This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.
It’s easy to get a bit down about the state of things. Inflation is running high. It’s November. In Britain there are strikes and it is starting to feel like a rerun of the 1970s, minus the not inconsiderable cultural compensations of that decade. Activists on Twitter are arguing about Brexit. The disgraced former health minister Matt Hancock made it to the final, and was eliminated in third place, on a television show called I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, which I haven’t seen but by all accounts represents a new low in the history of Western civilisation.
So, it’s understandable if people feel deflated about the situation. Times are tough. But let’s be realistic, it’s not that bad compared to what the Ukrainians are putting up with. And no matter how bad it gets, at least we’re not living in China.
The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a policy of “zero Covid”, with draconian restrictions tightening even more since the party congress last month, when Xi Jinping “won” a historic third term, presumably for life.
In remarkable scenes in recent days, there have been demonstrations across urban China against lockdowns and quarantine. The bravery of these demonstrators is astonishing, when they will not be difficult for the police to find given the way the state apparatus has China’s cities covered by CCTV, and a vast machinery of digital snooping, in order to control the population and eliminate dissent.
The regime has a growing problem, though, and ironically it is down in part to the side effects of globalisation and the way sport crosses borders. The population can see that the rest of humanity is moving on from Covid, thanks to the World Cup.
As the Italian sinologist Francesco Sisci, who lives in China, observed in his latest column: football is the most popular sport in China.
“Millions are glued to the screen for Qatar’s World Cup. Whatever China Central TV decides to show, perhaps hiding the fact that people are crowding the stadiums without any anti-COVID protection, it doesn’t take much to understand that everything is normal in Qatar.”
Says Sisci: “The World Cup shows that, unlike with the Beijing Winter Olympics held in a state of siege, life is normal in the rest of the world. Meanwhile a new COVID wave is spreading all over China, there are still quarantines, lockdowns, et cetera.”
The prescient Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research, has described how lockdowns are wrecking the health system. Doctors fear contagion and state punishment, so non-Covid ailments aren’t treated. The economic effect of lockdown is disastrous and distrust of government appears to be spreading.
In a presentation published last week – Back to the Seventies: China’s new Political and Economic Reality – J Capital Research ran through the challenges facing the government.
The property boom has blown up and earlier this month the government changed course, trying to prop up the sector. They’re panicking. “Spending on (Covid) tests and quarantines is crushing local governments,” says the report. Local government revenues are plummeting and services are closing. Tech companies are laying off workers. Youth unemployment was 19.6% in July and it is likely worse in rural China.
Then there’s the currency. The Renminbi is under pressure from a rising dollar. That weakening is good news for the West, as it will likely have a deflationary effect. Meanwhile, support for Russia and threatening China’s neighbours has increased international suspicion. The US sanctions on high-end semiconductor technology are biting.
The strength and unchallenged rule of Xi Jinping has been discussed a lot recently, particularly in the context of the threat to Taiwan and a West worried about its economic and military weaknesses. Now, the situation may be changing. Xi’s “zero Covid” disaster is unravelling.
Struggling Sturgeon playing a dangerous game
Scotland’s First Minister was defeated in the UK Supreme Court last week. Nicola Sturgeon wanted to test the idea the devolved administration she leads could hold another referendum on independence. This was always a ridiculous enterprise. Scotland is not a colony. It is a partner in the Union, which was endorsed by a majority in the referendum only eight years ago. Constitutional matters are reserved to Westminster. The founders of devolution never intended for there to be a “neverendum”, with the question being put endlessly until the SNP got its desired outcome.
Sturgeon herself used to say that a new referendum should not be run until there was an overwhelming demand in Scotland for leaving the UK. Opinion polls would have to show a clamour for immediate separation, something like two thirds support in opinion polls for a sustained period. It has not happened. Scotland remains divided on the question, with the Unionists often in front in the polls. There is no demand for a referendum any time soon either, despite widespread opposition in Scotland to Brexit, ex-PM Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.
Sturgeon responded to defeat last week not by seeking to persuade either the undecideds or the Unionists, her only possible route to a referendum. Instead, she dialled up the reckless rhetoric and said, bizarrely, that if she wins the next election that will be enough to declare independence unilaterally.
Outside the Scottish parliament last week the First Minister joined a populist demonstration to complain democracy is being denied. The mood looked angry, Trumpian. Furious bearded people whipped themselves into a frenzy of resentment.
And that’s where the risk of escalation lies. Since the Supreme Court judgment the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has, sensibly, talked about cross-border cooperation. Labour’s Scottish leader Anas Sarwar has called for calm, warning inflammatory sloganeering by Sturgeon risks encouraging further division and on the fringes even worse.
Sturgeon has been First Minister for eight years now. Her strategy for delivering a referendum has not worked. Them’s the breaks in a democracy and the careers of leaders tend to end in defeat of one kind or another. There is a good way to lose, with dignity and duty done, or there is the Trump way. Sturgeon is heading in a Trump direction.
What I’m watching
The World Cup, mainly. It’s addictive. The football in the early stages has been of a high standard and any qualms about the wisdom of holding it in the desert, a few weeks from Christmas, fade when it’s time for Spain v Germany.
Still, I’m finding the politics of the World Cup confusing. Contemporary football is fearlessly political, we are told by the England’s manager Gareth Southgate. Taking a stand on what is right is more important than the game, it is said.
When the England team took the knee before their goalless draw against the United States last week, the American team did not take the knee. Those who complain about the contemporary tendency to confuse the US and Britain – we are not America, this is a different country – now observe a situation in which American footballers have given up the gesture yet England’s footballers keep it going, and in Qatar too, a state not noted for its human rights record.
Gestures can change their meaning over time, of course. The taking of the knee began in the US and was adopted in England, as a declaration of solidarity with black Americans following the death of a man at the hands of the police. Now, say the England players, it symbolises their collective experience of racism at home and abroad.
What happened when this campaigning drive was extended to the wearing of armbands in Qatar was revealing. The One Love armbands were the product of an initiative started in the Netherlands in 2020, against discrimination in all its forms. Football’s governing body FIFA, still some way behind the Chinese Communist Party in the “world’s worst organisation” stakes, but relentless in its determination to catch up, has banned the armbands from the pitch, presumably to avoid offending their Qatari hosts.
The England players said they would wear the armbands when playing in Qatar. FIFA said if they did the players would be shown the yellow card by the referee. At which point the England players backed down. Justice ranks above football, until there is a threat of a yellow card and players not advancing to the last 16 of the World Cup. Politics is complex, it turns out, and involves trade offs and compromises.
If members of the contemporary footballing community do take all this seriously, why was there so much enthusiasm for the Saudi Arabia team? When they played Poland on Saturday, we were told relentlessly by the TV commentators how exciting the Saudi team and their supporters were. There did not appear to be many women among the Saudi travelling support, incidentally. When the Poles, our democratic allies, fearless supporters of Ukraine, and presumably with many Polish Britons watching the game back home in the UK, dared to start winning the contest it was treated as though they had committed some kind of cosmic crime, disrupting the progress of plucky Saudi Arabia.
A correspondent said that this is because everyone loves an underdog (the autocratic oil giant Saudi is an underdog?) and the Poles are mainly white, quite often right wing and unfashionable.
The Poles are not unfashionable in Kyiv.
What I’m reading
Love and Let Die: Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche, by John Higgs. The Fab Four and 007 are twins. The Beatles first single, Love Me Do, and the first Bond film, Dr No, were released on the same day, Friday 5 October 1962. Higgs narrates the overlapping stories of these two cultural powerhouses, presenting the band and Bond as the embodiment of contrasting, clashing visions of Britain. The Beatles are for love. Bond is death. The Beatles represent working class liberation. Bond embodies establishment control, says Higgs.
This is a curious, enlightening, entertaining and sometimes infuriating book. There’s so much in it to like. For this Beatles nut – versed in the work of historian Mark Lewisohn and venerating the late Ian Macdonald, author of Revolution in the Head, the song by song guide to the band’s work – it achieved the impossible, making me think again about aspects of the greatest love story, the story of the Beatles, even when I disagreed.
The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has often been presented by the press and Beatles fans as a con man, a greedy weirdo. John Lennon rumbled him and the Beatles left India in a hurry after their visit to his retreat in 1968. As Higgs says, Lennon seems to have been turned against the Indian guru because the Maharishi had a degree in physics and asked difficult practical questions of Lennon’s friend “Magic Alex” Mardas, the Greek electronics wizard who said he would build all manner of wondrous devices for the gullible Lennon, and never could because Magic Alex was a notable charlatan. “Alex” or Yannis, later renamed John, died in 2017.
What the Maharishsi advocated doesn’t look so weird now. It’s the stuff of mindfulness and well-being. Yoga and meditation with mantras are mainstream and big business, to help us escape the babble of modern life and improve mental health.
On class warfare, Higgs sounds off beam, describing status-obsessed England as London and the South East against the rest, stretching back to the Norman conquest. England is much more complex than that, surely. See the industrial revolution and then the story of the 19th century and the confidence and power of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle in that period.
Higgs also says the India trip in 1968 unleashed the band’s most creative period, in the following 18 months, on the White Album, Let it Be and Abbey Road, stretching into the early solo work. Isn’t the period from Rubber Soul, through Revolver and Pepper, up to Magical Mystery Tour, more consistent, and certainly a better expression of the essence of their optimistic, comradely credo?
Have a good week
Apologies for this newsletter being late. Like many of you, I’m engaged in a crazy scramble towards Christmas with so much to get done finishing up assorted projects before the shutdown. So, this weekend I crashed out, watched football on Saturday and Sunday, went to a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner hosted by friends, and read a lot ahead of an exciting week. We’re co-hosting a conference – The Price of War – with CERGE-EI a world-leading research institute, on Thursday 1 December in Westminster. If you would like a ticket it’s a tight squeeze, but I’m sure we can get in a few more Reaction subscribers if the team asks the venue nicely.
Some readers tell me they prefer this newsletter landing on a Monday morning, rather than first thing each Saturday. I’m not sure. I’ve been writing my newsletter for six years, and I enjoy a bit of flexibility to write on a wide range of topics and at a time when it flows naturally, usually after some sleep. I’ll take more soundings and see what works best for everyone next year.