BBC4 Analysis: Thinking for the Long Term

"The origin of civil government," wrote the Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1739, is that "men are not able radically to cure, either in themselves or others, that narrowness of soul, which makes them prefer the present to the remote."

Today, Hume's view that governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long term approach, feels little more than wishful thinking. The "now" commands more and more of our attention - quick fixes are the order of the day. But could that be about to change?

Margaret Heffernan asks whether the current pandemic might be the moment we are forced to rediscover our ability to think long term. Could our ability to emerge well from the current health crisis be dependent, in fact, on our ability to improve our long-term thinking?

Among those taking part: Paul Polman (Co-founder of Imagine and former CEO of Unilever), General Sir Nick Carter (Chief of the Defence Staff), Justine Greening (former Conservative minister and founder of the Social Mobility Pledge), Lord Gus O'Donnell (former head of the Civil Service), Chris Llewellyn Smith (former Director General of CERN), and Sophie Howe (Future Generations Commissioner for Wales).

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New Statesman: Anatomy of a crisis

In theory, the UK was well-prepared for a pandemic. The Global Health Security Index for 2019 – which measures preparedness – rated only the US higher. Yet the UK has one of the world’s highest official Covid-19 death rates per capita, and its excess deaths during the pandemic period are 45 per cent higher than expected in a typical year. A survey, commissioned by the New Statesman, of more than 500 UK-based business leaders, 72 per cent of whom work for organisations with revenues of more than $250m a year, revealed that 38 per cent thought the UK was well prepared to handle the outbreak, but only 25 per cent thought the government responded well. [...]

Just as the UK locked down late, it lifted lockdown early. At the time restrictions were first eased the UK was still recording nearly seven deaths per million population per day – higher than any other country at the point of lockdown release. [...]

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has predicted the UK economy will shrink by 11.5 per cent in 2020 – more than any other country in the group. Job losses have so far been mitigated by the furlough scheme: while the unemployment rate quadrupled in the US between January and April, in the UK it remained static at 3.9 per cent. However, furloughed workers may find they have no job to go to when the scheme ends in October, and the number seeking unemployment-related benefits has more than doubled. [...]

Boris Johnson – like all leaders in the comparator group – saw his approval rating rise in the early stages of the pandemic. By the end of May it had fallen back to roughly where it was at the time of the UK’s first Covid-19 death. Leaders in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Canada and South Korea all preserved increases of between 5.7 and 18.9 percentage points. The only world leaders to suffer bigger falls in their approval ratings were Shinzo Abe of Japan, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Donald Trump. Only 33 per cent of our survey respondents rated Johnson’s leadership during the crisis positively. While the Chancellor Rishi Sunak had a net approval score of 21 per cent, Johnson’s was -1 per cent, the lowest of any government member we asked business leaders to rate.

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New Statesman: The fatal delusions of Boris Johnson

In retrospect, it is telling that Johnson first mentioned the virus in public as an aside in a grandiose speech celebrating Brexit. He was speaking in Greenwich, London, on 3 February. The venue was chosen for its historic resonances: his theme was that the maritime greatness that enabled the creation of a mercantilist empire in the 18th century was about to be reborn. This was the vision of what ­Johnson had previously called the new Golden Age, the Global ­Britain that will replace half a century of EU membership.[...]

What is striking here is that Brexit is not a distraction from the emerging pandemic. It is the other way around: Johnson was worried that the coronavirus might take attention away from the thrilling prospect of a liberated Britain, shrugging off its boring, bespectacled Euro-normality, reassuming its native-born superpowers and saving the world. (Johnson’s Superman analogy does work in one respect: the coronavirus would be the Kryptonite of this triumphal moment, the mysterious, other-worldly substance that would render the Brexit state impotent.) [...]

Why the difference? It was not that the Irish government was particularly brilliant, merely that it was not blinded by an obsession that there should be some special Irish way of facing the threat. It grasped the meaning of the “pan” in pandemic: all, every, whole. This was something happening to humanity, not to individual nations. But in London, the government (and to some extent its scientific advisers) seemed to be reading a book called Why Be Normal When You Can Be British? [...]

Thus, to begin with, the extreme reluctance to go into lockdown. Even when Italy imposed drastic restrictions on movement, there was a widespread belief in political and scientific circles in England that the virus was somehow going to behave differently on the sceptered isle. As Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, put it on 9 March: “Personally, I do not think that such a large-scale lockdown would be appropriate in the UK.” Hovering around this belief was a notion that the naturally libertarian ­British people, unlike the more docile nations abroad, would not obey the rules.

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UnHerd: The disturbing history of statue-smashing

As I write, this contemporary Iconoclasm of the Woke seems to be accelerating, particularly in Britain. There is a website advising the Topplers where else they might chuck statuary in rivers: maybe Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth, or Captain James Cook in Teesside. And it’s not just statues, for the New Iconoclasts are targeting street names, movies, sitcoms, art: one particular target, much lusted after by the Topplers, is the Winston Churchill mural in Croydon (a borough heavily bombed in the Blitz). At the weekend the threats of further iconoclasm, in particular against the image of Britain’s wartime leader, lead to large numbers of ‘statue defenders’ turning up in central London.[...]

What provoked this national self-harm? Khmer Rouge leaders were steeped in a radical form of Maoism, acquired in Paris in the 50s. But that insane ideology needed a suitable place to breed, as mosquitoes need standing water. Cambodia in 1975 was a nation horribly traumatised by the neighbouring Vietnam War. Despite the nation’s neutrality in that conflict, the US government dropped more bombs on Cambodia than they dropped on Europe in all of the Second World War; the US bombing caused millions of refugees, and killed at least 250,000. A different kind of God was angry. [...]

What do these examples tell us of the Great Topplings of 2020? First, iconoclasms are far from rare (I could analyse two dozen more). Second, iconoclasms often burn out quite quickly, because there is only so much denouncing you can do before the denouncers denounce each other, the Revolution devours its own, and the cycle is done. Thirdly, they are commonly caused by external factors, unrelated to the broken images themselves: war, invasion, disease and economic disaster, many things can provoke these frenzies.

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Center for Research on Extremism: The Polish Presidential Election 2020: which role does far-right politics (not) play?

In 2015, Duda won the election after a dynamic campaign which tactically downplayed cultural conflicts, promised a new attentive political style, and called for conciliation among Poles. After PiS gained full power, President Duda’s term was marked by contributing to the government’s illiberal dismantlement of democratic checks and balances.

Since at least 2019, Law and Justice refocused on nativist anti-LGBTIQ rhetoric which it had already copied from the far-right League of Polish Families during the first PiS government 2005-07. In 2019, PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński described progressive-liberal values and specifically ‘LGBT ideology’ as threatening to the Polish state, nation and collective identity, in effect demonising LGBTIQ persons. [...]

Konfederacja Wolność I Niepodległość (Confederation Liberty and Independence) founded in 2019 is an amalgam of diverse far-right actors. Their programmatic supply includes Poland’s transformation into an ethnocracy embodying a mythicized, culturally homogenous nation built around traditionalist-Catholic principles contrasted against universal rights and value pluralism; nativist and anti-Semitic tropes; radical pro-market positions such as abolishing obligatory social security contributions and income tax; as well as anti-systemic stances. In the presidential election, Bosak won 6.8% of vote, a result comparable to Konfederacja’s 2019 parliamentary election breakthrough. [...]

Shaping the run-off as a contest over (roughly 2.9 per cent total) abstaining/undeclared far-right voters might turn out to be a tactical double-edged sword. First, Duda has reached an electoral ceiling and might be forced to walk the tightrope between catch-all moderate and radical politics. Second, similar to the anti-systemic electorate of Paweł Kukiz in 2015, many far-right voters might in the end abstain. Third, focusing on economic narratives owned by the far right is likely to backfire on KO, as there is more to be lost on the already acquired center-left vote. Fourth, the more relevant question seems to be whether Trzaskowski will mobilize first round abstainers and the electorate of publicist and TV host Szymon Hołownia. Hołownia who secured 13.9% of vote has run on an ‘anti-political centrist’ platform. With his comparably moderate conservative stance, Hołownia’s active support for Trzaskowski is more likely to be pivotal. The fact that Hołownia was strongly supported by former abstainers adds further potential to mobilize additional new voters in the run-off, usually characterized by higher turnout. This strategy is much more straightforward for the pluralist opposition, but could require more than just reluctant declaration of endorsement by Hołownia, as well as a stronger focus on a ‘Macron-like’ counter-political style by Trzaskowski – with all the potential and risks behind promises of profound change.

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Slate: In Europe, Green Is the New Red

When Green parties throughout Europe saw unprecedented success in European Parliament elections last year, it was clear that voters were responding to concerns about the climate crisis as well as a loss of confidence in the big mainstream parties that have dominated politics for decades. But EU elections are often favorable for protest votes and fringe parties, and there were questions about whether the enthusiasm would last. “People were already starting to flirt with us. Now they have had a one-night stand. Whether this is a permanent relationship is totally unclear,” Sven Giegold, a leading German Green MEP told me last June. Judging from recent election results, the infatuation hasn’t faded. In fact, in several countries the greens appear on the verge of eclipsing old-school socialist or social-democratic parties as the main electoral voice of the left. [...]

The coalition deal was approved by an overwhelming 93 percent of the Green Party’s membership. Writing in the American socialist magazine Jacobin, activist Teresa Petrik suggests we shouldn’t be surprised by this. “Some Green voters might identify as left-wing,” she writes, “Yet most of the party’s base are highly educated and financially well off. They are not the people who will suffer from continued welfare cuts and the neoliberal policies the new government is pushing forward.”

Austria’s strange new government is more troubling evidence of just how easily environmental concerns can be wedded to a hard-line anti-immigration agenda. But on the other hand, it’s also a sign that the climate issue has become so mainstream in Europe that even the bona fide right-wingers are embracing it. The U.S. is not quite there yet.

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