Labour and benefits: a regressive policy

In the last few days, Labour has begun to clarify its policy on benefits.  It’s far from encouraging.  There is still little to suggest that the party has not broken out of its dangerous tendency of allowing the Tories and their media to set the agenda, and the implications of its  announcements are that many of those on benefits will be hit much harder than even the current Coalition has managed.

The fundamental problem lies in the benefit cap, and how it will be applied.  Labour has announced that it will continue to cap benefit spending, and will include state pensions.  Tories reacted with surprise and no little glee to this, arguing that this provided evidence that Labour was in effect promising to cut pensions in real terms, affecting millions of the very people who are most likely to turn out to vote at election time. Not so, retorted Balls: while pensions – which account for more than 45% of DWP spending – would be included in the cap, the so-called triple lock – under which pensions are indexed against earnings, inflation or 2.5%, whichever is the greater – would remain.

The implications of this are obvious.  Retaining the triple-lock inside a capped benefits total will mean that other benefits will be squeezed disproportionately.  While the case for protecting pensioners remains overwhelming, for as long as the cap is in place other benefits will be subject to swingeing cuts – potentially significantly more than even the Coalition is making now.  Moreover, with Balls determined to keep Osborne’s wider cuts in place, it is unlikely that there will be a significant fall in unemployment or much progress on tax revenues, without very significant tax rises (or a serious and sustained assault on tax evasion, something that the entire Westminster establishment seems reluctant to countenance).  The effect of this cap – above all on in-work benefits and those dependent on housing benefit – will be devastating for individuals and collectively damaging to the economy.

It’s all evidence that Labour continues to be locked into a narrative on benefits dictated largely by the Tories and the media – one that is framed in terms of a Victorian language of workshyness, sanction and scrounging.  The effect is that Labour appears to be quite happy to endorse an approach to benefits that will punish the most needy, because it is afraid to be seen to be “weak” – and at the same time is helping to chip away at the universal principle.  Labour’s obsession with sanction rather than entitlement – so often expressed by Liam Byrne – is evidence of a similar refusal to take hold of the initiative.

The New Economics Foundation has today published a critique of Ed Miliband’s recent speech on welfare which shows that, despite his conscious attempt to distance Labour from Cameron’s “strivers versus strikers” rhetoric, Labour remains trapped in a mindset that draws on the myths that Tories want to propagate – about generations of the workless, benefits and idleness and social spending going mainly on the unemployed.  It is a narrative that simply cannot recognise that real wages are falling sharply, and that this is a major contributory factor to what is clearly no ordinary cyclical recession but a deep economic slump.  Other than the vague generalisations of “predistribution”, which looks increasingly like a rationalisation for the state throwing in the towel and admitting its reluctance to do anything about distribution, Labour has nothing to say about the problem of low and falling real pay – which of course is exacerbated by cuts in in-work benefits.

There is a desperate need for courageous, radical thinking on benefits and pay, which in turn means asking fundamental question about the balance of rewards in society between capital and labour – in recent years shifting powerfully in the direction of the former – and about social cohesion and solidarity, to produce a society that is characterised by generosity rather than the atomised, destructive, fear-driven meanness of Coalition Britain. Recent pronouncements suggest Labour is not remotely close to that territory.

Greens and power: the importance of theory

There has recently been a small media storm over a question in the Eton scholarship exam, in which 13-year-old boys were asked to imagine they were prime minister and to write a speech justifying the shooting of protesters.  The best response I’ve seen to this was by Chris Dillow on his Stumbling and Mumbling blog, in which he points out that it shows that Eton had a far better grip on the realities of power than those on the left criticising the question.  Power, he argued, is a problem for the Left.  And I think he’s absolutely right.

It reminds me of what my father always used to say about why Communists routinely got elected to office in his union, the NGA. Not because the nation’s printers were Marxist-Leninists, but because everybody knew that the Communists were the best negotiators. Confidence in their theory and a belief that capitalism was inevitably failing, added to disdain for the Public School arrogance and intellectual laziness of British management of the era, gave them a confidence that meant they negotiated without fear.

Management has of course changed.  It’s become more subtle and more pervasive and has a body of theory of its own. Dillow quotes The Jam – “what chance have you got against a tie and a crest?” – but it’s more subtle and sinister; a matter of firsts in PPE, sharp suits, MBAs, management theory and a whole host of ideologically-loaded guidance on human resource management (the term itself, Human Resources, being a perhaps unconscious throwback to the age when factory workers were dehumanised as “the hands”).  There is now a substantial, thriving body of theory  to be deployed by HR departments, couched in a language that conceals the essential purpose – how to get more out of people while paying them as little – and ignoring their rights as far – as they can get away with.  Much of that theory uses psychological narratives that seek to give the appearance of scientific respectability, but which are themselves deeply ideological. Describing HR departments as the advance guard of market capitalism sounds ludicrous and bathetic, until you consider what they actually say and do (when I was a civil servant, it was a standard joke that HR departments were largely staffed by people who couldn’t hack policy jobs – largely because a sharp nose for the sort of unevidenced bullshit that was the stock-in-trade of Government HR departments was one of the basic requirements for doing policy work – although with a qualification I discuss below).

And that’s just a microcosm of the whole range of assumptions deployed by those in power.  You see it in the way economists and foreign policy “experts” use technocratic language to dress up political consensus often based on the flimsiest of ideological assumptions; economics is a prime example, being ultimately based on a series of axioms about behaviour which in the real world are frequently contradicted.  But they are resonant, and have power; and establishments – financial, political, bureaucratic, media – unite around them.  We are told that Greece and Italy have “technocratic” governments; this is a euphemism for governments pushing extreme neoliberal programmes outside the jurisdiction of democratic control.

It is therefore obvious that if you are an elected politician seeking to effect real change, you have to challenge those assumptions.  If you are in office, the work of the officials who advise you and implement your policy will be shot through with those assumptions – they are the basis on which permanent bureaucracies select their senior membership.  Evidence-based policy-making in state bureaucracies can often be about moulding evidence in the service of ideology, rather than challenging it; a sort of collective intellectual heading-off-at-the-pass.  And you must not be seduced by the accoutrements of power – whether you are Ramsay Macdonald speculating that every Duchess in London will want to kiss him, or New Labour with its culture of self-abasement in the presence of corporate power and wealth, or One Nation Labour seeking to avoid asking any of the awkward economic questions.  Your whole philosophy of Government will be based on challenge – which quite obviously is not the same thing as bullying or ignoring officials, because (writing as someone who worked in both Whitehall for two decades, some of that time on European Commission projects) officials respond to challenge and strong political leadership (while reflecting that conventional notions of “leadership” are themselves deeply ideological).

All of this is a problem for a Party like the Green Party, which opposes existing power structures but finds itself engaged in electoral politics which, if successful to any degree, means that it will find itself managing those structures and seeking to implement its vision through them.  I’ve recently been re-reading Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism, so the thought of how Labour was seduced by a Parliamentary system whose essential purpose was to maintain the power and authority of the ruling classes is fresh in my mind (not just on the Right – there’s a fabulous irony in the way in which Tony Benn – the nearest thing the left has to a national treasure – used to base so much of his politics on the grounds of Parliamentary sovereignty) .  One of the interesting points was that of a party focussed almost exclusively on parliamentary action – and condemnatory of extra-parliamentary action – was undone in part by the way in which the establishment managed to organise its own extra-parliamentary networks like the media in opposition to elected Governments.  It’s a sad but telling fact that the real spade-work of neoliberalism has often been done by parties of the Centre Left – New Labour in Britain, Roger Douglas’ Labour Party in New Zealand – who, partly influenced by what have been presented as crises, have found themselves backed into positions where they do not have the political resources to challenge existing structures and being forced into compromises with “realism”  - usually defined with reference to the ideological positions of the Right.  It’s part of the genius of neoliberalism, and bolsters its claim that issues of economics and distribution are in principle above democratic scrutiny. With Labour having relinquished any pretension to socialism or radical change, its successors on the Left need to draw on those lessons and to understand the need to take on the value-systems of neoliberalism on the broadest possible front.

It implies that a rising political party of the left has to develop a strategy for dealing with power – a task that’s more urgent now when the ideology of reaction is more explicit and more pervasive than it has been in the past.  It needs a narrative that can challenge “realism” with evidence and build democratic consensus around that narrative, which means understanding the nature of the beast it is opposing and exposing the values of the beast, rather than accommodating them.  It also needs a special kind of discipline – not the discipline of the party whip and the witch-hunt but a rigorous understanding of how any lack of unity will be exploited by your opponents, and to develop truly democratic structures that represent that.

And that is very different from taking on the establishment at its own game.  This is a dangerous delusion above all for Greens, who want to argue for a new form of politics.  It’s not about behaving like the establishment, but about understanding it and developing the intellectual and organisational confidence to take it on.  The challenge, once you achieve elected office, is to keep a firm grip on whatever power you have, and to be able to challenge the bureaucracy and its ready made assumptions.  You never, ever relinquish that power to officers or officials.  Margaret Thatcher was dead right when she said that advisers advise and Ministers decide; but then Thatcher was someone who used power with deftness and skill. You do not need to share her values or approve of her methods to understand how much of her political ascendancy lay in her grasp of this fact.

Technocrats do not change the world.  Greens believe that changing the world – and building sustainable systems – is not just desirable, but an absolute imperative if our planet is to survive.  If we are going to do that, we need to have a strategy and a language for speaking to power with authority and confidence, which means understanding that.  And none of this is easy – which is why it’s desperately important for radicals to do the theoretical spadework. The rest, as they say, is managerialism.

Brighton politics latest: a failed Green coup and a big Labour headache

It’s been a day of extraordinary developments in the ongoing saga of Brighton’s minority Green administration and the fallout from the city’s pay modernisation debate.  Today saw the Council’s Annual Meeting at which the Leader and Mayor are elected – an occasion more notable for its formality than controversy.  Not today.

The big event has been Labour breaking the news that a substantial number of Green councillors had apparently been involved (or at least complicit) in soliciting Labour votes to topple the current Council Leader and convenor of the Green Group, Jason Kitcat.  Labour’s press notice includes a screenshot of an exchange Twitter direct messages between Green Cllr Alex Phillips and the newly-elected Labour Group leader, Cllr Warren Morgan, in which Cllr Phillips appears to be asking whether Labour would support the candidacy of Cllr Phelim McCafferty – and indeed be prepared to nominate him for the leadership.  Predictably Labour refused to muddy their hands with such things and are now arguing that this shows that the Green Group are hopelessly divided and incapable of leading the city.

At one level, you have to see their point.  I do not know any of the background to what has happened, but if you take it at face value (and that Twitter exchange suggests that one must), then, leaving aside questions of loyalty and honesty, it was above all an extraordinarily stupid thing to do. It is no secret that the Green Party is deeply divided over the administration’s decision (not Cllr Kitcat’s alone, incidentally) to hand over responsibility for the pay modernisation to officers.  I’ve argued before that it was a dreadful error of judgement and I know that many others far more active in the Green Party than I am share that view.

But seriously to expect that leaders of other parties would be willing to help the Green Group out of the hole it has dug for itself just beggars belief.  Labour’s interest obviously lies in keeping the Brighton Green Party in office, in a minority, and divided – especially with the higher task of reclaiming Brighton Pavilion for the Westminster consensus in mind.  Moreover, what sort of legitimacy would a Green council leader dependent on other parties’ votes for office have, especially when Jason Kitcat has just been re-elected unopposed as Green Group convenor?  Did they really think that this would lead to a situation in which the party – let alone the Green Group – would be more united and able to campaign more effectively? That the divisions would just go away with a new leader in place?

Moreover, did they really think that they could trust Labour?  Those of us with long Brighton memories know that Brighton Labour has traditionally had the political decorum and moral fastidiousness of a gang of rats fighting over a discarded piece of burger in a Preston Street sewer.  Making the approach on Twitter compounds the error – even by DM in confidence.  When I was a Civil Servant, a very wise senior colleague promoted the rule of thumb that you should never write anything in an internal email you would not prepare to have read out in court – a principle that could equally apply to politicians and Twitter.  The Brighton Green Party is full of ex-Labour members; there’s no excuse for not knowing your opponent, and it is difficult to see the Twitter exchange as anything other than astonishingly naive.

However, Labour does not emerge well from this, and may in the long run be the bigger loser.  That Twitter screenshot is something that may come to haunt Warren Morgan.  After all, Alex Phillips made it clear that the exchange was meant to be confidential.  Now I think that the Green Group has made some  errors of judgement, but nobody has ever suggested that Jason Kitcat is anything other than a man of complete personal integrity. Personal conduct matters and Cllr Morgan’s publication of that confidential Twitter exchange will inevitably raise questions about trust and betrayal of confidence. It’s one thing to campaign vigorously – as leader of Brighton and Hove’s third party that’s his job – but there is a sense here of lines being crossed.  I think the public interest defence some Labour people have deployed looks very much like a post-hoc rationalisation of some distinctly shabby behaviour. My guess is that people won’t forget that  and that he’s done himself personally no favours.

More interesting is the way in which this plays against the background of the pay modernisation.  There have been some fairly caustic tweets from the @gmbcityclean account this evening, representing the view of Cityclean workers threatened by the loss of allowances, arguing that Cllr Morgan has botched an attempt to get rid of Cllr Kitcat, who is apparently seen as the enemy (these are the same workers who gave Caroline Lucas such a rousing reception when she visited their depot).  I don’t think that’s necessarily true, as I don’t think the politics would ever have happened, but there is clearly tension there.

And there is history.  The Cityclean workers are members of the GMB – the union that at one stage was seeking the banning of the Blairite Progress Group from the Labour Party.  Cllr Morgan is a prominent supporter of Progress and at one stage ran for executive office.  It is a commonplace in some circles to describe the local GMB as the industrial wing of Brighton Labour, but given Cllr Morgan’s alignment with what one might call Labour’s Dodgy Dossier tendency one wonders whether this exchange was the result of  deeper tensions between Party and Union.  Who do council staff threatened with loss of income really trust to defend their interests – their unequivocally anti-austerity MP or Labour’s Blairite group leader?  While Caroline Lucas has provided almost a lone voice in Parliament against austerity, Cllr Morgan remains aligned with a group that is undermining even Ed Miliband’s lukewarm will to challenge austerity economics.

Despite everything I’ve written above, I haven’t written off the Green administration.  If the Green Group, led by Jason Kitcat as the duly elected Convenor, can regain the political initiative over the pay modernisation and take political responsibility for finding a detriment-free solution, the situation in Brighton will change. But today’s events leave Labour exposed.  Most of all – while Caroline Lucas continues to blaze a trail against austerity in Parliament, it is Labour and its explicitly Blairite local leadership that will be answering the awkward questions come 2015.

Brighton’s Green administration – lessons from the rise and fall of mango politics?

To understand the enormity of what has been going on in Brighton Green politics, try explaining it to an intelligent, Leftish, non-Brighton colleague who can stand back from the issues.  An administration elected on a mandate of minimising the effect of Coalition cuts, proudly working towards a living wage in a city with some of the highest living costs in Britain – which then, apparently in the name of equality and fairness, delegates decisions on equalising allowances that  could lead to substantial cuts in the living standards of some of the city’s lowest paid workers to officers, with apparently no political control over the final decisions. At the same time, local Green MP Caroline Lucas remains – along with Plaid Cymru and a few dissident Labour MPs – just about the only Parliamentarian making a sustained and cogent attack on austerity economics, and has said that she will join the picket if there is industrial action over the pay cuts. Not for the first time, the only Green MP in Britain finds herself shovelling up the ordure left by apparently inexplicable decisions by the only Green-led council in Britain and has shown that she can judge the public mood in Brighton rather better than the Green administration.  And the local Green Party, at a well-attended Emergency General Meeting, has voted decisively for a motion committing itself to campaign against pay cuts - a motion in whose support Caroline Lucas spoke forcefully and passionately.

Moreover, it runs the risk of revitalisng the Labour Party.  For two years, Labour, still smarting from its displacement as the natural home of progressive Brighton, has failed to land a single substantial punch on the Green Party.  Indeed, its 2012 Budget vote to back a council tax freeze at the expense of services remains one of Brighton politics’ more spectacular own goals; and its national policy to retain coalition cuts and possibly make more of its own has damaged its credibility further.  Faced with its inability to provide a credible policy alternative it has tried to portray the Green administration as a gang of amiable incompetents not cut out for big boys’ politics – a dubious proposition, not just in the face of memories of Labour in office (the botched attempt to create an executive mayor; or the farcical attempt to rebrand North Street as Ocean Boulevard, and Labour’s petulant response when people laughed) but in the face of some impressive Green achievements like the living wage and the ability of the council to lure new money to the city for big transport and public realm improvements (or perhaps in the face of the suspicion that “big boys’ politics” means the sort of municipal Stalinism for which Brighton Labour was once notorious).  But in the last year the Green administration’s record has begun to render Labour’s threadbare narrative credible – with the current split in the Green Party, the public admission that quite a lot of the Green council group has been out of the loop on key decisions, and the epic farce of the Seven Dials Elm Tree (a Green-led council threatening to fell an ancient and rare elm, the Green MP standing underneath it denouncing the decision and two Green activists camped in the branches of the tree).

Now of course it isn’t quite as simple as that – there is of course a lot of history and nuance behind the pay modernisation story, not least the political negligence by previous administrations (especially the previous Tory one, which appears to have failed to take forward the work that Labour in office started before 2007).  But there’s that extraordinary decision to surrender political control over the process; as my colleague pointed out, put it like that and you have what looks like the only political leadership left anywhere that has Nick Clegg as its role model.  It’s an intriguing thought: lefty Greens like to portray themselves as watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside.  Could this be mango politics, green on the outside but orange in the middle?

It’s very simple.  Talking about fairness on the one hand while abdicating responsibility for threatening some of Brighton’s lowest-paid workers with a pay cut of £97 per week makes you look like a Liberal Democrat.  Greens shouldn’t be in that game.

You could argue that this is an unfair caricature – although it’s one that is fairly current in Brighton and Hove right now – but the point is that there have to be important lessons to be learned from the Brighton pay debacle.

The first is quite simple – never, ever, abandon political responsibility for important decisions.  Arguments that issues like this should have the politics taken out of them are simply wrong. Issues of pay and rewards are political to their core – and it is astonishing that a Council group apparently of the left could make this error.  Yes, the background is that  the current allowance structures are discriminatory, in that they distinguish between “male” and “female” gradings.  Of course that’s unacceptable.  But the moment you try to argue that these are not political decisions, and should be left to technocrats, you are playing the neoliberal game – whether you intend to or not.  It’s what’s happening in Greece or Italy – and Greens should have no part in it. Whether you like it or not, officers’ decisions are not ideologically-neutral – especially when you are dealing with HR specialists who are trained to deal with issues of pay and conditions in a way that reflects the values of the corporate sector.  Moreover, there is a clear conflict in this case with the Party’s Brighton election manifesto – which undertook to defend the City as far as it could from Coalition cuts.  Now obviously this dispute was – is – not about reducing the City’s overall pay bill – but it is about some of the lowest paid people in the city, people who have been hit hardest by austerity economics.  If the point of handing over control to officers was to avoid political opprobrium, it’s a strategy that has conspicuously failed. A sophist could argue that the letter of the Green manifesto had not been breached; a political realist would argue that the implications of a cut in take-home pay is all of a piece with the austerity agenda, especially when a failure by Government to provide local authorities with the resources for equal pay is a de facto cut.

Second, get your relationship with your officers sorted out. For me, as an ex-Civil Servant who has worked for both Labour and Tory Ministers of a wide range of abilities, the signs have been unmistakeable – key members of the Green Group have been going far too native.  Their public pronouncements all too often sound like officers, not politicians speaking (like Jason Kitcat’s ill-judged tweet about the loss of allowances not really being a pay cut). I don’t imagine local government officers are so very different from Civil Servants and, like the Civil Service, I have every reason to think they are most effective when they have strong, decisive political leadership from elected politicians.  I am not close to Green councillors’ interactions with officers but I have seen all too many of the symptoms – in particular the language in which some prominent Greens conduct their politics. I do not underestimate the difficulties of what they are doing – there were times in my Civil Service career when I wondered whether being a new Minister must be the worst bloody job on the planet – but quite a few of them manage to get the hang of it.  Lawyers represent a particular problem; one of the most difficult things certainly that Ministers have to learn is that lawyers are there to facilitate the delivery of your policies within the law, not to tell you what you can’t do. In my Whitehall experience, it’s amazing how many ministers (and officials) don’t get that.  Again, I have little reason to believe that local government is any different.

Third, this is not just a local Brighton and Hove issue.  For the Green Party, anything that could jeopardise Caroline Lucas’ prospects of re-election is a national issue.  It is with no disrespect to Natalie Bennett, doing a terrific job as Green Party leader, that I’d argue that Caroline Lucas remains the most prominent and most eloquent Green advocate we have – and the fact that she is doing that in Parliament, when our media are fixated on Westminster, only increases that importance.  Greens outside Brighton are puzzled and angry about what has been happening in Brighton – not least because the Green Party is steadily building up its presence in local government, winning its first seats on a number of local authorities, with that unequivocal opposition to austerity at its heart.  Recent policy decisions – and indeed the most recent election broadcast – are unequivocally confirming the Green Party as a party of the Left. Mango politics in the only Green local administration are damaging for the Party as a whole.

Fourth, never forget your party roots. I am not a very active member of the Green Party ( for various reasons it’s difficult for me to get to meetings) – but I keep abreast of debates and it’s clear that there is a chasm between the Party and the administration’s leadership.  (There is also serious doubt – following some comments by Councillors on Twitter – that all of the Green Group were consulted or even aware of the ramifications of the decision to devolve to officers, or that the decision would not be remitted to Councillors for approval).  Greens are supposed to be different; Greens are supposed to value consultation and democracy (and have taken quite a bit of flak from some Labour people for consulting too much).  Green values are about how you conduct politics as well as outcomes, and one of the reasons for the rise of Brighton’s Greens is Brighton Labour’s history of vicious infighting.  I have occasionally – on this blog and on Twitter – had occasion to ask Liberal Democrats whether the Coalition is what they really went into politics for; some Brighton Greens must have been asking themselves the same question.  I have heard on so many occasions the argument that Greens in Brighton offered something new and different and now appear to be just another bunch of politicians.  We cannot afford this perception to take root.  If Brighton progressive people wanted just another bunch of politicians they’d have voted Labour.  Green leaders need to reconnect with the activists who are struggling to defend the administration outside the Town Hall bubble.

All of this means that the Green Party in Brighton is at a crossroads.  It can stand back now, take stock and try and get back to the idealism that led to its election – above all to take back the political initiative.  There are good signs – a unanimous vote at the Housing Committee in favour of a Green amendment to the officers’ report that enshrines the Green policy of no bedroom-tax evictions; a vote remarkable for the fact that even Brighton and Hove’s Tories supported it.  That’s a big Green win, and shows that the Green Party in Brighton has not lost its ability to be a game-changer on the Left.

What is needed now is hard strategic thinking.  It is almost two years to the day before the Green councillors, and more importantly Caroline Lucas, will face elections.  There have been some brilliant successes; by 2015 the city will look and feel different, with the 20mph limit and big transport schemes that have firmly shifted the balance towards cyclists and pedestrians.  In a time of austerity, to deliver these and to bring new money into the city is a huge achiemement.  But the Party’s electoral success will be largely down to whether it can learn some serious lessons from the pay modernisation debacle, an if it can recapture the idealism that made 2011 seem like a fresh start for the City.

UKIP, neoliberalism and the revolt of the moderately entitled

Much cyber-ink has been spilled following last week’s strong UKIP showing in the English County Council elections – it might seem superfluous to add to it.  I think the strength of UKIP’s “surge” is overrated – these were partial elections in which the major centres of population did not vote (along with Scotland and most of Wales, where nationalism has a very different political hue), and UKIP gained 25% of the vote on a 30% turnout.  Such little evidence as there is suggests that UKIP has very little traction in the big conurbations.

The real story is the way in which the Coalition parties – and particularly the Liberal Democrats, who once located their real strength in local government, have been decimated; counties that the Liberal Democrats controlled or were close to controlling no more than a few years ago (like Devon or Oxfordshire or East Sussex) no longer return more than a handful of Lib Dem councillors. Labour did not lose a single seat to UKIP – this looks less like a politcal surge, more like a realignment on the Right.  There is certainly nothing here to justify the wall-to-wall Farage-fest that the BBC in particular has launched (and one can only reflect on the irony of the BBC claiming that UKIP had “come from nowhere” when barely a day has passed in the last six months without Farage appearing on a BBC news programme).

But I have yet to see an analysis that decisively links the rise of UKIP to the political and economic failure that Britain has experienced in the last couple of decades – the post-Thatcher age.  There has been much talk of specific issues – Europe and immigration – and some about demographics (UKIP supporters as white, male, older, without university education) and nostalgia.  Above all, it’s seen as a protest vote against the existing political system, seen as remote and corrupt.  There are varying degrees of truth in all of these. But how does one tie all these together?

I think the starting point has to be austerity economics, and the way in which a generation that had come to expect security in later life has been shafted by the current economic and political orthodoxy.  I’ve blogged before about how people who took out private pensions in the Thatcher era in a mood of big-bang optimism have found their retirement funds devastated by the 2007 collapse and by the naked greed with which fund managers have helped themselves to fees and commissions and bonuses; but the issue of a secure old age goes much further than that.  The real value of state pensions is falling and the cost of essentials like power has soared; moreover, uncertainty over the future of a privatised NHS hits older people hardest, as they are the people who need to rely on it most.  Yes, the changing cultural mix in society presents challenges to some older people’s perceptions; memories of Imperial red on schoolroom atlases die hard.  But it seems to me that the cultural nationalism can be seen as a proxy for economic uncertainty; in this case by people who, in many cases, are not poor (but may have very low fixed incomes) but fear poverty and uncertainty.  Others may be people who fall for the rhetoric of “hard working families”, or even just work very hard for low pay and cannot get past the capitalist  rhetoric that hard work brings rewards, and look for other reasons why in a world of falling wages and mass unemployment it often appears to bring the opposite.

History, as that incomparable exponent of  ”history from below” Raphael Samuel wrote, begins at twilight.  He could have said the same about nationalism.  It is a truism that you see the flag of St George far more these days – especially during football tournaments – but I think the same is true of all sorts of national symbolism (including last year’s Jubilee celebrations).  None of this seems to me to be the behaviour of a confident nation; and it seems to me that the changes at the root of that uncertainty are not immigrants, or European bureaucrats, but white men in suits advocating a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon economic model that has seen the optimism that, on the whole, one’s material circumstances would improve over time replaced by uncertainty and the reality of falling living standards.  It is often said that UKIP is fuelled by nostalgia for the 1950s; yes, one can point to the fact that we were a whiter, less cosmopolitan, more culturally limited society, one that still saw itself as completely separate from Europe and which saw a white Commonwealth as its natural ally.  But it was also a society with full employment, decent affordable housing, an expanding welfare state and educational provision, with the Robbins report and the mass expansion of higher education around the corner; a society in which there was grounds for optimism that, year on year, the future would be better and that one could look forward to a reasonably secure old age.

And the contrast with what had gone before was so positive; a depression that had given way to war.  No wonder with hindsight it can look like a golden age.  The genius of the Right – whether UKIP or the right-wing newspapers that express many of its values – is to strip away the economic dimension from that nostalgia; to present that society as if its was its whiteness, its deference and its social hierarchies and accepted gender role, pulled apart by the pernicious Sixties, that were the things that produced that contentment, not the fact of growing economic security.  Indeed, as the economic consensus moves away from the kind policies that made such security – in the West at least – possible, it is almost inevitable that nostalgia will be rationalised in this way. One of the advantages of flag-waving and nationalism is that it provides capitalists with somewhere to hide, someone else to blame.

Moreover, the increasing homogeneity of the British political (and media) class – more remote, more privileged and less politically differentiated than at any time since the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee first made possible the election of working class MPs at the very end of the nineteenth century – has provided a focus for the discontent.  It is this homogeneity that has made possible UKIP’s positioning of itself as a party of protest challenging the British establishment, when in reality it is nothing of the sort – as Chris Dillow has shown in this brilliant blog post,  UKIP’s policies are neoliberal and pro-establishment to the core – for example its advocacy of flat taxes.  For all its sabre-rattling about immigration and Europe and even (faced with the Etonian tendency at the heart of Cameron’s government) class, it offers nothing to assuage the root causes of the discontent of slightly-privileged England – the economic dislocation that has been wrought by the neoliberal experiment.

At one level, then, UKIP is a threat to the prevailing political order; it strikes at the heart of the modern Conservative party, not least because its appeal is primarily to those who form the Conservative Party’s organisational base. (It’s interesting to note that one of the areas in which UKIP polled best was along the route of HS2, the high-speed rail grand projet that brings no real economic or environmental benefits, threatens huge destruction along its route through hitherto true-blue Tory middle England – and which is backed unanimously across the Westminster political spectrum).  David Cameron is a fundamentally weak leader who is mistrusted by many in his Party – the same people who see UKIP as being much closer to their idea of a true Conservative.  At another level, UKIP is about the continuation of the existing political order; not only does it not challenge a political consensus build around the market, privatisation, reducing the welfare state (including universal provision) and the size of the state – it actually endorses all those things. Its position on Europe and immigration lie outside the consensus, but represent no more than extreme positions on a policy continuum that the Westminster consensus can unite around (immigrants are valuable insofar as they serve economic ends). Of course, UKIP has more than its fair share of colourful bigots and fringe neo-Nazis; it draws on a similar constituency to the EDL and the now largely-defunct BNP; their politics is, in my view, deeply obnoxious and must be resisted at all costs. But they’re not perhaps the most important thing about UKIP.  UKIP is the party that sets itself up as anti-Establishment, the party that says the things that “political correctness” would make unsayable, but in reality is no more than a cheerleader for the biggest Establishment stitch-up of all. It is about mainstreaming and neutralising the sort of dissent that might interrupt the sleep of those who wield real power.  Looking at UKIP, Aneurin Bevan’s comment  that the art of conservative politics lies in persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power comes overpoweringly to mind.

The point about UKIP then is that they are part of the same essential phenomenon as the mainstream Westminster consensus – by promoting a political economy that is based on ideology rather than empirical reality, and which concentrates power in the hands of an increasingly homogenous and privileged political class.  While they act as the vehicle for a group of essentially quite privileged people who see their privileges being eroded, their role as a party is to reinforce, not challenge, the things that erode those privileges.

Time for more economics teaching in schools

During a less than complimentary Twitter exchange yesterday about the qualifications needed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (with the present incumbent providing the context) I made a serious point about the lack of economics teaching in schools, and rather surprisingly got a negative response; it would just mean pupils learning (I paraphrase) more of the neoliberal stuff being spouted by the political class.

I disagree.  I worry when I read that economics is in decline in schools (although there seems to have been a small recovery in the number of A-level candidates in the last few years), and that there are almost no newly-qualified economics teachers: an understanding of economics seems to me to be really important in a democracy in which the key political issues of the day are economic as well.  And I think it is wrong to assume that it must be neoliberal in nature.  Certainly as an A-level student in the late 1970s and as an undergraduate in the early 1980s I ingested a good deal of Keynsianism; but, more importantly, I learned about the fallibility of economics.  Richard Murphy, in The Courageous State, describes eloquently the disillusion that encountering academic economics produced, as he realised that what were being presented as iron laws of the market were actually based on axioms that were really little more than unsupported generalisations about human behaviour.  I had a similar experience; Murphy’s book aroused a strong feeling of sympathy.

Moreover, you do not need to have studied economics at a particularly advanced level to understand the fallibility of many of the economic propositions that neoliberal politicians proclaim as unchallengeable fact.  Much has been made recently of the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, in which the argument that high deficits lead to reduced growth has been found to rely on dubious assumptions and unchecked spreadsheet data; but there are more obvious questions that need to be asked about markets and about choice.  For example, influential constructs like public choice theory  rest on assumptions that are really open to any non-specialist to challenge.

Most of all, the issue that Keynes raised – about how decisions in economic policy can be influenced by politicians, and that, far from the elegant inevitabilities of the cruder kind of market theory, economic policy is messy and human – need to be exposed.  Politicians get away far less with proclaiming that There Is No Alternative (or its more subtle contemporary variations about deficits and debt) when people understand a bit of basic economics; a well-functioning democracy is one in which no politician could get away with describing the deficit as “maxing out the nation’s credit card”.  People need to understand the basic concepts, in a way that the current business studies curriculum simply doesn’t achieve.  And I’d argue that it’s perfectly possible to grasp those concepts at GCSE level.

It is almost impossible to imagine the current government making an intelligent decision about the school curriculum.  But the point remains that, at its best, economics opens the mind.  It means that, as part of their general education, people are equipped with the tools to challenge what politicians and advocates of big money want to present as fact.  It’s not obvious that increasing taxes means people move abroad, or that cutting the public sector increases confidence; people need the equipment and the confidence to question these sorts of proposition and to understand that the issues are not clear cut, and that the propositions of the neoliberal (or any other) economic consensus often rely on debatable social and psychological assumptions.  And in that sense a proper study of economics is a pretty good foundation for aspects of life going well beyond economic policy.

Abolishing the universal state pension – the new Westminster consensus?

Over the weekend, Ian Duncan Smith made widely reported comments that wealthy pensioners should be prepared to return some of their benefits – notably winter fuel payments and free bus passes.  This morning on the BBC Today programme, Labour DWP spokesman Liam Byrne (unsurprisingly) refused to defend the principle of universality. Nick Clegg and his party have for some time been advocating removing some benefits from wealthier pensioners.  It’s increasingly obvious that there is a Westminster consensus emerging.

It’s not difficult to see the attraction to policy-makers of a neoliberal bent.  It gives the impression of fairness, but also provides the opportunity to get to grip with the fact that spending on pensions and associated benefits represents a far greater proportion of DWP spending than the benefits for the poor (in or out of work) and the disabled that the Coalition has hitherto targeted.

But, as so often when our Westminster parties begin to coalesce around an idea, start picking at it and it falls apart. I’ve blogged before about the advantages of universal benefits – the way in which they are both more efficient and promote social cohesion – and Owen Jones has tackled the social cohesion arguments in a a characteristically powerful piece in the Independent.

But Duncan Smith’s comments raise some fundamental questions – just who are these wealthy pensioners? And how many of them are there?  The problem is that of conflating wealth and income.  There are many older people who have extremely low incomes – especially widows who have not worked or only worked intermittently, and whose tiny basic pension is topped up with pension credit – but who are sitting in houses that, thanks to long-term house price inflation, give the appearance of wealth. Are these people – likely to be hit hardest by rising fuel costs – to hand back their winter heating allowance?  And how on earth do you measure this wealth (as an aside, it’s quite amusing to see how many of the policy initiatives from the right involve the comprehensive post-Council Tax revaluation of property from which successive governments have shrunk in fear)? Everbody knows that the truly wealthy are expert at hiding their wealth, while the processes of deciding who is eligibility will almost inevitability  hit those whose apparent wealth is wholly unrelated to their income.

And there is a longer-term question.  One of the undoubted legacies of the Thatcher era was the belief that private pensions were the way to provide sustainably for old age; but as those who have started to draw pensions after the 2008 crash know to their huge cost, the vagaries of the market can decimate that provision.  The effect of relying on private provision is that old age is inherently less secure, less predictable, less stable.  Universal benefits have a hugely stabilising effect, especially when the market fails to provide.

One of the most dishonest pieces of Labour rhetoric is the claim that its approach to benefits aims to “restore the contributory principle”.  Of course the contributory principle is alive and well – all of us who earn pay National Insurance – and nowhere more so than for provision in old age; to claim otherwise is either dishonesty or gross intellectual confusion (and Liam Byrne’s daily pronouncements show that the two are by no means mutually exclusive).

All in all then, this looks like the Westminster parties lining up to end universal benefits in old age.  It’s not something they could ever propose openly – for a start everybody knows that older people are more likely to vote.  But then nobody proposed the privatisation of the NHS at the 2010 election.  It’s that insidious process of undermining something, dressing that undermining up as fairness and calling for a “debate” about long-term sustainability while making reassuring noises about things being off the agenda until after the next election.  And it’s worth recalling that many of the (in my view) most obnoxious elements of Coalition policy – workfare, outsourcing of health care, the promotion of academies, the privatisation of higher education, the use of ATOS to apply bogus science in the name of getting people off benefits – are really no more than New Labour policies taken to their logical conclusion.

Watch this space.  I predict that whatever the outcome of the 2015 election, the next Government will be looking to abolish the universal pension.  The time to start organising – and to start defending the universal principle is now; and there is no policy more dangerous than assuming that Labour in office will do the decent thing.