What does the political Promised Land look like?

There's a recent advertising campaign I've seen that I don't think is very good.

The campaign features two identical photos of someone enjoying a fun activity: going on holiday, say, or eating out. The punchline is that we're told that one of them is getting the experience "on points" while the other isn't. The concept is that, if you have the right credit card, you can get these great experiences for free. 

Now, I can see that getting free stuff is a Good Thing in the abstract, but the reason that the campaign doesn't impress me is that the impression one gets from looking at the posters is that having the credit card makes no difference to one's life: one can eat gourmet food, enjoy adventurous holidays and smile a wide, white smile just as easily without the credit card as with it. I think it would have been better to show the same person in two different photos: in one, looking tired, despondent and stuck in their boring home because they've run out of money; and, in the second, looking delighted and enjoying brunch because they've got points to spend. The contrast here is with the Duracell bunny: consider how much less effective that advertising would have been if the other bunnies had continued to run because their batteries had been replaced - the point that Duracell gives you more power is far more vividly illustrated by the other bunnies dying.

But I don't want to talk about the advertising of consumer goods and services. Instead, I want to talk about the advertising of political ideas. 

Political ideas - and I'm using that phrase in a pretty broad sense - tend to have two components: (1) what the Powers that Be (or Should Be) ought to Do About It All and (2) the wonderful things that will result from them doing it - the Promised Land that awaits. So, for example, the proletariat ought to throw off the shackles of bourgois oppression via revolution (component (1)) and, if they do, a glorious egalitarian communist age will be ushered in (component (2)). 

It's possible to imagine a political idea that only has component (1). Back in the good old days of the post-Brexit British national soul-searching moment (remember that?), I wrote a series of posts, starting here, about Matthew Parris' idea that the Leave campaign knowingly rode the tiger of racism to its victory. In part 5 of that series, I described what I called Power-Transfer Policies, i.e. policies that aim to achieve the transfer of power from one group to another, and I said that such policies might be supported purely on the basis that it is only right and proper that the second group rather than the first group should have the power, however that group chooses to use it: think of those supporting independence for a colony who say that the locals should choose their future even if they choose badly. But even in these cases it's rare that the supporters of the policy don't attempt to set out a component (2) Promised Land as well: the Leave campaign famously had plenty to say about more money for the NHS, for example, and independence movements tend to say that the locals will do a better job of ruling than the distant imperial metropolis.

But recently I've become worried that I don't understand quite what the Promised Land of various policies is meant to look like. I'll give you a couple of examples.

Neil O'Brien MP, a lively participant in online debates, published a piece over the Christmas break about the scandal of "Deliveroo visas", i.e. visas granted to immigrants, purportedly to study in the UK (or for other worthwhile aims), which result in a large number of young people spending their time delivering fast food. The responses to the piece that I have seen from pro-immigration people have been either "yes, this is indeed a problem worth looking at" (e.g. Rob Ford, Sam Bowman) or else "O'Brien's making it all up" (e.g., Jonathan Portes, Jonathan Portes and various people less well-known than Jonathan Portes). What I did not see was people saying "hooray!" - yet that, I thought, was precisely what the pro-immigration Promised Land was meant to look like: young, keen, thrusting immigrants, toiling away at the bottom of society to work their way up, creating a vibrant but chaotic employment market something like fictional depictions of 19th century New York.

Another example is this, the ever-interesting Peter McLaughlin accusing Kate Forbes of telling "pious lies" for giving public reasons in support of a position which are not her primary, private moral/religious reasons for supporting that position. Again, as I said at the time, I thought that was what the Promised Land of liberal debate looked like: people deploying publically-available arguments based on the shared values to be found in the Venn diagram intersection of the circles of beliefs held by the numerous religious, ethnic and moral communities that make up a diverse and multicultural society. You can't refer to what Allah tells you, I can't refer to what God tells me, but we can all refer to the principles of prudent budget management. Again, aren't "pious lies" precisely what liberals want political debate to be about in a multicultural society. Or rather, while I might call them pious lies, liberals should call them "appeals to public reason" or something of that kind - although we all know that secretly we're talking about the same thing.

This all started with Brexit, I think. Before the Brexit debate, free movement of capital, goods and labour and restrictions on public subsidies were the kind of thing that right-wingers favoured, while left-wingers wanted markets to be subject to democratic control, capital to be reined in, government subsidies to industry to be widespread ... and so on, and so on. But in everyone's haste to take sides on Brexit, positions got scrambled and so, for example, "free trade" went from being a Thatcherite right-wing obsession to becoming a left of centre shibboleth ("look at those stupid Brexiteers who want to cut us off from this huge market on our doorstep!"). Who whom?, in Lenin's phrase, took over from principle.

The pattern is wider than that. Take "diversity": is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Well, if you are a right-winger, diversity is a Good Thing when you are attacking Labour for never having women in charge or universities for not having enough intellectual diversity, or when you are celebrating the current cabinet for its ethnic mix. But there's no belief in any principle here, surely, merely a desire to find another stick for "Who" to beat "Whom". I feel my rightist credentials are sufficiently solid that I don't need to give a counter-example from the Left, but you can easily construct your own one for diversity with different examples (gay Muslims - good! conservative evangelicals - white men and bad! Sunak - rich!) should you not already be deeply bored of this kind of debate.

That change has an impact on what one's Promised Land looks like. Is the modern centre-left's Promised Land a world of free-trading capitalists bestriding borders? Does the modern centre-right want people with dark skins or ovaries to dominate politics? Not really. Both sides just want to win.

This is the predominant wider theme of modern politics. The Promised Land is one where Our People are in charge and Those People are not: whether Our People are "good" immigrants or sincere secularists or Remainers or the silent majority or... and whether Those People are immigrants or believers or out-of-touch elites or ... the pattern is still the same. 

To simplify only slightly, modern political debate in this country appears to have reached a consensus that there is always going to be a Blob running the publicly-funded bits of the country - and that there ought to be a Blob directing the privately-funded bits (telling it to do more manufacturing, housebuilding and domestic energy production, everyone agrees and then, depending on your tastes, less pornography or more environmental stuff or more science or more employment of ethnic minorities) - and hence the only real question is "who gets to run the Blobs?" (Or, if you prefer, "whose Long March through the institutions is the Longest and Marchiest?")

(Some examples: we have to have to "influencers", ergo they have to be "our" influencers; we have to spend billions on extra-London mass transit rather than defence or tax cuts, and the only question is where.)

I must admit that this kind of cynical Marxist view has some appeal. "Wake up and smell the coffee," its adherents say, "it's them or us. We've played fair before - and lost - but now it's time to play dirty". It's certainly got more appeal than "you can get avocado toast with points". But, ultimately, the two pictures of the alternative Promised Lands are too similar to each other for either to be tempting. I, for one, would welcome a Duracell bunny offering a wholly different outcome.