ON BIAS

There is a lot of talk in the UK of bias in reporting – whether it's the BBC or simple journalism. The reality is that it's very difficult to find examples of left-wing reporting – although the last post suggested we need to be cautious about this left-right classification, So I've attempted one of my famous TABLES which leads me to conclude that left-wing writing is very much a minority pursuit. But because the blogger site makes a mess of my tables I've attached the table as a pdf file - although I seem somehow to have succeeded in putting it below

People will note that I've drawn my net widely and included some bloggers – as well as someone no longer with us but whose ideas live on. The more names I added to the list, the more difficult it became to apply a suitable label about their “political leaning”

Some years ago I did an even more exhaustive list of good “journalistic” writers which readers may find interesting. It includes a fair number of writers who (in Hamlet's famous phrase) have shuffled off this mortal coil eg Arthur Koestler

Journalists have a reputation for digging up the dirt on people and institutions but John Harris (who figures in the latest table) is unusual in having started a series which celebrates the people doing good work in their UK communities

Writers I respect

	Normal source	Political leaning	Examples and COMMENT
Anthony Barnett	Open Democracy	liberal	A founder of “Open Democracy” and a writer famous for his long essays eg Out of the Belly of Hell (2020) but has also published several books on constitutional issues and on Brexit
Grace Blakely	Tribune	Harder left	Her many contributions can be read at the link at the title of the journal
Diana Coyle	Her blog and academia	liberal	British economist. Author of 9 books eg “Cogs and Monsters”
Matt Flinders	academia	liberal	British political scientist eg Flinders on democracy and a marvellous collection of his blogs in “What Kind of Democracy is this?” See also “Defending Politics”
David Graeber	Academia and activist	anarchist	Sadly David is no longer with us – here is my tribute
John Michael Greer	Current and previous blog	sceptic	One of the most stimulating US writers about the decline of industrial society eg “After Oil” and “The Ecotechnic future” with a strange interest in ancient druidry. This is his take on climate warming
Chris Grey	His brexit blog – and academia	open-minded	British organisational sociologist and author of several non-fiction books – on his subject and also on Brexit
John Harris	The Guardian	open-minded	Also famous for his “Anywhere but Westminster” videos
Chris hedges	Consortium news and his substack	left	Incisive, hard-hitting analyses of the reality of the American Empire
Anton Jaeger	New Left Review	left	His various pieces can be read here
David Jamieson	Conter	Soft left	The Conter site is “Against the Scottish Establishment”. David is its editor and host of its podcast
Owen Jones	The Guardian	Soft left	Author of several books eg “The Establishment”
Naomi Klein	various	open	Canadian writer and activist eg This Changes Everything
Andrew Marr	The New Statesman	liberal	Author of “The Making of Modern Britain”
James Meek	LRB	liberal	Author of several fiction books and of a couple of non-fiction
George Monbiot	The Guardian	Vaguely anarchist	Author of several books eg “Out of the Wreckage”
John Naughton	The guardian	Not clear	The paper's technology correspondent. Writer and academic. Author of several books including “From Gutenberg to Zuckenberg”
Dave Pollard	His blog	Diff to label	Dave is a Canadian – this a very useful post about what motivates him
David Runciman	London Review of Books (LRB)	liberal	David is a British political scientist with many books eg “How Democracy Ends” and “The Confidence Trap”
Jonathan Shafi	Conter site	Soft left	A Scottish free-lance writer
Wolfgang Streeck	New Left Review	Harder left	Wolfgang is a German sociologist and author of numerous important books eg “How will capitalism End?” and “Buying Time”
Gillian Tett	Various – inc Fin Times	Diff to label	Another anthropologist who has turned to financial journalism and author of several books eg “The Silo Effect”
Polly Toynbee	The Guardian	Centre leftist	Author of several non-fiction books eg “Dismembered”

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.

In Praise of Interviews

Interviews can be a very useful window into the soul – depending on the skill of the interviewer and how experienced/defensive is the interviewee. Michael Parkinson was Britain's most famous television interviewer – he died last week. He was a rather “soft” interviewer, very much letting his guests perform - in complete contrast to the likes of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, famous for her tough, no-holds-barred questioning of prominent figures such as Henry Kissinger and Komenei which you can read in her Interviews with History (1976)

Polly Toynbee is a progressive journalist and a stalwart of The Guardian newspaper which is seen as liberal but which revealed its true colours when it mounted a vicious campaign from 2016-2020 against Jeremy Corbyn. Faute de mieux, it is my regular daily reading but it thoroughly deserved the critical appraisal it got a couple of years ago with Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021). Toynbee, typically, comes from an illustrious family – her grandfather was the famous historian Arnold Toynbee and she has just produced a revealing memoir “An Uneasy Inheritance – my family and other radicals”. 

She was the guest on James O'Brien's “Full Disclosure” podcast recently – one of my favourites by virtue of the excellence of his conversational style. Like Fallaci, he does his homework, choosing his subjects simply because he finds them interesting. And the interview is conducted in a relaxed way but with O'Brien picking up throwaway comments and using them skilfully. I didn't know, for example, about Toynbee's spells in low-paid work – very much like Barbara Ehrenreich who, very sadly, died just a year ago and is particularly famous for her “Nickel and Dimed” book. Toynbee – ever the Labour stalwart – produced, with David Walker in 2017, the book Dismembered – how the attack on the state threatens us all which inspired my Search for Democracy – a long journey (2023). And then The Lost Decade 2010-2020 - and what lies ahead for Britain which is as good an account of the state of Britain in 2020 as you are likely to find (although without a single bibliographical reference!)

And it's interesting to compare audio and visual impressions of character. Videos offer the advantage of seeing the body language - which was particularly noticeable in the interview O'Brien conducted with one of the contenders for Tory leadership Rory Stewart some years ago. Stewart now runs (with Alastair Campbell (Tony Blair's spin doctor) the UK's best-known podcast and is a bit of a maverick by virtue of his commitment to traditional Conservative values which are now very much dead in the water. Stewart was clearly at one of these points in his life where he was having to consider his future – evident in the thought he gave to the questions.

All of these people, of course, are “celebrities” – well used to being interviewed – which perhaps limits what we might reasonably expect them to give away. Less so, perhaps, Toynbee who, as a journalist, is more used to writing than speaking although her fluency told us a lot about her sense of privilege about which Stewart was ready to confess.

Chris Hitchens had a great essay on Oriana Fallaci and the art of the Interview

Biographies of Journals

• Capitalism’s Conscience – 200 years of the Guardian ed D Freedman (2021)

• Liberalism at Large – the world according to The Economist by Alexander Zevin (2019 reviewed in the New Yorke by the inimitable Pankaj Mishra

• Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review; Duncan Thompson (2007)

AGAINST DESPAIR

The Western world has, in the new millennium, become despondent. In the 90s it was euphoric – but its world came crashing down with the Twin Towers in 2001, dealing a warning about the hubris it had shown. The falling standards of the working class then brought populism; the Global Financial Crisis austerity and rage against the indefensibly rich 1% and the governments in their pay. Global warming has been the last straw.

But what's new? My parents' generation had sleepless nights about economic depression and Fascism - my generation about the threat of nuclear war – although the 1960s brought new hope, starting with the initial issues of New Left Review (still going strong) and crystallised in the rebellious 1968

These thoughts were prompted by a post in Scottish Review which reflected on the author being accused of being too pessimistic in his writing – with links to posts in the same vein

The need for positive thinking has cropped up a couple of times in the blog – for example in a post about commanding hope and one about polarisation. And John Harris of the Guardian is one of the few journalists prepared to show examples of good community work - in his video series "Anwhere but Westminster"

But the real classics in the field (in descending order) are -

Hope in the dark Rebecca Solnit (2004) The classic contemporary statement of the need for a positive spirit – written at the time of the Iraq war. In 2016 Solnit reflected on the little book in this article

The End of Utopia – politics and culture in an age of apathy Russell Jacoby (1999) whose introduction contains this relevant injunction for our days - “At the dawn of another new century, Samuel Coleridge wrote to his friend William Wordsworth. Two hundred years ago, in 1799, he suggested that Wordsworth contest the widespread malaise and resignation. "I wish you would write a poem, in blank verse, addressed to those, who, in consequence of the complete failure of the French Revolution, have thrown up all hopes of the amelioration of mankind, and are sinking into an almost epicurean selfishness, disguising the same under the soft titles of domestic attachment and contempt for visionary philosophes."' I have not written a poem,but I would like to think that in its defence of visionary impulse this book partially fulfills Coleridge's bidding”.

Living in Truth – 22 essays Vaclev Havel 1989 As Havel made clear in earlier works, such as 1992’s Summer Meditations, he saw his new political role as fully consistent with his dissident opposition to totalitarianism. In his post-1989 books and speeches, Havel continued to defend a moral vision of politics that he called “nonpolitical politics” or “politics as morality in practice.” He identified this vision with the demanding but liberating task of “living in truth.” Havel refused to identify politics with a dehumanizing “technology of power,” the notion that power was an end in itself. Instead he defended a moral order that stands above law, politics, and economics—a moral order that “has a metaphysical anchoring in the infinite and eternal.” His speeches as president, many collected in English in The Art of the Impossible (1998), were artful exercises in moral and political philosophizing, enthralling Western audiences.

The Power of the powerless Havel (1978) His classic statement

The Principle of Hope; Ernst Bloch 1923 One of the earliest invitations to get off our butts!  

Why are there so few contemporary books about the impact of technology?

The last post demanded some thoughts about the wider aspects of technological change on our societies which, according to L Winer in his “The Whale and the Reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology ” (1986) had not been much examined. It was a curious judgement for the author to make since the decades before had been full of texts from the likes of Jacques Ellul and Daniel Boorstin (see below) about precisely that topic. The computer and the idea of the information society had hit America in the 1960s – so it was hardly surprising that it became a hot topic. Even geo-strategist Brzezinski got into the act with the highly readable Between Two Ages – America's role in the technetronic era (1980)

And in 1985 NASA and the renowned James Burke and Isaac Asimov produced a useful little booklet The Impact of Science.

The long list of books given in the last post don't deal with the impact of technology per se – their interest is rather in specific issues viz the internet, social media, Artificial Intelligence or the effect on jobs. What is so interesting about the writings of Asimov, Boorstin, Brzezinski and Ellul is that interest was much wider – on the social impact of technology. 

There are very few of us who dare to challenge technological change. Most of us fear the ridicule involved – being the targets of taunts of being Canutes or Luddites. It, therefore, took a lot of courage for Jerry Mander in 1978 to produce Four Arguments for the elimination of television and for Neil Postman to follow this up with “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in 1985.

And, with his “In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” (1992) Jerry Mander went beyond television to critique our technological society as a whole.

In this provocative work, Mander challenges the utopian promise of technological society and tracks its devastating impact on cultures worldwide. The Western world’s loss of a sense of the sacred in the natural world, he says, has led us toward global environmental disaster and social disorder - and worse lies ahead. Yet models for restoring our relationship with the Earth exist in the cultures of native peoples, whose values and skills have enabled them to survive centuries of invasion and exploitation.

Far from creating paradise on Earth, technology has instead produced an unsustainable contest for resources. Mander surveys the major technologies shaping the “new world order”, computers, telecommunications, space exploration, genetic engineering, robotics, and the corporation itself and warns that they are merging into a global mega-technology, with dire environmental and political results.

Needless to say, none of such book were taken seriously. It took perhaps a BBC television series of technological dystopia Black Mirror which first hit screens in 2011 for us to begin to realise that technology has its perverse side.

Resource on Technology

The technological society jacques ellul 1964

The technological system jacques ellul 1980

The technological bluff jacques ellul 1989

The impact of science james burke, isaac asimov (nasa 1985)

The republic of technology daniel boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era zbigniew brzezinski 1980

The whale and the reactor –a search for limits in the age of high technology langdon winner 1986

Technopoly - the surrender of culture to technology' Neil Postman 1992

In the absence of the sacred – the failure of technology” Jerry Mander 1992

The second machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Perhaps we need to be more cautious in assessing AI’s Impact

I’ve written a couple of posts this year about Artificial Intelligence – in April trying to put 

the sudden panic about it in the wider context of the discussion about the social impact of 

technology which has been ongoing since at least the 1980s; and in June about the 

possible impact on jobs. The latter post reminded us that such concerns had been around 

since Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” – although Living Together – the 

future of politics in a world transformed by technology by James Susskind in 2018 did 

paint a fairly grim picture. 

But both posts were perhaps too alarmist. Certainly a 2016 OECD report on The Risk of 

Automation for Jobs suggested that, if you looked at TASKS rather than OCCUPATIONS. 

the likely impact was minimal 

"Our paper serves two purposes. Firstly, we estimate the job automatibility of jobs for 21 

OECD countries based on a task-based approach. In contrast to other studies, we take into 

account the heterogeneity of workers’ tasks within occupations. Overall, we find that, on 

average across the 21 OECD countries, 9 % of jobs are automatable. The threat from 

technological advances thus seems much less pronounced compared to the occupation

-based approach. We further find heterogeneities across OECD countries. For instance, 

while the share of automatable jobs is 6 % in Korea, the corresponding share is 12 % in 

Austria. Differences between countries may reflect general differences in workplace 

organisation, differences in previous investments into automation technologies as well as 

differences in the education of workers across countries"   

and another report the following year supported this. For more discussion about the social impact of technological developments I recommend this podcast

That having been said, I must confess to one anxiety - relating to nuclear safety. Most of us have heard of the incident of a Russian radar official who identified an incoming ballistic missile on the screen but had the intelligence to assume that it was a glitch. So-called Artificial Intelligence does not have that same intelligence and would have obeyed what it was being told. We might assume that humans will always be there and act as a check – but most people in this field tell us that the day will shortly dawn when no such human checks will be there.    

For a marvellous discussion between Mustafa Suleyman and Yuval Harari, view

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JkPWHr7sTY&ab_channel=YuvalNoahHarari

Further Reading
The Gutenberg Parenthesis – the age of print and its lessons for the age of the 
internet Jeff Jarvis (2023)
Impromptu – ampflifying our humanity through AI" by AI and Reid Hoffman (2023) Interesting to have 
a book partly written by Artificial Intelligence!!  
http://mccaine.org/2022/04/26/book-review-aaron-benanav-automation-and-the-future-of-work/
this is a recent discussion with the authors of “The  Second Machine Age” (2014)
The Age of AI; and our human future Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and D Huttenlocher (2021)
Yes – that Kissinger and Schmidt! google excerpts only
Automation and the future of work; Aaron Benanov (2020) 2 articles from New Left Review
How to Run a City like Amazon and other Fables; ed M Graham…. J Shaw (2019)
Automation and the future of work HMSO (2019) a helpful overview
Rebooting AI - AI we can trust 2019Living Together – the future of politics in a world transformed by technology; James Susskind (2018) reviewed here
The People v Tech – how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it) Jamie Bartlett (2018) looks a good read
Ten Arguments for Deleting your social media right now; Jaron Lanier (2018) A recognised expert
A World without Work? (Values and Capitalism network 2018)
Utopia is Creepy; Nicholas Carr (2016) another famous IT writer
The Internet is not the Answer; Andrew Keen (2015)
The Future of Work (ILO 2015) from the international Labour thinktank
A World without Work (The Atlantic 2015) an early article
The Second Machine Age; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014) One of the classics
From Guttenberg to Zuckenberg – what you really need to know about the Internet; John Naughton (2013)
 If the link tempts you, the full book is here 
To Save everything click here – the folly of technological solutionism; Efgeni Morozov (2013) 
another classic 

The Shallows - what the internet is doing to our brain Nicholas Carr (2010) an early IT warning