There is an old anecdote from Neil Gaiman’s blog (from 2009, I hasten to add, well before the allegations made against him came to light) that has lodged itself somewhere in the moral compost heap of my brain.

Gaiman remembers hearing a comics editor complain about an artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor’s objection was not that the house looked bad, or that the artist had climbed a ladder in a high wind while wearing novelty slippers, or that he had accidentally chosen a shade called Tuscan Persimmon and condemned the neighbours to live beside it. The objection was financial. For the money the artist could have earned during those weeks, he could have hired somebody else to paint the house and still come out ahead.

Gaiman’s unspoken reply was wonderfully simple: “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

This is one of those lines that feels almost too small to contain the thing it contains. It is not a grand manifesto. It does not come with a twelve-point programme, a subscription model, or a downloadable worksheet called Reclaiming Your Paint-Based Agency. It is merely the thought that a person might do something because he wanted to do it.

How quaint. How inefficient. How magnificently suspicious.

The point, of course, is not that everyone should paint their own house. I am not proposing a moral hierarchy in which the righteous scrape skirting boards while the damned outsource the glossing. If you hate painting, are bad at painting, cannot safely paint, or simply have better things to do, then by all means pay someone who knows which end of the brush to hold. There is no dignity in making yourself miserable for the sake of pretending that the middle classes have been corrupted by tradespeople.

The point is smaller and larger than that. Smaller, because it is just about a man painting his house. Larger, because it exposes one of the stranger habits of modern life: the assumption that every choice must be defended as an efficiency calculation.

Under this logic, the question is never simply, did you enjoy it? The question is, did it make sense? Did it maximise your hourly value? Did it support your long-term goals? Did it contribute to your physical health, mental resilience, professional development, personal brand, side-hustle potential, creative practice, networking capacity, domestic optimisation strategy, or at least your ability to return refreshed to the sacred inbox?

To which the only civilised answer is sometimes: no. I just fancied it.

The Case for Getting Things Done

There is, annoyingly, a serious concession to make here.

Efficiency is not wicked. Planning is not a moral failure. It is good to get things done. Some tasks genuinely do need doing; some deadlines matter; some responsibilities become worse if left to fester in the dark like potatoes at the back of a cupboard. A person who refuses all structure in the name of authenticity will, quite quickly, discover that the gas bill has not been moved by their commitment to spiritual freedom.

Nor is self-improvement obviously bad. There are habits worth building, skills worth learning, bodies worth looking after, finances worth managing, relationships worth repairing, and homes worth making less actively hostile to human life. There is nothing noble about avoidable chaos. There is no romance in missing every deadline, losing every document, eating cereal from a mug because all the bowls have achieved archaeological significance in the sink, and calling the whole arrangement a resistance practice.

The serious version of productivity culture appeals because life is genuinely difficult to manage. Work expands. Administration multiplies. Notifications breed in captivity. Every institution, from the bank to the GP surgery to the local council website, appears to have entered into a secret pact to make ordinary life slightly more like filing taxes in a haunted airport.

So yes, we need systems. We need calendars, reminders, routines, lists, limits and the occasional grim afternoon in which we sort out the thing we have been avoiding for six months and discover that it took seventeen minutes. A good productivity method can be an act of mercy. It can reduce friction. It can help us keep promises. It can create enough order that life becomes less exhausting.

The problem is not doing things well.

The problem is when doing things well becomes indistinguishable from optimising the self.

That distinction matters because one is practical and the other is metaphysical. It is one thing to say, I need a better way of managing my time. It is another to say, I am a badly designed human product whose every feature requires upgrading. The first can help you answer emails. The second can turn existence into a permanent performance review.

When Everything Becomes a Metric

The most exhausting thing about productivity culture is not even the advice itself. Much of the advice is fine. Sleep more. Move about. Write things down. Do the difficult task first. Do the easy task first. Batch similar tasks. Do not batch similar tasks. Use your phone. Throw your phone into the sea. Wake at five. Respect your chronotype. Drink water. Do deep work. Touch grass. Put the grass into Notion.

The advice contradicts itself, but that is not the deepest problem. Human beings are contradictory, and any advice that survives contact with actual life will need exceptions, caveats and a certain amount of shrugging.

The deeper problem is the moral atmosphere. The language of optimisation smuggles in a whole theory of the person. You are no longer someone with finite time, strange moods, bodily needs, obligations, pleasures, griefs, friendships, distractions, appetites and occasional inexplicable desires to reorganise a drawer. You are a project. Your attention is capital. Your leisure is recovery. Your recovery is performance maintenance. Your hobbies are skill stacks. Your books are inputs. Your walks are steps. Your meals are fuel. Your friendships are networks. Your personality is content. Your sadness is friction. Your body is an asset. Your life is a portfolio of under-exploited efficiencies.

At that point, even rest becomes suspicious unless it can produce evidence of usefulness. You may nap, but ideally only because sleep improves cognitive performance. You may walk, but ideally while listening to a podcast about leadership. You may cook, but it should support gut health, reduce delivery costs, increase domestic competence, photograph well, and produce enough leftovers to make Thursday less pathetic. You may read a novel, but only if it expands empathy, sharpens prose style, deepens cultural literacy or provides a useful analogy for a future essay. I am not saying I have never done this. I am saying I object to being seen.

This is why the phrase self-care so often has a faintly managerial smell. In its better form, self-care is a humane recognition that people have needs and limits. In its worse form, it means servicing the machine so it can return to work on Monday without making a noise.

There is something bleakly comic about a culture that has learned to defend rest on the grounds that it improves output. It is like defending friendship because it lowers blood pressure, or defending beauty because it may improve regional footfall. The defence is not false, exactly. It is just spiritually deranged.

Rest may well make us more productive. Exercise may well sharpen concentration. A holiday may well prevent burnout. A lunch break may well improve afternoon performance. These are useful arguments in workplaces and policy documents because institutions often require a business case before they will allow human beings to behave like mammals.

But it should worry us if the only acceptable defence of rest is that it eventually pays productivity rent.

Rest Is Not Performance Maintenance

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is useful here because it attacks one of the great fantasies beneath modern productivity advice: the idea that, with the right system, we might one day get everything done. Burkeman frames much productivity advice as encouraging a limit-denying dream in which we become fully optimised masters of our time; his alternative is to accept finitude, choose what to neglect, and organise life around what matters rather than what can be endlessly processed.

This is not a glamorous thought. Nobody wants to buy a productivity book called Some Things Will Remain Unanswered and Eventually You Will Die. It lacks airport appeal. But it has the advantage of being true.

A great deal of productivity culture depends on denying limits while pretending to manage them. It tells us that the problem is not the impossible volume of demands, but our inadequate system. We have not found the correct app. We have not blocked our calendar with sufficient aggression. We have not learned to say no in a tone of voice that suggests both emotional maturity and excellent core strength.

Yet the truth is that a finite life cannot be made infinite by better sorting. There will always be unread books, unanswered messages, unvisited places, unmastered skills, unwritten essays, unstarted projects and people with whom we should probably have been more patient. The human problem is not how to clear the decks. The human problem is how to live on a deck that will never be clear.

That sounds miserable, but it is also a relief. If the fantasy of total completion is false, then the failure to complete everything is not a personal defect. It is a condition of being alive. You are not behind because you have failed to catch up with the universe. The universe was never offering inbox zero.

This changes the moral status of rest. Rest is not a tactic by which you trick yourself into becoming a more efficient worker. Rest is part of life. It is not justified only by what it repairs, improves or enables. Sometimes you are tired because you are tired. Sometimes you should stop because continuing would make you unpleasant, inaccurate, brittle or weirdly emotional about printer settings. Sometimes the correct response to being a person with a body is to lie down.

This should not be radical. It should barely be an argument. Yet here we are, bravely asserting that human beings may sit quietly without first producing a theory of impact.

The Proper Uses of Pointlessness

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing helps because it refuses the lazy caricature of anti-productivity as mere passivity. Odell is not arguing for sloth, ignorance or a permanent state of decorative collapse. Her argument is about refusing the attention economy’s terms: reclaiming attention, listening, observing, remaining in the world while declining to treat every moment as raw material for extraction. The LSE Review of Books summarises the book as a case for refusing productivity and redirecting attention towards active listening and contemplation, rather than simply doing less.

That is an important distinction. Doing nothing properly is not the same as doing nothing badly.

Doing nothing badly is the grey mush of semi-conscious scrolling; the kind where you look up after forty minutes with the spiritual texture of wet cardboard and a working knowledge of three controversies involving people you do not know. Doing nothing badly is not leisure so much as leakage. Time has passed, but it has not been inhabited.

Doing nothing properly is different. It may look inefficient from the outside because it does not always produce a visible object. But it is not empty. It is the walk where nothing happens except that you notice the angle of the light on a brick wall. It is the conversation that does not advance the plot. It is cooking something slightly too elaborate because the chopping is pleasant. It is reading about a topic you have no intention of monetising. It is sitting in a garden and slowly becoming aware that at least three birds are conducting complicated personal business in the hedge.

These things are not valuable because they secretly make you better at email. They may, incidentally, make you a calmer or more attentive person. Good. Lovely. Put that on the leaflet if necessary. But their first defence is that they are part of being alive.

Kieran Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic activities gives a useful philosophical backbone to this without requiring us to say the word Aristotle too loudly in a light essay. Telic activities are directed towards completion: finish the article, buy the house, get the promotion, run the race. Atelic activities are valuable in the doing: listening to music, spending time with a friend, walking, thinking, living well. Setiya’s point is not that achievement is worthless, but that achievements are not all that matter; atelic activities locate value in the present rather than postponing fulfilment until the goal has been reached.

This is exactly what optimisation culture struggles to understand. It can cope with painting the house if the goal is a painted house. It struggles with painting the house because painting the house is how you wanted to spend the afternoon. It can cope with running if you are training for a marathon, lowering your resting heart rate or constructing a personal narrative of discipline. It struggles with running because the weather was good and your legs felt like being used. It can cope with reading if the book is improving you. It struggles with reading because the book is there, and you are there, and for once nobody needs to be improved.

The optimised life is embarrassed by activities that do not terminate in a result. It wants everything to point beyond itself. But much of what makes life bearable, and sometimes beautiful, does not point beyond itself. It is not a corridor to something else. It is a room.

Wasting Time Properly

This is where the phrase wasting time needs rescuing.

There is such a thing as wasting time badly. We all know this. There are forms of waste that leave you diminished, not restored; numbed, not rested; irritated, not amused. There are evenings that vanish into the algorithmic sinkhole and leave behind only the faint impression that everyone is angry, everything is discourse, and you have somehow developed an opinion about a minor American podcast host.

But there is also such a thing as wasting time properly.

To waste time properly is to spend it without demanding that it become something else. It is to accept that not every activity needs to justify itself before the tribunal of future usefulness. It is to do something absorbing, pleasurable, restful, social, strange or beautiful without immediately converting it into a lesson, asset or productivity hack.

This is harder than it sounds, because optimisation culture follows us even into our escape routes. The hobby becomes a side hustle. The walk becomes a streak. The book becomes a content plan. The meal becomes a macro balance. The notebook becomes a system. The system becomes a lifestyle. The lifestyle becomes a brand. The brand becomes a tiny exhausting god that must be fed every morning before breakfast.

Even our pleasures are asked to professionalise. A person cannot merely enjoy coffee; they must develop a coffee practice. They cannot merely go to the gym; they must enter a transformative arc. They cannot merely take up pottery; they must open an online shop selling small irregular bowls to people who describe objects as intentional. They cannot merely enjoy a video game; they must be building transferable strategic capacities, unless they are writing an essay about how difficulty functions as atmosphere and world design, in which case apparently it is fine and intellectually important.

Again: I object to being seen.

The point is not that seriousness ruins pleasure. Hobbies can deepen. Skills can improve. Amateur interests can become crafts, and crafts can become vocations. There is nothing wrong with caring about doing something well. In fact, doing something well is often one of the great pleasures of life.

But doing something well is not the same as optimising yourself.

A person who bakes bread because they love baking bread is not the same as a person who has folded bread into a comprehensive programme of disciplined domestic excellence. A person who learns guitar because it is satisfying to make noise in a room is not the same as a person who treats every chord as an investment in personal complexity. A person who paints their house because they want to paint their house is not making a claim about efficiency. They are painting the house.

There is a kind of freedom in allowing an action to remain itself.

Conclusion: A Life Is Not a Workflow

The real objection to optimisation culture is not that it makes us work too hard, although it often does. Nor is it that it makes us feel guilty, although it certainly has a talent for that. The deeper objection is that it narrows the imagination of what a life is for.

It teaches us to see ourselves as bundles of capacity awaiting better management. It turns moral language into managerial language. It makes every limit look like a flaw, every pleasure look like an indulgence, every pause look like a failure to prepare. It tells us that the good life is the streamlined life: frictionless, measurable, disciplined, upgraded, efficient.

But a life is not a workflow.

A life contains work, and work matters. It contains duties, and duties matter. It contains goals, and goals matter too. There are things we owe to other people, things we owe to ourselves, and things that will not be done unless we do them. Nobody sensible is against calendars. Nobody humane is against trying.

But there must be room for forms of value that do not arrive wearing a lanyard.

There must be room for the pointless walk, the unmonetised hobby, the nap that is not a cognitive enhancement strategy, the conversation that solves nothing, the meal cooked slowly for no audience, the book read badly and happily, the afternoon lost to weather, the song played again, the garden stared at, the house painted by hand.

Not because these things make us better products.

Because they are among the reasons being a person is preferable to being a product.

So by all means improve yourself where improvement would help. Learn the skill. Keep the promise. Write the list. Answer the email. Fix the shelf. Make the plan. Paint the house efficiently if efficiency is what the moment requires.

But do not let anyone convince you that every hour must submit a business case.

Some things are worth doing because they are useful. Some things are worth doing because they are good. Some things are worth doing because they are yours. And occasionally, with a brush in one hand and paint on a sleeve you quite liked, you may discover that the correct answer to why are you doing this yourself? is simply:

Because I wanted to.

There is a particular kind of online sentence which ought, by rights, to be harmless, but which has started to fill me with a faint, weary dread.

It usually begins: ‘Can someone explain the lore?’

This is not, in itself, an unreasonable question. Games are strange now. Films are strange now. Television is strange now. Franchises sprawl across novels, comics, codices, item descriptions, prequels, sequel trilogies, campaign books, sourcebooks, developer interviews, wiki pages, convention panels, half-canon spin-offs and YouTube videos narrated over footage of someone walking very slowly through a ruined cathedral. If you feel that you have entered a story through the wrong door, it is natural to ask where the hallway begins.

Nor is the desire for lore a shallow desire. Quite the opposite. People ask for lore because they want fictional worlds to matter. They want the castle to have foundations, the monsters to have origins, the gods to have names, the map to continue beyond the playable area. They want to know that what they have just seen was not merely placed there for decoration. Somewhere, in some lost age, some king built that tower, some war broke that bridge, some priest wrote that heresy, some idiot opened the ancient door marked quite plainly ‘Do Not Open, Probably Full of Cosmic Misery.’

I sympathise with this. I own fantasy maps. I have lost time to invented genealogies. I have read paragraphs about fictional moons with a seriousness I cannot always extend to my own work emails. This is not an argument against lore. A world without any sense of depth can feel thin, stagey and disposable. Lore is one of the ways fiction suggests that the visible story is only the exposed edge of something larger.

The problem begins when that larger thing stops supporting the story and starts replacing it.

The problem with lore is not that fictional worlds have histories. It is that we increasingly talk as if those histories are the point. Story becomes backstory. Meaning becomes explanation. Mystery becomes missing information. A scene has not succeeded because it moved us, unsettled us, changed our understanding of a character, or left an image lodged somewhere unpleasant in the mind. It has succeeded because it connects to a thing we already know, or can be made to connect to a thing somebody else knows, or can be explained in a ninety-minute video called something like The Complete Timeline of the Sad Wizard War.

At that point, we are no longer encountering fiction. We are revising for it.

The poetry of not knowing

The first Alan Wake opens with a line attributed to Stephen King about nightmares existing outside logic, and there being ‘little fun’ in explanations. The fuller thought, developed by the game’s narrator, is that in horror the victim keeps asking why, but the unanswered mystery is what remains with us. Remedy reportedly secured King’s permission to use the opening quotation for a token fee; it is a neat little piece of literary inheritance for a game obsessed with writers, horror, repetition and the danger of mistaking narration for control.

It is also a useful doorway into the problem with lore.

Horror understands, at least when it is working properly, that explanation can be corrosive. This does not mean horror should never explain anything. A story made entirely from ambiguity can be as lazy as one made entirely from exposition. But fear often depends on an imbalance between encounter and comprehension. Something is in the house. Something is wrong with the lake. Something has happened in the old village, or will happen again, or perhaps has always been happening and you have simply arrived during one of its more photogenic recurrences.

The demand for lore often reverses that imbalance. It asks the story to account for itself. What is the monster? Where did it come from? What are its rules? Who built the ritual site? Is the cult connected to the entity mentioned in the second DLC? Does the deer-headed thing represent grief, colonial guilt, lunar fertility, the developer’s divorce, or a datamined boss cut from version 1.03?

Some of those questions can be interesting. Some of them can deepen the work. But there is a point at which the question ‘what does this mean?’ quietly becomes ‘what is the in-universe explanation for this object?’ They are not the same question.

That distinction matters because the unanswered mystery is not always a gap waiting to be filled. Sometimes it is the shape the work has deliberately taken. Sometimes the lack of explanation is not a failure of worldbuilding, but the means by which the story produces wonder, dread, melancholy or awe. To explain too much is not merely to add information. It can be to change the genre of the experience.

A ghost story with a complete metaphysical rulebook is not necessarily richer than one without it. A ruined kingdom whose every dynasty is exhaustively documented is not necessarily more tragic than one whose surviving records contradict each other. A god whose motives can be summarised in a wiki sidebar may be less powerful than one whose motives are half-lost, half-lied-about, and partly unknowable.

Lore can deepen mystery. It can also domesticate it.

Lore is not story

The simplest version of the argument is this: lore is what has already happened. Story is what is happening under pressure.

That is not a perfect definition, but it is a useful one. Lore gives us histories, cosmologies, factions, lineages, catastrophes, prophecies, rules, institutions and buried causes. Story gives us desire, action, conflict, reversal, consequence, recognition, failure and change. Lore is the sediment beneath the road. Story is the person walking it, bleeding slightly, trying to decide whether to turn back.

The two are not enemies. Often they need each other. A character’s choice may only make sense because of the world’s history. A war may only feel tragic because we understand the myth that sustains it. A city may only feel alive because its streets imply layers of use, conquest, trade, worship and neglect. Lore is often the material from which story is built.

But material is not architecture. A pile of bricks is not a house. A thousand years of invented history is not, by itself, drama.

This is where some fantasy franchises, games and fandoms get into trouble. They confuse density with depth. They assume that because a world contains a large quantity of information, it must therefore be rich. But richness is not the same as volume. A fictional world can be enormous and shallow. It can have twelve empires, seven ages, five magic systems, three dead creator gods and a downloadable glossary, and still fail to produce a single human moment worth remembering.

Conversely, a world can be relatively spare and feel immense. A half-seen ritual. A name nobody wants to say. A monument without an inscription. A character who flinches at a song. These can imply more than an appendix.

The question is not ‘how much lore is there?’ The question is ‘what does the lore do?’

Does it thicken the atmosphere? Does it sharpen the conflict? Does it make the character’s choice more painful? Does it give the landscape moral or historical weight? Does it complicate what we thought we knew? Does it make the world feel old, contested, wounded or alive?

Or does it merely answer a question nobody needed answered?

FromSoftware and the lure of the incomplete

This is why Dark Souls and Elden Ring are not straightforward examples of the problem. In some ways, they are the best defence against it.

They are, obviously, lore-heavy games. The player moves through worlds of dead gods, ruined dynasties, cryptic factions, half-remembered wars and proper nouns arranged with the calm hostility of a medieval theology exam. Much of the explicit backstory is scattered through item descriptions, environmental cues, enemy placement, architecture, boss names and fragments of dialogue. George R. R. Martin has described his contribution to Elden Ring in terms of worldbuilding, backstory and imaginary history; FromSoftware then took that inherited material and made a game out of its aftermath.

Yet the reason these games work is not simply that they have lore. They work because the lore is fused to the act of play.

In Dark Souls, you do not merely learn that the world is exhausted. You feel exhaustion in the loop of death and return, in the hostile indifference of the architecture, in the way triumph is always provisional, in the grotesque comedy of dragging one’s battered little body through another cathedral full of historical consequences. In Elden Ring, the shattered order of the world is not just a premise. It is a geography. The Lands Between feel like a place where cosmic law has broken into regional weather.

This is lore as atmosphere, not lore as lecture. It does not stand outside the experience, waiting to be consumed later. It presses in from every side.

Of course, the fandom around these games can still produce the more exhausting form of lore culture. There is a familiar ritual now: the game releases; players discover a sad knight, a suspicious tree and a corpse wearing someone else’s hat; the internet assembles; three weeks later, somebody has produced a diagram proving that every woman in the setting is either an aspect of the same goddess, a jar, or both.

I am not sneering at this. Some of that work is genuinely impressive. It can be a form of collaborative criticism, close reading by other means. But it does subtly alter the relationship between mystery and answer. The game says: here are ruins, traces, echoes, contradictions. The lore machine says: here is what happened.

Sometimes that is satisfying. Sometimes it is like pinning a moth.

The best FromSoftware lore remains powerful because it resists final settlement. Not because there are no answers, but because the answers do not exhaust the experience. You can know more about Lordran or the Lands Between and still feel that knowledge is inadequate. The past has not been explained away. It continues to rot beautifully underfoot.

The wiki is not the work

The more general problem is not really lore itself, but wiki-fication: the habit of treating a fictional world as a database whose highest purpose is completion.

The wiki is an extraordinary tool. It is also, as a model of reading, a dangerous temptation. It encourages a particular kind of attention: classificatory, connective, chronological, hierarchical. Who is related to whom? Which events are canon? Which source supersedes which other source? What is the official name of the war? Was this character present at the battle? Is this helmet the same helmet? Did the prophecy refer to the moon, the false moon, the dead moon, or the moon that was technically a metaphor until the tie-in comic made it literal?

Again, none of this is inherently bad. Continuity is part of the pleasure of large fictional worlds. The problem is when continuity becomes the substitute for judgement. The first question becomes not ‘is this scene good?’ but ‘does this scene fit?’ The audience is trained to experience recognition as meaning. A character appears, a musical cue returns, a planet is named, a helmet is lifted from a box, and the work receives applause for connecting to itself.

This is one of the besetting sins of modern franchise storytelling. It is particularly visible in Star Wars, a universe now so heavily shaped by canon management that some arguments about it feel less like criticism than property law. Lucasfilm’s 2014 decision to rebrand much of the old Expanded Universe as ‘Legends’, while establishing a new continuity for future films, books, comics and games, was commercially understandable and probably inevitable. It was also a perfect illustration of how franchise worlds become administrative structures.

The interesting question about Star Wars should not be whether every story ‘counts’ in the same official ledger. It should be why this mythic space opera, whose original power lay partly in its speed, archetypal clarity and sense of glimpsed vastness, has become so dependent on filling its own gaps.

The Clone Wars are more interesting before we know exactly what happened in them. Boba Fett is more interesting before we have been asked to care about his administrative style. The Force is more interesting when it is mystical, ethical and dramatic, rather than an inheritance dispute with glowsticks. This does not mean later stories cannot work. Some do. But they work when they find drama inside the world, not when they merely convert implication into content.

There is a difference between expanding a world and explaining it down.

Warhammer and the honest excess of setting

Warhammer is a slightly different case, because it has always been excessive. Its scale is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the product.

To complain that Warhammer 40,000 has too much lore is a little like complaining that a cathedral has too much stone. The whole thing is built from impossible accumulation: ten thousand years of decay, corpse-emperors, fallen primarchs, machine cults, fungal hooligans, space elves, bureaucratic theocracy, Latin-ish nonsense, skulls on everything, and an entire aesthetic apparently generated by asking what would happen if a medieval reliquary developed a cocaine problem.

Its lore is also inseparable from its function as a tabletop setting. Warhammer is not only a story; it is a playground, product line, miniatures range, wargame, art style, publishing ecosystem and identity machine. The point is not simply to follow a plot. It is to choose an army, paint it, name things, fight battles, argue about rules, read novels, watch lore videos, and develop strong opinions about fictional logistics.

In that sense, Warhammer may be the most honest lore franchise. It does not pretend that the lore is merely serving a single story. The lore is infrastructure. It gives players reasons to care about factions, colours, battles and models. It creates a shared imaginative field in which other stories can happen.

But even here, the problem can appear. The Horus Heresy began as mythic backstory: the great founding wound of the setting, the half-remembered civil war that explained why the Imperium was so broken. Over time it became a vast narrative enterprise in its own right, with dozens of novels and a continuing apparatus of guides, curated collections and follow-up material. Recent official material describes curated routes through the saga and pivotal events across the Age of Darkness, which is entirely reasonable for a body of fiction that has become too large for casual entry.

There is a real achievement here. Many of those books are loved. Some are very good. But the transformation is still revealing. A mythic past becomes a documented past. A legendary betrayal becomes a shelf. The half-seen tragedy is made narratively available.

That is not automatically a loss. But it is a change. Some forms of grandeur depend on distance. Bring the ancient catastrophe too close, give every demigod a speaking part, every faction a trilogy, every mystery a campaign supplement, and the scale can oddly diminish. The mountain becomes a guided tour.

The Elder Scrolls and lore as literature

If Star Wars shows lore as continuity management, and Warhammer shows lore as infrastructure, The Elder Scrolls at its best shows lore as literature.

This is especially true of Morrowind, whose strangest texts do not simply provide background information. They perform the world’s instability. The 36 Lessons of Vivec are not valuable because they straightforwardly explain what happened. They are valuable because they sit somewhere between scripture, propaganda, metaphysics, confession, joke, spell and textual fever dream. UESP’s collected versions of the Lessons give some sense of their density and strangeness, but their real effect comes from encountering them inside a game world where religion, politics and history are already entangled.

This is lore doing something more interesting than filling a database. It does not merely say: here are the facts of the Tribunal. It asks: what is a fact inside a world where gods are political rulers, myths may be retroactive, official histories are compromised, and metaphysics has a worrying tendency to behave like rhetoric?

That kind of lore does not close interpretation. It opens it. It gives the player not a settled account, but a field of competing accounts. It makes the world feel old because the past has been fought over, rewritten, sanctified, buried and lied about. In other words, it understands something real history also teaches: the past is not simply what happened. It is what survives, who records it, who benefits from the record, and what cannot quite be made to fit.

The weaker form of lore is the opposite. It takes strangeness and renders it as bullet points. It turns theology into mechanics, myth into chronology, contradiction into error, mystery into ‘deepest lore’. It approaches a religious text from a fictional culture and asks which parts are canonically true, as if that were the only interesting question.

But the best question is often not ‘what really happened?’ It is ‘why does this world need to tell the story this way?’

Why fans love lore

It is worth being fair about this, because the appetite for lore is not simply a failure of taste. Lore gives people several genuine pleasures.

First, it gives scale. A good fictional world feels larger than the story currently occupying it. Lore extends the horizon.

Second, it gives continuity. To follow a franchise over years is to develop a relationship not only with characters, but with accumulated places, events, objects and references. Lore rewards memory.

Third, it gives community. Lore is something fans can discuss, assemble, dispute and teach. It turns solitary consumption into shared excavation.

Fourth, it gives control. Stories are often ambiguous, emotional and unresolved. Lore seems firmer. It can be organised. It can be mastered. It can be put in order.

Finally, it gives a way to remain inside the work after the work is over. This may be the most important point. When a game ends, when a trilogy disappoints, when a favourite character dies, lore offers continuation. There is always another source, another fragment, another theory. The world does not have to end just because the story has.

That is not contemptible. It is touching, really. A fandom’s obsession with lore often comes from love. It is what happens when people do not want the lights to come up.

But love can be bad at criticism. It can mistake more for better. It can treat every blank space as an insult. It can demand that the work explain itself until the original sensation has been replaced by a dossier.

The problem with answers

The deepest problem with lore culture is that it often misunderstands what mystery is for.

A mystery is not always a puzzle. Sometimes it is a mood. Sometimes it is a wound. Sometimes it is the means by which a work gestures beyond its own edges. In horror, the unexplained can preserve fear. In fantasy, it can preserve wonder. In science fiction, it can preserve sublimity. In myth, it can preserve sacred distance. In games, it can preserve the feeling that the world was not built solely for you.

This last point matters especially in games. Players are trained to interact, solve, optimise, complete. The form itself encourages mastery. Good game worlds often have to resist that mastery. They have to make us feel not merely that there is content we have not yet found, but that the world exceeds us in principle.

That is why environmental storytelling can be so powerful. A ruined village does not need to explain everything to make us feel that something happened there. A locked door is not always an invitation to return with the right key. Sometimes it is a statement that the world contains interiors we will never enter.

Lore can support that feeling. It can place suggestive pressure on the world. It can make the visible surface tremble with invisible history. But when lore becomes too available, too complete, too taxonomic, it can flatten the very sensation it was meant to produce.

The answer is not always more explanation. Sometimes the answer is better silence.

What lore is for

So what is lore for?

Lore is for texture. It is for pressure. It is for making a world feel as if it did not begin when the protagonist arrived and will not end when the credits roll. It is for giving places memory, objects significance, institutions inertia, conflicts ancestry and choices consequence.

Lore is for the half-buried statue whose face has been scratched away.

It is for the song everyone knows but nobody explains.

It is for the holy book with three incompatible translations.

It is for the battlefield that is now a marketplace.

It is for the character who lies about the past because the truth would destroy the present.

It is for the sense that the world is not a level select screen but a living accumulation of error, reverence, violence, boredom, weather and time.

What lore is not for, or should not be for, is replacing the need to tell a story.

A fictional world does not become meaningful because we can name all its emperors. It becomes meaningful because something happens within it that could not happen in quite the same way anywhere else. A character changes, or fails to change. A choice reveals its cost. A myth collapses. A city falls. A god is exposed as a fraud, or worse, as real. The lore matters because it makes that movement heavier.

When lore is good, it behaves like geology. It sits beneath the surface, shaping the ground on which the story walks. When lore is bad, it behaves like homework. It asks to be admired for how much there is to know.

That is the problem with lore. Not that there is too much of it. Not that fans care about it. Not that fictional worlds should be smaller, thinner, simpler or less strange. The problem is that lore is increasingly treated as the proof that a story has depth, when often it is only proof that a story has appendices.

The unanswered mystery is not always a defect. The gap is not always waiting for a sourcebook. The shadow at the edge of the map is not always improved by naming the kingdom beyond it.

Sometimes the dragon does not need a family tree.

Sometimes it is enough that the bones are old, the villagers will not go near them, and something under the hill is still warm.

There is a familiar little pantomime in public life. A person with a newspaper column, a parliamentary platform, a large social media following, an endowed chair, a podcast studio, a publishing contract, or some other obvious means of communication says something provocative. People object. Some of them are rude. Some of them are tedious. A few are probably deranged, because it is the internet, and the internet’s main contribution to civilisation is making every village idiot discoverable by keyword search.

Then comes the solemn announcement: they have been silenced.

This is now one of the dullest rituals in public argument. A public figure says something in public, is publicly criticised, and then behaves as if criticism were a form of censorship. Disagreement becomes an attack. Rebuttal becomes intimidation. A lost booking becomes cancellation. A hostile review becomes persecution. A reply underneath a post becomes evidence that free speech itself has entered hospice care.

The problem is not that these people are always lying. Sometimes criticism is ugly. Sometimes it is excessive. Sometimes it is coordinated, malicious, dishonest, or frightening. Public argument can turn into public punishment with alarming speed. The problem is that we have become remarkably bad at distinguishing the different things that can happen after someone says something objectionable.

Criticism, discomfort, reputational consequence, harassment, exclusion, censorship and abuse are all real things. They are not the same thing.

That distinction matters because public life increasingly rewards us for collapsing them. To call disagreement persecution is to claim the moral status of the injured without accepting the intellectual burden of being answered. To call every consequence accountability is to claim the moral status of justice without accepting the ethical burden of proportion. In both cases, the argument is degraded by the same temptation: the wish to be the victim in a story where victimhood settles the question.

The strange comfort of being attacked

It is not hard to see why the language of persecution is appealing. It simplifies everything. If I am being persecuted, I do not need to ask whether the criticism has merit. I do not need to consider whether I was careless, arrogant, ignorant, cruel, or simply wrong. I do not need to distinguish between the weak version of the criticism and the strong one. I do not even need to answer the argument. I can answer the fact that the argument is being made.

This is especially useful for powerful people. A politician with a press office, a columnist with a weekly national platform, or an academic with institutional security can turn a few hostile replies into a morality play about courage. The posture is almost always the same. They are not merely being disagreed with; they are being silenced. They are not being asked to defend a claim; they are being punished for thinking. They are not encountering opposition; they are standing bravely against an orthodoxy.

Sometimes there is a real orthodoxy. Sometimes institutions do punish dissent. Sometimes social and professional circles become narrow, self-protective and vindictive. I do not want to pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between being unable to speak and being unable to speak without reply. A great deal of contemporary free speech panic depends on pretending those are the same thing.

Being criticised is not censorship. Losing an argument is not being silenced. Being thought badly of is not persecution. Even being treated unfairly is not, automatically, proof of a totalitarian culture closing in around you. Sometimes it means you said something poor and people noticed. Sometimes it means you said something defensible, but clumsily. Sometimes it means your audience is less indulgent than you had hoped. Sometimes, yes, it means the crowd is behaving badly. The point is that these possibilities have to be distinguished, not bundled together into one grand theory of martyrdom.

There is a particular kind of public figure who seems to experience all criticism as an existential violation. Their belief in free speech is so absolute that it apparently includes the right to speak without anyone forming a low opinion of them afterwards. They do not want censorship, certainly. But they also do not want contradiction, reputational risk, institutional judgement, social disapproval, or the ordinary unpleasantness of being held to one’s words.

This is not a free speech position. It is a demand for emotional immunity.

But the crowd is not innocent either

The difficulty, of course, is that some people really are treated with disproportionate cruelty.

This is where the lazy anti-woke version of the argument fails. Nobody is forbidden from saying anything any more is a bad argument not because every public shaming is justified, but because it treats all criticism of public speech as hysteria. It collapses in one direction exactly as its opponents collapse in the other. It cannot distinguish between legitimate accountability and mob cruelty because, at some level, it does not want to. It wants a simple story in which the speaker is brave, the critic is censorious, and the content of what was said barely matters.

That story is too neat. Public criticism can be necessary and still become abusive. A person can have said something genuinely harmful and still be treated unjustly. A complaint can begin from a real injury and become an excuse for ritual humiliation. A demand for accountability can become a demand that someone be made permanently socially, morally, and professionally untouchable.

ContraPoints’ Canceling is useful here precisely because Natalie Wynn is not making the standard lazy complaint that accountability has gone too far. Her argument is more careful than that. She distinguishes criticism of actions and beliefs from the construction of a totalising case against the person. The danger is not that people object; it is that objection becomes a machine for producing certainty, abstraction, essentialism, unforgivability, guilt by association and moral dualism. Her account identifies recurring tropes such as presumption of guilt, abstraction, essentialism, pseudo-moralism, no forgiveness, the transitive property of cancellation and dualism.

That list remains useful because it describes a recognisable emotional process. Something specific happens: a sentence, a joke, a association, a clumsy comment, a bad argument, an omission, a silence. Then the specific thing is abstracted into a pattern. The pattern becomes evidence of character. The character becomes essence. The essence becomes destiny. At that point, nothing the person says can really matter, because the conclusion has moved beyond conduct into ontology. They did not merely do something wrong. They are wrong. They are the kind of person to whom wrongness permanently belongs.

This is where accountability becomes theatre. The aim is no longer to correct, repair, deter, educate, protect, or understand. The aim is to establish a moral order in which everyone knows where to stand. The accused must become a symbol. The crowd must become righteous. The bystander must participate or risk suspicion. The original issue may remain somewhere in the background, but the real drama has shifted. It is no longer about what happened. It is about who may be seen to condemn it with sufficient force.

There is a brutal comfort in this too. If the public figure enjoys imagining themselves as persecuted, the crowd enjoys imagining itself as justice. Both positions are morally flattering. Both avoid the harder work of judgement.

Conflict is not abuse

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse gives this problem a deeper ethical frame. Schulman’s central concern is not that abuse is imaginary. Quite the opposite. Her argument depends on the need to distinguish abuse, involving domination or power over another person, from conflict, which involves struggle, disagreement, discomfort, fear, hurt, projection, misrecognition and responsibility on more than one side. The danger is that overstating harm can justify escalation, shunning and cruelty. A 2024 Heterodox Academy essay summarises the point as a critique of the tendency to misrepresent disagreement as abuse, while noting that Schulman writes from within traditions concerned with inclusion, safety and equity rather than from a reactionary rejection of them.

That matters because the phrase conflict is not abuse is easily misused. In the wrong hands, it can become a slogan for minimising real harm. It can be made to sound as if people should simply toughen up, stop complaining, and accept mistreatment as the price of adulthood. That is not the serious version of the argument. The serious version is more demanding.

It asks us to notice when the language of harm becomes a way of avoiding conflict rather than addressing it. It asks whether the claim I feel unsafe is sometimes being used to mean I feel criticised, I feel ashamed, I feel exposed, I feel socially at risk, or I do not want to remain in a relationship of mutual obligation with this person. Those feelings may be real. They may be painful. They may deserve care. But they are not all the same as danger.

This is a hard distinction to make because feelings do not arrive pre-sorted into ethically convenient categories. Discomfort can be a warning sign. Fear can be rational. Anger can indicate that a boundary has been crossed. But feelings can also be distorted by pride, shame, trauma, status anxiety, political identity, group loyalty, envy, projection, embarrassment and the ordinary human inability to bear being wrong in public.

We should be cautious here. There are many contexts in which people understate harm because naming it is costly. Abuse is often minimised by abusers, institutions and bystanders. Victims are routinely pressured to interpret coercion as misunderstanding, violation as awkwardness, discrimination as banter, and cruelty as mere difference of opinion. Any argument about harm inflation that ignores this becomes morally useless.

But the reverse error also exists. People can overstate harm because doing so grants moral clarity. If I am unsafe, I need not negotiate. If I am abused, I need not repair. If I am persecuted, I need not listen. If the other person is dangerous in essence rather than wrong in conduct, then cruelty towards them can be redescribed as protection from them.

This is one of the most unpleasant truths about public argument: people can use the language of vulnerability to dominate other people. Not always. Not even mostly, perhaps. But often enough that any serious ethics of argument must account for it.

Criticism, consequence, punishment

The distinction we need is not between speech and censorship, or between accountability and impunity. Those binaries are too blunt. The better distinction is between criticism, consequence and punishment.

Criticism is the ordinary process of being answered. It can be sharp, moral, emotional, public and unpleasant. It can include mockery. It can include anger. It can include the judgement that someone’s view is cruel, foolish, dishonest or beneath consideration. No serious account of free expression can require people to listen politely to every claim as if the world were a seminar room and all participants had done the reading.

Consequence is what happens when speech changes how people relate to the speaker. If you say something, others may trust you less. They may not want to buy your book, invite you onto a panel, vote for you, collaborate with you, date you, hire you, or keep pretending that they do not know what you think. This is not automatically censorship. It is part of living among other people, who also have agency, judgement and freedom of association.

Punishment is different. Punishment is organised deprivation. It seeks to impose a cost. It may be formal or informal, institutional or social, proportionate or wildly excessive. Sometimes punishment is justified. A person who abuses power, harasses colleagues, fabricates evidence, incites hatred, or uses a platform to make others materially less safe may deserve more than disagreement. But punishment needs standards. It needs evidence, proportionality, process, limits and some imaginable route back, unless the offence is so severe that exclusion really is the point.

Much of our confusion comes from calling all three things by the same names. The person criticised calls it persecution. The crowd calls punishment accountability. The institution calls panic safeguarding. The audience calls spectacle justice. Everyone reaches for the word that gives their side moral advantage.

A healthier culture of argument would not abolish consequences. That would be impossible and undesirable. It would ask more precise questions. What exactly was said or done? What is being criticised: the claim, the conduct, the pattern, the institutional role, or the person’s entire character? Who has power here? What harm is being alleged, and what evidence supports it? What response would be proportionate? What would repair look like? Is the aim to protect others, correct the record, change behaviour, deter repetition, or simply enjoy seeing someone suffer?

That last question is worth asking more often than we do.

The appetite for moral theatre

One reason public argument has become so deformed is that social media makes bystanders feel like participants. Most of us are not resolving the issue. We are not investigating, mediating, repairing, apologising, forgiving, compensating, changing institutions, or doing any of the patient work that justice usually requires. We are watching, reacting, sorting ourselves into position, and calling that politics.

This creates a strange economy of display. The public figure displays injury. The critics display righteousness. The institution displays seriousness. The audience displays discernment. Everyone performs the part most likely to protect their standing among the people whose opinion they care about.

The cruelest part of this is that it often does little for the people actually harmed. A person who has been mistreated may need acknowledgement, apology, changed behaviour, material redress, privacy, protection, time, or the restoration of trust. What they often get instead is a crowd using their injury as raw material for its own self-expression. The harm becomes content. The victim becomes evidence. The accused becomes symbol. The bystanders become morally entertained.

This is not accountability. It is punishment as community bonding.

Nor is it confined to any one political tribe. The style differs, but the structure recurs. The right has its own cancellation rituals, its own inflated victimhood, its own appetite for shunning, its own habit of treating criticism as persecution and difference as civilisational threat. The liberal-left has its own weakness for moral sorting, purity spirals and the transformation of conflict into harm. Centrists have their own melodrama too, usually involving the tragic silencing of very well-paid people who appear to be expressing their silenced views on every available platform.

The point is not that everyone is equally guilty in every case. They are not. The point is that the underlying temptation is widely distributed. We want the status of the victim because it makes our aggression feel defensive. We want the language of justice because it makes our punishment feel clean. We want the drama of moral clarity because the ordinary work of judgement is slow, compromised and unsatisfying.

The duties of being hurt

None of this means that people should be calm in the face of cruelty. Anger is not a failure of reason. Sometimes anger notices what politeness has been trained to conceal. There are situations where civility is used to protect the powerful from the emotional consequences of what they have done. There are arguments so degrading that treating them as respectable contributions to debate becomes its own form of complicity.

But being hurt does not make every response ethical. Being right does not make every tactic just. Being vulnerable does not remove all responsibility for what one does with the power that vulnerability can generate.

This is the part we tend to avoid. Victimhood has moral significance, but it is not moral infallibility. To have been harmed is to deserve care, not to acquire unlimited authority over the truth. To be angry is understandable, but anger can still mislead. To demand accountability may be necessary, but accountability without proportion becomes revenge with better branding.

The same applies to those criticised unfairly. If someone misrepresents you, you may defend yourself. If a crowd lies about you, you may object. If an institution panics and throws you under the nearest reputational bus, you may call that cowardice. But none of this proves that all criticism is bad faith, that all offence is manufactured, or that you have been persecuted merely because people no longer admire you as effortlessly as before.

There is no escape from judgement. That is the annoying thing about living with other people.

What repair would require

A better public culture would need to recover some unfashionable habits: specificity, proportion, patience, distinction and repair.

Specificity means saying what the offence actually was. Not the worst possible abstraction of it; the thing itself. The sentence, the action, the decision, the pattern, the failure. Without specificity, criticism becomes atmosphere. Once criticism becomes atmosphere, the accused cannot answer it and the crowd cannot assess it. Everyone is left arguing over vibes, which is among the least dignified ways to spend a human life.

Proportion means asking what response fits the wrong. Some errors require correction. Some require apology. Some require changed conduct. Some require institutional sanction. Some require exclusion. Some require nothing more than public disagreement. A culture that cannot distinguish these will oscillate between impunity and overkill.

Patience means resisting the demand to decide instantly. This is difficult because online argument punishes hesitation. Silence is treated as complicity; uncertainty as cowardice; nuance as laundering harm. But speed is not the same as moral seriousness. Often it is the opposite. The faster a crowd demands judgement, the more likely it is that people are being asked to perform certainty rather than reach it.

Distinction means refusing the cheap inflation of categories. Disagreement is not persecution. Discomfort is not abuse. Criticism is not censorship. Consequence is not always cancellation. Punishment is not always accountability. But the reverse matters too. Harassment is not debate. Institutional cowardice is not neutrality. Public humiliation is not education. Shunning is not repair.

Repair means believing that people can sometimes do better. Not always. Not cheaply. Not without responsibility. But sometimes. A moral culture with no route to repair is not serious about improvement. It is serious about disposal.

This is one of the contradictions in punitive public argument. It speaks constantly in the language of harm reduction, education and accountability, but often behaves as if people are fixed moral objects. Once named, they are known. Once known, they are finished. That is not an ethic of transformation. It is an ethic of contamination.

Nobody wants to be powerful

Perhaps the deepest problem is that everyone in public argument wants the moral status of the victim and almost nobody wants the moral duties that come with power.

Public figures with large platforms describe criticism as silencing because it is more flattering than admitting they are powerful people being answered by less powerful ones. Crowds describe punishment as accountability because it is more flattering than admitting that a large number of people can become powerful precisely by acting together against one person. Institutions describe evasive risk management as care because it is more flattering than admitting they are frightened of bad publicity. Bystanders describe participation as solidarity because it is more flattering than admitting that they may be enjoying the spectacle.

Power is not a stable possession. It moves. A person may be powerful in one context and vulnerable in another. A columnist may have institutional reach and still be subject to racist abuse. An activist may be marginalised in society and still be capable of cruelty within a community. A crowd may include many powerless people and still, as a crowd, wield terrifying force. Any serious ethics of argument has to follow power as it moves rather than assigning it permanently to whichever side has the better slogan.

That is why the central claim has to be double-edged.

Being criticised is not persecution. Being disagreed with is not silencing. But being publicly punished without proportion, process or repair is also not accountability.

Hold only the first half and you become smug about cruelty. Hold only the second and you become indulgent towards self-pity. Hold both and you have to do the harder work: distinguishing conflict from abuse, criticism from censorship, consequence from punishment, and justice from the pleasures of moral theatre.

This will not make public argument pleasant. It probably should not be pleasant all the time. Some disagreements matter because real things are at stake: rights, dignity, safety, truth, institutions, livelihoods, reputations, and the terms on which people can live together. But it might make argument more honest.

Disagreement is not persecution. Nor is every punishment justice. The beginning of moral seriousness is knowing the difference.

The sentence that does too much work

There are few sentences in British public life more quietly overworked than things were simpler then.

It appears almost everywhere. In arguments about monarchy, empire, childhood, manners, policing, postwar Britain, the lost high street, Sunday trading, social media, national service, school discipline, public order, community, neighbourliness, and the apparently vanished art of people knowing how to behave themselves in public.

Often it is not even offered as an argument. It arrives as a sigh. A photograph of a high street. A memory of children playing outside. A complaint about the price of a pint. A clip of an old royal procession. A story about a grandparent who left school at fourteen, worked hard, bought a house, raised a family, and did not need a sociology seminar to explain the meaning of life.

The sentence has force because it is not wholly false. Some things have been lost. Some institutions have decayed. Some communities have been made more fragile. Some forms of work, family, faith, leisure and civic life have changed so sharply that people are not imagining the rupture. The present can be isolating, bureaucratic, expensive, insecure, over-mediated and strangely airless. It is not irrational to miss a world with more stable rhythms, more legible institutions, and more shared assumptions.

The problem is not that nostalgia notices nothing real. It is that it notices selectively, then mistakes the feeling of loss for a reliable account of history.

The past was not simpler. It is simpler now because memory has edited it.

Nostalgia is not stupidity

It is tempting, especially for people who enjoy being correct in public (a regrettable tendency in which I have no doubt occasionally participated), to treat nostalgia as mere error. The nostalgic person has misremembered the past. They have watched too many period dramas. They have mistaken old photographs for evidence. They have forgotten the racism, sexism, poverty, violence, disease, class deference, bad dentistry, corporal punishment and unspeakable food.

There is truth in that critique, but it is also too easy. Nostalgia is not simply bad history. It is a human response to time.

Psychologists tend to describe nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion: a way of connecting past, present and future, often through memory, identity and belonging. It can comfort people. It can remind them who they are. It can hold together experiences that otherwise feel scattered. The danger begins when that emotional work is promoted into public analysis. Nostalgia can tell us what people miss. It is much less good at telling us how the thing they miss actually worked.

That distinction matters. A nostalgic memory may be emotionally true and historically misleading at the same time.

A person may genuinely remember the high street as warmer, busier and more socially coherent than the out-of-town retail park or the algorithmic convenience of online shopping. But the high street was never just a moral ecology of butchers, bakers and knowing the name of the person behind the counter. It was also shaped by rent, wages, planning rules, bus routes, car ownership, women’s labour, credit, supermarkets, economic geography, and the simple fact that people often shopped locally because they had fewer alternatives.

A person may remember childhood as freer before smartphones. That does not mean they are wrong to notice something degraded in the present. But childhood before smartphones also contained boredom, bullying, isolation, homework, arbitrary adult authority, social humiliations and long afternoons of having very little control over what happened next.

The point is not that the remembered joy was fake. The point is that nostalgia is a ruthless editor. It preserves the freedom and cuts the helplessness.

Not everything that has gone was taken

This is where the argument has to become more precise. Nostalgia often muddles together three different things: loss, change and finitude.

Some things really are lost. A library closes. A youth club shuts. A factory goes. A local newspaper becomes a hollowed-out content mill. A pub becomes flats. A bus route disappears. A community loses the shared institutions through which people once encountered each other.

Some things have not so much been lost as changed. The high street becomes less retail-centred and more service-led. Children socialise through different infrastructures. Work moves from one kind of insecurity to another. Families become more varied. Religion declines in some places and reappears in others. Public manners alter. Technologies reorganise daily life.

And some things are neither exactly loss nor change in the public-historical sense. They are the ordinary irreversibility of being alive.

This is the part nostalgia is worst at naming. Sometimes the thing that cannot be recovered is not the classroom, the summer holiday, the country, the shop, the street or the television programme. Sometimes it is the person you were when you encountered them.

In my family, there’s an old long-running argument about whether Wagon Wheels were bigger in my parents’ childhoods than they were in mine, or in the present day. This is almost perfect here because it is so trivial, and therefore so revealing. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were not. The empirical question can in theory be answered, or at least investigated. But it will never quite answer the emotional question, because the hand holding the biscuit has changed. The scale of the world has changed. The stakes of the afternoon have changed. The child is gone.

That is not a small thing. Childhood really is unrecoverable, and that is part of its power. Its pleasures are sharpened by their finitude. But if we confuse that finitude with some kind of surrounding public decline, we turn the basic sadness of time passing into a political theory.

This is how nostalgia can become dangerous. It does not merely mourn. It misidentifies the object of grief.

It says the country has been stolen when perhaps the deeper truth is that time has passed. It says the world has become uniquely cruel when perhaps we are now old enough to see cruelties from which we were once shielded. It says the past was coherent when the actual experience was often ignorance, dependence, selective attention, or someone else quietly doing the work.

Childhood was not simpler. You were a child.

There is a particular type of childhood nostalgia that depends on forgetting the conditions that made childhood feel light.

Children experience the world intensely, but not completely; they are not, for the most part, reading bank statements, arranging care for elderly relatives, understanding local government finance, absorbing the full emotional consequences of unemployment, or watching the roofline of the family home and wondering how expensive the damp patch will become.

This does not make childhood happiness false. It may make it more precious. A child’s delight in a summer evening, a packet of sweets, a den in the woods, a favourite programme, or a walk to the shop with a grandparent is real. But much of that delight rests on partial knowledge of the world. Someone else is carrying the risks. Someone else is making the decisions. Someone else is turning the chaos of the adult world into something that can be, with some regularity, a source of joy.

So when people say childhood was simpler, they are often right in the least useful way. It was simpler for them. That is not the same as saying the world was simpler.

The same pattern applies more widely. Every age has its hidden labour. The apparent stability of one period often depended on people whose constraints have been pushed out of the nostalgic frame: women doing unpaid domestic work; migrants doing difficult and badly rewarded labour; colonised people supplying wealth and status to the imperial centre; children absorbing adult authority without meaningful recourse; queer people remaining closeted; working-class communities living with industrial injury, pollution and premature death; families maintaining respectability by not speaking about what it cost them.

A society can look beautifully ordered when one does not have to ask who was ordered into silence.

The high street in the snow globe

The lost high street is one of the great nostalgic objects of British life. It has everything nostalgia likes: visible decline, local texture, personal memory, economic anxiety, architectural melancholy, and just enough truth to make easy dismissal impossible.

People are not wrong to miss high streets that felt useful and busy. The movement from everyday local shopping to out-of-town retail, supermarket dominance, online purchasing and hospitality-led town centres has changed the social meaning of local places. Something has been lost when streets stop being part of the ordinary practical choreography of life and become either leisure destinations or managed decline.

But the nostalgic high street is often a snow globe. It preserves the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the hardware shop, the library, the bank branch, the post office, the pub and the market stall in a permanent, walkable, socially warm arrangement. Shake it and community appears.

Real high streets were never that simple. They were economic systems, not just moral ones. They depended on household routines, transport patterns, property ownership, employment structures, gendered divisions of labour, and the limited alternatives available to consumers. They were also not universally loved. People welcomed supermarkets, cars, retail parks and later online shopping because convenience is not a conspiracy against virtue. It is something people choose when they are tired.

That is the boring-but-true difficulty. Many of the changes people lament were not imposed on a population that unanimously preferred the old ways. They were produced by millions of individual decisions that made sense at the time. Cheaper goods. Easier parking. Longer opening hours. More choice. Less time spent moving between shops. Fewer awkward conversations. Less dependence on what happened to be nearby.

The old high street may have been more communal. It was also less convenient. The new settlement may be more convenient. It is also lonelier. It would be unfair to call the grief over the death of the high street a luxury belief completely, but it’s certainly true that in this case, nostalgia wants the communal texture without the constraints that produced it.

Empire, monarchy and the uses of amnesia

The same compression operates in grander historical arguments, though with higher stakes.

Monarchy is often presented through continuity. The ceremony, the uniforms, the oaths, the processions, the architecture, the sheer visual grammar of it all suggest an institution floating serenely above ordinary politics. But the monarchy only looks simple when its conflicts, improvisations, dynastic accidents, constitutional crises, religious convulsions, imperial entanglements and public relations reinventions have been softened into pageantry.

Empire works similarly, though more dangerously. Nostalgia for the empire often depends less on direct longing than on amnesia. The empire becomes a mood,a vibe: maps, ships, ceremony, commerce, Englishness projected across the world, a national confidence borne of preeminence. What disappears is the extraction, the racial hierarchy, the engineered famine, the coercion, the violence, and the basic fact that Britain’s old global status was not generated by national character alone. It rested on an unequal, oppressive, and immoral exercise of hard power.

This is why arguments about imperial nostalgia can become too crude if they suggest people are simply wandering around yearning for pith helmets. Often the problem is subtler. It is not always nostalgia in the sense of explicit desire for restoration. It is a national memory that has kept the prestige and mislaid the horrific details of the machinery by which that prestige was constructed.

That matters because amnesia is politically useful. If the past was simply a story of pluck, decency and natural greatness, then present decline must be the fault of betrayal, bureaucracy, softness, immigration, metropolitan disdain, or insufficient belief. If the past was instead contingent, violent, compromised, lucky, inventive, exploitative and unstable, then there is no simple restoration available. One cannot solve the future by re-enacting a past one has not understood.

Public order and the golden age of people behaving themselves

Public order nostalgia is another case where the feeling should be taken seriously but the story should not be swallowed whole.

Many people do experience the present as more disorderly. They see shoplifting, antisocial behaviour, online abuse, street harassment, fraud, visible drug use, aggressive driving, vandalism, and a general weakening of the everyday expectation that rules will be enforced. They encounter institutions that feel slow, absent or evasive. Even where many forms of crime have fallen over the long term, perceived disorder can still shape daily life.

It is not enough to respond with a graph and declare the matter closed. People do not live inside national trend lines. They live on streets, buses, estates, shopping parades and school routes.

But the nostalgic answer is still too neat. The claim that people simply used to behave better usually depends on a highly selective memory of what counted as disorder and whose suffering was visible. Domestic violence was easier to hide because the status of women was still lesser. Racist abuse was normalised (my grandfather, an Irishman who came to Britain in the late 1950s, thought nothing of being told “Paddy go home”). Child abuse was less likely to be believed because children were to be seen and not heard. Even after decriminalisation in the 1960s, queer people were still largely expected to manage their own vulnerability by disappearing. Police misconduct was often harder to challenge. School discipline could shade into humiliation and violence. Public order has always depended partly on whose disorder mattered.

This does not mean nothing has worsened - maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. It means we should be careful about confusing lower visibility with better conduct.

The past often seems orderly because many conflicts were suppressed, privatised, normalised or ignored. The present can feel disorderly because more claims are public, more harms are nameable, more people expect redress, and more institutions are failing to meet those expectations. That is a different problem from simple moral collapse. It may be worse in some ways, but it is not simpler.

The political temptation

The political danger of nostalgia is that it turns a real ache into an easy programme.

If people miss community, promise them tradition. If they miss security, promise them discipline. If they miss status, promise them greatness. If they miss childhood, promise them the country they grew up in. If they miss being shielded from complexity, promise them someone to blame.

This works because nostalgia is emotionally efficient. It compresses the mess of present dissatisfaction into an image of prior wholeness. It does not have to explain how that wholeness functioned, what it cost, who was excluded from it, or whether it can even be recovered under modern conditions. It only has to make the present feel like a fall.

The answer is not to sneer at people for feeling the fall. That is politically useless and morally thin. People often know, with great accuracy, when their lives have become less secure, less respected, less rooted, less sociable or less hopeful. The question is whether nostalgia helps them identify the cause.

Often it does not. It confuses adulthood with decline, complexity with decadence, visibility with novelty, change with theft, and loss with betrayal.

This is where the phrase the past was not simpler needs its second half. The past was not simpler. You just know less about it. You know less because you were younger. You know less because memory has softened the edges. You know less because the photograph excludes the sewage works, the unpaid labour, the family secret, the slur, the debt, the boredom, the fear, the person who had to leave town, the person who was never allowed into the room.

And sometimes, most painfully, you know less because not knowing was part of what you miss.

What nostalgia can still tell us

None of this means nostalgia should be discarded. A society without nostalgia would be unbearable: all acceleration, no gratitude; all novelty, no attachment. There are things worth preserving precisely because they carry memory. Buildings, rituals, phrases, songs, public spaces, local institutions, seasonal habits, family stories, civic ceremonies, old skills, inherited obligations. Not everything old is oppressive. Not everything new is liberation.

Nostalgia becomes useful when treated as evidence of longing rather than evidence of history.

It can tell us that people miss social trust. It can tell us that high streets once did more than process consumption. It can tell us that childhood needs spaces of unsupervised freedom. It can tell us that public institutions should feel present in people’s lives. It can tell us that human beings need continuity, not just efficiency. It can tell us that convenience has costs, and that a life optimised for individual choice may leave people strangely alone.

But nostalgia cannot, by itself, tell us what to rebuild. For that, we need history, politics and a little humility. We need to ask what actually existed, who benefited, who paid, which conditions made it possible, and whether those conditions were desirable or recoverable.

The better question is not how do we go back? It is what did the old world provide that the new world has failed to replace?

That question is harder. It is also more honest.

The past after the missing evidence returns

The past was not simpler. It has merely been relieved of its uncertainty.

We know which panics passed, which institutions survived, which scandals were forgotten, which cruelties were normalised, which compromises held, and which costs were borne by people absent from the photograph. We have turned lived confusion into narrative. Then we mistake the narrative for the time itself.

This is why nostalgia is so powerful and so treacherous. It begins with love. Love for a place, a person, a childhood, a country, a ritual, a street, a lost rhythm of life. But love is not the same as understanding. One can love the past and still be wrong about it.

The task is not to cure people of longing. That would be inhuman. The task is to stop longing from becoming a substitute for thought.

Some things have been lost. Some things have changed. Some things were never as good as we remember. And some things were good precisely because they could not last.

That is the hard truth nostalgia keeps trying to evade. You cannot pass this way again. Not because someone stole the road, necessarily. Because roads are for travelling, and time only moves in one direction.

This complaint is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

The problem with our society is not that we care too much about material things. In many ways, we do not care about them nearly enough. We acquire them, use them, photograph them, compare them, discard them, replace them, and occasionally store them in cupboards until they become archaeological evidence of some previous version of ourselves. But we rarely look at them for long. We rarely ask what they are, how they were made, what they do to us, what kind of attention they deserve, or what kind of life they imply.

We are not too materialistic. We are not materialistic enough.

Or, more precisely, we are hasty materialists. We move through the material world with the appetite of collectors and the attention span of browsers. The object is not allowed to be itself for long. It becomes a purchase, a signal, a lifestyle choice, a productivity aid, a prop, a guilty pleasure, a status anxiety, a regret, a replacement, an item in the basket. Then the basket empties, and we begin again.

This is not an argument for buying more things. Heaven knows the economy has enough people making that case already, often with suspiciously good lighting and a discount code. It is almost the opposite. If we paid better attention to material things, we might become less desperate for the next one. We might notice the difference between value and price, between pleasure and novelty, between use and accumulation. We might begin to see that the world is not more fully possessed when it is consumed quickly.

The question is not whether material things matter. Of course they matter. We are material beings. We live in bodies. We eat, wear clothes, use tools, inhabit rooms, travel through streets, play games, read books, break mugs, repair tables, keep old jumpers for reasons we cannot quite justify and would slightly resent having to explain. Human life is not a concept floating above the world. It is lived through surfaces, textures, weights, smells, tools, habits, landscapes and objects.

The better question is what kind of attention those things receive.

A Basket of Fruit Against the Feed

Still life is an odd phrase. Life, notoriously, does not sit still. It grows, bruises, rots, ripens, leaks, wrinkles, blooms, splits, collapses, gathers dust, stains the tablecloth and attracts flies. To call it still is almost a contradiction. Yet that contradiction is part of the point. Still life is not life without movement. It is life arrested long enough to be seen.

This is why Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit remains such a useful image for thinking about material attention. Painted around the turn of the seventeenth century and now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, it is often described as a prototype of the still-life genre - often considered to be the first genuine western still-life painting since the fall of Rome. It gives us a wicker basket, fruit and leaves rendered with extraordinary realism, placed against a plain background. Nothing much is happening. And that’s kind of huge for the time - this is the first painting in the western world, anno domini, which abandons every obvious figure of grand religious narrative and places the sole focus on a mere object. There is no martyrdom, no annunciation, no king, no saint, no hero pointing nobly towards the middle distance. Just fruit. Just leaves. Just a basket.

But ‘just’ is doing an enormous amount of work there.

A basket of fruit sounds humble until one actually looks at it. The fruit is not a stock symbol of abundance. It is blemished. Leaves curl and brown. Some of the produce looks heavy with ripeness, some already carrying signs of damage and decay. The painting is not merely saying that fruit exists, which would be a fairly limited achievement even by the standards of art criticism. It is asking the viewer to attend to the fact that material pleasure is never separate from time. Ripeness is already on the way to rot. Abundance already contains loss. The beautiful thing is beautiful partly because it cannot remain as it is.

That is one reason still life is so often misunderstood as minor art. It can look modest because its subject matter is modest. Fruit, glassware, flowers, bread, fish, books, a skull, a jug, a peeled lemon, a half-empty cup. Yet the modesty is deceptive. Still life takes the objects that usually sit at the edge of attention and moves them to the centre. It does not need to invent grandeur because it has discovered that grandeur was already there, waiting in the bowl.

There is something quietly defiant about this. The world is always trying to organise our attention hierarchically. Look at the spectacle. Look at the grand event. Look at the famous person. Look at the newest thing, the latest thing, the next thing, the thing everyone is currently pretending not to be tired of. Still life refuses the hierarchy. It says: look here. Look at the apple. Look at the knife. Look at the vase. Look at the bruise.

This is not escapism. It is a discipline.

Tate’s description of still life captures the tension neatly: the genre can celebrate material pleasures such as food and wine, but it can also warn of the brevity of those pleasures and of life itself. That is exactly what makes it so useful against our own culture of consumption. It neither rejects material pleasure nor surrenders to it. It pays attention to it.

And attention, properly given, changes the moral texture of pleasure.

The World Is Not Content

The modern problem is not that we enjoy things. Enjoying things is one of the more defensible human activities. The problem is that we are increasingly encouraged to process things before we experience them.

A meal becomes a photograph. A book becomes an aesthetic accessory. A holiday becomes evidence of having been on holiday. A concert becomes a clip. A walk becomes a route map. A conversation becomes a post. A hobby becomes a personal brand. A private enthusiasm becomes, with alarming speed, a content strategy.

This does not mean every photograph is shallow, every post is fake, or every attempt to share pleasure is secretly a moral collapse. That would be silly, and worse, it would be the sort of joyless argument that makes people quite reasonably suspect that the critic’s real objection is other people having fun.

There is pleasure in sharing things. There is pleasure in saying look at this, I saw it and thought of you. There is pleasure in recording a meal, a place, a game, a view, a joke, a stupidly expensive coffee that came in a cup apparently designed by someone who has heard rumours of handles but remains ideologically opposed to them.

The trouble begins when the record of the experience becomes the purpose of the experience. The object is then no longer encountered. It is harvested. Its value lies not in its presence, but in its usefulness as evidence. The world becomes a set of prompts: document this, optimise this, display this, monetise this, archive this, move on.

This is hasty materialism at its purest. It is not the love of things. It is impatience with them.

A society that truly loved material things would not treat them as disposable at the first sign of inconvenience. It would not design objects to fail, furniture to be replaced, clothes to be worn twice, phones to become socially obsolete before they are technically useless. It would not reduce food to fuel one moment and lifestyle performance the next. It would not teach people to think of every object as either an upgrade or clutter.

Our culture does not value the material world too highly. It values possession, novelty and signalling too highly. Those are not the same thing.

To value the material world is to notice dependence. It is to understand that objects come from labour, extraction, craft, transport, design, repair, maintenance and waste. It is to see that the cheap thing is not cheap because it cost little to make, but because the cost has been displaced somewhere else. It is to recognise that a £10 object and a £1,000 object are not simply different quantities of worth. They are different stories about desire, status, scarcity, labour, branding, utility and power.

The market is very good at pricing things. It is much less good at teaching us how to value them.

That distinction matters because the moral critique of consumerism often sounds as though the virtuous person should float above material life altogether. Do not want things. Do not take pleasure in things. Do not be seduced by surfaces. Seek higher things. This is sometimes useful advice, particularly if the thing in question is a £600 air fryer with Bluetooth capability, but as a general philosophy it will not do.

We do not become better by pretending we are not embodied. We do not escape materialism by despising the material world. We escape bad materialism by practising better materialism: slower, more attentive, more grateful, more sceptical of novelty, more aware of cost, more capable of pleasure because less desperate to convert pleasure into proof.

Loot, Clutter and the Art of Looking

This is where games become unexpectedly useful.

Games are full of things. They may be digital things, but they are things all the same within the logic of play: weapons, armour, food, potions, books, keys, coins, crafting materials, furniture, letters, bottles, rugs, statues, bones, flowers, pointless decorative plates, mysterious glowing rocks, and approximately nine thousand red explosive barrels. If games have taught me anything, it is that digital civilisation would collapse without barrels.

Yet games often train us to treat things instrumentally. The object is loot. It has stats. It can be equipped, sold, scrapped, upgraded, combined, consumed, socketed, enchanted, dismantled, stored, or ignored because it is grey-tier rubbish and we have become, in that moment, little digital aristocrats. A world that may have taken artists hundreds of hours to assemble rapidly becomes a series of lightning-fast interactions: take, sell, improve, complete.

This is not a complaint about mechanics as such. Games need systems. Loot can be fun. Progression can be satisfying. There is an ancient and noble pleasure in finding a sword with bigger numbers than the previous sword, especially if the new sword is also on fire. The issue is not that games offer instrumental relationships with objects. The issue is that instrumental attention can crowd out every other kind.

There are games, and moments within games, that resist this.

Think of the domestic interiors in Red Dead Redemption 2, cluttered with the textures of a life nobody will explain to you because the explanation is not the point. Think of the melancholy accumulation of objects in Disco Elysium, where the world feels stained by politics, memory, poverty and failed grandeur. Think of the item descriptions in Dark Souls, where a ring or scrap of armour can feel like a fragment of a ruined civilisation rather than a stat adjustment wearing a hat. Think of the lovingly arranged nonsense in any Bethesda game: walk into a room and you’ll find books, plates, tankards, cheese wheels, all useless and yet somehow essential to the feeling that the place existed before you arrived to rob it.

The best environmental storytelling often works like still life. It does not merely decorate the world. It asks us to infer life from arrangement. The cup beside the bed, the chair angled towards the window, the bloodstain near the door, the child’s toy in the ruin, the meal abandoned halfway through. These things are not important because the quest marker says so. They are important because they produce the sensation of a world with weight.

But games also reveal how fragile this kind of attention is. Place a beautifully rendered apple on a table, and half the players will ignore it. Give it a minor healing effect, and they will strip the orchard bare like locusts with inventory management issues.

Again, this is not a moral failing. It is a design question. Games tell players how to look. If the world rewards only extraction, players will learn to extract. If every object is either useful or useless, players will divide the world accordingly. If every location is a checklist, players will develop checklist vision. The eye goes where the system sends it.

This is why the most interesting games often create moments where usefulness falters. A view that offers no reward. A room whose meaning is atmospheric rather than mechanical. A piece of clutter that cannot be picked up. A meal that exists only to imply ordinary life. A landscape that does not lead efficiently to the next objective. These moments can frustrate the completionist part of the brain, which is frankly good for it. That part of the brain has had things its own way for too long.

The point is not that every game should become a contemplative art installation in which the player spends forty minutes appreciating a spoon. There are limits, and one of them is probably the spoon. The point is that games, like still life, can remind us that attention is a form of relation. To see an object only as a means is to miss some part of its reality. To see a world only as content is to become incapable of inhabiting it.

Better Materialism

There is a social politics here, though it is not quite the one we usually reach for.

The obvious critique says: we consume too much, therefore we should consume less. This is true, or at least true enough to be getting on with. But it is also too thin. People do not only consume because they are greedy. They consume because they are anxious, bored, lonely, tired, pressured, rewarded, targeted, habituated and occasionally because the old kettle has started making a noise like a haunted tractor. A serious critique of consumption has to understand desire rather than simply denounce it.

Still life helps because it does not begin by denouncing pleasure. It begins by looking at it. It lets the peach be desirable, the glass shine, the flower bloom, the tablecloth fold. Then it lets time enter the picture. The fruit bruises. The flower wilts. The skull waits. The candle gutters. The object is not condemned; it is placed back inside mortality.

That is a better model for thinking about material life than either consumerism or puritanism. Consumerism says the thing will complete you, at least until the next thing arrives. Puritanism says the thing is a trap, and you would be better off wanting nothing. Still life says: the thing is real, the pleasure is real, the decay is real, and your attention is part of what gives the encounter its meaning.

This matters because attention is one of the few forms of resistance still available in ordinary life. Not resistance in the grandiose sense. Looking closely at a mug is not going to overthrow capitalism, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably about to sell you a course. But attention can interrupt the habits on which bad materialism depends. It can make us slower to replace, quicker to repair, less impressed by branding, more grateful for use, more alert to waste, more interested in craft, less easily bullied by novelty.

The more closely you look at things, the harder it becomes to treat them as disposable.

That does not mean becoming precious about every object. Some things are badly made. Some things break. Some things deserve the bin, including every novelty kitchen gadget designed to solve a problem that could be addressed with a knife and a modest amount of courage. But the general habit matters. A person who pays attention to material life may own fewer things, not because they have transcended desire, but because they have learned to desire more carefully.

There is a politics in that, but also an ethics, and perhaps an aesthetics too. The point is not to moralise the contents of the cupboard. It is to recover the possibility that ordinary things might be worth sustained attention before they are replaced by ordinary things in a different colour.

Going Nowhere in Particular

Near the end of my old first-draft attempt at this argument, in the comments section somewhere, I reached for Nan Shepherd, which I think was one of the better instincts of the comment. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes about the Cairngorms not as scenery to be consumed or conquered, but as a place to be known through repeated, bodily, attentive presence.

‘Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’

That is a profoundly unfashionable way of approaching anything.

We are trained to prefer destinations. Achievements. Views. Summits. Posts. Purchases. Completions. The startling pinnacle, the scenic payoff, the thing one can point to afterwards as proof that the experience was successfully checked off the bucket list. Shepherd’s point is not that destinations are bad. It is that a destination can become a way of not seeing the path.

The same is true of objects. We can own without attending, consume without enjoying, collect without caring, play without inhabiting, travel without arriving. We can move through a world thick with material presence and barely touch it.

Still life asks something slower of us. So do the best games, the best walks, the best meals, the best rooms, the best books, the best conversations with objects whose usefulness is not immediately obvious. They ask us not merely to acquire the world, but to notice it.

Contemplate the hum of the car engine the next time you hurtle down the road, late to pick up the kids. Notice the chatter of passers-by as you walk through a crowd on your way to work. Breathe in the still night air and look up at the silent stars as you walk home after a night out on the town. Look again at the fruit in the fruit bowl. Look at the object on your desk, the worn edge of the table, the controller in your hand, the book you keep meaning to read, the cheap pen that somehow writes better than the expensive one, the jumper you should probably throw away but do not, because it has become part of the private museum of yourself. Consider what it is, how it came to be there, the detail of how it was put together, and try to appreciate the effort, the beauty, the complexity of the object.

The details are not always easy to see. That is half the point.

And if you miss them, you are not rising above the material world.

You are missing the world.

The Memory Everyone Wants a Share Of

There are some historical governments that belong to a party, and some that escape it. Clement Attlee’s government belongs, in the formal sense, to Labour. It was a Labour government, elected on a Labour manifesto, sustained by a Labour majority, and remembered for institutions that still sit at the emotional centre of Labour’s idea of itself: the NHS, social security, council housing, public ownership, full employment, the welfare state.

And yet Attlee no longer quite belongs to Labour, or at least not only to Labour. He has become one of those figures everyone wants to inherit, usually with the inconvenient parts carefully sanded down first. The socialist left sees in him proof that an unapologetically transformative Labour programme can win a majority. The soft left sees a government that fused moral seriousness with practical reform. The Labour right sees moderation, patriotism, Cabinet discipline, NATO, nuclear weapons, and a Prime Minister who kept the party’s more excitable tendencies on a short leash. One-nation conservatives admire his seriousness (and quietly co-opted his grandson, the 3rd Earl Attlee, who was until recently a Tory peer in the Lords) while hoping nobody notices quite how much of the economy his government took into public ownership.

This is a clue. When everyone claims the same past, they are usually not claiming the whole thing.

The problem is not that the post-war settlement is remembered too fondly. It deserves much of its fondness. The Attlee government was one of the most consequential democratic governments in modern British history. It built institutions that changed the material conditions of life for millions of people. It helped turn insecurity, sickness, unemployment and bad housing from private misfortunes into public responsibilities. It did so through Parliament, not insurrection; through legislation, budgets, administration, compromise and the dreary machinery by which, if we are lucky, civilisation occasionally improves itself.

But the memory has become too neat. The real post-war settlement was not a soft-focus photograph of a grateful nation deciding, as one, to build socialism over tea. It was radical, but not romantic. It was idealistic, but not sentimental. It was collectivist, but also austere, bureaucratic, patriotic, centralising, imperial, military, technocratic, moralistic and, at times, frankly rather bossy. The New Jerusalem was not built in a burst of warm national feeling. It was built with ration books, shortages, wage restraint, bomb damage, Treasury anxiety, professional resistance, American loans, cold houses, tired ministers and queues, queues, queues.

That does not make the achievement smaller. It makes it stranger, harder and more impressive.

The Myth of the Clean Mandate

The 1945 election result is the easiest part of the story to mythologise, because it really was extraordinary. Labour won 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 213, securing its first majority government and ending Winston Churchill’s wartime premiership with a brutality that still seems faintly indecent if the story is told only as a morality play about gratitude.

That is a mandate by any sensible definition. But it was not quite the clean mandate later memory often requires it to be. Britain did not simply wake up in July 1945 as a socialist country. It had been changed by war, by class memory, by the failures of the 1930s, by the experience of evacuation, conscription, rationing, bombing, mobilisation, and by the practical discovery that the state, when forced to do so, could organise the country on a scale previously dismissed as impossible.

Let’s not overstate things. The war did not make everyone socialist, but it did alter the boundaries of the politically plausible for all parties. A state that had directed labour, managed supply, planned production, rationed food and mobilised whole populations could hardly return, without argument, to the comforting fiction that social misery was merely an aggregation of private failures. The Beveridge Report did not arrive from nowhere. It spoke to a country already living inside a vast, improvised experiment in collective provision and national discipline. If it could win the war, could the mechanisms of government also win the peace?

Nor was the vote simply an embrace of public ownership in the abstract. It was a verdict on unemployment, poverty, interwar failure, Tory association with the hungry thirties, and the fear that victory in war might be followed by betrayal in peace. The promise of Labour in 1945 was not merely that it would nationalise industries, but that it would not allow the country to return to the conditions that had made the war’s sacrifices feel, in retrospect, like a pause rather than a transformation.

This is where modern factional memory starts to go wrong. The left is right that Labour won with a programme of enormous ambition. The moderates are right that this ambition was made credible by patriotism, discipline and administrative seriousness. Both are wrong when they turn one half of that truth into the whole thing.

Attlee did not win because Britain had suddenly acquired a taste for abstract ideological maximalism. Nor did he win because he was a cautious manager who kept the Labour party’s more radical impulses in check. He won because Labour had earned the right, through the war and before it, to be trusted with reconstruction, just at a point where the lived experience of being a British citizen made their vision of reconstruction seem both credible and plausible.

The Settlement Was Radical, But Not Romantic

There is a dulling effect that comes with reverence. Institutions become so familiar that their original strangeness disappears. The NHS now sits in British political culture as a kind of civic religion, invoked by people who would not dream of defending the wider assumptions that made it possible. Council housing is remembered either as lost social solidarity or as failed municipalism, depending on one’s chosen polemic. Nationalisation is flattened into a word people either cheer or boo, as though coal, rail, steel, electricity and long-distance haulage were all the same kind of object requiring the same kind of argument.

The Attlee government deserves better than this. Its radicalism was not mainly a mood. It was an institutional programme: The National Health Service Act 1946; the National Insurance Act 1946; nationalisation of coal, electricity, transport, railways and long-distance haulage; the Town and Country Planning Act 1947; the Children Act 1948; and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949.

This was not tinkering. It was a deliberate remaking of the relationship between citizen and state. Attlee’s government nationalised roughly one fifth of the British economy. Health care would be provided according to need rather than ability to pay. Working-age people would contribute to a system of social insurance that would support them when they could no longer work. Major utilities and industries would be brought under public control. Land development would become a matter of public permission, not merely private ownership. Children deprived of care would become a public responsibility. Access to countryside would be protected and widened.

It is worth dwelling on this because one kind of revisionism tries to turn Attlee into a moderate whose main virtue was that he kept the left quiet. He did do that, often with some relish - look at how the likes of Harold Laski were kept in their box. But if this is moderation, it is a peculiar form of moderation that creates the National Health Service, rewires social security, nationalises major industries and changes the legal basis of land development.

The better word is not moderate. It is serious.

Seriousness is not the opposite of radicalism. Often it is the condition that makes radicalism matter. The Attlee government was radical because it built things capable of outlasting the rhetoric used to justify them. Its achievements were not merely declarative. They involved structures, budgets, staffing, professional negotiation, local authorities, administrative systems, eligibility rules and all the other unromantic components of real power.

This is why the NHS is such a useful corrective to the myth. It was a moral project, certainly. It was also a political battle with doctors, the British Medical Association, Cabinet colleagues, financial constraints and public expectation. The National Archives notes that while there was broad agreement on the goal of universal healthcare, there were serious disagreements over method; the BMA opposed key elements, and as late as January 1948 described the proposed service as fundamentally unacceptable.

Bevan won, but not by floating above politics. He won through pressure, persuasion, publicity, compromise institutional design, and famously stuffing the mouths of consultants with gold. The NHS launched on 5 July 1948, and 95 per cent of the population had registered before it began. Demand surged. Doctor prescriptions rose from 7 million per month in 1947 to 19 million per month by 1951. The moral breakthrough immediately became an administrative and financial problem, because that is what happens when a right becomes real.

This is not a criticism of the NHS. It is almost the opposite. A utopian promise that never has to survive contact with appointment books, staff shortages and invoices is not yet a public service. The NHS mattered because it translated moral principle into actual use. People got the glasses, the dentures, the consultations and the care they had previously needed but could not afford. That was the point. It was also the cost.

The New Jerusalem Had Queues

If the left sometimes remembers 1945 as an uncomplicated burst of popular socialism, the right sometimes remembers post-war Britain as a grey prison of queues, ration books and dreary collectivist self-denial. The inconvenient truth is that both pictures contain something real. The trick is not to choose one, but to understand why they belonged to the same world.

Post-war Britain was exhausted. It had won the war, but it had not escaped the war’s consequences. Cities had been bombed. Exports had been disrupted. Debt was enormous. The country was short of dollars, short of materials, short of housing, short of food, short of labour in some places and overloaded with expectations almost everywhere. Britain was effectively bankrupt after the war, and the government faced recurring currency crises and shortages of food and resources severe enough that rationing continued long after the fighting stopped.

This is the part that tends to vanish from the commemorative version. The post-war settlement was not only a settlement of rights. It was a settlement of restraint. Food rationing did not end with VE Day. It continued into the 1950s; meat was the last item to be derationed, and food rationing ended completely in 1954. Attlee’s government was notorious for price controls, rationing and austerity, and the Trades Union Congress – the Labour party’s effective founder – agreed to a freeze on wages for most of the government’s existence.

That fact alone should complicate the sloganising. The government that created the NHS also presided over austerity. The government that expanded social rights also demanded discipline. The government that promised a better life also had to tell people, repeatedly, that the better life was not yet available in the quantities they wanted, and that they had to wait.

There was no contradiction here, or at least not a simple one. Solidarity in post-war Britain meant provision, but it also meant limits. The ration book was not outside the moral world of the welfare state. It was part of it. It said, in effect, that scarcity would be managed publicly rather than left to purchasing power alone. It was not freedom in the consumer sense. It was fairness under constraint.

This is one of the hardest things for later politics to inherit, because almost everyone wants the generous half of the settlement without the disciplinary half. The contemporary left often wants the universalism, investment and public provision, but is less comfortable with the moral language of duty, restraint and contribution. The right often admires the duty and restraint while resenting the institutions that gave them egalitarian force. The centre admires the seriousness but prefers not to ask what serious reconstruction would require now.

The New Jerusalem had queues because real social democracy is not a vending machine. It is a covenant. It asks what citizens owe one to another, what the state can reasonably coordinate of that, how scarcity should be shared, and what must be built before people can live the lives politics promises them.

This is the part of 1945 that feels most alien now. We are very good at the language of entitlement and very bad at the language of shared limitation. We know how to demand better services, and often we are right to. We know how to denounce waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency, and often we are right about that too. But we struggle to speak honestly about the fact that serious public goods require trade-offs: tax, planning, administration, prioritisation, patience, institutional competence and, sometimes, the political courage to say not yet.

The Attlee government did not solve that problem. No government solves it permanently. But it faced it more squarely than most.

The State Was Not Just Kind

There is another way in which the memory of 1945 becomes too gentle. The post-war state is often remembered as a caring state: the state of hospitals, houses, family allowances, school milk, social insurance and the promise of cradle-to-grave security. That picture is not false. It is incomplete.

The Attlee state was not just kind. It was powerful.

It planned, taxed, rationed, owned, regulated and directed. It extended care, but it also extended authority. It could be emancipatory and paternalistic in the same gesture. It gave people rights they had never had before, but it also assumed a model of citizenship shaped by work, family, nation, discipline and deference to institutions. It was universalist in ambition, but not especially liberal in temperament.

Again, this does not make it bad. It makes it historical.

The domestic welfare state also sat within a much larger imperial and geopolitical state. Attlee’s government presided over Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan, over Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine and the creation of Israel, over decolonisation in Burma, Ceylon and Jordan, over American loans, Marshall Aid, the Berlin airlift and Britain’s commitment to the United Nations.

This matters because the sentimental domestic memory of 1945 often detaches council houses and hospitals from the world in which they were built. Britain was not merely a plucky social democracy deciding to be nicer to itself. It was a declining imperial power trying to manage exhaustion without admitting too much decline. It was building the welfare state while trying to remain a great power. It was creating the NHS while maintaining global commitments. It was nationalising industries while entering the Cold War security architecture. It was, in other words, not a Sweden with worse weather and better war films.

This is particularly awkward for later inheritances of Attlee. The left likes the NHS but is often less keen on Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy, NATO, nuclear weapons and the anti-communist labour tradition. The Labour right likes Bevin, NATO and Cabinet discipline, but can become strangely hazy about the economic scale of the government’s domestic programme. Conservatives may praise Attlee’s patriotism and seriousness, but rarely dwell on the fact that his patriotism was compatible with very large-scale public ownership and a permanent shift in social rights.

Everyone gets a piece. Nobody gets the whole man.

There is also a deeper point here about the nature of the state. The British left has often remembered the post-war state as though public provision were naturally humane because it was public. But anyone who has dealt with the state in its less inspiring forms knows this is not true. A state can provide care, but it can also humiliate, delay, ration, confuse and command. It can build hospitals and trap disabled people in them. It can house families and demolish neighbourhoods. It can protect workers and ignore citizens. It can be the only institution capable of creating equality at scale, and still be experienced by many people as remote, cold or arbitrary.

That is why simply invoking 1945 is not enough. The post-war settlement was not an argument for big government as such. It was an argument for a capable, legitimate, solidaristic state that could convert collective sacrifice into shared security. That is a much harder thing to build than a larger public sector.

Why the Memory Keeps Being Useful

So why do we keep misremembering it?

Partly because all political traditions need ancestors. Nobody wants to admit that they are making everything up as they go along, even when this would be a refreshingly honest campaign slogan. The past supplies authority. It gives arguments a family tree. It turns preferences into inheritances.

The post-war settlement is especially useful because it has the rare quality of being both morally elevated and institutionally concrete. It is not just a mood or an aspiration. You can point to things: hospitals, houses, benefits, national parks, public industries, planning law. The story offers the comfort of proof. Once, it says, Britain was able to do big things.

And that is true. It was.

But the usefulness of the memory encourages selectivity. Each faction takes from 1945 the parts that flatter its current instincts. The socialist left remembers public ownership and the welfare state, but sometimes forgets austerity, patriotism, wage restraint, anti-communism and the administrative conservatism of many Labour ministers. The Labour right remembers discipline, respectability and patriotism, but sometimes downplays just how materially redistributive and structurally interventionist the government was. Conservatives remember national unity and civic seriousness, but prefer to forget that the settlement they often claim to admire was built through precisely the kind of state power they now tend to distrust.

This is not simply hypocrisy. It is how memory works. We do not inherit the past as a complete archive. We inherit fragments, symbols, family stories, images, anniversaries and usable myths. The danger comes when the myth stops being a doorway into history and becomes a substitute for it.

1945 is particularly vulnerable to this because it has acquired a liturgical quality in British politics. The words themselves now do half the work: Attlee, Bevan, Beveridge, blitz spirit, New Jerusalem, cradle to grave, spirit of ‘45. They carry emotional weight before the argument begins. The danger is that invocation replaces thought.

This is visible whenever modern politics tries to borrow the authority of 1945 without confronting the differences. Britain today is not the Britain of 1945. Its class structure is different. Its economy is different. Its housing market is different. Its media ecology is different. Its family forms, working lives, unions, local government, empire, public expectations and experiences of bureaucracy are different. Citizens are less deferential, more individualised, more vocal, more sceptical of institutions and, in many cases, more accustomed to experiencing the state as something that obstructs or processes them rather than mobilises them.

That does not make 1945 irrelevant. It makes lazy analogy dangerous.

The old settlement was built in a society where the legitimacy of collective discipline had been reinforced by war. Our society has plenty of insecurity, but far less shared discipline. It has plenty of demand for public goods, but much weaker trust in the institutions that deliver them. It has deep nostalgia for competence, but much less patience with the compromises competence requires.

This is why both nostalgic revivalism and smug dismissal miss the point. The question is not whether we can return to 1945. We cannot, and should not pretend otherwise. The question is whether we can recover the habits that made 1945 politically creative: seriousness about institutions, moral clarity about social insecurity, patience with administration, willingness to use the state, willingness to reform the state, and a national story capacious enough to make solidarity feel like common purpose rather than sectional demand.

The point is not to dress up in Attlee’s old suit. It probably would not fit, and in any case there is something faintly tragic about political cosplay after a certain age. The point is to ask what kind of politics can build durable institutions under the conditions we actually inhabit.

What 1945 Can Still Teach Us

The most useful lesson of 1945 is not that Labour should nationalise more things, or that it should be more moderate, or that it should say British more often, or that every political problem can be solved by finding the nearest available grandparent and asking what they thought of Nye Bevan.

The useful lesson is that democratic politics can build. It can do more than signal virtue, manage decline, distribute blame or triangulate around polling. It can create institutions that alter the basic texture of life. It can take experiences previously treated as private misfortune and make them matters of public justice. It can enlarge freedom not by leaving people alone in insecurity, but by giving them the material foundations on which a freer life can be lived.

But the second lesson is just as important: building is hard. It is not enough to want humane outcomes. The Attlee government was not great because it had good intentions. Plenty of governments have those, or at least have press releases claiming them. It was great because it joined moral purpose to machinery.

That is the part worth recovering. Not the exact machinery, necessarily. Some of it belonged to its time. Some of it failed. Some of it became rigid. Some of it produced new problems. Nationalisation was not a magic spell. Council housing could be liberating, but it could also become bureaucratic, stigmatised or badly maintained when the political economy around it changed. The NHS remains the greatest institutional achievement of post-war Britain, but even at its birth it had to balance universal aspiration with cost, workforce and demand. The National Archives’ account of the NHS is striking precisely because it shows the institution’s creation as both visionary and embattled, with Bevan’s idealism constantly rubbing against professional power and financial anxiety.

That is what adult admiration looks like. Not worship. Not debunking. Gratitude with the lights on.

If 1945 still has a claim on us, it is because it reminds us that the state can be an instrument of common life rather than merely a referee between private interests. It also reminds us that the state must earn that role. People will not trust public power simply because it calls itself public. They will trust it when it works, when it is intelligible, when it treats them with dignity, when it gives them some meaningful stake in the institutions that govern their lives.

That may be where a modern post-war memory needs to move beyond the old argument between statism and market liberalism. The central issue is not whether the state should be big or small, but whether it is capable, democratic, responsive and legitimate. A bad state can make social democracy feel like a queue with a logo. A hollowed-out state can make freedom feel like abandonment. A serious state has to avoid both.

The post-war settlement is misremembered because we want its authority without its difficulty. We want the NHS without the Cabinet fights, the council houses without the bomb damage and material shortages, the national story without the empire, the solidarity without the ration book, the radicalism without the restraint, the moral clarity without the compromises, and the nostalgia without the actual past.

But the real 1945 is more useful than the myth. It tells us that the welfare state was not inevitable. It was made. It tells us that institutions do not descend from moral feeling. They have to be argued for, designed, staffed, funded, defended and revised. It tells us that serious reform requires both imagination and discipline. It tells us that a government can be radical without being theatrical, patriotic without being kitsch, practical without being bloodless, and democratic without being timid.

The New Jerusalem was not built by people who thought history had ended in their favour. It was built by people who knew the country was exhausted, damaged, indebted and impatient, and decided that this was not an argument against reconstruction but the reason for it.

That is the inheritance worth keeping. Not the postcard version. Not Attlee as factional mascot. Not 1945 as a magic year in which Britain briefly became morally uncomplicated.

The real thing was harder than that.

Which is why it mattered.

I do not say this with pride, exactly, but nor do I say it with shame. Some people climb mountains, some people learn dead languages, some people spend their evenings parrying demigods with the timing of a concert pianist. I usually play games on easy. Or story mode. Or whatever phrase the games industry now uses to avoid admitting that some of us would quite like to see the ending before our wrists seize up and our self-esteem leaves the room.

I bought Elden Ring largely because George R. R. Martin’s name was attached to it, which, in retrospect, is a bit like buying a horse because you liked War Horse and then discovering you have entered the Grand National.

My first hours in the Lands Between were not triumphant. I was killed almost immediately by the Grafted Scion, but because the game carried on, I assumed this was probably meant to happen. Then I made it through the tutorial and defeated the Godrick Soldier without dying, which gave me the dangerous impression that I had understood something. Then I reached Limgrave.

I had not yet seen a non-ghost, non-cutscene NPC. So when I saw White Mask Varré standing there, looking suspicious in the way that almost everyone in Elden Ring looks suspicious, I hit him. This was not, it turned out, the intended social protocol. By the time I realised he was speaking to me rather than preparing to murder me, it was too late. He became extremely committed to the bit. What followed was a long, humiliating cycle in which he killed me, I respawned, and he killed me again. Eventually, through perseverance, luck, and the kind of grim stubbornness that has caused many avoidable disasters throughout human history, I killed him.

Then I met the Tree Sentinel.

This, I thought, was absurd. Why would you put a boss like that at the very beginning of the game? Why give a new player a beautiful open field, a dazzling golden horseman, and then have him flatten them into paste every time they tried to make progress? I put the game down for a few days and considered writing the whole thing off as a bad investment.

Then I discovered something important. You can just go around him.

This sounds embarrassingly obvious now. At the time, it felt like a design revelation. Elden Ring was not asking me to beat everything in front of me. It was asking me to notice what kind of obstacle I was looking at. Some enemies were challenges. Some were warnings. Some were environmental hazards with a health bar. The Tree Sentinel was not a test I had to pass before entering the game. He was part of the game’s grammar.

That distinction matters, because much of the argument about difficulty in Elden Ring collapses several different questions into one.

There is the accessibility question, which is serious and should not be waved away by people whose main contribution to cultural criticism is typing git gud under strangers’ comments. There is the question of whether certain quality-of-life features would make the game more legible without making it less meaningful. I still think the absence of anything resembling a quest log is, at times, less an artistic decision than a practical joke being played on people with jobs. There is the genre question: whether every game should be designed for every player, or whether some games are entitled to a narrower and more demanding form. And then there is the artistic question: what is the difficulty actually doing?

The problem with the difficulty debate is not that one side cares about accessibility and the other cares about artistic integrity. That is too flattering to everyone involved. The problem is that difficulty is often treated as a single substance: either a virtue, proving the game’s seriousness, or a vice, proving its hostility. But difficulty can be many different things. It can be a gatekeeping device. It can be bad tuning. It can be a lack of accessibility options. It can be nostalgia for a more punitive era of game design. It can also be atmosphere, pacing, narrative pressure and worldbuilding.

In Elden Ring, difficulty is not incidental to the experience. It is one of the main ways the world tells you what it is.

The Lands Between are not arranged like a theme park, with appropriately levelled attractions and helpful signs telling you which ride to queue for next. They are broken, ancient, hostile and indifferent. You arrive late, ignorant and underpowered, surrounded by the remains of conflicts you do not understand. The world does not explain itself because, in narrative terms, it has no reason to care whether you understand it. You are not the chosen one arriving at the start of history. You are a Tarnished wandering through the wreckage after the catastrophe has already happened.

A friendlier version of the same game might have preserved the lore, the bosses, the map, the gorgeous melancholy of the setting. It might even have been a very good game. But it would have meant something different. If the Lands Between were scaled around my comfort, if every enemy politely registered my level and adjusted itself accordingly, the world would cease to feel like a place that existed before me and beyond me. It would become a sequence of content.

That is the dullest possible word for what Elden Ring is doing.

Its difficulty forces a different rhythm of attention. You cannot always sprint towards the golden arrow. You cannot assume that the next thing in front of you is the next thing you are meant to defeat. You learn to read terrain. You learn to retreat. You learn that a cave, a ruin, a graveyard or a suspiciously empty patch of land may contain the one weapon, spell, flask upgrade or scrap of knowledge that makes the impossible merely dreadful.

This is why the open world matters. In a more linear game, an early overpowered boss can feel like a brick wall. In Elden Ring, the Tree Sentinel is not a brick wall. He is weather. He is topography. He is a visible statement of principle: this world is not arranged around your entitlement to progress.

That does not mean the game wants you to suffer for suffering’s sake. It is not simply difficult in the manner of an old arcade machine designed to extract another coin from a child with poor impulse control. It is difficult in a way that teaches caution, curiosity and humility. It makes ignorance dangerous, which is thematically appropriate for a game so invested in fragments, ruins, half-truths and buried histories.

This is where the difficulty becomes narrative.

When you spend an hour being murdered by the same boss, you start to notice things. You listen to the same lines of dialogue. You look properly at the arena. You read the item descriptions because, frankly, anything might help. You start asking why an enemy is where they are, what they are guarding, what their design suggests about their place in the world. A sword is not just a sword; it is a clue. A spell is not just a spell; it is a remnant of a school, a faction, a catastrophe. A boss is not just a test of reflexes; it is a piece of environmental storytelling with a murderously large health bar.

This is not unique to Elden Ring, but Elden Ring makes unusually good use of it. Its story is not delivered as a tidy sequence of cutscenes in which characters explain the plot with the patience of museum audio guides. It is scattered. It is half-buried. It is overheard, excavated, inferred. The game’s opacity and its difficulty reinforce each other. You are not just told that the world is ruined and unknowable. You experience it as ruined and unknowable.

There is a risk, of course, of overstating this. Not every frustrating thing in a difficult game is secretly profound. Sometimes a camera is bad. Sometimes a runback is tedious. Sometimes an interface is obscure in the way that an unlabelled fuse box is obscure. The defence of difficulty should not become a theology in which every irritation is revealed as grace.

Nor does defending Elden Ring’s difficulty mean endorsing the tedious machismo that clings to these games. The worst version of Souls fandom talks as if the highest purpose of art is to sort the worthy from the unworthy, preferably while being insufferable to strangers online. That is not an argument. It is a social performance with a dodge-roll button.

A serious defence of difficulty has to be more careful than that. It has to admit that exclusion can be real. It has to distinguish between challenge and inaccessibility, between opacity and carelessness, between meaningful friction and needless inconvenience. It also has to accept that some people will not enjoy this kind of experience, and that their dislike is not a moral failure. A game can be excellent without being hospitable to everyone. A player can bounce off an excellent game without being wrong.

But once those concessions are made, the point still stands. The difficulty of Elden Ring is not just a badge of identity. It is not merely there so that people who completed it can feel superior to people who did not. At its best, it is a form of atmosphere. It gives weight to the world. It makes exploration feel earned. It turns progress into comprehension. It slows the player down enough to notice the story that would otherwise be missed.

I do not think this argument holds for every game. I would not want every RPG to become Elden Ring. There are many games where an easy mode is not only desirable but obviously harmless. There are games where difficulty settings broaden the audience without compromising the work. There are games where the appeal is the story, the characters, the choices, the spectacle, the mood, and the combat is mostly there to give everyone something to do between conversations.

But Elden Ring is not one of those games.

Its difficulty is part of its fiction. It makes the Lands Between feel ancient, dangerous and indifferent. It makes victory feel less like consumption and more like survival. It makes the player inhabit the world’s brokenness, not merely observe it. To make the game easy in the wrong way would not simply lower the challenge. It would change the texture of the place.

That is why my most satisfying moment in Elden Ring was not becoming Elden Lord. It was going back to Limgrave, over-levelled and over-equipped, and reducing the Tree Sentinel to crimson finger-paint with a large hammer.

Petty? Yes. Spiritually limited? Almost certainly. But it meant something because the game had first made him mean something. He was not just the first hard enemy I found. He was the point at which I started to understand what kind of game I was playing.

Elden Ring is not easy. But the point is not that hard games are inherently better, or that players who struggle should be mocked, or that inconvenience is always artistic integrity wearing a funny hat. The point is that, in this particular game, difficulty is one of the ways the world speaks.

It says: you are small.

It says: you do not understand this place yet.

It says: come back later.

And, eventually, if you are patient enough, it lets you answer.

There is a comforting way to think about voting, particularly among people who care quite a lot about politics. You vote for the party that most closely expresses your values. You vote with your conscience. You vote for the kind of politics you want to see in the world. You walk into the polling station, make your small democratic mark, and emerge, if not quite morally cleansed, then at least politically legible.

This is not a ridiculous instinct. In many ways, it is a noble one. There is something grim about reducing democracy to a permanent spreadsheet of lesser evils, tactical squeezes, marginal wards and grim-faced calculations about which candidate is least likely to produce the worst available outcome. Nobody joins a political party because they are excited by the phrase ‘locally best-placed alternative’. Nobody campaigns in the rain because their soul is stirred by efficient anti-opponent vote consolidation. At least, if they do, they should probably get out more.

But there is a problem with treating a vote as though it were primarily an expression of personal identity. The problem is not that values do not matter. The problem is that electoral systems matter more.

In a proportional system, voting for the party that most closely represents your views is, broadly speaking, a reasonable way of building political representation. The votes stack up; the seats follow, more or less; coalition-building then happens in the open. But in first-past-the-post, the meaning of your vote is not exhausted by what you intended it to mean. You may think you’re registering a protest, rewarding courage, punishing timidity, expressing frustration, or refusing to compromise. The counting system does not care. It asks one brutally simple question: who got more votes than the next person?

That distinction matters because, in May 2026, a large number of progressive voters appear to have voted as though they lived in one system, while their votes were counted under another.

The Green surge was real

I’m going to use the city of Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, as an example here, for reasons which I will explain later. And before I get too far, it’s very important to start by saying this clearly: the Green Party’s rise in Sheffield was not bad, stupid or illegitimate.

The Greens had an excellent election. They won six additional council seats, took 47,886 votes across the city, reached 27.5% of the vote share, and could plausibly describe themselves as the most popular party in Sheffield by votes cast. That is not a rounding error or a protest vote in the old dismissive sense. It is a serious political event.

Nor did it come from nowhere. The national context mattered. Labour entered the 2026 local elections as an unpopular government, facing disillusionment from parts of the coalition that had delivered its landslide only two years earlier. YouGov’s post-election polling found that only 46% of 2024 Labour voters who voted in the 2026 local elections stayed with Labour, while 22% switched to the Greens and 16% to the Liberal Democrats. It also, tellingly, found that voters were more likely to say their choice was driven by which party best represented their values than by local issues, and that Green voters were particularly likely to frame their decision in values terms.

There was also a new national Green story. Zack Polanski’s leadership had given the party greater visibility, a sharper populist edge, and a narrative of class politics which has been lacking from the Green offer for decades; by late 2025, the Guardian was already reporting a major membership surge under his leadership. Then came Gorton and Denton. On 26 February 2026, Hannah Spencer won the by-election for the Greens with 14,980 votes, ahead of Reform on 10,578 and Labour on 9,364. For Green supporters, and for many Labour voters looking for permission to defect leftwards, that result seemed to show something important: Greens could win in unexpected places. They were not merely a repository for nice opinions in safe middle-class neighbourhoods, as they had been in the Caroline Lucas era. Maybe they could beat Labour and Reform at the same time?

That was the story many progressive voters took into May.

The difficulty is that Sheffield is not one political place. It is several.

Sheffield is not one election

Sheffield is a useful city through which to think about this problem because its political geography is unusually stark.

Unlike many other cities in the UK, the city’s social divides are not remotely evenly scattered. University of Sheffield public health mapping describes a clear east-west gradient in life expectancy, with people west of the city centre tending to live longer than those in the east. It also notes that Sheffield’s more affluent areas tend to lie west of the city centre, while the east is shaped more heavily by former industrial areas. This is not just a sociological curiosity. It matters electorally because the same political gesture does not have the same effect in different parts of the city.

In parts of central, western and south-western Sheffield, a Green vote in 2026 often helped elect or re-elect a Green councillor. In Ecclesall, Graves Park, Nether Edge and Sharrow, Walkley, Manor Castle, Burngreave, City, Hillsborough, Gleadless Valley and Broomhill and Sharrow Vale, Green votes translated into Green representation. In those places, whether one welcomes or regrets the outcome, the vote did what its voters probably intended it to do.

But in many of the wards where Reform won, the Green surge did something very different. It did not build Green representation. It helped fragment the anti-Reform vote.

That is not a moral judgement on every individual voter. No voter can be expected to run a full ward-level model in their head while standing in a school hall with a pencil. Parties have responsibilities too: to campaign properly, to make tactical realities clear, and to earn the votes they ask for. But once the votes are counted, the arithmetic is not subtle.

In Stocksbridge and Upper Don, in the northern edge of the city, Reform won with 2,554 votes. The Liberal Democrats came second with 2,208. Labour took 1,160 and the Greens 638. A clear majority of voters did not vote Reform. But the non-Reform vote was divided in a way that allowed Reform to win.

In Park and Arbourthorne, in the south of the city, Reform won with 1,740 votes. Labour came second with 1,287. The Greens took 1,009, the Liberal Democrats 193, and the Conservatives 210. Again, Reform did not need to persuade most people. It only needed its opponents to disperse.

In Shiregreen and Brightside in the post-industrial northeast, Reform won with 1,671 votes. Labour took 951, the Greens 707, and the Liberal Democrats 192. The combined Labour-Green-Lib Dem vote was higher than Reform’s total. It just did not belong to one candidate.

In East Ecclesfield (northeast) Reform won with 2,365 votes. The Liberal Democrats took 1,850, Labour 1,203, and the Greens 442. In Mosborough (southeast), Reform won with 2,114, while the Liberal Democrats, Labour and Greens together polled 2,730. In the southeastern Woodhouse ward, Reform won with 1,987; Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens together reached 2,019.

Beighton (also southeast) is especially instructive because it shows why this is not simply a complaint about Green voters. Reform took both seats up there. The two Reform candidates received 2,197 and 1,989 votes; the two Liberal Democrats received 1,701 and 1,636; Labour’s two candidates received 683 and 655; and the Greens received 436 and 371. The point is not that Green voters alone handed the ward to Reform. It is that Labour and Green voters in that ward were participating in a contest their preferred parties were not in a position to win.

That may feel unfair. It may even be unfair. But unfairness is quite a large part of the point.

The fantasy of expressive voting

The fantasy exposed by these results is not that Green voters are uniquely vain, or that Labour voters are uniquely entitled, or that Liberal Democrats are uniquely convinced that every ward is secretly a Lib Dem target if you only deliver enough Focus leaflets.

The fantasy is that voting for a progressive party is primarily an expression of personal virtue, rather than a decision with institutional consequences.

For a certain kind of voter, ‘I voted Green’ does not simply mean ‘I thought the Green candidate was best placed to win here’. It can mean: I care about climate change; I opposed Labour’s position on Gaza; I want politics to be bolder; I refused to reward triangulation; I did not let myself get blackmailed by lesser-evilism. For another kind of voter, ‘I voted Labour’ can mean: I am on the side of working people; I want to stop the far right; I believe in public services; I am not indulging protest politics. For some Liberal Democrat voters, especially in wards where they are the established anti-Reform or anti-Conservative force, the vote carries its own localised version of civic seriousness: we know how to win here; we do the ward work; we are not playing at politics.

All of those identities may contain some truth. None of them changes the arithmetic.

This is the uncomfortable thing about first-past-the-post. It strips votes of their intended emotional complexity. It does not ask whether your Green vote was anti-Reform in spirit. It does not ask whether your Labour vote was cast by someone who would have preferred the Lib Dems to Reform. It does not ask whether your Lib Dem vote was a small-l liberal protest against both Labour complacency and Reform populism. It simply counts.

And if the anti-Reform vote is split three ways, Reform can win with a minority.

This is why ‘vote with your conscience’ is not quite the innocent phrase it appears to be. Conscience is not irrelevant. It is one of the reasons people enter politics in the first place. But conscience without strategy can become self-indulgence, particularly when the cost is paid by someone else.

The Green vote in Broomhill and Sharrow Vale did not carry the same consequences as the Green vote in Park and Arbourthorne. A Labour vote in Darnall (narrowly won) did not mean the same thing as a Labour vote in Beighton (distantly lost). A Lib Dem vote in Dore and Totley did not mean the same thing as a Lib Dem vote in Shiregreen and Brightside. The same party label, placed in a different local contest, performed a different political function.

This is why voting cannot simply be treated as a personality trait. A ballot paper is not a mirror. It is a lever.

Sheffield’s progressive alliance problem

There is an additional irony in Sheffield, because this is not a city that has been obviously incapable of plural progressive politics.

For the five years before the 2026 election, Sheffield City Council was run by a coalition government - first of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and later adding the Greens. And under their committee system, all political groups are represented on committees in proportion to their seats. After the 2026 election, the rotating cast of the progressive alliance rotated again; Labour and the Greens formed a joint administration, with the Liberal Democrats moving into opposition, while the council again emphasised proportional committee representation and cross-party involvement in decision-making.

In other words, Sheffield is not an example of a city where Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats cannot work together. Quite the opposite. It is one of the better examples of grown-up pluralism in local government.

That makes the election result more revealing, not less.

Supporters of proportional representation often argue that British politics would become more mature if voters were allowed to express their genuine preferences and parties were then required to negotiate. Sheffield’s recent council history gives some strong support to that view. The city has already lived with coalition, committee governance and cross-party decision-making. It has not collapsed into the sea, though given the state of local government finance, one should not tempt fate.

But the voting system has not caught up with the political reality. Sheffield voters are behaving in an increasingly plural political culture while still voting under a system that punishes pluralism. That is the problem. A Labour-Green-Lib Dem council chamber may be capable of cooperation after the election. But in ward after ward, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates still have to fight one another before the election, even where the obvious beneficiary of that fight is Reform.

So Sheffield becomes a kind of democratic contradiction. In the Town Hall, progressive parties can share power. On the ballot paper, their voters can split the vote and hand seats to a party most of them did not want.

That is not a sign that voters are stupid. It is a sign that the system is stupid. But knowing that the system is stupid does not exempt voters or parties from having to understand it.

Tactical voting is not betrayal

One of the reasons tactical voting is so emotionally difficult is that it feels like a kind of disloyalty.

For party members, this is obvious. Asking a Labour member to vote Liberal Democrat, or a Green member to vote Labour, or a Liberal Democrat member to vote Green, feels like asking them to suspend a part of their political identity. Parties are not merely administrative vehicles. They are communities, histories, habits, friendships, grudges, WhatsApp groups, grudges about WhatsApp groups, and a surprisingly large number of people who know exactly which clipboard belongs to which campaign group.

But most voters are not party members. Their attachments are looser, less procedural, and often more values-based. For them, tactical voting can feel less like organisational betrayal and more like moral compromise. Why should they vote for a party they do not especially like? Why should Labour be rewarded for disappointing them? Why should the Lib Dems inherit votes from people who do not share their politics? Why should the Greens be treated as a safe protest in some places and a dangerous indulgence in others?

These are not silly questions. Parties that want tactical support have to earn it. Labour cannot assume that left-leaning voters will come home because the alternative is worse. The Liberal Democrats cannot assume that being locally best placed absolves them of the need to make a genuinely positive case. The Greens cannot claim the moral energy of progressive protest while ignoring the wards where they are not realistically in contention.

But tactical voting is not the abandonment of principle. It is the application of that principle under the constraints that reality places in front of you.

If your principle is to increase Green representation, then voting Green in a winnable Green ward makes sense. If your principle is to keep Reform out, then voting Green in a ward where the contest is Labour versus Reform, or Lib Dem versus Reform, does not serve that principle at all. The same is true in reverse. A Labour voter who wants to stop Reform in a Lib Dem-facing ward is not being more principled by voting Labour anyway. They are confusing the party they prefer nationally with the electoral instrument available locally.

This is the boring-but-true answer at the heart of the argument: local viability matters.

Not because it is inspiring. Not because it looks good on a poster. Not because anyone dreams of building a politics around the phrase “please check the previous ward result before making a symbolic point”. But because first-past-the-post makes it matter.

The cost of getting it wrong

The consequences of this are not abstract.

When Reform wins council seats on a minority of the vote, it gains councillors, resources, visibility, casework operations, local legitimacy, committee places, data, social media content, and proof of momentum. It gains the ability to say: we are not merely a national protest vehicle; we are winning here. In local politics, that matters. Parties become real by occupying institutions.

This is one of the great asymmetries of protest politics. A voter may experience their ballot as a message sent to Labour, or to the Greens, or to the political class in general. But the institution receives it as a seat for somebody else.

That is why the phrase ‘sending a message’ is so often inadequate. Electoral systems do not send messages with much precision. They allocate power. A voter may believe they have sent Labour a warning about Gaza, or climate, or public services, or the government’s timidity. But if the local result is a Reform councillor, then the message arrives with a councillor attached.

This is not an argument for shutting down dissent. It is an argument for taking consequences seriously.

The progressive vote is not one thing. It is a bundle of competing instincts: environmental urgency, social democracy, liberal constitutionalism, anti-racism, local competence, anti-austerity politics, public service reform, anger about Gaza, anger about Westminster, anger about potholes, anger about the price of everything, and, in some cases, anger at being asked yet again to vote for a party that has disappointed you.

But first-past-the-post does not reward the richness of that bundle. It rewards concentration.

That means progressive politics has to learn a discipline that does not always come naturally to it. It has to distinguish between a party being right, a party being preferable, and a party being viable. It has to distinguish between a vote that expresses a value and a vote that advances it. It has to stop treating tactical intelligence as moral cowardice.

The progressive vote is not a personality trait

There is a case, after Sheffield, for humility from everyone.

Labour should not look at Reform gains in its former heartlands and conclude that the only problem was irresponsible Green voters. That would be far too convenient. If Labour loses enough trust that its previous voters are willing to take risks with the local consequences, that is Labour’s problem too.

The Greens should not look at their citywide vote share and conclude that every Green vote was equally productive. Their surge produced councillors in some places. In others, it helped create the conditions for Reform to win.

The Liberal Democrats should not imagine themselves outside the story. In several wards, they were either the best-placed anti-Reform alternative or part of the fragmentation that allowed Reform through. Their local strength can make them essential in some contests and irrelevant in others. The trick is knowing which is which.

And voters, too, have to give up a comforting fiction. A vote is not a little autobiography. It is not a certificate of virtue. It is not a consumer preference, or a dating profile for your political soul.

It is an intervention in an electoral system.

Sometimes that intervention says exactly what you meant it to say. Sometimes it says something else entirely. Sometimes it lets you elect the person you wanted. But only sometimes.

That is the hard lesson of Sheffield in 2026. Reform won the most seats, but the city did not suddenly become a Reform city. In ward after ward, most voters did not vote Reform. But Reform did not need Sheffield to become a Reform city. It needed progressive voters to behave as though their private meaning mattered more than the public count.

The progressive vote is not a personality trait. It is not proof of inner cleanliness. It is not a reusable badge of moral distinction. In the system we actually have, it is a lever. Sometimes it opens the door to the politics you want. Sometimes it opens the door to the politics you most fear.

The trick is learning the difference before the count, not afterwards.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to panic about Doctor Who right now.

A Christmas special disappears, a showrunner leaves, the familiar machinery of production goes quiet - and a certain part of the audience immediately hears the hollow tolling of 1989. Somewhere, in the deeper recesses of British television memory, Sylvester McCoy is wandering away from the TARDIS again, the lights are going out, and a generation of fans are being quietly advised to make do with novels, audio dramas, fanzines, rumours, VHS tapes and increasingly elaborate grief.

It’s not difficult to understand why that anxiety has resurfaced. Doctor Who has form here. The show has been cancelled before, or at least allowed to die in the particular institutional way large organisations sometimes prefer: slowly, awkwardly, with everyone insisting that no final decision has been made until the final decision has somehow already happened. For fans with a long enough memory, the language of pauses, futures, reassessments and new directions can sound less like renewal than a polite letter from the undertaker.

But I don’t think that is quite what is happening now.

The boring-but-true answer is that Doctor Who is almost certainly coming back. It is too valuable, too recognisable, too internationally marketable, and too deeply embedded in the BBC’s own story of itself to be casually abandoned. There is a brand architecture, to use the sort of phrase that ought to be kept several rooms away from Doctor Who but, regrettably, explains quite a lot.

Doctor Who is not a fragile cult object in the way it was in the early 1990s. It is not merely an old programme with a loyal audience and a questionable place in the schedules. It is one of the BBC’s few genuinely global pieces of television mythology. You do not need to be especially sentimental to see why the corporation would want to keep hold of it. You only need a spreadsheet.

So the interesting question is not: will Doctor Who survive?

The interesting question is: what does survival mean?

Because there is a version of survival that is not very reassuring at all. Doctor Who could return with a healthy budget, an international production partner, a fresh visual identity, a new Doctor, a new format, and a press release full of all the correct nouns. It could be glossy, expensive, technically competent, and broadly intelligible to a global streaming audience. It could look much more impressive than several eras of Doctor Who have ever looked. It could have convincing aliens, coherent action sequences, a cinematic colour grade and a season-long mythology leading to a fulfilling ending.

And it could still not feel like Doctor Who.

That is the concern worth taking seriously. Not that the BBC will bury the show in a filing cabinet and pretend it’s gone to live on a farm. Rather, that in the process of securing the programme as a valuable piece of intellectual property, it may become less clear who is responsible for understanding what the property actually is.

Doctor Who is very easy to describe badly. It is a science-fiction series about a time-travelling alien who changes face and travels around in a police box. This is true in the same sense that Hamlet is a play about a student with family problems. The description is not false, exactly. It is just so thin that it misses nearly everything that matters.

Doctor Who is not simply science fiction. It is ‘family show’ 1960s-era children’s television that grew up without ever entirely ceasing to be children’s television. It is gothic horror in municipal corridors. It is satire with monsters in it. It is an adventure serial, a morality play, a theatrical contraption, a fairytale about curiosity, a weekly argument against cruelty, and a machine for turning budgetary inadequacy into imaginative force. Its cheapness was never merely cheapness; at its best, it became a kind of expressive grammar. A quarry somewhere in South Wales could be an alien world because the programme had already trained you to meet it halfway. A corridor could be frightening because the camera, the music and the idea had decided it was. A sink plunger stuck on a pepper-pot could become an icon because Doctor Who, at some fundamental level, has always understood that terror is not the same thing as realism.

That is why the tender matters.

Not because independent production is inherently bad. It plainly isn’t. Doctor Who has already been made through various production arrangements, and the modern revival has itself depended on partnerships, outside companies, complex rights structures and the ordinary practical machinery of television. Nor is the point that only British writers, or only lifelong fans, or only people who can identify The Sensorites from a blurred production still should be allowed near it. That way lies smallness, gatekeeping and the sort of fan culture that mistakes possession for love.

The point is more precise than that. Doctor Who needs creative custodians who understand which parts of the format are flexible and which parts are load-bearing.

That distinction is everything.

The show is built for change. It has a lead actor whose departure is written into the premise. Its tone can shift from horror to comedy to tragedy to nonsense before the credits have finished cooling. It can be made for children, families, students, nostalgics, newcomers, casual viewers and people who own replicas of the Key to Time (like my dad!). It can tell a story about existential grief one week (“The End of the World“) and farting aliens the next (“Aliens of London“). It can survive absurdity. In fact, absurdity is one of its natural habitats.

But because Doctor Who can change almost anything, people sometimes mistake it for a format with no essential shape. That is where the danger lies. Reinvention is not the same as replacement. You can rearrange the theme tune, but the opening titles still need to feel as if they are pulling you through time itself. You can redesign the TARDIS, but it still needs to feel like a home, a stage, a haunted machine and a joke about British public infrastructure. You can reimagine the Daleks, but they still need to carry the awful simplicity of hatred trapped inside a metal tank. You can make the Doctor darker, stranger, angrier, sadder or more vulnerable, but the character cannot simply become another chosen-one action hero with a tragic family destiny and a marketable silhouette.

This is where the history of the revival matters.

Before I go on too far, let’s just get it said, clearly and upfront: the modern Doctor Who did not work only because it was made by fans. That would be much too neat. Plenty of fans have bad ideas. Some fans have catastrophic ideas. There are fan theories that should be sealed in concrete and lowered gently into the Mariana Trench. Nor was every great figure in the revival a lifelong obsessive. Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor works precisely because he does not feel like a fan auditioning for ownership of the toybox. He brings seriousness, damage, class anger, danger and emotional credibility. He makes the revival possible because he treats the Doctor as a dramatic role rather than a sacred relic.

Still, it is striking how much of the 2005 revival was shaped by people for whom Doctor Who was not merely an assignment but a beloved passion project.

Russell T Davies did not revive Doctor Who as a lucrative genre format he had identified after an IP audit. He revived the programme as someone who had carried it in his head since childhood. His great achievement in 2005 was that he understood Doctor Who well enough to change it. He made it faster, more emotionally direct, more working-class, more contemporary, more romantically charged, more comfortable with soap, grief and domestic consequence. He rebuilt it for a post-Buffy, post-reality-TV, post-New Labour BBC One audience.

But he also knew what not to remove. The Doctor remained an eccentric moral intelligence rather than a conventional hero. The TARDIS remained impossible, intimate and daft. The monsters mattered, but so did the ordinary people facing them. The show could go to the end of the world, but it also had to come home to a council estate. Davies did not save Doctor Who by embalming it. He saved it by knowing where the pulse was.

Steven Moffat - who took that revived show and turned it into an international IP - understood a different part of the machine. His Doctor Who is more puzzle-box, more fairytale, more verbal, more structurally elaborate, sometimes to a fault. But again, the point is not that Moffat merely liked Doctor Who. The point is that he had absorbed some of its deepest operating principles. The show, for him, is not a space opera. It is a system for making children frightened of statues, shadows, cracks in walls, gas masks, ticking clocks and the empty spaces under the bed. His best Doctor Who stories do not ask what would make a plausible science-fiction threat. They ask what ordinary thing could become unbearable if looked at from the right angle.

Chris Chibnall complicates the argument, usefully. He was plainly a fan. His teenage appearance criticising the Colin Baker era has become part of Doctor Who folklore; not because it proves anything especially profound about his later work, but because it places him unmistakably inside fan culture. And yet his era remains divisive - the day-to-day storytelling too linear and too much like a police procedural, the cast too overloaded, the narrative arcs too grand and fundamental. That should prevent any lazy conclusion that fandom is enough. Love of the show can produce care, attention and knowledge. It can also produce overcorrection, lore congestion, piety, defensiveness or the urge to settle arguments that were more interesting when left unsettled.

So the claim cannot be that Doctor Who must be made by fans. The claim is that it must be made by people who understand the programme as an inherited form, with a peculiar moral, tonal and imaginative grammar.

That is why figures like Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, and Pete McTighe are all useful examples. They are not identical writers, and they have not all contributed equally to the television series, but they represent something important in the ecology around modern Doctor Who. They belong to a generation, or a set of overlapping generations, for whom Doctor Who was not dead during the so-called wilderness years. It had migrated. It lived in novels, audios, conventions, magazines, arguments, private obsessions, professional apprenticeships and fan memory. It became a place where viewers learned not only to consume television, but to imagine making it.

That matters because Doctor Who has always depended on more than production. It depends on continuity of sensibility. Not continuity in the narrow sense of whether someone has correctly remembered a Time Lord collar from 1978, but continuity as craft knowledge: an understanding of how the show can be silly without becoming weightless, scary without becoming cruel, moral without becoming sanctimonious, nostalgic without becoming taxidermy.

The best modern Doctor Who often came from that place. David Tennant and Peter Capaldi are the obvious on-screen examples: actors who grew up with the role before eventually inhabiting it. Capaldi, especially, makes the recursive strangeness of Doctor Who almost too perfect. The child who wrote letters about the programme became the man standing in the TARDIS. This could have been unbearable if it had turned into cosplay. Instead, at its best, his Doctor feels like someone wrestling with the burden of an idea he has loved for too long.

That is the real value of fans in the room. Not that they produce references. References are cheap. Any competent writer’s room can generate a list of monsters, planets, costumes, old companions and phrases to reactivate. The question is whether those references mean anything. The danger of bad fan service is that it treats memory as confetti. The danger of bad reinvention is that it treats memory as clutter. Doctor Who needs something better than either: an active, argumentative relationship with its own past.

The cautionary example here is not the 2005 revival, but the strange prehistory of the 1996 TV movie. Before Paul McGann’s Doctor arrived on screen, various development ideas circled around a much more radically reconfigured version of the programme. There were plans involving the Doctor searching for his father, Ulysses; the Doctor and the Master as half-brothers; Borusa as the Master’s father; a grand Gallifreyan backstory; spider-like Daleks; nautical Cybermen renamed as Cybs. Some of this is fascinating. Most of it is cursed.

The issue is not that every one of these ideas is automatically wrong. Doctor Who can absorb almost anything. It survived Kamelion, the Kandyman, Adric, the Myrka, the in my view unfairly maligned “Love & Monsters”, and whatever emotional category we’re supposed to place The Timeless Child in. A spider-Dalek proposed for an abandoned development document is not, in itself, automatically beyond the pale.

The problem is the direction of travel. What is interesting about those specific TV movie-era proposals is not their individual weirdness, but the pattern they reveal. The mythology being developed around the 1996 film points toward a recurring temptation: to make Doctor Who more legible as a conventional franchise by giving it family secrets, origin mysteries, grand destiny arcs, redesigned monsters and a more standard heroic structure. This is what franchises often do when they become anxious about their own strangeness, and kind of what Chibnall’s era was guilty of to some extent. They explain. They systematise. They intensify. They provide lore where there used to be mystery, spectacle where there used to be suggestion.

And Doctor Who can bear some of that. But only some.

Because the Doctor is not interesting because of who his father was. The point is not that every attempt to explore Gallifreyan history or expand the mythology is misguided; Doctor Who has always added layers to its own backstory. The caution comes from the assumption that the way to strengthen the programme was to make it more like other franchises. But the core identifiers of the show work because they carry an atmosphere that is almost entirely apart from other Sci-Fi. They are conceptual shapes as much as narrative devices. Alter them too casually, and the show may retain its trademarks while losing its grammar.

That, I think, is my real fear behind the tender.

It is not that a new production company will necessarily be bad. A new creative team could be exactly what the programme needs. Both Chibnall’s run and Davies’ second era had wonderful moments and beautiful standalone stories, but they each also ended in a muddle of unresolved gestures, inflated stakes and institutional uncertainty, after both showrunners took time to detach their stories from the show’s established history (either via the Flux/Timeless Child arc or Davies’ whimsical Gods narrative). A pause may be healthy. A new showrunner may bring discipline. A new producer may look at the franchise and see possibilities that have been obscured by decades of familiar argument. Doctor Who should not be treated as the hereditary property of the same small circle of British television-folk, however talented, affectionate or foundational they have been.

But the next custodians need to understand what kind of freedom they’re inheriting. Because underneath the variation is a particular rhythm. Doctor Who is anti-authoritarian without being adolescent. It distrusts uniforms, empires, corporations, generals, priests, bureaucrats, tyrants and gods. It is suspicious of violence not because violence never appears, but because violence is usually what unimaginative people do when they have run out of better ideas. The Doctor wins, when the character is written well, not because he is the strongest person in the room, but because he can see the room differently.

That is a difficult thing to tender.

You can tender production capacity. You can tender budgets, schedules, studios, post-production pipelines, sustainability commitments, regional investment, skills development and delivery timelines. You can ask who has made large-scale drama before. You can ask who can handle effects, overseas partners, unions, secrecy, casting and publicity. All of that matters. Television is an industrial art form, and the industrial bit is not optional.

But Doctor Who also needs someone who can answer a less procurement-friendly question: do you know what this thing is?

Not in the trivia-night sense. Not in the sense of being able to name all six actors to have played Borusa. I mean: do you understand why the show’s ridiculousness is part of its seriousness? Do you understand why its Britishness matters, even when it travels everywhere? Do you understand why the Doctor should not simply be cool? Do you understand why fear in Doctor Who is often strongest when it brushes against childhood logic? Do you understand why the programme can be cosmic without becoming pompous, political without becoming a lecture, sentimental without becoming soft, and silly without becoming contemptible?

This is where J. Michael Straczynski’s public interest is revealing, whether or not he is remotely likely to be involved. The significance is not that an American writer with a major science-fiction pedigree has raised his hand. In fact, the more interesting thing is his awareness that Doctor Who is not just another science-fiction show. His pitch begin from admiration for Doctor Who’s existing identity rather than from the assumption that it needs to be rebuilt into something more normal. That does not make him the answer. But it clarifies the question.

The right person for Doctor Who does not have to be British… but the show’s Britishness cannot be incidental. They do not have to be a lifelong fan… but indifference to the programme’s history would be alarming. They do not have to preserve every old habit… but contempt for those habits would be fatal.

What they need is not ownership, but custody. Ownership asks what can be extracted from a property. Custody asks what must be carried forward so that change remains meaningful. Ownership sees the TARDIS as a brand asset. Custody sees it as a promise: that the universe is stranger, funnier, scarier and more morally urgent than the people in charge insist; that the small and disregarded matter; that cleverness is better than conquest; that monsters can be defeated without becoming one.

Doctor Who will survive. I am fairly sure of that. The BBC has every reason to bring it back, and almost no good reason to let one of its most recognisable creations dissolve into folklore and Blu-ray box sets. The more interesting question is whether the next version will understand survival as more than continuation.

Because the TARDIS can land almost anywhere. That has always been the point. It can land in a quarry, a council estate, a spaceship, a school, a battlefield, a library, a nightmare, a joke, a Christmas special, or the middle of some future tender document nobody should have to read unless professionally required.

But wherever it lands next, someone has to know why it is bigger on the inside.

There is a very funny theory of artistic decline in which Fable was not wounded by clumsy design, overpromising, tedious navigation, anaemic combat, awkward co-op, loading screens, cancelled spin-offs, studio closure, or the general difficulty of sustaining a whimsical British action-RPG franchise inside a modern platform-holder’s release strategy. No. The culprit, apparently, was tofu.

This is not quite as invented as it sounds. Fable, or at least Fable II, really did attach moral value to food. Eating tofu increased purity; eating meat nudged the player towards corruption. PETA really did praise the game for this, handing it a Proggy Award for being animal-friendly. In the grand museum of silly gaming controversies, this is not even the strangest exhibit. It is, however, one of those facts that sounds as though it has been retold so many times that it has become a different story. PETA did not kill Fable. If anything, PETA appears to have mildly embarrassed it by applauding from the sidelines.

The occasion for all this, naturally, is the new Fable, currently due in February 2027. The exact object of anxiety varies depending on where you look. Some people dislike the art direction. Some are suspicious of the shift away from the old morality system. Some simply mistrust any revival of a beloved franchise after a long absence, which is not an unreasonable instinct. But beneath the ordinary caution there is a more familiar and more tedious claim: that the old Fable was somehow killed by wokeness, DEI, sensitivity, political correctness, animal-rights meddling, or whatever label has been chosen this week for the general suspicion that somebody, somewhere, has been allowed to consider the feelings of another person.

This is a bad explanation. It is not bad because politics never damages art. It is bad because it is a substitute for criticism. It offers a suspect before it has found the body.

The true thing in the wrong argument

The serious version of the anti-woke complaint is worth taking seriously, at least briefly. Art can absolutely be damaged by nervousness. It can be damaged by committee thinking, brand management, reputational anxiety, moral flattening, or the dull sense that every character has been made to pass through the same HR induction before being allowed on screen. A story can fail because it is too frightened of ambiguity. A game can fail because it mistakes player freedom for a risk to be managed. A television drama can fail because it wants the audience to endorse its values before it has earned their attention.

There are works now, as there have always been works, that confuse righteousness with quality. They give us characters who do not argue so much as represent positions. They avoid drama because drama would require the possibility that the wrong person might be interesting. They treat virtue as a casting decision rather than a conflict, a cost, a temptation, a discipline, or a tragedy. There is a genuine criticism to be made of art that becomes so afraid of being misunderstood that it forgets to be alive.

But this is not the same claim as wokeness kills art. The difference matters. One is an argument about execution. The other is an incantation.

The issue is not whether art should contain politics. Art is always carrying values, even when it pretends not to. The issue is whether those values have been transformed into form: into structure, character, mechanics, rhythm, image, consequence, contradiction, tone. Politics can be sermon. It can also be architecture.

Fable was always political, because Fable was always moral

The odd thing about applying this complaint to Fable is that Fable was never a neutral franchise. It was not a pristine little folk tale minding its own business until ideology barged in wearing a lanyard. It was always a game about visible morality. It made goodness and corruption physically legible. It turned ethics into skin texture, diet, reputation, property, sex, taxation, marriage, cruelty, sacrifice, spectacle and occasionally horns.

This was not subtle. Fable was not exactly Dostoevsky with fart emotes. Its moral universe was broad, silly, theatrical and often incoherent. But that was also part of its charm. It wanted moral choice to be legible at the level of pantomime. The saint glows. The villain mutates. Your diet, rent policy, cruelty, generosity and social behaviour become part of a visible civic mythology. Albion was always a world where private choices became public theatre.

So when people complain that Fable became political because tofu was pure, they are not really complaining about the arrival of politics. They are complaining about a specific moral coding that now feels, to them, politically suspect. The game was allowed to moralise about murder, greed, selfishness, public duty, sexuality, marriage and class. But tofu? Suddenly Albion has fallen to the commissars.

This is the sleight of hand behind a great deal of anti-woke cultural criticism. It does not object to politics in art. It objects to politics it recognises as politics.

A game in which kingship, property ownership, public reputation and visible sin structure the player’s experience is already political. It may not be sophisticated politics. It may not be coherent politics. But it is certainly not apolitical. The old Fable was not some pure domain of prelapsarian play before the serpent of DEI entered the garden. It was a moral cartoon. That was rather the point.

Fable 3 was not assassinated by tofu

The problem with Fable III was not that it contained ethical ideas. The problem was that it was, on the most ordinary level, annoying.

The AngryJoeShow review from 2011 is useful here not because it is subtle (it is not especially trying to be), but because it is so firmly about the experience of playing the game at the time of release, rather than looking back on it through your spectacles of choice. The complaints made against it in 2011 are not about diversity targets or vegan propaganda. They are about the Sanctuary replacing usable menus; the lack of a proper map; constant loading screens; meaningless co-op; DLC restrictions; weak customisation; broken or unbalanced combat and the overpowered magic system; the lack of challenge; degraded NPC interactions; weapon morphing that did not work as advertised; empty crates; short story length; anticlimactic boss fights; and the general sense that the game had made everything slower, thinner and less satisfying.

That is a boring explanation, but it is also the better one. Boring explanations often are. A game can have gorgeous environments and still fail because it makes the player fight the interface. A game can have charm and still fail because its systems do not reward attention. A game can promise consequence and still fail because its choices are mechanically shallow. A game can let you be king and still fail if the route to doing anything useful runs through a tiresome sequence of rooms, podiums, button holds and loading screens.

You could remove every moral point from every vegetable in Albion and the Sanctuary would still be there, waiting to waste your afternoon.

This matters because games are not just scripts with graphics attached. They are systems of action. A bad film may be dragged down by dialogue, pacing or performance; a bad game may be dragged down by the feeling of moving through menus, the friction of repetition, the absence of tension, the mismatch between promise and mechanic. When criticism ignores that, it ceases to be criticism of games and becomes criticism of vibes.

This is why the Fable III example is so revealing. The anti-woke account does not explain the experience of playing the game. It explains the experience of reading a culture-war argument into the ruins afterwards.

Politics as mechanics

To take another game from broadly the same era, consider Dishonored, released almost exactly two years later. The game (and subsequent series) does not merely contain a moral preference for non-lethal play as a line of dialogue or a scolding end screen. It builds that preference into the world. Violence changes the atmosphere depending on its lethality. Higher chaos alters the city, affects endings, shifts the sense of social collapse and makes the player’s behaviour part of Dunwall’s disease. It is not simply that the game says killing is bad - that would be a boring lecture. It asks a much more interesting artistic question about world design; what kind of city is produced when one more body can always be justified?

Was that woke? It would be easy, in the lazier corners of the internet, to make it sound so. Here is a game that discourages impulsive lethal violence, associates bloodshed with social decay, and makes restraint not only possible but narratively meaningful. One can almost write the thumbnail now: Stealth Classic RUINED by WOKE Pacifist Agenda. The only reason this sounds absurd is that Dishonored is too good, too stylish and too mechanically rich for the complaint to stick easily.

That is the point. When politics is well integrated, people often stop calling it politics. They call it atmosphere, consequence, theme, tone, worldbuilding, tragedy, satire, character. When politics is badly integrated, or when a work is bad while also containing politics, the politics becomes the obvious thing to blame.

This is not unique to games. Russell T Davies has built whole dramas around queer life, homophobia, grief, desire, family, shame, sex, public panic and the violence that grows in the gap between private fear and social permission. Queer as Folk was not apolitical. Cucumber and Banana were not apolitical. It’s a Sin was not apolitical. His recent Tip Toe is a drama fundamentally about the politics of rising hatred, misinformation, and online rage in a more frightening public climate.

One can criticise any of these works on artistic grounds. One can argue that a scene is too broad, a character too schematic, a plot too engineered, a monologue too direct, an ending too cruel, an image too obvious. But to say that politics has killed the art would be bizarre. The politics is not pasted over the drama. It is the matter from which the drama is made.

The better distinction is not political versus apolitical art. It is digested versus undigested politics.

The anti-woke alibi

The phrase wokeness kills art is powerful because it is lazy in a very satisfying way. It reduces many possible failures to one cause. Commercial caution? Wokeness. Bad writing? Wokeness. Underpowered mechanics? Wokeness. Corporate consolidation? Wokeness. A sequel made without the original conditions that allowed the first work to succeed? Wokeness. The slow entropy of a franchise whose symbols have outlived its creative purpose? Wokeness. Three loading screens to find the right bit of the inventory menu? Somehow, still wokeness.

This is criticism as conspiracy board. Everything is connected because the theory requires it to be connected.

It is not that culture-war readings are always irrelevant. Games, films and television are made within institutions, markets and moral climates. Developers and writers do make choices under pressure. Publishers do worry about backlash. Audiences do fragment into ideological markets. Studios do sometimes sand down awkwardness in the hope of pleasing everyone, which is a reliable way of pleasing nobody. Political incentives exist. Social incentives exist. Commercial incentives exist.

But the anti-woke account collapses all of that into a morality play. It is not interested in how art is made. It is interested in how art can be recruited as evidence.

The result is a kind of criticism that has become weirdly incurious about craft. It can tell you that a female character’s jawline proves civilisational collapse, but not whether a combat loop has tension. It can identify the alleged ideology of a trailer from seventeen pixels and a haircut, but not ask whether the quest design has momentum. It can rage at inclusive casting while ignoring pacing, structure, animation, level design, sound, mise-en-scène, performance, system balance and the thousand other things by which art either lives or dies.

This is especially perverse in games, because games are so obviously formal objects. They are not just about what they represent. They are about what they ask us to do, how often, at what cost, with what feedback, under what conditions, and with what consequences. A game can be reactionary in story and progressive in mechanics. It can be progressive in story and exploitative in economy. It can tell you that freedom matters while refusing to let you jump over a waist-high fence. Games embarrass simple ideological readings because they are made of too many interacting parts.

That does not stop people trying.

When politics really does damage art

There is a trap here, and it is worth avoiding. The answer to bad anti-woke criticism is not to insist that politics can never damage art. Of course it can. Politics damages art when it prevents conflict. It damages art when characters become delivery systems for approved conclusions. It damages art when the audience is never trusted to infer. It damages art when a work is more interested in signalling its moral hygiene than in testing its moral imagination.

This can happen from the left, the right, the liberal centre, the nationalist fringe, the corporate brand department, the pious legacy franchise custodian and the prestige dramatist with one eye on awards season. Bad political art is not owned by any one faction. Propaganda can be dreary in many directions.

But again, the issue is not politics as such. The issue is artistic digestion. A work has to metabolise its values. It has to turn them into living problems. It has to allow difficulty. If a game wants to explore violence, it cannot simply wag its finger every time the player uses the elaborate violence toys it has spent half the budget creating. If a drama wants to explore prejudice, it cannot make every bigot an idiot and every victim a saint. If a fantasy world wants to explore monarchy, class, corruption, public duty and moral visibility, it has to do more than assign purity points to lunch.

The criticism of bad political art should be more demanding, not less. It should ask whether the politics has become dramatic, mechanical, aesthetic, comic, tragic, frightening or playable. It should ask whether the work has found form for its values. It should ask whether the audience has been given an experience or merely a position.

That is a more useful standard than counting the number of suspiciously modern moral assumptions and declaring the corpse woke.

The politics were not the problem. The criticism was.

The saddest thing about the anti-woke reading of art is that it makes people worse at noticing what is actually wrong. It flattens failure. It deprives bad work of the dignity of being bad in specific and interesting ways.

Fable III is not a perfect object of nostalgia. It is not a fallen temple desecrated by tofu. It is a game whose artistic direction, humour and setting could not compensate for frustrating design, thin systems, and a suffocating interface that turned what could have been a good game into a tiresome chore. Its failure is not mysterious. You do not need a theory of cultural capture to explain why players dislike being made to take a detour through a magical changing room every time they want to do something simple.

The wider lesson is not that progressive politics guarantees good art. It plainly does not. Nor is it that anti-woke criticism never identifies real problems. Sometimes it stumbles into them, usually by accident, before misnaming them. The lesson is that politics is a poor substitute for criticism when it becomes a single-cause explanation for everything one dislikes.

Art fails in many ways. It fails through cowardice, indulgence, incoherence, laziness, bad structure, commercial pressure, overproduction, underdevelopment, tonal collapse, mechanical friction, poor pacing, weak endings, bad acting, timid direction, misplaced faith in lore, sequel exhaustion, fan service, algorithmic anxiety and sometimes because the person in charge simply did not know when to stop. Occasionally, yes, it fails because its politics have been badly handled.

But if every failure is explained by the same enemy, you are no longer doing criticism. You are sorting evidence for a prior belief.

The new Fable may be good. It may be terrible. It may discover a new way to preserve the old series’ absurd moral theatre, or it may sand the whole thing down into a politely eccentric brand revival. It may contain good politics badly handled, bad politics elegantly handled, or almost no politics beyond the usual fantasy assumptions about heroes, villains, power and destiny. The only honest thing to do is judge the work when it exists.

Until then, we might at least retire the idea that tofu killed Albion.

Wokeness did not invent loading screens. And if the next Fable fails, the first place to look will not be the vegetable aisle.

On one level, this is not an unreasonable conclusion. A party that repeatedly sends candidates into public life only to discover, days later, that some of them have apparently spent years treating social media like a pub toilet wall is not a party that has fully mastered candidate vetting. A party that promises an assault on waste, bureaucracy and taxes, then finds itself raising council tax, cutting ordinary services or arguing about infrastructure finance, is not exactly staging a seminar in administrative seriousness. A party that takes control of local authorities and then starts losing councillors to resignations, suspensions, expulsions and internal warfare has, at the very least, a personnel problem.

But I think the incompetence explanation is incomplete.

The problem with Reform is not merely that it is bad at responsibility. The problem is that its politics depend on evading responsibility.

That distinction matters because it explains both Reform’s appeal and its vulnerability. Reform is very good at politics when politics means naming grievances, directing anger, finding enemies and promising the simple moral pleasure of finally saying what supposedly cannot be said. It is much worse at politics when politics means budgets, trade-offs, legal duties, procurement, adult social care, children’s services, scrutiny committees, risk registers and the melancholy discovery that a council cannot, in fact, pay for much-needed road repairs with the proceeds of cancelling a diversity training session.

This is not an argument that the grievances are invented. They are not. The country is full of places where people - rightly - feel that public services have deteriorated, that politics has become unresponsive, that immigration has changed communities faster than institutions have adapted, and that the old parties have offered managerial disappointment in slightly different colours. It is not hard to see why Reform’s story appeals. It tells people that the problem is not complexity, scarcity or institutional decay, but betrayal. Someone did this to you.

The trouble is that grievance is not a programme for government.

Reform’s national politics works because it converts dissatisfaction into momentum. Every failure can be folded back into the same story. If public services are struggling, it is because the old parties wasted the money. If councils are broke, it is because of bureaucrats, consultants, net zero, equality officers, asylum hotels, work-from-home culture, or whatever target happens to be nearest to hand. If a promise proves impossible, it was because the establishment hid the true scale of the problem. If a candidate collapses under scrutiny, the media are out to get them. The emotional structure is wonderfully convenient: success proves the people are rising; failure proves the establishment is afraid.

Local government ruins this game because it supplies receipts.

Reform’s breakthrough in the 2025 local elections was enormous. The party gained hundreds of council seats, won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election (albeit by six votes), took mayoralties, and won pluralities or majorities of councillors in Durham, Kent, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, Doncaster and West Northamptonshire. In 2026, the pressure continued in Labour’s northern heartlands, with Labour losing control of Barnsley for the first time in the council’s 52-year history.

For a national insurgent party, these are trophies. But for a party supposedly preparing for government, they are tests.

That is the difficulty. Reform has spent its entire existence making the claim that other people are useless. Then voters, reasonably enough, began giving them the opportunity to be useful. The party’s old posture was anti-establishment. Its new problem is responsibility.

Take council tax. This is where an anti-waste party should, in theory, have its easiest win. Reform’s pitch depends heavily on the idea that the state is bloated, captured and frivolous; therefore, a determined outsider should be able to find savings where the old parties found excuses. Yet Reform’s record is awkward for the easy version of this claim. The party made pledges at various levels to cut or freeze council tax, on this basis, with local election leaflets saying the party would “reduce waste and cut your taxes”.

Reform have not managed to do this anywhere. In many places, they’ve fallen into the kind of political doublespeak they rightly criticise the ‘uniparty’ for - my favourite example, from Kent, is the line “cutting taxes could mean not putting them up as much”. Kent then increased council tax by 3.99%. Elsewhere, the pattern has been even starker. In January 2026, the Guardian reported that Derbyshire, North Northamptonshire, West Northamptonshire and Leicestershire had proposed 5% rises, the maximum normally permitted. In Worcestershire, they received special dispensation to go above the usual cap on rises and upped it by nearly 9%.

Now, to be fair (a terrible habit, but sometimes necessary), this is not only a Reform problem. Local government is under extraordinary pressure. Councils with social care responsibilities face a 5% referendum threshold, including 2% for adult social care and 3% for general spending. The Local Government Association has warned that the finance settlement puts pressure on councils to raise council tax up to referendum thresholds to fund demand-led services such as adult social care. The Institute for Government has shown the deeper structural shift: between 2009/10 and 2024/25, per-person spending on adult and children’s social care rose in real terms, while spending on other services fell by more than a third; social care rose from just over half of local authority spending to more than two-thirds.

This is the boring-but-true answer, and it matters. Councils are not sitting on vast secret vaults of spare money waiting to be unlocked by someone sufficiently annoyed with HR departments. Everything that can be cut, has already been slashed during the years of Conservative austerity. And much of what is left is simply not optional. Adult social care, children’s services, homelessness, SEND transport and safeguarding obligations do not disappear because a councillor has found a pleasingly punchy phrase about waste.

But that’s precisely the point. Reform’s promise is not just that it would be a slightly better manager of scarcity. Its promise is that the old constraints are fake: that the system is rotten, the waste is obvious, the priorities are mad, and only cowardice or corruption prevents someone from sorting it out. Then it gets into office and starts sounding, very quickly, like every other council leadership that has ever had to produce a legal budget.

Worcestershire is the clearest example because it compresses the whole problem into one local authority. Reform took minority control of a council Farage later described as virtually bankrupt, adding that he wished the party “hadn’t bothered”. That is an extraordinary confession, not because Worcestershire’s finances were easy, but because the complaint amounts to this: governing would have been more convenient if the inherited problems had been less real. Reform’s tenure was then marked by emergency funding, a council tax rise of 8.98%, internal battles, the replacement and suspension of its former leader, and ultimately the loss of minority control after Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents formed a short-lived alliance.

What is revealing about that story is not simply chaos. It is the implied expectation that opposition politics could continue after power had been taken. But councils do not exist to supply press release material for Westminster. They exist to fix roads, fund care packages, maintain libraries, run children’s services, process planning applications, manage SEND transport, collect bins and keep the whole civic machine moving even when nobody is paying attention. Local government is unglamorous because it is real. It is where politics stops being a pose and becomes a spreadsheet.

The same thing appears in Doncaster, where Reform’s position on reopening the Doncaster-Sheffield Airport has moved through a strange cycle of support and opposition, confrontation and retreat. Reform councillors have certainly argued that they wanted scrutiny and better terms. That is not inherently unreasonable. A £57 million loan is not pocket change, and major regeneration schemes should be interrogated. But the politics around it has been deeply revealing. Reform councillors submitted a motion criticising the Labour mayor’s airport pledge and stressing their own democratic responsibility, after that mayor’s narrow victory in 2025, which was attributed in no small part to Labour being the only party with a plan to reopen the airport. Later, Reform members sought to revisit or rescind the previously approved loan, before an amended position allowed the loan to continue after negotiations.

Again, the point is not that every concern they raised was automatically illegitimate. The point is that attacking the symbol of another party’s campaign is easier than carrying responsibility for the mechanism that might deliver a major investment. Reopening an airport is an excellent local political goal because it condenses jobs, pride, regional neglect and economic hope into one image - and thus making sure it fails would show the public that their opposition can’t deliver. But the actual ‘getting stuff done’ work of leases, loans, commercial operators, regulatory hurdles, passenger forecasts, public risk and timelines is also extremely popular, and trying to shut it down showed Reform the limits of their own strategy; they caved and backed it once they realised they were hurting their own position.

Then there is candidate vetting. Here, Reform’s defenders sometimes say that rapid growth brings growing pains, and that every party has had bad candidates. This is true as far as it goes. The Greens, Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have all had candidates suspended, exposed or embarrassed. No party with hundreds or thousands of local candidates can guarantee moral perfection.

But Reform’s problem is not an isolated embarrassing Facebook post. It is a recurring inability to filter out candidates whose public records appear to contain racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic or otherwise extremist material. Mark Pack notes 73 Reform UK resignations or kickings-out between May 2025 and May 2026, with a further 17 (and counting) since May 2026. Add that to their two lost MPs since the General Election, and criticism of both Farage and Tice over their financial dealings.

That is not just a reputational issue. A political party asking to govern cannot treat candidate selection as a content acquisition strategy. Councillors are not disposable avatars for national messaging. They are their own people. They sit on planning committees. They handle casework. They make decisions affecting schools, safeguarding, highways, care, housing and community cohesion. In a political system already suffering from immense distrust, a party that floods public office with unfit or poorly-vetted candidates is not challenging the establishment. It is lowering the minimum acceptable standard for entering it.

The deeper problem is that Reform’s politics rewards irresponsibility long before it reaches office. It rewards the person who says the difficult thing is easy, the complex thing is a conspiracy, the constrained choice is a betrayal, and the boring institutional answer is cowardice. This is powerful because it feels like clarity, but clarity is not the same as truth. Sometimes the simple answer is simple because it has left out the parts of the problem that make the problem hard.

That is also why local government is so dangerous for them. It deprives them of the luxury of purity. It asks them not what they oppose, but what they would fund. It asks not what they would abolish, but what they would put in its place. It asks not whether they dislike waste, but whether the promised waste actually exists in sufficient quantity to pay for their promises. It asks not whether they can identify public anger, but whether they can turn that anger into functioning administration.

And when they cannot, they increasingly risk portraying themselves as what they most despise: another party promising change and delivering excuses.

There is a political lesson here for Reform’s opponents too. Simply calling Reform chaotic will not be enough, because some voters already believe the whole system is chaotic. Being ‘adults in the room’ counts for very little when a plurality of most voters in any given constituency want to burn the house down. Simply listing offensive candidates will not be enough, because some voters have become grimly accustomed to scandal as political weather. Simply saying their sums do not add up will not be enough, because many people already think expert arithmetic has been used for years to justify decline.

The stronger argument is about responsibility.

Reform should be judged not only by whether it reflects grievance, but by whether it can carry the burdens that come with power. Can it select candidates fit for public office? Can it make lawful budgets without pretending every rise is someone else’s fault? Can it scrutinise major projects without turning them into performative hostage situations? Can it govern places it wins, even when those places are financially strained, demographically complicated and institutionally fragile? Can it tell voters the truth before an election, rather than discovering the truth immediately afterwards?

If the answer is no, then Reform is not the antidote to broken politics. It is broken politics with a harder edge and a louder microphone.

The party’s great asset has always been its ability to stand outside responsibility and profit from everything that goes wrong inside it. Local government changes that. A pothole does not care whether your rhetoric is insurgent. A care package cannot be funded by vibes. A council tax bill is not impressed by the phrase ‘more of the same’. The moment Reform wins power, its central trick becomes harder to sustain, because every grievance it harvests becomes, in some measure, a problem it now owns.

That is why the title matters. Reform is not simply anti-establishment. Plenty of establishments deserve criticism, and many institutions have earned the public’s suspicion. The more precise charge is that Reform is anti-responsibility: fluent in anger, evasive in power, and increasingly exposed wherever voters have made the understandable mistake of asking it to govern.

There is a very odd little civil war happening in Labour circles at the moment.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed more and more posts and comments in Labour forums and political discussion boards whose main purpose seems not to be defending the Labour Government, or arguing for a particular political direction, or even making the case for Keir Starmer. They exist, instead, to have a go at Andy Burnham.

Sometimes this is dressed up as strategic seriousness. Sometimes it is framed as irritation with the Westminster psychodrama. Often it is just a good news story about the Government posted alongside some little non sequitur comment about his opponents, like “Andy Burnham isn’t fit to lick Keir’s boots”, or a dark muttering about treachery, ambition, or betrayal - all the other words people reach for when politics becomes less about judgement than court etiquette.

I find this baffling.

Not because Starmer has no case to make. He absolutely does. There are serious Labour achievements to defend: the Employment Rights Act, the increase in the National Living Wage, Great British Energy, the Renters’ Rights Act, the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme, and the return of passenger rail services to public ownership. Those are not trivial things. They are the kind of things Labour members should be willing to defend, and the kind of things the Government should be much better at explaining.

The problem is not that Starmer has done nothing. The problem is that politics is not a university course in which policy delivery is marked against a neat little assessment rubric. Voters are allowed to dislike a Prime Minister who has passed good legislation. They are allowed to feel that the country still does not work. They are allowed to conclude, fairly or unfairly, that the Government does not speak to their lives. And at the moment, the available evidence is grim: Labour has taken a severe beating in every poll since 2024, Reform is miles ahead in the national polls, and Starmer’s personal ratings remain at Liz Truss levels of dire.

That is frustrating. It’s unfair. But it is not irrelevant.

This is the lesson Labour members should have learned from the Corbyn years, if nothing else. Personal loyalty to a leader is not the same thing as political seriousness. Nor is it evidence of moral fibre to keep insisting that the public must be wrong until the public, with weary impatience, removes the opportunity to insist on it any longer.

There is also a more immediate problem. Andy Burnham is not a hostile columnist, a freelance leadership plot, or a spectral threat haunting the fevered imaginations of Starmer’s supporters. He is Labour’s candidate in a high-profile by-election.

The party has already made its choice. It could have tried to block him again. It did not. The NEC had previously blocked Burnham from standing in Gorton and Denton; in Makerfield, it approved his route to selection, despite the same obvious issue that if he wins he is immediately disqualified from the Greater Manchester mayoralty, triggering a mayoral by-election.

That tells us something. Perhaps Starmer wants this contest? Perhaps he thinks it is better to have Burnham inside the tent than outside it. Perhaps he believes the party has no credible way of keeping him out without looking absurd. Perhaps he thinks a win in Makerfield shores up Labour, while a loss would wound Burnham. Whatever the calculation, it has been made.

Which makes the internal attacks stranger still. If Burnham loses, that is not just a defeat for Andy Burnham. It is another Labour defeat. It is another Reform advance. It is another headline about a Government unable to hold together its old heartlands. It is another piece of evidence for everyone - Left and Right alike - already saying that Labour is finished.

And for what? The emotional satisfaction of proving, in public, that some Labour members dislike the Labour candidate?

Have a look at the kind of print going out in Makerfield right now. I’ve attached two examples - one from Labour, one from Reform.

Reform’s letter is from Nigel Farage. It attacks the government, attacks Burnham, talks about boats, net zero, the ECHR, tax, crime and Westminster ambition. It claims that Makerfield needs a local person who will put the area first - but doesn’t even bother to name their candidate!

This is an extraordinary thing, really. A parliamentary by-election in which the would-be MP is treated almost as an administrative detail. The brand is Farage. The enemy is Labour. The target is Burnham. The candidate is somewhere behind the curtain, presumably waiting to be properly introduced once the vibes have done their work.

Labour’s letter, by contrast, is from the candidate. It talks about Makerfield. It talks about Burnham’s local connections. It talks about his record in Greater Manchester. It talks about his interests and plans; energy bills, rail fares, council housing, reindustrialising the North, and technical routes into good jobs.

It does not mention Reform. It does not mention Farage. It does not spend its limited space calling the other side names. This is a small thing, perhaps, but a revealing one. Reform accuses Labour of making the contest about attacks and Westminster ambition, while sending a leaflet from its party leader attacking Labour and Andy Burnham. Labour sends a leaflet from its candidate, simply making the case for what he has done and what he wants to do.

Set aside, just for a moment, the looming leadership question. Starmer clearly did when he chose not to push the NEC to repeat the Gorton and Denton decision. The immediate question is much simpler.

Labour members can have the argument about Starmer and Burnham after polling day. They almost certainly will. They may have it with spreadsheets, WhatsApp briefings, anonymous quotes, soft launches, hard launches, triangulated outriders and all the other grim ceremonial objects of internal Labour politics.

But right now, Andy Burnham is the Labour candidate in Makerfield. Reform is trying to beat him. And every Labour supporter who spends this by-election trying to undermine him is not defending Starmer. They are helping Nigel Farage make Labour look divided, bitter and unserious.

That is not loyalty. It is factional self-harm with a red rosette pinned to it.

It can be done in several registers.

• There is the moral register, which reaches almost automatically for Iraq.

• There is the generational register, in which Blair is treated as a man still trying to govern the country from the politics of 1997, like a ghost haunting the Downing Street sofa.

• There is the ideological register, in which every mention of the ‘radical centre’ is presumed to be a coded demand for privatisation, triangulation and a nice lunch with someone from a management consultancy.

• And there is the simpler, more tribal version: he is Tony, therefore he is wrong.

None of these responses is entirely unfair. That is what makes the problem awkward.

Blair’s recent essay on Labour’s direction contains plenty that any credible Labour person should reject. A Labour government should not abandon new net zero projects as though the climate crisis can be postponed until the bond markets are in a better mood. It should not treat laws for workers’ rights as a dispensable luxury. It should not ignore the need for a higher minimum wage, nor retreat from changes to non-dom tax status because the very wealthy have once again discovered their deep emotional vulnerability to being taxed. Nor should a Labour Prime Minister treat alliance management as a moral blank cheque for Donald Trump’s military choices in Iran.

If that were all Blair had said, the response could be short, satisfying and almost entirely useless.

The problem is that Blair has also said something true. Labour is in danger of confusing office with purpose. It won the 2024 election not as the author of a fully believed national project, but as the acceptable alternative to Conservative collapse. That was enough to win. It was even enough, for a time, to govern. But it was never going to be enough in the long run.

This is the uncomfortable part. Blair’s answers are often too thin, too technocratic, too impatient with the moral commitments that make Labour worth having at all. But his question is the right one. What is Labour for?

Not what is Labour against. We know that already. Labour is against Conservative Party’s austere selfishness, Reform’s authoritarian racist pantomime, the Green party’s magical thinking, The Liberal Democrats’ opportunism, and the general political habit of setting the house on fire then congratulating ourselves for having produced warmth.

The harder question is what Labour is trying to build.

The official answer still exists. Labour has its five missions. The government’s ‘Plan for Change’ still talks about milestones for mission-led government, built around economic growth, the NHS, safer streets, opportunity and clean energy. The language remains formally intact. There is still an architecture, a set of headings, a structure under which announcements can be filed.

But a filing system is not a governing story.

That distinction matters. A mission is only politically useful if it disciplines choices. It has to tell ministers what matters when two good things conflict. It has to tell the Treasury what cannot be sacrificed. It has to tell the public why pain is being asked of them, what trade-offs are being made, and what sort of country should exist at the other end of the work. Without that, a mission becomes a brand category. It gives announcements somewhere to live, but not necessarily a reason to exist.

This is where Ian Dunt’s essay, ‘How to build a good Prime Minister’, gets closer to the problem than Blair does. Dunt’s argument is not merely that Starmer needs better slogans, though God knows a few would not hurt. It is that successful government requires a relationship between vision, policy and delivery. You begin with a sense of direction. You translate it into practical measures. Then you build the machinery capable of making those measures real. Dunt’s criticism of recent prime ministers is savage, but the analytical point beneath the savagery is quite simple: Britain is not ungovernable, just badly governed.

This is, in one sense, an old Blairite lesson. The first New Labour government did not simply say ‘Education, education, education’ because somebody in the comms team had discovered repetition. It said it because the phrase did actual political work. It told voters what mattered. It told Whitehall what mattered. It gave ministers a test against which decisions could be judged. It allowed delivery mechanisms to form around something more substantial than the Prime Minister’s inbox.

This is also why the comparison is so uncomfortable for Labour now. Starmer’s government has done real things. Its defenders are not wrong to point to serious achievements. But the public impression remains one of drift, because the actions do not yet add up to a project. Too often the argument seems to shrink at the moment it should expand. We were promised national renewal. We are offered administrative reassurance. We were promised transformation. We are told that the grown-ups are in the room.

The grown-ups do need to be in the room. This is an underrated point in politics, mostly because people who sneer at competence have usually not had to deal with the consequences of incompetence. The country suffered badly under recent governments that seemed to treat seriousness as an optional extra. There is nothing trivial about restoring some basic capacity to the state.

But competence is not a political project. It is the precondition for one.

This, I think, is the trap Starmer’s Labour has fallen into. In opposition, competence was an electoral argument. It was necessary and, after Johnson, Truss and Sunak, rather more emotionally resonant than people sometimes admit. Labour did not have to persuade the country that it was thrilling. It had to persuade the country that it was sane. The campaign could contrast steadiness with chaos, adulthood with theatrical irresponsibility, the modest promise of repair with the exhausted absurdity of Conservative rule.

That was enough to win the election. It is not enough to govern through a period of national insecurity.

People do not merely want ministers who can operate the machine. They want to know what the machine is for. They want to know why their lives are still hard. They want to know why a Labour government, elected after fourteen years of Conservative decline, so often sounds as though the limits of politics have already been reached. They want to know whether the future being built is one they will have a place in.

Blair sees part of this. His essay is strongest when it insists that Labour cannot retreat into self-delusion, nostalgia or factional comfort. He is right that the country faces a world being remade by artificial intelligence, geopolitics, energy insecurity, demographic pressure and a changed global economy. He is right that government has to be serious about technology, growth, skills, state capacity and Britain’s place in the world. He is right, too, that politics cannot simply be the art of giving one’s own side comforting things to say to itself.

But Blair’s account is incomplete in precisely the way Blairism is often incomplete. It sees change more clearly than it sees security. It sees adaptation more clearly than it sees equality. It sees the need for Britain to face forwards, but not always the equally important need for people to believe that the future is being made with them and for them, rather than done to them by clever people who will not live with the consequences.

That is where Tom Watson’s response is useful. Watson’s argument, as I read it, is not that Blair is wrong to demand adaptation. It is that adaptation without fairness is not enough. The radical centre cannot be only a doctrine of reform, technology and growth. It has to be a doctrine of equality, security and democratic consent. Otherwise it becomes modernisation with the moral content stripped out.

This is the distinction the next Labour argument needs. The choice is not between Blairite modernisation and left-wing comfort politics. That is too neat, and much too convenient for everyone involved. The real question is whether Labour can produce a politics that is modernising and egalitarian at the same time.

New Labour, at its best, was able to do that because Blair and Brown, in their different and often mutually poisonous ways, held together two necessary truths. Blair understood change, national adaptability, the need to make Britain face forwards. Brown understood inequality, poverty, the role of the state in altering life chances, and the moral seriousness of redistribution. This is a simplification, obviously. All useful political memories are simplifications. But it captures something real.

The last successful Labour project was not simply a cult of managerial competence. Nor was it simply a programme of redistribution. It combined modernity with investment, reform with social mobility, constitutional change with public service improvement, and national confidence with a moral concern for those excluded from opportunity. It did not always do this well, and when it did, it often did it with an unbearable degree of self-congratulation. But it had a story.

The country Blair governed no longer exists. That is the point his admirers sometimes miss. The economy is weaker. Housing is more punishing. Work is less secure. Trust is lower. Public services are more strained. The promise that globalisation and technological change would lift all boats now sounds, to many people, less like optimism than a cruel joke told by someone who owns a boat.

So yes, Labour needs growth. Of course it does. Without growth, social democracy becomes an argument about how to distribute disappointment. But growth by itself is not a moral purpose. People have lived through too many versions of national success that did not quite reach them. They have heard too many clever people explain why the graph is improving while their rent rises, their bus disappears, their GP surgery becomes unreachable, and their children cannot imagine buying a home.

This is why AI cannot be treated only as a productivity question. Blair is right that it will reshape government and the economy. He is right that a state which cannot use modern technology will become slower, weaker and more expensive. But a Labour account of AI has to ask different questions too. Who owns the gains? Who bears the risks? What happens to young people if entry-level work is automated away before they have acquired the experience that makes them employable? What happens to training if every firm praises it in public and avoids funding it in private? What happens to dignity when work becomes more monitored, more precarious, more easily replaceable?

The same is true of welfare reform, public service reform, policing technology and the green transition. The question is not simply whether change is necessary. Often it is. The question is whether Labour can make change legitimate. That requires more than a plan. It requires a social contract.

This is also why the current debate cannot be reduced to Starmer’s personal limitations, though those limitations are real. Dunt’s sharper point is about the qualities required to govern: vision, delivery, courage, decision-making and curiosity. Those are not always the qualities British politics selects for. Parties often reward loyalty, message discipline, caution and the ability to survive internal systems without frightening anyone important. These are not useless qualities. But they are not the same as curiosity, strategic imagination or the capacity to make decisions under pressure.

Starmer’s particular tragedy may be that the traits which made him electorally plausible after 2019 are not the traits the moment now demands. His caution was once reassuring. His seriousness was once a relief. His refusal to emote theatrically was once a useful contrast with Johnsonian narcissism. But government changes the test. What looked like discipline in opposition can look like drift in office. What looked like restraint can become an inability to define the argument. What looked like seriousness can become a fear of politics itself.

There is a danger here, though. The Labour Party is very good at turning strategic problems into leadership psychodrama. It is perhaps the one national industry in which we remain world-leading. A party can always persuade itself that somewhere, just offstage, there is a leader who will resolve all tensions by force of personality. The right speech. The right accent. The right regional biography. The right soft-focus video. The right mixture of toughness and empathy, which usually means whatever the person speaking already wanted.

But the question is not simply whether Labour has the right Prime Minister. It is whether Labour has a governing project capable of surviving whoever the Prime Minister is.

That project cannot be a memory of New Labour. Nor can it be a retreat into a comforting left politics that treats public anger as proof of its own virtue. It has to begin from the world as it is: poorer than it should be, angrier than it used to be, more insecure than polite politics likes to admit, and increasingly vulnerable to parties which turn decline into resentment.

Labour’s answer cannot be to triangulate around Reform in slightly softer language. That is not realism. It is a category error. Reform’s strength does not come merely from its position on immigration, or from culture war theatre, or from Farage’s apparently inexhaustible ability to look like a man complaining about a hotel breakfast. It comes from the fact that too much of life in Britain feels broken, expensive, insecure and rigged. Mimicking Reform’s language does not answer that. It confirms their premise.

A serious Labour project would start somewhere else. It would say that Britain needs to adapt to the future, but that the future must be made fair. It would say that growth matters, but that growth must improve ordinary lives rather than merely decorate Treasury forecasts. It would say that technology matters, but that people are citizens, workers and neighbours before they are data points. It would say that public services need reform, but that reform must be done with the people who use and deliver them, not imposed from a sealed room in Whitehall. It would say that the state must become more capable, but also less remote. It would understand that equality is not only about income, but about power, security, place, dignity and childhood.

This would be neither nostalgic nor timid. In fact, it would require more courage than either Blairite adaptation without equality or left comfort politics without delivery. It would require Labour to say hard things to the public. Not everything can be fixed by taxing a handful of billionaires. Not every demand can be met at once. The state cannot repair fourteen years of damage instantly. Immigration is economically and socially necessary, but it has to be governed well and explained honestly. Net zero will require disruption, but the alternative is worse. Public services need more money, but money without reform will not be enough. Europe matters, and Britain will not prosper by pretending geography is optional.

That is what leadership is for. Not to recite public opinion back to itself, but to shape it. Not to avoid trade-offs, but to explain them. Not to make politics feel painless, but to make sacrifice feel purposeful.

The mistake Labour must avoid is assuming that because Blair’s prescription is flawed, his diagnosis can be ignored. This is a comforting error. It allows the party to preserve all its existing habits. Blair can be dismissed as out of touch. Starmer can be defended as merely unlucky. The missions can remain on the website. The machine can continue producing announcements. Everyone can agree that the alternative is worse, which it is, and then wonder why the public remains stubbornly ungrateful.

But the public is not obliged to be grateful for the absence of catastrophe. It is not enough to say that Labour is better than the Conservatives. It is not enough to say that Reform would be worse. Both things are true. Neither is a project.

This is why ‘competence’ becomes such a seductive but dangerous word. It sounds serious. It sounds adult. It sounds like the opposite of everything that went wrong before. But competence without direction becomes maintenance. And maintenance, however necessary, cannot meet a moment of national decline.

Labour needs something larger. It needs a story about work, power, technology, climate, security, care, place and democracy. It needs to connect the everyday frustrations of people’s lives to a plausible account of national repair. It needs delivery machinery, yes, but machinery pointed at something. It needs to stop treating values as decorative language attached to policy, and start treating them as the test by which policy is judged.

Blair is not the answer to Labour’s present crisis. The country has changed too much, and his own account leaves too much out. But he has put the right question back on the table. Dunt sharpens it into a question of governing capacity. Watson sharpens it into a question of equality and social contract. Taken together, they point towards the real problem.

Labour does not need to become Blairite again. It does need to remember that government requires purpose as well as process. It does not need to worship at the altar of the radical centre. It does need to become radical enough to face the future, and Labour enough to make that future fair.

The question is not whether Labour should listen to Tony Blair. It is whether Labour can answer him.

What is this government for?

Annotated bibliography

Tony Blair, ‘The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country’, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Used as the main irritant and provocation for the piece: Blair’s critique of Labour’s lack of coherent plan, his emphasis on the radical centre, technology, growth and state reform, and the points where his policy prescriptions become morally and politically contestable for Labour. (https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country)

Labour Party, ‘Plan for Change’. Used to ground the claim that the five missions and formal language of mission-led government still exist; the argument is not that Labour has literally abandoned the missions, but that they are not presently functioning as a governing story. (https://labour.org.uk/plan-for-change/)

UK Government, ‘Plan for Change’. Used as the official government framing of the missions: growth, NHS, safer streets, opportunity and clean energy, set within a wider promise of national renewal. (https://www.gov.uk/missions)

Institute for Government, ‘Keir Starmer’s “Plan for Change” is necessary — and overdue’. Used to support the point that Labour’s mission language has shifted through several framings, and that consistency and staying power are essential if missions are to discipline government rather than merely organise announcements. (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/keir-starmers-plan-change)

Ian Dunt, ‘How to build a good Prime Minister’. Used for the distinction between vision, policy and delivery, and for the wider argument that Britain is not ungovernable but badly governed.

Striking 13

How to build a good prime minister

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2 months ago · 220 likes · 54 comments · Ian Dunt

Tom Watson, ‘Blair is right. But the radical centre needs equality‘. Used for the balancing argument: Blair is right about adaptation, but incomplete without equality, democratic consent and a new social contract.

Tom Watson's Newsletter

Blair is right. But the radical centre needs equality.

Tony Blair’s waspish note says something clear and uncomfortable. Labour is “playing with fire”. It won the 2024 election “not by acclaim”, but by being an “acceptable” default after Conservative failure. It has an “almost infinite capacity for self-delusion”. It lacks a “worked-out, coherent plan”. It has retreated into a “politics” bubble. It faces a …

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2 months ago · 25 likes · 17 comments · Tom Watson

The Guardian, ‘Keir Starmer defends policy choices in rebuttal of Blair’s criticism’. Used for live political context around Starmer’s response to Blair, including the dispute over workers’ rights, net zero, and Blair’s criticism of Starmer’s position on Iran. (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/28/keir-starmer-defends-policies-tony-blair-criticism-labour)

As Labour reels from the results of the 2026 local elections, Westminster and the national media have done what they do best: taken a complicated national picture and immediately turned it into a horse race between a handful of people who have already been profiled to death.

Angela Rayner. Wes Streeting. Ed Miliband. Andy Burnham, somehow, despite the awkward technicality of not being an MP. A familiar cast of plausible, semi-plausible and constitutionally inconvenient names has been arranged across the nation’s politics pages like the world’s least erotic swimwear calendar.

But this is old thinking. Tired thinking. Thinking of the sort that asks whether the next leader of the Labour Party might be someone with a national profile, an ideological project, a recognisable public image, a factional base, Cabinet experience, or any evident desire to do it.

That is precisely why the conversation must move on.

To be clear, this is not because the people listed below have done anything wrong. Quite the opposite. Their only offence is being sufficiently unknown to be available for projection. In the new politics, the decisive qualification for leadership is not experience, popularity or a coherent plan for change. It is not yet having annoyed enough people to be impossible.

By that measure, Labour’s true field of leadership contenders is not to be found among the so-called big beasts, but among the mysterious 2024 intake: that vast parliamentary hinterland of lanyards, maiden speeches, local newsletters, and the haunted eyes of 211 once-hopeful people who thought they had won a seat in a functioning government, not a timeshare in a bin fire.

Here, then, are the real runners and riders.

Chris Bloore: the Redditch Realist

In every leadership contest there comes a moment when the party yearns for someone who can cut through the noise. Someone grounded. Someone serious. Someone whose name has the lexicographical texture of a well-managed public consultation.

Step forward Chris Bloore, MP for Redditch.

Bloore’s great strength is that absolutely nobody in the Westminster bubble has yet formed a strong opinion about him, making him uniquely placed to unite the party. The left cannot denounce him, because it has not yet got around to maliciously editing his Wikipedia page. The right cannot brief against him, because the special advisers are still checking whether Redditch is a real place or a conceptual metaphor for Ordinary Working People. Soft-left MPs are said to admire his tone. The unions are understood to be monitoring developments, which in this context means someone from USDAW once nodded at him awkwardly while sharing a lift.

A Bloore leadership would offer Labour a clean break from the Starmer era while promising to preserve its most popular feature: an almost erotic commitment to saying very little, very firmly, in front of a plain background.

His supporters, believed to include a parliamentary researcher, two councillors, and a man who once replied great point Chris in a WhatsApp group, argue that he represents the future: sensible, understated, and extremely unlikely to be recognised in a Toby Carvery.

Maya Ellis: the Ribble Valley Reset

If Labour has learned anything from the local elections, it is that the party must reconnect with those places it has lost, those places it never quite understood, and those places it mainly imagines through stock photography.

This is where Maya Ellis comes in.

As MP for Ribble Valley, Ellis offers Labour something no other candidate can: the chance to say Ribble Valley in a serious setting.

The Ellis pitch is simple. Labour cannot win again by choosing between the cities and the towns, the suburbs and the shires, the Red Wall and the metropolitan base. It must go deeper.

It must go Ribble.

Early supporters, dubbed the Ribble Alliance, are already describing her as the candidate of renewal, by which they mean she has not yet been loudly blamed for anything. Her critics say she lacks national name recognition, but her allies counter that this is precisely the point. After the last few years, the British public may be ready for a Labour leader they have not already decided to put on mute.

In private, one supporter is understood to have said: she has a very strong backstory, once we’ve finished writing it.

Callum Anderson: the Bletchley Breakthrough

1900-1923. 1924-1929. 1931-1945. 1951-1964. 1970-1974. 1979-1997. 2010-2024. 2029?

For a party trapped in an endless cycle of interpreting and reinterpreting electoral defeats throughout its history as though it were an indecipherable code, the answer may have been hidden in plain sight all along: Bletchley.

Callum Anderson, MP for Buckingham and Bletchley, is already attracting interest from those who believe Labour must crack the code of modern politics. This phrase is expected to form the backbone of his leadership launch, his campaign merchandise, and at least one unbearable interview with The Rest Is Politics.

The symbolism is irresistible to Labour. Bletchley means codebreaking. Codebreaking means strategy. Strategy means meetings. Meetings mean PowerPoint. PowerPoint means government. It is the sort of intellectual chain senior party officials find reassuring.

Anderson’s supporters insist he offers the party a generational reset: young enough to sound fresh, serious enough to survive a select committee, and enigmatic enough to be projected onto by every faction simultaneously. The Blairites will see a moderniser. The soft left will see a listener. The hard left can see a firebrand. The unions will see someone who might answer an email. The public will see nothing at all - which may currently be Labour’s strongest available offer.

Alice Macdonald: the Norwich North Mutualist Moment

Every Labour leadership contest needs a candidate who can make the party feel briefly better about itself before everyone remembers it is not the 1945 landslide again.

Enter stage left: Alice Macdonald, Labour and Co-operative MP for Norwich North.

Macdonald’s appeal lies in her ability to combine the moral seriousness of the Co-op movement with the raw political glamour of Norwich. Hers would be a campaign of mutualism, community wealth-building, fair shares, ethical retail, and trying not to shout at one another on the NEC. In other words, completely doomed, but in a way that would produce a very beautiful launch video and several mentions of Alan Partridge.

After years of managerialism, triangulation, and ministers looking as though they are being held hostage by their own briefing notes, a Macdonald campaign would offer something genuinely different: the faint but moving possibility that politics does not have to be quite so spiritually degrading.

The problem, of course, is that Labour has historically responded to such possibilities by forming a working group, losing the minutes, and then inexplicably appointing Peter Mandelson to something again. I mean, seriously. Have we learned nothing?

Still, in a crowded field, Macdonald has one decisive advantage: she sounds like the sort of candidate most likely to know where the biscuits are kept at a community meeting room. After the 2026 results, luring exhausted activists in with the promise of snacks may be the closest thing the party has left to a mass movement.

Luke Charters: the York Outer Insurgency

Finally, no serious analysis of the Labour leadership can ignore Luke Charters, MP for York Outer.

Indeed, the case for Charters is almost embarrassingly obvious. Labour should not become inward looking. Labour must look outward. Charters represents York Outer. Sometimes politics really is that simple.

In an age when the party is divided between centrists, soft-lefts, Blue Labourites, democratic socialists, socialist democrats, former Corbynites, anti-former-Corbynites, never-Corbynites, people who claim not to care about Corbyn but still bring him up every eleven minutes, and the four remaining Labour councillors outside London, all of whom have developed a thousand-yard stare after months of gruelling trench warfare masquerading as local politics, Charters offers a much-needed new factional identity: Outerism.

Outerism rejects the tired categories of left and right. It asks instead: have we considered moving further out?

Out from Westminster. Out from the discourse. Out from the group chat. Out, ideally, beyond the point where anyone from GB News can find you.

Far out.

A Charters campaign would not seek to dominate the centre ground. It would orbit it, moving further and further until the Labour Party leaves the upper atmosphere, suspended like a planetary ring around the Earth. His pitch to the party would be calm, understated and geographically inevitable: if Labour cannot hold the centre, perhaps it can hold the outer.

Already, sources close to no one in particular suggest that the York Outer insurgency is gaining traction, which is code for I have decided to write about it.

The field is open, by which I mean nobody knows what they are talking about

Of course, critics will say that none of these MPs are likely to become Labour leader according to their sources. But these critics are trapped in the old politics, where likely means something, contender implies intent, and sources are expected to have names, knowledge or access.

The new leadership discourse is much more liberated than that.

A contender is anyone whose name can be placed in a sentence between some people believe and could emerge as a compromise candidate. A campaign is any conversation that has taken place within thirty miles of Portcullis House. A faction is three people with similar coffee orders. Momentum is when the second journalist rings the first journalist to ask whether there is any momentum.

So yes, Starmer may survive. Or he may not. Burnham might get back into Westminster. Or not. Rayner may run. Streeting may run. Miliband may be begged to return by people who have learned absolutely nothing except how to format nostalgia as analysis.

But somewhere, on the parliamentary estate, a new-intake MP is walking into a meeting unaware that they are, at this very moment, being positioned as the candidate who can heal Labour, reconnect Britain, redefine the centre-left, win back Runcorn and Gorton simultaneously, neutralise Reform, de-claw the Greens, reassure the markets, inspire young people, mollify old people, rebuild trust, and somehow explain why the party just got battered in places where the leaflets definitely all said standing up for local people.

I am being silly, of course.

But only slightly sillier than the serious coverage, which is the problem.

There is a familiar temptation, especially in religious contexts, to treat certainty as the purest form of faith. The more certain one is, the stronger one’s faith must be. The person who says I know appears to stand above the person who says I believe, and the person who says I believe, though I sometimes doubt seems weaker still.

This is understandable. Certainty is reassuring. It has the sound of courage. It tells others, and perhaps oneself, that the matter is settled.

But faith and certainty are not the same thing.

Survey data are useful here only as a starting irritant. Pew’s recent work has shown that remains unusually resilient in American life compared with much of Western Europe, and Pew’s Western European research similarly shows wide variation in belief, practice and religious identity across the region. But surveys can only tell us how people describe belief. They cannot settle what faith is.

A better starting point is conceptual. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that some traditions have understood faith as a kind of knowledge attended by a certainty that excludes doubt. But it also describes other models in which faith is not simply possession of proof, but trust, venture, commitment and practical orientation. On these models, faith is not destroyed by doubt; indeed, it may be impossible without doubt of some kind.

That last point matters. Doubt by itself is not a virtue. It can be lazy, evasive, self-protective, or merely fashionable. There is nothing especially noble about standing permanently at a distance from commitment, congratulating oneself for never being naïve enough to believe anything too strongly. Doubt can keep faith honest, but it can also become a way of avoiding the risk of faith altogether.

The stronger claim is not that doubt is better than faith. It is that doubt can deepen faith when it is held inside commitment.

Kierkegaard is useful here, though he is often flattened into a slogan. His point is not simply that faith means believing absurd things for no reason. The Stanford account places him within a doxastic venture model: faith as full practical commitment to a truth that one recognises cannot be objectively secured by the evidence. His famous formulation of faith as objective uncertainty held fast with passionate inwardness is not an invitation to stop thinking. It is a description of what faith becomes when detached certainty is unavailable and yet one still has to live.

William James makes a related point from a different angle. Faith is not the arbitrary decision to believe whatever one likes. It concerns those live and momentous questions where refusing commitment is itself a form of commitment. One does not always get to wait outside life until proof arrives. Some truths, if they are to be lived at all, must be approached before they can be certified.

This is why doubt deserves a defence. Not as an end in itself, and certainly not as a pose of superior cleverness, but as one of the disciplines by which faith is kept from hardening into idolatry of itself.

The person who never doubts may be steadfast. But they may also be insulated, incurious, or merely fluent in the expectations of their community. The doubting believer, by contrast, knows that belief is vulnerable to question and continues to wrestle with it anyway. That struggle is not a failure of faith. It may be one of the things that makes faith morally serious.

Without doubt, faith can become brittle. Worse, it can become cruel. It can mistake inherited confidence for truth, certainty for righteousness, and discomfort with questioning for loyalty to God. Doubt does not solve these dangers, but it interrupts them. It leaves room for humility, repentance, self-criticism, and the possibility that one’s own understanding is partial.

If faith is to be more than social inheritance, tribal performance, or the refusal to revise oneself, then doubt is not its enemy. It is what keeps faith honest.

Annotated bibliography

Pew Research Center / AP reporting on religion in America.
Used lightly as the opening prompt rather than the foundation of the argument: survey data can show how people describe belief, but cannot settle what faith is. (https://apnews.com/article/1f1ac0da0577cfcb50f3c48e7014a070)

Pew Research Center, Being Christian in Western Europe.
Used for contrast with the American context and to frame the difference between reported belief, religious identity and lived religious practice. (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/05/29/being-christian-in-western-europe/)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘Faith’.
Used for the conceptual scaffolding of the piece: faith as certainty, faith as trust or venture, Kierkegaard’s objective uncertainty, and James’s account of faith as commitment beyond but not against the evidence. (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/faith/)

The original outrage was broader than the endings themselves. Mass Effect had sold itself, more than almost any other series of its era, on the idea that choices mattered. Players had carried decisions across three games, saving or sacrificing characters, settling old conflicts, shaping alliances, curing plagues, preserving species, and occasionally punching journalists. Then, at the end, the whole thing seemed to collapse into three abstract options presented by a newly introduced god-child on the Citadel.

The debate has since become more specific and, somehow, even more tedious. Which ending is best? Destroy, Control, Synthesis, or Refuse?

There are many interesting takes on this.

I disagree with most of them.

Hence, regrettably, this article.

But What is the Best Ending?

There is a boring-but-true answer I could give here, which is that ‘best’ is a subjective category boundary and different people will come to different conclusions depending on what they value. That is true. It is also not very interesting. So the more useful answer is this: Synthesis is the best ending for the in-game universe, but it is not a good ending for Mass Effect as a story.

Yes, I know. No points for a noncommittal answer. But hear me out.

The distinction matters because there are really two different questions being argued over. The first is an in-universe question: which ending produces the best outcome for the galaxy? The second is a narrative question: which ending best completes the story Mass Effect has been telling?

Those are not the same question. In fact, the problem with Synthesis is that it answers the first question so neatly that it fails the second.

Within the frame of the game itself, Synthesis is quite plainly presented as the superior option. It is not just a synthesis of organic and synthetic life in the literal, in-story sense. It is also a narrative triangulation between the two binary choices the game has been placing in front of us all along: Destroy, associated with Anderson and the Alliance; and Control, associated with the Illusive Man and Cerberus.

Both of those endings have obvious benefits and obvious costs. Synthesis is written to retain the benefits while mitigating the costs.

Like Destroy, it removes the Reapers as an existential threat. But it does so without destroying the Geth, EDI, and synthetic life more broadly. Depending on your effective military strength, Destroy may also mean devastating collateral damage. Even at its best, it requires Shepard to save organic life by wiping out synthetic life.

Like Control, Synthesis preserves the Reapers’ vast knowledge and technological capacity for the use of the wider galaxy. But it does so without placing any one person, even Shepard, in a position of absolute authority over an armada of ancient Lovecraftian death machines. It avoids the obvious quis custodiet ipsos custodes problem, which Mass Effect has been worrying at since Saren and the Spectres in the first game.

On that basis, I think it is reasonable to say that the game codes Synthesis as the best ending within its own moral universe. Not necessarily the most emotionally satisfying. Not necessarily the most coherent. Not necessarily the one I would choose. But the one the game presents as the most complete resolution.

This is where some of the common objections come in. People often say that Synthesis is what Saren wanted, or that it is space communism, or that it turns the whole galaxy into a green Instagram filter with feelings. Some of these objections are more serious than others. Saren did not really want Synthesis; he wanted submission to the Reapers, and his vision of coexistence was already corrupted by indoctrination. The space communism thing is mostly internet noise. The green filter point, while aesthetically important to me on a spiritual level, is probably not the deepest moral critique available.

The consent objection is fairly credible, at least. Synthesis transforms every living and synthetic being in the galaxy without asking them. It alters bodies, minds, cultures, species, and perhaps consciousness itself. It is not just a military decision. It is a metaphysical intervention imposed universally. That is a fairly substantial ethical problem, and the game does not really know what to do with it.

This is not some minor nitpick invented by people trying to prove that Synthesis is secretly evil. The absence of consent is one of the reasons the ending feels so unsettling. Shepard does not merely choose a strategy for defeating the Reapers. Shepard chooses the future nature of life itself, on behalf of everyone, everywhere, forever. Even by the standards of space opera, that is quite a lot to authorise on a collapsing platform after a stressful conversation with a glowing child.

But I think this objection is better understood as a criticism of the writing than as evidence that Synthesis is, in-universe, supposed to be a bad ending. The game does not present Synthesis as violation, horror, or tyranny. It presents it as transcendence. The Extended Cut gives us a broadly utopian montage: conflict recedes, knowledge is shared, the galaxy rebuilds, and organic and synthetic life seem to enter a new era of mutual understanding. The consent problem is real, but it is real in a way the text largely fails to acknowledge.

That is the deeper issue. Synthesis is not bad because it’s secretly sinister. It’s bad because it’s too good.

Synthesis and Tonal Collapse

As an ending, Synthesis is poor writing. Bluntly, it reduces consequence at the very moment the trilogy should be most committed to it. It also swerves away from the series’ wider themes in order to offer a fairy-tale resolution that few people who had actually played Mass Effect were likely to find satisfying.

The earlier games are brilliant because, despite their emphasis on player choice and agency, they rarely pretend that choices are free of cost. You can shape events. You can make things better. You can prepare well, act wisely, and sometimes save people who would otherwise die. But the series usually resists the fantasy that every problem has a perfect outcome if only you completed enough side quests beforehand.

No matter how good you are, Jenkins still dies on Eden Prime. You may be able to save Kirrahe and Wrex, but someone still has to die on Virmire. There is no cost-free way to save the Council during the attack on the Citadel. Even Mass Effect 2, which softens this somewhat by allowing a perfect run through the Suicide Mission, at least makes you work for it. You have to build loyalty, commit Shepard firmly to a paragon/renegade leaning, resolve team conflicts, upgrade the Normandy, manage time properly, and choose the right people for the right tasks. The perfect outcome is possible, but it feels earned because failure is genuinely available.

Mass Effect 3 initially returns to the harsher logic of the first game. Its best moments are built around the impossibility of saving everyone. Mordin’s arc on Tuchanka works because redemption has a cost. The Geth-Quarian conflict works because peace is possible only if you’ve spent three games earning the trust and conditions that make it possible; otherwise, it can easily collapse into catastrophe. These are some of the strongest parts of the trilogy because they understand what Mass Effect is good at: making hope feel fragile, partial, and expensive.

Then Synthesis arrives and short-circuits that logic.

As presented, it is a utopian ending. The Reaper threat ends. The Geth survive. EDI survives. The Reapers help rebuild. Organic and synthetic life are reconciled. The central conflict of the trilogy is not merely resolved but apparently transcended. Everyone gets glowing green circuitry and, insofar as the ending shows us, a future of peace, understanding and shared existence.

That is not a conclusion. It is a cosmic group hug with particle effects.

The problem is not simply that the ending is happy. A happy ending can work. Nor is the problem that Mass Effect needed to end in misery. It did not. The problem is that Synthesis offers a form of happiness that feels disconnected from the series’ normal moral machinery. It gives us a choice without a meaningful cost, a victory without sufficient sacrifice, and a resolution so total that it stops feeling like Mass Effect.

That is especially jarring because the trilogy has never really been utopian. Even in the lighter first game, the galaxy is a bleak and difficult place underneath all the clean surfaces and dramatic uplighting. The series deals with racism, terrorism, slavery, genocide, political paralysis, militarism, state violence, corporate experimentation, refugee crises, and the long shadow of historical atrocity. The Reapers themselves are basically Lovecraftian horrors rendered in polished black metal. Your victories against them in the first two games are not true victories at all. You delay the crisis. You survive the encounter. You buy time.

That grimness is not incidental. It is part of the series’ texture. The Council is slow, cautious, compromised and politically evasive. The Alliance is brave but limited. Cerberus is effective but monstrous. The Spectres are a solution to bureaucracy that immediately reveals its own danger. Again and again, the series asks what you are willing to risk, sacrifice, overlook or destroy in order to achieve something good.

The final stretch of Mass Effect 3 understands this perfectly until, suddenly, it does not. Shepard reaches the Citadel bloodied, exhausted, and probably dying. Anderson dies in front of you. The Illusive Man’s ideal is revealed as another form of indoctrinated delusion. Everything points towards a final decision in which even victory must hurt.

And in every other ending, it does.

Destroy defeats the Reapers, but at the cost of synthetic life and perhaps the very relationships that proved organic-synthetic peace was possible. Control preserves the Reapers, but at the cost of Shepard becoming something distant, post-human, and frighteningly powerful. Refuse preserves moral purity, perhaps, but condemns the current cycle to destruction. These endings may be flawed, but they at least understand the series’ tragic grammar.

Synthesis does not. Or rather, it tries to rise above that grammar entirely. It offers not a hard-won political settlement, not an uneasy survival, not a victory shadowed by loss, but a metaphysical fix. The central conflict of galactic history is solved by an act of universal transformation. The ancient cycle ends. Organics and synthetics understand one another. The Reapers, who have spent hundreds of millions of years harvesting advanced civilisations, are folded into the reconstruction effort with surprisingly little awkwardness.

Again, this is why I understand the impulse behind theories that Synthesis must secretly be the bad ending. It feels too easy. It feels too smooth. It feels like the sort of offer that, in a better-written version of the story, would turn out to have a terrible hidden cost. Surely this much peace must be sinister. Surely the green glow is a warning. Surely the Reapers have won in some more subtle way.

But I do not think that is what the game is doing. I think the game means it. That is the problem.

Synthesis is not written as a trap. It is written as transcendence. The issue is that transcendence is a poor fit for Mass Effect. The series has always been at its best when dealing with compromise, consequence and partial victories. It is a story about building coalitions among people who mistrust each other for good reasons. It is about persuasion, sacrifice, history, loyalty, and the frustrating work of making common cause in an imperfect galaxy. The best moments do not erase conflict; they make resolution feel possible despite it.

Synthesis skips that work at the end. It solves the galaxy from above.

That is why the ending fails for me. Not because Synthesis is obviously the worst outcome for the people living in that universe. On the contrary, if you take the game’s presentation at face value, it may well be the best. It saves the geth. It saves EDI. It stops the Reapers. It preserves knowledge. It ends the cycle. It offers the possibility of peace between forms of life that the series has repeatedly placed in conflict.

But that is precisely why it fails as an ending.

The best ending for the Mass Effect universe is not necessarily the best ending for Mass Effect as a story. In fact, in this case, it is the opposite. Synthesis is too clean, too complete, too totalising, too uninterested in the costs that would make it dramatically and morally legible. It gives the galaxy everything, and in doing so it gives the story too little.

That, finally, is why the debate will probably never end. The Synthesis ending is infinitely defensible in-universe and infinitely unsatisfying out of universe. It is morally attractive and narratively weak. It is the best answer to the Reaper problem, and a bad answer to the story problem.

What makes Synthesis a bad ending is not that it is secretly evil. It is that the game genuinely believes it is good.

Addendum: My Secret Fifth Ending

There is, however, one final complication.

While I absolutely love the series, I hate the fact that the lasting legacy of Mass Effect has been reduced to this endless back-and-forth over which of the endings we think should be the right one. Destroy, Control, Synthesis, Refuse. Pick your colour, choose your metaphysics, justify your war crime, and prepare to argue about it forever.

After a certain point, the endings do not need to be theorised, interpreted, explained or analysed any more. They need to be ignored. Which is, if we take Warlord Okeer seriously in Mass Effect 2, the greatest insult one can deliver to an enemy.

Because the endings are, hands down, the worst part of the trilogy. They are a shocking dismissal of the tone and style established by the writers over five years, two preceding titles, and a small mountain of tie-in books and comics. The series spent hundreds of hours building a universe of compromise, consequence, tactical uncertainty, historical grievance and hard-won coalition-building, only to end by asking us to choose between three abstract space levers and a sulking refusal option. There comes a point where analysis starts to feel like collaboration.

So, me? I take the WarGames route. I choose not to play.

The Reapers must lose, obviously. Let us not be silly about this. But Destroy is doing it wrong. Synthesis (as we’ve just discussed at length) is contrived and unsatisfying. Control is irresponsible. Refuse is sociopathic. So I leave the galaxy as it is: Reapers, Cerberus and the allied forces locked forever in unresolved tension, suspended at the last possible moment before the assault on Cronos Station locks you out of the free-roaming Galaxy Map.

This is not cowardice. It is curation.

In my unofficial version of events, Shepard retires to Anderson’s extremely tasteful apartment on the Citadel, plays Armax Arena, visits the arcade, throws a party, has several emotionally necessary conversations, and allows the final mission to remain indefinitely unlaunched. The galaxy is still on fire, yes, but it is at least on fire somewhere else. Commander Shepard discovers that the most powerful war asset is shore leave.

And oddly, this works better than it has any right to.

The Citadel DLC is one of the most perfectly self-aware pieces of storytelling in gaming. It is not merely fan service, though it is absolutely that. It is a love letter to the characters, the tone, the friendships, the jokes, the accumulated emotional architecture of the trilogy. It understands something the formal endings somehow forgot: that Mass Effect was never only about the Reapers.

So my secret fifth ending is not canonical. It is not even really an ending. It is a refusal of the ending as offered. Through the crucial interaction between the ludic rules of the game and the narrative satisfaction of the setting, the final attack never happens. Shepard and co. remain on break. The Reapers wait patiently, twiddling their tentacles. The galaxy hangs in the balance. Garrus is somewhere calibrating something. The arcade high scores become, in practice, the last meaningful objective.

It was not a formal ending.

But it should have been.

Sykes-Picot.

Sometimes this is done with a map. Sometimes with a thread. Sometimes with the weary confidence of someone who has just remembered that imperialism existed and would now like the rest of us to know about it. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, the Gulf, Iran, sectarian conflict, jihadism, borders, mandates, oil, coups, state failure, the lot: all of it, apparently, can be traced back to two men with a ruler, a secret agreement, and an unusually high tolerance for straight lines.

It is not hard to see why this story appeals. It has villains. It has a document. It has a map. It has a date. It has that special explanatory tidiness that history almost never provides, but which public argument is always desperate to find. It also has the great advantage of being partly true.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement really was a secret imperial bargain. In 1916, Britain and France, with Russian assent, discussed how Ottoman Arab territories might be divided into zones of control and influence if the Entente powers won the war. The agreement’s own language is full of the mechanics of imperial privilege: priority of enterprise, local loans, advisers, foreign functionaries, ports, spheres, access, control. It is not a pretty document. It does not need to be rescued from its reputation.

So the problem with the Sykes-Picot myth is not that Mark Sykes, François Picot, or their less-mentioned Russian counterpart Sergei Sazonov were innocent. They were not. The problem is that the agreement has become too useful and too lazy an explanation. It is asked to explain more than it can bear.

That distinction matters. A historical episode can be symbolically powerful while still being explanatorily inadequate. Sykes-Picot is an excellent symbol of imperial arrogance. It captures, in a particularly neat form, the habit of European powers treating foreign lands as pieces on a board; assets to be allocated, routes to be secured, influence to be apportioned. If you want a shorthand for the moral atmosphere of wartime imperial diplomacy, Sykes-Picot will do nicely.

But shorthand is not explanation. And the more we treat Sykes-Picot as the master key to the modern Middle East, the more the actual history disappears.

This mattered in 2014, when Islamic State made the symbolism literal. Its propaganda campaign around the End of Sykes-Picot presented the demolition of the Iraq-Syria frontier as an assault on the old colonial order. Daesh released English- and Arabic-language material showing fighters destroying parts of the border infrastructure and symbolically creating a single territory across Iraq and Syria. The image was irresistible: jihadists with bulldozers erasing the line drawn by European imperialists.

It still matters now. In 2026, with Gaza devastated by prolonged war, Israel expanding territorial control inside the strip, and a wider regional conflict involving Iran disrupting politics and shipping across the Gulf, the temptation to reach for a grand origin story remains powerful. Reuters reported today that Netanyahu had directed Israeli forces to expand control in Gaza to 70% of the territory; separate reporting has described the 2026 Iran war as having widened the conflict across the region, with consequences for Gulf shipping and neighbouring states.

That does not make the colonial age irrelevant. It does mean we should be wary of letting it become a historical vending machine: insert crisis, receive colonial explanation.

The older I get, the less patience I have with explanations that are satisfying in exactly the way they are inadequate. The Sykes-Picot story is one of these. It offers an answer which is not quite wrong, but which becomes wrong through overuse. It gives us a morally legible past, at the cost of flattening the very thing we claim to be trying to understand.

The real history is worse, and more interesting.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was not settled by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in 1916. It unfolded through a long, violent and contingent crisis stretching from before the First World War to several years after it. To make sense of the modern Middle East, one has to widen the frame: the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, Ottoman defeat and radicalisation, the rise of the Young Turks, German-Ottoman strategy, Russian ambitions in the Black Sea, British anxieties over India and the Suez Canal, French claims in Syria and Lebanon, Arab dynastic politics, Zionism, Armenian genocide, Greek expansionism, the Mandate system, the Turkish War of Independence, and the final settlement at Lausanne in 1923.

That is not as elegant as two men and a ruler. History is often inconsiderate like that.

Sean McMeekin is useful here because he forces the argument out of its narrow Anglo-French groove. The Berlin-Baghdad Express follows Germany’s attempt to use its Ottoman alliance, the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and pan-Islamic politics as instruments of world power during the First World War. The Ottoman Endgame widens the story further, framing the making of the modern Middle East through war, revolution and imperial collapse across the first three decades of the 20th century. One need not accept every emphasis in McMeekin’s account to see the corrective value. The Ottoman Empire was not simply a passive body on an operating table while Britain and France sharpened the knives. Germany was not incidental. Russia was not marginal. Ottoman leaders were not decorative, and local power-brokers and strongmen within the empire were not waiting politely for Europeans to pick them.

This is the first thing the Sykes-Picot myth obscures: the post-Ottoman Middle East was not made by one agreement. It was made by a series of interconnected wars spanning decades, born of European imperial ambitions but also of local political, ethnic, cultural and religious divides.

The second thing it obscures is that the war did not end neatly in 1918.

If the modern settlement had simply been imposed by Allied fiat, the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 would have mattered more than Lausanne. Sèvres was the punitive, maximalist postwar settlement for the Ottoman Empire. It envisaged enormous losses of sovereignty and territory, including Allied zones, Greek expansion, and provisions that Turkish nationalists considered intolerable. But Sèvres was never fully ratified or implemented. It was overtaken by force. The Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal fought, won, and compelled the Allies back to the negotiating table.

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 then recognised the boundaries of the modern Turkish state. Turkey made no claim to its former Arab provinces; the Allies abandoned several claims they had previously pursued, including autonomy for Turkish Kurdistan and territorial cession to Armenia. Whatever else Lausanne was, it was not Sykes-Picot being rubber-stamped seven years late. It was the result of military defeat, nationalist victory, diplomatic retreat and hard bargaining.

This is where the familiar story begins to wobble. If Sykes-Picot was the blueprint, why did so much of the final settlement emerge through later war and revision? Why did Sèvres fail? Why did Lausanne replace it? Why did Mosul become a subsequent dispute? Why did the borders of Turkey come to be settled by Kemalist success rather than by the wartime dreams of British and French officials? Why did then-Persia remain intact? Why did some projected zones of influence never take the form imagined for them?

The answer is not that Sykes-Picot did not matter. It did. The answer is that it mattered as one episode in a wider imperial scramble, not as the master document from which everything else followed.

This is especially important in Palestine, because Sykes-Picot is sometimes also made to stand in for the whole tangled set of British wartime commitments: promises to Arab leaders, understandings with France, Zionist diplomacy, strategic anxieties, and later Mandate administration.

The significance of this is not that Sykes-Picot is unrelated to Palestine. The agreement placed a rump state in Palestine under an international administration to be agreed with Russia and other allies, which is itself revealing. The point is that Palestine cannot be explained by Sykes-Picot alone. The conflict’s later development involved the Balfour Declaration, British Mandate policy, Zionist immigration and institution-building, Palestinian Arab opposition, imperial retreat, UN partition, war, displacement, state formation, occupation, nationalism, religion, regional rivalry, settlement, American power projection, and repeated failures of diplomacy. To say Sykes-Picot over this history is not to explain it. It is to put a label over it.

The same is true of Iraq and Syria. The border between them - one of the few lines from the original Sykes-Picot map which did basically survive the agreement - became the poster child for the Sykes-Picot myth, but the actual states themselves were formed through mandate rule, local revolt, military occupation, dynastic bargaining, administrative improvisation and later authoritarian consolidation. Their problems cannot be reduced to the artificiality of a single line. The more useful question is not whether a state’s borders are artificial, but whether the institutions inside them gained legitimacy, capacity and durability.

This is where the Sykes-Picot explanation becomes actively misleading. It encourages us to imagine that the Middle East’s central problem is bad cartography. As if the region would have been spared its tragedies had only the lines been more aesthetically sensitive, perhaps with a little more attention to ethnographic shading. This is comforting, in its way. It locates violence in the geometry of the map rather than in the harder history of power: armies, parties, monarchies, oil companies, foreign interventions, patronage networks, sectarian mobilisation, secret police, coups, sanctions, invasions, occupations and civil wars.

Bad borders can matter. Of course they can. Borders can trap minorities, divide communities, reward clients, punish enemies, and convert administrative convenience into permanent grievance. But the great error of the Sykes-Picot story is to confuse map logic with political history.

This is also why the anti-imperial critique loses force when it becomes too neat. British and French (and Russian and German and Italian) imperialism did enormous damage in the region. It treated local agency and sovereignty as something to be managed (at best), ignored, or destroyed (at worst). There is no need to soften that. But blaming Sykes-Picot for everything risks letting imperialism off the hook ,by making it seem like a single decision made by bad actors rather than a system of practices.

The British did not need Sykes-Picot to be duplicitous in Palestine. The French did not need Sykes-Picot to pursue their ambitions in Syria and Lebanon. Russia did not need Sykes-Picot to covet Armenia or Constantinople and the Straits. Germany did not need Sykes-Picot to cultivate pan-Islamic agitation against its enemies. Ottoman leaders definitely did not need Sykes-Picot to centralise, gamble with, repress, deport, or massacre their own citizens. Later dictators did not need Sykes-Picot to build prisons, secret police states, and cults of leadership. The United States did not need Sykes-Picot to invade Iraq. Iran and Saudi Arabia did not need Sykes-Picot to pursue regional competition. Israel did not need Sykes-Picot to occupy Palestinian territory. Hamas did not need Sykes-Picot to massacre civilians. Hezbollah, Assad, the Ba’athists, the Hashemites, the PLO, the Gulf monarchies, the Iraqi army, the CIA, the IDF, the IRGC, and UN diplomats all belong somewhere in this history too.

That is not a pithy slogan. It is not meant to be. The untidiness is the whole point.

One reason the Sykes-Picot myth survives is that it performs a moral simplification. It gives progressive Western audiences a way of admitting imperial guilt without having to understand very much about what they’re admitting to. It says: yes, we made a mess; two of our men drew the wrong line; the consequences followed. There is a kind of shallow contrition in this. It looks like historical seriousness, but in the worst case it’s just another form of self-centring. Even in guilt, Europe still gets to be the centre of attention.

The actual history is less flattering and less convenient. The injustices of European empires mattered profoundly, but they were not omnipotent. Local actors mattered enormously too, though not always nobly. Anti-colonial movements could be both liberatory and authoritarian. National self-determination could coexist with ethnic violence. Imperial retreat could produce freedom in one place and abandonment in another. The Ottoman Empire was not a paradise of pluralism before Europeans descended with their pencils. Nor was it simply a doomed relic awaiting partition. It was a real imperial state, modernising and decaying, coercive and adaptive, capable of reform and catastrophe.

This is why Lausanne matters so much as a corrective. It reminds us that the post-Ottoman order was not merely imposed; it was contested. The Turkish national movement did not accept the settlement prepared for it. It fought, and it changed the result. That does not make the final order just. Lausanne came with its own human costs, including the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey. It does, however, make the history harder to narrate as a simple morality play.

A better account would treat Sykes-Picot as one layer in a palimpsest. Beneath it lie Ottoman structures, provincial identities, imperial rivalries, religious communities, trade routes, dynastic ambitions and local politics. Around it sit the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, the Balfour Declaration, Russian claims, French and British military occupations, and wartime bargaining. Above it come Sèvres, the mandates, Lausanne, state-building, anti-colonial revolts, coups, oil politics, Cold War alignments, American intervention, Islamist movements, authoritarian collapse and the accumulated failures of governing elites.

That is harder to fit on a graphic. It is also much closer to reality.

None of this means Sykes-Picot should be discarded. Symbols matter in politics because people act through symbols. Daesh understood that perfectly well. It chose the Iraq-Syria border not because it had conducted a dispassionate seminar on the finer points of wartime diplomacy, but because Sykes-Picot had become a name for humiliation, division and imposed order. In that sense, the myth became politically real. A bad explanation can still motivate real action.

But historians and commentators owe us more than the reproduction of a myth because the myth is potent. The fact that Sykes-Picot matters symbolically is precisely why it needs to be handled carefully. Otherwise, we end up confusing the history people invoke with the history that happened.

The question, then, is not whether Sykes-Picot was bad. It was.

It is not whether imperialism matters. It does.

It is not whether borders can produce grievances. They can.

The question is whether one secret agreement in 1916 can bear the explanatory weight placed upon it. It cannot.

Sykes and Picot belong in the story, but not in the starring roles to which posterity has oddly promoted them. They were participants in a wider process: one crowded with soldiers, ministers, revolutionaries, dynasts, nationalists, colonial officials, railway men, generals, propagandists, oil interests, religious leaders and insurgents. The story’s dramatis personae come from pretty much every major European state involved in the First World War, but also draws its key figures from North Africa, the Middle East, and as far afield as Afghanistan. It was written in chancelleries, certainly; but also on battlefields, in collapsing provinces, in refugee columns, in cabinet rooms, in nationalist assemblies, in imperial offices and in the ruins of failed settlements.

A famous name is not the same thing as an adequate explanation.

That, finally, is the trouble with Sykes-Picot. Not that it tells us nothing, but that it lets us stop too soon. It allows us to mistake recognition for understanding. It gives us the satisfying click of a pattern falling into place, when what we need is the patience to see how many patterns were layered over one another.

The Middle East was not broken by a line. It was remade through the collapse of empires, the violence of war, the improvisations of victors, the resistance of the defeated, the ambitions of local rulers, the failures of new states, and the repeated interference of outside powers who were almost always less clever than they imagined and more destructive than they admitted.

Sykes-Picot is part of that history. It is not the history.

And if we want honest answers about the modern Middle East, we need to stop mistaking a useful symbol for the truth.

Annotated bibliography

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916, Avalon Project.
Used for the primary text of the agreement itself, particularly its language around British and French zones of control and influence, local loans, advisers, and proposed arrangements for Palestine. (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/sykes.asp)

Meghan Tinsley, ‘Whose colonialism? The contested memory of the Sykes-Picot Agreement’.
Used for the discussion of Daesh/Islamic State propaganda in 2014, especially the End of Sykes-Picot campaign and the symbolic destruction of the Iraq-Syria border. (https://pomeps.org/whose-colonialism-the-contested-memory-of-the-sykes-picot-agreement)

Reuters, ‘Netanyahu directs Israeli forces to expand Gaza control to 70 percent’.
Used to frame the 2026 relevance of the article: the Middle East remains in violent flux, and current crises again tempt commentators towards sweeping historical explanations. (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-directs-israeli-forces-expand-gaza-control-70-percent-2026-05-28/)

Reuters, ‘How has the Iran war affected Middle East states?’
Used for the current 2026 regional context, including the wider effects of the Iran war on neighbouring states, Gulf shipping and regional politics. (https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-has-iran-war-affected-middle-east-states-2026-05-13/)

Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express.
Used as a major interpretive source for widening the story beyond Britain and France, especially Germany’s Ottoman strategy, railway geopolitics and wartime use of pan-Islamic politics. (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674064324)

Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame.
Used for the broader frame of Ottoman collapse between 1908 and 1923, helping to move the essay from a narrow 1916 focus to the longer sequence of revolution, war, partition, resistance and settlement. (https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/187942/the-ottoman-endgame-by-mcmeekin-sean/9780718199715)

Balfour Declaration, 1917, Avalon Project.
Used to distinguish Sykes-Picot from Britain’s later and separate commitment to support a Jewish national home in Palestine, while supposedly protecting the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp)

Treaty of Sèvres summary.
Used for the discussion of the failed 1920 postwar settlement, which Turkish nationalists rejected and which was superseded after the Turkish War of Independence. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_S%C3%A8vres)

Britannica, ‘Treaty of Lausanne’.
Used for the 1923 settlement: recognition of the modern Turkish state’s boundaries, Turkey’s abandonment of claims to its former Arab provinces, and the Allies’ retreat from several earlier demands. (https://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Lausanne-1923)

Qatar Digital Library, ‘Lausanne’s Legacy’.
Used for the point that Lausanne delimited boundaries and was tied to the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey, helping avoid an over-neat or celebratory account of the Turkish nationalist victory. (https://www.qdl.qa/en/lausanne%E2%80%99s-legacy-peace-treaty-led-century-conflict)

In April 2025, the UK Supreme Court gave gender-critical campaigners much of what they had spent years demanding. In For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, the Court held unanimously that the words man, woman and sex in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. The Court’s reasoning was not that trans people have no rights under the Act. Quite the opposite: it explicitly affirmed that trans people remain protected under the characteristic of gender reassignment, and may also be protected in other ways by sex discrimination and harassment provisions. But on the central interpretive question, the Court was clear. For the purposes of the Equality Act, sex means biological sex.

That clarification has now moved from judgment into institutional guidance. On 21 May 2026, the Minister for Women and Equalities laid the EHRC’s updated Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations before Parliament. Unless Parliament disapproves it within the review period, the code will come into force as statutory guidance. The EHRC’s own summary says that, for Equality Act purposes, a person’s legal sex is the sex recorded at birth, and that obtaining a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change that position under the Act.

So here we are. The law has, in important respects, caught up with the gender-critical argument. Biological sex is now treated as the operative category for the Equality Act. Single-sex provision can be organised on that basis. Organisations have been told to take a practical and proportionate approach to toilets, changing rooms, services, associations and public functions.

One might have expected that to settle something.

It has not.

Instead, it has exposed the argument beneath the argument.

What are we Talking About?

This is not a piece about whether sex ever matters. Of course sex matters. It matters in medicine, some sports, pregnancy and maternity, sexual violence, intimate care, and some forms of single-sex provision. There are contexts involving trauma, coercion, undress, vulnerability, privacy or bodily risk where it is not merely permissible to notice sex, but negligent not to. A liberal and tolerant society does not have to pretend that these things are irrelevant. In fact, it would probably become less liberal and less tolerant if it did.

Nor is single-sex provision inherently irrational. There are women who have survived male violence and who have good reasons to experience some spaces differently from others. There are service providers who have to make difficult decisions under competing legal, ethical, and practical obligations. There are institutions that must weigh inclusion against privacy, dignity, risk, feasibility, evidence and the needs of particular users. These are not imaginary problems. They cannot be resolved by slogans, however inclusive the slogan sounds.

But that is precisely the point. There is a difference between sex-conscious policy and disgust-conscious politics.

Sex-conscious policy asks a set of disciplined questions, critically and on a case-by-case basis. What is this service for? Who uses it? What risks are actually present? What does the law require? What does the evidence suggest? What alternatives are available? What would exclusion achieve? Who would be harmed by inclusion? Who would be harmed by exclusion? Is the rule proportionate to the aim?

Disgust-conscious politics does something else. It begins with a bodily flinch, then goes looking for a principle grand enough to dignify it. It starts with discomfort around a person’s voice, face, clothes, body, name, mannerisms or self-description, and then retrofits that discomfort into arguments about safeguarding, feminism, children, free speech, science or ‘reality’. The policy language may be serious, but the emotional engine is often something older, uglier, and harder to admit.

That distinction matters because the trans debate is now full of people who speak as though they are doing one thing while plainly doing another. They say they are defending women’s rights, but keep returning to the physical revulsion they feel towards trans women. They say they are protecting children, but talk about gender-questioning young people as though they are symptoms of a social ill. They say they are defending reality, but use reality as a polite synonym for disbelief in another person’s social existence.

This is not true of everyone who holds a gender-critical position. That needs saying clearly. Some people have serious, bounded, good-faith concerns about the interaction between sex and gender identity in law. Those concerns should be argued with, not psychoanalysed away. But it is also dishonest to pretend that all anti-trans rhetoric sits in that register. A great deal of it does not. A great deal of it is not policy reasoning at all. It is the politics of recoil.

The old analogy here is with the anti-gay rhetoric I grew up listening to in the years either side of the millennium, when the gay age of consent and later the issue of marriage equality were the ‘culture war’ of the age. The argumentative machinery is often strikingly familiar; one vulnerable out-group is presented as the thin end of the wedge for some larger horror.

• ‘If gay people are allowed to marry, the sanctity of marriage will be undermined and the family unit will collapse.’ (What does this mean?)

• ‘If gay men are allowed to adopt, what will it do to the children?’ (Implying that either gay parents would indoctrinate ‘their’ children to be gay too, or - more sinisterly - that this would erode the protection of children and enable paedophiles.)

• ‘What, will people marry their dogs next?’ (No, because there’s a world of moral difference between consenting adults and schnauzers.)

The claim is rarely just that this particular group wants something. It is that granting rights to one group is somehow transactional with another, and will open the door to predators, corruption, contagion or civilisational decay in some form or another.

This does not mean every contemporary concern about trans rights is equivalent to old-fashioned homophobia. But it does mean we should recognise the pattern. Moral panics often work by smuggling an older disgust response into a newer public vocabulary. Nobody says, or at least nobody respectable says, I want the law to enforce my revulsion. They say they are thinking of the children. They say they are protecting the vulnerable. They say common sense has been outlawed by fanatics. They say there is a silent majority. They say they are only asking questions, usually while standing next to a very large pile of answers.

The point is not that predators do not exist. They do. The point is that predators become rhetorically useful. The imagined faux-transgender male predator in a wig, lurking in a women’s toilet, is asked to do a suspicious amount of political work. They stop being merely a risk to be assessed. They become a symbolic solvent, dissolving distinctions between trans women, abusive men, cross-dressers, sex offenders, drag queens, identity-testing adolescents, Stonewall, queer theory, gender clinics, university HR departments and whatever someone on Twitter said yesterday. Once the panic is fully assembled, all of these become parts of one shadowy machine.

That is not safeguarding. That is folk horror.

Spaces and Gender.

The issue with toilet panic is not that safety is irrelevant. Women’s safety is obviously relevant. So are privacy and dignity. The problem is that the public version of the argument often bears only a loose relationship to practical safeguarding. A serious policy discussion would ask what kinds of facilities are being discussed, who uses them, how they are supervised, what evidence exists about risk, whether single-user provision is available, and how staff should respond to harassment or assault. It would distinguish between a school changing room, a nightclub toilet, a hospital ward, a domestic abuse refuge, a leisure centre, and a small workplace with two lockable cubicles in a corridor.

Instead, we often get a morality play about toilets. On one side, helpless women and girls. On the other, trans women treated less as people than as an aperture through which an unrestrained male violence will pour.

The evidential basis for that panic is thin. One US study found no evidence that gender identity non-discrimination laws increased criminal incidents in restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms, though one should be cautious about importing American evidence wholesale into a British legal context. More importantly, even if risk varies by setting, the answer cannot simply be to treat all trans presence as predatory presence. That is exactly the slippage that good policy exists to prevent.

The serious question is not whether every trans woman must be admitted to every women’s space in every circumstance. That absolutism is politically fragile and practically unhelpful. The serious question is what justifies exclusion in a particular setting. A rape crisis service working with traumatised women may reach one conclusion. A public library toilet may reach another. A changing room in a small leisure centre may require a third solution altogether.

The government’s own framing of the draft code emphasises practical, proportionate decision-making, safety, dignity and freedom from harassment. That is what the debate should be about. Not whether trans women make some people uncomfortable. Not whether someone can imagine a lurid scenario. Not whether a boundary feels emotionally satisfying. What rule is justified here, for this purpose, with these effects?

Think of the Children!

The same distinction applies, even more urgently, to children.

Here, the argument is genuinely difficult. Anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. The Cass Review has changed the terrain. NHS England’s implementation plan states that children and young people’s gender services are being redesigned around a more holistic model of care, and that there is insufficient knowledge about who may benefit from medical interventions. It also says that such treatments, where considered, should be available through carefully constructed research arrangements to build a better evidence base. In December 2024, the government announced that restrictions on puberty blockers for under-18s would be made indefinite, citing advice from the Commission on Human Medicines and the Cass Review’s concerns about the evidence base.

None of this should be brushed aside. Clinical caution is not moral panic. Evidence matters. Children’s healthcare should be careful, especially where interventions may have long-term consequences and where the evidence base is contested. There are legitimate questions about social transition, medicalisation, waiting lists, comorbid distress, family dynamics, safeguarding, consent, clinical governance, detransition, and how to support young people without either rushing or abandoning them.

But clinical caution is not the same thing as cultural panic.

Clinical caution says: the evidence is uncertain, the stakes are high, and care pathways need reform.

Cultural panic says: trans children are proof that society has gone mad.

Clinical caution asks how to support distressed young people safely.

Cultural panic asks who infected them.

Clinical caution is interested in service design, data, follow-up, risk, consent and therapeutic support.

Cultural panic is interested in villains.

This is where the rhetoric becomes dangerous. The figure of the child is almost always the most powerful weapon in a moral panic. Children are vulnerable. Children are suggestible. Children can be harmed. All of that is true. But precisely because it is true, think of the children arguments require more discipline, not less. Otherwise, children become rhetorical hostages. Their vulnerability is used to end the argument rather than improve it.

There is a good version of the concern about children. It worries that some young people may be medicalised too quickly. It worries that gender distress may sometimes be entangled with trauma, autism, sexuality, sexism, homophobia, body image, depression or social contagion. It worries that institutions may adopt affirming language without a sufficiently robust clinical framework behind it. These are serious concerns.

There is also a bad version. It imagines trans identity as a contagion spreading through schools, TikTok, activist teachers, weak parents and fashionable ideology. It treats young people not as complex human beings in distress, but as evidence of a decadent culture. It is less interested in helping children than in prosecuting the adults it already disliked.

Again, the distinction matters. A society can be cautious about puberty blockers without becoming cruel to transgender and gender-questioning children. It can insist on evidence without turning every trans adult into a groomer, every supportive parent into a fanatic, and every gender-questioning teenager into a dupe. The tragedy of the present debate is that too many people seem to regard these distinctions as evasions. They are not evasions. They are the minimum conditions of thought.

What is Really Real?

Then there is reality.

Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls is subtitled Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Stock’s central claim, broadly put, is that biological sex has material significance and that gender identity theory should not override it in contexts such as law, data, healthcare and women-only provision. There is a serious argument there. Bodies matter in a whole host of contexts. Reproductive sex matters. Law cannot function if its categories become completely detached from the purposes for which they exist. Medicine cannot be run on vibes. Data collection cannot be subordinated entirely to politeness. Feminism, if it is to mean anything material, must be able to talk about female embodiment, male violence, pregnancy, menstruation, sexual dimorphism and the social meaning attached to sexed bodies.

The problem is not the word reality in itself. The problem is what it can be made to imply.

In a careful argument, reality means constraint. It means that not every subjective claim can settle every institutional question. It means that law and medicine need categories stable enough to do their work.

In a careless argument, reality means dismissal. It means: you are not what you say you are. It means: your identity is make-believe. It means: I will tolerate your costume, perhaps, but not your claim on the shared world.

The difference is not small. One is a claim about institutional limits. The other is a claim about social illegitimacy.

This is where high-profile progressive women in the gender-critical debate have often been most revealing. Germaine Greer has not merely argued that womanhood should be defined by sex. She has done so with a relish for bodily disparagement, famously describing trans women in terms that linger on voice, hair, hands, physical incongruity, and a dehumanising “it”. The argument is not simply I disagree with this legal category. It is look at this body. The disgust is not incidental. It is part of the performance.

"On the day that The Female Eunuch was issued in America, a person in flapping draperies rushed up to me and grabbed my hand. ‘Thank you so much for all you’ve done for us girls!’ I smirked and nodded and stepped backwards, trying to extricate my hand from the enormous, knuckly, hairy be-ringed paw that clutched it. The face staring into mine was thickly-coated with pancake makeup through which the stubble was already burgeoning, in futile competition with a Dynel wig of immense luxuriance and two pairs of false eyelashes. Against the bony ribs that could be counted through its flimsy scarf dress swung a polished steel women’s liberation emblem."

J. K. Rowling’s rhetoric is more complicated, and it is worth being fair about that. In her 2020 essay, she wrote that trans people deserve protection and acknowledged the vulnerability of trans women, particularly those exposed to male violence. She has also argued, repeatedly, that sex matters, that women’s spaces matter, and that women should not be punished for saying so. I don’t believe those claims can simply be waved away as transgender hatred.

But Rowling’s public argument also repeatedly returns to the idea that recognising trans women as women opens the door to any man who wishes to enter women’s spaces. Her 2019 support for Maya Forstater framed the issue around whether women were being forced out of jobs for saying that “sex is real”. The trouble is not that sex is real is false. It is that the phrase functions as though it settles questions it has barely begun to ask. Sex is real. But so is gender dysphoria. So is gender-affirming care. So is social transition. So is violence against women. So is violence against trans people. So are privacy, dignity, law, fear, trauma, recognition and disgust. Reality is not a single trump card. It is the whole difficult mess.

Greer, Stock and Rowling are not the same thinker, and it would be lazy to pretend otherwise. Greer often sounds openly contemptuous. Stock is more philosophical and institutional. Rowling writes as a survivor of male violence and as a public campaigner who sees herself as defending women from a misogynistic ideology. Their arguments differ in tone, seriousness and object.

But across much of this terrain, the same slide recurs. A legitimate point about the role of sex as a category boundary becomes a general suspicion of trans identity. A concern about safeguarding becomes a lurid fantasy of invasion. A defence of reality becomes a licence to treat other people’s lives as delusion. The argument begins with policy and ends with metaphysical exasperation at the existence of trans people at all.

The Argument Beneath the Argument.

It is not enough, in a liberal society, to say that someone makes you uncomfortable. Many people make many other people uncomfortable. Gay couples make some people uncomfortable. Public displays of affection make some people uncomfortable. Masculine women make some people uncomfortable. Feminine men make some people uncomfortable. Disabled bodies make some people uncomfortable. Religious clothing makes some people uncomfortable. Neurodivergent behaviour makes some people uncomfortable. The sight of poverty makes some people uncomfortable. Ageing makes some people uncomfortable. Public grief makes some people uncomfortable. The human body, in most of its actual biological and social variety, is a near-endless affront to those who feel they were promised a tidy world where everyone would be basically just like them.

Some of this discomfort may be understandable. That does not make it authoritative. Disgust is a real human response, but it is a terrible political philosopher. It is quick, certain, embodied, and almost always convinced of its own innocence. It tells us that what repels us must be wrong, and that what unsettles us must be dangerous. It gives us moral clarity at the exact moment we should be most suspicious of ourselves.

This is why the progressive self-image matters. There is something especially jarring about people who have spent their intellectual lives criticising oppression, essentialism, moral panic and patriarchal control, only to become so incurious about their own recoil when the subject is trans people. Feminism at its best is not merely the defence of one’s own category. It is a discipline of critical attention to power.

The law has now clarified some things. It has not clarified everything, it has muddied some things (particularly the legal status of gender, which now sits in a sort of limbo) and it certainly has not absolved us of the need to think. There will still be hard cases. There will still be bad policies, bad-faith activists, frightened institutions, confused guidance, opportunistic politicians, and people who would rather shout adult human female or trans women are women until the room empties, than do the miserable work of institutional design.

But if we are going to have the argument, we should at least have the real one.

The real argument is not whether sex ever matters. It does.

The real argument is not whether women’s safety matters. It does.

The real argument is not whether children’s healthcare should be evidence-led. It must be.

The real argument is whether those truths justify the wider cultural-political project now being built around them: a project in which trans people are treated not merely as participants in difficult policy questions, but as symbols of suspicion, fraud, danger, unreality and social decay.

That is where the line should be drawn.

A liberal society cannot be built on the rule that nobody must ever encounter a person whose body, identity, name, pronouns, or existence makes them uncomfortable. Discomfort is real. It may even be understandable. We are all, in one way or another, carrying the prejudices of the world that made us. But discomfort is not, by itself, an argument.

And it is certainly not enough to carry the moral weight that anti-trans rhetoric keeps asking it to bear.

Sources

UK Supreme Court, For Women Scotland Ltd v The Scottish Ministers, press summary.
Used for the opening legal context: the Court’s 2025 ruling that ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex, while also noting that trans people retain protection under the characteristic of gender reassignment. (https://supremecourt.uk/cases/press-summary/uksc-2024-0042)

House of Commons Library, ‘Supreme Court judgment on the meaning of “sex” in the Equality Act 2010: For Women Scotland’.
Useful as a clearer parliamentary briefing on what the judgment did and did not do; especially the point that the ruling gave an authoritative interpretation of the existing law rather than formally changing the statute. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10259/)

EHRC, ‘UK Supreme Court ruling on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act: our work’.
Used for the 2026 update: the EHRC’s account of how it has responded to the Supreme Court ruling, including the statement that legal sex for Equality Act purposes is sex recorded at birth and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change this for Equality Act purposes. (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/our-work/uk-supreme-court-ruling-meaning-sex-equality-act-our-work)

EHRC, ‘Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations’.
Used to establish the procedural status of the updated code: laid before Parliament on 21 May 2026, subject to the 40-day review period, and intended to become statutory guidance once commenced. (https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/equality/equality-act-2010/codes-practice/code-practice-services-public-functions-and-0)

GOV.UK, ‘Equality Act 2010: Draft Code of Practice for services, public functions and associations 2026’.
Used for the discussion of practical, proportionate decision-making by service providers, and for the distinction between serious sex-conscious policy and symbolic boundary-making. (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/equality-act-2010-draft-code-of-practice-for-services-public-functions-and-associations-2026/equality-act-2010-draft-code-of-practice-for-services-public-functions-and-associations-2026)

NHS England, ‘Children and young people’s gender services: implementing the Cass Review recommendations’.
Used for the section on children and clinical caution, especially the shift towards redesigned, holistic gender services and the post-Cass emphasis on evidence, safety and service reform. (https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/children-and-young-peoples-gender-services-implementing-the-cass-review-recommendations/)

GOV.UK, ‘Ban on puberty blockers to be made indefinite on experts’ advice’.
Used in the discussion of puberty blockers and youth transition pathways, following the Government’s December 2024 decision to make restrictions indefinite. (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/ban-on-puberty-blockers-to-be-made-indefinite-on-experts-advice)

House of Commons Library, ‘Hormone treatments for children and young people: Clinical guidance, policies and regulation’.
Useful for the most compact current-policy summary: restrictions on puberty blockers, review planned for 2027, and NHS England’s 2026 consultation on stopping routine prescription of gender-affirming hormones to children and young people. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10596/)

Hasenbush, Flores and Herman, ‘Gender Identity Nondiscrimination Laws in Public Accommodations’.
Used cautiously in the spaces/toilets section as evidence from the US context that gender identity non-discrimination laws were not associated with increased criminal incidents in restrooms, locker rooms and changing rooms. (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4rs4n6h0)

Williams Institute summary of the same public accommodations study.
A more accessible source for the same point: it summarises the finding that inclusion of gender identity in non-discrimination laws did not affect the number or frequency of criminal incidents in the relevant facilities. (https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/ma-public-accommodations/)

Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.
Used as a primary example of the ‘reality’ argument: I try to treat Stock as making a serious philosophical and institutional case about sex, gender identity theory, and feminism, while criticising the way ‘reality’ can slide from institutional constraint into social dismissal. (https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/kathleen-stock/material-girls/9780349726595/)

J. K. Rowling, ‘J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues’.
Used as a primary example of Rowling’s own framing of her position, including her arguments about sex, women’s spaces, vulnerability, safeguarding and her personal experience of male violence. (https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/)

J. K. Rowling, 2019 Maya Forstater tweet.
Used as a compact example of the slogan-like function of ‘sex is real’ in the public debate: a phrase that is not false, but which often operates as though it settles much more than it actually does.

Germaine Greer, ‘On Why Sex Change is a Lie’ / quoted extracts.
Used as the clearest example of rhetoric that moves beyond policy disagreement into bodily disgust, particularly Greer’s appalling description of a trans woman in terms of voice, clothing, hands and physical revulsion. (https://www.artandpopularculture.com/On_Why_Sex_Change_is_a_Lie)