If We Tolerate This, by Daniel Trilling

On Monday, the Dr and I had a day trip to Oxford. She went to the new Aphrodite exhibition at the Ashmoleon, and I spent an afternoon in a university library reading a 60 year-old pamphlet for a thing I am writing. On the way there and back, we listened to Rory Kinnear reading this short book which seems to have two subtitles: "How the British establishment made the far right respectable" and, "The rise of the far right and what we can do to stop it."

As Trilling argues, what were at the time of the 2010 general election considered rather fringe, extreme views, on immigration especially, have since shifted into the mainstream. He charts why and how, threading together austerity, neoliberalism, unregulated social media and political opportunism more generally. 

Along the way, he asks key questions, such as why there was a sudden surge in the numbers of immigrants attempting to reach the UK by small boats after January 2021, aka the "Boriswave." But he does more than just ask questions; he does his best to provide the answers, too. In answering this question, for example, he explains why efforts by governments both blue and red have struggled to meet their own targets to reduce such numbers (and why such targets were a hostage to fortune anyway). 

It's at once a depressing read and yet also empowering, in part by making sense of the apparent chaos and in part because he identifies a number of positive ways forward. Concise, cogent and pragmatically optimistic, it's a good primer on what the heck is going on, and what we can and should do next.

I'd been keen to read this since meeting author Daniel Trilling at the Festival of Ideas in York earlier this year, where we were both speaking - on YouTube, you can watch him on the panel "Democracy on trial: the promise of democracy" and my talk on writers David Whitaker and Terrance Dicks. But I knew Daniel's work already, not least his brilliant piece on Alexander Baron for the LRB (in case of interest, I've previously written here on Baron's memoir Chapters of Accidents and novel The Lowlife.)