Good afternoon. This is Tom McTague, editor-in-chief of the New Statesman.
For much of the past 72 hours, Westminster has been gripped by a sense of mounting chaos. To understand what is happening, we have a bumper edition of the magazine this week:
A special report from inside the rebellion against Keir Starmer from our political editor Ailbhe Rea
A blistering essay on the state of affairs from editor at large, Andrew Marr
The NS is only available to paying subscribers at the moment. But you can take out a subscription here, with thanks to those who already have.
Have a great day. Thank you for you reading.
Mostly relevant to the social and political turmoil seemingly everywhere are the words of American sociologist Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), of Obedience Experiments fame/infamy: “It may be that we are puppets — puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception [and] awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.”
There’s relatively little compassion in the world when compared to the very plentiful anger or rage. I’ve noticed myself getting angrier over the last few years, especially about domestic and global injustices, or at least how I perceive them as such. Maybe my anger is largely related to the Internet’s ‘angry algorithm’ sending me the stories, etcetera, it has (unfortunately correctly) calculated will successfully agitate me into keeping the (I believe, overall societally-/socially-damaging) process going thus maximizing the number of clicks and scrolls I’ll provide it to sell to product advertisers.
At least as individuals, we can try to resist flawed human nature thus behavior, however societally normalized it may be, once we become aware of its potential within ourselves. Once cognizant of it, perhaps enough of us could instead perform truly humane acts in sufficient quantity to initiate positive change on a large(r) scale.
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PostScript: Interestingly yet disturbingly enough, before people of color became the primary source of newcomers to the U.S. and Canada, thick-accented Eastern Europeans were targeted with meanspirited Anglo-Saxon bigotry. As a broken-English, 1950s Eastern-European immigrant to Canada, my (now deceased) father experienced such maltreatment. Hypothetically, if Canada and the U.S. were to revert back to a primarily Caucasian populace, I wouldn’t be surprised if Eastern Europeans with a thick Slavic accent would eventually again become the main target of bigotry within the dominant Euro-Canadian/American ethnicity/populace.
The Starmer government is appalling. Their early priority was to cut my heating allowance as energy costs soared. Starmer is is unable to rise to the challenges we face as a country and he must go. An argument that says replacing him will inevitably be chaotic is as valid as an argument for not repairing Albert Bridge. Stupid, stupid, stupid.