'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt

The Righteous Mind serves as an introduction to moral psychology, in particular to the theories favoured by, and personally developed by, the author. The book's narrative thrust is the author's personal hero's journey through academia. He relates how his understanding of the topic grew over the years, from his time as a student through to carrying out the research that led to the Moral Foundations theory. This is a very effective mechanism for introducing all the various concepts to the reader, naturally building on what came before, and the autobiographical elements give you a personal connection with the author-protagonist. The narrative sweeps you along, you share his joy at learning more at each step of the journey, and cheer on as the quest continues. Haidt's intuitionist theories are also very compelling, and do provide a good framework for understanding people of various political and religious persuasions. It's an excellent example of how to communicate ideas from academia to a lay audience.

 That being said, there's plenty to criticise in Haidt's theory and conclusions. The central metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider irritated me. The elephant represents your emotional intuition, whereas the rider is your reasoning. The elephant does most of the work and movement, with the rider having little influence over where it goes: your emotions make most of your decisions, and your reasoning goes along with it, making up post-hoc justifications to rationalise the decision after the fact. This is a useful metaphor, but throughout I couldn't help thinking of real-world elephant riding, where the elephant has been brutalised into submission to make it passive enough to ride. 

The 'Emotions First' approach also provides an easy built-in method for dismissing Haidt's critics: their elephants have recoiled, and their riders are rushing to come up with justifications to rationalise this response. Haidt does not discuss criticisms of his theory from other academics; instead, the theory forms the conclusion of his hero's journey: now he can return to the real world to share his wisdom and save American politics.

According to Haidt, a big part of the motivation behind his research and this book was frustration over the Democrats not connecting with voters, and a desire to understand conservative moralities that were extremely alien to him as a student at a very liberal university. Having gone on his hero's journey, Haidt is now an Enlightened Centrist who sees the merits and flaws of both sides: he sees morality for what it is, not for what it should be. In the book, he is presenting a descriptive theory of morality, which ostensibly avoids any judgment on what is actually good and moral. However, he does make these kind of judgments throughout, while also claiming not to.

He tries his best to be a both-sidesing critic of both liberals and conservatives, but the way he writes about the two camps is very different. An early chapter describes a visit to India, during which he began to see beauty in a society built on a deeply religious and socially conservative morality; many passages display a deeply orientalist romanticism, and elements of this romanticism are carried forward into descriptions of American conservatism. He writes with anthropological fascination of conservatives, but with a weary tiredness about liberals. As an ex-liberal, he is not excited or interested in liberal morality: he is familiar with and bored with it; he associates it with his own immaturity, and thus his criticisms of liberalism are couched with the cringe adults feel looking back on their younger selves.

This is not to say that his criticisms of liberalism are not valid, especially those about how a lot of liberals refuse to understand conservatives. This is a very real issue which prevents liberal criticisms of conservative positions getting through. A few years ago I read Margaret Thatcher's books, which I found a very useful and enlightening experience, enabling me to understand and critique her actual motivations and goals, rather than those of the demonic caricature presented in left-wing media. I remember discussing this with a friend who said, "But I don't want to give those views legitimacy by trying to understand their motivations."

Compared to other factors, Haidt places more blame on liberals refusing to understand conservatives for the extreme polarisation of American politics. The book was first published in 2012, and this is one of many of Haidt's opinions which has aged poorly over the subsequent decade. Evidently, despite the success and popularity of 'The Righteous Mind', it has failed to undo the polarisation he was decrying a decade ago, and the various culture wars over 'wokeness' have taken that polarisation to obscene new highs. In 2024, Haidt's soft criticisms of conservatives now read as extremely cowardly.

The book is also in part a response to the New Atheists, and this is another aspect which has aged less well. The New Atheists were in vogue when it was first published, but popular culture has now moved on considerably. He defends religion as a means of social and moral cohesion, and decries what he calls 'the Rationalist Delusion'. I enjoyed his argument in favour of evolutionary group selection via religions, and this aspect of the book nicely synergizes with Tara Isabella Burton's Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, which looks at modern neo-religious movements through a similar lens to Haidt, and fills a large gap in his analysis.

Despite these flaws, and others not described here, I do actually very much recommend the book. The Moral Foundations Theory is a useful if imperfect descriptive model to help you understand different moralities, like the similarly useful but imperfect Political Compass. The narrative sweeps you along like a rousing adventure; it's a great example of a non-fiction book that takes you on a ride and makes you feel like you've learnt a lot. After the initial exhilaration fades, the flaws become more obvious the more you think about it, but not so much that I wouldn't recommend it to others.

'Strange Rites' by Tara Isabella Burton

Of the books I read during my Religion Phase, 'The Case for God' by Karen Armstrong was one of my favourites. It was marketed as a rebuttal to the various New Atheist books in vogue at the time; the cover is similar to that for 'The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins, but blue where Dawkins is red. I imagined the books battling each other to the sound of Star Wars' 'Duel of the Fates' whenever I left the room.

However, the book largely sidesteps, or indeed implicitly agrees with, many of the New Atheist arguments. Instead, via a potted history of religion and theology, mainly focused on the Judeo-Christian traditions, the book argues that religiosity is an incredibly important part of human nature, going far beyond the crude literalism attacked by the New Atheists, whose understanding of theology she derides as 'poor' but also 'not radical enough'. For Armstrong, supernatural entities are not the basis of religion: the search for transcendence is.

As much as I liked the book, I also found it frustrating because it was, ironically, not radical enough. A former nun, Armstrong's immersion in the traditional religions had left her oblivious to the various ways the religious behaviours she celebrates are expressed by the nominally irreligious. I wanted her to go further in exploring religiosity as human nature, but at the time I could find no book that delivered on what I wanted. I remember finding a conference on the subject, but being unable to attend due to my limited budget. George Steiner's 'Nostalgia for the Absolute' scratched the itch a bit, but it wasn't enough.

Eight years later, I've found the book I wanted: 'Strange Rites' by Tara Isabella Burton. I first heard about the book and its core argument via the BBC Sounds podcast 'The New Gurus', on which the author was a guest (the podcasts cover art also uses a similar stained-glass art-style to the book cover). 

Burton compares the World Wide Web to the printing press which was the essential catalyst behind the Protestant Reformation in Europe: those who disagreed with the established church could print and propagate their ideas, leading to Christianity fragmenting into many smaller sects. The World Wide Web is like a Super Printing Press, enabling everyone with access the ability to spread their own ideas, or find whatever beliefs suit them. Together with cultural shifts towards individualism, emphasizing the importance of the self and growing distrust of institutions, this has led to us living through a Super Reformation (or, to use Burton's more America-focused term, a new Great Awakening), in which an increasing number of people are 'religiously remixed', combining ancient and modern beliefs and practices in heavily individualised ways.

An early chapter establishes Burton's understanding of what religion is, based on the works of sociologists Emile Durkheim, Peter Berger, and Clifford Geertz. For Burton, religions fulfil four needs: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.  

The grand narratives of religion provide an explanation as to why things are the way they are, imbuing reality with meaning and putting adherents lives into a wider context. Adherents are also given a role, a purpose, in the grand narrative, and asked to change their behaviour in various ways: personal decision-making, for even the small and mundane, is linked to and influenced by the universe-spanning narrative. Groups of adherents together form a community (physical or online), with all the psychological benefits that belonging to a community brings. Rituals help re-affirm the grand narrative, bind the community together, and mark the passage of time. 

A single religion in a person's life can cover all four needs, as historically was the norm, but modern individualism encourages a more 'pick and mix' approach to cover all the bases. For example, someone could pray to the Christian God on Sundays, practice meditation on Mondays, go to a Yoga class on Wednesdays, profess a belief in Karma, and make changes to their diet based on the perceived 'Vibrational Energy' of the food.  Religions have always influenced each other, sharing ideas and practices, or splintering into new sects, but the process is happening faster than ever before, in our Internet-connected globalised world. (I once knew someone who believed that Jesus went to India and learnt Yoga during the 'Missing Years' not covered by the Bible.)

The bulk of the book then explores various modern religions identified by the author: fandoms, with particular emphasis on the extremes of the Harry Potter fandom ('Snapewives'); Wellness culture, which utilises spiritual and religious practices to sell products and create a loyal customer base; modern Witchcraft; sexual subcultures; social justice activism; techno-utopianism; and the many regressive, atavistic online cultures from across the online 'Manosphere'. The chapters are engaging but somewhat superficial, giving an overview with varying amounts of depth, but paint a convincing picture of these subcultures as neo-religions.

There's an interesting comment in the chapter on social justice activism about how its opponents deride it as a religion, without realising how accurate they may be, and I would have preferred this to lead into a greater examination of the religious nature of political ideologies more generally. In popular parlance that nature is usually only identified by opponents: socialists and communists deride capitalism and neoliberalism as religions which put their faith in the Invisible Hand.

It's a relatively short book, so an easy criticism is that there is plenty more which could have been included, but I prefer a book to leave me broadly satisfied if eager for more, to one that overstays its welcome. I'm extremely happy to have got hold of this, and highly recommend it, especially if combined with the other titles mentioned at the start of this review.

'Ultra-Processed People' by Chris van Tulleken

Over the past two years I've got into cooking using a bunch of cookbooks, which has massive changed my relationship to food and had a huge impact on my wellbeing. I now get so much joy from cooking and eating as multisensory experiences: the intermingling of sounds, smells, and textures. 

For Phase Two of my food journey, I've decided to learn more about food and the food industry, and this book, which has had a lot of buzz and marketing around it, seemed like a good place to start. The book builds on various other work van Tulleken has done exploring Ultra-Processed Food (UPF), including a podcast (which I listened to beforehand) and various TV documentaries.

The term UPF comes from a food classification system proposed in 2010, which divides food into four groups:

1) Unprocessed or minimally processed food (such as raw kitchen ingredients)

2) Processed culinary ingredients (such as butter, honey, oils, vinegar, etc)

3) Processed food (such as tinned vegetables or fruit, cured meats, etc)

4) Ultra-Processed Food

The full definition of UPF is quite long, but the key points are that UBF is designed to be convenient and highly profitable, and is made using chemical ingredients that would not be encountered in a domestic kitchen. There is acknowledgement in the book that the definition can get a bit woolly around the edges, and there is disagreement over its usefulness. I'm personally quite happy with this breakdown, particularly with the emphasis on profitability over nutrition as the food's raison d'etre: the food is designed to encourage overconsumption. 

I had previously found complaints about "processed foods" quite tedious, and was pleased that van Tulleken took time to explain that most foods require some form of processing to be edible. There is a good discussion about how cooking is part of being human: over the course of our evolution, humans have used fire to externalised part of our digestive system. We cook food to make it is easier for us to digest; or, we cook food to partially digest it before it reaches our mouths.

(I was reminded of the various vegetarian/vegan memes which argue that since we find raw meat disgusting, this is evidence that humans shouldn't eat meat. It's certainly evidence that we shouldn't eat raw meat.)

We have complex sensory apparatus to help us detect both when something is safe to eat, and the nutrients it may contain. The chapters which explore the various ways UPF tricks our bodies into wanting more of it ('Once you pop you can't stop!') are the most eye-opening. Tastes and textures prime our digestive and metabolic systems into expecting certain nutrients: if something tastes umami or meaty, our bodies prepare to digest food rich in protein; creamy textures prime us to digest fat; sweetness signals an incoming sugar boost.

UPF tricks our bodies by dissociating these sensory inputs from the promised nutrients, leaving our digestive system unsatisfied, our metabolic system confused, and us craving more food. So we reach for another crisp, and still feel hungry after a UPF meal with 1000 calories. Fibre, very important in signalling fullness, is also largely stripped from UPF during its manufacture. When your diet is largely UPF, it is very difficult to regulate your eating behaviour. The book opens with a warning that UPF now makes up 60% of the average diet in the UK.

In addition to making me think more about ingredients and UPF deceptions, I was particularly affected by descriptions of the microbiome: the microorganisms that live in our guts symbiotically with us. We provide them with nutrients; they help our digestion. Our body is the vehicle that transports them through space. I have often felt disconnected from my body due to my less than stellar coordination; I feel like my consciousness is a pilot awkwardly controlling a vehicle, rather than being one with it. Now I feel like I have a duty to keep my microbiome passengers safe (and in turn they won't make me ill). UPF additives harm the microbiome in various ways.

The book is written in a very chatty and light style that is easy to understand and read. There were times when I personally got frustrated that the book didn't go as in depth as I'd wanted, but I was pleased it did expand on the science presented in the podcast, and there are copious references for further reading.

The writing is occasionally stylistically conflicted. The author has clearly done a lot of reading about the topic, and often writes with authority; but at other times, he presents himself as an everyman going on a journey of discovery about the topic, interviewing various experts, in the style of the documentary TV and podcasts that preceded the book. This means that parts of the book feel like an urgent and in-depth investigation into a mounting crisis, whereas other parts feel more like light-hearted gonzo journalism (à la Jon Ronson). The transitions between these parts are often jarring.

As much as it is easy to read, there are also parts where it felt like van Tulleken struggled to balance the need to simplify for a lay audience with the desire to go more in depth with the science. This peaks with a particularly overly convoluted section explaining how our bodies utilise chemical energy from food via ATP; it is simultaneously extremely simplistic yet crammed with detail and similes which make it irritating when you know more about the topic (even if you're rusty like me), and largely incomprehensible if you don't. What's most irritating is that I don't think this sequence adds anything particularly useful to the book: it just shouldn't be there.

There are plenty of other things that could have been removed to make the book better. Mainly, footnotes. There are a lot of footnotes throughout, the contents of which should either have been incorporated into the body of the text or removed because they add little of value. Most of the footnotes felt like notes on a draft; combined with the stylistic shifts mentioned above, this made the book feel unfinished, in need of some more polishing and tidying.

Early chapters also have a tendency to imply that those working in the food industry are cackling cartoon villains. I know, because I've done it, how easy it is to imagine those you disagree with as simplistic villains (and, to be honest, there are a lot of people in the world who do talk like cartoon villains), but this tendency is often unhelpful since it does not help us to understand the incentives that drive their behaviour. I was pleased, however, that as the book approaches its end it does touch on a more nuanced and systemic critique of the food industry. 

To stop eating UPF, van Tulleken does not advise just quitting and going cold turkey. Instead, he recommends eating along but consciously thinking about the UPF as you eat it. How it is tricking your body, how it messes with your body, and as you do this you will develop a disgust response and learn to not want it. Shaming people to change their diet does not work - a subject covered extensively in the 'Addicted to Food' podcast and repeated in this book. Turning UPF into a taboo will give it the allure of the forbidden; you have to learn to not want it, and for many people on lower incomes, food that isn't UPF simply isn't affordable enough to eat regularly. Alleviating poverty is the path to improving people's diets and health. 

Despite my occasional irritations with the writing in this book, I did thoroughly enjoy it and found it revelatory. The information in this book is extremely important and I highly recommend it. It was a good choice to start with for Phase Two of my food journey. 

Next up, I have a couple of books about meat eating and the meat industry.

'Fighting for Life' by Isabel Hardman

This year is the 75th anniversary of the NHS, so naturally a few books have been published to commemorate the occasion. Hardman's 'Fighting for Life' is a pop history of the institution, framed around 12 battles which shaped the NHS into what we have today. I would recommend it, with caveats, to those who work in or with the NHS, or use its services regularly. 

I found it an enlightening reading experience which helped me contextualise my working life into the story of the NHS. Hardman is a political journalist - her previous book, 'Why We Get The Wrong Politicians', is excellent and one I include in my canon of 'Books That Exacerbated My Disillusionment With British Politics - but this means her NHS book is largely focused on the political personalities and arguments within government and parliament about NHS reforms. While I personally was engrossed (in another life I could imagine myself as a policy wonk), I imagine many people would find this political focus quite boring, especially if they don't go into the book with some pre-existing knowledge about UK politics.

The NHS is a political football; Hardman deftly shows the various ways all political parties have, often hypocritically, attacked each other over the NHS. She explores the realities and misunderstandings behind the fear, present since the inception of the service, that there is a secret plot to dismantle or privatise the NHS, and replace it with an American-style system. Like any good conspiracy theory, there are grains of truth to it: a small faction of the Conservative party does admire the American system, but are aware that going down that route in Britain would be political and electoral suicide on a truly colossal scale. 

Politicians are often frustrated that popular political discussions about healthcare in Britain are framed around, and therefore extremely limited by, the false dichotomy between the state-run NHS model and the American-style private hellscape, ignoring the myriad other ways that countries fund and manage their healthcare. Both Labour and Conservative governments have increased private sector involvement in the NHS and added charges, though Labour tends to get away with it because they are more trusted on the NHS.

Across the 12 battles, which range from early arguments over whether there should be an NHS and how it should be structured and funded, through many reforms and modernisations, to the COVID pandemic and the many crises that face the post-pandemic service, we learn about the origins of prescription charges and CQC inspections,; the uses and abuses of performance targets; why maternity units are particularly scandal-prone; the growth of the culture of cover-ups, bullying and blame; the many arguments between Health Secretaries and Chancellors over funding; and much, much, much more. 

The picture that emerges is of a vast, complex, bureaucratic system that is slow to change but has changed so much. A service which very few people even begin to understand, even as they claim to adore it. An institution that is extremely impressive and successful, but creaking, straining, and intensely suffering from deep seated problems exacerbated by recent systemic shocks. 

The final chapter ends with an attack on the shallowness of current NHS discourse, and a call for action for someone, or several someones, to actually do something about it:

'There has been enough lovebombing from politicians too fearful or lazy to confront the truth about the state of the service and what it needs. Now, it needs someone who knows what they are really fighting for. Depending on how well they fight, it could either be the latest or the last battle of the NHS's long struggle to exist'.

'Greater' by Penny Mordaunt & Chris Lewis

I got a copy of Penny Mordaunt's book when she was one of the frontrunners to win the Conservative leadership contest back in summer.

I was originally intending to write a proper review of it, but the experience of reading it has been so exhausting and frustrating that I do not want to spend that much energy on it. While there was the occasional interesting observation or argument which I could either get behind or constructively disagree with, it is not those that spring to mind when I think about the book.

What comes to mind is the inane waffle that pads out the word count; words for the sake of words, the literary equivalent of filibustering. The parts that are potentially interesting or worth reading are utterly drowned by a relentless deluge of shallow cultural commentary, tedious rehashes of already stale arguments, groan-inducing attempts at humour, and excessively long lists.

So. Many. Lists.

Every few pages there is an atrociously long list. Used sparingly, such lists could be good for humour or emphasis, but there are SO MANY of them, and some of them are SO LONG. A few times I verbally exclaimed in frustration when I reached the next one.

The book is appallingly written; all the padding gives it the feel of a rushed AS level essay written the night before the deadline. I am quite confident that at least 50% could be cut out, leaving behind an at least slightly better book.

However, a shorter book wouldn't look so impressive. The physical copy is a nice edition. The cover design is elegant, and its thickness gives it a satisfying weight and the illusion of depth and seriousness. It perfectly encapsulates the way politicians adopt the aesthetics of intelligence and competence to hide the shallowness of their thinking - see Jacob Rees-Mogg for a particularly extreme example of this tactic.

The book comes recommended by various political or business figures - Bill Gates wrote the foreword, and blurbs are provided by the likes of Tony Blair, Richard Branson, Elton John, and more. Assuming those quotes are genuine recommendations and not just a friendly favour, this is a damning indictment of our political class.

If you ever wanted a physical manifestation of the sheer intellectual and imaginative bankruptcy of the political class, then this book is for you!

Some excerpts:

'Failures of State' by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott

Despite me not being completely ignorant of how bad the UK government's response to the pandemic was, I still found this book shocking. It is a relentless catalogue of bad decisions, made by a government both callous and incompetent. Working in a hospital through COVID, the book put some things I remembered into a wider context.

I remembered colleagues sharing photos of the PPE worn by healthcare staff in other countries, and comparing it to the flimsy aprons we were given. Public Health England downgraded the threat ranking of Covid-19, which meant that only basic PPE needed to be worn, according to health and safety laws, and this was a way of getting around the shortage of PPE caused by the pandemic stockpile being allowed to run down or expire over the austerity decade.

I remembered the mixed messages given about masks, and learnt that there was a government desire early on in the pandemic to minimise the effectiveness of masks to the public, because there were fears that masks might run out if everyone rushed out to get them. The government was trying to buy as many commercially available masks as possible for the NHS, because of the austerity-ravaged stockpile. This then, obviously, backfired later when masks were made mandatory.

What shocked me the most was how much the politicians rejected scientific advice, or never sought it. The scientific advisors first heard about Eat Out To Help Out on the day it was announced to the public. Same with the nonsensical tier system. The government announced many changes to restrictions without asking for any modelling work to estimate the impact on infections or the NHS.

I remember the 'I back Boris 100% he's doing his best in a bad situation' crowd on social media being roundly mocked at the time, but there was nevertheless a sizeable chunk of the population who were sympathetic towards the government, believing them to be doing their best, making tough decisions while following the best scientific advice available. Unfortunately, that is a poisonous fiction.

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry will be the Johnson administration's Chilcott, and hopefully its outcome will have actual consequences for those whose terrible decisions led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.

I do recommend this book a lot. I learnt a lot from it, and it has made me even more disillusioned with our political system. 

In a just country, Matt Hancock would at least be a disgraced ex-politician, not a pseudo-celebrity joining a reality TV show while trying to flog a book. In a just country, Rishi Sunak would never have become Prime Minister, and even the thought of Boris Johnson returning as PM would have been anathema to all of the political class. Alas, that is not the country we live in.

UK Doomsday Preppers

 I watched a documentary on UK Doomsday Preppers this morning, and I was struck by how much the prepper mindset is rooted in, and fuelled by, social isolation and loneliness. The preppers' apocalyptic fantasies either serve as an affirmation of the individual's present isolation, or as an imagined negation of it. 

There are preppers whose fantasies are all about individual survival: a solitary badass macho man, sometimes accompanied by his immediate nuclear family, hiding away from the imagined evils of a society crumbling around them, surviving and thriving due to the Great Man's ingenuity and resourcefulness. Strength in isolation.

One has hidden a large cache in a hut in the Welsh countryside; he gets his family to do drills regularly, where they quickly pack their things, leave their Stockport home, and drive to the Welsh hideaway to practice living simply, away from the society whose imminent collapse they imagine. Really, it's just an elaborate excuse for a camping holiday.

Another has his supplies hidden on a small uninhabited island in the middle of a river, which he can navigate to with a kayak. He imagines he could survive alone on the island for several months, living off either his supplies or the island's flora and fauna. He does not mention the negative psychological consequences of a lack of human interaction, probably because they are such a constant in his present life that he sees them as normal.

On the other extreme, there are the preppers who imagine that the apocalypse would grant them opportunity for socialisation and community that they have been denied under present society. 

One prepper has stocked up on equipment for 'about a dozen like-minded people', who he imagines he will meet in the ruins. Crucially, they are not the friends and family he knows today, but imaginary future friends whom society is currently preventing him from meeting. He also imagines that 'because of [his] resources and knowledge, [he] would probably have leadership thrust upon [him].'

Another, who explains that she lives in an area that is majority Muslim, has several copies of the Qur'an in her doomsday supplies, which she might need to read during the apocalypse in order to fit in with her wider community. 

There's a latent curiosity apparent in this fantasy; she could, of course, read the Qur'an right now, get to know her neighbours, become active in the community, all of her own free will. Literally no one is stopping her but herself. But instead of doing that, she imagines apocalypses which force her to do all those things.

She also has a stockpile of condoms and lube, because sex is one of the few easily accessible comforts during an apocalypse, and you never know you will meet as society collapses, so it's best to be prepared.

Some people would rather spend £1000s on army surplus equipment and non-perishable food, than get therapy or learn social skills. One could also make a wider and deeper point about atomization, the breakdown of community, and the need for greater mental health services and therapy options in our hyper-individualistic capitalist society, but that's not something I can really be bothered going into in this particular Facebook post.

'Flat Earth News' by Nick Davies; 'Bad News' by Mark Pack

Two books on how awful the news industry is, which I read in parallel. 

I was impressed with 'Flat Earth News' (2008) by Nick Davies, which is about how and why so much falsehood ends up in the news. His titular 'flat earth news' refers to stories which appear true but would quickly be shown to be false if anyone bothered to check. It's a book about fake news and the need for fact-checking way before those topics became so massive in the public consciousness, post-2016.

A lot of mainstream coverage of these topics, by journalists not wanting to attack their own profession and colleagues, has pinned the blame on social media. Davies shows that all that falsehood and distortion is a product of decades-long trends in the news industry. The Internet and social media has accelerated those trends, dialling them up to 11.

He opens the book by explaining that a lot of news industry criticism is done by outsiders who don't actually know how the industry works, so their analyses miss an awful lot and tend to focus on a few basics: the influence of advertisers and owners.

Newspapers want to please their advertisers; owners want their papers to push certain lines. As a result, the news industry presents a version of reality that is acceptable to corporate advertisers and billionaire media moguls. Davies accepts that advertisers and owners do influence editorial decisions, but far less than popular media criticism would have you believe.

Advertisers don't care that much about the political stances of where the adverts show up, as long as people are seeing the adverts. The only time that advertisers properly influence the editorial line is when the story is directly about the advertiser - such as when the Daily Telegraph refused to run stories about HSBC's money laundering, because the bank was one of their big advertisers. 

Historically, a lot of newspaper owners wanted their papers to push their political opinions - they were propaganda outlets first and foremost, a way for the wealthy to push for what they thought was positive social and political change. However, through the 20th century, newspapers were bought up by corporate owners who saw the papers primarily as a business which made a profit. They would still influence the paper's line when doing so would benefit the business, but the motivation was profit and business growth - not the desire for particular social and political change.

In order to increase profits, the new owners cut staffing numbers, and wanted the remaining journalists to write more and cheaper stories, which fuelled the rise of 'churnalism' - writing stories based largely on material already written by someone else - and meant a massive reduction in the time that journalists had to properly check their stories. 

The quality and veracity of the stories didn't matter, so long as the paper was making a profit. Reporters were encouraged to make stories out of anything they could to fill space - especially on the local papers. I thought a lot about Nottinghamshire Live when reading this book.

Churnalists are reliant on others having written the stories, and so the majority of news stories are reproductions or slight rewordings of press releases, PR, and stories from news agencies.

Wire agencies are like the news industry wholesalers - they write stories which are then purchased by news outlets to present to the public, either reproduced word-for-word, or altered and expanded upon depending on the outlet. Different papers and websites have almost exactly the same story in almost exactly the same words because they've all purchased the same story from the same wire agency. 

This is far more obvious to see nowadays with online news, but back when people would read just one newspaper, it would be unlikely that the readers would notice that almost the exact same report appeared in multiple papers.

The wire agencies have also suffered from staffing cuts over the years, and the demand for more and cheaper stories has led to a decline in both the range of topics covered and the quality of the stories for sale.

There's an excellent chapter on the various ways the PR industry manipulates and colludes with journalists, and the various tricks PR companies use to create pseudo-news and pseudo-events, with fake grassroots (astro turf) organizations, and fake experts (who are just PR employees). Reporters desperate for stories will happily run something handed to them ready-written by a PR agency and present it as news. Many journalists are in regular contact with PR agencies, requesting stories from them that fit certain themes. 

PR companies understand the time pressures that journalists are under, and know that they are extremely unlikely to check whether the story they're given is true. And so, too, do politicians, government press officers, and the intelligence agencies. 

There's another excellent chapter on media manipulation by intelligence agencies. If you visit some of the more paranoid far-left places on the Internet, you'll likely encounter people who label everything they disagree with as CIA propaganda, and any media figure (incl. YouTubers) or outlet that is insufficiently left-wing will be accused of being CIA-funded. Davies' exploration of Cold War CIA activity shows there is a bit of grounding to this paranoia. 

After 9/11, the US and UK's strategic communications (propaganda) operations were massively expanded. Davies explores this through a few case studies of misinformation, and by attending a conference on the subject and speaking to a lot of people directly involved (on condition that the quotes are not attributed to a name). 

One of his sources paints a hilarious-yet-terrifying picture of state disinformation campaigns: all these different agencies and teams, are each putting out their own misinformation, but doing so in a chaotic, uncoordinated fashion, so that false information put out by one agency, another agency will pick up and treat as legitimate intelligence. And that's before we even start to think about the chaos caused by the misinformation campaigns of hostile regimes.

Journalistic time pressures; the inability to check stories; manipulation by PR, politicians, press officers, and propagandists. These are major systemic causes of the falsehood, distortion, and trivia in the media, which ultimately presents a version of reality favourable towards the powerful and the wealthy. And then we can add in the influence of advertisers, owners, and the fact that most journalists come from similar middle class and upwards backgrounds (because getting into the industry often involves unpaid internships), and we can start to see why news media is so full of falsehood, why the reality it presents is so detached from the lived reality of ordinary people.

I was pleased with this book, it made me even more disillusioned with the news media industry. 

(The final three chapters are, admittedly, weaker than the rest of the book: they are case studies looking at the decline of particular newspapers - The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Daily Mail - and Davies unfortunately gets a bit too personal in his attacks on specific journalists.)

'Bad News' by Mark Pack is a guide to spotting distortion and falsehood when you're reading the news. It is quite handy having all this advice in one book, but the chapters are each broken down into smaller sub-chapters which each feel like the length of a blog post. Pack makes reference to his blog multiple times, and this book unfortunately feels like a series of blog posts but together. Each topic is covered briefly, and there is very little sense of a narrative building throughout the book. The short sub-chapters meant the flow of reading was often interrupted. I found it enjoyable to dip into, but not so enjoyable to read for a prolonged period. The footnotes were also annoying, adding further interruption to the flow (in many cases the information in the footnotes could easily have been omitted, or incorporated into the text proper).

'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden

Had a weird moment towards the end of Edward Snowden's book when he mentions that he had his 30th birthday while in Hong Kong hiding from the press and secret services. I'm currently the same age as Snowden was when he became the most famous whistleblower in the world - my 30th birthday is this coming Thursday - and I cannot imagine myself ever being brave enough to do what he did.

Understanding how he became that whistleblower is, therefore, fascinating.

The most exciting chapters are, of course, towards the end when he actually gets round to the whistleblowing, when it becomes a real life globe-hopping spy thriller as he meets journalists to reveal the NSA's global surveillance system, and goes on the run, eventually ending up exiled in Moscow. 

(The US canceled his passport before he could get a connecting flight, and blocked other countries from allowing him asylum, thus enabling the US to discredit him by suggesting he is was a Russian agent all along. At the airport he is met by the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, who do, of course, offer him a job, which he refuses. He had hoped to reach Equador.)

The earlier majority of the book is comparatively extremely bland, but this is where we get to know him more as a person, the forces and events that shaped him into becoming the Whistleblower - his origin story. 

He had a comfortable middle class upbringing, where both parents (who divorced in his teens) were patriotic government employees. He talks about his interest in computers and hacking, and reminisces about the Internet of the 90s which he sees as a golden age of freedom compared to the Internet of today.

He became adept at computing from a young age, and wanted to serve his country - he had been imbued with strong patriotic fervour by his parents - so after a failed stint in the army (discharged for medical reasons), he begins his career in the American intelligences agencies, initially at the CIA, eventually at the NSA.

He was very good at his job, was promoted very quickly, and got access to a lot of classified documents, and what he saw shook his faith in the government he was working for.

Ultimately, the mistake the NSA made was to promote him too highly when he still had a lot of idealism about what America should be, what America should represent, so his conscience rebelled against what he was seeing, reading, and doing at work.

In a particularly affective chapter, he describes a time when he was spying on a target via their laptop - the NSA can access any device's camera and microphone extremely easily. Through the laptop's camera, Snowden was watching the man work while the man's toddler son was fidgeting on his lap. The laptop's microphone picked up the toddler's giggling. Suddenly, the toddler looked directly into the laptop camera and stared at it. Snowden felt like the boy was looking directly at him, peering into his soul.

'Adults in the Room' by Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece during the Eurozone crisis. His memoir is a political thriller: he rushes from meeting to meeting trying to avert an impending disaster, while being demonised by the press, plotted against, and openly spied on. In a memorable scene, he tells an American colleague something over the phone, and that colleague immediate gets a call from the US National Security Council asking about about what he's just been told.

His memoir is also a Kafkaesque nightmare: he struggles to deal with the convoluted rules, bureaucracy, tricks, and backstabbing of the Troika. In another memorable scene, he is presented with a copy of an agreement to be signed by him at a Eurogroup meeting later that day; he reads the agreement and is happy with it; and then at the meeting he notices that the agreement presented to him to sign is completely different to the one he had been shown earlier. 

It is also a tragedy, since it ends in failure and betrayal (spoilers for real world events).

While it is definitely the best political memoir I've read so far, I wouldn't say it is a consistently enjoyable read: a light-hearted fun romp, it is not.

It is dense and packed full of policy details and financial jargon, and was therefore often exhausting and hard to concentrate on. Not being super familiar with many of the characters involved, I often got confused about who was who and what their job was. 

Prior to getting involved in Greek politics, Varoufakis was a professor of economics, and fond of protesting. His limited experience of the political arena - off the streets - meant he struggled with the theatre and the game of politics. While he may have had strong arguments, he and his team lacked the political skill and resources to sell those arguments within the machine and win the game against vastly more powerful and experienced adversaries. Varoufakis is often frustrated that while the people he is arguing against often agree with him in private (or at least say they do), in public and in official meetings they have to be against him because of the complex forces and political allegiances at play.

As Varoufakis notes at the end, the Eurozone crisis and the Greek calamity were huge factors in the growth of Euroscepticism and contributed to the Brexit vote. Certainly, the EU does not come across well in this book, and it has certainly made me feel far more negatively about the European institutions as they exist today. Varoufakis is in favour of European unity in principle but hopes the current set up can be massively reformed, or that something better could be built from its ashes when it falls apart.

The complexity of the European issue has made me convinced of two points:

1) The Brexit referendum should not have been held because the question was too complicated to be reduced to the tedious and mendacious binary campaign narratives of Leave and Remain.

2) As shit as Brexit has been, going against the referendum result would have been a disaster given how toxic the issue of democratic sovereignty had become, both in the UK and in the rest of the EU.

'Austerity: The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy' by Kerry-Anne Mendoza

When I was first starting to follow politics, I read quite a lot of Another Angry Voice and Scriptonite Daily. The latter was the blog of Kerry-Anne Mendoza, who went on to be a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Canary, the leftwing news website. At the time I remember being quite excited by The Canary launching, and then being thoroughly disappointed when it turned out to be clickbait trash. 

Mendoza's Scriptonite Daily blog posts were collated, revised and expanded to form her first and so far only book, with the simple title 'Austerity' and the rather overlong and clunky subtitle 'The Demolition of the Welfare State and the Rise of the Zombie Economy'.

In the age of COVID and Brexit, it's a bit of an odd experience to return to a polemic criticising the austerity policies of the Cameron government. I had vague recollections of reading the blog versions of some of the chapters, and found myself in a sort of dialogue with my younger, only-just-starting-to-be-politically-engaged self.

The book is divided into three parts: the first two ('The Demolition' and 'Austerity and Democracy') are Mendoza's; part three ('10 Economic Myths') was written by two other authors and was added as extra material to this edition. This third part is only twenty pages and effectively debunks some economics myths which might be made of straw.

Mendoza is strongest where she is criticising a specific policy, describing the harm it is causing - for example the bedroom tax, benefits cuts, and Michael Gove's education reforms. The best chapters are therefore in the first half of the book. 

The book's origin as a series of blog posts hampers the flow between chapters. Despite Mendoza's attempt to add a frame narrative, there is no real sense of a narrative building across the chapters: they work as standalone pandemics about certain subjects, but are not linked very convincingly into a wider arc. I felt very little impetus to read more than one chapter at a time.

What's more, some of the chapters cover quite a range of topics, but only cursorily. For example, in Chapter 10, 'Outsourcing the justice system', Mendoza gives two pages on the growth of G4S, 2 pages of G4S failures, 3 pages about how awful the American justice system is, and 2 pages on Legal Aid cuts. These are all important topics, and none of them are covered adequately. Without the added material, the book comes to less than 200 pages: there was plenty of room for further expansion.

The frame narrative is the 'Rise of the Zombie Economy' part of the overlong subtitle. This is where the book starts to come apart, degenerating towards incoherence and conspiracism. It contains by far the worst parts of the book.

The story begins with the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, where the post-war economic order was established, and organisations such as the IMF and World Bank were founded: this 'set the roadmap for domestic and international economic policy to this day... they have overseen the transfer of power from the State to private institutions and corporations. This is the endgame of the neoliberal project - whether the key players know and intend it or not.'

It was somewhat surprising to encounter Bretton Woods presented as the beginning of Neoliberalism; most leftwing narratives date it to the late 70s with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan and the increasing influence of Milton Friedman. Neoliberalism is an imprecise and not entirely useful term, since you can stretch it to encompass quite a wide range of views; hence it becoming ubiquitous and almost meaningless in some online discourse these days.

Despite dedicating Chapter 2 to explaining the 'Zombie Economy', Mendoza never really makes clear what it is, only using vague comparisons to a 'real economy'.

It is 'a night-of-the-living dead economy that consumes value and defecates debt'. 

So the Zombie Economy is about destroying value and creating debt, got it.

'The Zombie Economy exists to overcome the barriers to capital growth. It creates financial instruments that increase the paper value of an asset by financialising it.' 

Ah, so the Zombie Economy is about using debt and finance to increase value, got it.

'The purpose of... the Zombie Economy is for creditors, investment banks and investors to make maximum profits from lending... The purpose is to move people away from making money by producing things, towards making money from money.' 

OK, I think I get it: the Zombie Economy is about restructuring the economy away from physical industries such as manufacturing towards the financial services industry.

'It's priority is rather to transfer public spending from the real economy, where things are made and people are supported, to the Zombie Economy, where profits are made and people are abandoned.' 

What? Are you saying that profits are not made in the 'real economy'? What does this even mean?

Chapter 2 begins with a section titled 'Understanding Value', where Mendoza explains that value is:

'A Good Idea + Skill + Usefulness = Added Value'

That is certainly an idea of value. 

Mendoza does not explain the difference between 'Value in use' and 'Value in exchange': utility versus price. Mendoza does not talk about the price mechanism or of "value being in the eye of the beholder".

Indeed, her presentation of the Zombie Economy seems to rest on the belief that 'Value in use' is the correct, good, proper, real, value, the one used in her so-called real economy, whereas 'Value in exchange' is the evil, false value used in the 'Zombie Economy'.

After giving her definition of value, Mendoza then complains that 'the problem is, this has ceased to be the way our economy has actually worked for some considerable time (if it ever was)… The way most wealth is accumulated today is not based on this simple premise of adding value by creating something useful and being rewarded for that contribution.' Sounds like there might be something missing from this analysis.

There are many things missing from her analysis. 

I expected the topic of 'Zombie Banks' to come up at some point in a book about a 'Zombie Economy'. Nope. I would expect a book about Austerity to talk about the international bond market and bond yields. Nope. The famous, and famously debunked, paper 'Growth in a Time of Debt' gets a brief mention in explaining the turn towards austerity, but there is no real attempt to understand the motives behind those implementing austerity: they may as well be cartoon villains.

In her overall conclusion, Mendoza returns to her frame narrative to talk about 'The endgame of Austerity':

'The inevitable endgame of neoliberalism is corporate fascism, and the de-civilisation of our world. The only way out is to abandon capitalism in all its forms... French poet Charles Baudelaire once wrote 'the devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.' This is the trick pulled by the neoliberal project. Convince billions of people that there is no plan'

We've reached the part of the book about sinister plots to take over the world and destroy civilisation.

And the only way out is to reject all forms of capitalism - unfortunately she does not explain this solution in detail, as 'the purpose of this book is not to present solutions in detail.' She teases a future book that will explore this, but it hasn't come out yet.

There are good things in this book - the polemics against specific policies are well done - but the whole is ultimately frustrating and unsatisfying. There are better books out there which feel like complete, properly structured books, with a proper narrative and consistent argument. 

'Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization' by Grace Blakeley covers what I think Mendoza was trying to say with her 'Zombie Economy' stuff, but with coherence and an actual narrative arc.

'Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea' by Mark Blyth gives a thorough rundown of the theoretical underpinnings of austerity and the effects it has had when variously implemented across the world.

'Operation 10' by Hardiman Scott

Hardiman Scott's justifiably forgotten and out of print first novel is, ostensibly, a fast-paced thriller about Margaret Thatcher being kidnapped by IRA terrorists. I heard of it via an advert at the back of my old edition of A Very British Coup by Chris Mullin, and purchased a copy in the hope that it had fallen out of print due to the subject matter not being topical anymore, and possibly having become distasteful in the aftermath of the Brighton bombing, rather than as a sign of it lacking quality.

I gave up at the halfway mark.

Part of the problem for the book is that the blurb does an excellent job of getting you ready for a fast-paced, but probably trashy, thriller which opens with Thatcher being kidnapped and then excitedly follows the various characters as they try to discover her whereabouts, negotiate with the terrorists, investigate leads, perhaps reveal that one of her special advisors had been an IRA agent in deep cover or something - y'know, standard trashy thriller stuff. 

Alternatively, it might have been a more thoughtful book of political intrigue and ideology, exploring the complexity of the Troubles, and perhaps posing a direct challenge to Thatcher's stance at the time. The blurb's description of the 'the price on her head is outrageously high, and the government refuses to pay' could perhaps hint at a questioning of Thatcher's belief in the price mechanism and market economics.

The book is in fact neither of these things, it is ruthlessly boring. 

I gave up at the halfway mark because Margaret Thatcher had not yet been kidnapped. At least half of the novel is devoted to following the IRA members as they meticulously plan and rehearse the kidnapping, over and over and over again, for months. And it feels like months. The terrorists are not even interesting characters - they have a few character traits each, so they are slightly more than one-dimensional.

A side-plot involves a Special Branch Superintendent worrying - for months - that a major IRA operation will be happening soon, because nothing has happened for a while and his informants have revealed that the IRA cells across the country have been instructed to lie low for a bit. We periodically check in on him, and discover that he is still worrying and that nothing has happened.

At the halfway mark, both the reader and the characters themselves are still waiting for the promised story to start. Chapter 9 begins (page 106 of 252) with the date for the kidnapping finally being chosen, and the terrorists then finding stuff to kill time 'just to pass the hours'. We then cut to the side-plot and learn that for the superintendent 'also the time passed slowly' BECAUSE NOTHING IS HAPPENING.

Time passes slowly for both the reader and the characters in this supposedly pacey and gripping thriller. I became so bored and so uninterested that I didn't care enough to continue to find out when the story would actually start and whether it would somehow improve in quality once it did. Time passed so slowly while reading this that I struggle believe that I only read half of a short novel when it felt so excruciatingly long.

'Dangerous Hero' by Tom Bower

When Corbyn was Labour leader, I found it very difficult to get any real idea of how good or bad he was doing, because the reporting of him was so blatantly polarised. He was vilified in the mainstream press, and hailed as a messianic figure on social media. The mainstream reporting was so brazenly hyperbolic that it was easy to disregard it all as a smear campaign; when anyone criticised Corbyn, they could be dismissed as part of the Establishment campaign against him. Two hyperpolarised mythologies developed around the Labour leader: Corbyn the Messiah, who would champion the downtrodden and lead Britain to a golden age; Corbyn the Destroyer, who hated Britain and sympathised with terrorists.

Tom Bower's book is all of the Corbyn the Destroyer mythology condensed into one handy volume, published in 2019 (it was also serialised in the Daily Mail). It is not a good book, sometimes it is comically bad, and it is riddled with errors and inaccuracies.

Sources are not provided for most of the information - 'for legal reasons... unusually the book has no references'. When a source is named, such as the notoriously untruthful George Galloway, it becomes clear that Bower has largely been in contact with people who disliked Corbyn or had vendettas against him: he has no interest in getting a proper understanding of Corbyn as an actual person, only in presenting him as an incompetent Marxist cartoon villain. 

The sources of quotations from books, magazines, and newspapers are also frequently not given: we are just meant to trust that the magazine or newspaper did say it, but are not given the date or issue number for us to find the quote ourselves. We also have to take it on trust that Bower has not deliberately omitted positive comments from his various sources. The few times that a source does say something positive about Corbyn, Bower immediately tries to defuse it:

'"People thought he was a nice bloke," conceded Allcock. "He made them feel comfortable. He even charmed his adversaries." In his constituency dealings at least, Corbyn had perfected a genial mask, despite not yet proving himself as an effective MP.'

Bower pretends to understand Corbyn's inner thoughts and motivations, which are invariably sinister and malicious: he acts not out of concern for the unfortunate, but out of hatred for the upper and middle classes. For example, before he was an MP, councillor Corbyn pushed to for houses to be built on some parkland; if we are to believe Bower, Corbyn's main goal here was to annoy the middle classes who would lose their park, not to help people without homes.

'Annoying Haringey's middle classes game him particular delight. Faced with a huge housing problem after the arrival of thousands of Cypriot refugees in London, Corbyn proposed building homes on green parkland. Local residents were outraged. The rich, he scoffed, clearly disliked living alongside immigrants - but they would have no choice.'

Racist dog whistles are common throughout. The reader is meant to be suspicious of Corbyn's anti-imperialist beliefs and championing of refugees and immigrants; we are meant to see him as anti-White, anti-British, a self-hating white British man who sides with foreigners against his own people: 'He would black up if he could,' one Labour MP said of Corbyn, according to George Galloway.

This characterisation is appalling, and I think it tells you a lot about the author. Indeed, throughout Bower comes across as an intensely repulsive man; this is not helped by the two author photos, in which his body language and facial expression make him look like an absolute prick. 

Furthermore, in the introduction and author bio, Bower says he used to be a Marxist himself back at university, and was known as 'Tommy the Red', and yet he seems completely incapable of understanding Corbyn & co's ideology and motivations. Leftist descriptors such as 'Marxist' are used almost as synonyms for 'evil' or 'villainous'. Corbyn is variously described as 'ideologically inconsistent', 'obsessed with ideological purity', 'Marxist', 'Trotsykist', 'committed to Stalinism', and 'anarchist'. These words have incompatible meanings which you would expect a supposed former leftist to understand; Bower's 'ex-Marxist' backstory reminded me of the unconvincing 'ex-atheist' backstories encountered in works of Christian apologetics. If he genuinely was Tommy the Red, my assumption is that he was motivated by teenage rebellion and a temporary dislike of middle class Britain, and he is projecting those remembered feelings onto Corbyn & co.

The book's subtitle is 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power'. As a result, Corbyn's lack of both ruthlessness and ambition for power throughout are hilarious recurring themes. Bower repeatedly tells us that Corbyn is ruthless without backing this up; often he clunkily adds implied ruthlessness when it manifestly isn't there.

'Lenin would have expected him to act ruthlessly, but... <proceeds to describe a lack of ruthlessness>'

It is clear throughout that Corbyn is not power-hungry. He was quite happy as a backbench MP focused on his constituency and protesting global injustices; he had never aspired for ministerial positions or put in the work to develop policies. In 2012, he was considering retiring to Wiltshire to focus on beekeeping and growing vegetables. On page 311 out of 348, describing the 2017 election campaign, Bower says:

'The campaign had transformed Corbyn himself. The veteran protester understood that politics was no longer just a series of battles within the Labour Party, but actually about winning real power. His new ambition was to become prime minister.'

It is on page 311 out of 348 of a book supposedly about 'Corbyn's Ruthless Plot for Power' that Corbyn is first described as wanting power.

The book ends with what is meant to be a mic-drop by Bower, but it is such a failure of a mic drop that it perfectly illustrates how lazy and perfidious the book is. Bower does not believe that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is Corbyn's favourite poem, as he has claimed in interviews.

'His enthusiasm for it was dubious, not least because Wilde himself was no believer in socialism.'

Bower then closes the book with a part of the poem which ends with,

'For none can tell to what red Hell

His sightless soul may stray.'

The implication is that Wilde was somehow warning of a socialist hellscape like the USSR, but the poem is about someone being executed by hanging at Reading Gaol, the British prison, and the 'red Hell' refers to - you know, well - the afterlife hell to which 'his sightless soul may stray', not to socialism.

That's not the worst of it. After reading this I had to look around for a bit thinking I was going mad or had fallen into a parallel universe. Hadn't Wilde wrote an essay advocating socialism? The Soul of Man Under Socialism? Wasn't this essay a socialist classic?

'Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.'

Either Bower didn't bother to check Wilde's views on socialism (even just by Googling 'Wilde socialism'), or he doesn't care, because it doesn't matter if the book is truthful or accurate: its only purpose is to damage Corbyn's reputation.

There are of course grains of truth in the book, as there was in other Corbyn coverage, (I think it is quite clear that Corbyn's administration would have been disappointing, that the bond market would have savaged him, that he was out of his depth as leader, that he had some weird views, and that there was a serious anti-Semitism crisis*) but they are so thoroughly buried in falsehood and hyperbole that it becomes easy to dismiss it all as smears and nonsense. Those hoping for an accurate insight into Corbyn and his leadership would best look elsewhere.

*When Corbyn was leader, I had absorbed, from friends and social media, the narrative that the anti-Semitism crisis was largely an Establishment smear against Labour and Corbyn. I wasn't following politics or the story very assiduously, and I wasn't on social media that often. However, by the time Rebecca Long-Bailey was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, I was on social media more often, and on the day of her sacking I saw a huge explosion of anti-Semitic comments and posts from leftwing sources. This was a moment of Great Disillusionment for me, the scales fell from my eyes.

'Terrorism and Communism' by Leon Trotsky

One leftwing narrative about the Russian Revolution is that in its early years the Soviet State was doing good work creating a better society, but then Stalin came along and ruined it. Back in 2017, I went to a book event where the author/speaker made this argument - I bought his book, but have not read it yet (nor have I read the other books on the revolution which I purchased that year). The author described himself as a Trotskyist.

Trotsky was one of the organisers of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and then became leader of the Red Army. After the Revolution, Russia quit WW1 and Civil War broke out, chiefly between the Communist Reds and the Anti-Revolutionary Whites, with various smaller groups also being involved (many leftwing groups did not like the Bolsheviks). Trotsky was ousted during Stalin's rise, and spent the rest of his life in exile, before being assassinated by a Soviet agent in Mexico in 1940. 

In Animal Farm, the character Snowball is largely based on Trotsky, a sympathetic portrayal that follows the narrative that the revolution started well but was ruined by Stalin, represented by Napoleon. One of Trotsky's later books, which seems to have popularised this narrative, is The Revolution Betrayed (1937).

Terrorism and Communism (1920) is Trotsky's defence of political violence - it is also one of the very few of his books that is still in print by a major publisher, and comes with a long introduction by Slavoj Žižek. I posted in a leftist Facebook group that I was reading it, and a few people commented, saying it was 'one of Trotsky's best' and 'an absolute banger'.

This context should hopefully explain why I went it into expecting, despite the controversial title and subject matter, to feel some positivity towards it. Instead, I bounced off it so hard I almost ended up a Thatcherite; indeed, I was left thinking I would much rather have the Tories in power than Trotskyists.

At times, I wanted to hit my head against a wall, and once I imagined myself looking to camera and saying, "Wow, this is garbage."

In hindsight, it should not have been so surprising that I hated it. On the Political Compass, Trotsky is Authoritarian Left. My instincts place me in Libertarian Left: my radical sympathies lie more with anarchism rather than Bolshevism. In leftwing groups, a frequent topic of discussion is uniting the fractious Left against the more united Right, but many argue that there are irreconcilable differences between Authoritarian and Libertarian leftists, which make such an alliance impossible to maintain: anarchists and communists were enemies in both the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars.

(The Political Compass is a simplification, and has probably had negative impacts on political discourse, but it's a fun simplification and has led to some good memes.)

Trotsky is good at describing flaws in parliamentary democracy: the political and legal equality of the wealthy capitalist and the poor labourer, both having one vote in elections, is mystical nonsense. It does not take account of economic realities and the ways the political and legal system is biased in favour of the wealthy, who can use their wealth to influence politics and get away with criminality ('Punishable by a fine' translates to 'Legal for rich people'). Thus, with political power concentrated in the hands of wealthy, and the workers only having insignificant or indeed illusory power, you might describe liberal democracy as a 'dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' - therefore, the solution is to trash this false democracy and put in place a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', where political power is held by workers, represented by the Communist Party, the only political party. 

It is not the job of the communists - the class-conscious and politically advanced vanguard of the working class - to represent majority opinion, but to create it, by elevating the understanding of the rest of the population and proving how good communism is. Eventually, the rest of the working class, and the re-educated remnants of the bourgeoisie, will understand that the communists were right all along.

The criticisms of parliamentary democracy are strong - and you can find echoes of them across all sorts of media right up to the present day. I was specifically reminded of Isabel Hardman's Why We Get The Wrong Politicians (2018) and Martin Williams' Parliament Ltd (2016), among many other works. His explanation of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' made me understand this doctrine better, though I think the flaws in it are quite evident.

Some of Trotsky's arguments in defence of political violence are quite standard, and could be used by adherents of any political position: sometimes, when your political opponents are uncompromising, inconvincible, and repressive, violence is the only way to topple them. When you are a new and fragile regime, surrounded by enemies within and without, violence is inevitably necessary to maintain control and defend the revolution. 

Trotsky uses various examples of political violence throughout history to make his point; today, we might use the example of the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars. Of course their violence was necessary to overthrow the Galactic Empire! Unfortunately the sequel trilogy did not explore the rebels' difficulties in establishing the New Republic: this is covered in books I have no intention to read.

So we can agree that violence is sometimes necessary. If we were to then agree that liberal democracy is a dictatorship of one class over the rest, and that the interests of the ruling class are directly antagonistic and irreconcilable to those below it, then we can see how easy it is to justify a violent insurrection and subsequent reign of terror.

'As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side... The question as to who is to rule the country, i.e., of the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence... [There is] in history no other way of breaking the class will of the enemy except the systematic and energetic use of violence.'

It's a recurring theme in history, and popular media, that revolutions end up recreating the old order with new faces in charge. Some descriptions of Tsarist Russia from the 1800s can be mistaken for descriptions of Soviet Russia, for example this one by the Marquis de Custine, who visited in 1838:

'It is a country in which the government says what it pleases, because it alone has the right to speak. In Russia fear replaces, that is paralyses, thought... Nor in this country is historical truth any better respected than the sanctity of oaths... even the dead are exposed to the fantasies of him who rules the living.'

Trotsky defends the Soviets against charges that they are using exactly the same tactics as tsarism by pointing out that the Soviets are doing it to the bad guys, the capitalists, the landlords, the bourgeoisie - not the good guys, the proletariat. 

'Do you grasp this... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.' 

'Who aims at the end cannot reject the means.'

The end goal is, of course, a socialist utopia. The Soviet state is described as the transition towards true socialism, when the state 'will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune'. This is where Trotsky sounds most like a religious fanatic awaiting his preferred apocalypse. Actually, 'awaiting' is perhaps the wrong word, since in his mind the Marxist apocalypse is already here: he is living through it. As the Christian Heaven on Earth is preceded by Armageddon, the final battle between Light and Dark, so too is True Socialism preceded by the Revolutionary Epoch, the final battle between Proletariat and Bourgeoisie:

'The road to socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the state. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the state, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the most ruthless form of state, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction... civilised humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch; all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary spiritual armoury and buttress of organisation.'

During the transitional stage, forced labour is necessary. Trotsky uses a few arguments to justify this. In wartime, it is fairly standard for states to conscript soldiers; it is necessary for the defence of the realm. The communists are extending this principle to the militarisation of labour: as conscripting soldiers in wartime is necessary and acceptable, why not the rest of the labour force? Furthermore, labour under capitalism was wage slavery, made compulsory by the forces of economic necessity: 'freedom of labour' was a lie. 

By contrast, forced labour under communism is honest about the compulsion, and besides, at least the workers were now working for the Communist Party, who have their interests in mind, not some heartless capitalist; and at least the compulsion is only temporary during this transitional stage. Once we reach True Socialism 'there will be no compulsion... under socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labour, etc, etc... under socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the state.'

'As all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labour service is sketched into our constitution and our labour code.'

'The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet state: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet state, under its orders in every direction - for it is his state.' 

Trotsky defends the Soviets against the charge that they are slave state no better than the Egyptian regime who used slaves to build the pyramids by pointing out that the Egyptian slaves were working in the Pharaoh's interests, while the Soviet workers are working in the interests of the workers, as represented by the Communist Party.

Parts of this book make Trotsky sound like someone who has never organised any industry or enterprise before, trying to explain why practices he and his mates had previously being railing against have persisted after the revolution. These are the funniest parts of the book, because he's defending practices associated with capitalism while desperately trying to rebrand them.

For example, he describes the importance of 'rivalry' in boosting economic production. He wants us to believe that this 'rivalry' is different to capitalist competition. Under socialism, 'rivalry will acquire an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express itself in striving to perform the greatest possible service for one's village, region, town, or the whole of society, and to receive in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or just internal satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But in the difficult period of transition... rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or lesser degree bound up with a striving to guarantee for oneself one's own requirements.' He also explains why some people need to be paid more than others, if they've 'done more for the general interest' than the lazy, careless, or disorganised.

Elsewhere, he defends 'One-Man Management' of factories against critics who argue the factories should be under the control of the workers themselves. Trotsky argues that (a) the factories are controlled by representatives of the Communist Party, who represent the working class, therefore the factories are actually under worker control; and (b) one-man management is more efficient, because it means a single person is ultimately responsible and accountable for the factory; and besides, if a worker is interested in management, perhaps one day when they're a bit more experienced they can earn a promotion and become a manager themselves!

'The foremost, intelligent, determined administrator naturally strives to take the factory into his hands as a whole, and to show both to himself and to others that he can carry out his work.' Gee, I wonder what it would be like if that administrator owned the factory.

To understand how Trotsky got to these views, we do need to understand him in historical context. This book was written during the Russian Civil War, after the great conflagration of the First World War. His views were shaped by the traumas of war and political repression under the Tsar. After the revolution, the Bolshevik regime was fighting off enemies on multiple fronts while trying to figure out how to govern effectively and bring about socialism. It is also worth reflecting on how terrible the conditions of the working classes were globally at that time, and also specifically in Russia under the Tsar. Add in Marx's and others' many criticisms of capitalism, many of which still hold up.

Communism, like Christianity 2000 years ago, offered people radical hope for a better world following an imminent apocalypse. The Communist Manifesto's famous finale, 'The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.' is not so effective these days in the developed world: most people can point to many things they could lose other than metaphorical chains; we live lives of relative comfort, both in the global picture and certainly compared to the working classes of a century ago.

However, I can certainly understand communism's appeal when you're living in a slum, when you have long working hours in terrible conditions and a dead-end job with no hope of advancement or change. If you're already living under wage slavery, why not communist slavery? At least that's only temporary while you wait for Heaven on Earth.

I did not find this book 'an absolute banger'; I found it relentlessly tedious, unpleasant, and nonsensical. I can certainly understand wanting and hoping for a better system than what we have now, but the answer - if this book, supposedly 'one of Trotsky's best', is anything to go by - is not to be found in Trotskyism.