La Garde Nationale

La Garde Nationale

This post is part of our series looking at lessons from history to the challenges facing us today

It is certainly true that the French Revolution of 1789 would not have been possible had it not been for the National Guard.

Initially created on 13 July 1789 explicitly as the Bourgeois Militia by the National Assembly, the guard was intended to protect both the Assembly itself and law, order and property generally from the twin perceived threats of mob violence and an increasingly erratic King who had just sacked the popular and capable Jacques Necker as de facto prime minister.

The popular riots and attacks on factories, warehouses and larger private homes were themselves a cause for concern – and were being stoked up by the King’s apparent disregard for maintaining popular support and his increasing willingness to reassert regal powers. Popular newspapers were already full of gossip about the King’s alleged plans to use force against the people or even the Assembly and the body felt the need to establish a body which would act as a force for moderation and calm in Paris.

The need to both arm and to assert the legitimacy of the force, rapidly renamed the National Guard, was what instigated the famous actions against Des Invalides and Le Bastille on 14 July – both were seen as likely places were gunpowder, shot and muskets were likely to be found. Despite the legends which have grown up around the storming of Le Bastille since, it was neither a mass popular initiative nor one designed to free prisoners – it was an attempt to bolster the military power of new, emerging institutions.

Throughout the early years of the revolution, especially under the instinctively establishment and moderate Lafayette, the National Guard went on, broadly, to fulfil this purpose. It proved willing to protect targets of crowd violence, including unpopular political prisoners and enemies, and even played a role in facing down and breaking up popular demonstrations, riots and attempts to seize property.

Similar bodies sprang up in many towns throughout France but as with the Revolution itself, it was what happened in Paris which really set the tone and dictated a particular path.

Crucial for the success of the Guard in the first few years was the significant property requirements which existed, particularly for its officers and the core of former French Guards who helped to establish its professional and loyal ethos.

It was only when, in response to continued pressure from the Jacobins and Cordeliers, the former distinction between “active” and “passive” citizens was abandoned that things began to change. On 11 July 1792 the famous emergency motion declaring “le patrie en danger” passed the National Assembly and the the professional and property owning membership of the National Guard was promptly swamped by huge numbers of new entrants – fulfilling Robespierre’s vision of the people as a whole under arms.

This radically changed the character of the Guard, turning it from an instrument of moderation and control which could usually be relied upon to subdue and calm crowds, even whilst maintaining popular support and legitimacy, into a force which was more likely to side with the mob and enforce its will on the Assembly.

The new, truly revolutionary Guard, under increasingly revolutionary leadership and with the active support of most local communes, began to become one of the most effective levers of the Terror, losing its professional character and its interest in preserving peace and property.

The history of La Garde National and its composition and leadership played a key role in the course of future French Revolutions throughout the 19^th Century – usually siding with the professional and propertied classes and protecting peace, property and political liberties, and only acting in the most measured way to remove counter the most despotic or odious actions of the King. Sometimes though, as in 1848 and 1871 it would find itself filled with those without a stake in such things and under the leadership of radicals – leading in turn to far greater spilling of blood and to revolutions spiralling out of control.

Whilst often overlooked or viewed mechanistically as a tool of whoever the prevailing political actors of the day were, it should not be forgotten that a broadly popular, armed and often moderate Garde National was a major political actor in its own right.

Rising from nothing to become, within days, a significant and coherent force the 1789 Revolution and all of France’s major revolutions thereafter, the National Guard is a perfect illustration of how largely non-political popular but moderate movements can arise very quickly when needed – and how dangerous they can be when their force is co-opted into wider revolutionary movements and falls into the wrong hands.

Tidings of Comfort and Joy?

Tidings of Comfort and Joy?

Merry Christmas!

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

With celebrations in full swing we hope that you’ll pardon today’s relatively short post. But we think it is important that we do not let our regular readers down.

Our own small dedication, sacrifice and effort to serve others helps us to remember the much more significant efforts and sacrifices many make at Christmas to support their fellow man. Efforts which should be a huge encouragement to us all as something in which we can all take pride – demonstrating as it does the better nature of mankind.

Christmas has always had a strong charitable and giving element to it. With the growing burden of taxation, bureaucracy and the cost of living crisis it is clear that this year’s Christmas will be characterised by this even more so than usual.

All across the UK and in many other countries there will be people, often associated with churches or local community charities providing meals, shelter, support and comfort to those in our society most in need.

From community provision of Christmas meals to the least well off in thousands of parish halls and even in people’s homes, to food bank parcels, clothing exchanges and little acts of neighbourly or community support – these are lights which add a genuine warm glow to Christmas.

The fact that this all happens without needing the clunking fist of the state to make it happen is a huge encouragement about our potential to support and care for one another when we need it – and a great illustration of what could happen if we did things differently.

This might be why some people get just so angry and upset about it all.

To anyone of a socialist persuasion the very existence of foodbanks and community groups offering these kinds of support is an appalling reflection on our state as a society. As far as they are concerned voluntary action and community support should be playing no role here. Why let people be motivated by genuine humanity, compassion and fellow-feeling – when the Government could (and as far as they are concerned should) be doing it all?

This is quite a sickening reaction and it really says more about those who hold it than about society.

There is absolutely no reason why it is morally superior for these things to be done inefficiently, bureaucratically and grudgingly under compulsion by the state than by people caring for their neighbours.

Love and goodwill is not possible without choice – and when the Government does everything the possibility of things being done by choice is eliminated – and we become less as a species as a result.

You can sense the Herod-like fear that these self-important socialists feel when their position is threatened by the hope of communities doing so much good without them. They would happily kill off all of this wonderful, joyful and loving activity because it must be them organising and dictating it or better for it not to be happening at all.

Yet for all their murderous rage at these good things they fail to eliminate them.

So please join The Torch is sharing these tidings of comfort and joy, taking solace that the light is in the world and the darkness has not overcome it.

Market failure – public good. Railway mania in the 1840s

Market failure – public good. Railway mania in the 1840s

This post is part of our series looking at lessons from history to the challenges facing us today

Charles Mackay’s brilliant book – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a brilliant insight into how irrational we are capable of being as a species at large and thus how we are capable of repeatedly making bad collective decisions which manifestly go against our own individual and collective interests.

Most of Mackay’s original economic examples – price riots, the South Sea Bubble, Tulip Mania etc had disastrous consequences. The same is equally true of the social examples – the veneration of and conflicts over relics, witch hunts and admiration for criminal thugs being good illustrations of this – as are many modern examples of public hysteria and collective examples the reader can probably bring to mind.

Mackay sums up the problem very well when he says that:

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

This is particularly likely to be true in situations where lots of people do not really understand the subject but are impressed by some new and shiny aspect of it – technology or science, religious claims or belief in experts. As such it is a trend we see very often in financial markets where all of these criteria tend to apply.

One of Mackay’s examples added in later editions is also worthy of note though because of the long-term positive impact that such popular madness has had. Indeed, it is the ideal illustration of how what might seem to the immediate observer as market failure is in fact the working out of long-term progress through market mechanisms.

The 1840s were a time of massive growth in the UK economy. The deregulation and pro-free market policies pursued since the 1830s had started to have an effect and the Industrial Revolution was bringing wealth and higher living standards to more people than ever before throughout the country.

This created both a plethora of investment opportunities and ready markets for both goods and services, including travel.

Both the immediate need for better transport networks, and the long-term potential of the railways led to a massive influx of investment and the creation of a large number of new lines backed by private investment, connecting up huge swathes of the country, in turn bringing in more potential industrial users and leisure travellers.

There was therefore a very real basis for optimism about railway investments and good returns to be had for a good discerning investor.

Not everyone though was either good or discerning investor.

As was to be expected with the sheer size and scale of what became known as Railway Mania, as well as a good number of people who had looked at the business fundamentals, considered their customer, potential growth, costs of capital, risks etc – there were also more than a few con-men, speculators and of course quite a lot of people who were following the crowd and were drunk on optimism and fanciful hopes of huge returns.

In 1846 alone, Parliament passed over 260 Bills granting permission for the creation of new railways – with nearly 10,000 miles of track being granted. Many of these lines were based on insanely optimistic assumptions about future growth and revenue, as well as the continuing of low interest rates. As a result some never got built. Many however did.

Through the 1830s and 1840s tens of thousands of miles of track were added to Britain’s railway networks – with over 4,000 miles being laid down in a single year. By contrast Britain’s current railway network measures at less than 12,000 miles.

Inevitably, a number of the companies that built these railways did not survive.

The trigger for the collapse of the railway investment boom was the Government’s decision to raise interest rates. This led to more astute investors diversifying their holding out of railway stocks and a slowing in the growth of railway stocks. This slowing started to become apparent to more and more people who in turn sold up and the slowing became a fall which in turn became a crash.

The sheer upfront expense of producing railway lines meant that lots of companies had only losses to show at this point and the more valuable of them were bought out by larger railway operators. Those which had never been realistic prospects to begin with were abandoned entirely.

Lots of people lost a lot of money in Railway Mania and the short term consequences were awful for them – leading many people to cite this as an example of market failure.

Yet the market here was acting exactly as it should do, despite the over-exuberance and irrationality of many investors.

We are all better off if resources are properly invested to maximise their return. We are also all better off if useful infrastructure like railways get built.

Those who succeed with their investments, whether through shrewd insight or luck, do very well out of them, those who make poor investments lose money.

Yet even when they do so and when they get bought up by other companies who go on to make a better profit from them, we, the public at large go on to benefit. The right railways get built in the right places, money goes on to be invested elsewhere, and rational economic growth and progress continues.

What is therefore most truly remarkable about all of this is how even the most irrational, mad and delusional behaviour gives way in time to “normal” behaviour with even some good lasting progress having been made. And the march of history continues.

And of course – those of us who are prepared to avoid following the crowd and learn the lessons of history are in a position to benefit most of all.

Now that’s a cheery thought to end on.

Happy Christmas from The Torch.

Church and state – a problem looked at all wrong

Church and state – a problem looked at all wrong

“…no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”
Article 6, United States Constitution

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
United States Constitution First Amendment

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

Britain has no laws forbidding the involvement of the church in the state. Quite the contrary.

Our Monarch is the head of our established church. The bishops of that church sit in our House of Lords. There are various laws on the statute books which enshrine the special status and privileges of the Church of England. The terminology, ritual and ceremony in which many of the most important affairs of state are conducted are all based on religious liturgy.

Whilst the American constitution is in many ways an outgrowth of the political theory and traditions of 17^th and 18^th Century Britain it is in some important ways based on a reaction to them.

Much like Montesquieu’s separation of powers which was also based on British constitutional arrangements and theory, the foundational documents of the United States are really an attempt to manufacture an idealised version of how its theorists thought the British Government ought to have worked.

The nature of the relationship between church and state is therefore much misunderstood – and even those who do understand it tend to focus on the wrong aspects of it.

There is an abiding belief amongst many British people that there is something vaguely wrong, or even possibly illegal about involving churches in service delivery, in community engagement or in receiving grants. This view is especially prevalent in the huge number of quangos which now rule so much of the country, but also in local government, and even in business and the charitable sector. It is this vague feeling, possibly stemming from watching too much American television, which leads to the hostility so many Christian charities face, and even some of the incredibly silly anti-Christmas posturing we see at this time of year.

This is of course nonsense, and as this site has commented previously, given the general incompetence of the British state and its agencies in just about everything they do they really should welcome people trying to do good, whatever their motivation may be. Charities and businesses meanwhile need to re-acquaint themselves with reality and recognise that most of their customers are actually pleasantly surprised to see them engaging with Christianity.

Even amongst those who do understand the relationship between church and state and who make the legitimate case for separating the two there is a tendency to focus on just one side of the problem.

The main reason for the United States refusing to establish a national church was because of the massive variety of Christian denominations which existed in the states at the time of independence and which have deep roots in different waves of migration from the UK and other parts of Europe. Establishing one denomination as the approved church would be seen as a slight to all others.

More than that, there was a very real perceived risk that an established church could drive some form of religious persecution and discrimination as was the case in so much of Europe. Avoiding putting the power of the state in the hands of the church was seen therefore as a great way of reducing the chances of internal repression and conflict in what was then a very fragile and, politically active and freedom loving country.

But having a close and sometimes symbiotic relationship between the church and state doesn’t just shape the state and how it uses its power.

It shapes the church too.

It is this aspect of the established church which gets too little attention – especially in England were the problem is greatest.

The Church of England used to be jokingly referred to as “The Conservative Party At Prayer” – making the point that the established church was so very establishment that its thinking, actions and assumptions were all shaped by the establishment orthodoxy at the time. It has ever been thus and is still so, it is just that the nature of our Government and its sprawling establishment consensus has changed.

The Church of England could more correctly these days be called The Guardian or BBC at prayer – or given the relative decline of religious activities in church, perhaps The Guardian tea rota and local committee meeting.

This is reflected overwhelmingly in the increasingly open political messaging adopted by the leadership of the Church of England and its increasing willingness to genuflect in front of establishment norms and values over those of the faith it is meant to represent.

Because its values and increasingly its leadership and personnel are so establishment the Church of England is increasingly losing its way in terms of Christian faith.

And this doesn’t just matter to those of us who are Christian. It matters also from a political and social perspective.

Churches can play a key social, not just in doing good and encouraging good, but in setting moral and social norms and preserving unifying traditions and ways of life.

As the church turns itself increasingly into just another quango we are losing this and so much of the fabric of society weakens as a result – inevitably causing establishment socialist politicians to clamour for yet more Government provision through Government agencies to intervene in our lives and “do something” which we were previously doing for ourselves.

Those who advocate for disestablishment and for a separation of Church and state are often seen as somehow anti-church and motivated to protect Government from the influence of Church.

In the UK we have reached a position where this is now absolutely necessary in order to protect Church from the influence of Government.

When Rome fell no one really noticed

When Rome fell no one really noticed

This post is part of our series looking at lessons from history to the challenges facing us today

In 476 the Roman Empire fell – and almost no one at the time would have realised it.

There is endless academic debate about when the Roman Empire fell. Was it with the formal creation of multiple emperors, multiple capitals and the structural separation of east from West under Diocletian? Was it earlier when political power shifted from Rome to a variety of capitals closer to the endless conflicts on Rome’s borders – starting in 286 with Nicomedia and Mediolanum? Or later when Constantinople emerged as the pre-eminent city in the Empire? Should the Roman Empire rightly be seen as continuing for another millennium beyond this point until Constantinople fell to the Turks? Or as some claim, has the Roman Empire never actually fallen?

Whatever your preferred date, 476 was certainly the end of something. The end of Imperial status for the Western Empire, the end of any pretensions to special status for Rome or Italy, and certainly the start of quite a different period in Western European history.

This is apparent in retrospect, yet it would not have been clear at the time.

The Roman Empire as a whole, but particularly the West had been in decline for a very long time.

476 for example, did not amount to the first sacking of Rome. Whilst the original sacking of Rome by the Gauls in 387 BC was a distant and barely remembered memory by this point, there were a number of far more recent precedents.

In 410 AD Alaric, having already sieged the city a number of times and secured tribute and payments to leave the city in peace, finally, having run out of options to put pressure on the out-of-his-depth Emperor who steadfastly refused to deal with the Germanic tribes and to properly incorporate them into the Empire, decided to make a statement by assaulting and plundering the great city.

Contemporary accounts, such as that of St Jerome: “My voice sticks in my throat, and as I speak, sobs choke me” were rightly focussed on the symbolism of the sacking and the blow to Rome’s imperial prestige. Yet this was an incredibly restrained sacking by the standards of the time. The Christian Goths left Churches and Church property unmolested and respected the sanctuary of Church buildings for anyone who sought safety there.

It is telling both of the increasing weakness and ineptitude of the Emperors, and of Rome’s fallen status that this sacking had next to no effect on shifting Imperial policy and Alaric was finally forced to look elsewhere in his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to secure his people’s integration into the Empire.

And in 455 AD the same unwillingness to use traditional Roman strengths of incorporating and assimilating previously barbarian tribes to become “Romans” led to a similar but worse result. The criminally under-rated and insufficiently written about Vandal leader Genseric sought to make the same kind of point Alaric had and to highlight the costs to Rome of refusing to work with his people and to keep promises. The permanently weak and badly led Roman forces in Italy put up a laughably weak resistance to the Vandal tribes as they made their way down the peninsula and sacked Rome. This time far less restrain was shown and weeks and weeks of plunder and with widespread burning of buildings and damage to many of the most prominent buildings of the city – earning themselves a permanent association with damage and destruction in the process.

Whilst these sackings were symbolically and reputationally important and caused great concern amongst Roman citizenship at large, they were not the hammer blows to the political power and authority of the Western Roman Empire they might be thought to be.

Because the sad fact is that Rome’s status within the Empire had been declining for centuries. As we set out above, Rome had long since ceased to be the sole capital, or even the most important city within the Empire. As well as Mediolanum, Nicomedia and Constantinople as set out above, Ravenna, Milan and a series of settlements in Gaul had all served as capitals at various points ad the Emperor had sought to establish his base of power closer to the main military theatres, and as power fractured between multiple Emperors. Milan and Ravenna has both certainly overtaken Rome in terms of strategic and military importance even within Italy.

It was only as the Western Empire entered its final phase of fragmentation that Rome returned to prominence, partly because so much of Gaul, Germania and Hispania had been lost (along with Britain and most of North Africa.) This was almost in itself an indication of the desperate straits the Western Empire found itself in – having to resort to and rely on the ancient prestige and reputation of Rome to lend a no-longer merited sense of authority to the crumbling Empire.

So when Odoacer, the leader of the Foederati association of Germanic tribes,  again following a petty betrayal by the latest lightweight and unreliable Western Roman Emperor decided to take matters into his own hands and force an abdication by sacking Rome (the third time in less than seventy years) it was not the shock that it might have been.

Romulus Augustulus, the deposed child Emperor, and his closest allies would surely have recognised it as a significant moment – at least for him personally. Julius Nepos, another deposed and exiled lightweight puppet emperor may have batted an eye-lid but would probably have regarded this as just another roll of the dice in the game of Imperial politics. Yet most Roman citizens would probably not have noticed the true significance of the moment at the time.

But Odoacer did – and he found the perfect symbolic gesture to represent it.

Shortly after deposing the hapless Augustulus Odoacer sent an emissary to the court of Emperor Zeno in the East at Constantinople.

Along with pledges of goodwill and calls for alliance and recognition the mission carried with it a parcel to the Augustus of the East.

It was the Imperial robes of the Western Empire.

Odoacer made it clear that the West had no more need for an Emperor. That he intended to serve as King/Dux of Italy and would request recognition of such (he didn’t quite get it but was allowed to hold his territories in peace.)

Zeno accepted the robes and made his peace with Odoacer.

And just like that, physically and politically a thousand miles away from the public fora for which Rome was famed, in a private meeting at the very furthest edge of Europe, it was agreed between a delegation representing a Germanic king and an Eastern Emperor hailing from Asia that the Roman Empire was indeed no longer needed and had passed – whilst the robes of the once great emperors sat beside them in a box.

It can indeed be hard to say when things have ended or how – and even harder to say why. Yet it is possible later on to look back and be absolutely convinced in hindsight that by a given point it is surely all over.

Losing the war: the coming darkness and the triumph of collective politics

Losing the war: the coming darkness and the triumph of collective politics

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

Count Carl Von Clausewitz once claimed that war is politics by other means, yet there is far greater truth in the inverse of that claim. The nature of politics is nothing so much as war by other means.

Politics is the term we give to the legal and legitimate interactions of individuals or groups within the state as they compete for control of limited resources and limited sources of authority to achieve their various goals.

Whilst the nature of their interactions is often far less destructive than war this should not distract us from the truth that unlike more positive and productive human interactions – trade, provision of services, manufacturing, agriculture, art, education, science etc – politics really is a zero-sum game.

In Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature we are in a state of war of each one against the other, constantly competing in the most vicious and destructive ways and living precariously as a result.

Over time people club together for collective safety and for increased power. We have seen this in geo-politics over the centuries, gradually producing larger and larger states or alliances of states in order to maximise either their safety or their ability to dominate others.

We have seen something similar emerge in domestic politics in every country which practices anything resembling popular or democratic politics – with most people with political ambitions banding together with those they share some interests with in order to maximise their chances of attaining power and being able to impose their will in this war of all against all for the control of the state’s authority and its resources.

The emergence of this collective form of politics then creates an additional dimension – with the insistent demands for loyalty from these political parties vying with the direct personal interests and beliefs of nearly every political actor and pulling him away from that which he truly believes in.

This being the true nature of collective politics in the form of political parties it is worth asking ourselves whether we consider this to be a good or a bad thing for the interests of the population of the state at large and thus, whether we should seek to promote or discourage political parties and their power.

To undertake such an analysis it is important to remember that the authority and legitimacy of the state is itself tenuous at best. Despite thousands of years of political theorising, no convincing and watertight theory of the state has ever found solid grounds on which to rest claims of legitimate state power. If one started instead from the hypothesis that the state was not legitimate then one could easily conclude that these thousands of failed attempts at refutation represent one of the greatest applications of scientific method to politics ever – and that there is an overwhelming case for the theory that the state is not legitimate.

Being pragmatists though, and recognising the risks of war of all against all, at The Torch we are willing to accept and tolerate the unsatisfactory but “least-bad” situation of a minimal state.

Clearly the nature of modern Governments and bureaucracies in every country on earth go far beyond this.

Even whilst tolerating the existence of minimal states though it is important that we continue to defend ourselves against the threats of other individuals or collectives who would seek to dominate or harm us. To that end we view active engagement in the political process – at the bare minimum voting, and ideally seeking to influence political discourse, as being a vital form of self-defence.

Voting and political engagement by definition more effective when we have more choices, and ideally, more effective and viable choices.

As such we conclude that the more that politics becomes collectivised, and the stronger political parties become, the less effective our voting-self-defence is, and the more likely it is that harm will come to us.

That has certainly been our democratic experience over the years.

The stronger and fewer the parties are, the fewer choices we have, the stronger the distortion of political options is and the worse the results are for the electorate.

This being so, we really should seek to shape our voting and electoral systems and our political institutions to minimise the power of political parties.

Political parties are at heart a form of free association, so can never be completely banned or prevented but there are a number of measures which could be easily introduced in the UK and in other similar democracies around the world.

Public funding for political parties is an obvious starting point – not just rejecting the insane claims doing the rounds at the moment for more taxpayer money, but also the self-serving measures already in place including Short Money and the provision of political advisors in a proliferating number of (apparently too broke to provide good services) local councils.

Next, no institutional recognition should be given to party offices such as Whips and Party Chairmen and no Parliamentary preference given to particular MPs because of party membership (think of the system of Select Committee appointments to see a good example of what needs fixing.)

Most importantly though, there should be no place on any ballot paper for party names or logos. Individuals seeking political election must be forced to make a name for themselves and to build a profile on the basis of their own abilities, talents and integrity – rather than relying on party labels.

This also means that we must reject entirely party list systems and voting systems which are geared towards this – including the particularly awful form of proportional representation which keeps on making zombie like returns to British political discussions.

With Labour looking increasingly likely to win the next General Election by default we are hearing renewed calls for this nonsense – yet entrenching such a system in the UK would represent a massive power-grab by our political parties. Rather than being able to vote for a particularly outstanding individual with strong local connections and the interests of the local area at heart, we would find ourselves served by an endless production-line of party apparatchiks, entirely dependent on the party for their position, promotion and profile in future.

So if you think politics is depressing and banal now – then brace yourselves, we’ll soon be looking back on these as the days when amidst a sea of darkness there were still some shards of light, some individuals willing and able to give us choice in politics. We are entering instead the coming triumph of the collective over the individual, and our mass disarmament by the oligarchic vested interests, with our capacity for voting-self-defence striped away from us.

Those lights look set to flicker out all over our political landscape. We can only hope that they will burn again in our lifetimes.

After the revolution

After the revolution

This post is part of our series looking at lessons from history to the challenges facing us today

There is a curious yet predictable tendency for the most seismic shocks to the political landscape to be followed, in time,  by the most soporific administrations which then anaesthetise then defang whatever radicalism may have been present in the body politic.

Wherever the fires of genuine political and social revolution engulf the previously well established and comfortable status quo, over time the wealth, influence and comforting blandness of the ancient regime have a way of reasserting themselves, like water on a pavement, seeping into every available crack and eventually undermining what sits on top of it.

One of the most prominent of these was the Protectorate after the English Civil War.

The English Civil War is often overlooked and underestimated in terms of its genuinely revolutionary nature. Granted, it was in part driven by an assertion of the historic rights of Englishmen against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts. It was increasingly, throughout its duration though, driven by a fair amount of religious and political radicalism.

It is easy for us to underestimate, from the entirely different position of our own society, the extent to which the highly literate, very faith driven and Evangelical protestants leading, funding and manning the Parliamentary forces were seeking to combat what they saw as genuinely evil and morally repugnant about Charles’s regime.

The way in which Bible verses from Judges, Kings and Psalms in particular were used to condemn the actions and to question the legitimacy of the king were so entirely out of keeping with the established tendency for the Church to work in partnership in support of political authority that they could count as revolutionary in their own right.

But beyond this, it was not just the Levellers and the Ranters in the wider population who were developing ground-breaking political theories about property, ownership and democracy as they went along; the rank and file of the New Model Army were riven by similar debates.

The very well documented Putney Debates amply demonstrate the fast evolving political dynamics with which Fairfax, Cromwell and the other leaders struggled to contend. The agitators amongst the ranks, Rainsborough in particular, developed almost entirely unaided, deep seated critiques of the nature of authority, the whole disciplinary structure of the army and previous assumptions about what the new settlement would look like.

It was not just the dramatic act of regicide which demonstrated the radicalism of the English Civil War, it was the power dynamics and the extent to which the leaders of what should really be seen as the English Revolution, were forced to react to fast moving societal pressures driven by genuinely new thinking about how the state should be structured.

This amazing energy and promise was however finally brought under control – to a great extent through the personal influence of Oliver Cromwell, but also through the bureaucratic systems developed to institutionalise authority into the hands of reliable, dull and loyal functionaries in the form of the Major Generals.

Following the death of Oliver Cromwell and the reversion to the assumptions of the status quo ante with the succession of his son, Richard Cromwell, the triumph of the ancien regime reached its epitome with the often lauded, but ultimately treacherous betrayal of the regime by Monck.

A similar sort of reversion famously also took place with the French Revolution. After the initial hope, optimism and energy of the early stages of the revolution came the insane and murderous Jacobins and Cordeliers until the Revolution finally succeeded in eating its own children and murdering both its own brightest talents and its own most driven idealogues.

This created the vacuum, into which the grey men, the bureaucrats, the uninspiring non-entities to reclaim the levers of power in the Directory – taking a kind of perverse pride in their very dullness and non-revolutionary nature. They of course in turn were overthrown by a reversion to the form of Monarchy in Napoleon’s regime and then in turn and in time, to a full-blown reversion to a Bourbon Monarchy itself.

Wherever attempts at genuine, belief-motivated, popular challenges to establishment orthodoxy occur, it seems that it is just a matter of time before we get a similar trend and a similar reversion. It is hard to tell whether to be depressed by the seeming futility of real, lasting and positive change, or to be encouraged by the knowledge that even the most demented and damaging modern societal trend will be irradiated, eradicated and subjugated in time by the all pervasive bland, grey, ancien regime perma-bureaucracy lying just beneath the surface and ready to return.

The aftermath of media mob justice

The aftermath of media mob justice

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

Quietly, not on the news homepages, or even in the politics homepages of our major news outlets, there has been a tacit admission that the media-mob-justice meted out to a former Minister might not have been justified.

Conor Burns, the former Minister who was hounded out of office and out of The Conservative Party on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations had this to say:

“The last two months have been a living nightmare, not just for me, especially for my elderly parents, for my many friends and my wider family and all those who love and care for me.

“When you get to the point where your 80-year-old father is saying: ‘When is this going to end?’ and you spend your time reassuring everyone else you are fine when actually you are far from fine is very difficult.”

“I think this all had become more to do with nice things I had said about the Trade Secretary than about being up late at the conference.”

“It felt and smelt like a stitch-up and that is what it was.”

Politicians are by and large comfortably-off financially. They are obviously, to an extent, successful, and they do jobs which many other people would like to do.

But remember this – they are human.

Cut them and they bleed, just as much as the rest of us.

There will be no great public outcry at the disgraceful treatment of Conor Burns. No best-selling books will emanate from the affair, and no high profile apologies will ensue.

You can also bet that no lessons will be learned.

We have reached a point where the hue-and-cry of social media and woefully biased and not-very-competent journalists can not just significantly damage a career, it can lead to huge amount of mental and physical suffering, abuse, victimisation and general nastiness suffered by innocent people.

People should always be allowed to be stupid and shouty in the media and social media – there’d hardly be anything left if we took all of that away. But institutions, the Government and wider civic society should seek to hold itself to a higher standard, and to something approaching due process.

What we are seeing instead is a variety of weak and craven political, civic and governmental organisations following the example of many of their spineless commercial counterparts in throwing loyal and hardworking members or employees under the bus on the basis of nothing more than accusations.

Because some offences or crimes are so appalling there is a growing tendency to view the mere fact of someone being accused of them as an unforgivable sin in and of itself. Organisations and institutions find it much easier to insulate themselves and to be seen as “tough” or “uncompromising” by treating people who have been accused of such things appallingly – “until we have investigated… etc”.

Yet all of this sends a message that the organisation is not willing to stand by someone who is accused and to risk their own reputation – no matter how weak or specious the initial charge is.

And in many cases such as this, eventually the media and social media circus moves on, and only later do we find that they were not guilty.

This never receives the same level of public attention – and there’s no recognition of what having an accusation hanging over you and your family has on you.

Instead they are nothing more than littered corpses lying in the wake of the bandwagon as it moves on.

As our politics continues its journey into dehumanisation…

Diocletian: the man who laid the foundations of feudalism

Diocletian: the man who laid the foundations of feudalism

This post is part of our series looking at lessons from history to the challenges facing us today

The Emperor Diocletian often appears in people’s lists of greatest Roman Emperors – usually behind the likes of Augustus, Hadrian and Trajan but sometimes ahead of the likes of Constantine the Great, Clodius, Aurelian or Marcus Aurerlius.

It is easy to see why people reach this conclusion.

He reigned for a remarkably long 21 years – only ending his term because of the unprecedented decision to voluntarily abdicate.

The sheer duration of his reign after the recent crises of the third century, and the consequent opportunity he had to reshape pretty much every aspect of the empire – from the high politics of the way that the Emperor was presented and how he shared power with the Tetrarchy, down to the economic, military, judicial and administrative organisation of the provinces does all argue that this is an eminently notable Emperor and one who had a significant impact.

And whilst some of his reforms didn’t even outlive him – such as the form of the Tetrachy, others have had lasting impacts which are arguably still felt today.

Yet it is the nature of those reforms and their impacts which strongly argues against his being regarded as one of the greatest Emperors – and which actually make a compelling case for his being one of the most damaging – far more so that the weak, directionless, fickle and fleeting emperors who often occupy that list.

Any man can be bad – it takes a highly capable, driven and committed individual to be utterly disastrous.

Our specific charge is that in the way he chose to expand both the power and prestige of the Emperor, his military reforms, his economic reforms and his social measures that he laid the foundations of feudalism.

Many of these reforms happened in accordance with conventional wisdom at the time, and others represent simply an oblivious misunderstanding of how economics and society truly work at a time when the study of such was in its infancy, so perhaps some of Diocletian’s actions are excusable, nevertheless as the author and implementer of these reforms he bears responsibility.

One of those responses to the conditions of the time was Diocletian’s decision to elevate the status of the Emperor and his court. Traditionally, going all the way back to Augustus, the Emperor would have been at pains to portray himself as Princeps – the first citizen of the Empire but ultimately first amongst equals. Diocletian made a concerted effort to significantly alter this styling – seeking to restrict access, create more mystery, ceremony and protocol and to adopt the more traditionally Eastern depiction as a semi-divine or outright divine figure even whilst alive.

It is suggested that the intention here was to make challenges to the Emperor and his prestige that much harder to even comprehend and to use that status to bring about political stability.

Whether this was successful or not is impossible to disentangle from the various other factors which impacted on Imperial succession and contention in the following centuries.

It is however very possible to see here the model of Divine Right, Divine Appointment and other regal postures which had previously been rare in Europe yet which were to become near universal for over a thousand years afterwards.

Another area of Diocletian’s reforms was in relation to the military, where his separation of civilian administrative command structures from military command structures inevitably led to the latter becoming the more powerful, prestigious and influential – especially since their military commands tended to span more than one of the new, smaller administrative provinces. These warlords, accountable only to the new divine emperor went by the name of Dux – the linguistic and organisational ancestor of the Dukes of the Middle Ages.

Patronage had always been a major feature of the Roman Empire but as part of the elevated status of the Emperor, Diocletian massively inflated the size of the Imperial bureaucracy to create a massive web of dependency – causing the Christian author Lactantius to joke that there were now more men receiving tax money than those paying it. And, whilst the extent of Imperial favour and patronage did not quite reach that level, historians have estimated that the bureaucracy at least doubled in size during his reign.

Diocletian also official enshrined Imperial hostility to free markets, trade and merchants – blaming the traders for consistently rising grain and commodity prices (a phenomenon then as now entirely caused by debasement of the currency) and instituting the famous Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium – an extensive and detailed framework of fixed prices, which bore no relation to market realities, based instead overtly on what the Emperor saw as the “moral” “true” or “real” prices of goods – based on no substance whatsoever.

This edict did not allow for variation in prices throughout the Empire – despite the realities of some goods and commodities being far more plentiful in some parts of the Europe-Mediterranean wide Empire and the inevitable transport, storage and risk costs associated with their availability elsewhere. This huge act of systemic economic vandalism also helped to set the tone for European antagonism to open flourishing free trade which was to become such a feature of the mercantilist feudal regimes which followed over the next millennium

Inevitably as well as quashing much economic activity and leading to shortages and even riots, the measures also drove a massive growth in the black market. This lesson was not learned though – and for his next trick Diocletian went on to invent serfdom.

In a spectacularly ill-judged attempt to go on to fix the labour market –  labour market which we have already observed was being undermined by Imperial handouts and largesse, Diocletian introduced the appalling idea of hereditary trades. Every person and all their descendants were to be tied forevermore to the work they did now and would require Imperial permission to even seek to practice that trade outside of the area they currently lived in. This meant, for many people agricultural labour, Diocletian hoped it would keep many families tied to army service – but for every other craft, trade, profession or line of work the rule was the same – you and your family were stuck doing what you currently did, forever more and almost certainly in that place.

This did become the beginnings of serfdom and the massive oppression, lack of social mobility, progress and growth which came to characterise the feudal system of the Middle Ages.

Along with the other lasting innovations outlined above Diocletian has a very strong claim to being the founder of feudalism and the forger of the chains which held Europe back for a thousand years.

All of this, please note, whilst only doing what most experts at the time thought was the wisest course of action (whilst of course not having to live with the consequences).

It should make us all think a little bit more carefully and to seek a little more perspective about every extension of power, control, direction and compulsion we introduce, any utopian system we may wish to build, and every heavy handed solution we may seek to introduce to what may seem to be the overwhelmingly important challenges facing us today.

It would be good if Diocletian had done so.

An own goal: how the politics of sport has changed

An own goal: how the politics of sport has changed

This article is part of our series where we take a look at bad ideas motivating recent political decisions and explain what lies behind them – and what the Government should be doing instead.

There has always been something political about sports.

There has to be.

It is hard to imagine large numbers of people turning up for a shared organised activity without there being political implications.

Obviously there’s the logistics of how they get there and how they are provided for and cleaned up after and how all of that that is organised and or regulated if at all. Given that we’re dealing with activities which get emotionally charged it is also likely that some degree of crowd control will be needed at least some times. There’s then related questions of how the competition is organised, under what rules and under what governance. And that’s before you get in to all the names, songs, traditions and symbolism associated with teams and competitions.

The political structures associated with the governance of sport are a whole sub-genre of politics and the perfect illustration of the banal evil, the corruption, the self-righteousness and incompetence and the sheer brazen wrongness which is the inevitable future of unaccountable organisations who can mark their own homework. And in FIFA’s case to brazenly award one of the world’s biggest tournament to a country with almost no history or interest in the sport and which was manifestly incapable of keeping its promises – and the fans’ views be damned.

There’s also at least some politics about territorial or geographical restrictions on competition – who’s in and who’s out of scope? These questions are even more magnified when it comes to international sport.

People talk about the potential of sport to unite us – but of course it can only do so once there is an “us” to unite – and a clearly defined “them” against whom we are united.

All of this is before you get in to pricing, broadcast rights, ownership, sponsorship, contracts and the myriad of other financial and legal arrangements which will ultimately depend on a political underpinning.

Sport has also been quite openly used for political purposes at least since the Roman Republic and almost certainly before. Politicians would arrange and sponsor chariot races and gladiatorial contests and teams– and use these to build up tribalistic political support.

In the modern world it is not just tyrannical regimes – such as the NAZIS with the 1936 Olympics, the Soviet Union with the 1980 Olympics or Russia and China with various recent iterations who have used major sporting events to send a political message. There were fairly ill-disguised political elements to the London 2012 Olympics, the 2010 Football World Cup and many other major tournaments.

Anything which attracts and excites that many people will find all sorts of political interests seeking to attach themselves to it – you can’t stop them.

Politics has a place in sport – it always has done and it always will do.

But sport by its very nature is a form of escapism. It is meant to give us something to enjoy which will distract us from daily concerns and miseries and to elevate our interests beyond them. If sport becomes too heavily defined by politics and the grinding political debates and concerns of the day then it ceases to fulfil its purpose, or at least does so rather less well.

And this does seem to have been happening increasingly over recent years.

There are the gestures which have received explicit or tacit official approval – the adoption of rainbow paraphernalia, athletes bending their knees to support a particular campaign group and the near universal appearance of minutes of silence or black armbands to mark relatively minor events in what were once gestures reserved for hugely significant and unifying moments.

It is of course by appeal to the precedent of these pre-existing unifying political gestures such as the minute’s silence for Armistice Day or the singing of the national anthem that a swathe of different interest groups have been able to attach themselves to sport.

This slippery slope argument has never really been pushed back on properly by those who should – so now we have the bizarre situation of a thoroughly rotten and hypocritical international sport authority seeking to make a narrow point on this issue, which even though right in isolation, only serves to confuse public understanding of the issues further.

The truth is that the reason national anthems and minutes’ silence were observed and didn’t impinge on the game, why Welsh football teams were allowed to compete in English football competitions without much complaint and why even highly tribal and divided sporting towns and cities could function well throughout the rest of the week was because the politics in sport used to be about our shared values and institutions – country, tradition, decency, fairness etc.

What has happened though is that as in our society, our shared cultural values and institutions have been undermined, attacked and eroded, we have seen a vacuum opening up where once there used to be solid foundations to appeal to. With self-serving campaign groups and special interests seeking to question these unifying values and to pain them as divisive, they have made a flimsy intellectual case for other fringe interests and priorities being given equal or superior status.

And thus week after week in sport after sport one interest group’s preferred symbol after another is paraded in front of uninterested or outright sceptical fans and veneration is demanded. When the fans object to such treatment or voice their own views it is this which is taken as the political act.

This is less about politics than about the form of politics – or to put it another way, about politicisation.

There has always been politics in sport – but sport has not always been politicised. The fact that it has is symptomatic of the way every aspect of our society has undergone the same process – and it is because of the hollowing out of the previously robust, shared and yes political values we use to hold in common.

Sport will no longer serve as the joyful, elevating escape it always was so long as it is torn between a corrupt, unaccountable and incompetent set of governors on the one hand and an ultra-politicised set of activists who recognise no legitimate boundaries to their own dominance on the other.