Comment
US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Met Gala in 2021. Jamie McCarthy/MG21/Getty
Like miniskirts and mullets, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, obsolete ideologies eventually come back into fashion if you wait long enough. So it is with socialism, which is having a resurgence in America among a generation seemingly unfamiliar with rationing, the gulag, the Cultural Revolution and “the reliability of late-Soviet-era nuclear power plants”. Four in 10 Americans say they have a favourable view of the long-discredited dogma, and socialist-aligned Democrats have won primaries in the likes of Michigan, Colorado, Maine and New Jersey. For conservatives, it’s tempting to dismiss this as “post-adolescent psychopathology”. But the widespread dissatisfaction behind socialism is rooted in some “real, objective” problems in the way American capitalism is working.
Inequality is on a scale “not seen in a century”, with the share of national income that goes to wages and salaries at its lowest level in 80 years. The proportion of Americans earning more than their parents has dropped “precipitously” over the last couple of generations and is expected to fall further. AI threatens to intensify these trends, returning ever greater rewards to a diminishing number of Silicon Valley plutocrats. Then there is the “tightening nexus” between our business and political elites; the rampant corruption our politicians seem to have no interest in curbing; the “oligopoly-level” concentration in almost every industry. What we have, in short, is a system where the business-political class are promoting their own wellbeing at the expense of competition, free markets and ultimately the people. Is it any wonder voters are demanding something radical to replace it?
😡🙄 The problem for the hard left, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, is that they always pair a “conceivably popular” economic platform with a “provably hated” cultural one. It’s not enough for the Democratic Socialists of America to push for wealth redistribution – they also want to abolish the police, end visa caps and pay out race reparations. “The Republican attack ad writes itself.” Jeremy Corbyn regarded socialist economics as a distraction from “the real fun of nuclear disarmament and uniting Ireland”; even the French left has absorbed woke jargon. If a politician could decouple economic dirigisme from identity politics, he or she would be “difficult to stop”.
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The holiday is sorted. Is everything else?
Summer is when life starts to slow down. Schools have broken up. Holidays are underway. Many of us are enjoying a chance to recharge and reset. That pause matters. Time away from work and routine can help us think more clearly about what matters most.
This year, the summer lull arrives alongside a change in political leadership and a flurry of headline-grabbing announcements before the summer recess. While nobody knows exactly what comes next, change is often a good prompt to review important plans.
Most of us are comfortable planning some parts of our lives. We’ll carefully research a holiday and think about costs, making it easier to relax when the trip finally arrives. The same principle applies to our finances. Good planning isn’t about restricting choices. It’s about creating the confidence to enjoy them.
Financial balance isn’t about choosing between today and tomorrow. It’s about giving both enough attention.
Property
THE WINDMILL This five-storey windmill on the north Norfolk coast used to belong to the family of singer James Blunt, says The Telegraph. Built around 1819, the Grade II* listed red brick tower at Cley next the Sea is topped by a white-painted timber cap, sails and fantail, with a gallery giving uninterrupted views across the salt marshes. Between the tower and the courtyard outbuildings – exposed beams and original brick fireplaces throughout – there are nine bedrooms with en suites. Outside, 0.6 acres slope down to the River Glaven and a private jetty. Norwich is a 45-minute drive. £2.65m. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
A Dobby memorial on Freshwater West Beach. Matthew Horwood/Getty
Villains
Developers who diverted a £430m subsea power cable between Ireland and the UK to avoid upsetting a few mawkish Harry Potter fans. Simon Ludlam, who led the Greenlink scheme between 2017 and 2019, says they changed the route after receiving hundreds of complaints that the cable might disturb “Dobby’s Grave”, a memorial on Freshwater West Beach in Wales set up to mark the supposed final resting place of an elf in the Harry Potter films. “We went quite close to some real Bronze Age remains,” he told The Energy Revolution podcast, “but we avoided Dobby’s Grave.”
Villain
The sun, after internet searches related to eye pain surged in the wake of Wednesday’s once-in-a-generation eclipse. Google queries for terms such as “eyes hurt” jumped by more than 800% in the 24 hours after the celestial phenomenon.
Hero
William Arnold, an artist and photographer living in Cornwall, who took a 1,700-mile round trip to the Isle of Lewis to keep a public telephone box in service. Phone boxes have to be used at least 52 times a year to remain operational, so Arnold (pictured) schlepped up to the village of Einacleit with £36 in small change and made 52 calls to 52 different people. The 43-year-old, who has been working to save phone boxes since 2022, tells BBC News it’s a “slightly ridiculous” project but that the lines can be “vital rural lifelines”.
Villain
An Australian tech executive who created an AI agent to book his spot in a popular gym class, only for the overzealous bot to hack into the system to give him preferential access. The AI discovered and took advantage of a flaw in the booking software to secure Andrew Bird a class four months in advance, bypassing the gym’s rules. When Bird then asked if it could move him up the waiting list that week, the agent obliged by kicking someone else off the list.
Hero
An amateur golfer from Worcestershire who hit a 411-yard hole-in-one, which is thought to be an English record. Matthew Vigurs, 32, says his monster shot at the par-four third hole at Great Barr Golf Club in Birmingham was a good 100 yards longer than his usual drive, probably thanks to the hard ground. He was still some way short of the world record, a 447-yarder in Nebraska in 1965.
The great escape
Instagram/@Travelwithlivii
The travel agent for the 0.1%
Olivia Ferney recently found herself in a Las Vegas beach club counting out 200 bottles of vintage Dom Pérignon, says Guy Trebay in The New York Times. As part of an event she was preparing for an entrepreneur who’d just closed a $150m deal, the luxury travel specialist had organised to break the Guinness World Record for the “largest champagne presentation”. An official adjudicator flew in, and at 1.30am, as celebrity DJ Diplo played to the 2,800 guests, servers aboard floats shaped like speedboats, fire trucks and a giant shark sprayed the bottles into the crowd. The bill for the alcohol alone came to $226,000. “He would have spent more,” says Ferney. “But he got hit hard at the casino the night before.”
Documenting crazy requests like this on TikTok and Instagram has won Ferney more than two million followers on TikTok and Instagram. To join her and her fiancé’s agency, Top Tier Travel, clients must pay an annual $100,000 fee and spend at least $1m in yearly travel. For that, they can request almost anything. Ferney has flown to Paris to retrieve the largest croissant in the city for the daughter of a Miami billionaire, and bought an entire day’s supply of an Ontario bakery’s famous butter tarts to cater a holiday meal. Together with her 10-strong team, she regularly secures VIP perks including reservations at top Manhattan restaurants, close access to Formula 1 races and bookings on private Bombardier flights for clients “so choosy they look askance at Gulfstream jets”. “Our job is to execute,” she says, “not to judge.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
The Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy (1940)
One problem Britain doesn’t need to solve
Andy Burnham’s call for Britain to develop a written constitution is a “seriously bad idea”, says Jonathan Sumption in The Telegraph. For one thing, the purpose of written constitutions is “essentially negative”: they serve as a rigid code of supreme law, designed to make major change difficult by people wanting to entrench their own political views. To see the results of this in action just look at America, which, owing to its constitution, is now the only civilised society not to enforce gun control. That stance made sense in the country’s 18th-century settler society, when the document was written. Today, “it has barbarous consequences”. Yet nothing can be done about it because amending the constitution is all but impossible.
A written constitution would also hand “enormous political powers” to the courts. Lawyers would become politicised, with the power to interpret the constitution’s principles and overturn acts of parliament, no matter how strong the democratic mandate for the policy in question. In effect, these lawyers would be “answerable to no one”. The Polish constitutional court, for example, restricted the right to abortion, while the US Supreme Court expanded it and then shrunk it again. In each case, the constitution enabled taking a “major moral issue out of reach of democratic politics where it properly belonged”. Britain does not need this. We are a “mature political society”. Think of everything we’ve weathered over the past 300 years with our current system: the demise of the monarchy’s political power, the arrival of mass democracy, the onset of industrialisation, the acquisition and then loss of a worldwide empire, two world wars, devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, joining and then leaving the EU. Britain faces many problems today. Our lack of a written constitution is not one of them.
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Quoted
“Life isn’t all diamonds and rosé, but it should be.”
TV personality Lisa Vanderpump
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