Net zero divide means the King and Whitehall will have to be careful

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, exclusively for Reaction subscribers.

Since the death of his mother, King Charles III has not put a foot wrong.

The commentary expressing fears in the run-up to his accession turned out to be misguided and in the year since the death of his mother the monarch has vindicated the hopes of those of us who think Britain lucky to have such a figure, someone interested in ideas and with deep experience through the Prince’s Trust charity of the challenges facing the country.

The monarch’s state visit to France last week was a triumph, in almost every regard. After a speech to the national assembly, French senators and MPs gave the king a standing ovation. There was a state banquet and President Macron excelled in the warmth of the welcome.

There was one sign of potential trouble, however. In his French parliamentary speech, the monarch touched on the environmental campaign that was such a feature of his time as heir to the throne.

He told French parliamentarians: “Just as we stand together against military aggression, so must we strive together to protect the world from our most existential challenge of all: that of global warming, climate change and the catastrophic destruction of nature… Together, our potential is limitless. That’s why we must cherish and take care of our entente cordiale. For future generations, so it becomes an entente for sustainability to tackle more efficiently the global urgency in terms of climate and diversity.”

The timing was intriguing. On Wednesday, the prime minister Rishi Sunak had sensibly, in my view, adjusted course on net zero policy. The date at which petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned from sale has been pushed back five years to 2035. Other green measures are being watered down.

There is now a clear division between the two main parties, the Tories and Labour, ahead of a general election. The environment as a topic has always been political, now it is an especially charged theme with Sunak having decided to begin the process of explaining how difficult it will be to get to net zero. Although the voters are in favour of net zero in the abstract, when the costs appear they don’t like it.  

As Professor Helen Thompson, the most clear-sighted thinker on the subject, keeps reminding us, we are attempting a shift on a par with the industrial revolution. It is being attempted in only three decades, about half the time the first industrial revolution took. Huge amounts of mining for the minerals needed to produce “clean” power are already involved. Is the environment being despoiled in new ways as we go green? Undoubtedly. There is also an intense competition underway for these resources as we move, unfortunately, into a war era.

Incidentally, it is astonishing that those executives who complained about the net zero shift by Sunak could have lived through the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the energy crisis, the inflation surge and cost of living crisis, and the rising tensions with China, yet seem to have thought that these geopolitical upheavals wouldn’t change things very much. Do they not read the news or think about it?

Sunak’s move is just an overdue start in a process of adjustment that will play out across the developed world, as voters rebel against the costs and politicians try to pace the shift accordingly.

It was in the context of this rising political storm that the monarch spoke in Paris on Thursday.

The king has made it clear he understands his position as a constitutional monarch prevents him from expressing opinions as he did as Prince of Wales.

His speech in France on Thursday will have been carefully vetted some time ago by the government before he delivered it. The views expressed on the environment in his speech were arguably views officially and widely held across much of the political spectrum until the PM refined his policy the day before.

Suddenly, a passage in the King’s speech that when first drafted reflected a broad consensus shared by the leadership of all the main parties might seem to some no longer to do so.

This exposed the King to a danger. If he delivered the speech as agreed, he would suddenly, in the eyes of some of his most subjects, be putting his necessary constitutional neutrality at risk.

A question arises: was something lost in communication between Number 10 and the Palace?

Perhaps the government was so bounced into making its announcement, shifted forward by at least 36 hours as a result of a leak, that the necessary communications broke down and that as a result no thought was given to the risk the King was now running. Whatever the truth of the matter, Whitehall and the Palace as a matter of course should bear the point in mind.

What’s that rumbling sound? It is the noise of grumbling online and in WhatsApp groups with concern being expressed by those with a sceptical view of climate change policy. Among them are some people usually sympathetic to the monarch.

There will be green activists who say the king’s remarks simply encapsulated a consensus view, a view they happen to share, which precisely illustrates the problem. As the polls show, once you get into the practicalities, many of us disagree with what is presented by the BBC and others as a green consensus. Millions, even tens of millions of us, think there are economic trade offs that have to be considered carefully. It is an intensely political question.

The monarch’s previous views are so well-known in this area, because of decades of earlier campaigning, that when as king he mentions it even in passing, or seemingly innocuously, those of other persuasions will pick up the signal and not like it.

That makes it potentially dangerous for the monarchy. As the king has acknowledged, the British system rests on the vital convention that the monarchy stands apart from and above all this.

Made by humans, not AI

Stephen Fry fell when leaving the stage at a tech festival held in London last week. Let’s hope he makes a speedy recovery, but the accident overshadowed the importance of his remarks.

Fry is a noted tech enthusiast, who has been, until now, optimistic about our technological future. The accelerating rise of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on media seems to be changing his mind about the machines.

After playing a clip from a new documentary, apparently narrated by Fry, he revealed the following: “I said not one word of that – it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me. They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration. It could have me read anything from a call to storm parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge.”

Fry is the latest author to issue a warning about what is coming our way. The Writers Guild of America is striking against the studios over the use of AI. On Tuesday, in New York, the Authors Guild launched a bid to sue OpenAI, one of the leading firms in the field. Among the authors who say their copyright has been infringed are John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and Elin Hilderbrand.

In essence, the complaint is that AI firms feed novels, along with the contests of the internet, into their models from which the machines steal, learn and duplicate.

Fry’s experience offers a glimpse of a dystopian media landscape in which everything – absolutely everything – can be faked. Delivered via smartphones, degraded social media and televisions hooked up to apps, imagine a never ending wall of content (how I hate that word) in which footage, audio and text of anything can be made to look real by AI. All of it going faster and faster until it is blur, in which the line between reality and fantasy disappears. We’re more than half way there already.

I have said before that within a decade publishers will be marketing books, websites, films and printed magazines, if they survive, as having been “produced by real humans.” Such is the speed of AI’s development that I’m upgrading my prediction of a “produced by humans” label to within two years.

Yet I wonder how much most people, the overwhelming majority of citizens, will care whether what they consume was made by AI. In the early days of the internet, many of us print journalists thought, romantically, that readers would back a fight to defend newspapers. Most consumers didn’t care even though print is obviously a superior technology in the field of news and ideas. Picking it up and then putting it down comes with a feeling of completion and often satisfaction. Even if you didn’t read every word, you walk away from it, to make a cup of tea, go for a walk, or engage with other humans, not haunted by the pulsing digital machine.

The alternative, endless digital scrolling on a screen, is anxiety inducing because the internet is endless. You can never really finish anything. What did I miss when I put my smartphone down for one minute? I’ll just check, and that’s me back on it for another hour.

I’m aware of the irony. I’m writing this, my weekly newsletter, on a laptop and it is likely you are reading it on a smartphone. The internet has flattened hierarchies, enabling more groups of writers to found their own small enterprises and to forge direct links with readers. Reaction was our attempt to do just that. We cluster together, interested in each other’s ideas, in search of information and entertainment on a human scale.

But the obvious thing for many large producers to do, particularly in the US where there is the most rigorous impetus to eliminate costs, will be to automate, via AI, the generation of (that dread word again) content so that it is produced by the machines, perhaps initially overseen by a human or two.

In that world, with an endless wall of video, audio and text, some of it fake but looking real, much of it impossible to regulate or hold to account, it will be fascinating to see how big or small the niches are for the alternative, made – written, filmed, voiced, verified – by humans. Is it 10% of the population who care where information comes from and want humans to provide it? Is it anything like 50%? I doubt it although we’re about to find out.

Brand values – the nasty Nineties and Noughties

The grotesque Russell Brand, now accused of sexual assault, has had enough attention already, so I’ll keep the section on him short.

He was never funny and always grim. Edgy Channel 4 made him a star and when in 2008 the BBC fired Brand from a radio show, for leaving disgusting messages on the answer phone of Andrew Sachs, the corporation was presented by cool types as having behaved like a bunch of Tory squares. When he then moved into amateur political philosophy, parts of the left in Britain, usually men, fawned over the grifting of a tinpot revolutionary. The books sold. Audiences packed out theatres. A Guardian writer hailed him as a “hero of 2014”, the Guardian featured Brand as a columnist on its pages and Owen Jones was an ideological supporter.

A lot has been written about the vulgarity of popular culture in the “noughties” having made all this possible.

The timeframe should be broader, I think. The roots of it lie in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the popularising of the idea that boundaries must always be pushed, extended or broken, because beyond bourgeois restrictions and the veneer of manners supposedly lay ever greater liberation. That was hardly a new idea. Writers and philosophers had advocated smashing convention long before Pete Townshend of the Who smashed a guitar on stage or Keith Richards of the Stones appeared in front of the magistrate in Chichester in June 1967 on drugs charges. “We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals,” Keith said in court.

Some of what changed as a result of the ensuing social revolution was undoubtedly enormously positive.

Yet in popular entertainment, where there had long been a seedy underside, the trend was in the direction of ever more coarsening. 

In comedy there is a line leading from the 1960s to Brand. The anti-establishment impulse of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore went mainstream yet by the 1970s they were producing the filthy Derek and Clive tapes, outrageous bootlegs that were later sold legitimately. Cook and Moore had a major advantage over Brand, in that they were often very funny.

Even so, it’s not difficult to see how an odious character such as Brand, and his former friends such as Jonathan Ross, who was with him on the Sachs broadcast, could see what they were doing thirty years later in terms of being just the latest groovy types to break boundaries.

Producers and promoters had an obvious motive to go along with it, because by the 1990s there was so much money to be made. And who wanted to object to a comic’s vile material and risk being called a prude?

Simultaneously, the anti-political correctness backlash against feminism in the early 1990s had helped create the licentious “lad” movement. British lad mags – bringing soft porn into the mainstream and mixing it with machismo and Britpop music – sold in vast quantities to young male readers.

This produced another counter backlash, with the emergence of the “ladettes” who could match the “lads” in terms of booze, drugs and sexual appetite. The 1990s media, even at the top end, celebrated this as women getting in on the act. Everyone, do what you want. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout, something was going very wrong indeed in Rotherham where a vast scandal centred on child sexual exploitation was underway. More than 1400 children were groomed and abused. The police wouldn’t listen and the scandal surfaced only because a handful of brave campaigners risked their lives to take on the gangs responsible.

This was the other side of Britain in the 1990s and early 2000s. Into the cultural sewer walked Russell Brand.

Reaction podcast: Walter Russell Mead

My latest guest on the Reaction podcast is Walter Russell Mead, scholar and renowned expert on geopolitics. We discuss the US election, the relative decline of Europe, the rise of Asia, the need for more defence spending, Russia and Ukraine and more. It’s sixty years since Walter first visited Britain, and he views the place with great affection. He has a critique of the country’s current situation that should concern us, though.

Listen here on Spotify, Apple or Google.

What I’m watching

More of the wonderful rugby world cup.

What I’m reading

Isabel Colegate’s The Blackmailer, her 1958 debut novel I mentioned last week, is turning out to be a bit of a struggle. I’ve just received Calder Walter’s Spies: The epic intelligence war between East and West and will start reading that instead.