Imagined Realities
This week: the British right follow Elon down the rabbit hole; when London built a bypass for cows; and the real, sort of, unicorn.
How can you know what other people think? How can you gauge when your views are shared by a substantial number of people, and when they’re just, well, weird?
For most of us this doesn’t really matter, except in the sense of not making everyone go suddenly silent by saying something inadvertently outré over dinner. Indeed, in some lines of work, by which I of course mean my own, having mad, unhinged opinions can be a positive boon. But politicians actually need a handle on what people are thinking: you can neither lead nor follow public opinion if you don’t know what it is.
Today, of course, there’s an entire industry dedicated to helping with such things, and so accustomed have we become to an endless supply of fresh polls that people keep talking about them now even though the next general election is so far away as to render them all but meaningless. Much of the time, though, politicians have relied on a proxy. What Britain cares about is assumed to be what its media talks about.
Which is a problem because it’s increasingly unclear that those two things line up at all. Newspapers have always been prone to focusing on the weird obsessions of their editors and owners, but the need to actually sell to a broad readership historically kept them in touch with something resembling consensus reality, at least among whichever segment of the electorate they represented. In recent years, though, the broad readership has collapsed, but the weird obsessions remain. It’s easy to imagine that front pages, laundered through newspaper reviews and BBC coverage, can tell you what the electorate thinks. But quite often today, the only people whose opinions they reflect are the ageing minority of the electorate that still buys a newspaper – or worse still, Paul Dacre.
This has been a problem for the British right for some time, and if they didn’t realise that there was a world beyond the newspapers before the Mail greeted the Truss/Kwarteng catastrophe with “At last! A true Tory budget”, then they certainly should have realised afterwards. Now, though, the problem seems to be getting worse. Because now the person frontbench Tories are falling over themselves to please is not even someone with a British newspaper to run.
Elon Musk is not British; Elon Musk does not know this country. Yet he tweets obsessively about it at all hours, in a manner that speaks of a man who’s spent too much time on the wrong bits of the internet until it’s seemed to leave him quite badly unwell (a story that’s only unusual because he happens to own the bit of the internet in question). He also, and you’d think this would be a factor for the Tories in deciding whether to take his side, has decided that Nigel Farage is insufficiently right-wing.
No matter: he’s attacking the Labour party, so the Tories see him as an ally. Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick has followed Musk’s lead blaming the grooming gangs scandal on “people from alien cultures”, which is not so much a dog whistle as a bullhorn. His leader Kemi Badenoch has shown the political acumen for which she’s justly famous by steadfastly defending a colleague who everyone knows would stab her in the back for her job. Senior Tories are said to be concerned, but none that I can see have said as much in public, and James Cleverly, who was meant to be the sensible one, has suggested the real problem is Keir Starmer’s use of the words “far right” (“He is the best recruiting sergeant for extremism”).1
Highlighting Musk’s obsession with Pakistani grooming gangs may serve to momentarily embarrass the government. It is not clear why it will persuade anyone to vote for a Tory party that was in office until July and did nothing about it. Worse, it means that the party is handing direction of British national discourse to one mad foreigner who hasn’t had enough sleep, and has made clear that it will line up with him against its democratically-elected government. At least when Rupert Murdoch was the guy with this influence, he had a financial stake in not moving too far from the electorate. Musk doesn’t even have that.
The other big story coming out of Mar-a-Lago this week is that President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to take Panama, Greenland or even Canada by force. It is clear neither that he is joking, nor that Elon Musk won’t noisily support him if he tries this. What will James Cleverly tweet then, I wonder?
When London built a bypass for cows
Between 1853 and 1870 the prefect of the Seine, the man known to history as Baron Haussmann, set out to remake Paris. Out went overcrowded and unsanitary medieval neighbourhoods; in came wide boulevards, new parks and squares to provide access to green space, and an entirely new water and sewage system. Haussmann’s work was criticised – for its careless approach to the city’s history and its heartless approach to its residents; for the suspicion the boulevards were not merely a gift to Paris but an attack on the Parisians, an attempt to prevent yet another bloody revolution by creating roads too wide for barricades. But it reshaped Paris, and created the city we’re familiar with today.
London has generally eschewed such grands projets in its street plan. There were the Embankments, of course – Victoria in the east, Chelsea in the west, Albert across the river – designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette to replace marshes with new roads and flood defences, not to mention convenient places to keep a sewer or a Tube line. There was Shaftesbury Avenue, built from 1877 and clearly influenced by Hausmann’s work in being both a wide new thoroughfare and an aggressive act of slum clearance. But new urban road plans have frequently ended up as little more than stubs, because of the fact residents kick up a fuss until they go away again. Even after the Great Fire, Christopher Wren’s extensive rebuilding plans fell by the wayside because the locals had rebuilt most of the city before he’d made it as far as his drawing board.
There was one such scheme that did come off, however, and which still affects the shape of the city today. It was, in a manner that feels telling of the difference between Britain and France, privately built. And it got around the “We don’t do that sort of thing here” problem in the same way the M25 would later: by being built outside the city altogether. One of central London’s main roads, a traffic-smogged chasm that anyone who has so much as visited the city has almost certainly been to, was originally built as a bypass.
Oh, and its intended users were mainly expected to be cows and sheep.
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