The Heart of the Problem

This week: where is “central” anyway? But first: on Germany, and the English language media’s strange enthusiasm for fascists.

Good news first. The far right German party AfD underperformed its polling, despite Elon Musk and JD Vance’s attempts to boost it. It remains shut out of the federal government by strong norms in Germany against working with the far-right (there are, to be fair, compelling historic reasons for these). And while Friedrich Merz, the man all but certain to be the next chancellor, may have flirted with copying some of the AfD’s anti-immigrant rhetoric for electoral reasons, he, unlike certain other centre right politicians one could name, understands that a line needs to be drawn. All good things.

On the other side of the ledger, though, AfD still got 20% of the vote, came second in both share and seats, and topped the polls in all five states of the former East Germany. These things are not good. What’s more, while the electoral math does make a grand coalition of right (CDU/CSU) and left (SDP) plausible – which likely means a more stable government than the three-party coalition that preceded it – it surely might rankle a little that the SDP can have its worst result in decades, lose two fifths of their vote, and still end up in government. It’s also not clear that a coalition of left and right will be able to work together well enough to actually solve any of the country’s problems. I don’t know nearly enough about German politics to know how worried to be here – but even from my position of ignorance I can see some glaring downsides to this result.

Something that is a good thing or a bad thing depending on your politics, and what you think about forms of pacifism that start to feel unnervingly pro-Russian, is the unexpectedly strong performance for a party even further to the left: Die Linke (literally, “the left”), which won 8.7% of the vote and 64 MPs. That was driven by a particular demographic, whose obvious dissatisfaction has gone weirdly under-discussed. As Professor Rob Ford asks: “Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand ‘what is going on with young men?’ posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all?”

Sexism is surely a factor, if only because sexism is almost always a factor. But it’s hardly the first time that English-language media has been breathless with excitement about a big election result for the far-right, while noticeably unmoved by similar enthusiasm for the far-left, so it’s worth going searching for other reasons why.

One I think we can dismiss is the power of novelty. On the UK’s election night last year, in the long hours of dead air between that exit poll and actual results, most of the chat concerned the unnerving Reform surge. The reason we were given for this was that everyone knew Labour was going to win, so the media immediately moved on to talking about the new information. I’m not sure the inevitability of a big Labour majority had actually reached much of the public – lord knows, certain papers did their best to stop it – but even if that were true it can’t apply here because AfD underperformed and it’s Die Linke that provided the novelty. So once again, we are left with “the English-language media likes stories about fascists, for some reason”.

The theory that certain more conspiracist bits of the internet prefer is that the media has an institutional interest in talking down the left. Fascism may be horrifying – but at least it’s not a threat to capital. That, given the finances of the average media owner and their editors, is surely in the mix somewhere: a for-profit media organisation is hardly likely to get excited about the case for revolution. But given that threats to those interests are still news, there must surely be more going on.

There are other reasons the “far-right on the march” story might appeal. It’s easier to spot and tell than the one about Die Linke because the results are obvious rather than something you have to drill down into crosstabs to spot. It’s an easier sell to the powers that be, too, because bad news stories are always an easier sell, and also because everybody else is writing them so no one is going to yell at you for missing the real story. The sense of a Europe hovering above the abyss is exciting, too, and a not insignificant proportion of the people who go into journalism are history nerds who always kind of wanted to cover a world on fire.

But a big factor, I think, is that sometimes that idea that the media is most interested in new things is the opposite of the truth. Just as stories about minor plane crashes get more prominence after big ones, or unpleasant but routine crimes get more attention during moral panics, perhaps stories about far-right success are getting more prominence because they fit into the larger story we’ve been telling – and, indeed, living through – since last November or 2016 or whenever you care to start the count. A left-wing surge doesn’t fit that meta-narrative, even when it’s real.

The media may sometimes favour simple explanations, but these often explain its own behaviour little better than they explain anything else. There are a lot of different reasons the far-right gets more coverage than the far-left. Relatively few of them can be reduced to a secret hunger for jackboots.

But overstating the threat of a slide into fascism may be just as dangerous as understating it, and being able to explain something is not the same as being able to stop it. What we do about any of this, I have very little idea.

Some book shops at which I shall be talking about borders

If you happen to be in London on Thursday 10th April, I will be talking about A History of the World in 47 Borders at the big Waterstones on Piccadilly with the Critic’s sketchwriter Rob Hutton. You can get your ticket here.

Alternatively, if you happen to be in Liverpool on Monday 14th April, why not come hear me talk about A History of the World in 47 Borders with Neil Atkinson off The Anfield Wrap at the Waterstones in Liverpool One? More details of that one here.

I’ll be doing at least a couple more of these, and will let you know when and where as soon as I can. If you happen to have a bookshop / literary festival / podcast / living room, I love the sound of my own voice, so please do hit reply.

The Central Question

“A few years ago, perhaps pre-Covid, a restaurant like this in London would most likely have been found in what my kids call Central and I call the West End. (Sidebar: when did this change? How dare the young people come up with a name which makes so much more sense?)”

So runs an aside in a recent restaurant review by the food critic Jay Rayner. It’s not actually what the column is about – it’s about a bistro, in Queen’s Park – but, Londoners being who they are, most of the chat it sparked has been about the vexed question of what exactly counts as “central”. That seems to me to be more than enough of an excuse to explore the issue here, so let’s have at it.

There are, it seems to me, a number of different ways you can approach this question.

Ol’ London town

London exists because some Roman army engineers who arrived in the invasion of 43CE concluded that the site of London Bridge was the easternmost point at which they could plausibly bridge the big river that was in the legions’ way. The original London is today’s City of London, the Roman settlement built on the northern side of that bridge. That means that the original centre of London must be logically in roughly the centre of that district, just to the north of that bridge. Call it Bank Junction.

Except no one would call Bank Junction the centre of London today. That may be because, as early as the 3rd century, the city began to decline, and sometime after the Romans pulled out in the early 5th it was abandoned altogether. When the Saxons relaunched the city as a sort of trading post – we don’t know why or when; bloody dark ages – it was about a mile to the west of the original Roman city. The new name “Lundunwic” persists on the modern street plan as “Aldwych”: the “old wic” (basically, settlement).

No one would call Aldwych the centre of London either, although it’s surely closer. That’s because…

Centre points