The Last War

This week: is the British government making a horrible, avoidable error? Also: a helpful guide to primates; and some notes on Lisbon’s transport network.

So, my holiday – my first proper holiday, with sun and sights and a pool, in more years than I care to remember – was great. I walked a lot. I read six books in a week. I climbed a big hill to look at a ruined castle, and enjoyed the best views of anywhere I’ve ever reached on foot. Honestly, holidays are great. I think they could catch on, I really do.

One of the main purposes of this holiday was to really, properly switch off. On my various trips around the UK I’ve always had half an eye on what’s going on back in Westminster, and have acquired a bad habit of writing when I’m meant to be on leave, either because I feel strongly or because, well, somebody asked me to. Abroad though, even though I have access to the exact same email and social media as I do at home, it’s somehow easier to ignore all that. So I did. It was glorious.

That, though, made it all the more depressing to arrive back in London, refreshed and autumnal and ready for a new term, only to learn that the Prime Minister had given a major speech with the theme of (I paraphrase, but not by much) everything is awful and it’s going to get worse. 

This should really have been no surprise: things are awful, our economy has barely grown on a per head basis in a decade and a half, and “the Tories left a worse mess than we thought” is simultaneously 

a) the exact message a new Labour government was inevitably going to push at this point; and 

b) almost certainly true. Keir Starmer’s speech in the Downing Street rose garden was clearly pitchrolling for this autumn’s budget, and we can expect to hear upsettingly regular use of the phrase “difficult choices” in the weeks to come. The event itself, on 30 October, is likely to bring forth a flurry of tax rises and probably – worse, given the state of this country – departmental spending cuts, too. 

There is one way, though, in which the pitch remains distinctly unrolled. Labour will not raise taxes on working people, the party has promised: that’s clearly an attempt to overcome the party’s historic reputation for doing exactly that, which while not entirely fair is clearly one reason it’s won relatively few elections. The electoral logic of keeping income tax, national insurance and VAT at their existing levels is clear.

The administrative logic, though, is rather murkier. Those three taxes are by some distance the government’s biggest fiscal levers: promising not to touch them is promising to govern with one hand tied behind its back. In the dying days of the previous administration, what’s more, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt cut National Insurance twice, in essence giving voters an unaffordable four pence tax cut in an attempt to bribe them into giving his government another chance. It didn’t work – the first cut had no visible impact on polling, which makes it all the more baffling there was a second. 

One possible explanation for it is that he was setting a trap for Labour, cutting a tax he knew they’d have to raise again, just to stop the state from falling over. You can understand why the government would rather not walk straight into this trap. The only slight problem is that sidestepping it could actually make things worse. At the moment, after all, the government has as much political capital as it ever will, and the opposition is essentially absent, spending months on a leadership contest in which the leading candidate has decided to take the fight to [checks notes] Doctor Who. This is the single best time for difficult choices, which is exactly what that Rose Garden speech was all about. 

If the party doesn’t raise national insurance to the level it was as recently as four months ago, though, it’s forgoing revenues of £9bn, vastly more than it’s likely to find from any other single tax change. It may avoid bad headlines today, when they can’t really hurt it – but it’s storing them up for the future. Raise taxes now, and by the next election everyone might remember it as another aspect of how the Tories screwed everything up. Do it in two years, or preside over the consequences of more avoidable austerity, and it’s much more likely that Labour will take the blame.

Almost exactly a year ago, I got in trouble with certain parts of the internet for a column headlined, “Once it wins, Labour can set the terms of debate”. My point was not, as some seemed to believe, that Keir Starmer was basically Jesus and that anyone who said otherwise an apostate: it was that being in government came with a huge quantity of soft power to drive coverage and re-define fiscal rules, and that, if it wanted to fix things, it should use it.

At the time, I was quietly confident the upper echelons of the party understood this a lot more than some of my critics: one frontbencher, now a member of the Cabinet, sent me a DM that can be roughly translated as, “LOL, we know”. Now, though, I’m not so sure. 

Oh, do you have a book out, Jonn? You hadn’t mentioned it

The good news, according to a freedom of information request which the Spectator’s James Heale was kind enough to share, is that A History of the World in 47 Borders is the most borrowed book in the House of Commons Library since the election! The slightly bathetic news is that’s because it’s literally the only book to be taken out twice. Oh well, it’s not been that long, and also the news made Politico, so all publicity. 

You can, should you somehow have failed to heed this suggestion already, buy the book from Amazon, Waterstones, Stanfords, Foyles and Bert’s Books. Also, good news for North Americans and Elledge completists: the Region One version of the book, mildly re-titled and amended for your more delicate sensibilities, is out from The Experiment on 8 October. 

A brief guide to the different sorts of primate

1. An order of mammals which have large brains relative to their bodies, powerful eyes but a relatively weak sense of smell, and, generally speaking, thumbs – a series of characteristics originally developed to adapt to tree top life. 

You are – forgive me for saying so – almost certainly a primate yourself. (Caveat left in because one doesn’t like to presume.) You are almost certainly likely to be rather smaller than the eastern gorilla, a critically endangered great ape native to the slopes of Uganda, Rwanda and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the male of which is, at up to 205kg, the largest known primate (and any larger would, one imagines, have made their presence felt). But you can take some comfort from the fact you are probably rather bigger than the adorable, and indeed adorably named, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur, another critically-endangered species under 10cm long and weighing just 30g. Other primates, should you want any, include baboons, monkeys, lemurs and so forth.

A panoply of primates courtesy of Wikipedia. I’m including this mainly because I wonder how that pair of humans feel about being included.

There are several hundred species of primates – estimates range from 376, to 524, which is let’s be honest quite the range – and new ones are still being discovered, several this decade alone. The word, incidentally, is taken from the Latin “primus” via the Old French “primat”, and was chosen by the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linneaus, to mean “the highest order of animals”. 

Which is fair enough, if a little self-aggrandising. (What can you expect from a bloke who, despite being from Stockholm, went around calling himself both Carolus Linnæus and Carl von Linné.) The only slight problem with this decision is that it means we now associate the word mainly with monkeys, which makes it odd that, in a much older use of the term, it also refers to…

2. ...archbishops in certain Christian churches, as a way of highlighting that they’re the most important ones. So, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also the Primate of All England; there are Catholic, Anglican and Ukrainian Orthodox Primates of Canada; there are 36 other Anglican Primates who since 1979 have periodically held Primates Meetings; and so on. There is absolutely nothing remotely funny about any of this.