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25.7.20

My son sends me a Matthew Syed piece from The Sunday Times and I respond!


Xi banks on the decline and fall of the West
The rot reaches so deep, we do not even see it. But our enemies do
Sunday July 19 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times
On Thursday, Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed the spending plans of the messianic Rishi Sunak. His analysis made for interesting reading. He found that the much-trumpeted “Rooseveltian” injection of £5.5bn was not quite as it seemed. Looking through the small print, Johnson found that it was an accountancy trick, a statistical mirage. It was money shunted from one place to another or, as he put it, an increase “of precisely zero”. He found the same for a litany of other “pledges”.
I was struck by this story, not because of what it said — if correct — about deceit at the heart of government, but because of how we responded to it. Some newspapers didn’t cover Johnson’s claims at all. It eluded the BBC’s main bulletins and, as far as I can tell, ITV’s, too. And, frankly, who can blame them? Deception has become so commonplace, so par for the course (think of previous budgets, many of which contain set-piece conjuring tricks), that it has melted into the background. Like a virus that has become endemic in a host population, we scarcely notice it any more.
I mention this because we stand at a crossroads. The stand-off between what we might loosely call “the West” and China has been described as a new cold war. I am not particularly attracted to the language but can’t dispute that a battle of historic significance is now being waged between Xi Jinping’s Communist Party (CPC) and the liberal democratic order. Unlike the last Cold War, centred around nuclear brinkmanship and ideology, this will be a battle over quantum computing, AI and global influence. And here’s a sobering truth: this is a battle the West might lose.
I say this not because of any esteem for the CPC, but because the decay within the liberal system has taken on a distinctive quality. It is not Donald Trump (who, to be fair, was quick to spot the threat of China) that should worry us, or his pardoning of his former adviser Roger Stone, or the woeful response to the pandemic or, coming to our side of the Atlantic, the farce involving the housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, or a million other scandals across the democratic world. It is not even the chronic short-termism of the modern West, something that stands in contrast to China making strategic plans stretching towards 2050.
No, the most telling sign of decay is stories — such as that of Sunak — that we hardly notice any more; a putrefaction so familiar that we can no longer smell it. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon writes: “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption.” His point is, I think, indisputable: the last people to spot a system in decline are insiders. It is outsiders who are better placed to detect the rot.
And this, I think, helps to explain the growing assertiveness of the CPC. Some western analysts have expressed surprise at Xi’s menacing stance towards Taiwan, his manoeuvres in the South China Sea and the skirmishes with India along the Himalayan border. It is all too easy for us to write this off as imperial overreach, the vanity of a wannabe dictator. Doesn’t he realise that the Chinese system is corrupt, riddled with contradictions and saddled with slowing growth?
Here’s some news: Xi knows this only too well. The politburo may be kleptocratic but it is not stupid. No, its members assess that the time is ripe for global expansion not because of a hubristic assessment of their own strength but an assessment of our weakness. Like Gibbon looking back on Rome, they spot the rot. They note the epic polarisation, the surreal identity wars, the growing contempt that many westerners have for their own histories and institutions. And they see this as a chance to reset the world order gradually in their interests and against ours.
The same analysis applies to Vladimir Putin’s Russia which — although an economic basket case — has been flexing its foreign policy muscles and running a hacking racket against western targets; last week it was accused of trying to pilfer Covid-19 vaccine research and influence the 2019 general election. Again, western commentary explains this as a consequence of the internal dynamics of Russia and the personality of the president, who fancies himself as Peter the Great. I’d suggest that it is better understood not by our assessment of them, but their assessment of us. The wily former KGB agent, like Xi, sees a western order in decline.
Let me repeat: when an empire is decaying, it’s the stuff insiders no longer notice that is the killer. We focus our ire on property developers getting payoffs or government scientists breaking rules. All well and good. But we no longer notice, as Gibbon put it, “the poison introduced into the vitals of the system”: the legalised corruption, the revolving door between politics and business, the rules rigged to suit special interests. According to the author Francis Fukuyama, the US tax code is 10,000 pages long, layer upon layer of sweetheart exemptions, favours and quid pro quos.
As for market economies — they have ossified under our very noses. The rules are so advantageous for insiders that new businesses can’t get a look-in, clogging up innovation. Of Europe’s 100 most valuable companies, none was formed in the past 40 years, a point made by the author Matt Ridley. In America, incumbents are staying ever longer in the main indices. As for start-up rates, they are falling in 16 out of 18 western economies. Now consider another trend by way of explanation: in 1971 Washington had 175 registered lobbying firms. By 2013 this had exploded to 12,000, spending more than $3.2bn annually, a trend replicated throughout the western world.
I am not, of course, making a case for Russia or China. I could spend thousands of words detailing their corruption and horrific repression. I am merely suggesting that the best way to understand their actions is through the prism of our weakness. They don’t see their manoeuvres as overreach but the poking of a western order that is decaying from within and has lost the capacity to garner international support. On the latter point, they are surely right. At the UN, Britain failed miserably to gain backing for the condemnation of the draconian security law imposed upon Hong Kong, securing only 26 votes. Whereas 53 nations backed China, an early payoff from the Belt and Road initiative, where the CPC is spending big on other nations, garnering ever more soft power.
I am still putting my money on liberal democracy. We have the more enlightened system. But the best way to overcome our vanity is to put ourselves in the shoes of other nations, both friends and adversaries, looking at us in disbelief. As psychologists say to narcissists and as Gibbon warned down the centuries: “We need to see ourselves as others see us.”

RESPONSE:  So thank you so much Ben for sending this on which I read with interest.  Matthew Syed seems one of the more insightful journalists working for the Murdochs though I continue to have obvious problems with Journalists musing on the erosion of ‘liberal democracy’ (whatever that is) whilst taking the filthy lucre of one who is a prime eroder of said democracy.
Here we have a continuation of a genre of journalism, realpolitik, personal anecdote, frankly expressed insight, tell it all-warts and all, which seems to be exploding.  It’s breast beating but disguised as insight.  It bemoans the loss of what, in reality, never existed, because specific interests with paws on the levers of power cannot in what might be laughingly referred to as ‘their view’ allow IT to happen.  What that IT is, is a functional, widespread, engaging and engaged, honest and transparent political system that responds to a series of checks and balances that are beyond the control of individuals or interest groups and to which all subscribe on pain of political disgrace and annihilation.
What we have instead is a philosophical hotch-potch of self interested think tanks, lobbyists, millionaires and billionaires, Corporate interests, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Control of media, a militarised Police Force, State Erosion and Public Services nullified with their replacement by inefficient and unqualified private providers seeking profit from said Services.
The family silver has, of course, been sold.  The grounds also hived off for luxury flats and crowded estates.  The owners are all absentee landlords yet members of all the right clubs.  Navigation through the replacement forests of think tanks and special interest groups requires a Privately Educated School System to groom the next wave of Alpha’s in the codes and signals required for flourishing.
The point is that all of this, all of it, was clearly signalled in 1979 with the election of Research Chemist, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and with the installing of the actor Ronald Reagan in the US and the resulting onslaught of neo-liberalist ideology that led to the systematic dismantling of effective democratic state structures and the mass sell-off of public goods at bargain-basement prices to chronically liberalised international financial markets.
Along with privatised utilities of life-essentials like water, coal, gas, transport and public housing came the neo-liberal wraith coming up the rear with the inevitable consequences arising of endless war, privatised military and the hijacking of the military industrial complex by gangs with political masks.  The encouragement of massive corruption in the absence of state controls.  The exploitation of Africa and Asia for her mineral wealth made inevitable by TIFF and TIPP trade liberalisation as with the continued ravaging of Earth’s resources for short term profit.
The World stares obliterative disaster in it’s ugly face, not only for the humans but for all the extraordinary critters and vegetable and arborial life forms. Shrouded now in our winding sheets, stitched together in sweat shops by children, using micro-plastics dredged from the oceans, we await the inevitable. Mostly with the percolated anxiety of cattle milling outside the slaughterhouse, sometimes with an oddly triumphant and wilful ignorance that seems to celebrate itself.  Sometimes we wait frozen with despair or rage. 
But mostly we carry on.  Fighting, fucking, crapping, littering, music making, despoiling, loving, hating, boredoming, maniacal thoughting, opiated, close reading, not reading, mobile phoning texting, bullshitting, group thinking, micro exploiting, ageing, Being, transcending, being born.  Hope, hopeless.
To be alive is to be Cassandra, the doom-caller.  There are worse things, but I just can’t think what they are.







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