what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Democratic BackSliding?

Thomas Fazi is an interesting German who has just produced an article How Western Democracy Died which reminded me of a couple of books which presaged the current disenchantment with western liberalism - David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2019) and Steve Levinsky’s How Democracies Die (2019)

Whether in Britain, Germany or Ireland, censorship has become routine across Europe and beyond, even as dissent is increasingly criminalised and legal systems are weaponised to suppress opposition. In recent months, these trends have escalated into direct assaults on the basic institutions of democratic governance. In Romania, to give one example, an entire election was annulled because it delivered the wrong outcome, while other countries contemplate similar measures too.

In theory, all this is being carried out in the name of defending democracy. In truth, the purpose is clear: to help ruling elites maintain their grip on power in the face of a historic collapse of legitimacy. Whether they will succeed in doing so remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the stakes are enormous. If elites manage to entrench their control through increasingly authoritarian means, the West will enter a new era of managed democracy — or democracy in name only. 

 As far back as 2000, political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term “post-democracy” to describe the fact that, even though Western societies boasted the trappings of freedom, they had increasingly become a meaningless facade. Elections, Crouch argued, had become tightly managed spectacles, orchestrated by professional persuaders who operated within a shared neoliberal consensus — pro-market, pro-business, pro-globalisation — and offered voters little choice on fundamental political or economic questions. Citizens, for their part, played a passive role, helpless in the face of political and corporate power. The historical defeat of socialism shrank the ideological space in the West, foreclosing any fundamental challenge to capitalism and enabling the emergence of a technocratic, depoliticised governance model underpinned by the “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) consensus around neoliberalism — centred on individual responsibility, market hegemony and globalisation. 

Geopolitically, meanwhile, US “hyperpower” status allowed it to aggressively assert global hegemony, creating a unipolar “new world order”. This was underpinned by structural economic shifts within the West: the decline of traditional manufacturing, and the Fordist-Keynesian social contract, replaced by services, labour dispersion, precarity and fragmentation. Most Western countries saw manufacturing employment decline by a third-to-half in absolute numbers. This pulverised the working class as a unified political subject — along the way wrecking trade unions and other material symbols of postwar mass politics. Beyond these institutional shifts, meanwhile, unelected elites increasingly interfered in the democratic processes of member states. The ECB’s “monetary coup” against Berlusconi in 2011, where the central bank effectively forced the prime minister to leave office by making his ouster the precondition for further support for Italian bonds and banks, is one good example here. The financial blackmail of Greece’s Tsipras government is another. Taken together, anyway, these events led some observers to suggest that the EU was becoming a “post-democratic prototype” — one fiercely opposed to national sovereignty and democracy both.

Western liberal democracy, even minimally defined as representative government based on universal suffrage, is a very recent phenomenon. Full male suffrage emerged in a limited number of countries only between the middle of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Women’s suffrage generally came after the Second World War. Effective voting rights for racial minorities, such as African Americans, arrived decades later. In short, democracy as universal adult suffrage, regardless of wealth, property, race or class, has existed for mere decades. Previously, it was the exclusive domain of propertied elites, or else based on sex or skin colour. All the same, it’d be wrong to idealise the mid-century West. Even then, democracy in its substantive sense remained heavily constrained. Though the ruling classes were forced — under pressure from popular movements, the Cold War, and the threat of social unrest — to extend voting rights and acknowledge a range of political and social rights, they did not do so willingly. On the contrary, they were often driven by the fear that the masses could pose a real threat to the established social order — that workers might use democracy to overturn existing power relations. As a result, alongside economic concessions, Western elites also constrained democratic participation in various ways. Modern constitutional systems — including nascent supranational ones like the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 — explicitly limited popular sovereignty. Elected governments were prevented from enacting certain economic or social policies, or even challenging existing international alliances. All the while, power shifted. Parliaments got weaker, and technocrats and judges grew more powerful, each in their way proving capable of overriding national laws. This was often justified as a way of protecting democracy from what elites feared could be the irrational or destabilising demands of the masses — a longstanding argument in liberal political thought that equates too much popular participation with the risk of populism, mob rule or economic irresponsibility.

This challenges common conceptions of the state: across the Western world, we 
are accustomed to identifying the state with the executive and with parliament, 
assuming that these institutions act in accordance with constitutions and the rule 
of law. But this is a misunderstanding: the state doesn’t coincide with the 
institutions of representative democracy. Rather, the two belong to entirely 
distinct spheres of politics. On the one hand, there is the politics of the state. 
On the other, there is what we might call popular politics, embodying popular 
sovereignty and typified by political parties, trade unions, social movements and 
civil society. The state operates with a significant degree of autonomy from the 
latter, meaning it is not only largely independent of civil society, but also of 
parliaments and even governments themselves.

In theory, after all, state bureaucracies act as neutral executors of government 
policy. In reality, they often act independently of, or even in opposition to, elected 
parliaments and governments, particularly when it comes to protecting institutional 
continuity, legal norms or elite interests. Supreme and constitutional courts, for 
example, frequently rule against government policies — especially when it comes 
to controversial issues like immigration. The way in which the Bank of England 
derailed Liz Truss’s infamous mini-budget is another example here. This phenomenon 
is obviously much more pronounced when national governments are subordinated to 
supranational institutions, as in the European Union. And then, of course, you have 
the military and intelligence bureaucracies, which today arguably exercise more 
influence than ever before (see, for instance, the Russiagate hoax).
The state thus emerges as a social organism endowed with its own internal logic and 
continuity, capable of pursuing goals and directions often independent of those 
declared or pursued by the political leadership of the day. This has always been true 
— even if, depending on the relative balance of class forces within society, the state 
may at times be forced to make concessions to the forces of popular politics. 
In other words, then, today’s crisis doesn’t represent democracy’s sudden collapse, 
but instead the unveiling of how power truly works. The contemporary crisis of Western 
democracy exposes the limits of formal democratic institutions, bringing the logic of state 
power into blindingly sharp relief.

Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of 
books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces – 
very little of it worth much. 
- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s 
How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different 
ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics; 
technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to 
other books. Violence stalks the fringes of our politics and the recesses of our imaginations, without ever 
arriving centre stage. It is the ghost in this story. Second, the threat of catastrophe has changed. Where the 
prospect of disaster once had a galvanising effect, now it tends to be stultifying. We freeze in the face of our 
fears. Third, the information technology revolution has completely altered the terms on which democracy 
must operate. We have become dependent on forms of communication and information-sharing that we 
neither control nor fully understand. All of these features of our democracy are consistent with its getting 
older. I have organised this book around these three themes: coup; catastrophe; technological takeover. 
    • I start with coups – the standard markers of democratic failure – to ask whether an armed 
takeover of democratic institutions is still a realistic possibility. If not, how could democracy be subverted
without the use of force being required? Would we even know it was happening? 
The spread of conspiracy theories is a symptom of our growing uncertainty about where the threat really lies.
 Coups require conspiracies because they need to be plotted by small groups in secret, or else they don’t 
work. Without them, we are just left with the conspiracy theories, which settle nothing.
  • Next I explore the risk of catastrophe. Democracy will fail if everything else falls apart: nuclear war,

calamitous climate change, bio-terrorism, the rise of the killer robots could all finish off democratic
politics, though that would be the least of our worries. If something goes truly, terribly wrong, the
people who are left will be too busy scrabbling for survival to care much about voting for change.
But how big is the risk that, if confronted with these threats, the life drains out of democracy anyway, as we
find ourselves paralysed by indecision?
    • Then I discuss the possibility of technological takeover. Intelligent robots are still some way off.

But low-level, semi-intelligent machines that mine data for us and stealthily take the decisions
we are too busy to make are gradually infiltrating much of our lives. We now have technology
that promises greater efficiency than anything we’ve ever seen before, controlled by corporations
that are less accountable than any in modern political history. Will we abdicate democratic responsibility
to these new forces without even saying goodbye?
    • Finally, I ask whether it makes sense to look to replace democracy with something better.

A mid-life crisis can be a sign that we really do need to change. If we are stuck in a rut, why don’t
we make a clean break from what’s making us so miserable? Churchill famously called democracy
the worst system of government apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time.
He said it back in 1947. That was a long time ago. Has there really been nothing better to try since
then? I review some of the alternatives, from twenty-first century authoritarianism to twenty-first
century anarchism.
Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies 
of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent 
"Strategies for Governing"
- I was not at all taken with ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how 
to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation. 
It has an index but no bibliography. 
- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon 
Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a 
brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).
It too has an index but no bibliography. 
- How Democracy Ends, David Runciman (2019)
- How Democracies Die S Levinsky and D Ziblatt (2019)
- Democracy in America – what has gone wrong and what we can do about it Page and Gilen 
(2020 edition) 
- Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism Anne Applebaum (2020) 
reviewed by Quillette and by Helen Epstein  
- Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful 
update of how democracy continues to slip globally…

- Autocracy – the dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum (2024)

The last 3 books remind me of a post I did 4 years ago about authoritarianism

The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate 
post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno
I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu  
who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology 
Democracy  and Dictatorship. 
One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index. 
I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every 
book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small 
number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then 
add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I 
should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s 
Contents are actually followed. 

Saturday, July 19, 2025

A Sympathetic Look at Anarchism

Why do some of us have a positive view of the State – whereas others take a more negative if not anarchistic approach? Patrick Dunkelman’s recent book may be about the US situation but raises much wider questions of this sort. The book is Why Nothing Works – who killed progress and how to bring it back (2025) and argues that

  • progressivism is defined not by one, but rather by two divergent impulses - the progressive head and the progressive heart are in different places. Alexander Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, worried primarily about chaos. He wanted to place more authority in the hands of centralized officials and financiers capable of developing America into an industrial dynamo—a “Hercules” on the global stage. His worry was that America would remain too disorganized, too divided, too chaotic to make the most of its opportunity. Putting power into a leadership class would deliver more for the public. Thomas Jefferson’s narrative, by contrast, was born of an entirely different frame. Horrified by the English Crown’s treatment of the colonies, he was determined to thwart overbearing authority—to protect individuals (or, at least, white, male, landowning individuals) from the abuses of public authority.

  • the two impulses have waxed and waned through time such that the movement’s underlying zeitgeist has shifted, a bit like the tide.

  • the balance that’s emerged since the late 1960s—the excessive tilt toward the Jeffersonian—is a seminal political liability for the progressive movement.

I have to admit to some ambivalence about the State – despite my fixation on it and how it might be “reformed” to ensure it better serves the interests of the ordinary citizen. Occasionally, I confess to a streak of anarchistic makeup in me.

And what better way to do that than to dip into some of the books on my shelves here in the mountain house where I spend my summers -

Anarchy in Action Colin Ward (1973) – very much a British take
Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow David Goodway (2006/12) a very discursive UK text
Black Flame – the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism ed Lucien 
van der Walt and Michael Schmidt (2009) A bit too enthusiastic
Two Cheers for Anarchism James Scott (2012) a classic although a bit weak on the 
theory
The Government of Noone – the theory and practice of anarchy Ruth Kinna (2019) a more 
academic approach
Means and Ends - the revolutionary practice of Anarchism in Europe and the US 
Zoe Baker (2024) A pretty comprehensive study with an extensive bibliography

Friday, July 18, 2025

Damascus

In 2002 I spent a few days in Damascus – the latest capital which the crazy Israelis have decided to bomb (the others being Beirut, Tehran and Sana'a). 
I went to check whether I would be happy spending some years there on an EU funded project but decided it was not my thing on the basis of being pissed off by the obvious antipathy to women displayed by Arab men – particularly on the plane out. But I do remember being bowled over by the quality of the glassware I found in the small workshops in the city – and by the amazing mosque. 

 https://alastaircampbell.org/2025/07/429-question-time-gaza-genocide-and-global-hypocrisy/

This post puts it very appropriately – indicating that a 
new country is bombing a 5000 year old country.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the only Arabist known to me who 

From 1982 to 2019, lived in an ancient tower house off the "Market of the Cows" in the old city of San'a, Yemen. As a consequence of the civil war in Yemen, he had to leave this home and temporarily relocate to Malaysia.[4] He is the author of the travel books Yemen: Travels in Dictionaryland (1997) and Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (2000). Further, he is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan medieval scholar Ibn Battuta. Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting Ibn Battuta's journeys as published in his Muqaddimah (The Prologue): Travels with a Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010).

Wednesday, July 16, 2025

The Natives are Restless… again

For more than 60 years it has been evident that something was profoundly wrong with British society – a series of reports, official and unofficial, have plotted public alienation, starting perhaps with the Labour Government of 1964 which commissioned a series of Royal Commissions covering most aspects of society – not least industrial relations, the civil service, local and regional government and social services. All aspects were put under a microscope and found wanting. 

So we should not be surprised that yesterday’s papers were full of an official 
report which claimed that social tensions in the country were ready to explode
The report in question was The State of Us commissioned by British Future (2025) 
which starts -

Communal life in Britain is under threat. Some of these threats are driven by long term 
trends that have undermined connection within our communities over many decades: 
the degradation of community infrastructure and institutions, weaker family units, growing 
inequality, declining trust in institutions and chronic neglect from policy makers. 
But there is another set of threats that are more recent and are turning the chronic crisis 
of social disconnection into an acute threat of social division: the mismanagement of 
immigration, cost of living pressures and social media driven extremism. 
These forces are converging into something altogether more dangerous - leaving the UK 
sitting on a tinderbox of disconnection and division.
The report comes with a very comprehensive Literature review consisting of four
parts.
  • The introductory section defines community strength and 
cohesion and looks at how these conditions can be measured. 
  • The second part examines barriers to community strength and 
cohesion. 
  • Part Three look at the delivery of community development and 
cohesion programmes on the ground. It examines the approaches used by different 
organisations and the evidence on the impact of different programmes. 
The strategic role of local authorities is also examined, as well as learning from outside the UK.
  • Part Four draws together evidence on the economic and social case for investing in community development and cohesion and draws some final conclusions.

The review itemises such official reports as 
Commission for Racial Equality 1976).
Let alone the unofficial reports such as 

Perhaps the real problem is that such reports are dealing with a variety of 
very different issues – whether poverty, racial inequality and discrimination, 
“community cohesion” (whatever that means) and lack of democracy. 
Little wonder that the efforts were so unfocussed. And that action consisted of 
little more than terminology, words and reification.

Monday, July 14, 2025

The Latest Thinking on reforming Government systems

Most suggestions for reform come from Think Tanks and are incremental in spirit. The rare exceptions are those from NESTA such as Radical Visions of Future Government NESTA (2019) a visionary rethink of how government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented by Deloitte reports. Let me first give a taste of the more conventional crap - Mission-driven Government The Future Governance Forum paper sent to the UK PAR Select Committee (2025)

Mission-driven government is new and compelling – but it cannot gain traction, nor function properly, within the confines of old, unchanged systems. Barriers include:

The concept of mission-driven government, as well as the missions themselves, being poorly framed and/or misconstrued

A siloed approach within government, where officials and political advisers work first and foremost to ‘my Secretary of State’

Rigid boundaries between central and local government, other parts of the state, other sectors of society and the economy, and between state and citizen

Public finance allocations and processes working against ambitious cross-departmental working

A risk-averse culture, where civil servants self-censor for fear of failure or political exposure

Hollowed-out capacity at the centre of the state. The UK has lacked a purposeful centre of government for some time. Some necessary structures, skills and culture have lost effectiveness and those that are still in place are the products of a previous age and not fit for the current moment.

Missions being seen as another word for ‘priorities’, leading to departments ‘mission-washing’ in order to gain prominence or secure funding for projects and initiatives.

Overcoming these barriers and moving to a mission-driven model will be difficult – and will not happen just by willing it into being. It requires sustained commitment from both political leaders (including the Prime Minister, Chancellor, Cabinet and senior advisers) and senior officials (Permanent Secretaries and Directors Generals). Without strong, visible leadership, missions are unlikely to take hold – tarnishing both the concept itself and wider efforts to modernise government.

Government must:

1. Lead with purpose. The centre should articulate an overarching vision that sits above its five missions, as well as clear, outcomes-focused ‘theories of change’ for each mission. If missions announced in early 2023 no longer reflect the current context, they should be repurposed. Missions should be backed by strong, personal commitment from both the Prime Minister and Chancellor, with a small Missions Leadership Group – consisting of the ‘quad’ of the PM, Chancellor, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Deputy PM – providing political leadership of missions. A more sophisticated and expansive set of strategic capabilities should be brought into No.10, enabling the Prime Minister to effectively drive forward the missions agenda.

2. Govern in partnership, orchestrating the collective efforts and resources of a wide array of actors – state and non-state – around shared missions. To enable this kind of partnership approach, Whitehall must ‘open up’ culturally and become a better partner – embedding external engagement into every stage of the policy cycle, professionalising relationship management and building a new culture of collaboration. Missions should be seen as a shared national endeavour involving every community and citizen, building the legitimacy needed to endure over the long-term.

3. Work collaboratively across government. Missions should sit above departmental silos and be collectively owned. A new model of shared accountability is needed to capture where an intervention by one department creates benefits or savings elsewhere. Governance should be focused on how well this system is learning, not just top-down targets.

4. Ensure the money follows the missions. Public finance should be aligned with mission goals at every stage – from how departmental budgets are set to how policy is appraised. That means embedding missions within the Treasury’s mandate and processes, including the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR), Green Book guidance and procurement rules. A dedicated ‘preventative’ category of spending should be created, recognising the long-term value of early investment and reform. At the local level, place-based public service budgets should be introduced, enabling greater collaboration and preventative investment. The upcoming CSR in June 2025 represents a critical test of whether this new approach to public finance will be realised.

5. Rebuild state capacity in critical functions: Mission-driven government will only succeed if the state has the tools and capabilities to deliver it. That requires building up the civil service’s dynamic capabilities in mission-aligned areas – equipping the workforce to adapt to evolving needs and events, while investing in the tools, technology and infrastructure it relies on. This means both bringing in new expertise into government – through recruitment reforms and a high-profile ‘Missions Secondment Programme' – and building up capabilities among the existing workforce through investment in learning and development and a renewed focus on talent pipelines. Reducing reliance on external consultancies for core functions will also be a critical step here. Local government capacity must also be rebuilt, including by using digital and technology to modernise how councils work and deliver services.

6. Encourage a culture of test, learn and grow. The centre should be prescriptive about ends, but flexible about means, and provide the necessary political cover for officials to experiment and take risks. Whitehall’s deeply-ingrained aversion to uncertainty and risk should be swapped for a culture that tolerates experimentation and adaptability. Structural change is also needed for officials to work in this way – with significant focus needed on building greater flexibility into Whitehall processes, as well as updating the competency, reward and performance frameworks that govern organisational behaviour.

Dan Honig’s presentation about his book can be found here Mission-driven governmenthe seems a rather bumptious character.

The Radical How Anthony Greenway and Tom Loosemore (Nesta 2024) is a rather 
disappointing exception to my comment which started the post

There’s a different approach to public service organisation, one based on multidisciplinary teams, starting with citizen needs, and scaling iteratively by testing assumptions. We’ve been arguing in favour of it for years now, and the more it gets used, the more we see success and timely delivery.

We think taking a new approach makes it possible to shift government from an organisation of programmes and projects, to one of missions and services. It gives the next administration an opportunity to deliver better outcomes, reduce risk, save money, and rebuild public trust.

Making the Radical How a reality.

  • Make outcomes matter most; Ministers should see delivering outcomes as a path to accelerating their own ambitions

  • Let outcomes define accountability Hold senior officials accountable for delivering promises, not paperwork

  • Demand politicians set direction through missions; Empower civil servants to determine how to make them happen

  • Add more teams to get more done; Because multidisciplinary teams are the best unit of delivery, not individual generalists

  • Open up ; Mandate that teams work in the open, sharing their successes, failures and knowledge in public

  • Fund teams, not programmes; Invest public money incrementally, with oversight proportionate to financial risk

  • Reinvent procurement; Buy or rent services that support teams, not simply to whom outcomes are outsourced

  • Train civil servants for the internet era; Find, develop and keep the best, most skilled people; reward and incentivise them competitively

  • Invest in digital infrastructure; Open data, common platforms, clear design; the basic foundations for everything

  • Lead with courage; Accepting and committing to reform is the hardest, but essential first step

Recommended Reading

conventional wisdom
(2025) Marvellous account of government work which the author discusses 
here with Aaron Bastani
book from someone who advised Michael Grove in the UK Department of 
Education
Graeme Garrard (2022) a Canadian political writer working at a UK university. 
Historical and a bit abstract
et al (2021) A collection of British essays on how progressives might 
reform the state 
history Stewart Lansley (2021) Fantastic read

Successful Failure Matt Andrews (2021) the US (Harvard) guru who advises many governments on their reforms

government might be organised which destroys the thinking represented 
by Deloitte reports