About the blog

This blog has been running since I began to contemplate “hanging up my boots” after a career which had started in the late 1960s in “planning” work, moved on to economics and public administration and finished as a “consultant” in ex-communist countries in something called “institutional development”. You might think that after 16 years this blog has said most of what there is to say – but I keep coming across books which throw new light on things. Most blogs have a specialist focus, be it economic, political, sociological or cultural and apply that lens to the latest fashion of the day. This blog celebrates instead the butterfly approach and depends very much on what catches my fancy – generally a book or article, sometimes an incident, painting or piece of music. And I do like to offer excerpts from the books and articles I feel positive about – as distinct from offering opinions. It’s time, however, to do one of my periodic stock-takings of the blog. When it started (in 2009) it set out three aims -    

• “This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved 

• in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

• I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time 

• nor inclination to read widely.

• A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. 

• What have we done with our life? What is important to us?”

The first two objectives are still important. After 12 years, it’s fairly obvious from the unfinished nature of my books on administrative reform (“Change for the Better?”) and on social change (“What is to be Done?”) that there’s still work to be done – although I often feel I’m just going round in circles. And I’m still finding fascinating books and continue to have this urge to share relevant insights with posterity. But I should probably stop imposing these rather forbidding reading lists.

But the blog has been weak on the third purpose. Indeed one friend has queried the absence of the personal touch – feeling that the tone is too clinical and aseptic. And it’s certainly fair comment that the blog is a bit “scholastic”. A couple of other friends have indeed called me a “scholar” – which I used to take as a compliment. Perhaps they meant bloodless!?

As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) should, certainly, loom larger. Charles Handy is a real inspiration here – someone constantly challenging himself and making fresh choices every decade or so about where to put the energies and skills he’s been endowed with  

One of my favourite fellow-bloggers is Canadian Dave Pollard who is constantly offering valuable insights from his life experience – he is a few years younger than me. A lot of this touches on inter-personal relations – one of my weak areas. In that spirit let me apply the Johari Window

	strong Known to me weak
Strong Known to others Weak	Open “The Arena”	Blind The “blind corner”
	Hidden “The Façade”	Unknown

Our public self is something we try to control – but rarely succeed in. People notice things about us which we ourselves are not necessarily aware of (our blind corners). Friends should be helpful here – but we often resent critical comment and they soon learn to shut up…

From 1990 I’ve had a nomadic life – living in some ten different countries – generally leader of teams in which I would make a few new friends. Both the contexts and my particular role were very different from those in which I had spent the previous 20 years.

But I was very aware of this – even so, it took me almost a decade before I was fully up to speed and confident that my skills were producing results. Those skills were broadly the same mix of political and scholastic I had used in my previous life - but the context was so very different. And my new skill was being sensitive to that and making the appropriate adjustments to the tools I used. 

As a Team Leader, I had, of course, to be sensitive to the strengths and weaknesses of the members of the team – but it’s almost impossible to shake off one’s cultural assumptions and I carried the baggage then of a Brit still proud of what our democratic tradition had given the world (!!!). In the past decade, in Bulgaria and Romania, I've deepened my understanding of cultural contexts - and am still learning..... 

I write in English – but literally a handful of Brits read the blog. Americans are its biggest fans making up 30% of readers (for which I’m so deeply grateful) - with Russians, curiously, coming in next at 15% and no other country having more than 5%. But the scale of non-English readership is an argument for keeping the posts short. 

Because I have the time to read widely; live on Europe’s edge; and have been out of my home country for more than 30 years, I have perhaps developed a bit of the outsider’s perspective….But I remain painfully aware of my shortcomings in the inter-personal field - I learned so much when I first did the Belbin test.... 

Charles Handy's Inside Organisations - 21 ideas for managers includes the Johari window as one of the ideas. It's a delightful and easy read which I strongly recommend

What I am really trying to say is that I have to recognise that I have always been a bit “distant” in my relations with others. Indeed, as a young politician who was quickly given responsibilities, I was seen as a bit arrogant – when that was the last thing I actually felt. It was rather a defence mechanism. Ernest Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful") put our usual approach into superb perspective in 1973 when he wrote -

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning

· learning about things
- learning about oneself
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"

I was slow to learn about myself – let alone the other dimensions. Despite undergoing some sessions of psychotherapy in the late 1980s, I was too much of a “word merchant” to allow mere words to get inside my brain and challenge my being.

It’s only recently I’ve been willing to be open about that experience all of 30 plus years ago which, at the time, it wasn’t possible to discuss. Philip Toynbee was one of the rare people who had actually written about it – I learned later that Winston Churchill used the euphemism of “black dog” to refer to his episodes. And about the only popular book about the subject was Dorothy Rowe’s Depression – a way out of your prison (1983). How times have changed – with credit being due to characters such as Stephen Fry and Alasdair Campbell who were amongst the first to go public and to encourage others to be open about a condition which touches most of us at some time in our lives.

One of my favourite books is Robin Skynner and John Clease’s Life – and how to survive it (1993) A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the initial stages of everyone’s development – as babies weaning ourselves from our mothers, learning about the wider environment and coping with our feelings. The understanding the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexibility and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

It took a massive change of role and circumstances before I came across an early edition of “A Manager’s Guide to Self-Development” by Mike Pedler et al which made me aware of a range of self-evaluation tools such as the Belbin Test of team roles which you can try out on yourself here. When I did it for the first time with my team of the moment, it was quite a revelation. I had assumed that I was a “leader”. What I discovered was that I was a “resource person” ie good at networking and sharing information – which was exactly right.

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) was also a revelation for me - indicating that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we (a) understand what our own style is and (b) that others think in different ways.

The authors suggest we have 5 styles – “synthetist”, “pragmatist”, “idealist”, “realist” and “analyst” and, of course, combinations thereof.

I regret now that I came late to an understanding of the interpersonal - the question I now have is how people can avoid my fate. Is it enough that there are so many books around for people to stumble on? Or should it now be an integral part of undergraduate work? Perhaps it is?
Dave Pollard is one of the few bloggers whose posts I generally read in full – always thoughtful, generally provocative. This post is typical - professing lack of interest in what people had to say about themselves in CVs or expressions of future hopes – but preferring rather to suggest……

six “leading questions” that might evoke some kind of useful sense of who someone is and what they care about - and possibly assess whether the person you’re talking with might be the potential brilliant colleague, life partner, inspiring mentor or new best friend you’ve been looking for. These are the questions:

1. 1. What adjectives or nouns would you use to describe yourself that differentiate you 

1. from most other people? When and how did these words come to apply to you?

2. 1. Describe the most fulfilling day you can imagine, some day that might realistically

   • occur in the next year. Why would it be fulfilling? What are you doing now that might 
   • increase its likelihood of happening?

   1. What do you care about, big picture, right now? What would you mourn if it disappeared?

   • What do you ache to have in your life? What would you work really long and hard to 

   • conserve or achieve? How did you come to care about this?

   1. What is your purpose, right now? Not your role or occupation, but the thing you’re 

   • uniquely gifted and inspired to be doing, something the world needs. What would elate 
   • you if you achieved it, today, this month, in the next year? What would devastate you 

   • if you failed, or didn’t get to try? How did this become your purpose?

   1. What’s your basic belief about why you, and other humans, exist? Not what you believe 

   • is right or important (or what you, or humans ‘should’ do or be), but why you think 
   • we are the way we are now, and why you think we evolved to be where we are. It’s an 

   • existential question, not a moral one. How did you come to this belief?

   1. What’s your basic sense of what the next century holds for our planet and our 

   • civilization? How do you imagine yourself coping with it? How did you come to this 

   • belief?

• These are not easy questions, and asking them might prove intimidating or even threatening to some people, which is why in the last post I suggested volunteering your own answer to each question yourself first, in a form such as “Someone asked me the other day… and I told them…”. It’s also why there are supplementary questions to each, to get the person you’re asking started. And the last supplementary question in each group lends itself to telling a story, since that’s what we’re most comfortable with. Even then, some of these questions will stop many people cold, which might tell you something about them right there.

Return of the Strong Gods

Two books have come to my notice – the first Return of the Strong Gods – nationalism, populism and the future of the west by Rusty Reno (2019) is a right-wing intellectual history of the past 80 years which attacks a hero of mine – Karl Popper and his idea of the “Open Society”

The second, Anger, Fear, Domination - dark passions and the power of political 

rhetoric is a small book (120pp) by William Galston (2025). The first was reviewed 

thus 

Reno’s argument is that after the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, the ruling 

classes of the West chose to create societies of “openness, weakening and disenchantment,” 

in an explicit attempt to prevent the “return of the strong gods”—“the objects of men’s love 

and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that united societies.” Rather than 

simply trying to wall out only the terrible strong gods, the ruling classes chose to wall 

them all out: truth along with fascism; loyalty along with Communism. 
He starts by acknowledging post-liberals such as Patrick Deneen and (an early voice) 

Alasdair MacIntyre, and if I had not read this book, I would have guessed that Reno 

mostly agrees with them. Yet, after some wavering, comes down on the side of the 

Enlightenment—that is, of liberalism, of atomized freedom, and the destruction of all 

unchosen bonds in a desperate quest for total emancipation. For Reno, we find, it was 

not 1789, but 1945, which was the year that it all went wrong. 

The book starts with a bang...

... the emphasis on openness and weakening in highly theorized literary criticism and cultural studies in universities, often under the flag of critique and deconstruction, and in popular calls for diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusivity, all of which entail a weakening of boundaries and opening of borders (p8).

Nor is the cultural influence of the postwar consensus confined to the left. The same insistence on openness and weakening is found in libertarianism as well, which seeks cultural deregulation so that individuals are not constrained by shared norms.

It is felt in free-market economic theory and sociobiological analysis of politics and culture, both of which adopt a reductive view of human motivation that disenchants public life. Openness, weakening, and disenchantment are at play in postwar sociology, psychology, and even theology. In every instance, they rise to prominence because they are seen as necessary to prevent the return of the strong gods…..I want to understand how the West was reconstructed after 1945 in accord with openness and weakening and how they debilitate us today, threatening to destroy the Western tradition they are meant to redeem.

Today, the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems.

Unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the “we” that is the political subject in public life—we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica. Under these circumstances, increasingly prevalent in the West, civic life disintegrates into the struggle among private interests, and in this struggle the rich and powerful win. In the twenty-first century, oligarchy and an unaccountable elite pose a far greater threat to the future of liberal democracy than does the return of Hitler.

Our troubles do not stem from William of Ockham, the Reformation, John Locke, capitalism, or modern science and technology. It is true that there are atomizing, deracinating, deconsolidating trends in modernity. Many historians, philosophers and social critics have pointed them out. But it is always so. The fall of man left every civilization, every era under the law of entropy, which is why renewing shared loves and unifying loyalties is one of the primary arts of leadership. This is what we lack today.

The distempers afflicting public life today reflect a crisis of the postwar consensus, the weak gods of openness and weakening, not a crisis of liberalism, modernity, or the West. The ways of thinking that became so influential after 1945 have become unworkable and at the same time obligatory. We need to recover the “we” that unites us, but the postwar consensus is an undying zombie. The West needs to restore a sense of transcendent purpose to public (and private) life. Our time—this century—begs for a politics of loyalty and solidarity, not openness and deconsolidation. We don’t need more diversity and innovation. We need a home. And for that, we will require the return of the strong gods.

There is an interview about the book on this podcast

Rhetoric is hardly Trump’s strong point but Twitter has given him a powerful 

means of communication which is explored in Anger, Fear, Domination 

- dark passions and the power of political rhetoric 

There are a couple of video presentations here and here. 

A History of Societal Collapse

Previous posts have tried to do justice to the idea of collapse. 

Luke Kemp, of Cambridge University, has just published a voluminous (almost 700 

pages) book on the subject Goliath’s Curse – the history and future of societal collapse 

(2025) which I find rather disappointing since, despite its subtitle, it doesn’t try to 

summarise the previous work in the field. 

I’ve extracted the following text from his Epilogue

OUR FRAGILE FUTURE

We live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads. Since the invention of the atom bomb the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear war at least a dozen times.

The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago. Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer viruses at the speed of an internet connection.

The better-known and more deeply studied threats of nuclear war and climate change are joined by new, more hypothetical technological terrors.

In 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and other luminaries (strangely including the CEOs of the main companies building these new AI systems, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind) released a statement warning against the risk of human extinction from AI. They fear that an uncontrolled, ultra-intelligent machine whose interests are not aligned with those of humanity (or at least most of us) will either destroy or enslave us. Other scholars, including biological scientists, have warned of advances in bioengineering that could create doomsday diseases – far more contagious and deadly than anything that has ever existed. And those are just the present threats. Who knows what new hazards rapid technological change could conjure in the coming decades. The confluence of these different threats has led some to call our current predicament the ‘metacrisis’, ‘the precipice’, or a ‘global polycrisis’.

Decreasing nuclear stockpiles, slashing carbon emissions, and making our societies more democratic are all completely feasible, and doing so in the long term will mean escaping these traps and digging up the root causes of existential risk. We’ll need to do what few societies have successfully done: kill Goliath.

Collapse may seem inescapable. This is an illusion. Most of the challenges we face are entirely solvable. If our world falls apart in the cold of a nuclear winter or the unending blaze of climate change, it won’t be because there was nothing we could have done. There are many ways to reduce the risk of global collapse, to defeat Goliath, and even actions that individuals can take.

We need to introduce open democracy, with deliberative juries and assemblies creating national policies for governments and providing oversight of corporations. If decision-makers are randomly selected from society, we will no longer be selecting for those who crave status and power or who rank higher in the dark triad. The constant cycling through new citizens to make decisions will also help ensure no one is in authority long enough (or holds enough power) to be corrupted.

There are many other options, such as banning the revolving door between regulators and industry. Corporations such as Exxon or the East India Company have been just as destructive as empires, and firms today are less accountable and less democratic than most states. Corporations could similarly be democratized by reforming them into large-scale worker cooperatives governed by workers alongside deliberative juries, and with an overriding legal goal of providing social and environmental benefits, not short-term returns to investors.

Levelling political power won’t be enough. Even a deep democracy that uses citizens’ assemblies and juries, as well as digital technology to carry out regular direct votes, will eventually be undermined if some people have billions of dollars with which to rig any system we come up with. One could argue that we have democracy and massive inequality in the world today, and that the two are not in tension. It’s a mistaken idea. What we ordinarily call democracy – systems in which a subset of people (who are aggressively propagandized by political marketers and billionaire-owned media empires) vote every four to five years for a tiny number of (usually rich) representatives who are funded and lobbied by corporations (for whom they frequently work afterwards), who then enact policies which usually better represent elite interests than popular opinion – is better described as an oligarchy with democratic furnishings.

It is far more inclusive than most governments throughout history, but that is a low bar compared to what is possible. Even this threadbare democracy is being frayed by increasing wealth inequality. It is no coincidence that (with a slight time lag) democracy started backsliding after inequality began rising across the world in the 1970s. Inequality in one form of power or another will eventually spill into others: the rich buy elections, overly powerful generals launch coups, and autocrats amass fortunes.

Wealth becoming more unequal may be close to an iron law throughout history, but reversing it is surprisingly easy. The simplest way is through taxation. The US had an income tax of above 90 per cent on the highest earners from 1944 through to 1963 (the highest rate in the US is now 37 per cent). It didn’t lead to an economic bust. It actually helped to usher in an economic golden age for the US. A highly progressive taxation system should be combined with an even higher tax on wealth such as land and stocks.

Other measures include placing a cap on wealth, $10 million for example (a level that is well beyond what any individual needs), or capping the income of the highest earners within companies at five times that of the lowest-paid worker.

Democratic Control of Information and the Military; One of the best ways to distribute the control of information is to break up existing monopolies, specifically in big tech and the media. This could mean creating new legislation as well as rigorously implementing existing anti-trust tools, such as the Sherman Act and Clayton Act in the US, which have already been used to block big mergers.

Rebalancing power will inevitably require increased protest and activism in the coming decades. Yet governments have made a concerted recent effort to curtail the right to protest, such as through the UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing, and Courts Act 2022, or the 323 different bills that have been introduced in the US since 2017 that restrict the right to protest, and even encourage violence against peaceful protesters. Finding ways to roll these back and unshackle concerned citizens will be critical to levelling power and holding the Agents of Doom to account.

This is not a complete blueprint for solving our problems. Trying to foist a vision of utopia on the world has never ended well. Instead, we should democratize the world, level power, reduce Goliath fuel, reduce existential risk, and see what world blossoms from this new civilization.

Other recommedations include

• Don’t Be a Dick; First, I propose a simple pledge to not be a dick. This is a pledge to not work for, invest in, or support any firm, institute, or individual that significantly contributes to global catastrophic risk. Don’t work for an Agent of Doom, whether it is an AGI lab, a fossil-fuel company, or an arms manufacturer. No institution should be financing our global descent, and no one should support one which does.

• Be a Democrat; Second, practise democracy. Democracy is not just a form of government; it is a culture and a way of life. One that all of us need to recapture. Be a democrat: don’t just vote every few years, but join a union, join an activist group (while there is no group fighting against all the sources of catastrophic risk, there hopefully will be one soon), advocate for workplace democracy, and discuss political matters in a productive way – whether it be nuclear weapons or mass surveillance or climate collapse – with friends and family members.

• Vote Against the Apocalypse; Third is voting. You are first and foremost a citizen, not a consumer. While democracy is more than voting, voting is a fundamental part of democratic practice in the modern world. If you know about climate change, a nuclear winter, and the other real risks to the survival of our species but base your vote on who promises to cut your taxes, then you are culpable for our current path towards self-destruction. It is a travesty that no election to date has been decided by the candidates’ positions on nuclear weapons and climate change. There is no reason to contribute to that trend in the future.

• Don’t Be Dominated; Fourth is to re-cultivate the counter-dominance intuitions that guided us through the Palaeolithic. Oppose domination in all your relationships, whether they be personal, family, or workplace. Whenever you come across a hierarchy, whether it is based on wealth, gender, or age, ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.

See also Collapse, you say?
Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
Collapse You Say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022

A Million Readers – and counting

I’ve apparently just had my millionth click and registered my highest monthly 

audience 60,000 so far (with two weeks still to go). Many thanks to my readers! 

IMMIGRATION as the number one issue in Europe and the US

For 35 years, I’ve been a foreigner living in a country in which I wasn’t born. “Ex-pat” is the name we tend to call ourselves – but that is a bit high-falutin compared with the “immigrants” that we actually are. Sam Freedman puts it well with this comment

Migration has rocketed worldwide, driven by warfare, climate change, rapid population growth in lower-income countries and the relative ease of travel. Since 1990, the number of people living outside the country of their birth has doubled to 300 million. But as well as greater supply, there has been rising demand. The birth rate in all rich countries, apart from Israel, has fallen well below the replacement rate at which population levels are stable. This is the first time in history that there has been a sustained drop in populations without war, famine or disease as a trigger. As a result, more and more countries are becoming dependent on migrant labour to sustain shrinking and ageing workforces.

And continues with this article

Compared to the years immediately after World War Two, with much of the country in rubble and a ruined economy, or the mid-1970s with runaway inflation, blackouts and a three day week our troubles are small scale. But spend a little while scrolling through X, or reading a right-wing paper, and one would think Britain was on the brink of civil war, with endless warnings of imminent ethnic conflict and a tidal wave of violent crime. Last week one of the Telegraph’s resident apocalypse correspondents Alison Pearson took to wondering when there would be a military coup to save us from the hell in which we live. Nigel Farage made a speech warning about “societal collapse” and “civil disobedience on a vast scale” in protest at immigration and crime. The Government are not being quite so hyperbolic but have been briefing about society “fraying at the edges” and the risk of more riots. Last month, culture minister Lisa Nandy talked about her concerns that the North would “go up in flames”.

It's true that there’s plenty of anger around and it is likely that we’ll see further protests 

this summer along the lines of those in Epping over the past few weeks. Some of these could 

turn violent. But summer riots, even if they happen, are hardly a new phenomenon. 

We saw them in 2001 in various northern cities following racial tensions, and in 2011 after 

the police shot Mark Duggan. The 2011 riots led to 3.5 times as many arrests as last year’s. 

In each case the damage has been done by fairly small groups catching the police by surprise 

and violence has been contained within a few days. The vast majority of Brits, regardless of 

political views, wouldn’t go anywhere near a violent riot. 72% of people thought the sentences 

for those convicted of rioting last year were either fair or not harsh enough and an even 

larger percentage said the rioters don’t speak for them. 87% said the people who cleaned up 

after the riots represent “the real Britain” compared to the rioters, one of the highest 

percentages I’ve seen on any poll.
Britain isn’t on the verge of civil war but the relentless doomerism is damaging nonetheless. 

For a start some of it, particularly from the radical right, is clearly designed to encourage 

violence and disorder. But it also stops us focusing on the real, more boring, problems of debt 

and governance. And it can be self-fulfilling even for those who wouldn’t dream of rioting. 

People’s perceptions of crime, migration, social cohesion and the economy can be warped by 

unending negativity, which then makes things worse. Public confidence really matters. 

Ben Ansell puts it best with this analysis -

OK throat-clearing over. What I want to argue today is that there are three important 

stylised facts about British public opinion over immigration.

• Stylised Fact One: National Public Support for Immigration is Thermostatic

• Stylised Fact Two: People in More Diverse Areas Like Immigration More

• Stylised Fact Three: Local Public Support is Thermostatic but only Sort Of

A lot of our public confusion comes from mixing these things up. Facts One and 

Two feel contradictory. Fact One implies that national changes matter: when 

immigration increases nationally, support for immigration goes down. 

But Fact Two implies that in places with higher levels of immigration, support for 

immigration is also higher.
In other words, the dynamics and statics of immigration public opinion work in 

opposite directions. This helps explain why the people who are most upset by 

rising immigration are in places that don’t have many migrants.
Facts One and Three by contrast, seem to go together. If local areas that see 

higher immigration become more opposed to immigration that helps explain the 

national thermostatic effect.
Facts Two and Three, on the face of it, also clash. Local areas with high levels of 

immigrant population have higher support. But local areas with higher changes in 

immigration become less supportive. It is perhaps less surprising when you 

consider that places with very proportions of non-UK residents back in 2011 

tended to have lower rates of increase, or indeed declines, compared to places 

that began as less diverse.
This split between levels and changes helps explain why our political debates 

over immigration produce so much talking past one another.
Anti-immigration commentators see rising national discontent when net migration 

rises nationally - and indeed in some localities; and they chat to fellow travellers 

who left that there London for whiter destinations.
Pro-immigration commentators point to the disconnect with on the ground experience, 

noting that their friends who live in diverse places love diversity and it’s in places 

without immigration that people seem angriest.

And all the time, the forces of sorting and selection produce geographic communities 

that don’t understand one another. Immigration can lead to balkanisation where a 

group of ethnically homogenous residents don’t talk to outsiders and become 

increasingly detached from their fellow citizens elsewhere. 

But enough about white British residents of Essex.

Recommended Reading
Select and Respect Ben Ansell (2025) article
Immigration and Freedom Chandran Kukathas (2021) rather too philosophical a book for my taste 
Exodus – immigration and multiculturalism in the 21st Century Paul Collier (2013) Collier comes 

from a richly migrant background and has produced a profoundly interesting and challenging book

Political Scientists Don't Understand the Public

One of my favourite writers is economist Branko Milanovic who has an interesting post about a conference he attended recently on the theme of “democracy and inequality”

I would like to go through a short historical excursus. The most compact definition of 

democracy is by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: 

the struggle of political parties for the largest number of votes and thus for the right to 

rule. With that very narrow definition of democracy, we must acknowledge that the 

1930s authoritarian regimes came to power observing it. NSDAP won the largest 

number of votes in the German Parliament in the last two elections in 1932 and was 

kept out of government precisely because it was believed that it would rule dictatorially 

once it came to power. Eventually large industrialists and large landowners decided to 

somehow fence Hitler in and Hindenburg gave him the mandate to form the government 

(see, for example, Henry Turner’s excellent Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power). 

They did so because the country was becoming entirely ungovernable not only in 

Parliament but in the streets. Similar autocratic and dictatorial regimes ruled practically 

all of Europe in the 1930s: Metaxas in Greece, King Alexander in Yugoslavia, 

Marshal Pilsudski and Colonel Beck in Poland, Admiral Horthy in Hungary, 

Schuschnigg in Austria, Mussolini in Italy, Smetona in Lithuania, General Franco in 

Spain, Salazar in Portugal. 

Mark Mazower describes the period very well in Dark Continent. “Dark” of course refers 

to Europe of the 1920s and the 1930s. 
What we notice is that all these leaders were popular, some very popular, and many 

came to power by democratic or semi-democratic means. Ian Kershaw in his two-volume 

biography of Hitler writes that Hitler in 1937 was surely the most popular head of state 

in Europe. His popularity increased after Anschluss, and even more so after he got most 

of Bohemia and united the Sudeten Germans who lived there.

Let us now move to the current situation. We see something similar: governments that 

ruling opinion-makers believe are bad do seem to do well in the polls. At this very moment 

the genocide in Gaza is being conducted by a fully democratically elected government 

of Israel. The invasion of Ukraine against all international norms is being led by Putin 

who won all the elections since 2000 and although there was certainly a significant 

amount of fraud nobody denies that even if the election were totally free he would win 

them. Erdoğan who is now trying to crack down on the opposition has nevertheless 

ruled Turkey for 22 years and won the elections whose outcomes were accepted by the 

opposition (except the last one where the opposition contested the validity of the vote). 

Other so-called undemocratic leaders like Orbán in Hungary, Fico in Slovakia and 

Vučić in Serbia might at some point lose elections but, so far, for more than a decade, 

they had won them all and they still enjoy significant or even majority popular support. 

Milanovic then goes on to question the difference between the thinking of 

political scientists and the wider public 

We need to reassess why there is a gap between what most political and social scientists 

believe is desirable, and what normal people who participate in the process find attractive. 

This gap has produced many other negative effects. Those who believe that people tend to vote 

wrongly disparage them by calling them malcontents, envious, deplorables or fascists. 

The other side accuses in return various elites to be supercilious and estranged 

(precisely thanks to their education and wealth) from what normal folks really want. Both

 accusations have some truth. 

And goes on to argue -

Those who attack majorities that vote wrongly seem to speak, when it comes to international 

organizations, in tongues that come from an entirely different era. They call for 

international solidarity, inter-country cooperation etc. at the time when the world is being 

divided Into political, economic and military blocs. 
It is a fantasy that under the current conditions which are likely to prevail for at least 

several decades there will be anything but the very minimal ability to do things internationally 

whether it be fighting climate change, epidemics, or coordinating monetary policies, 

rescheduling of debts, trade rules. All of it basically has to go out of the agenda and 

would be dealt with either bilaterally or from position of force by whoever is in that position. 

So the presumption that there is some general interest shared by all citizens of the world 

is entirely inapplicable in today’s times. When one hears some such speakers, one feels 

that they have been stuck in the 1990s (when such illusions could at least have been 

entertained) and to not have observed that the world has since changed. 

The two sides speak past each other: one speaks about things which existed in 

the past and no longer exist today, and the other tries to speak of the things that 

exist today but is accused of glorifying the present and of lacking aspiration or vision 

for the betterment of humankind. This leads both sides to produce unhinged, one-sided, 

and in some cases borderline crazy arguments.