The UK government’s new asylum and immigration rules are the antithesis of everything Labour is supposed to represent, Neil Mackay argues. By rejecting their core values, the party dooms itself to destruction

Tragedy's defining characteristic is neatly expressed in the epilogue of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

“Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, and burned is Apollo’s laurel bough that sometime grew within this learned man. Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall.”

Marlowe is saying that Faustus fashioned his own fate by rejecting his essential self. That’s the heart of tragedy: to move so far from what you once were that you become unrecognisable even to yourself.

Faustus journeys from brilliant scholar to corrupt narcissist. In Macbeth, the loyal general becomes the king-killing war criminal. Faustus and Macbeth - like all great tragic figures - come to a sticky end because they deliberately killed off their own better angels.

There’s something especially horrifying to the human mind about a decent person wilfully smothering all that’s good within them just to achieve some petty ambition.

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We become a husk; we travel so far from our true self that we cease to be ourselves any longer. We’re disfigured by our own hand.

Tragedy, then, is based on self-destruction. For a story, or life, to be tragic, the central character must engage actively in their demise.

It’s the act of mutilating your own morality - your own ideals and values - which contains the germ of tragedy.

If

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