All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book Club, which is designed to get us all reading despite our shriveled brains and crippling TikTok habits.
A surprisingly large number of politicians apparently want to nuke taxation from orbit…
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 an 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 who are 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 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about regulating lawyers in Scotland, banking, music festivals, oil and gas, clinical trials, killer robots…). In large parts of public life, regulation essentially replaces politics. Technocratic governments don’t actually want conventional authority because it brings with it too much political risk.
UPDATED 18 March 2025. So the latest tweak to the regulatory fabric from the Starmer Government is the introduction of the Online Safety Act. Paradoxically, for a government apparently so committed to taking down the ‘blockers and checkers‘ of regulation, the law introduces dozens of important new duties for the regulator Ofcom. Nice work, chainsaw man…
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.
I wrote this to avoid writing about Disney’s big hit of 1946
Here’s another post lifted from my cinema history newsletter GROSS. I’m reviewing the top-grossing Hollywood movie from each year since 1913 and, when I got to 1946, I groaned. It’s Walt Disney’s Song of the South, the biggest movie of the year and a nasty piece of work. I was tempted to skip it or write about something else. I didn’t skip it – I wouldn’t do that to you, reader. But this awkward, maddening film and the fact that, here in the mid-forties, we really do seem to have come to the end of some kind of blessed period in Hollywood, got me thinking about Hollywood periodisation. About how we divide up the chronology of the movies. Read my review of Song of the South.
When I started all this I’ll admit I had a shaky sense of the periods, the eras you read about in the film books and reviews. In fact I’d go so far as to say I was suspicious of the whole idea – I mean all these invented periods – generations, long and short centuries, geological eras, obsessively delineated eras of pop – they all seem pretty arbitrary, right?
And of course I knew all of these tens of thousands of movies were arranged on the timeline somehow but the order was hazy to me. Obviously black-and-white was furthest away and then there were those crazy, headache-inducing Cinemascope blow-outs and then the gritty, urban colours of the auteurs and so on. Along the way there were the other traditions – Kurosawa, Varda, Rosselini, Ray – the Russians, the South Koreans, the Iranians, the British, the South Americans, all the rest.
But now, after feeding thirty-odd annual blockbusters into the GROSS time-machine I’ve got, if nothing else, a much improved idea of the sequence. So, let’s break it down:
“The history of cinema is written by the winners…”
Prehistory (before 1913). Before there was an economic model or even a practical method of distribution. Many beautiful, strange and funny films. The moon, the train, the Victorian variety shows, the street-scenes, the gags.
Poetic (1913-1929). This is where I came in, the first year covered in my GROSS newsletter: it’s 1913 and the industry has just begun recording the rental income of the movies released. The first really big, national hits. The first stars known by their names. Studios are going up fast along the un-paved roads and on the empty lots of Hollywood. Capital is engaged, accumulating talent, converting theatres, funding increasingly ambitious projects. Directors in this period are artists, chancers, entrepreneurs – and often self-conscious modernists. They’re a heterodox lot: painters, writers, engineers, accountants, aristocrats – weirdos of every kind. And the writers, designers, editors and crew around them are cut from the same cloth. It’s a period of constant experiment – creatively and commercially. As a result this period is the source of some of the most beautiful and complete works of art of the modern era. By the end of the silent era cinema is a highly-evolved medium and a huge business.
Golden (1930-1941). Sound changes everything. There’s no going back – to the painterly, the lyric, the surreal. It all happens in a rush. Within a couple of years everything tightens up. Capital is now fully in control, studios and their oligarchs dominate. The poets are (mostly) left behind in their reverie. There’s also the Hays Code (enforced universally from 1934). So now we’ve got ‘pre-code’ as a category to get retrospectively excited about and the forensic work of locating the effects of the code in everything that came after it can begin. But what we also have is a golden age. A sequence of perfect movies in this new, crisp, naturalistic style – romances, razor-sharp comedies, musicals on a huge scale, hard-edged crime and stories about businessmen and tough working women. Melodrama has hardened into realistic depictions of families in crisis, grief and sacrifice – the great depression is an unavoidable backdrop, acknowledged or unacknowledged.
Oh dear (1941-). What’s happened? The war’s happened, I guess. And soon after that it’s television. Boom. Hollywood’s disciplined, hyper-effective golden decade has come to a grinding halt. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the absolutely optimal creative conditions of the long 1930s no longer apply. The licence given to the early creators, the urgency and sheer rotational speed of the production routine, the rush of talent into the business. The giant magnet hidden in the cloakroom at the Brown Derby that pulled in literally thousands of geniuses and near-geniuses and genius-enablers – Gable, Stanwyck, Curtiz, Wells, Hepburn, Hawks, Perelman, Davis, Vidor, Von Stroheim, Crawford, Capra, Korngold (ridiculous to try to list them) – seems to have stopped working, even gone into reverse. Hollywood talent is still present, of course, and we’ll see so many wonderful movies in the coming decades, but we’ll also see ‘Mom and Dad’ and ‘Song of the South’.
I should pick up the periodisation when I get a bit further into the sequence – I mean there are many more phases of the project to come – including the long 1970s, which began with Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and ended, roughly, with Scarface in 1983. To be honest, I’m a bit worried that I might have to vary the approach a bit here, especially as we enter the 1950s, a period Quentin Tarantino wants us to believe is the absolute low-point of Hollywood cinema.
Obviously I asked ChatGPT what brought an end to the Hollywood golden age and I got this predictably bland statement. It does mention anti-trust, though, which is something that hadn’t occured to me: “The end of the Hollywood Golden Age was influenced by various factors, including economic changes, the rise of television, shifts in audience tastes, and the decline of the studio system due to antitrust rulings.”
The GROSS archive now runs to forty-odd newsletters, including a few diversions from the chronology you might like – Dune and Ripley, for instance. All the reviews are also on my Letterboxd.
The Apple Vision Pro represents the end of something. Or possibly the beginning. It’s an apex product from an apex economy.
(updated on 10 June with some new market valuations)
What we know about capitalism – liberal democracy, Western economic dominance – suggests some kind of discontinuity is coming, some kind of historic break or epochal crisis. A lot of people accept this. Meanwhile, the happy plateau we were expecting from the 21st Century never materialised and the steady growth in incomes and wellbeing we were promised stopped years ago.
The exception
Except in America. Since Covid and the economic shock of the Ukraine war the US economy has essentially entirely rebounded. Growth is up, jobs are up and inflation is close to the Fed’s 2% target. This is not, of course, to say that there’s anything ideal about the US economy or permanent about this upturn. And the paradoxes of US economic power – out-of-control poverty and precarity, healthcare and housing in permanent crisis and so on – are self-evident. The American economy, though, continues to have all sorts of advantages, advantages that compound over time and help us to explain, er, the Apple Vision Pro:
The USA is the largest producer and the largest exporter of both oil and gas. Until 2016 it was literally illegal to export oil from the USA – a remarkable, unprecedented change in direction that is probably the biggest single contribution to the economy’s current robustness. The irony of the fact that the US economy is switching to renewable energy more quickly than anyone anticipated and thus needs a lot less of this oil and gas domestically is, of course, profound.
The country has the largest agricultural sector in the world and is the largest exporter of food. Huge expanses of fertile land of many different kinds, intensive production methods and light regulation (and huge federal subsidies, natch) make food in the USA cheap and accessible. This is not secondary to America’s success. Cheap calories is the most elemental fuel for a booming economy.
The US stock market is vast and getting bigger. The S&P 500, the main index of American stocks, is worth 60% of the whole world’s market capitalisation. The numbers are bonkers. As of today (10 June 2024) the largest company in the American system (Microsoft) is worth substantially ($3.15T) more than the whole of the London stock exchange’s FTSE all-shares index ($2.43T). Every traded business in the UK added together gives you nearly one Microsoft (or one Apple, for that matter).
The country has a larger working-age population, as a proportion of the overall population, than any other developed economy and it’ll be like that for longer. There’ll be a population crunch in the USA but it’s a lot further off than it is in Europe or Asia. Flexible, available labour will continue to drive the American economy (Southern border crisis notwithstanding).
America’s domestic economy is enormous and essentially insulates the country from the vagaries of world trade. Even the biggest world economies depend much more on the continued health of all the other economies. It’s difficult to calculate the exclusively domestic component of the US economy but, in 2022, US households spent $2.39T on food in grocery stores and on eating out – roughly the GDP of Italy. 335 Million people organised into a single economy with a very high level of integration, high disposable incomes and frictionless internal trade – and now energy independence – turns out to be a big deal. The 20th Century logic of world trade is unravelling, mercantilism is making a comeback and economies are hardening their borders. The USA will hardly notice.
The tech economy and the warfare economy. You don’t need me to tell you that the US tech sector dominates the world (see the top five stocks above – MSFT, AAPL, AMZN, NVDA, GOOGL) but the country’s military sector – manufacturing and contracting – is also vast and has the unique advantage of not really needing an export market. Plenty of F-35s and Hummers are sold worldwide but the American military buys more kit than all the other militaries put together. Since the Authorization for use of Military Force, passed by Congress a few days after 9/11 and never repealed, military manufacturing in the USA has been on a war footing, both legally and economically, an unending bonanza for the contractors and manufacturers – and for the US economy. The US defence budget for this year is $842B, somewhere between the GDP of Poland and Switzerland. If you add in export income from weapons sales, aid to other countries that returns to the USA in defence contracts and space you have an economic powerhouse unprecedented in world history – a shadow nation grounded in warfare.
And all this is essentially self-sustaining, an arrangement continually renewed by a thoroughly captured Congress: a perpetual motion money printer. If Raytheon never sold another Tomahawk missile abroad they’d barely notice. This cannot be said about other warfare-dependent nations, like the UK, where a constant stream of new beligerant dictatorships must be secured to sustain the industry. The American economy has a military economy – with investment and manufacturing on an amplified, war-footing cadence, on the scale of a large developed country – inside it. America cannot help but pull ahead of those nations lodged in the older model of a civil polity that steps up to war once or twice per century. In combination with that long list of advantages, the USA looks like the unassailable world-historical superpower to end all unassailable world-historical superpowers.
I don’t want to idealise the American economy. I really don’t. And even the most basic logic of reversion to the mean must, presumably, eventually apply. Can a single economy so enormously exceed the mean forever? A quarter of a century past the end of history – and well into the end of the end of history – can an economy expect to continue to add wealth and complexity at the same pace? Can a capitalist economy indefinitely resist collapse into a more primitive shape, a less productive form?
What’s this got to do with anything?
Well, now there’s the Vision Pro, a new product from Apple that seems to stand at the junction, right on the brink of the discontinuity. It’s evidently an extraordinary bit of kit and it has the potential to jar the matrix, change the way we think about computing, in the way the Mac did forty years ago. I haven’t even met one yet but it’s giving me the kind of tingles I got when I essentially bullied my dad into buying me a Mac Plus and when I got an iPod couriered from California before they were available in the UK.
But why all the numbers? Well, this new device is a creature of the American boom and of the spinning flywheel of the American tech innovation machine. It’s a condensation of all those advantages and all those crazy distortions. Not directly, of course – no pork bellies here, no space lasers – but the Vision Pro could not have been produced in any other economy. It combines breakthroughs in half a dozen areas. Not raw innovation – this is an Apple device after all – but brilliant integration of features developed elsewhere. And each one of these features – the gorgeous hi-res displays, the subtle and beautiful UI, the eye-tracking and gestures and all the rest – each one represents the very peak of an industrial discipline, of a software or hardware or project-management culture. There’s a level of integration and completeness that hardly any organisation could match and that really only an American organisation with access to essentially unlimited capital could fund.
In this sense, the Vision Pro seems in some way overdetermined, too richly-provisioned, too designed, too complete. And in this it really does seem like a creature of an economy at its apex, of a culture that cannot be further refined, of a state that has reached its organisational and economic peak.
But I should say that I thought this about previous Apple products too (and I have to remind you that I haven’t even seen one of these things yet so you’ll have to forgive me if when you buy yours it turns out to be a bit Russell Hobbs). I remember an uncanny feeling when I unpacked my first Mac and set it amongst all the junk on my desk in Camberwell. It seemed to possess an extra dimension of detail, of conceptual complexity. It made all the other bits of kit, even the lovely ones, like my Nikon and my Walkman, seem half-finished, barely thought-through. From another era.
On that Mac Plus I wrote my undergraduate dissertation. I’d found a quote from Jacques Derrida about nuclear war. He said that nuclear war, unlike previous kinds of conflict, would be ‘fabulously textual’, which was a phrase I loved. What he was describing was the complexity and technological density of modern weapons systems but also the layers of inscription and meaning embedded in them. I remember thinking my Mac, a product of the Silicon Valley outpost of what had already been the apex economy for decades, was definitely also fabulously textual.
The Vision Pro has competition and some devices – from Meta, for instance – have been around for years. They’re basically simpler and cheaper, they come from a little further back down the complexity curve and will mop up billions of dollars of business from the markets and users that can’t quite stomach the cost and complexity of the apex device.
Comparing market capitalisations is legit, obviously, but comparing a company’s market cap with the GDP of a country (something people do all the time because it’s kind of dramatic) less so. One is a stock and one is a flow. But, Will Davies says here, this is more appropriate than it used to be.
Over the long run, since the 1980s approximately, incomes in the most of the developed world have stagnated for working people. The USA is no exception.
This was really all triggered by an ep of the Vergecast. The breathless excitement about the Vision Pro launch was infectious (there was plenty of scepticism too) but what seemed really significant was something kind of hermetic about the discussion. I realised there was no discussion at all of the world beyond the USA (or beyond the product’s highly-paid, tech-literate customer base for that matter). I realised that, for these journalists, there was really no need to consider the world beyond at all. This extraordinary bit of kit, one of the most complex consumer devices ever launched, marrying half a dozen bleeding-edge technologies, will almost certainly produce big international sales but, to be honest, it doesn’t really need to.
Of course, when I linked the American warfare economy and the Apple Vision Pro it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be some more concrete connections.
Since the beginning of the year, Microsoft’s market cap has increased from $2.75T to $3.17T and currently stands at $3.15T – an increase of $400B, approximately the value of the top three UK businesses added together.
Since I published this post, Apple and Microsoft changed places at the top of the S&P more than once. Microsoft’s market cap is currently $130B larger than Apple’s. That difference is approximately today’s value of the FTSE’s third-biggest company HSBC. It’s as if non-US stock markets trade in the gaps between individual stocks on the S&P.
