re championing the cosmopolitan vision of the future. And it makes people miserable.

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Harry

You have written that “we’re living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse through twitchy overreaction”.  I wondered how you think that has played out in the media. When you left Vox for Substack in late 2020, you described the outlook of a new type of journalist that was becoming dominant in America: “if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it’s very challenging to do good work… it is definitely the mentality of a lot of people working in journalism today.” Do you feel like that mentality is still gripping the media?

Matt

I think the grown-ups have taken back command of a lot of these media institutions. We had a cresting peak with the pandemic, the George Floyd protests and Trump being in office, and since then there has been a move back towards sanity. I do see entrenchment. The idea that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never harm me”, I think that idea has gone out of style among people younger than me [Yglesias is 42]. Of course that was never literally true. But there was a wisdom to it. It was trying to teach people to be more resilient in the face of mean-spirited dialogue or whatever else. For people under 40, under 30, a lot of what they got acculturated to in school is the idea that stopping people from saying bad things is a really important part of life.

A lot of the concern about misinformation on the internet has a very partisan and very ideological valence to it. There’s this idea lurking behind it that if we can get all the educated liberals together, we can stop people from saying the bad conservative things, and then nobody will believe this stuff. And then we’ll carry the day all over the town.

Harry

You’ve talked a lot about the Biden Boom^TM recently: inflation’s down, the “misery index” – the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate – is low, wages are rising. It looks like the soft landing may be in sight. Why do you think his approval ratings remain subdued? They are no better than Trump’s at the same point in his presidency.

Matt

It’s a good question. Consumer confidence has just started to go up over the past two months.  One theory is that we have a lag, and in a couple of months the political numbers [will] start getting better. I hope that’s true. People may be so dug in on social and cultural issues, that if you disagree with Biden on abortion and guns and transgender youth and sports, you just won’t give him credit no matter what happens. But if you look at the polling of state governors, the good economy is helping incumbents of all parties. It’s just not helping Biden. It raises questions about the White House’s communication strategy, and, frankly, about age. If you poll people they say Biden is too old. And he does not have a mechanism to become younger, unfortunately. He seems like he’s doing the job fine. But he does fewer public appearances than presidents normally do.

Will

It sounds a bit morbid, but what happens if Biden dies in the next 18 months?

Matt

I think everybody would feel better about that scenario if Kamala Harris was wildly popular. One of the paradoxes of the Biden administration is that he would be better off politically if Harris were more popular, except that you would have tonnes of people saying he should step aside and let her run if she was. For the three years of his presidency it was good for Biden that she was not held in high esteem by the public. There’s a move under way to rebuild her political standing. She’s out talking a lot about abortion rights now, which is a very good issue for them. At the beginning of the administration, they tasked her with border security, which is the worst assignment you could possibly be given in a Democratic administration. She’s been a very effective politician at earlier times in her career. She’s been a little bit lost in the fog [as vice-president].

Will

Is abortion going to hand Biden the 2024 election? You’ve been highlighting data showing how powerful an issue it is for Democrats.

Matt

It depends exactly what Trump says he’ll do. But it’s a potent issue. Republicans were given a big gift by Roe vs Wade [the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalised abortion nationwide], which let them tell their base that they were 100 per cent anti-abortion, but also tell swing voters “there’s nothing we could do about it, don’t vote against us”. The Dobbs case [which overruled Roe last year] has pulled that rug out from under them. It’s a really big deal politically.

Republicans are trying to reassure people that there isn’t going to be a federal abortion ban. But in every state they gain power, they make abortion illegal. After the [2024] election, it’s going to depend on how many votes they have, but it’s clearly what they think they should do. It’s what they do when they have power. It’s something they are willing to spend political capital on in Texas and Ohio and Georgia. So it’s very alarming to people.

Harry

Can you put a number on it? Out of ten, how confident are you Biden wins next year?

Matt

I think it’s a six. In 2020, the electoral college was very heavily tilted towards Trump. Biden won the popular vote by four points and only narrowly won the election. Dobbs has reconfigured the geography a little bit, so Biden’s odds of winning a 50/50 election are a lot better than they used to be. Pair that with a growing economy, and the incumbent will probably get re-elected. But it will be close.

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Will

Are you surprised Trump has managed to weather four indictments? You’ve written about not being bewildered by his success. As you put it: “The basic ideas of ‘cops and troops are good, we should have less immigration and wave little flags a lot instead of obsessing over racism’ just have a lot of appeal.”

Matt

I think that he succeeded because he hit on some good stuff politically. He’s definitely a disaster as a person, and so plagued by scandal that I think everybody knows – except for Republican primary voters – that they’d be better off with some random governor. But as a person, rather than as a set of ideas, he has a real grip over a lot of people.

Harry

Why do you think that is?

Matt

I don’t know. Except that conservatives have developed this very oppositional stance towards American society. And it makes them feel that they have something in common with this one guy. That’s something we’ve seen in the past at a local level, with scandal-plagued mayors successfully wielding ethnic grievance concerns to make people feel that “I uniquely represent you, my legal troubles mirror your alienation from society” – whether that’s Buddy Cianci in Providence or Marion Barry in Washington DC, where I live. It’s unusual to see that in national politics, and to see conservative institutions have so little ability to check it.

Will

I think the piece you wrote about Hungary is interesting. I wanted to talk a little bit about the mistakes you think conservatives are making by following this path towards Orbánism.

Matt

It’s weird to have a world in which traditionalists have decided that big cities and the people who live in them, and the people who are educated and successful, are so bad that it would be better to have this homogeneous, middle-income, Central European, backwater country. I mean I’ve been to Budapest, it’s a beautiful city. But it’s such a strange aspiration to say we want the politics of rural Hungary, rather than London and New York and San Francisco. These are the crowning achievements of Western civilisation.

The success and dynamism of the richest country on Earth is something that, traditionally, American conservatives would celebrate. And they become really very alienated from the biggest icons of American society. You see it in Trump. Everything Trump does is this seething resentment against his social peers from New York City who never respected him. And he’s now going to vindicate every person who thinks somebody else is looking down on him.

Will

Could you speak to the impact of neuroticism on American politics?

Matt

From what we can tell, liberal people are a lot more neurotic. When you lump all the edgy, low-emotional stability people together in one political camp, I do think that, as an emergent phenomenon, you start to get a neurotic politics. Take Covid. There was a new virus, and there was a social response to it that I think was necessary. There was also a lot of uncertainty. At a certain point it became taken for granted on the left in America that whatever was the maximally cautious mode of behaviour, that was correct. That’s not how societies have traditionally worked. There’s always been a value placed on not shutting yourself up in your home or being paralysed by fear and terror.

It ties in with what we were talking about before with speech and expanding concepts of harm, right? You can have norms that say you should try to buck up and learn to deal with something. Or you can have norms that say: we all have to be more interpersonally sensitive to the foibles of the weirdest guy in the room.

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Will

I wondered if you agree with Adam Tooze and others that we’re living in a “polycrisis”.

Matt

Politics is always high stakes. So if people want to say it’s a crisis, I mean, sure, but compared to when? I’d compare today to my grandfather’s stories about invading Italy to fight the Nazis, or my dad ducking under desks because there might be nuclear war, or even just when I was a college student and 11 September happened and the United States was invading various countries. The stakes seem lower than they were back then.

Harry

You’re taking me back to the Obama presidency. What errors do you think he made?

Matt

I think Obama made fewer mistakes than most people think. But there was one really big one: across his whole first term, the administration consistently underrated the potential to create jobs through fiscal and monetary stimulus. We had this very slow labour market recovery all through his eight years in office, and things were really, really bad in his first term. The Obama White House thought there were a lot of fake problems. Obama used to talk a lot in public about how ATMs and automatic ticket kiosks had reduced labour demand. But we saw over the course of his second term, and then Donald Trump’s whole term, there were just a lot of people out there who needed work and could be put back into work with a less austere fiscal policy. I think that is what prevented him from being a Reagan-like figure. He won re-election in 2012, it was a very well-run campaign. But he never got that “It’s morning again in America” moment.

Harry

One policy of Obama’s that Biden inherited and did away with was American military involvement in Afghanistan. You argued recently that Biden gets no credit for this. Do you think he should, given the nature of the withdrawal from Kabul? His approval rating cratered at the time. It fell from 50 to 46 per cent in ten days in August 2021, and has not recovered since. (It is at 41 per cent today.)

Matt

Obviously, not every specific of that withdrawal was done perfectly. But the mission was failing; he was correct to end it. Given what’s happening in Ukraine, and tensions with China, having the American military pinned down indefinitely in Afghanistan was a disaster. I think the media was incredibly harsh on Biden, and that was the proximate cause of the fall of his approval rating [in 2021].

Harry

How optimistic are you, ultimately? Because on the one hand you see great possibility in the small triumphs of policy, at a local, state, or national level, but then on the other you describe all these forces that are making such success less and less probable, from the antagonising radicalism of some parts of the American left to the impotence of the Trump-bitten right.

Matt

I try not to be too optimistic about anything. We’re starting to see Republican-run states really taking an axe to their higher education systems. What I would hope to see happen [in reaction to campus illiberalism on the left] would be a recalibration. What I’m afraid is going to happen is we’re going to detonate the red-state universities and they won’t exist. And then elsewhere [in blue states] things are going to go further. So that there is total social polarisation of the concept of university. Ron DeSantis clearly just wants to be seen as fighting with college professors. His politics aren’t about technocratic improvements to the Florida university system. It’s about war. And that makes it hard to make things better.

We have also moved to a media where more people are reading the internet instead of a local newspaper. They are getting information about symbolically-freighted fights happening in communities they don’t live in, rather than information about practical stuff happening where they do live, and that twists everything around. People feel like they’re engaging in politics because it helps people, because it’s important. There are lots of things you can do in politics that are constructive and do help people. But the thing I always urge people to ask themselves is – is this thing that I am actually doing right now helping people? Does it make you happy to doom-scroll and read about allegedly terrible things that governors of states you don’t live in are doing?

Thanks for reading. If this interview was of interest, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

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— Harry & Will

Thanks to Barney Horner.

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Will and I spoke to Helen last week about everything from her changing approach to journalism to why Ron DeSantis doesn’t get it, as well as Labour’s new shift away from self-ID (“I want Keir Starmer to turn up at my house with a bunch of flowers and a note saying, ‘Hello, we now agree with you on everything. I can’t believe we didn’t recognise you, John the Baptist crying in the wilderness.’ But it’s not going to happen, is it?”). The conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

You can subscribe here to Helen’s weekly Substack, the Bluestocking, which we both read:

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Harry

Helen when we met you were an editor who wrote. Now you are a writer who edits (one day a week at Private Eye). Why the shift?

Helen

I want to do more writing, I want to go to places where stuff is happening and talk to people. I spent too much of the past decade living on the internet, where everyone is angry and you’re finding all the same stories as everybody else who’s on there. I’d like to go and be in weird places with people who don’t spend their whole time reading the same things as I do.

Harry

You have written a few features in the last couple of years for The Atlantic, most notably on Ron DeSantis in March. What have you learnt about the craft of the long-form piece? Which we don’t really have in the UK, despite our attempts to change that.

Helen

I think I’ve learnt about the novelistic use of detail. You can then apply that to everything else you write. You can tell so much of the story in little glimpses, in delicate little touches – as in a screenplay you should be showing not telling. That speaks to the importance of reporting. If you’re describing something, it will bring it to life for people, rather than just baldly stating your opinions. I think people are quite tired of polemic. I kind of groan slightly now when I see lots of opinion journalism. I just feel like I really overdosed on it in the past decade.

Harry

The opinion is going to be there anyway, in the way you structure the material, right? You will have plenty of opportunity to get your view in through the details you choose.

Helen

It’s more elegant to try and create an atmosphere than to turn to the camera and say, ‘such and such is a bad man’. There’s a scene I had at the end of my DeSantis piece, which was his inauguration in Tallahassee in January. And they had a guy who was an 81-year-old veteran of the Bay of Pigs come up and do the Pledge of Allegiance. And he stumbled through it. And I just thought any good politician would have gone up and taken his arm and done it with him, right? And DeSantis – he just stared straight ahead, looking a bit embarrassed. And everybody tensed up because they felt really bad for this guy. I thought that if I tell that story it is going to convey the fundamental problem of Ron DeSantis as a political candidate, which is that he’s got no charisma, no empathy, no initiative – that he wouldn’t think this was his problem, that he could do something about it.

Harry

There was that famous press conference where the Ukrainian journalist is almost tearful, saying she wants to come up and give [Volodymyr] Zelensky a hug. And he just stops and says, “Well, why don’t you?”

Helen

Right. As I said in the piece, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair or Bill Clinton would have done it. Or take Barack Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the church in Charleston, just understanding what a big moment is, and what people want emotionally from politics. [Obama was speaking at the funeral of a pastor who was one of nine people killed by a white supremacist gunman.] People go to Donald Trump rallies because they’re angry but also because it’s the Colosseum: they want to be entertained. And that’s why he’s so successful. If you don’t understand that you don’t understand politics.

Will

Let’s get into Keir Starmer. He’s 20 points ahead, but somehow he’s always being criticised. You wrote a great piece on him in December (“Starmer’s secret”), the whole point of which was that we get him wrong, that he has much greater strategic patience than us in the press. Do you think we’re getting him wrong now? Or is he finally making some missteps?

Helen

I think nature abhors a vacuum. You have to pretend that things are on a knife-edge even when they’re not. The counterpoint to that is that Theresa May went into the 2017 election 20 points ahead and managed to lose that in very short order. So it’s not like we can all actually go home. But I think a lot of political journalism isn’t really an analysis of what’s happened – it’s an argument by the writer that the politician should agree with them more. So you will see a lot of commentary asking why can’t Keir be more left-wing. And the reason is: Britain isn’t a particularly left-wing country, and he wants to win an election in Britain.

Harry

But let me hold you up on that. I’m writing a piece now, arguing that Labour could and should be more left-wing on tax. If you look at the polling data, people are extremely supportive of a lot of left-wing policies on tax, but somehow that’s all discounted, and there is a sense that we’re a Tory nation. 

Helen

Right, but I remember having this argument under Ed Miliband, in that renationalisation of the energy companies was, and is, really popular. But there are two other points here. One, how much is this going to cost? Two, how much of your time is it going to take up? That was Blair’s point against it – is that really what you want to do with your term? You see this all the time: policies poll well, people like them in the abstract, but do they like them in reality? And what do they add up to? I think Labour is undeniably cautious for a very good reason about policies that individually poll well but can be painted as radical. Labour succeeds in getting its most radical policies through when it sounds most conservative, when it talks about marriage and family and law and order.

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Harry

I feel like the 2017 election is always the thing that gets ignored here, when people suggest Labour must win on Tory terms. But are you one of those who just thinks that election was an aberration?

Will

They didn’t win, Harry.

Harry

But Labour called for £50bn in tax rises and was then ahead in the polls for a year [after the 2017 election]. That seems to me to fly in the face of this idea that you can never be bold. But is that the wrong way to think about it? 

Helen

No you can be bold, but Joe Biden is a really interesting example. The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge piece of legislation with all kinds of stuff in it. But how did he win the election? I think there was no more important thing Joe Biden did to win than, at the height of ‘defund the police’, saying, ‘Do I look like a radical socialist, man?’ in that debate with Donald Trump. I think if you’re going to be a left-wing government, which is something I want, you should be as boring as possible about it and not promise people that the Glorious Revolution is dawning in Britain, but instead promise that you’re going to make life better for working people.

Harry

And then be bolder once you’re in office?

Helen

Exactly. The Labour government of 1997 came in pledging to stick to the Tory spending envelope over the first two years, but overall it was an incredibly progressive government, which took pensioners out of poverty, took children out of poverty, instituted the minimum wage, put money into public services. But the thing it’s now remembered for is not being left-wing enough. It was a lot more left-wing than the next John Major term would have been – that’s the baseline here.

Will

Does this boringness of Keir’s, which we’ve praised a bit, does it make it hard to introduce him to American readers? Meet Captain Boring, America.

Harry

That’s quite a good title.

Helen

It’s a challenge. 

Will

Perhaps casting him as the Ruthless Man makes him interesting. I wanted to ask you about this Labour policy shift on gender self-ID this week [24 July].

Helen

So look at that policy – it is a huge deviation from what he was saying to get elected [as Labour leader], which was ‘I will introduce self ID’. He has now said sex and gender are different, that women have a right to single-sex spaces, and that being trans is to be treated as a medical issue, not a kind of spiritual self determination. Those are three huge changes towards the gender critical position in the space of three years. And what did he do? He got Anneliese Dodds, a politician that basically nobody has ever heard of – I know she was briefly shadow Chancellor – and ran an op-ed in the Guardian, the most pro self ID newspaper out there. Then he refused to go on the Today programme the next day to defend the policy. When he was later asked about it on LBC he said, ‘We’ve always been in favour of safe spaces and a woman is an adult female’ and I’m thinking: did I receive a blow to the head at some point here? He just very ruthlessly ditched a whole load of stuff, and actually severely embarrassed a lot of people in the shadow cabinet. David Lammy said people who think that women are biological females were “dinosaurs” hoarding their rights. And it turns out – update – we love dinosaurs. We meant dinosaurs in a good way, hoarding their rights in a good way, clinging on to their rights with their little dinosaur hands. Then there is Lisa Nandy, who said during the leadership campaign that a male rapist should be put in a female prison. Those people will now be quite embarrassed in future interviews, but tough. He needed to close down that issue in order to stop every interview before the next election being: does a woman have a penis? And he’s done it. And he did it in recess, without a big blitz to go out and defend his position. It’s been pretty effective. The usual suspects – [Labour MPs] Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Nadia Whittome, Zarah Sultana – have really not kicked off about it. Because Keir has been wandering around with his big stick for some time now. 

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Will

How do you feel about your experience of this debate over the past half decade? I thought the piece you wrote about reactionary feminism was interesting (“The feminists insisting that women are built differently”). And perhaps more sympathetic than it would have been had this debate on gender not happened. 

Helen

Look, I think it’s been good for me as a journalist to be rejected by people who I would have once thought were my allies, because actually a true journalist should have no allegiances, no tribe. And it’s been fascinating to me that there are people who I disagree with on almost everything, but I agree with them on the fact that male puberty confers a sporting advantage. The people who reject that are essentially creationists. And lots of people I thought were pretty sane on lots of stuff turned out to be gender creationists. And that has made me question whether or not they might be wrong on other things, too. I think it’s a really useful exercise as a journalist to go: I assumed you were the side that cared about evidence, and in this case you’ve proven that you’re not, so I’m not going to take that on trust anymore. And maybe I should have done that earlier.

Harry

You’re being very sanguine about this now. But was there a time where it was much more of an affliction to be cancelled by people you thought were your friends?

Helen

I can’t think of that many people I genuinely respected who have ended up on the properly screamy side.

Harry

Not friends then. Your ideological gang, if you like.

Helen

Am I sanguine about it? No, I’m not sanguine about it! I want Keir Starmer to turn up at my house with a bunch of flowers and a note saying, ‘Hello, we now agree with you on everything. I can’t believe we didn’t recognise you, John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness.’ But it’s not going to happen, is it? I realised this by writing [her 2020 book] Difficult Women. The suffragettes won, and then almost immediately the violence of the campaign was written out. And history was written as if women getting the vote was always going to happen. Of course they were going to get the vote, silly. That’s what happens. That’s what’s happened here. Labour’s leadership is now saying: ‘We’ve always acknowledged that men have a sporting advantage over women, we’ve always acknowledged that men commit rape at much higher rates than women, no one ever said that wasn’t true – that would be crazy talk!’

Harry

So now they’re gaslighting?

Helen

Well we just went through this ten-year period where people pretended that biological differences didn’t exist. And I’m happy that time appears to be over, but I remember it happening. It feels very odd that people have already forgotten that they said things that they absolutely said.

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Will

I’d like to ask you about Twitter. In an email the other day you said you think you might finally be done with social networks. Are you done with Twitter? You still have an account.

Helen 

The difference is, now I don’t give a s**t. I will put my articles on there to help other people in journalism remember that I’m alive, but I don’t care. I’m still on there as that’s where I have a lot of my network and contacts from ten years-worth of journalism. But I was a fool to have been tricked into making content for free for people who did not have my best interests at heart. Why did I do that for so long? I think we all tricked ourselves into thinking it was going to help our career and I’m not entirely sure that it did.

Harry

I’ve been meaning to write a piece for months to the title “Twitter was a con”. But does the platform’s demise make it harder to break out now if you are a young journalist? It was the great equaliser.

Helen

I think that what I got from Twitter was a lot of invitations to be on BBC politics shows and argue about stuff. But after a while you realise that the only reward for that is being invited to do more BBC politics shows where you are invited to argue about stuff. The bit where someone turns up with a huge cheque or a Pulitzer – that bit never happened.

Harry

Whereas writing a great piece is rewarding in itself?

Helen

I’m just not sure what you get from Twitter anymore. It replaced the pub for journalists, right?

Harry

Yes, that was a bad thing.

Will

What about the Tories: where do you think they go after [Rishi] Sunak, if he loses?

Helen

I think it would be wrong to predict that the Tories go Cameroon again, because they might just as easily double down and go, “We want David Frost to be leader”. I would say the Tory party is tired of governing. It’s clapped out. And it has this fundamental problem, which is that it’s become a boomer protection racket. It’s so in hock to the idea that this is how you win elections: freebies for the over 60s, stopping all housing development, protecting retirement pension benefits, while really squeezing the pips out of working age people. But it doesn’t really know how to make the sums add up in any way apart from that. And that’s probably the bit that it needs to go away and think about.

Will

I can imagine Frost as leader.

Helen

You can see a Corbyn-esque turn, right? Populism will have to find the next thing to fight against after Brexit: the mirage over the horizon that’s causing all of our problems. And I think that’s probably going to be climate change. That’s going to become the next frontier. The Tory right are going to say ‘this is totalitarianism. We are being told what to do. You’re impeding the glorious freedom of people to set the air on fire.’ I don’t think Brexit has got a lot of mileage left in it as a great populist cause because it’s happened. Populism only really works when you haven’t achieved the thing, when it’s a promised land.

If this interview intrigued, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

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— Harry & Will

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