Convenience Big Store: Brexit has moved Britain to the left

6 September, 2021

In the headlines

Boris Johnson is under attack from all sides over plans to raise National Insurance contributions to pay for social care. "How casual the Tories seem to be about torching their historic reputation for low taxes," says The Sun. "I've seen it reported that five Cabinet ministers are opposed to the idea," a minister tells the Mail. "The truth is you would struggle to find five of us who are in favour". The Taliban boasts that it now controls Afghanistan's last pocket of resistance, the never-conquered Panjshir Valley, after taking out rebel leaders in an airstrike. The rebels say they have retreated into the mountains. "Get set for a microwave," says the Daily Mirror, with temperatures predicted to reach 29C this week. "OK, it's only a little one but it's still an official heatwave."

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Brexit has moved Britain to the left

Instead of the right-wing revolution Brexiteers dreamt of, says Matthew Parris in The Times, Britain's divorce from the EU seems to be serving the left. Suddenly we're bailing out the steel industry and renationalising the railways. "Tax rises are no longer anathema." Jeremy Corbyn, always a "closet Brexiteer", was right about the possibilities Brexit opened up for the left. Back in 1983, Michael Foot's election manifesto pledged to get Britain out of Europe, and the "socialist logic against membership" has only strengthened since. The EU, after all, restrains state subsidies and, in Marxist terms, cuts the bargaining power of workers by letting capitalists ship in cheap labour from the Continent.

The right's post-Brexit dream could hardly have been more different. Boris Johnson foresaw the UK "exploding" out of EU red tape, "breaking our shackles" like "the Incredible Hulk". Freed from anti-American Europe, we would deepen our special transatlantic relationship and join buccaneering Uncle Sam. In the event, "ignored by Washington" and adrift from Europe, the UK now cuts a "rather lonely and confused figure". None of those spanking new trade deals are in the offing – the ones we have signed largely replicate those we had before. The country is moving sharply to the left, while the post-Brexit, small-state dream of the right has evaporated, and with it the Tory case for Brexit.

The truth about cancel culture

Striking up a conversation in a trendy north London café last week, says Jemima Kelly in the Financial Times, I was amazed at the response of a "fashion-conscious 28-year-old" when I mentioned the culture war: "God, I hate all the woke stuff that's going on... cancel culture and everything, it's terrible." Stuck online during lockdown, I can think of countless occasions when anyone daring to challenge the rigid progressive consensus was "attacked viciously by online mobs". Out in the real world, however, there's more nuance and less "moral grandstanding". Social media has magnified the voices of a smallish number of angry people shouting at each other, distorting our picture of what people really think.

My hope is that the "new puritanism" sweeping across the West will lose its power when the institutions currently bending over backwards to abide by its rigid rules realise the online social justice warriors they're pandering to don't really reflect how most people feel. In the coming months, if the end of lockdown goes to plan, we will return to offices, cafés and cultural venues en masse, and engage in more face-to-face discussions. As we do, "we might start to realise that we agree on more than we think".

Quoted

"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field." Edmund Burke in 1790

Inside politics

My ex, Michael Gove, and I have our differences, says Sarah Vine in The Mail on Sunday, "but for one thing I am hugely grateful: he is not Matt Hancock". The former health secretary is hardly keeping a low profile – he's been photographed canoodling with his new flame, Gina Coladangelo, on the Swiss slopes. I hope poor Martha, his ex-wife, isn't crushed. Michael has at least been "a perfect gentleman". Trust me, no one is looking at Matt and thinking: "Great guy, I wish I were married to him."

Noted

Marine biologists have explored the sea floor around the remote Phoenix Islands, in the Pacific, for the first time. As well as discovering a host of new species on a 34-day expedition, boffins aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute's Falkor research vessel made two rare sightings of the glass octopus, a see-through species whose only visible features are its optic nerve, eyeballs and digestive tract. Before this expedition, there was virtually no footage of the creature: scientists learnt about it by studying remains found in the guts of dead predators.

Tomorrow's world

Nearly one in three Americans experienced a fire, drought or hurricane this summer, says The Washington Post. Climate change has "turbocharged" weather disasters: 388 people have died in heatwaves, storms or fires since June. The five largest wildfires in Californian history have occurred in the past five years and the odds of a storm becoming a hurricane have grown by 8% every decade since 1979.

Snapshot

On the way back

Hedgerows: the Campaign to Protect Rural England is lobbying the government to boost Britain's hedgerow network by 40% by 2050, to suck up air pollution, dampen noise and provide a safe home for endangered species. More than half of our hedgerows have been lost since the Second World War.

Snapshot answer

It's the world's biggest vacuum cleaner, just outside Zurich, which sucks more than 900 tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. The Swiss company behind the cutting-edge tech, Climeworks, isn't just doing it to be green. The firm is selling captured carbon to Coca-Cola to create bubbles for fizzy drinks.