Things to think about #6 - An Irish murder mystery, global fertility and the Armas Substack
I’ve recently spent ten days on the lovely Adriatic coast on Croatia. It is the second time I have holidayed in the country, and I wasn’t disappointed. Its inviting coastline—especially between Split and Dubrovnik—is as good a retreat for sun and relaxation as anywhere in southern Europe’s other more well-known holiday spots. Holiday tends to mean audiobook binging, and on this occasion I listened to John Banville’s Snow, narrated by Stanley Townsend in the Audible version. This was a bit of a risk. My wife recently bought Banville’s The Singularities, and struggled to get traction with it. I then had a go, and while I found the prose mysteriously hypnotic, I struggled to follow the plot, and eventually put it down, having reached only a bit further than my wife. I later realised that this was partly because The Singularities presumes knowledge of Banville’s earlier works.
Snow, meanwhile, was an instant hit for me, especially in the audiobook version expertly brought to life by Townsend in a thick Irish accent, and a wide-ranging repertoire of voices and accents for the various characters. If you’re in the market for a good murder mystery on audiobook, Snow won’t disappoint. I am looking forward to listen to further of detective Strafford’s exploits, and who knows, I might even pick up The Singularities again.
The fertility wars
I recently penned an essay here about the increasingly extreme positions in the debate about the significance and causes of the continued, and accelerating, decline in global fertility rates. I call it the Fertility Wars. This essay contains a number of key ideas on global fertility trends, and more generally tries to capture the mood of the people and cultural movements that are now laying down a big stake in this discussion.
The political flurry in the US over the virtues of parenthood and a high birth rate is part of a much larger cultural moment in which the debate on the significance of falling global fertility is pitting two increasingly militant and unyielding sides against each other. We have trade wars, culture wars, even actual wars; we can now add fertility wars to the list. When Elon Musk, a US entrepreneur and businessman, calls Ms. Harris an “extinctionist”, because she has linked the reluctance of young people to have children to “climate anxiety”, he means it, just as he means it when he concludes that “the natural extension of her philosophy would be a de facto holocaust for all of humanity!”
How to get handle on this? With difficulty, but in the end, hopefully with precision and clarity. First, I will briefly show that the fertility wars have been fought for a long time. I will then draw the contours of three separate positions in the fertility wars today—on the Conservative right, on the left, and a feminist perspective—before offering a suggestion on where this discourse goes next, and where it ultimately ends up, if we are sufficiently unlucky or un-attentive.
Armas
I recently became a paid subscriber to the Armas newsletter, published on the Substack platform, and you should too. Armas is written by Joshua Treviño, a US conservative commentator and think tank director. Joshua’s writes from a conservative and right-of-centre vantage point, but paints with a sufficiently broad brush to make him interesting more widely, and certainly to me as a fence-sitting centrist. Recently, he has been writing good stuff about the cultural wars in the UK, which is how Armas got on my radar in the first place. Joshua’s analysis offers a much-needed in-depth perspective of recent events on this Sceptred Isle, which is, incidentally, the title of Joshua’s piece that set the scene for the Armas take on current affairs in the UK.
Perhaps then it is time for Alpha Sources to go on record on this matter. It is important to remember why Keir Starmer’s Labour was elected with a commanding majority in the first place. It wasn’t, in my estimation, a sign of the electorate’s glowing endorsement of Labour, its political leadership or its political program. It was mainly to give the Tories a good hiding. That’s exactly what Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives received, and they deserved it. The whimper with which more than a decade of Tory rule ended under Sunak’s leadership, the odd timing of the election—one of the only parameters in Sunak’s hands—and the split of the right-wing vote due to the rise of Farage’s Reform, which devastated the Tories under the FPTP voting system, has to go down as one of the most spectacular political clusterf’cks in modern British history. This is not to downplay the size of Labour’s opportunity or the uniqueness of its victory, but simply to state what is universally obvious. The British people chose to kick the Tories over the edge, more so than they picked the new Labour government.
Let me then start on a charitable note. Labour does seem to have brought an element of grown-up politics back to the UK after deep-seated incompetence by the Tories, with only a few notable exceptions. The new government has put its finger on most of the key issues facing the economy—there are quite a few—and pledged widespread and comprehensive policy action on a number of fronts. Time will tell whether they follow through, and this is exactly the problem; time. The reform euphoria that dominated in the days after the election has been replaced by hand-wringing and excuses. Conditions, we are told, are much worse than Labour thought, mainly because the scope of the damage and incompetence wrought by the Tories have been more profound than initially feared. The change that the country needs is then set to take more time than first anticipated, and near-term economic trade-offs are likewise more challenging than expected. This message is entirely predictable and par for the course; Labour needs to impose difficult economic decisions on the electorate as soon as possible, hoping that they will have forgot about it come the next election, or that the government are in a position to reverse some of the pain by then. But this is a political strategy that has a short expiration date. After all, Labour has the second-largest majority of any government in a post-war era, so it really doesn’t have any excuses for getting on with it, as it were, and it has promised big changes.
Then we get to the anti-immigration riots, and their associated political and cultural ramifications, which are the source of much of Armas’ recent writings on the UK. The riots marked the end of Keir Starmer’s honeymoon with the electorate. The viciousness and scope of the riots ostensibly was in response to false rumours that the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport had been perpetrated by an asylum seeker. But discontent about the surge in immigration more generally, and the government’s inability to stop the flow of asylum seekers betting it all on the voyage across the Channel from France, has been looming for a while. It was only a matter of time before it spilled over onto the streets.
The riots and protests, their underlying cause and cultural importance, are a big test for any government and Prime Minister. I do not want to downplay the difficulty in dealing with this moment. Many politicians would get it wrong, not many would get it exactly right. But it is disappointing to see that Keir Starmer and his government have gone for the “basket of deplorables” response. Granted, a reasonable defence for this position is that many of the protesters indeed are deplorables, setting fire to hotels housing asylum seekers, lobbing projectiles at the police and worse, who should feel the full force of the law for their actions. But permitting the government to bracket the sentiment underlying these events as something which can be thwarted by the iron boot of the police would be to misinterpret the significance of the moment itself. Many people in England, native-born whites and otherwise, are deeply concerned about the culturally deleterious effects of what they see as uncontrolled immigration. Whatsmore, these same people feel that they have, time and time again, expressed this opinion at the ballot box, only to be ignored if not outright gaslighted by the political elite. The riots and protests in recent months are also an expression of this sentiment.
Reform, playing the role as refuge for voters expressing concern over immigration, got 14% of the popular vote in the July general election, but just 1% of seats in parliament. The combined popular vote for the Conservatives and Reform was 4.0pp higher than the popular vote for Labour. Yet, Labour secured 63% of seats in parliament, and a towering majority, while the combined seat share of Conservative and Reform was less than a third of the ruling party’s. As the BBC explains, the gap between votes collected and seats won was the highest on record. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, I guess. But to deny that this divergence between votes cast and political outcome is not at least partly reflected in the gruesome scenes played out on the streets of Britain in recent months would be to deny reality itself.
Then there is the feeling that the scales are tilted, that justice perhaps isn’t as blind as it should be. This sentiment is visceral, but the truth is murky as ever. The accusations and perceptions of two-tier policing fall neatly across party-lines, making it difficult to extract reality from the eyes of the beholder. Similarly, controversy over the prosecution of dissenting opinions on social media, and the premature release of incarcerated criminals to make room for some of these social media offenders are all strongly contested trends. I do not hold the claim to be an arbiter how accurate any of these are, since this in itself is a question of interpretation of the observer and the evidence presented in any given situation. But if some people are now feeling that they can’t speak their mind on a topic of huge political and cultural consequence in the UK, it is exactly because the government wants it that way.
On Downing Street, meanwhile, tarring the rioters, and anyone expressing anti-immigration views from the comfort of their couch, with the same brush is politically expedient. The stronger the government pushes this narrative, the more split the right-wing vote becomes. This, at least for now, means that Labour’s position in the polls—under a FPTP system—strengthens. Here then lies the cruel irony of this moment. Labour can drive at the anti-immigration agenda as hard as it wants—despite promising in the election campaign to reduce immigration—exactly up until the point at which the Tory and Reform vote unites on the right. It will have to sooner rather than later to mount a fighting chance at the next GE, and when it does, Labour will have to pivot right on immigration. Many Social Democrats on the continent have learned that lesson, and Labour will too, in time.