This essay is based on Jacob Reynolds’s speech at Living Freedom Summer School last weekend, and examines how the severe pressure the establishment is under drives ever-more expansive attempts to maintain narrative control.

Jacob is convenor of The Academy – an intellectual retreat which, like Living Freedom, is an initiative of the charity Ideas Matter. Each year, The Academy takes a major intellectual theme and interrogates it through history, philosophy and literature. This year, the theme is the idea of the ‘Hollow Leviathan’: the feeling that the contemporary state and government is degenerating, less and less able to deliver basic goods, and more desperate to maintain control.

The Academy 2026 takes place at Wyboston Lakes, Bedfordshire, on Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 August. Early-bird discounts are available until Sunday 26 July. Get tickets here.

Narrative control: the collapsing authority of the state

Jacob Reynolds

Perhaps the central battleground of contemporary politics is the need of our political elites to control the narrative. Primarily, the role of establishment politicians is not to deliver changes and reforms, not to fix problems identified by people in their everyday lives, and not to change circumstances such that they can attract votes, but to maintain narrative hegemony.

Crucially, this differs from previous attempts to maintain ideological hegemony – that is, to win the societal ‘battle of ideas’ – because ideological warfare was always related to the real world. For example, Stalinism’s ideological success was demonstrated in defeating the Nazi industrial machine at its own game, capitalism defeated communism by offering unparalleled standards of living, social democracy was ideologically effective to the degree it demonstrated you could balance both the demands of organised labour with those of economic growth.

By contrast, the attempt at narrative hegemony treats the political realm purely in the domain of information management. This is a political class that has given up on shaping the world and instead looks to shape the narrative.

A variety of attempts to maintain control of the narrative

The news cycle is full of examples that demonstrate that contemporary elites are concerned, above all, with controlling the narrative. Three suffice.

First, there was the recent confirmation of a story which many people had assumed for a long time, although was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The British government has a special division, run out of Whitehall, called the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU). The job of RICU is to intervene with victims of potentially ‘racially inflammatory’ crimes and make sure that they ‘calm community tensions’. You could call this the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit – its job is to make sure that government, victims and the media all stick to a story which encourages people to avoid asking difficult questions.

This unit has been involved in creating media narratives in conjunction with the press, public campaigns like plastering London in posters following the 2017 London Bridge attack, and working with victims’ families (such as the families of Henry Nowak) to write their statements to the press. In all such cases, the RICU unit serves to further the interests of state multiculturalism, force-feeding the public with the message that ‘division’ and ‘demonisation’ are the primary issues, rather than government policies on migration and multiculturalism.

Second, the Department for Media Culture and Sport released a proposal with an almost innocent-sounding name: Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media.

It proposes a ‘prominence regime’ for ‘trustworthy’ news on social media and video-sharing platforms. It would make news from public service media plus other ‘trustworthy’ providers ‘prominent and easy to find’. It gives the example of national and local news publishers appearing near the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news, especially during ‘social unrest or crisis’.

The DCMS worries that online news is now heavily shaped by algorithms, that misinformation and echo chambers can worsen ‘polarisation, conflict and division’. The government will explore legislative options for a news-specific prominence regime on social media. The proposals explicitly raise whether this should be ‘ongoing and always on’ or only active in periods of crisis, and whether users should be allowed to switch it off.

A third example, which although I take from America is extremely relevant here, is the reaction to the brutal murder last year of Iryna Zarutska by Decarlos Brown Jr, a 14-time offender who was repeatedly set free by authorities under the influence of defund-the-police style racial-justice policing policies. Despite the case being an enormous sensation on social media, it took 18 days for the New York Times to comment. When it finally did, the article was a monstrosity of moral evasiveness. ‘A Gruesome Murder in North Carolina Ignites a Firestorm on the Right’, ran the headline, with the piece engaging in a bizarre detour to talk about the ‘egregiously exaggerated stories about Black criminality’ in the Jim Crow era.

The NYT was not alone in preferring to talk about the reaction to the attack rather than the attack itself. Elite barometer Politico went with ‘Ukrainian refugee killed in North Carolina gets dragged into political messaging war’, while Axios complained of ‘MAGA influencers seeking to elevate the issue of violent urban crime’. CNN, not to be outdone, produced this horrific example of the shiftiness of the passive voice: ‘How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing.’

Clearly, the regime media was concerned above all with ensuring that no one draw any political consequences from the stabbing, which had been going viral on social media for almost a whole week. The issue for these outlets, when it became impossible to simply ignore the issue, was to ensure that widespread concerns about urban criminality, ineffective justice policies and the withdrawal of law and order prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement did not get a hearing. Such concerns are merely ‘right-wing firestorms’ and part of a regrettable ‘political messaging war’.

A very similar logic was seen in the days following the murder of the French student Quentin Deranque earlier this year by Antifa thugs. He had been attending a demonstration organised by a group of young women, and had come along lest they face any trouble. This man was simply murdered in cold blood by a premediated attack of Antifa militants, who picked him out, followed him home, and ambushed him 12-to-1 before kicking him in the head until he was dead. The mainstream French media reported that a far-right activist had died after inciting a confrontation.

In these examples, I don’t even have to mention the explicit censorship systems which now rule the Western world, such as the Online Safety Act or the EU’s Digital Services Act.

What drives attempts at narrative control

What is driving this? Why such a desperate need to exercise total narrative control?

The key to this issue, is, in essence, the following schematic: the established political class are unable to reckon with the sources of their unpopularity, and must employ ever more comprehensive attempts to provide a foundation for their deeply unpopular rule, because they face total destruction. The stakes are existential for them.

One of the fundamental driving facts of contemporary politics is that the ideology of the ruling class is thoroughly discredited. The political pressure on the ruling class is, across the West, extreme. They face, if not electoral annihilation, then electoral defeats to populist forces who, until recently, would have been totally marginal.

But the response of the political mainstream does not include the possibility of introspection. While they might be capable of asking the question why they are unpopular, they are incapable of answering it with a hard look at themselves.

At the same time, this ruling class certainly feels itself under sustained pressure. To invoke the language of Marxism, they feel threatened not just as a government, but as a class. Their class position – their position as the dominant political and economic group in society – is under threat.

These two facts – the inability to look in the mirror and the dread they feel at the approach of a new order – give rise to a response which at the same time focuses their efforts on political messaging and licenses extreme measures. Put together, this sets the stage for some of the most profound and most desperate attempts to control speech that we know in mature democracies.

Because they cannot avail themselves of introspection, they must come up with a particular explanation to understand their unpopularity. They need, to borrow a term from philosophy, an ‘error theory’ – that is, a theory for why it is that their programme, policies and worldview face such opposition. If they are on all issues fundamentally correct, why do people not agree with them? What explains the errors that the populist masses make?

The explanation is, in the time-honoured fashion of anti-democrats since Plato, that the voting masses are not just wrong, but also misled. The masses do not really disagree with the experts, they just lack the skills and knowledge to perceive what the experts have already decided is the truth. The masses have been tricked – tricked by sophists, by propagandists, by the internet, by Elon Musk, by Russians, by populist charlatans. They have been fed a diet of propaganda, hoodwinked by adversarial algorithms, fallen prey to foreign misinformation.

Therefore, the most important task for the ruling class, anxious to solve the problem of the erroneous masses, is to ‘fix’ the narrative imbalance. The problem of political disagreement becomes a problem of political messaging. If the truth has already been decided, but people still don’t see the light, then we need special techniques for bringing the masses to see the truth. Controlling the narrative – arranging what can be seen, heard and said – becomes not an alternative to democracy but the better substantiation of its essence.

At the same time, the class interest of the establishment is keenly felt by them all. This is not merely a possible change of government afoot but a change of regime. We are not talking about different shades of the postwar consensus, but a desire to overturn it entirely. Given how much the stakes have been raised, the available tools have become proportionally more powerful. Things that would have never been conceivable before in democratic peacetime – dawn raids over private messages, the use of the world’s most powerful technologies to change the debate in real time, gagging orders on the press so powerful their existence cannot even be mentioned – have become fair game in the contemporary political contest.

These two features come together to mean that the establishment classes are thus both psychologically and personally motivated to establish ever more elaborate and intrusive schemes for controlling the narrative.

Three strategies of control

We can group these tactics together under three banners

A. Strategies of control

B. Strategies of deception

C. Strategies of delegitimisation

The strategies of control are perhaps the most obvious – the various forms of soft and hard censorship, regulation of the internet and other communications.

The strategies of deception are also quite straightforward to spot. We have already mentioned the ‘don’t look back in anger’ unit, but we should also note the government supply of industrial-grade misinformation. One examples is the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) modelling the impact of migration by using info on migration from 20 years ago, ignoring, for example, care workers who bring 15 dependents. Another is the refusal to publish crime statistics broken down by nationality and migration status. NGOs are also part of these strategies of deception.

But so far we have said less about the strategies of delegitimisation. The most obvious example here is the hysterical moral panic around ‘foreign disinformation’ and the attempt to turn all critics of the establishment into various versions of stooges of Vladimir Putin (or, more recently, of Donald Trump). It literally does not compute for the establishment to see mass discontent as the logical response to their despotic and failed policies, and so the possibility that this as all manipulated by Russia or funded by shady Trump-aligned forces is the only logical step.

Beyond controlling the narrative

This story – a story of a political class engaged in what is effectively an all-out war for survival – seems bleak enough. But it looks increasingly likely that as the narrative control efforts fail, they will intensify their work in more radical directions.

Indeed, the past few days gives us an indication into how Andy Burhnam – who is said to have a more ‘mature’ understanding of the problems of establishment politics – plans to deal with mass discontent. Burnham’s solution is to re-orient the Civil Service away from London. But the small print reveals this is less about devolution than a desire to make the Civil Service less responsive to any future Reform government: Politico reveals he aims to ‘rewire’ the Civil Service to head off Farage.

This is just one part of a playbook now well-established in continental Europe. Macron has led the continent in ‘future-proofing’ the state against populist adversaries: key political allies of President Macron are being appointed to the top of major French institutions like the courts, the national bank and the armed forces.

But in addition, British bureaucrats will be considering adopting the whole continental package: mobilisation of paid Antifa to attack political opponents, the use of lawfare against opponents such as banning and financial investigations, and the solidifying of the deep state.

Reasons for optimism

Despite this dark picture, we actually have reasons to be far more optimistic about what the future holds. Ultimately, the reason for all of the efforts at narrative control is that the establishment have already lost the ideological battle, and their desperate attempts stem from the anticipation that they are about to lose the political battle as well.

The reason they lost is twofold. On the one hand, the impact of their policies have become unavoidable. On the other hand, a tremendous rebellion has taken place among ordinary people, fuelled by the tenacious work of an insurgent ideological counterweight.

Their fear is the justified fear of the losing party. They are terrified because of the enormous cumulative work of the great populist revolt. Just as the night is darkest before dawn or the cornered animal is capable of great violence, the established order is, I think, on its last legs. This means we should be both watchful but also cautiously optimistic.

Ultimately, the reason for elite panic is the mass of popular discontent. It is this desire for something profoundly different that is the condition for all our efforts to overturn the narrative hegemony that we would otherwise be subject to.

Jacob Reynolds is convenor of The Academy, taking place on 22 & 23 August. Tickets and more here.

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No less important are developments in the world of culture. The summer school took place against a backdrop of demands that anti-Israel rappers Kneecap should be banned from playing Glastonbury. This week, as noted by Living Freedom speaker Rob Lyons, we have seen Jewish acts banished from Edinburgh festival. As discussed on the Arts First podcast, this is part of a growing trend for artists to experience antisemitism through cancellation. In the recently published Afraid to Speak Freely, campaigners Freedom in the Arts exposed the growing climate of fear, censorship, and ideological conformity in the arts.

Our summer school took place in a venue whose rich history includes its own artistic controversy that generated demands for censorship. 55 Broadway, the iconic Art Deco building at St James’s Park is currently awaiting redevelopment by Blue Orchid Hospitality. But almost a century ago, controversy was inflamed by the commission of two public sculptures, Day and Night, by Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), which challenged the then accepted boundaries of public art.

Today, intolerance and accompanying demands for censorship often revolve around issues of identity. But as the writer and curator Ella Nixon explained at Living Freedom, a century ago it was questions of morality and accompanying issues of aesthetic taste that so exercised opponents of these sculptures.

Today in the first of a series based on discussions at the summer school, we feature an adapted version of Ella’s talk. And we highly recommend you visit and subscribe to Ella’s Substack.

Alastair Donald, convenor, Living Freedom

Scandalous public sculpture in interwar London

Ella Nixon

Look up from the pavements of London and quite often your eyes will catch a work of art, hidden in public sight.

Nestled behind Green Park and rising atop the entranceway to St James’s Park tube station, the iconic Art Deco 55 Broadway building is no exception in this regard. Both its architecture and sculptural flourishes are paeans of modernist design. The building itself was constructed between 1927 and 1929 as the headquarters for Underground Electric Railways Company of London (now the London Underground). Architect Charles Holden (1875-1960) commissioned artists — including Henry Moore and Eric Gill — to produce eight sculptures that would sit at a high level to reference the ancient Greek Tower of the Winds in Athens. However, public attention focused on the work of Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), who had been commissioned to produce two additional sculptures to occupy a lower flank of the building. Day (1929) depicts a sinister patriarch surrounding a naked young boy, whilst Night (1929) portrays a dying son laid across a woman’s lap. The former of these two sculptures inflamed public controversy.

Why does contemporary art provoke controversy?

Contemporary implies the present, and the term ‘art’ implies value. Thus, contemporary art is a declaration about current standards of worth. Retrospective vision makes it much easier to identify which artworks pushed boundaries and became genre defining. Until then, disputes over what constitutes ‘art’ and ‘not art’ bubble under the feet of working artists.

Epstein was no stranger to controversy. Born in the US in 1880, he spent time in Paris before moving to London in 1907, where he settled and spent most of his life. In conventional histories of British art, his name is held in esteem similar to that of Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), two other prominent British sculptors. His renown is largely associated with the financial success eminent from his over one-hundred cast bronze busts, which populate public galleries across the country: for example, Esther (1930), on display at the nearby Tate Britain. Busts provided security, whilst his more avant-garde ideas were tested in carved public sculptures.

Day and Night (1929) were unveiled in 1929 to an audience that found the sculptures so shocking that a campaign ensued to have them removed. To modern eyes, why might this be the case?

Most glaring when looking at Day is the flagrant exposure of male genitalia. Nudity in art has always invited censorious eyes. Think to classical sculptures of men and women, whose pudenda are oftentimes concealed by delicately placed carved leaves. Not long before the Broadway House commission, Epstein had already sparked controversy in 1907 for creating 18 nude sculptures for what was the British Medical Association Building (BMA) on the Strand (now Zimbabwe House). Commissioned to pay homage to the great men of medicine, Epstein instead installed large naked figures in a public space. The South London Press reported on 26 June 1908:

Father Vaughan, referring to the figures on the front of the British Medical Association's offices in the Strand, said he was sorry to say there were those who advocated the erection of certain statuary which would desecrate public buildings in the highways.

They were all entitled to hold their own opinions about the nude in art, but let them keep the nude in its proper place, where it would not appeal to the more vicious in human nature.

Let them keep such statuary in their art galleries and museums, or where people had to go out of their way to find it.

Like the BMA commissions, the public display of nudity represented on 55 Broadway invited criticism. However, Day hit another nerve altogether due to accusations of paedophilic imagery, in that a naked boy stands at the lap of an adult figure.

Indictments of immorality quickly followed its unveiling. A contemporary commentator, the classical archaeologist Percy Gardner, felt that the sculptures lacked ‘morality’. Some senior London Underground staff even resigned in protest. These reactions can be interpreted in light of the social role attributed to public sculpture. For Charles Jagger (1885-1934) — another recipient of public commissions across London, including the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner (1921) —sculpture had a definite social role in that it portrayed ‘the peoples, customs and great achievements of its time’. In this context, what message did Day convey?

It’s clear that some members of the public found the sculpture an insult. Many criticisms concerned the length of the boy’s genitalia, leading Epstein to shorten the penis by an inch. By most accounts, this slight adjustment calmed the public furore. Specifics aside, for Epstein the depiction of nudity was a means to reach a universal truth. Primitive figures represented mankind in noble and heroic form. Study in Paris in the 1900s had sparked his appreciation of Indian and West African art traditions – penned ‘primitive’ and seen in the work of Picasso. His move to London in 1907 saw him develop an active interest in the antiquities at the British Museum, especially the African, Greek and Ancient Egyptian galleries.

Epstein found beauty in so-called primitive sculpture, whilst some critics expressed outrage at their perceived ugliness. For such critics, these issues spanned wider than purely aesthetic taste and formal qualities. The hegemony of Greco-Roman tradition — a line that had descended over centuries from the Italian Renaissance, including its ideal standards of proportion and beauty — had been directly attacked and corroded by his non-European influences, in what constituted an insult to Western culture. On display in a public place, the sculptures thereby raise questions about the political repercussions of artistic taste.

Conflictual opinions over the sculptures represent different stakeholders, each with set ideas about which artistic standards to aspire towards. These debates continue into the present day, and can be seen played out in discussions pertaining to architecture and the programming and acquisition strategies of public galleries. Endorsed by state funds, key stakeholders ultimately elevate some artistic standards over others, and thereby feed notions of value to the envisaged public.

One prominent example of how these processes play out at the governmental level was the appointment and subsequent sacking of the philosopher Roger Scruton (1944-2020) as the chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission in the UK (2019-2020). His conservative writings provide insight into how so-called ‘ugly’ public art might be judged as immoral. Scruton believed that modern architecture – its architectural ornaments and sculptural flourishes – expresses the modern city’s godlessness. Aside from the so-called ‘immoral’ imagery, Scruton believed in Western or classical models of beauty. Thus, a major responsibility is attributed to public sculpture: moral civic life and public life go hand-in-hand to imbue harmony into its subjects.

Defendants would explain Day in the context of Epstein’s wider oeuvre. Namely, a pursuit towards universal truth via the themes and subjects of nudity, maternity/paternity, primitivism and allegory. Thus, these primitive influences frame nudity as a natural element, rather than a political ugliness. Is censorship and vehement criticism the price that one has to pay for veering away from traditional European iconography? Alternatively, perhaps Epstein was another white man profiteering from the ‘Otherness’ of so-called ‘primitive’ societies.

After all, Night and Day have clear non-Western elements in their design. Simple in form, the square-shouldered and flattened adult figures of both sculptures recall and liberally fuse elements from ancient Assyria, Polynesia and Egypt. One contemporary protest was by the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie, who argued that the ‘mock simplicity’ of the work was a ‘fad’ of fashion and not in-keeping with ‘the natural beauty of England’. Petrie's words echoed the racist and nationalist attacks Epstein – as a Jewish American émigré – received in his career, which penned his work as alien to Britain and un-English.

Nevertheless, to Western eyes, this depiction – a longing look of the child and exposed genitalia – certainly continues to shock. Epstein was considered ‘avant-garde’ at the time for his pioneering primitivist language. Famously, avant-garde artists were the ones pushing the conventions – the artists excluded from the official Salon in Paris, the economically hopeless Romantics strewn from accepted society – but Epstein was different. Avant-garde yet institutionalised, many of his works feature across the city, on both the street and behind gallery doors. Perhaps this combination of shocking imagery and its institutionalisation were limits pushed too far.

Wherever you stand on the debate, it is astonishing to reflect that most people now wander past the sculpture, blatantly unaware of its controversy. Contemporary art quickly becomes old news, and the shock of the new erodes much quicker than the Portland stone with which it is carved.

Ella Nixon is an art historian, curator and writer. She has written for various publications including the Critic, the ArtReview and The European Conservative.

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