Liz Truss is back and she’s got a book to plug. ‘It will set out what we must do to counter the disastrous ideas of the global left,’ she told X at the weekend. Now, I think she’s right that there is a smorgasbord of disastrous ideas about in the modern West – net zero, increasing state power and general economic nuttery, and a whole host of barking cultural ideas about biological sex and race. But can these really be laid at the door of the left, and at a hypothetical global left?
I think these foggy notions come from a different place, and they’ve seeped in to all sides of politics. Yes, some have indeed risen from the sediment of people who think of themselves as left wing, or are routinely described as such. Genderism, for example, has attached itself to the Sky bundle of the progressive opinion suite, despite being based on sex stereotypes from about 1866.
But we are in a new age, and creaking, ancient 19th-century terms like left and right don’t mean much in the 2020s. We live in a world utterly transformed by technology and abundance, but we are still using old words and old concepts as a frame for almost everything. It’s no wonder we get so confused.
The disastrous ideas Truss is talking about are surely not a bottom-up movement of the proletariat. The left was – and we must get used to saying was – a project that at its heart was about reshaping society for the benefit of the working class. Today, what passes for the left is often contemptuous of the lower orders, and frequently actively concerned with impoverishing them, or reducing them to the status of helpless clients and victims.
No matter how inapplicable or disastrously misconceived the old left’s schemes were, they were at least on paper, rational. The new consensus is, I think, emerging from a much barmier place, despite its cloak of sensible centrism. Net zero, for example, is as reasonable as Year Zero. It is utterly cracked, a scheme to spend trillions on something that will make no appreciable difference to anything at all. It works on the same principle as the monorail of The Simpsons – everyone’s going along with it so it must be OK because everyone’s going along with it. It is not centrist. But it comes dressed in shiny shoes and nice ties so we assume it is.
Is it left wing then? A scheme to immiserate and drastically reduce the movements and opportunities of the poor – really?
The left part of the loony left is long dead, leaving only the loony bit behind. And then we have the enthusiastic movement to move away from biology – to drug tomboy girls and camp little boys. That doesn’t sound very left wing or right wing or centrist to me. It sounds crazy, because it is.
Net zero, for example, is as reasonable as Year Zero
This malaise is surely a confection of middle-class affluence. We have created a civilisation that is (or was) more stable and prosperous than any previous society. That’s bound to have an effect on us, but we don’t even notice it. So we talk blithely about smashing it up, pulling all the blocks of the Jenga tower out at random while wearing boxing gloves, without appreciating how precarious it is.
As human beings we have an atavistic and sensible fear of hubris. We mistrust comfort and ease. It’s very hard to accept. We feel we have to be doing something. Or anything. The scary thing is that the barmy western politics of today is not deliberate or planned by a shadowy elite. Rather it is a death drive, born out of mass boredom.
The case of Truss vs Sunak is instructive as a microcosm of this. It was mooted as ‘Calamity Jane vs safe pair of hands’. As we can now see, the latter means you will be ruined with decorum. Rubble will fall on your child’s head during a bizarre Sex Ed lesson about safe choking, but it will at least all happen very respectably and while following the appropriate guidance.
Truss needed charisma to sell her revolution against almost insurmountable odds, and the guts necessary to stay firm. Shifting the paradigm back to sanity in a world gone mad will make you look like the crackers one. Whatever her shortcomings, she was hobbled before she even began by her own MPs.
But those people weren’t left wing; they were, and are, Tories. And Starmer’s Labour? Virtually indistinguishable from them – and not left wing, or right wing, either. Truss did not fight the global left. She fought the loony centre – and the centre won.
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