Two recent essays

and a partial update

I have been neglecting this substack recently, partly because i have been busy, partly because, just before Christmas, my father died. I never had the best relationship with him, but that hasn’t made his death any easier.

One thing that has helped, though, was writing this essay for Vittles. The editors there approached me about writing for them at the start of 2024, with the idea that i would write an essay about why the British TV chef Rick Stein is so popular (I am, and have been for a long time, a huge Stein fan, somewhat despite my own best inclinations). I ended up sitting on that commission for far too long. When i finally got round to it, it become something far more personal: about fatherhood, comfort food and my father’s death. It’s here, if you’d like to read it.

I also published a long essay on the British historian Correlli Barnett in the New Statesman, continuing my recent spate of essays on the new British right. I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a book project on the right in Britain since 1900 (actually, i’d probably go back to Ruskin and Joseph Chamberlain, but that’s beside the point), so i’m sure there will be far more where this came from in the coming years.

But I also wanted to direct the piece to parts of the British and international left, and to address in however sketchy way some of my own increasing misgivings about the strain of economic nationalism that lies there. I think, with the crises we face and will continue to face in the years ahead, economic nationalism just isn’t up to the task.

This hasn’t been picked up by many readers, which is fair enough; it was, after all, buried at the very end of a 4,000 word essay about a historian few read anymore. But i wanted to draw attention to it again here. Here is what i wrote:

The questions raised by this conjuncture for the left are profound. Is there any inherent connection between industrial policy and economic nationalism, for instance, or must the left be forever stuck between the Scylla of free markets and the Charybdis of nationalism? And how do we dispel the myths of Britain’s lost greatness and the revivalist bluster it so often gives way to? To that we could add a third and even more serious question, one raised by Perry Anderson. “How relevant a metric,” Anderson asks, in light of the looming threat of climate breakdown, “is growth of GDP… for assessing the course of a society from the left?” These questions are currently far removed from a national soul that feels the wounds of retreat so keenly. Despite his clear intellect, Barnett’s life work was scarred by them from the start.

Last year looks almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded, and the first to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The relentless focus on growth as a measure of national health above all else has undoubtedly contributed to deepening the mess we find ourselves in; the Thatcherite cures for the British disease of sluggish growth are only increasing the rampant inequality and rentierism in British society. Sections of the right, however embryonic, are developing a response, one which finds succour in the same streams of English nationalism that Correlli Barnett once did. They may one day find their ideas as close to power; their own volumes passed between cabinet ministers as they already are between Tory MPs and right-wing influencers. To chart a way out may require the left to start looking beyond nationalist discourses of decline for good.

The rest of the essay, if you are interested, is here.