All these thoughts I keep having about AI, I’m going to put them here…
Good art is true. All of it. AI art can never be true. It can be plausible but it can never be true. In this AI art is like bad art. They’re the same thing. They’re not true. This seems obvious to me.
Don’t be a mug. Don’t refuse to use AI because of an ethical objection to one of its applications or to a particular, exploitive use or because you have a vague idea that it’s ‘evil’ or ‘stupid’.
It’s safe to assume that AI will improve. That gaps will disappear, errors and hallucinations diminish, plausiblity and usefulness increase. Don’t expect it to fail or weaken or ‘eat itself’.
With AI, discrimination will become a more valuable skill. Not magically being able to ‘detect’ AI work – for that will surely soon be impossible – but being confident in your judgement of all work, whether human or AI.
Copyright does a very simple thing: it provides a creator a temporary monopoly. Should we suspend this 300 year-old protection so that AI businesses can train their models cheaply? Should a nation voluntarily suspend copyright to boost the AI economy? No.
In criticising AI poetics will be more useful that heuristics. In fact, the profusion of increasingly-plausible AI work surely represents some kind of crisis for interpretation. Susan Sontag saw this coming.
Is AI going to be one of those tech innovations that actually reduces profit? Like the web and solar power – producing huge incomes for critical businesses but driving down profitability across whole industries? Seems plausible.
The liberal world order, the whole post-war, rules-based thing that we treasured. That’s obviously over. It’s not just what’s happening now, and not just in theatres of war: the symptoms of the end of the progressive or liberal period are everywhere – and we learn that it was really all bullshit anyway.
I argue about this stuff with my family. I feel like the last few years (or maybe it’s the last 25 years, essentially the lifetime of my children) have turned me into a terrible, unreformable cynic. A miserable pragmatist with no belief at all in the reformability of states and institutions.
In a way I hope they’re right and I’m not. I hope the old truths about the arc of the moral universe reassert themselves. But I find that the case that the whole thing was always essentially fake anyway – a kind of consensual fiction – is persuasive. In the 80 years since the end of WW2 even the most enthusiastic advocates of the institutions and protocols of global cooperation have actually continued to behave roughly as they did before they existed, even while claiming absolute adherence to the rules. One of them – the big one, the hegemon, the USA – never fully joined up anyway.
League
The list of international bodies that one or other branch of the American state has objected to or withdrawn from (or actually destroyed) would be a long one. It would include the League of Nations, the ICC, Kyoto and Paris, various arms control treaties (including, remarkably, landmines and cluster munitions). And, perhaps more to the point, the USA has a track record – going back decades before MAGA, as far as the 19th Century, in fact – of withdrawing from or deprecating bodies and treaties having once agreed to them. Hegemons gonna hegemon.
And, obviously, a list of actual offences by governments – hegemonic and otherwise – against the rules-based order, even since the establishment of the UN, would be an even longer one and would include: the secret bombing of Cambodia, the coup in Guatemala, Russian slaughter in Chechnya, Afghanistan over and over again, the Iraq war, genocide in Rwanda, expulsions and mass imprisonments in Western China, the indiscriminate bombing of Yemen, Ukraine, Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, French attrocities in North Africa and Indochina (and a million other, smaller, unremembered offences).
Congress
You can test the thesis that there has never been much of a rules-based order by going further back – to the previous wave of international treaty-making and institution building that followed the coalescence of the modern, bourgeois states in the nineteenth century. Treaties, conventions, international bodies, the first of the NGOs. They did not – could not – stop or even impede the great and terrible conflicts of the 20th Century – including holocausts summing, plausibly, to 150 million deaths; expulsions and repressions, every category of violence and destruction. None sanctioned by international law, all allowed to happen anyway.
But there’s something about our moment that’s obviously hugely clarifying. Nations – their governments, security agencies and armies, mainly, of course – are raiding, annexing, slaughtering and expelling at an extraordinary, undiminished rate. It’s the norm, now, and there’s no need to conceal or dissemble any more. Entire populations are being imprisoned, expelled and killed – by states of every complexion, including those we still think of as liberal, democratic nations.
Ruins
Cities and towns are levelled; ethnic groups enslaved, ejected or killed; civilians everywhere are legitimate targets. In fact civilians are killed and injured at a rate that is almost always higher than that amongst combatants. They’re more than legitimate; they are preferred. For soldiers war is becoming less lethal: stand-off weapons and drones reduce injuries; better medical care improves survival rates. Not for civilians, though. In fact, for non-combatants, wars are getting more lethal. More are deliberately targeted; the withholding of evacuation and treatment are weapons in themselves. It’s almost as if in sophisticated, modern warfare, as it gets harder to kill opposing forces, the emphasis is switching to killing more vulnerable civilians. It’s quite possible to imagine future wars in which the only deaths and injuries that occur are amongst civilians. And it is the rules-based order that has brought us this demonic reversal of the logic of warfare.
So are there any states not presently involved – either as direct combatants or as second-degree actors, supplying arms and training and money – in dark, hyper-realist, Schmittian state violence? I don’t know. Maybe some small ones – Ireland? Peru? To return to my original point, this is clarifying because it confirms that this was actually the case all along; that only mugs believed at any point that world governance or norms might constrain the pragmatic, self-interested state. Only mugs believed that somehow the various talking shops, annual conferences, standing committees and conventions could have anything beyond a superficial influence on the shape of the global polity.
I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag on the car during the World Cup). So I really don’t want to sound like one of those annoying people who can celebrate Britain but only to the extent that it is mixed and polyglot (“food from every continent all on one street!” and so on). I also will not reject patriotism as some kind of moral defect (something for ‘gammons’ or Telegraph readers) or a false consciousness (a malign by-product of capitalism). Patriotism is a profound and probably necessary effect of birth and upbringing and rootedness.
But I don’t have it. It is, from my soul, absent. What am I to do? Will it one day just arrive? Will it land, eventually, on wings or something, in my vicinity, announce itself and then become part of my outlook? So that I might bristle appropriately when my nation is defamed or attacked? Proudly assert Britain’s superiority in matters military, economic and cultural?
I’m sorry to be flippant. This is a serious question. I’m an ordinary human being. I was brought up in a working class household in the approximate middle of England. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of living here for over sixty years. I went through the state education system like everyone else (well, most of us), my loyalty to the NHS is solid. Is there something wrong with me?
For all sorts of reasons I’m receptive to patriotism. But where is it? What has stopped it from lodging in my psyche? What do I lack? I obviously don’t buy any of the really dumb explanations for this sort of thing – I’m not more intelligent than the average patriot. I’m not better-informed or more open to the world or whatever. I have approximately the same intellectual assets as everyone else.
It’s obviously plausible that my broadly left-wing upbringing has brought this about. Mum and dad were both trade unionists, Labour Party members. But dad was in the army reserves ffs. Mum came to Britain from Ireland at 17 specifically to join the women’s auxilliary (ATS). Dad would sob through remembrance services and parades (he’d go out of his way to see a parachute display or a restored Spitfire). And I’ve inherited a lot of this. I’m not hostile in any way to nation or people or land. So where is my patriotism? I’m getting old. It’s overdue.
And I guess the reason I’m interested is because we’re now deep into a period of weaponised patriotism, of furious patriotic denouncements of every category of disloyal behaviour and beliefs. And, of course, of hateful racism premised on a lack of ‘assimilation’ or respect for British customs and norms. I look at the politicians and commentators whose patriotism is prominent, public, proudly asserted and I wonder, what is actually different about us? What caused this fervent love for nation to take root in you and not in me? Can it really just be our somewhat different political perspectives? That seems implausible. Political differences are – by necessity – essentially intellectual, superficial – not deep-rooted, not determined by my place of birth or my connection to this nation. Or did politics somehow short-circuit my patriotism? Divert its energy into something else?
I wonder if my 1990s entrainment with ‘global Britain’, with Blairism (and the tail end of Big Bang-era Thatcherism) – with technocratic politics and end-of-history pragmatism – has in some way neutralised any patriotism that did exist. Did the constant, strident assertion that there was no alternative to the globalised outlook leave me high and dry? A hollowed-out, unpatriotic shell? Likewise, did my later interest in internationalist politics – the whole idea of the Imagined Community and the general disdain for things national, local, parochial – innoculate me in some way?
And is this something I could work on? Should I just make more effort? Study the great patriotic texts? Find an online course? Is there a store of patriotism, a source that I could access? A place to go to tap into my lost patriotism? I’m serious about this too. I never decided not to be patriotic, never consciously rejected it or worked to exclude it. It’s just not there. Is this, in itself, a defect? Is there something wrong with me?
Anyway, I’m ready. If it does arrive I’ll greet it happily. I don’t presently own a flag-pole but there’s room for one out the front.
It’s September 2005; towards the end of the Blair era, a few months into his third term, long after the thrill of the great millennial project has faded, spavined by a series of shockingly bad decisions. The Labour government, re-elected with a much-reduced majority, is unpopular but, somehow, the Tory opposition is even more unpopular. The Conservative party’s leadership campaign is about to begin. One of the party’s ‘modernisers’, an ally of the ultimate winner David Cameron, baby-faced George Osborne, has been appointed shadow Chancellor (he’ll go on to be a ruinously bad actual Chancellor, of course). He gives a speech to a think tank the centrepiece of which is an oddly fashionable fiscal wheeze called the ‘flat tax’.
Young Osborne, with a weapon
Most commentators dismissed Osborne’s idea as infantile, not a serious proposal. Just the kind of gimmick new shadow ministers come up with all the time, especially when they’ve never had a proper job and only been in Parliament since the last election. The FT said, bluntly “…the politics of a flat tax is electoral suicide.”
As usual, commentators read this odd intervention as a diagnostic, the kind of idea that gives you a sense of a person’s fitness for office. They weren’t impressed. It was like something from an undergraduate debating society: “this house proposes that the tax regime that supports one of the largest and most sophisticated polities on earth be thrown in the air and replaced with a scheme the millionaires think would be cool.”
Somehow, as you know, Osborne transcended the flat tax (and various other debating society ideas), found his way into an actual government and wound up impoverishing the nation instead.
The tax
…a single-percentage income tax rate applied to all taxpayers regardless of income.
Investopedia
I could burn a couple of paragraphs explaining the flat tax and its history – but it’s honestly so simple I think I’ll just leave you with Investopedia’s definition (there’s a pretty good Wikipedia entry). The reason I’m writing about it at all is that another sophomoric parliamentarian, this time Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, has rolled it out again. It seems to be a kind of compulsion on the Conservative front bench when in opposition. It might actually be a kind of cathartic necessity for a recently-defeated party to recycle two or three of the old favourites. Probing the collective memory. A rite of passage?
Kemi Badenoch, apparently on a farm
In fairness, Badenoch didn’t actually write a speech about it. She just answered a question from the floor at a farmers’ event. But she did express some enthusiasm for the idea, as if she were back in that undergraduate debating society. If we’re to read it as a diagnostic on this occasion, it doesn’t look good. Instead of dismissing the idea, providing a bromide about the Tories’ committment to tax cuts, she actually gave it the time of day: “It’s very attractive, but if we’re going to get to that sort of scenario, there’s a lot of work we will need to do first…”, “We need to make sure we rewire our economy so that we can lighten the burden of tax and of regulation on individuals and on those businesses that are just starting out.” Something caused her to qualify her enthusiasm, though, perhaps she remembered her job title or something: “We cannot afford flat taxes where we are now.”
Others have pointed out that Badenoch, six weeks after her election as leader, still seems to be talking to the membership, offering up free-market and culture wars treats to her loyalists while, apparently, forgetting she’s going to need to win an election with ordinary human beings in four years. But there’s obviously an appetite for this kind of idea among the activists, or at least the commentators. Let’s look at this thing:
The project
First of all, it’s important we’re not mugs and don’t get hung up on the obvious, narrow purpose of a flat tax: redistributing wealth upwards. Almost any flat tax will do that because the rate has to be set at a level that ordinary workers can tolerate. Abolishing the higher rates will, of course, produce an absolute torrent of money for the already-wealthy. That’s nice for them but it’s not the actual point of the thing. The larger ideological purpose of a flat tax is to further remove fiscal policy from political control, a core goal of the neoliberal project. This thing has layers.
Nuke it from orbit
This is one of those supervillain situations. The neoliberal overlords observing all this from a cloaked, orbiting space-station cackle when they see the stupid pols act on their instructions. It’s possible that Badenoch and the others advancing this idea don’t know about the orbiting supervillains. They genuinely might not realise that making the rich richer isn’t the policy’s primary purpose. The supervillains, floating around up there, bump fists and woop appreciatively.
Badenoch is not idiot but neither is she an intellectual. It is plausible that she, like other politicians from the free-market right – believes a flat tax really is a simple redistributive measure, tidying up the code, reducing collection costs and moving wealth to the owner class, where it ought to be.
But this policy is lifted directly from the programme of Hayek, Friedman et al – the neoliberal economists who inspired Reagan, Thatcher and their advisers – to shrink the political state in every dimension. In this case to reduce government to a powerless ‘administrator of things‘, collector of a single, tightly-constrained stream of tax income (see also related concept starve the beast).
Democracy is the target
Neoliberals want to limit democratic control of the economy because electorates cannot be trusted not to break things. In their ideal scenario, bolshy, self-interested electors would be reduced to the status of compliant consumers, voting mainly in reality TV formats; the state to a slimmed-down operation that defends the borders and collects the bins and the market allowed to run everything else. Everyone interested in democracy should oppose this – especially populists and popular sovereignty fans. I mean, seriously, It’s a dystopian, technocratic nightmare that capital wants to overlay on democracy, to neuter it. Kind of a final victory.
The flat tax is a persistent idea and, intriguingly, it’s not really a partisan issue. Parties from far-right to centre-left, even third-way types, have bought in (in the US it’s been part of platforms from Dems, GOP and Libertarians). The nations that have adopted it are on a pretty broad spectrum too. In Britain, we learn, while George Osborne was getting excited about the flat tax, the Treasury under Gordon Brown was quietly researching it. LibDem Coalition cabinet member Vince Cable thought the idea of a flat tax had strong public appeal, and – apparently completely misunderstanding the idea – hoped to come up with a version that was also progressive. Classic LibDem. Tony Blair never publicly embraced the idea but was, in his pomp, as he tipped over from political opportunist into weary, messianic world saviour, rather fond of its kooky cousin the Laffer curve. Don’t get me started on the Laffer curve.
Wanna see Rob “When Harry Met Sally” Reiner and Carroll “Archie Bunker” O’Connor supporting Democrat Jerry Brown’s 13% flat tax?
Those supervillains
So this establishment blindness to the actual purpose of a flat tax is material. And it may have something to do with the fact that the people promoting it literally never mention it. You’ll find hundreds of documents like this one from the IEA and this one from the Cato Institute on the think-tank web, all focused on supposed improvements to efficiency and fairness:
The core principles were to tax income at one low rate, to eliminate double taxation of saving and investment, and to wipe out the special preferences, credits, exemptions, deductions, and other loopholes that caused complexity, distortions, and corruption.
In Britain, the Adam Smith Institute supports a flat tax, obvs, although Adam Smith didn’t. It’s entertaining that this paper promoting it, from the Institute named for him, quotes the Adam Smith Institute but not Smith himself, who wrote:
Subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.
Smith’s understanding of the purpose of a progressive system is of its time, of course. We’re two or three levels of abstraction away from a state of nature, most of us no longer feel that we pay tax in acknowledgement of the protection we’re granted by the state (do we? Perhaps unconsciously). The flat tax sets this aside all together, though, deleting the reciprocal relation of state and subject and reducing taxation to a simple penalty for being. No wonder we resent it. So the flat tax is a device intended to kneecap the social state, to diminish the public realm, sever the subject’s connection with institutions and to limit government’s room for manoeuvre.
Countries that currently operate a flat tax fall into two categories: relatively fragile states recently split from larger blocs and tax havens. It would be interesting to know what the economic composition of these states is. It seems likely that few of them have the top-heavy wealth structure of a Western European state or the USA, so the effect of transferring wealth upwards would likely be muted and the positive benefits for people on lower or median incomes amplified. The largest economy on the list is Romania, with a GDP of about a tenth of the UK’s: Abkhazia (10%), Armenia (20%), Belize (25%), Bolivia (13%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (10%), Bulgaria (10%), East Timor (10%), Estonia (20%), Georgia (20%), Guernsey (20%), Hungary (15%), Jersey (20%), Kazakhstan (10%), Kurdistan (5%), Kyrgyzstan (10%), Moldova (12%), Nauru (20%), North Macedonia (10%), Romania (10%), South Ossetia (12%), Tajikistan (12%), Transnistria (15%), Turkmenistan (10%), Ukraine (19.5%), Uzbekistan (12%).
Of course, it’s interesting that the flat tax – the kind of thing the most genius in a gillet will bang on about for hours at the table next to yours in the pub – came up at a farmers’ inheritance tax ‘summit’. These grass-roots movements of business owners often seem to find friends at the oddball end of the policy spectrum.
The Telegraph, instinctively in the flat tax camp, presumably, in a follow-up explainer, is remarkably level-headed about the risks as well as the apparent benefits. Still no mention of the underlying purpose, though.
Tl;dr: Our medical/care system is screwed, governments are all efficiency- and cost-obsessed. They’re fixated on ageing and on the explosion of the ‘economically inactive’ population. This system would like the idea of more people taking the voluntary way out.
Am I being neurotic? My concerns about the assisted suicide bill, currently in the UK Parliament, are not with the risk of coercion by family members or doctors or scumbags of one kind or another – although I’m quite sure this is a real risk.
I’m also not particularly worried about ‘the slippery slope’ or about the risk that old people might want to avoid becoming a ‘burden’ (isn’t that actually a perfectly legitimate reason to go?). My concern is much simpler. It’s about this system, a healthcare system that is less and less humane; more and more obsessed with measurement and control, with efficiency and throughput and the management of shrinking resources.
In this system – this diminished and dehumanised system – the pressure to move the sick and elderly, the incurable and the intractable (the awkward, the unemployable, the unproductive) along the expensive health and care timeline and onto the fast track, onto the slip-road out of here, is already enormous.
My grim suspicion is that there are managers and administrators and government ministers (not forgetting the management consultancies and insurers and private equity firms) who would quite like to speed things up a bit, to increase the system’s throughput, to just slightly improve the ratios.
Thanatology? Just down the corridor
To deliver on this new policy, once it’s on the statute books, NHS managers will have to add death to the roster of treatments available and, presumably, add a Death Unit to every major hospital. They’ll mechanically formalise the process, setting targets and, quite plausibly, tweaking incentives to ‘nudge’ the sick and old onto the pathway. There can be no better way to address bed-blocking in our hospitals than by permanently removing the problem.
This system would like to reduce the pointless expenditure on keeping the sick and the inactive alive and to create in the citizenry – the customer-base, you and me – a new habit – the habit of volunteering to step off this mortal coil a bit early.
Not too early. Just a few months or a year. Barely noticeable, just a tiny statistical effect. But every little helps. Move along now. Off you go. Thank you for your contribution. It’s been lovely knowing you… See ya!
I’m ready to make a small bet that within a few years we’ll see the first ‘Dignity Unit™’ or ‘Goodbye Suite™’ in the grounds of a hospital or a care home. It’ll be all pastel colours and there’ll be a wild-flower garden maintained by volunteers. A minor Royal will cut the ribbon…
This, incidentally, explains why politicians are not freaking out about the fact that life expectancies are now falling in parts of the developed world – including Britain. That looks like a self-adjusting system to these people.
I don’t want to be too pedantic. When people – some of whom are well-informed, even brilliant – become hysterical about the alleged damaging effects of mobile phones, in particular on young people, I know they’re not proposing that we give up on decades of technological progress or deprive our kids of access to knowledge. They’re worried about harm to our children, which is very reasonable. Honestly, I get it. But what is it about these devices that they’re actually upset about?
Is it the portable supercomputer? The general-purpose powerhouse they’re carrying around with them? The device that’s capable of running a complex AI model, shooting and editing a 4K video, translating speech in real time, making a 3D model of your house?
Or is it the universal communicator? The multi-channel messaging device they can use to reach essentially anyone on earth (including you), to share their creations worldwide, to locate and contact practically anyone?
Or the unlimited access to information? The infinite photo album they can flick through on the bus? The continually-expanding encyclopaedia of human knowledge, the inexhaustible library of movies and books? The deep archive of world art and creativity they can access in class or in breaktime?
Of course not. It’s none of these things. What is it then? Well, if you don’t mind my saying so:
It’s the predatory corporations. Excuse me while I state the obvious: the problem is the corporations. And not all of them, either. Just the handful of vast, stock market-listed businesses whose robotic, out-of-control profit-seeking cannot apparently be impeded.
Another smartphone precursor
This is a variant of capitalist realism – the sense we all have that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE. We’ve convinced ourselves that, somehow, a modern state – a nation, a people – cannot say ‘no’ to manipulation and exploitation by these huge companies, with their trillion-dollar valuations and their megalomaniac management. It’s a remarkable bind to have got ourselves into. The seventh largest economy on earth – a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN security council etc. etc. – cannot even try to protect its population from the various depradations of the platforms – from the anxiety and misery they produce to the literal fraud and theft that they enable on their platforms to [insert your own risk here].
Remarkably, in the Guardian, Torsten Bell – a famously clever man, a superlative communicator and now a member of parliament and a junior member of the UK government – cannot imagine any exit from this dilemma better than chucking our children’s smartphones – the most sophisticated technology most of humanity will ever own – in the bin and replacing them with something from an earlier era – from the era, to be specific, before they became general purpose computers.
Steve Jobs called computers bicycles for the mind – capacity multipliers, accessible devices that would amplify the capabilities of human beings in remarkable ways. The smartphone is perhaps the ultimate expression of this vision – a powerful computer you can carry around in your pocket and use to transform reality, create and communicate.
Teenagers wasting their lives on a smartphone precursor
But, for some reason, instead of asserting our sovereignty, expressing the independence and the self-confidence of an ancient democracy, Britain must just cave in, dump the smartphones and surrender our kids to primitive, pre-IT era kit. Here in this advanced economy, in the nation where the stored-programme computer was invented, we must not expose our children to the unlimited possibilities of the computers in their pockets but rather shelter them from the evils of the computer era because we have no idea how to tell these plutocrats to fuck off.
In modern monarchies it’s tricky. The sovereign can no longer send soldiers from town to town to extract funds and, since the end of empire, the plunder route is basically closed off too. In Britain no one pays tax directly to the monarch any more. But many of us do pay rent…
Britain is home to one of the most important monarchies in the world. A big operation with branch offices all over the kingdom and in dozens of other countries that retain affiliate status.
The options for monarchies in the modern period have been limited. They’ve either disappeared all together, withered to an essentially showbiz function or – in a few important cases – retained their absolute power. In the Gulf states, for instance, the royals still run the show. When you’re executed in Saudi Arabia you’re executed by the king. No arguments.
In Britain, though, we have a kind of hybrid situation. The monarch has limited powers under the constitution but huge prominence and a large, although quite ill-defined official role. Right now, Britain’s sovereign is well into his seventies and he’s not been well. Although you might expect him to have chosen a quiet retirement over a full-time job, he’s actually more-or-less constantly on the road, providing figurehead duties and walking along lines of fenced-in royalists seeking cures and indulgences.
And what do you do?
Britain’s is considered to be a relatively modern monarchy. It hasn’t blocked a law in the parliament for over 300 years, showing up politely to open new sessions and taking an essentially deferential public stance towards whoever currently controls the executive. But there’s a tension. The British monarch holds various powers in reserve and there are several privileged back-channels connecting the monarch with government. The head of government is obliged to travel to Buckingham Palace for weekly meetings, for instance, and, remarkably, there’s a full cabinet member whose job it is to safeguard one of the sovereign’s historic estates. This awkward balance is said to be what’s most precious about the British crown-constitutional settlement, the arrangement that guaranteed peace in Britain across the centuries while Europe was roiled by revolution and unrest. But it’s assumed that, were a sufficiently radical government to come to power – perhaps one elected on a republican mandate – the monarchy would be less quiescent, more engaged. In ordinary circumstances, though, the king agrees to stay in his lane.
But the trade-off is a costly one. The British monarchy stands back from the polity – the senior royals have accepted the somewhat humiliating role of constitutional zoo animals (they must smile and wave and never lash out in public) – in exchange for essentially unlimited wealth. It’s not a bad deal. The king is one of the wealthiest men in Britain. Likewise his immediate family. His children and their children will want for nothing and will enjoy cosseted, globetrotting millionaire status for life, whether they choose to get involved with the firm’s official business or not. There are men and women in the royal orbit – people none of us have even heard of – who are millionaires because of this clever settlement with the state. Even errant family members are promised accommodation for life provided they STFU and toe the line.
The present British monarchy, installed on the death of Queen Victoria – the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (renamed Windsor once being German became an issue) – has had its ups and downs. The Nazi thing, the divorcee (who was also a Nazi), the uncooperative Sloane ranger, the one accused of sexual abuse and so on. The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II is said by everyone to have largely restored the institution’s reputation but, crucially, also shored it up against future crises. What she achieved, in that record-breaking 70-year period, was to provide a platform for her family – and for her successor King Charles III – to operate freely.
As a result, the present king, brought up in extreme luxury, isolated from ordinary people and indulged since childhood, has a degree of freedom to operate that few of his modern predecessors could claim. His entrepreneurial activity is diverse – both in business and in his official role. He’s able to intervene in nationally-important matters – from sustainability to urban planning to youth unemployment. Many thought that his ascent to the throne would in some way limit his activity beyond the wearing of the big crown, launching ships and so on. They were wrong. King Charles III is an engaged sovereign, a head of state unafraid to get his oar in.
One of the king’s places
All this activity is, of course, expensive. And the official sources of income are under pressure – from public scrutiny, from obligations to comply with legal and financial norms and from tightening budgets. So we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the king and his eldest son, Prince William, have been developing an additional source of income – previously undeclared – from property owned directly by the two estates they control – the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster. There’s no need to provide the detail here (read the story). It’s what you’d expect. Monarchs gonna monarch. But The Times, historically the newspaper of record and the paper thought by the British establishment to be essentially their own, has done some first-class digging and found hundreds of secret leases, adding up to millions of pounds per year of income for father and son (and all with no capital gains tax or corporation tax to pay).
Every monarchy on earth derives its income principally from land (or what’s under it). The king and the prince own land on which a prison, various Royal Navy boatyards, windfarms, the Mersey ferry, NHS hospitals, a scout hut, a mine, pubs, fire stations and a motorway service station are located. We learn from the report that they also own ancient title to various riverbeds, beaches and foreshores and that they claim fees from those who want to cross them or build on them or even moor boats in the water above them – literally the definition of unproductive, rentier behaviour, right? Anyway, it’s powerful new evidence of the parasitic hold that even a modern, constitutional monarchy must have over the nation to which it has attached itself if it is to prosper. And this one is certainly prospering.
Tom Nairn’s Enchanted Glass is the best book about the British crown-constitutional settlement as ‘symbol of a national backwardness’.
In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work
UPDATED 30 December 2024.
I keep having to update this because regulation and regulators continue to make the news, despite being no more than jumped-up accountants whose main role is to shield the regulated industries from actual political scrutiny. This time, in a genuinely headspinning inversion of proper politics, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has written to regulators to ask them for ideas.
Seriously, instead of announcing that he will make use of his huge majority and almost universal public support for reform of the regulatory regime to shut them down or increase their powers or… something – anything, really – he’s meekly inviting the regulators into the policy process. It’s such a profound abdication of political responsibility, such a refusal of political opportunity as to be almost incomprehensible. An admission of defeat made before the battle has even begun.
Anyway, by way of a primer, here’s how regulation actually works:
The present-day regulatory state is not an intrusive government intervention, it’s the invention of the post-war neoliberal economists. It was designed not to protect consumers but to shield capital from democratic control.
Since the 1970s, politicians have eagerly embraced this new regulatory model. It looks competent and technocratic but mainly it protects them from democratic outcomes. Politicians can’t be criticised because they literally can’t alter the behaviour of regulated industries.
In Britain now, for instance, the actual government of the sixth largest economy on earth – a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN security council – has no mechanism to stop executives from pumping shit into rivers while routing profits off-shore.
When new governments come to power they promise action but this rigid regulatory system doesn’t permit them to do much. Larger fines, tougher sanctions for managers, ‘dashboards’ and so on. Soon, everything returns to normal.
Businesses claim to hate regulation and campaign more-or-less constantly to have it neutered or removed all together, but they can live with it: it’s predictable, imposes manageable costs and doesn’t threaten their operational models (it has the secondary benefit of imposing costs on new entrants, which limits competition).
The actual regulators – hapless machine-minders, junior to the executives they regulate – must reconcile the irreconcilable. They must somehow discipline businesses without materially altering the terms of the agreement that protects them.
When things go wrong it’s the regulators who get it in the neck – asked awkward questions on the TV, called to testify and so on. But this is their job. To absorb and dissipate public anger and frustration. Occasionally they’re monstered in the press or actually fired. Their contracts of employment reflect this risk, though, and there’s always the revolving door.
When it becomes evident that regulators cannot do more than cosmetically alter even the most egregious behaviour of the regulated companies, citizens and legislators get angry and bluster about giving regulators ‘teeth’.
But to give regulators teeth would be to reabsorb them into the state, put them under direct democratic control and give them literal, life-or-death control of the regulated function. Impossible.
Regulation in this system is an aspect of the corosion of civil society that reduces citizens to consumers. In this regime we’re permitted to choose between almost identical management regimes but not to decide for ourselves.
The whole idea of regulation in the contemporary setting is fake, a derisive pantomime of control that inevitably contributes to the accelerating collapse of trust in institutions and to democratic fragmentation.
The position of the actual neoliberals on regulation was, of course, more complicted than this. They believed in the ‘unfettered market’ but at the same time advocated – and helped to bring into being – a complex web of global institutions – GATT (later the WTO), third-party arbitration courts, the EU and a long list of treaties and untouchable, ‘independent’ regulators whose function was essentially to keep elected governments out of their business. Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists is a really gripping account of how this worldwide system came into being and Adam Tooze’s review of the book a good introduction.
…lefties used to say things like “the forces of reaction – the capitalists and their proxies – divide us in order to control us, in order to disempower us and better exploit us. We should work to unite working people, to bring black and white – immigrants and the communities they live in – together, to overcome oppression…” and so on.
And the thing is, of course, this still makes perfect sense. There’s no new argument. Nothing has come along to supercede this worldview (capitalism didn’t become a benign force when it adopted chill-out rooms). Working class communities across the history of capitalism have been divided and set against each other for a reason.
It’s pretty simple: for capital there could be nothing more threatening than a working class that recognises itself in others – across borders and races. Imagine: a single working class – absolutely terrifying for the owner class. Racism is a deeply-ingrained aspect of the system. It’s not an incidental effect of migration, there’s nothing innate or natural about it (and it’s definitely not a pathology of white, working class communities).
And everyone who used to say this kind of thing understood that this would be hard, that persuading everyone that their interests are best served by uniting against the powerful elites that tolerate and encourage hatred and division is a very tough sell. Bringing communities together is hard – and it requires material interventions, not appeals to compassion or fairness or love for others.
More to the point, we can’t ‘fact-check’ our way out this. Explainers, ‘open-source journalism’ and all those forensic investigations of mis- and dis-information on social media can’t help. Only concrete action: investment in housing and public services; community-building (actual human beings meeting each other) – and in democratic institutions – can help.
This will be doubly hard in the teeth of poverty, soaring inequality and a collapsing public realm (plus Robert Jenrick). It would, in any circumstances, take years and huge, focused effort – especially when organisation and solidarity are at a low ebb and the racists are so deeply embedded and so confident.
But, guess what, a new government has just come to power in Britain. And this government has a huge majority and an uninterrupted five years (some people reckon it’ll easily be ten) to act. This new government comes from what is still the only mass political party in Britain and has activists and organisers in every council ward and every Parliamentary constituency on the mainland. It’s, at least in principle, the best possible platform for bringing together an anti-racist coalition, for animating communities and people against despair and hatred.
So far, of course, what we’ve got from the new government is hardly encouraging. I don’t know how to put it. When I’m looking at a contemporary politician – any of them, really, with a few obvious exceptions – it quite often comes back to aesthetics. There’s something so dour, defeated, hedged, circumscribed… about the ministerial mien (and the recently-defenestrated ministerial mien, for that matter), about the serious-face podium manner. I’m sure you know what I mean. I don’t expect the political class to use this scary eructation as an opportunity to roll out a new vision of unity for Britain. I do, though, expect an explicit plan, some enthusiasm for the project, some hope about its outcome (and, honestly, what else have we got to do? Might as well try, right?).
These are desperate times. But they’re also cynical times. Realists dominate. I’m a realist most of the time myself. So I feel like an idiot saying these things: but we’re right at the beginning of a new regime. The new regime is meeting its first big challenge. It has everything it needs to respond. It must at least look like it means it.
In the late eighties I lived in the East End of London and I used to rent movies from a little video shop on the A11 near Bow Road underground station. The routine – you might remember this – involved picking up a video on the way home from the tube and returning it in the morning. But life changed, I left college and got a job. Things got busy and I just stopped going up to Bow Road. Then one day, of course, I found a tape in the VCR, rented at some point in the distant past, waiting to be returned (pretty sure it wasn’t Repo Man).
Anyway, I was aware of the terrible, ineluctable logic of the videotape late fee. Everyone was in those days, it was a fact of life. No tape rental guy had ever forgiven a late fee, there was no such thing as a discount or time to pay or any kind of compromise. These guys looked like soft-eyed dweebs but we all knew they were backed up by brutes who’d come round and kneecap you for the fee if it went unpaid.
I left the tape there in the kitchen for a few days but it was haunting me. I mean the economics of the matter. I couldn’t sleep. Videotape late fees could only go up and they would never stop. I was watching my life disappear into a videotape-shaped void. You have to know, this wasn’t like dealing with the credit card company or the car loan people. There was no reasoning with a video shop, no restructuring, no resort to arbitration.
So one morning, accepting the inevitable, I nervously took it up to Bow Road and handed it to the man behind the counter, quivering, trying to smile. He looked it up in his entirely non-computerised records, noted the rental date, raised an eyebrow and calculated my late fee – a daily sum multiplied by months and months. “Four hundred and ninety pounds” he said. At this point I could easily have cried or fainted or something. That would be at least a month’s wages, several months of rent – a ridiculous, comically-large sum of money for a schlub like me at that point, in my cheap suit.
We looked at each other. I instinctively knew what to do and he apparently did too. I said “okay thanks” or something, turned around and walked out. Be aware: this is not what usually happened. What usually happened was you blanched at the number, hesitated and then got your wallet out and paid up while videotape guy just watched. There could be no pleasantries in that moment, no chit-chat. Nothing at all till after the register drawer was closed.
On this occasion, though, he said nothing; didn’t demand payment, nor shout as I left, nor follow me out into the street, despite the iron law, the terrifying rigidity of the video shop fines regime. He just watched me go. So I treasure that moment. A parable of some kind – the silent agreement, the mutual acceptance of the absurdity of the situation, its irresolvability. I never went back and I never heard from that video shop again. And then, at some point, that whole chapter in the history of media technology closed, VHS tapes became awful, unrecyclable landfill, charity shop poison, undisposable at any cost. History drew a line around that moment in time and froze it forever.
![A worker removes the rubble to prepare for restoration on the site of a collapsed UNESCO-listed building following heavy rains, in the Old City of Sanaa, on August 12, 2020. Drainage infrastructure has also suffered from neglect, making Old City buildings vulnerable to collapse during flash floods. [Mohammed Huwais/AFP]](https://bowblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Sanaa-ruins-1200.jpg)
