Hammer blow reform

'A hammer blow to young people': Businesses fume at proposed zero hours reforms

According to the government's own impact assessment, the direct cost to UK employers could be between £350m and £2.9bn per year.

Retailers have warned that a ban on zero-hours contracts risks inflicting a "hammer blow to young people's job prospects" after the government's own analysis found the move could cost businesses billions of pounds a year.

Something we regularly see in mainstream media is the use of the word 'reform' for government measures which could more neutrally be described as 'change'. 

It's one of those casual language biases which governments favour for obvious reasons, it is an easy way to bias their announcements. Media outfits don't have to go along with the word 'reform' in these contexts, but they usually do. 

As is the case here, the reaction of opponents is usually reported and it may be effective, but that word 'reform' is in there too, with its suggestion of benign authority handing down a carefully considered and beneficial measure. 

There is also a language bias problem with attempts to abolish 'reforms'. It is not easy to present the proposed abolition of a 'reform' as a reform.


But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted.

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

Too timid to endure responsibilities

At the moment, polling suggests that about 63% of UK voters would vote Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem or Green in a general election. We might say that democracy blockers rule because these voting intentions, assuming they are accurate, cannot resuscitate UK democracy.

Until voting habits change drastically towards the promotion of major reform around issues voters claim to care about, then it is not clear how anything democratically positive will come about.

Opinion polls are a political scammer's guide. Voting intention polls are a political scammer's guide. As a result, voters are mostly scammed until the next election when they will be scammed again.

It’s an old problem and there are few indications of worthwhile change. Democracy hasn’t decayed as G K Chesterton wrote well over a century ago, it never really got going –


Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice.

That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

Hanwell Systems

England is the country of the Party System, and it has always been chiefly run by public-school men. Is there anyone out of Hanwell who will maintain that the Party System, whatever its conveniences or inconveniences, could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

G. K. Chesterton - What's Wrong With the World (1910)

 
Hanwell -

Lying to the west of the River Brent and so actually in the precinct of Norwood Green, the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum was commonly referred to as the Hanwell Asylum because it was closer to the centre of Hanwell than either Norwood or Southall.

As Chesterton wrote over a century ago, the UK political party system has not served us well. It is not only leaders who fail but the party system itself. Political parties cannot do veracity, they cannot provide honest political oversight of the machinery of government. They promise but can’t deliver.

What’s the answer? To begin with, only believers in systems have clearly defined answers and implied guarantees. Unfortunately political system failures and the failure of those guarantees all appear to have similar root causes - human behaviour is easily corrupted. No system is safe from that.

We are not only suffering from the breakdown of our democratic system, we are suffering from crimes, broken political promises, official lies, crowded cities and so on. That’s human behaviour coupled with weak political oversight.

Party politicians know they can’t fix it, but they are comparatively free to lie about it. So they do what they are comparatively free to do, not what they can’t do. Hanwell systems are easier.

The mind that never finds its way back

Only ‘Lord Almighty’ can tell me to stand down, says Biden

Joe Biden has said only the “Lord Almighty” can tell him to stand down, as he refused five times to say what he would do if his allies in the Democratic Party turned on him over his health.


The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.

G. K. Chesterton - What's Wrong With The World (1910)

This dazed and floundering opportunism

 

Plaque on a stone building in Matlock which
housed a Victorian charity school until the 
1870 Elementary Education Act

There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favour of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.

G. K. Chesterton - What’s Wrong with the World? (1910)


I've used this quote before, but it’s an interesting one now the general election seems to have highlighted Chesterton’s link between compulsory education and what he calls this dazed and floundering opportunism.

Educated people and socialists do seem to be floundering around in their frantic attempts to take advantage of every opportunity offered by events and the unstable sands of political fashion.

The mind that finds its way to wild places

The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet’s; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic’s.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)


Sir Keir Starmer commits to clean power by 2030

Speaking to Sky News, the Labour leader said that Rishi Sunak was putting "vanity before country" by not calling an election straight away.

Asked about the 2030 commitment, he told Wilfred Frost on Sky News: "I'm not prepared to move that date. People keep saying to me, are you moving back on your goal? No, we're not - clean power by 2030.

Of course Starmer already knows one way back - redefine 'clean power'. 

Such a mephitic morass of slogans and cliches does offer us an extremely sobering perspective on the political huckster though. Sadly we have become accustomed to the smell and don’t expect anything better.

Quotes for 2024

She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)


Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend’s drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one.

Arnold Bennett - These Twain (1915)


But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.

G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)

It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons

I was reminded of this quote while sitting here on one of those chilly and empty afternoons. Not empty inside the house, we've been busy, but a chilly grey dusk appears to have arrived early. Maybe it’s about time to make the coffee.


IT was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamp-post that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamp-post.

A light fall of snow had half-melted into a few strips, also looking leaden rather than silver, when it had been fixed again by the seal of frost; no fresh snow had fallen, but a ribbon of the old snow ran along the very margin of the coast, so as to parallel the pale ribbon of the foam. The line of the sea looked frozen in the very vividness of its violet-blue, like the vein of a frozen finger. For miles and miles, forward and back, there was no breathing soul, save two pedestrians, walking at a brisk pace, though one had much longer legs and took much longer strides than the other.

G. K. Chesterton - The Wisdom Of Father Brown (1914)

If nobody is running the show

Sitting here by the window over the past few weeks, I’ve seen parents taking their kids to school just before the joy of summer holidays, recycling bins being emptied, a couple of chaps replacing windows over the way, another chap building a garden wall and the Air Ambulance rumbling off somewhere overhead. Everyday life in other words.

About a year ago I posted the G.K. Chesterton quote below. It has niggled away ever since, because Chesterton was mostly right - there are vanishingly few public people important enough to be seriously missed when they are gone.


As a plain, practical man of the world, I must realize that it is the Prime Minister who has been murdered. As a plain, practical man of the world, I don’t think that the Prime Minister matters at all. As a mere matter of human importance, I should say he hardly exists at all. Do you suppose if he and the other public men were shot dead tomorrow, there wouldn’t be other people to stand up and say that every avenue was being explored, or that the Government had the matter under the gravest consideration? The masters of the modern world don’t matter. Even the real masters don’t matter much. Hardly anybody you ever read about in a newspaper matters at all.’

G. K. Chesterton – The Father Brown Stories (1929)


Yet day to day government carries on however irrelevant its political leaders are. It seems to be the outcome of huge numbers of people doing what they usually do. Complex pressures and influences working themselves out today as they did yesterday, money doing what it usually does, a culture of following procedures, doing things reasonably well. Sometimes done out in the open, often not.

If the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet were to be abducted by aliens today, new Cabinets would be in place tomorrow. Naturally there would be a certain amount of official consternation of the Something Must Be Done persuasion, but we’d be well rid of them and many people would know it.

So who really runs the show? Perhaps nobody does in a direct cause and effect sense. The show is an outcome of opaque complexities, not one with a managed and scripted beginning middle and end. It all seems to hang on enough people performing their roles reasonably well. 

If a culture of doing things reasonably well goes awry then this will be reflected in how the show runs. Failures will become obvious but not necessarily explicable. Yet the top-down nature of the show cannot make finely-judged corrections - it is all too complex and opaque. It has to collide with reality first - as we are discovering.

This dazed and floundering opportunism

There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favour of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.

G. K. Chesterton - What’s Wrong with the World? (1910)

It's everywhere, just as it was over a century ago in Chesterton's time -  this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. As if opportunists see the world in terms of personal opportunity rather than trying to connect the dots and do something constructive. 

In the world of the opportunist, Net Zero isn't good or bad, sane or insane, but merely an opportunity. Yet many people know well enough that Net Zero is crazy. In which case, why aren't their voices heard? The reason for that was apparent over a century ago too -


It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom — so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Comfortably Mad

Both the characteristic modern parties believed in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or Progressive few. It might be put, somewhat coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes in any minority that is rich and the other in any minority that is mad.

G.K. Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)


A characteristic which seems to have evolved into both major UK parties and their more influential supporters being comfortably mad. Not necessarily rich, but certainly comfortable financially. And mad of course. Even their professed virtues are mad.

Political madness is a barrier to entry, keeps out the troublesome sceptics. If they ever do breach the barrier the solution is obvious - tell the servants to pile on more madness.

Anointing The Next Prime Minister

As a plain, practical man of the world, I must realize that it is the Prime Minister who has been murdered. As a plain, practical man of the world, I don’t think that the Prime Minister matters at all. As a mere matter of human importance, I should say he hardly exists at all. Do you suppose if he and the other public men were shot dead tomorrow, there wouldn’t be other people to stand up and say that every avenue was being explored, or that the Government had the matter under the gravest consideration? The masters of the modern world don’t matter. Even the real masters don’t matter much. Hardly anybody you ever read about in a newspaper matters at all.’

G.K. Chesterton - The Father Brown Stories (1929)

Progress by precedent II

First quoted here back in 2014 but the mess we are in makes it worth revisiting because what counts as precedent is going global –

But modern Tories have only the dullness of defending situations that they had not the excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o’clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o’clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution. By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the Conservative.

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

Inevitable that things should be like this perhaps, but Chesterton has left us with a fundamental insight into the core of progressive thinking. Take a suitable precedent, push it a little further and lay claim to the new version as an essential progressive reform.

Hence political correctness. Push decent human tolerance until it becomes both foolishly defenceless and foolishly intolerant. Yet where exactly did it go wrong? It went wrong because there was No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question.

The resultant problem is of course obvious as Chesterton spotted over a century ago - It is a good way to prevent real revolution. Political correctness is retarding progress rather than promoting it. That’s the purpose of it.

Even worse, further progress based on a previously debased precedent is a route towards inevitable decline. It cannot be prevented - the precedents are already corrupted. And that is what we now see. We no longer have the ability to handle practical issues such as the coronavirus debacle. Or even changes in the weather. Or even…

The professional simpleton

But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game.”

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong with the World (1910)

It seems obvious enough that we could divide the political arena into simple and complex rather than left and right. It would be much the same as a political and apolitical division where we acknowledge that political ideas are based on oversimplified pictures of reality.

Suppose we follow this idea and consider an imaginary political initiative designed to appeal to about 80% of the population. This would necessarily include a substantial number of people with little interest in abstract analysis. In other words our imaginary political initiative must be sold via a narrative so simple that it is likely to be impractical. Quite possibly stupid too. Passing national laws to influence the global climate for example.

Political initiatives designed for wide popular acceptance cannot easily acknowledge complex issues such as the do nothing option, practical boundaries or uncertainties. Otherwise mass acceptance is compromised because our imaginary political position is not simple enough. It is insufficiently misleading.

It gets worse though, because we attract political actors who are effectively professional simpletons. They are comfortable promoting hopelessly implausible but simple goals even if those goals are ridiculed by everyone who understands the rough edges of real life. Practical people don’t usually aspire to be professional simpletons. Apart from climate scientists. And epidemiologists.

Unless the political class has enough integrity to develop pragmatic politics and eschew the politics of the professional simpleton we have a problem. Unless voters vote against professional simpletons we have a problem.

We have a problem.

Playing the game for keeps

But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game”.

G K Chesterton - What's Wrong With the World (1910)

Strange times we live in. For example, it is obvious enough that many people willingly adopt an idea they consider to be ‘right’ even though it is equally obvious that the idea is dubious, misleading or even false. In other words, truth is not always the high point on a scale of values. For some people and some subjects a scale of values may peak at ‘right’. In this distorted world a true idea can be wrong in the sense that the favoured alternative already sits at the top of the value scale.

Right > True > False > Wrong

It is worth adding that ‘right’ is more personal than true – it has a sense of ownership, kinship and collective virtue which truth cannot match. Truth is more austere, remote and difficult. That last one is important for mass persuasion – truth is difficult when issues are complex and nuances must be acknowledged. Difficult is rarely popular.

To argue any debating point is futile if true is not even a staging post on the way to ‘right’. This leaves us with an odd situation where wrong may be worse than false. Wrong may be far right, imperialist, xenophobic or numerous other variants but they all equate to wrong where wrong is worse than merely false.

In other words a true idea may be denounced as wrong and therefore worse than false because it is much further down a scale of values. Those who insist on truth as the ultimate arbiter may be seen as bad people or a basket of deplorables rather than merely mistaken. From here is no great leap for true ideas to be denounced as evil and beyond serious consideration by the ‘right’ people.

None of this is new and of course there are complex nuances because truth is usually conditional or merely the best we have rather than unambiguously true. Yet the problem is still with us and is getting worse. However nuanced it may be, truth as the ideal arbiter has to form common ground for any debate or there is no debate at all. Unfortunately no debate at all is what many activists want, including institutional activists such as the BBC.

Unfortunately ‘right’ always feels justified in suppressing true - so it does. Again this is what the BBC does. There is no common ground because ‘right’ cannot understand a common ground which isn’t ‘right’. It’s an old problem but now the game is being played globally and for keeps.

All’s fair in footy

We have the same grossly insincere pretence that sport always encourages a sense of honour, when we know that it often ruins it.

G. K. Chesterton - What’s wrong with the world? (1910)

Many years ago, Son played for a local junior football team. I went along to help with various jobs which have to be done for each match including putting up the nets, running the line and on the whole I enjoyed it. It was an experience as they say, but what I also recall too well is the cheating. There was a lot of that. I’ll give one example, but there were many more.

Towards the end of one season Son’s team were due to play an away match against a much weaker team faced with the possibility of relegation. We arrived at the ground and hung around the changing hut waiting for it to be unlocked.

Members of the opposition team were also hanging around the changing hut, including four remarkably big lads who looked a little furtive. We didn’t remember them from the previous encounter and there had also been stories about this team playing over age players. Those big lads certainly looked over age.

After a while the referee turned up but fortunately he wasn’t just any referee, he was the League Secretary doing a spot check on ineligible players. Oh dear. The four big lads quietly legged it and Son’s team won as expected. All part of the rich tapestry that is junior football.

A horrible hunger

The god of the aristocrats is not tradition, but fashion, which is the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would you look for it in the Scandinavian Smart Set?

No; the aristocrats never have customs; at the best they have habits, like the animals. Only the mob has customs. The real power of the English aristocrats has lain in exactly the opposite of tradition. The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress.

They have always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for the future.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

A curiously interesting quote. Chesterton may be stating the obvious but it isn’t something we usually account for. The rich and powerful have it all, so naturally enough they tend to be bored with the present and look to the future for their schemes, plans and entertainment.

In which case progress is substantially driven by the rich and powerful trying to keep boredom at bay. I’m not sure if I agree with the idea, but professional football, the art market and grand infrastructure projects may suggest Chesterton was at least partly right.

Is the EU a symptom of boredom among the rich and powerful?

It could be - we already know about the brats.

Broad-minded is no escape

Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else. It was meant to benefit the rich; and meant to benefit nobody else. And if you think this unwarranted, I will put before you one plain question. There are some pleasures of the poor that may also mean profits for the rich: there are other pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the rich. Watch this one contrast, and you will watch the whole creation of a careful slavery.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

In his social and political criticism old Gilbert was essentially a pundit with a love of paradox and a pundit’s weakness for hyperbole. He wrote much that leaves one wishing he’d been less sweeping in his judgement, more analytical, less fond of shaky analogies.

Nevertheless he had many penetrating insights if we take the trouble to examine matters from his idiosyncratic perspective. The above quote is a case in point. These days it is somewhat dated in that it refers to the poor who in Chesterton’s day were more numerous, closer to destitution and possessed of fewer resources than today.

His attack on the pursuit of money also seems dated from our opulent perspective because Chesterton’s poor are no longer with us and much of that is down to the pursuit of riches he so eloquently despised. From that perspective it is easy to dismiss his view as an irrelevant cry from another age.

Yet Chesterton still commands respect. He saw what we have almost lost the ability to see because modern life is so enfolding, so clamorous and demanding, so adept at diverting all but the most detached attention. He was both anti-capitalist and anti-socialist. He saw both as social evils bent on crushing us all between the grindstones of big business and big government.

What did he mean by pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the rich? Those which were so unprofitable that they were doomed to be rooted out by the rich and powerful?

Family life perhaps, the traditional work, comforts and pleasures of building a home. Pubs, clubs, a quiet smoke and a game of skittles. A Sunday walk in the park. A stroll by rivers unpolluted by factories. A traditional glass of lemonade rather than some fizzy, concoction made in a rich man’s vats, forced on the unwary by another of Chesterton’s bêtes noires - advertising.

Escape in other words, in a world where escape had become a necessary part of life even for the middle classes.

..to escape foul air, noise, hard hats, black uniforms, multitudes, confusion, incompleteness, elaborate means without clear ends.

Edward Thomas - The Country (pre-1945)

What about that intriguing comment on broad-mindedness? It’s obvious enough once we see it from Chesterton’s perspective. To be broad-minded is to be ripe for profitable exploitation. It offers no escape from the daily grind, nothing but the insipid palliatives of assent.

Chesterton may have been a reactionary, even a professional reactionary but one is left with a strong temptation to raise a glass in his memory. Before all the good pubs close down.

To convince a newborn babe

source

Now most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice.

That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

As he does so well, Chesterton uses a rose-tinted view of the past to probe a genuine canker in human affairs. One obvious response is that we have a problem where modern philosophies are so half-baked, because of our increased awareness of myths and uncertainties.

On the other hand, Chesterton makes a telling point in that our awful and ancestral responsibility has also seeped away into the swamps of relativism and moral uncertainty. Possibly connected with this:

Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult.

Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895)

Is atheism a cult? Not in itself perhaps but something secular and cult-like has arisen since Le Bon's time.

Chesterton’s Bind

source

But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized.

The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.

G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)

Chesterton was right, the political class don’t care which system they administer as long as they are the administrators. The political class is an environment, a niche. As with any other niche it selects those best adapted to it.

So there is no point in expecting a political party to change the niche, rebuild it into something more democratic, spoil it for the current occupants. Why would they? They merely want to occupy it. Such an appealing niche too, and a staging post for so many others equally attractive.

We could call it Chesterton’s Bind - a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them. Not an easy nut to crack.