COVID-19 brought to light an unacknowledged but widely recognised truth – the Western model of government is incompetent and unwilling to look beyond a limited ideological window. “The dreadful fact which has burst, uninvited, into the salons of right-minded discourse, shattering the Overton window. It’s the fact that failure in the face of COVID-19 was bipartisan. It was universal. It was unanimous. The so-called ‘Trump administration’ failed. The media-industrial complex failed. The conservative media apparatus, its purported counterweight, has likewise failed. The FDA: failed. The experts, failed. The circus of American politics? Failed. And the apparatus behind it, which does the alleged work of governance, has also failed. That ‘the whole machine has failed’ is irrefutable reality”[1].

The British state is in the grip of a tangled web of sectoral interests and ideological contestation within its technocracy. “Tensions have emerged between a liberal, managerialist civil service and a series of governments with a populist veneer in their legislative programmes”[1]. Inaction is winning out in these battles, as the stalemates over immigration, policing and economic policy show. The UK is homeostatic, its governing class content to rule over stagnation and mediocrity.

Accusations of bullying would be attendant on serious misconduct, relating to personal insults and harassment, persistent acts of demonstrable aggression and potential physical threats. Unless you’re an unpopular or controversial government minister, in which case bullying equates to being terse and impatient, demanding work be done on time and, at its most serious, raising your hand to interrupt someone speaking. Such are the conclusions of Adam Tolley’s investigation into the Dominic Raab bullying claims. And at the end of it, Raab wasn’t a bully. He was rude, and the action of suggesting that a civil servant may have broken the Civil Service Code was interpreted as a threatening action (although this wasn’t the intention).

The title may be hyperbolic, and there is no doubt that very few in the UK experience anything like the poverty of developing countries, but its existing governance and political structures present a key form of third worldism: a byzantine, fragmented set of actors and institutions competing against each other and creating self-referential rules and procedures. Modern Britain is an archipelago of disparate bureaucracies and levels. Infrastructure projects and economic planning must now be strained through a variety of organisations, from local enterprise partnerships and council plenaries to planning bodies, representative organisations, lobby groups and charities.

The successor ideology, or the new orthodoxy, represents an evolution of liberalism rather than its replacement[1]. What then contests it must understand this evolutionary nature, recognising that the fruits of the new orthodoxy grew from the liberal tree. Sullivan identifies moral clarity as the clarion call of this movement[2]. This means the removal of objectivity or neutrality as values of a governing consensus, instead characterising nations or the Western ethico-legal order as intrinsically racist and subjective. Sullivan thereby reveals the flaw of his argument, that the liberal order was genuinely objective, whether in its governing apparatuses or in its media complexes.

The character of what is called progress contains a deep irony. In the flavour of dramatic irony, we as an audience can seemingly see ahead of our expert narrators, yet the play goes on as we are told that, no, everything is going according to plan. In fields as diverse as ecology, agronomy, economics or medicine there is a disconnect between what is witnessed and what is accepted. These fields are increasingly side-lined in developed economies which are dominated by their service and administrative sectors[1]/tasks[2], creating a loss of knowledge.

Enclosure, beyond its historical specificities as a means of enclosing common land, has a wider implication of enclosing autonomy itself in various forms. “The enclosure of common land ran alongside the decline of communal systems of agriculture and the marginalisation of other forms of communal entitlement”[1]. The specific aspect of the community is the maintained functioning of established lifeways and relations between groups/classes. Enclosure in a wider sense is the closing off of means of independence, in the form of freehold land, unclaimed commons or specific relations that entail duties between groups. Through a combination of structural imperatives and negotiated choices both rapid and extended declines of established modes of existence are curtailed and destroyed in favour of new methods and relations which close off autonomy.

A “peculiar species of authoritarian utopianism sweeping through the ruling institutions of American life, which I have termed ‘the Successor Ideology’”[1] is emergent in liberal democracies throughout the West. In various forms of identity politics, culture wars, NGO complexes[2] and institutional capture, a sociocultural logic is nascent, struggling to fully form into a coherent multiplicity of organisational and political structures. Through Rudi Dutschke’s formulation of a long march through the institutions, the successor ideology represents a bridge between systems of liberal government and neoliberal business practice and a metastatic superstructure of cultural revolution.

Metropolitics as a phenomenon is a convergence of various trends and forces: international urbanisation and the development of a vast precariat class between and within cities; the growth of telepresence technologies and vast networks centred around social media and cloud computing; international security architectures like the Five Eyes as well as private surveillance structures; the logistical revolution; and cosmopolitan culture as a growing element in socio-political cultures i.e. the development of a post-national ethic.

“Metropolitics, a rootless, placeless and increasingly timeless politics concerned with the dissolution of barriers to speed”[1]. Virilio describes a new mode of politics within the modern city as a post-Leviathan beyond the space of the nation-state. Metropolitics is a politics in the tradition of the friend-enemy distinction, yet its enemy is abstract. Barriers to speed constitute its primary locus of action, being the means through which these are sped up or eliminated altogether.