In an appearance on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line back in 1980, newly inaugurated President Reagan was asked his thoughts on a number of key issues. His responses, despite now being 42 years old, remain all too relevant.
He argued for long-term investment in expanding the oil economy in the face of rising energy costs, an argument that Republicans are making once again as Joe Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline has driven gas prices up to eye-watering levels, compounded further by sanctions on Russian oil. On the issue of inflation, he pointed out that “since government causes inflation, government’s the only one that can stop inflation,” in stark contrast with Biden who prefers to leap from calling inflation “transitory” to celebrating it to blaming Trump to blaming Russia.
Perhaps Reagan’s most pertinent words of advice were on dealing with aggressors:
“The United States cannot recklessly put itself in the position where the confrontation does take place. The United States… should make it plain that [the Soviet Union] can run that risk of having such a confrontation, if they continue with their imperialism and this kind of expansion.”
He followed this by stating:
“I think one of the foolish things we’ve done going clear back to the Vietnamese war is telling potential enemies the things we would not do. For example, when President Johnson repeated over and over again that, of course, we would never use nuclear weapons there. I don’t think we should’ve use nuclear weapons there. But I think the North Vietnamese should have gone to sleep every night worrying about whether we would. We shouldn’t tell them the things that we wouldn’t do.”
Reagan faced a Russian state spreading its imperial tentacles, acting through its various satellites as well as through its own troops – a situation that is playing out once again.
Biden’s tendency to rule out action represents a major stumbling block in dealing with Putin, who knows all too well that the West is simply not ready, militarily or otherwise, for a major conflict of any kind. At his meeting in Brussels, when asked if his clear unwillingness to go beyond a proxy war had “emboldened” Putin, Biden replied, “No and no,” as if saying it twice would make it any less untrue. Obama made a similar mistake by talking big with his “red line” threat but failing to follow up with any action. One can hardly blame Putin for expecting the same from Biden as he effectively acts out Obama’s third term.
When Biden does propose any action, as he did when he mistakenly suggested that use of chemical weapons would be met with a response “in kind,” the White House quickly performed damage control. The net result was an embarrassed Biden, a bemused Putin and a slightly nervous free world.
Whatever one may say about Trump, his unpredictability lent him a Reaganesque quality, with his talk of consequences for America’s enemies being followed through with appropriate, often severe, action, as was the case with his targeted assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.
What is most alarming is that Reagan’s advice, given in 1980, has not been heeded by Biden and his team despite his being in politics since 1976. If he had paid attention, he may not have been called “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” by Obama’s defense secretary Robert Gates. Although he had numerous failings, from Iran-Contra to his response to the AIDs crisis, Reagan was the man who helped end the Soviet Union. If history is to repeat itself, as it seems to be doing, perhaps following in Reagan’s example is the ideal course of action.
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A Reply to Lea Ypi | Vilma Djala
A few months ago, I came across a book titled “Free” in a book section of a renowned magazine. As a pathologic bibliophile, I was curious but I was also filled with pride to see the Author of “Free” has an Albanian sounding name, Lea Ypi. Indeed, Ypi is an Albanian that fled Albania during the ’90s and is now a Professor in Political Theory in the Government Department of the London School of Economics, not to mention the author is also a woman, adding even more appreciation on my part. The voice of Albanian women hasn’t always been heard in our society, so you can imagine the level of joy I felt. Just to be crystal clear, this feeling of pride is not a mere reflection of any kind of nationalism on my part. It only describes a feeling that many other of my compatriots share: the genuine joy of our country being mentioned abroad, without any relation to crime and poverty. To no surprise, I followed Ypi’s interviews with great anticipation, as she would promote her book and her upbringing in communist Albania.
However, anticipation was soon followed by great disappointment. I must confess, I held high expectations that Ypi would provide a strong and clear-cut condemnation of the communist regime. Reading her interview proved to be an emotional rollercoaster. In Ypi’s interview with what happened to be my professor Ferenc Laczó at Maastricht University, whilst Ypi condemns the communist regime, she somehow waters down its effects on the Albanian people. Every bland admission of a shortcoming on the part of communism is followed by a much fiercer criticism of liberalism. Misinforming the reader of Albanian history, leading them to believe that communism was evil, but a far lesser evil than what was about to follow. When I asked my professor, with disdain, how he agreed to allow someone to skew the truth or, at least, downplay it, his response was, “what do you want from me?.. This is her story, her perception, write your own book then.”
Since I am afraid my book would take too long to write, I feel the urge to clarify a few things for the readers. Indeed, my professor Ferenc Laczó was correct, what Ypi presents is not the truth but indeed her perception. Perhaps, the book “Free” is an account of how Ypi digested our history, and it is that exact digestion that pleases Western readers. Ypi goes as far as feeding the western readers the idea that we were obsessed with symbols such as Coca Cola cans, hence the cover of Ypi’s book. A mixture of pop and folkloristic representation of our grief. If you are seeking a true representation of the horror Albania endured during the communist regime, I regret to inform you that the right person is not someone that defines themselves as a “Kantian Marxist”, not someone with a fallacious view on freedom – thus definitely not Lea Ypi.
Ypi talks about the importance of free will and the ability to make choices by suggesting that, in communist Albania, “you could choose whether to spy on your neighbour. You could pretend you didn’t see something” she adds “there were some good officials who exercised a little discretion”. Ypi believes that “morality is not something created by institutions, there is a kernel of goodwill in everyone”, without mentioning that morality in Albania was often punished and that it becomes really difficult to keep your integrity when you are starving. Ypi goes on to claim that communism had important things to offer, such as solidarity, by saying that in our society nowadays solidarity takes the form of charity and that this distracts us from asking where that wealth comes from. But, I’d like to remind Ms Ypi that solidarity in Albania was achieved through the forced appropriation of private property. These are important details she surely forgets to mention. My father, a member of a family of Kulaks, at the time, was a warehouseman and decided to falsify the figures to give extra flour to a very poor family he knew in his village. This family was one of many around him struggling to survive. The poor family went on to report him to authorities and my father risked his job. A few years afterwards he decided to illegally migrate to Italy. If this is the freedom Ms Ypi talks about, it is a freedom I struggle to aspire to.
Two points are especially misleading about the recollection she gives about those times:
Education and competitiveness:
Ms Ypi argues that education was currency under communism and that in Albania people were extremely competitive on intellectual grounds. She adds that people could freely ask how much money others were making because the competition was not based on material things. This is a statement bordering on incredulity as many people, from persecuted families could not even go to school or pursue any higher education. And when they were allowed, it was the party who decided what subject they could study. My paternal family serves as an example: my father and some of his siblings were not given the concession to pursue higher education. For others, my grandfather had to pay someone a sum to convince them to give that permission. I wonder if we could call a schooling system “competitive” if many did not even have access to it. In fact, this created a division between first and second class citizens, the educated and the uneducated. A division that had repercussions even within an individual family.
She has gone on saying that the system “was unforgiving in terms of performing well, and reading all the books that could be read and knowing all the culture that could be known.” This sounds like a contradiction; how can a system be competitive if it puts a limit to the knowledge you can access? My mother recalls having to write a paper on “why is Albania the best country in the world” and being silenced when she asked the teacher how could she know if it was best when she had never seen any other country. Of course, very few people were allowed to leave the country and many were killed when they tried. Can a system that was based on Marxist propaganda and censorship be considered competitive?
Mass emigration and its causes:
Similarly, Ms Ypi seems to misplace correlations between events. She seems to suggest that what caused the mass emigration of Albanians all along with the 90s was the financial disaster that took place at that time. Indeed, two-thirds of the population was estimated to have invested in Ponzi schemes that mostly collapsed, leading to a lot of families losing all their savings. But can the exodus be blamed on this last misadventure or on the over 40 years of a command economy that left Albanians in financial illiteracy and unable to manage their own money for so long? The exodus was provoked by decades of lack of all basic freedom, among them the right to private property. It comes to no surprise that when freedom came, people of Albania acted like a dog trapped for so long, finally unleashed and without a master.
Albania is going through a dark phase, where freedom is in peril once again. More than ever in our republican history. When the parliamentary elections were held in April 2021, the government of Edi Rama won for the third term. One of the bastions of his party is the digitalization of public administration. However, it is a pity that this process has been used to monitor its own citizens. In fact, a scandal followed these elections, revealing that the government had access to a database containing names and last names, their phone numbers, their ID number, addresses, place of work and voting preferences of 910,000 citizens. Since then it has been revealed and confirmed that each person was assigned a “patron”, basically a canvasser who tracked their political preferences. Additional comments, recorded by the patrons, reportedly detail their interactions with citizens, with some instances amounting to possible voter intimidation.
The Prime Minister has confirmed that the system of patrons is in place but he has claimed that the collection of data happened through door-to-door meetings. Since then, no investigation has been performed. In the meantime, many journalists have identified that among the 9,000 “patrons” there are public sector employees, police officers and even army personnel. And, Albania’s Ombudsperson has already declared that the collection and processing of sensitive information seen in the database are unlawful, in the first place. This would not cause indignation if this monitoring had received any consent, which was clearly not the case. It is a chilling feeling that reminds me of the times when spying on your fellow citizens was encouraged. Moreover, as I write this article, other sensitive data was released on salaries and cars possessed by citizens. Why don’t you know about it? Because people are too tired to fight back.
It is also quite puzzling how Ypi decided to present her book in the villa that belonged to the dictator along with Prime Minister Edi Rama. She replied to accusations about this choice saying that for her it was a powerful message to send for someone with persecuted ancestors to present her book there. Instead, I believe, an even more meaningful signal would have been that of presenting that book in what was the house of Musine Kokalari or the dedicated museum? Musine, being the first published Albanian women author, and the founder of the Social-democratic party, died poor and neglected after decades of forced labour by the regime. A commemorative placard dedicated to her was vandalised last year. The question around the role that writers and artists, in general, have to play in our society is a timeless one, but since Lea Ypi has decided to write about our history she holds a duty to be truthful to facts. Especially when our country is experiencing increasing limitations of freedom, and appalling breaches of privacy.
I have tried in these past months to understand what can push a person to minimise the evils of our regime. Nobody in their right mind would do that with Nazism and I have acquired the personal conviction that Lea has to still overcome a sense of inferiority towards the West and that she also holds personal interests in a future political career. What gives me this conviction? In her interview with the Guardian, she claims that “there is a special pleasure in observing the empty shelves and educational chaos of post-Brexit Britain because, after years of being lectured about the supposed failures of where she comes from, the tables are reversed for once”. My mother, who migrated to Italy, along with my father, and many other Albanian immigrants would have no problem admitting the failures of where they come from.
Those failures are not supposed, they were real. Admitting them is the first step to rebuilding our country better. Those failures need to be acknowledged in order to not be repeated. The reason why Ypi takes pleasure in seeing her host country, the United Kingdom, suffering while my mother would never do the same, struck me: my mother being 50 years old experienced both the regime and the chaos of the days where the country fell into anarchy, while Ypi was only 10 when the regime fell. Ypi only experienced a fraction of the strict communist regime. She herself admits that her parents had opted to keep their children safe by letting them believe everything they were taught at school during the regime. So, is she the right person to weigh in if it is liberalism that has failed the country or communism? In her interview, she also admits that one of her childhood dreams was that of being a president one day. Given the welcome she received from the ruling Socialist party, I would not entirely exclude it. The party needs repainting and new faces. What better than a young female professor in a prestigious university such as LSE, in times where symbols matter more than substance? After the criticism her interviews received, she claimed those are only defamatory voices. But, shouldn’t someone who knows her country well protect herself from any affiliation and appropriation of her work? Once again, this is either a sign of naivety or ignorance.
Although the interviews provoked a lot of sorrow and outrage in my own and other descendants of persecuted families, her words were also essential in providing yet further evidence about the fact that our country is in desperate need of a decommunization process. Thirty years on from the fall of communism, people know so little about the past, who were the perpetrators and how much they are still involved in our current institutions. I find it emblematic that another book was published almost at the same time by a Polish author, whose book I promptly bought. The book is titled “Mud sweeter than honey” by Margot Rejmer, whose homeland of Poland has done far more to address its communist past wounds. Perhaps, the book is less of an intellectual grabbing at straws or mental gymnastics but it also demonstrates that the minds behind our regime were able to produce atrocities that defy the imagination of the best science fiction writers.
Communist Albania was often compared to a European North Korea. Although it is true that freedom has not always represented peace for us, it was worth fighting for. It is better than a system that decided what we could study, what we could eat and how much of it and whom we could marry. The last step for freedom that we still have to take is owning our shaded areas. Many of us, second and third-generation Albanian migrants spread around the world, who often speak better foreign languages than our own mother tongue, had to grasp a past that our parents were too traumatised to tell. It was only when I turned 25 that my father finally let go and he told me about his past made of betrayal, deceit and lack of chances and freedom.
However, it is also in us, the children of these emotionally broken people, that rests the power of healing our country of origin. If our parents and grandparents are not strong enough to recount their past, we can be their megaphones. We cannot let people who have egos and inferiority complexes do it instead of us. Because all of that pain cannot be minimised; healing only rests in accepting you are sick first.
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Against assisted dying
It is unsurprising the government is rushing through ‘assisted dying’. Having decimated what little political capital it possessed after a hollow election victory, Labour is clearly desperate to shore up as many achievements as quickly as possible; successes which can be fashioned into something resembling a coherent and tangible legacy at a later date, showing little-to-no regard for the common good.
What is surprising is how limp-wristed and tepid the opposition to this policy has been, especially from Britain’s commentariat. In no uncertain terms, the assisted dying bill is one of the most radical proposals for social liberalisation in decades, yet our opinion-having class has alarmingly little to say, at least when compared to other matters. Those eager to broadcast their intelligence on other issues – which they’re similarly unqualified to write about (that’s not a bad thing, by the way; far from it!) – are inexplicably scared to take a crack at this offputtingly complex but highly important matter which affects us all.
What little discussion has occurred in the commentariat (never mind Parliament) has revolved around the foreseeable practical issues of such a policy, typically pointing to the results of Canada’s assisted dying policy (MAID; Medical Assistance in Dying), the initial proponents of which say is being abused. As such, opponents of assisted dying in Britain essentially oppose it on the basis of negative and unintended consequences, specifically the gradual loosening of safeguards overtime, killing people who should’ve received non-lethal forms of care.
None of this is wrong per se, although it’s hard to treat this angle as anything other than unsatisfying. It does not bode well for a civilisation that its only barricade against its destruction is the ineptitude of the barbarians.
More than a total lack of faith in anything improving at all, it suggests that we are caught between our reluctance to end life yet struggle to justify such an instinct; we retain the form of a society which professes something like the sanctity of life, but lack any of the substantial belief, frightened to unlearn that which can’t so easily be relearnt once lost to history as another primitive superstition.
It’s difficult to be truly hard-line on something like assisted dying because it elicits so much sympathy. No right-minded person wants people to suffer, never mind be made to feel that they are forcing people to suffer. After all, humans are motivated by aversion to pain more than most things. However, advocates of assisted dying use this fact to strongarm more hesitant individuals into agreeing with assisted dying in principle, disagreeing solely on the technicalities of implementation.
More often than not, support for assisted dying is couched in the idea that if you’re in ‘unbearable’ pain, you might as well be given the choice to end your life, especially if you’re going to die in six months anyway. Putting aside the remarkable precision of such a prediction, it never occurs to advocates that if you’re going to die in six months anyway, you might as well tough it out, if not for the sake of yourself or your loved ones, then for the sake of ensuring that society-at-large doesn’t suffer the wrath of short-sighted policy.
Of course, this is assuming unbearable pain is the main reason for assisted dying, contrary to plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.
According to data from places where it’s already legal, the main reasons for assisted dying are the inability to fulfil day-to-day tasks and engage in ‘meaningful activities’. Even abstract notions like autonomy and dignity are cited as more important than pain. Even fear about being a burden on one’s family is reportedly just as common.
A real shame, that’s for sure. There are few greater exertions of autonomy than refusing to die for someone else’s benefit, and there is nothing more ‘undignified’ than having so little sense of self-worth that you sacrifice yourself for others in your most intimate and personal moment. If we can’t reserve ourselves for our own death, it’s no surprise that things like sex and marriage continue to lose any sense of exclusivity.
Concepts like ‘anarcho-tyranny‘ and ‘two-tier policing’ are typically used in discussions surrounding criminal justice, but the underlying logic surely applies to a system which releases unrepentant, serially violent criminals as it provides the sick and vulnerable – many of whom needlessly swell with guilt over their condition – with the option to end their own life. This sense of guilt will only become stronger when someone in a position of medical authority – in a culture which reveres expertise, even when it fails us – tells them they can make it go away. That which is legally a ‘right to die’ will feel like the duty to die, and by extension, those expected to sign-off on the procedure will feel as though they have a duty to kill.
Far from acting as a safeguard, medical professionals will act as affirmers to something which they’ve been told is not theirs to dictate in the first place. When the option is available, like the patient, the fact something can be done will weigh down upon them, and whilst they may be motivated by a desire to alleviate or prevent suffering, those once hesitant are now incentivised to act with urgency.
Indeed, the same can be said of the patient’s family, the consultation of which is notably absent from the bill’s supposedly stringent requirements, although they’ll certainly weigh on the patient’s conscience. If patients don’t feel burdensome to their loved ones, they’ll absolutely feel burdensome to the NHS, an institution our country continues to revere with mindless zealotry.
Courtesy of the selfish (but outwardly generous) nature of our present culture, the patient’s expectation of good care risks being outweighed by the ’empathy’ we demand them to have for others in a different position. Assisted dying is not yet legal and yet many already feel (perhaps not without reason) that the elderly are spitefully overstaying their welcome on this mortal coil.
Advocates of assisted dying (similar to advocates of abortion) like to believe that leaving something up to choice absolves the decisions made of any and all comparable virtue. Far from removing an ideological imposition on society, this notion that we have no choice but to leave everything up to choice, that all options must be on the table, is one of the most duplicitous and tyrannical value systems afflicting contemporary society; so much that life itself is ceasing to be the default, becoming just another option for which one is cruelly judged behind a veil of strained, artificial tolerance.
Extending the comparison, liberalising assisted dying doesn’t just implicate those who’ll be inevitably and unjustifiably killed in the name of healthcare, it devalues death outside of the circumstances in which assisted dying would be viewed as an option. When abortionists downplay (or functionally deny) the value of the child, they’re implicating any baby which (for whatever reason) doesn’t make it. A procedure once permitted for the sake of saving the mother’s life, balanced against the life of the child, is now a simple matter of preference, exalted as a form of empowerment.
Followed to its conclusion, an involuntary miscarriage, rightfully treated as a tragic incident deserving sympathy, can only be regarded, in all sincerity, as ‘tragic’ as receiving a bad hand in a game of Blackjack. Of course, insincerity is the essence of civility, and therefore integral to any tactful interaction, but this is not the same as having a genuine moral compass. The tragedy lies in the fact we know something deeply valuable has been lost. We say “I’m sorry for your loss” not “better luck next time” for a reason. As such, unless you intend to engage in mental gymnastics to suggest “terminating” highly viable babies past the legal limit is worlds apart to killing newborns, the recent movements for decriminalisation should be concerning, even if wholly in-step with our opponents’ revealed attitude towards the unborn.
In a similar vein, if assisted dying should be liberalised to alleviate suffering on the basis that our life is ours to use as we see fit, then suicide becomes just another expression of individual choice which needs to be destigmatised. After all, why should we need to suffer? Why would such a precondition exist if life didn’t have an inherent value, and if life has an inherent value, how could we justify a policy like assisted dying in the first place? Because the suffering outweighs that inherent value? How would you know when suffering outweighs this value? After all, suffering is extremely subjective. You can make this assessment for your own quality of life, but not for another person’s. Confronted with the potential suicide of another person, there’s not a lot you could do. You needn’t assist the act or condone it, but you’d be a hypocrite for showing or feeling anything more than defeated indifference. After all, who are you to judge? Again, it’s not your life. In order to override them, you’d need to believe life has a value beyond quantification, which it certainly does.
If one’s suffering is one’s business, then it becomes one’s business to deal with it, using their preferred option of the many made available. Although plausibly convenient, it makes life less rich, for what good are the virtues of mercy, assurance, and even heroism itself? More than rendered obsolete by consent-based ethics, they are contorted into acts of undue, arbitrary interference.
Life is worth suffering, not merely because of what can be done between our birth and death but due to its facticity; it is given, not chosen. Nobody derives meaning from the things they consciously choose; at least, not for long. There will always be the sense that relying on such things feels constructed, inviting us to seek something more essential. We don’t choose our nationality, our sexuality, our name, our family, and so forth, and so the importance of these things is heightened in an era with an abundance of choice.
The present political landscape serves as testament to this fact, not solely in the form of progressive-left identity politics. Regardless of how his economic prospects ebbed and flowed, the Englishman could rely on having won the lottery of life. He was born into a community with just cause and proficient capability to take his welfare seriously, as well as provide him with a sense of rootedness in an otherwise changing world. He had a cultural heritage which suggested he was part of something greater than himself; any belief in his abilities was well-founded and any shortcoming would surely be redeemed by the successes of his kin. Confronted with large scale demographic change from immigration, he feels himself in revolt against a class which has not yet taken everything from him, but is in the process of trying to destroy his few but cherished saving graces.
Even things which aren’t pleasurable, such as personal tragedies, supply us with a greater and much needed confrontation with the involuntary nature of our existence than even the most high-brow, profound, and enriching pastimes.
It is often said that the value of life lies in its depth, not its length; in other terms, life is about having a good time, not a long time, and whilst there’s certainly truth in this idea, it detracts from the distressing fact that we have time at all; a fact we tend to avoid truly thinking about until we’re out of it. Indeed, I suspect many have thought about how they’d spend their last day on Earth before resuming their lives as if their mortality was part of the hypothetical. The fact death takes us without our prior consent frightens us; it goes against what we regard as the basis for permissibility, so we’re inclined to ignore it.
The simple fact of the matter is that assisted dying is never abused; it merely comes to better embody the spirit in which it was introduced. The process misconstrued as the ‘slippery slope’ is nothing more than a superficially innocent argument being carried to its garish but logical conclusion. The ever-ambiguous safeguards aren’t meant to shield against improper uses of the system, merely to shield against uses which haven’t achieved mainstream acceptance, and could be used as a justification to prevent (or outright reverse) its full implementation. Things called insane right-wing conspiracy theories today will be referred to as inevitable and necessary progress tomorrow.
So, let’s cut to the chase. Instead of obsessing over regulations which will be altered or subverted, let’s be very frank about our fundamental and irreconcilable differences, and eagerly embrace the intellectually demanding and morally sensitive nature of this matter.
Those in support can make their case for life’s essential hollowness, and that our time on Earth is nothing more than taking the path of least resistance to the grave, filling our time with surrogate activities until it becomes too much, at which point we hop-off the existential ride. As for those opposed, we must more staunchly make the case for death as it comes for us, as it does. Just as we can gain value from being born here rather than there, from being this rather than that, the same must be said of our death. We do not view life as an empty vacuum to be filled with things that matter. The fact we do what we do, in the knowledge that our time is finite, makes what we do meaningful. Life gives meaning to our activities, not the other way around.
The advocates of assisted dying are right about one thing. We don’t get to choose what we do with our life, but it is because of this fact that our death remains our own. Therefore, the only way to ensure our death remains truly ours, something indivisibly belonging to us as individuals, free of aggregated social pressures and bouts of false consciousness, immune to last-minute bargaining and uncontaminated by ambiguity over cause-and-effect – altogether free from the risk of coercion – is to prevent it from being turned into a choice in the first place.
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Rishi Sunak: MP for Anywhere
In his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart sought to explain the Brexit vote, and the furore that followed, as a rift between two tribes in British life: ‘Somewheres’ and ‘Anywheres’.
Somewheres, Goodhart explained, are traditionally-minded and attached to place. By contrast, Anywheres are cosmopolitans and attached primarily to ideals. Somewheres are often provincial and typically live in (or nearby) the communities in which they were raised. Anywheres are primarily urban and often live far from where they were raised.
For Goodhart, Brexit was a revolt of the nation’s Somewheres. Alienated by the extraordinary rate of social change in the post-Blair era, they took a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to vote against the Anywhere-dominated political establishment.Though nominally a vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union, the referendum was essentially a vote of protest against the cross-party consensus on immigration.
The frustration of Somewheres is exemplified by voters in ‘The Red Wall’, a patchwork of traditionally Labour-supporting northern constituencies, who voted Tory en masse in the 2019 general election in the hope that Brexit might finally be settled and migration numbers could be reduced.
Though no less baffled than the rest of the establishment, The Conservative Party – unlike many of their fellow Anywheres – was willing to implement the referendum’s result. Ultimately, however, the failure to capitalise on the opportunities presented by Brexit, the collapse of the Red Wall, and a major electoral realignment was to define our outgoing government.
None personified this failure to understand the significance of Brexit as much as the man who was destined to lead the Conservative Party into the most recent election. This would not surprise readers of Goodhart’s work, for Rishi Sunak is Anywhere incarnate.
The hyper-conscientious child of immigrant parents who, through hard work and talent, has risen to the very apex of his profession, Sunak personifies the cosmopolitan ideals of the contemporary western elite.Sunak’s failure as Prime Minister does not reflect a lack of merit. Of the four Prime Ministers who succeeded Cameron, Sunak was probably the most capable and accomplished.
Sunak’s relationship with his heritage is interesting. Born to Ugandan-Asian parents, Sunak exemplifies the industry and drive of that entrepreneurial group of people. Teetotal and vegetarian, our erstwhile leader married outside both his caste and ethnicity – of Punjabi heritage, his wife is the only daughter of a fabulously wealthy family of south Indian origin. In this he typifies the subcontinent’s elite diaspora who, as Razib Khan writes, have globalisation ‘etched in their bones’.
His heritage aside, Sunak’s background is that of a stereotypical Tory frontbencher. A product of Winchester College (where he was Head Boy), Sunak progressed to Oxford (where he earned a 1st in PPE) and thence to Stanford (via a Fulbright Scholarship).Upon graduating, he pursued a career in high finance, first at Goldman Sachs and then at two hedge funds, the latter being based in California. Notoriously, Sunak filed US tax returns while serving as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, not relinquishing his Green Card until 2021.
Having joined the Conservative Party following an internship at Central Office, Sunak became an MP in 2015, replacing William Hague as the representative for Richmond. Parachuted into Number 10 in the aftermath of the Truss debacle, Sunak proceeded to dismay colleagues with displays of poor political judgement, choosing to announce the cancellation of a trainline to Manchester while in Manchester, to cite but one of several notorious examples.
Whereas for most the office of Prime Minister represents the culmination of a long and bruising career; Sunak’s brief tenure as Prime Minister will likely represent just another impressive (though relatively ill-remunerated) entry in a glittering CV. It is safe to presume that, before the Tories are again returned to power, he and his family will decamp to California in order that he might resume his career in finance.For all the bluster about his supposedly reactionary politics, Sunak’s values align with the managerialist liberalism which dominates the contemporary Conservative Party.
The Economist describes Sunak as ‘the most right-wing Conservative leader of his generation’ and claims his ‘nerdy demeanour covers an overlooked fact… [o]n everything from social issues, devolution and the environment to Brexit and the economy, Mr Sunak is to the right of the recent Tory occupants of 10 Downing Street’, but this is merely relative.
Objectively speaking, similar to his background, Sunak’s politics are blandly Anywhere, believing that a modern economy cannot function without high levels of immigration – derived from his instinctive belief in entrepreneurial mobility – and extols ‘diversity’ as both a moral good and political virtue, even at the expense of factual accuracy.
Sunak’s support of Brexit, often cited as evidence of his right-wing convictions, is misconstrued. Sunak was no ‘Little Englander’ hoping to make Britain’s borders more restrictive. Rather, Sunak saw leaving the EU as an opportunity to further liberalise Britain’s immigration regime.
With Sunak gone, the Conservative Party is once again presented with the opportunity to reinvent itself.
For a generation or more, the Conservative Party has simply failed to take the concerns of Middle England seriously. Sunak, so removed from the concerns of ordinary British people that he didn’t think it worthwhile to attend ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, exemplified this detachment.
If the Tory party is to regain political relevance, it must listen to the nation’s Somewheres – a constituency that remains in flux, and that the Labour Party does not speak for. The lack of enthusiasm for our incoming government is remarkable and telling. The electorate has grown tired of the Tories, but are dubious of a Labour Party who seem to offer nothing but more of the same.
So farewell, Prime Minister Sunak. We wish you well, Anywhere you go.
