The silly season is upon us, that time of year when the news agenda slows and serious reportage finds itself usurped by tales of crop circles and shark-infested waters off Cornwall.
Yet this summer the most absurd storyline has taken place not on the country's news pages or broadcast bulletins, but via social media, where a number of young Jeremy Corbyn supporters have spent the last week revealing – or boasting of – their sympathy for communism.
Their sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit support for a totalitarian system responsible for such a vast amount of human suffering rests on all manner of sophistry and indulgent student-union-style musings. But it has served one purpose – to remind us of the extremist sentiment lingering behind the current Labour leadership, a fact that is amplified by the party's shameful inability to settle on an accepted working definition of antisemitism.
Such ugliness is by no means restricted to the left, of course. An alarming poll published on Sunday revealed that nearly one in four voters would be prepared to support a (theoretical) party with far-right policies. Similar surveys across the Channel show the populist right enjoying strong support in several large EU countries.
Away from the polls, a more immediate threat to liberalism and modern-era capitalism comes from US President Donald Trump, whose belligerent and economically-illiterate campaign to discredit international trade agreements poses an increasingly serious threat to global growth.
To gauge the gravity of this situation, we must remember the tangible human benefits derived from economic growth. GDP figures, presented either as percentages or in dollar terms, often seem dry, business-like, and removed from the realities of everyday life. Thus it is worth considering other data, such as those from Oxford University researcher Max Roser, who charts how life expectancy has increased by an average of 9.5 hours every single day since 1950; how 137,000 people escaped extreme poverty every day since 1990; how, over the same timespan, and extra 305,000 people gained access to safe drinking water every day, and how 620,000 people per day accessed the internet for the first time.
The more one observes the political situation in Britain, elsewhere in Europe, and across the Atlantic, the more one senses that the tenets of liberal democracy and free trade are under threat from every direction. Nonetheless, supporters of these principles are still in the majority, and it is vital we make the case for them as loudly as ever – even in the quiet depths of a sweltering summer.
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