Politics & Democracy

The Left's "Diversity" Blindspot

Alan Flanagan
·
October 9, 2023
The Left's "Diversity" Blindspot

In a very visible way, British politics in the past year has provided a stress test to the contemporary liberal shibboleths of “diversity” and the imperative to “listen to voices” of historically marginalised minority communities. It is a stress test that liberals have failed, and in doing so revealed a hypocrisy and lack of substance behind the sanctim…

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Dead Ideas and Lifeless Old Beliefs

Alan Flanagan
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August 14, 2023
Dead Ideas and Lifeless Old Beliefs

“It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.” Penned by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in his 1881 play, ‘Ghosts’, this quote is timeless in its relevance and poignancy. Humans have a hard time letting go of lifeless old beliefs and dead i…

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Climate Inaction is Inseparable from Inequality

Alan Flanagan
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July 23, 2023
Climate Inaction is Inseparable from Inequality

When the UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, referred to climate protesters as emanations of the “tofu-eating wokerati”, it was mostly laughed off as an absurd statement to be made by a cabinet member in Parliament. In fact, implicit in those three words was an issue far from trivial; it encapsulated an express link that Right-wing populist parties acr…

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The Rise of Electoral Autocracy

Alan Flanagan
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May 28, 2023
The Rise of Electoral Autocracy

The political scientist Samuel Huntington popularised the concept of “democratic waves”, in which he attempted to capture periods in history where the proportion of nations adopting democracy substantially increased. Although academics debate the definitions of democracy Huntington applied, even with stricter definitions there remain clear patterns acro…

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The End and Beginning of History

Alan Flanagan
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July 17, 2022
The End and Beginning of History

The 20th Century comprised a number of catastrophic struggles between various ideologies of political and economic organisation. From the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, imperialism, fascism, communism, and nationalism - not necessarily distinctly delineated - convulsed the world. From that apocalyptic…

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A Battle of Ideas

Alan Flanagan
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January 30, 2023
A Battle of Ideas

The centennial issue of the journal Foreign Affairs captured the zeitgeist in its title: ‘The Age of Uncertainty’. The term ‘zeitgeist’ - a spirit of the times - emerged from the German Romantic philosophers of the 18th Century, Herder in particular, as Europe sought to grasp with its explosive metamorphosis from the old order of theology, feudality, an…

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An Act of National Self-Harm

Alan Flanagan
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October 3, 2022
An Act of National Self-Harm

The bath is now drawn. It’s been filling for some time; 12 years to be precise. But filling with a slow drip that reflected the hesitation of a party which, for some of those early years post 2010, thought it had something to live for. No such illusion persists now. There is no ignoring the blunt knife by the bath.

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Why Do Progressives Loathe the Working Class?

Alan Flanagan
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June 27, 2023
Why Do Progressives Loathe the Working Class?

After the colossal electoral defeat of Labour by the Conservatives in 2019, Deborah Mattinson, a UK pollster who had worked for the Labour Party, engaged a series of focus groups in the North of England in three towns: Hyndburn, Darlington and Stoke-on-Trent. These towns, along with so many others, considered part of “the Red Wall”, areas of the industr…

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The Abject Failure of the Left

Alan Flanagan
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September 5, 2022
The Abject Failure of the Left

Three mandates from the UK electorate have come to define the metamorphoses of the Conservative Party from “small ‘c’ conservatism” to the hard-Right. The first was Thatcher’s 1979 victory giving the Tories a 44 seat majority (339 total seats) with 43.9% of the vote. This signalled the beginning of the end for British social democracy, the end of the co…

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Unchain Britannia to Behold a Naked Emperor

Alan Flanagan
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September 18, 2022
Unchain Britannia to Behold a Naked Emperor

You shouldn’t be surprised. Like any political movement that sees itself as revolutionary, all that is about to happen was foretold. The wannabe-revolutionaries wrote it down for us all to see: they hid nothing. In 2012, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, and Chris Skidmore, co-authored the manifesto of the conservative ideology that …

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"Be Like Sweden!"

Alan Flanagan
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May 9, 2021
"Be Like Sweden!"

In 2004, two researchers - Raghabendra Chattopadhyay (a public policy professor) & Esther Duflo (an economist) - published the results of a study they had undertaken in the Indian province of West Bengal. In 1992, the Indian government had initiated constitutional reform which reserved one-third of the Panchayati Raj, or local councils, for women leader…

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Why Can't They Just Swim Harder?

Alan Flanagan
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July 25, 2022
Why Can't They Just Swim Harder?

The origins of the phrase, “the rising tide raises all boats”, have been the subject of debate, but whatever its origins, the popularising of the phrase appears to be attributable to John F. Kennedy during his 1960 presidential campaign. What is ironic, given that the phrase was ultimately destined to become another Right-wing economic banality for just…

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Status Disaffection and Populism

Alan Flanagan
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June 12, 2022
Status Disaffection and Populism

The political fallout from the 2008 global financial crash remained relatively obscured until the twin harbingers of 2016: the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit referendum. Much of the political analysis has attempted to explain the trajectory of electoral trends since 2008, including beyond the U.S. and UK in countries like Hungary, Poland, Ven…

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Moral Decay

Alan Flanagan
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January 16, 2022
Moral Decay

There are periods throughout history where it is possible to identify a point in time where a civilisation, usually drunk on decadence and despairing in decay, passes into a stage of terminal decline, a caricature of its former self. Often this point is not necessarily the result of a singular seismic event, but a slow devolving process from a moment in…

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Tech Culture & Democracy

Alan Flanagan
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July 25, 2021
Tech Culture & Democracy

Can you have a functioning democracy with a participatory, informed electorate, when the control of information, data, and the capacity to direct thought, is held by a concentrated power, an unaccountable third party operating beyond the institutions of state?

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The Rudderless Raft of Despair

Alan Flanagan
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August 14, 2022
The Rudderless Raft of Despair

Britain is a nation adrift, lost at sea in a raft of its own making. Rudderless, leaderless, and becoming ever more hopeless. There are no adults on the raft. Just a group of petulant rich children, engaging in that desperately British class ridicule where kids who went to £45,000 per year schools try to convince us they’re just one of the plebs, ruling…

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The Roots of Democratic Erosion

Alan Flanagan
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November 13, 2022
The Roots of Democratic Erosion

The collapse of the Soviet Union is often encapsulated by the symbolism of the Berlin Wall falling on the 9th November 1989, the final barrier toward the emergence of a democratic world crumbling along with the last tyrannical socio-political ideology of the 20th Century. The current outlook for democracy makes this historical hubris of optimism seem qu…

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How Can We Reimagine a Better Future?

Alan Flanagan
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April 3, 2022
How Can We Reimagine a Better Future?

In 1834, the British parliament enacted the Poor Law, which placed the worldview of society deeply embedded in the psyche of the British ruling class on a statutory footing: that of the “undeserving poor”. The unwritten assumption on the other shoe, of course, was that those born into generational wealth were deserving of all that came way their way by …

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Democracy Doesn't Die in the Dark

Alan Flanagan
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December 12, 2021
Democracy Doesn't Die in the Dark

In the aftermath of the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president, the Washington Post adopted the slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” While evocative and somewhat quaint, it is historically illiterate. The Rise and Progressive Decline of Democracy

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Conservatism is the Problem

Alan Flanagan
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July 10, 2022
Conservatism is the Problem

In the run-up to the U.S. 2020 election, it was interesting to see different themes develop on how to interpret the 4-year Trump presidency. In the liberal press, a common theme was to portray the 2016-2020 period as an aberration; a bad dream that America would wake up from. Over the subsequent tumultuous transition period, and the ongoing embrace of i…

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The Deliberate Dismantling of Accountability in U.S. Politics

Alan Flanagan
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April 17, 2022
The Deliberate Dismantling of Accountability in U.S. Politics

Baked into the fabric of American political life is a reverence for the Constitution that is difficult to compare to any other nation with a written constitution. The centrality of the Constitution to the operation of America’s political institutions, and to the yet unresolved foundational battle for rights, liberty, and equality for all, has placed the…

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Does Populism Have a Political Spectrum?

Alan Flanagan
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April 18, 2021
Does Populism Have a Political Spectrum?

To have paid attention to any political event in the UK or the US in the past 5yrs is to have witnessed an incomprehensible mesh of confused ideologies clash with levels of tribalism previously unseen in post-Second World War democracies. For a fleeting half-century from the end of that conflict, the political fault lines were relatively narrow across a…

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It's Not Fascism

Alan Flanagan
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June 6, 2021
It's Not Fascism

In 2016, the word "surreal" just beat out "fascism" as the most used word of the year, according to Merriam-Webster. The gratuitous use of the term is not confined to any source; redtop and broadsheet, Left wing and Right wing, the recent trend in brandishing any opposing individual, group, or party as 'fascist', transcends historic political fault line…

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The Spectre of Violence

Alan Flanagan
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August 24, 2022
The Spectre of Violence

What happens when a dangerous mix of irrational paranoia, constant perception of being under threat, and exuberance for extreme measures to defeat the other side, come to dominate the political landscape? No democracy can function when it is defined by such an extreme, zero-sum struggle along moralised ideological fault-lines. But America is not a functi…

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The Right Stepping into the Void of Left-wing Politics

Alan Flanagan
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May 16, 2021
The Right Stepping into the Void of Left-wing Politics

Much has already, and will continue to be, written about the further dismantling of Labour by an electorate who sees straight through the mirage of a party that purports to represent the interests of ordinary people and workers. This has been sorely obvious to anyone paying attention to the trends for Labour since Gordon Brown's incompetent economic pol…

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