A short book for optimists: Lord Waldegrave reviews 'Avoiding the Coming Anarchy'
March 2025: Commonwealth Day | Image by: Eleventh Hour Photography / Alamy Stock Photo
3 min read
With its astute reflections on the politics of the digital age, soft power and the Commonwealth, read this book by Lord Howell, one of our most determinedly forward thinkers
David Howell is one of those rare politicians who, notwithstanding very long service in Parliament – from 1966 until today and still counting – and alongside a successful ministerial career in a range of departments of state, will be remembered long after the majority of his ministerial and parliamentary colleagues have been forgotten. The reason is that all his life he has dealt in ideas, and a great many of those ideas have helped to shape the world in which other, less cerebral and sometimes more famous politicians, have lived and found their being.
Right back to his early days in the 1960s steering the Conservative Political Centre and midwifing a series of outstanding pamphlets, to which he also contributed, he used both clarity of expression and his first class Cambridge economics mind (and in those days only 10 per cent won firsts as opposed to the 30 per cent today) to help create the economic and social policy of Edward Heath mark one and Margaret Thatcher in the early 80s. He explained how humane capitalism could work at a time when collectivist thinking ruled the roost. Many others claimed and indeed got the credit, but he was nearly aways there first.
All his life he has dealt in ideas
In recent years, he has again been ahead of most in the Whitehall bubble in realising how profoundly the second great industrial revolution – that of the microchip and the internet – has changed everything. This book brings together some of his more recent articles and updates them further. He shows how 25 years ago he warned that a new “networked politics” had arrived and made obsolete the old ways of doing things: movements, crowds, literal and figurative, could be assembled without leaders all over a nation and beyond – such as the gilets jaunes in France. He predicted ahead of the rest of us how social media would help to create the sweeping movements of the kind on which Donald Trump has surfed into quasi-dictatorial power in America.
But Howell is an optimist. The same networks which create an overextended but weakened state, and make it vulnerable, can also save the enlightenment values on which he rightly wants us to stand. And at the centre of one of the greatest – the Commonwealth – lies the UK. We can gather allies for the light just as well as the dark side can gather its adherents. Before Trump forced it on us, Howell was and is saying we can find our place in what he calls the “neo-non-aligned” who don’t want to march to Uncle Sam’s drumbeat.
Oh, and he knows more about how to run a sensible energy policy than anyone else I know. In a few years people will be saying, as often, “Why didn’t we listen to David Howell? Why have the lights gone out?”
Read the book. Argue with it. Think about it. And applaud one of the most determinedly forward looking of our political and economic thinkers, still going strong in his ninth decade.
Lord Waldegrave is a Conservative peer
Avoiding the Coming Anarchy: A short book for optimists in dangerous times
By: David Howell
Publisher: Nomad Publishing
