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.

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.

Why prize draws for voting miss the point

I have a lot of respect for Angela Eagle, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons (and, as it happens, my university contemporary).  So I was surprised to see her quoted as supporting a range of measures to encourage more voting, including incentives like prize draws and making election day a bank holiday.

There is buried in all of this a serious point about making voting easier – and of course in recent years it has become much easier to get a postal vote and the number of people using them has risen vastly.  There is a serious point too about electronic voting, although I remain far from convinced that this could be made to work at the current state of technology (and of course there is a question of  whether those who are least likely to vote would also be least likely to have access to that technology).  And she is absolutely right about the diversity of the British political establishment: grey men in grey suits, for the most part, and a political class that is becoming more homogenous over time.

But the real issue here is a failure to ask why all of this should be the case.  The clue perhaps lies in Margaret Thatcher’s funeral – an event that clearly galvanised the political class but appears to have been viewed with some indifference outside the Westminster bubble.  Ironically enough, Cameron’s claim that “we are all Thatcherites now” provides a telling indication of how Westminster and the rest of the country just think differently.  It indicates not just that the main Westminster parties (and the media that serve them) have coalesced around a narrow free-market consensus, but also the way in which the political class itself is narrower, more affluent, drawn from a narrow class range, in which internship increasingly acts as the new property qualification.

For the Left, it seems essential that democratic renewal goes hand-in-hand with the rejection of neoliberal economics.  Neoliberalism is, at its heart, an anti-democratic idea – it rejects the idea that questions of economics, and especially questions of distribution, should (or even can) be subject to democratic control.  And the people for whom neoliberalism represents economic and personal catastrophe are, by and large, simply not represented in the political class (and consistently misrepresented by the media that serve that class).

So Angela Eagle is right about diversity – but it is about much more than that.  Labour as a party (if not in Westminster) remains deeply conflicted over neoliberal economics and this means that it is poorly placed to address issues of democratic renewal; the Coalition parties, enthusiastically engaged in implementing a neoliberal programme for which they have no electoral mandate, have clearly shown where they stand.  But the idea of raffle prizes for voting is condescending and insulting, a symptom of a political system that wants the legitimacy of high turnouts at elections while avoiding any hint of real democratic renewal.

The truth is one that Westminster dare not speak: that the political elite in this country no longer represent vast numbers of its citizens. And this sort of thinking does not even begin to address that; it’s a rationale for not doing so.  The left should have no part in it.

Liz Truss and the privatisation of childhood

Junior Education Minister Liz Truss has launched an attack on what she describes as the “purposeless activity” to be seen in many nurseries.  She claims that this is not about academic work, but about structured activity and learning to be polite through activities which the teacher is clearly leading.

No doubt there will be much rationalisation of what she actually did or did not say, and it is easy to ridicule Truss’ apparent ignorance of what toddlers actually do, but it seems to me that Truss’ comments expose the dark heart of contemporary Toryism in a revealing and significant way.  Truss was of course one of the gang of bright young Tories behind Britannia Unchained, the book that notoriously accused British workers – who demonstrably work some of the longest hours in Europe – as being lazy and uninterested in achievement.  Now we are given tales of unfocussed behaviour by pre-school children.

The point about Truss’ comments is that, like Britannia Unchained, they are about discipline and obedience; about ensuring from the age of three or four that children are not educated, but trained – trained to be disciplined workers and consumers.  Education is about sitting children in uniform in rows behind desks, as preparation for a life of the same – the world of Gradgrind in which children are moulded for life in a modern-day factory system, in which imagination and challenge and spontaneity are banished unless expressed in ways that are economically useful.  One of the most humane definitions of education that I know is Ivan Illich’s “growth in disciplined dissidence” – a phrase that Truss and her ideological comrades can surely barely understand.  Truss’ comments are about training people to function in a late capitalist economy, not about facilitating their development as diverse and fully human individuals.  This is the privatisation of childhood; its acquisition by those who generate profit.  It is, in the literal sense of the word, a philosophy of alienation.

And, as so often with the ideology emerging from Gove’s education department, it is desperately at odds with evidence-backed good practice.  Early years activities should be child-led not teacher-led, because that is how children learn in the broadest sense.  Formal education starts later in most European countries than in the UK – including those in which outcomes are rather better than ours. (Although looking at Gove, the Tory Party and the British establishment generally you do wonder whether these are the people who failed to learn through play).  More anecdotally,  I think we are all familiar with the spiritual destructiveness of academic hothousing, and the damage done to children by the academic rat-race; as Jimmy Reid put it in that still-magnificent, still-relevant speech on assuming the rectorship of Glasgow University, we are not rats.

Truss’ comments are all of a piece with the Tories’ rhetoric on benefits – a return to a nineteenth-century view of Britain in which disciplined productivity is the only measure of human worth.  Work hard, produce, consume and accept your lot; that’s all there is to your allotted span unless you are one of that rarefied economic elite who can consume without work.  It is a vision that lacks the joy, the spontaneity, the imagination and, yes, the sheer purposefulness of the toddler at play, before she has had those things drilled out of her in the name of conformity and obedience.  In short, it is the abolition of the human.

Thatcher: mythologies and legacies

The past week was inevitable. It was always going to be the case that when Margaret Thatcher died, there would be a torrent of Thatcherabilia in the media; much of it adulatory, some of it reopening the old wounds from the 1980s.  The State Funeral question had been well-trailed; it was always clear that the Westminster political class would unite in eulogy (although the recall of Parliament for seven-and-a-half hours of expensive rhetoric probably went further than many predicted).  It was, too, always going to be an important moment in the Conservative Party’s uneasy dialogue with itself; David Cameron, a weak leader held in open contempt by much of his party (not least for his failure to win a decisive election in 2010) would inevitably be measured by his response to the passing of the iconic Conservative figure of recent history, who famously never lost a General Election.

As one of the Thatcher generation (I cast my first vote, a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, in the 1979 General Election) it has been fascinating to see the divisions of those years re-open, and to read the various opinion pieces on her legacy.  It has also been interesting to see the generational divide; the diffierence between those of us who lived through the Thatcher years and those who came after.  Not just the experience of explaining the Miners’ Strike, or the Falklands War, or even free school milk, to people who were not born when those were live issues; but the sense of a newer post-Thatcher generation for whom the things she did are part of the background.  But I’d argue that in order to understand the politics of the Coalition it is essential to bear witness to Thatcherism and remember it for what it was, not the sanitised version that the media and political establishment want to present.

Thatcherite legacies

The Conservative-led political establishment are now busily engaged in building the mythology, the strong leader who saved Britain and transformed the economy.  I think the legacy is real, but rather different; for all her divisiveness there are key elements of our mainstream political society that are essentially Thatcherite.  I list some thoughts on these in turn below.

1.  Markets trump democracy

In some ways this is the most fundamental of all.  If there is one phrase that one associates with Margaret Thatcher, it is that there is no alternative – the imperatives of the market rule.  In our post-2008 austerity, this has come to mean that the demands of economic orthodoxy will always triumph over expressions of democracy.  Economic activity runs according to iron rules rather than democratic mandates – as Italy and Greece with the imposition of “technocratic” governments to impose austerity packages to ensure that the risk associated with lending to governments is borne, not to any extent by the lending institutions, but by the people of those countries without any risk of their having any democratic say in the matter.  David Harvey, among others, has pointed out how the erosion of democracy is at the heart of the neoliberal project; more recently we have seen the EU seeking to create a treaty which would effectively surrender member states’ ability to set deficit budgets, and hence to make macro-economic decisions.  Although there is a growing reaction against this mechanistic view of economics and the unquestioning acceptance of assumptions about the operation of markets that underpins it – following Keynes’ view that policy-makers can influence economic outcomes for both good and bad – the assumptions of austerity, supported by intellectually-dubious constructs like public choice theory, occupy a position of hegemony in policy decisions.  And, importantly in the UK, that consensus is shared across all the main political parties.  Ed Balls has made it  clear that there will be no relaxation of austerity if Labour wins the 2015 election; but more generally celebration of the market was among the salient features of New Labour.

2. War and the cult of the military

It seems to me that one of the most interesting social changes in recent years concerns the way the military is viewed in Britain.  In that underrated masterpiece The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell – writing during wartime – describes the British indifference towards war and militarism; he suggests that if the British Army ever adopted the goosestep, people would laugh.  My father’s generation did National Service; it was a generation that joked of the imbecility and pointlessness of military life.  It seems to me that since the Falklands War we have seen a complete change in public attitudes towards the military – something that has gone hand-in-hand with British involvement in successive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an almost Orwellian acceptance of permanent war (although not of course the total war that Orwell envisaged in Nineteen Eighty-Four).  It is a different type of war, in which a relatively small army of professional soldiers achieve heroic status by fighting wars from which the civilian population is thousands of miles distant, in pursuit of war aims that are described as “liberal” – about freedom and dealing with dictators – but whose aims are anything but.  The talk of heroes is proportionate to the distance from the front line.

Moreover, as the generations who fought in the century’s two total wars pass away, the attitude to remembrance has notably changed.  The comments of the last British survivor of the First World War, Henry Allingham, who had experienced the reality of war and loathed it, contrast powerfully with the gung-ho Poppy Fascism and the sheer theatricality of modern remembrance.  Nobody much cared if you wore a poppy, and there was no two-minute silence on the 11th November as well as on Remembrance Sunday.  Thatcher was both the first British Prime Minister in modern times not to have served in war, but also the first – through the victory in the Falklands – to understand its potential as a political weapon.  In a notorious speech at Cheltenham Racecourse in the weeks after victory in the Falklands, Thatcher coined the phrase “the Falklands Factor” to contrast the bravery of British servicemen with the attitudes of striking railway workers.  It seems to me that before the Falklands War, there was a general assumption that a political leader who led Britain into war would have lacked popular support; it is possible that without the post-colonial narratives of beleagured Brits in the South Atlantic who wanted nothing more than to be part of Britain (although, crucially, the management of the Falkland Islands before the 1982 conflict was in the hands of a private company and had nothing whatsoever to do with democracy), war would still have been intolerable; but Thatcher, in the Falklands, normalised British involvement in war.  Moreover she popularised it and made it into a rallying cause for the tabloid press.  It was perhaps the experience of the Falklands in the back of Blair’s mind (it is often forgotten that his debut on the political stage was as Labour candidate in a by-election in Beaconsfield during the Falklands War) while lying his way into an illegal war into Iraq while a million people marched through London in protest.  And Thatcher had already made the poisonous link between backing “our boys” and neutralising dissent at home, with the backing of a feral tabloid press.

One aspect of this militarisation that may become clearer as the funeral progresses – if the expected dissent is shown – is the militarisation and politicisation of the police.  It is an irony that as the rhetoric of policing has shifted away from the idea of force to the language of service, policing of dissent has become more systematic and militarised, often drawing on practice from the brutalisation of occupied Palestine.  During the Brixton riots the police notoriously protected themselves with dustbin lids as makeshift shields; by the Miners’ Strike the police were using force of numbers; now tactics like the collective punishment of kettling and the practise of “pre-arresting” those likely to indulge in visible dissent (like the arrest of a street theatre company before a royal wedding) are routine.  Thatcher came to power weeks after the murder of Blair Peach by illegally tooled-up police officers; the use of officially-sanctioned police violence is now central to the maintenance of the Westminster consensus.  Students, betrayed by politicians who had lied about fees, took to the street to protest and were kettled and beaten, learning, perhaps, an early lesson in the limits of democracy in the eyes of the Westminster consensus.  This – and the Orwellian tale of Alfie Meadows, beaten by police until he bled into his brain and then charged with violent disorder – is a key legacy of Thatcher; one that nobody in the Westminster consensus is willing to disown.

3. The marginalisation of compassion and solidarity: no such thing as society

In almost every respect political discourse in post-1979 Britain has become harder, crueller, less compassionate.  Hugo Young’s magisterial piece on Thatcher’s legacy - written in 2003 but reprinted in the Guardian the day after Thatcher died – made the important point that Thatcher did not much care about being liked; it is part of a wider aspect of her politics, which is that she ended the pretence that government was conducted on behalf of the people as a whole.  Thatcher was overtly partisan; there were whole swathes of people that did not matter – people who were not going to vote for her, or to vote at all, and who could therefore be disregarded – or demonised for the gratification of her supporters.  Of course, it helped to have a supine media; Thatcherism represents the triumph of tabloid values erected into a system of Government.  But at a more basic level, Thatcherism elevated the psychopathology of the playground bully into a principle of public administration, providing legitimacy and cover for some of the most feral tabloid journalism on the planet.  (When conservatives – of all parties – call for “respect” in the run-up to her funeral, it is worth remembering the “respect” that Thatcher and her media cronies showed for the 96 victims of police stupidity and negligence at Hillsborough)

If you stand back, and try to listen dispassionately, it becomes clear that casual brutality has become the dominant tone of political discourse, right across the political spectrum: the language used to describe people who are not quite like us.  Owen Jones has of course written eloquently about the “Chav” phenomenon and the language used to describe the poor at a time when economic and social policy seems calculated to make life more difficult, more marginal for people who do not enjoy the security of privilege.  And the rhetoric of demonisation goes across the political spectrum; listen to New Labour’s adoption of the “strivers versus shirkers” rhetoric, or the way in which so much political rhetoric argues the case for “hard working families”; the language of exclusiveness and exclusion appears increasingly hard-wired into our political discourse.

Above all, the legacy of Thatcherism is that you have to earn the right to a say, through conformity to certain values and practices.  One of the most potent of Thatcher’s legacies is the way in which the Westminster establishment – regardless of party – has returned to the language of the deserving and undeserving; Thatcher’s hankering after Victorian Values made into the centrality of political discourse.  Hard work as a precondition for acceptance when, for millions, there is no work at all; or when the grinding hard work of caring for, or even being, physically or mentally disabled counts for nothing because no exchange of cash is involved.  I have blogged before about how the Westminster establishment has re-adopted the values of the workhouse, and how citizenship has become contingent on conformist contribution.  When Labour luminaries use the language of individual effort and personal sanction in their response to mass unemployment, the legacy of Thatcherism is all too clear.

4. Class Warrior and enemy of the establishment

One of the most insightful of the many pieces that appeared following Thatcher’s death was a piece in the Glasgow Herald which, for all its value, made the fundamental error of claiming that Thatcher was not a class warrior.  Perhaps not in the sense that Cameron and Osborne – scions of an old aristocracy reclaiming what they think of as their heritage – but, as ever with discussions of class in England, it’s complicated.  It is difficult to think of the young Margaret Roberts, the bright and driven grammar-school girl at Oxford, viewing the antics of the Bullingdon Club with anything but distaste; Thatcher was undoubtedly a warrior for her class, but it was not the class that had run the Conservative Party for so many decades (although it was of course the class of her predecessor Edward Heath).

A small cameo from my own student days: a debating contest at the Oxford Union in which first-year students hoping to make their mark on that smug and over-rated institution vied for attention.  The subject of debate was Margaret Thatcher and no sneer was spared by the young future masters of the universe: she was provincial, shallow, narrow-minded, with a vision that extended no further than the double-entry ledger of the grocer’s shop over which she had grown up.  Of course, what they – we – lacked was the wit or maturity to understand that these things were the core of her strength; the certainty that she spoke for a class of English people who believed themselves to be misunderstood and undervalued, and how she became the medium by which the frustration of an entire class could be released.  It’s very easy to make generalisations about Poujadism, but that missed the point.  We now of course know that the policy of selling council houses is one of the root causes of a deep housing crisis that blights modern Britain, but of course in the 1980s it was seen as a sign of genius.  The great strength of Thatcher was that she knew her supporters and played to them, and empowered their values in her politics; it represents a powerful contrast to a Labour Party that has abandoned its aim of acting as a voice for organised labour, the poor and dispossessed.  In her ability to tune into and mobilise the discontent of the relatively-privileged, Thatcher’s strengths closely mirror New Labour’s weaknesses.

Aneurin Bevan famously wrote that the art of twentieth-century conservative politics lay in persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.  Thatcher offers a powerful exemplar of that; how to capture the discontents and aspirations of a discontented middle-class to ensure that wealth keeps power, but in a way that suggested that power was being taken away from old aristocracies and oligarchs (including erecting a whole new category of trade union barons who were portrayed as having the real power in society).  One of the fascinating things about Thatcherism is how it managed to reel in the radicalism and discontent of the sixties generation; how swinging London swung behind Thatcher in 1979.  One answer of course is that, for all the discontents of 1968, the popular radicalism of the 1960s was often hedonistic and lacking in any theory or grounding – it was essentially selfish, and a fertile ground for the denial of any such thing as society.  The redefinition of aspiration in hedonistic and individualistic terms – the mythology of home ownership as independence and freedom, the great car economy, the idea of higher education as an investment to be purchased rather than as something that defined a good society, the idea of a vibrant neighbourhood as one containing cafes and bars rather than collectively-provided libraries, parks and schools –  was a Thatcherite triumph that has never really gone away.  We idolise celebrities – pop stars, sports people and so on – who articulate a content-free, safe and wholly solipsistic ideal of aspiration; the X-Factor, with its competition, its sentimentality and its grandstanding of sincerity and effort, is the purest Thatcherism. When Labour agonises about aspiration, it is showing that it simply lacks the intellectual and moral equipment (not to mention the grasp on its own history) to get away from the Thatcherite terms of reference.

Cementing the mythology: Thatcherism and the redefinition of Britishness

Those seven hours of Parliamentary eulogy, the official funeral with full military honours, even the absurd debacle over whether the BBC should play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead - driven to the top of the charts by sales to anti-Thatcherites; it is clear that something way beyond the usual commemoration of a deceased Prime Minister is happening.  This is ideological; it is about taking the most divisive Prime Minister in modern times and cementing her divisive and bitterly-contested ideology into the canon of British identity.  The political and media establishment are uniting around a single idea – that we are all Thatcherites now.

And, if your concept of Britishness simply includes the political and media class, that’s probably true. The simple fact is that a political class drawn from a steadily-narrowing – and privileged –  social spectrum remains predominantly loyal to the Thatcher doctrine.  But of course the ambition of this funeral is to go much further than that.  This is about power, and about the boundaries of legitimate citizenship.

Milan Kundera famously wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.  The pageantry of the past week – the Parliamentary tributes, the tabloid adoration, the Ruritanian excesses of the taxpayer-funded funeral – are much more than the excesses of a political establishment that, in its economic weakness and its reliance on myth rather than fact, has never really looked weaker.  They are a ritual of forgetting; a mechanism for pretending that the divisions and resistance never happened, or at best represented the discontent of deviance.  While Orgreave, the Belgrano and the riots in Brixton and Toxteth fade into grainy black-and-white, the fundamental unity of the British political class is to be paraded through central London in full, if respectfully muted, technicolor. This is Britain coming together, and you’ll damn well celebrate your freedom by mourning. And if you turn your back on the procession there’s a kindly bobby with a baton to set you right.

And here is the irony.  For all the establishment rhetoric of respect and solemnity, the real message of this funeral (appropriately enough) is – rejoice.  The political establishment is saying – these are your values now, and this is your identity – whether you like it or not. Rejoice.  And unless we learn to resist we are all Thatcherites now.

Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement? One Nation Labour and the politics of fear

Notoriously, when asked what was her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher answered: “Tony Blair and New Labour”.  Margaret Thatcher was not known as a humorous woman, so one has to assume that she was not being facetious.  And the point remains; Labour was swept to power in 1997 and, despite some distinctly non-Thatcherite legislative achievements (the minimum wage) the rationality underpinning the Labour government – privatisation, the free market, interventionist foreign policy – remained similar to that of the Thatcher years.

Now, in 2013, with the financial collapse of 2007-8 and the formation of a Conservative-led coalition in 2010, things are very much starker.  The boom years which allowed a general feeling of well-being to cover the continuities have given way to an economic crisis in which the conflicts are much starker.  Yet in the midst of what is quite clearly a systemic failure of the economics that Thatcher championed, Labour’s reaction to it – and to the ideology of austerity that is being promoted as the route back to “business as usual”  -remains shot through with fear.  Faced with the effect of cuts, Ed Balls’ response is to promise that Labour will keep the cuts and possibly make more of its own.  Faced with the effective destruction of state education, Stephen Twigg’s response is a near-Trappist silence.  Faced with an unprecedented assault on the living standards of the poor and disabled, Liam Byrne’s reaction is to parrot Tory language of sanction and desert, of “hard-working families” rather than citizens empowered as of right. Faced with a society in which low pay is endemic and living standards in free-fall, it falls back on vague language about “predistribution” which, as far as I can see, amounts to little more than asking big business to play nice (some chance).  This is an opposition that could not get its Peers out to amend the Health and Social Care Bill, but whips its MPs into line to attend Parliament’s tributes to Thatcher.

It’s the politics of fear.  The irony of course is that one of Thatcher’s principal legacies is a feral tabloid press, that has up until recently been allowed to operate effectively outside the law, and whose symbiosis with the Tory Party has been cemented over Oxfordshire hacks and kitchen suppers; but Labour in government was just as guilty of cosying to media empires.  Labour is notable for not standing up to tabloid bullying; some, like Liam Byrne, appear to have made their life’s work out of parroting its lies.

Labour needs to decide where it stands. Is it prepared to offer serious alternatives to the failed economics of austerity, and to learn to speak once again for the most vulnerable in society, rather than joining in the chorus of demonisation?  Is it prepared to argue once again for an active, interventionist state which can become the engine of real improvements in the lives of ordinary people, as well as driving sustainable economic recovery?

At the moment the signs are not good.  Labour happily whips its MPs to attend more than seven hours of eulogies to Thatcher, as part of a Parliamentary system that devoted a small fraction of that time to voting through measures which have blighted the most vulnerable people’s lives.  Rather than joining in the tributes, a party which predominantly represents those communities that Thatcher destroyed might make more impact by staying away; the rows of empty opposition benches as an eloquent testimony to the fact that Thatcher divided Britain like no other leader in modern history, and that Labour will not accept this particular variety of cant.

But that would require courage, and above all the courage to realise that at this late stage of capitalism, we are not living through “business as usual”.  As Tawney famously wrote, to kick over an idol you must first get off your knees: this is no time to be frit.

The peculiar obsessions of Liam Byrne

Once again, the opinions of Labour’s DWP spokesman Liam Byrne are causing controversy – this time a short piece in the Observer that starts off surprisingly well with quite a cogent critique of the failings of Coalition welfare policy, before shooting himself spectacularly in the foot by proposing a raft of solutions demonstrating his acceptance of the Coalition’s assumptions.  Readers of course can make up their own minds as to which they believe.

The problem with Byrne is that he is completely hung up on the idea of sanctions – a belief that people need to be threatened to give up the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.  The Welfare State after Beveridge represented a fundamental shift – from the idea that poverty, unemployment and idleness were caused by individual failings to the idea that they represented a systemic failing (going hand-in-hand with the adoption of the Keynsian economic rationality in which an interventionist state could prevent, to coin a phrase, boom and bust).  The Coalition’s assault on welfare is based on a rhetoric that returns to the idea of individual responsibility; it is the message that underpins the vile rhetoric of Osborne, Cameron and their media cheerleaders in their claim that the appalling acts of Mick Philpott are the product of welfare “dependency” (notwithstanding the fact that the case judge’s withering and powerful assessment did not mention benefits once, but focussed on issues of domestic abuse that the political establishment finds far less congenial to its prejudices).

Byrne’s Observer piece starts by discussing systemic failure, but by the time he reaches his proposed solution he is back on individual failings – and where he talks about institutional changes, like a new 10p tax rate and “supporting good employers” (whatever that means) he’s as vague and woolly as his talk of personal sanctions is precise.  And in doing so he is happy to accept, rather than challenge, the myths of welfare as against the realities (nicely summed up by Ricky Tomlinson here).

And his talk of the “old principle of contribution” is just nonsense. He forgets – or ignores – that it was the principle of contribution that Beveridge sought to replace with universality; yes, you still contributed through National Insurance, but for the general good rather than as a private individual.  It was the principle of contribution that meant that, before the NHS, men in work received more support for health-care than did their wives or children; Beveridge sought to build a more generous, more collective approach to the welfare state because it was both the right and efficient thing to do. Byrne does not even begin to address the cost and complexity of this idea – something that Beveridge’s universal principle sought to avoid.

Byrne – and Labour more generally – need to understand that the welfare debate is part of a much wider one about the collective versus the individual, and about systemic failure.  Of course it’s much easier to spread myths about three generations of worklessness; it means you don’t have to confront the much more difficult systemic questions.  But doesn’t – or shouldn’t – Labour have ambitions to be better than that?  After all, as I’ve argued before, the rhetoric of individual culpability that Byrne seems happy to adopt leads straight to the door of the workhouse.

And the simple fact remains – talk of sanction almost completely misses the point.  There is mass unemployment in this country because there are no jobs; because our economy has been smashed, not by the indolence of a tiny minority of those on benefit, but by the the greed and delusion of Byrne’s fellow bankers which fuelled the bubble that burst in 2008, and by an economic policy of austerity that is, by any definition, failing desperately (except in its success in shifting wealth to the wealthy).  The gobsmacking thing about the tone in which the Westminster establishment conducts the debate about welfare is not its unpleasantness, or its lack of evidence; it the sheer frivolity of it all.  A grown-up democracy deserves something far better than Liam Byrne’s easy generalities.

The Spirit of ’45: a flawed but powerful message for contemporary politics

You would need a heart of stone – or to be Liam Byrne – not to shed a tear during The Spirit of ’45.  My moment came when the retired doctor – one of a number of individuals whose reflections and reminiscences punctuated the narrative, and whose demeanour might have been made for a white coat and stethoscope – recalled how on the first day of the NHS, he was making a house call to a family and heard a child coughing upstairs, and offered to help.  The mother demurred, obviously worried by the cost, until the doctor gently reminded her that his visits were now free. It’s a story that has all sorts of resonances, not least of tales from my own family history of when the arrival of the NHS  eased life so significantly for my grandmother and my semi-invalid, weak-chested grandfather.

Ken Loach’s film tells the story of how a nation mobilised for total war determined never to allow the squalor and poverty of the 1930s to be repeated and elected a Labour government on an avowedly socialist platform, and how that Government took the pillars of the economy into public ownership, built good quality social housing, and set up the National Health Service.  He then jumps forward thirty years to Thatcher and discusses how the structures that had been established after 1945 were dismantled and returned to management for profit, focussing in particular on the brutality visited on striking miners in the 1985 Strike,  and culminating in the destruction of the NHS under the Coalition.  But the film also shows the disappointment that the structures of the new nationalised industries did not mean workers’ control – although nationalisation brought huge gains (for example the ending of the priority of output over safety in the mining industry) the structures of management remained fundamentally unchanged, with the newly nationalised industries being managed from the top down (although paradoxically the union officials interviewed in the post-1970 sections of the film all argued that privatisation meant that the efficiencies of central strategic planning were no longer to be had). The narrative is carried on by archive footage and narration intermingled with comment from a number of people – a man who grew up in the pre-war Liverpool slums, a Welsh miner, a group of retired nurses and our doctor.  The post-Thatcher narrative was carried on by a succession of Union officials, who emphasised the key role of class in the politics of the era and argued that Labour had abandoned its working class roots.  It ends with a powerful and emotional message about the witness of those who lived through the post-war years, and the imperative of passing their hope and belief on to a young generation that had few reasons for either.

It is a powerful, emotional film – it is shamelessly polemical, often in revealing ways.  Footage of the 1945 election campaign shows Churchill not as the powerful war leader, but strangely glassy-eyed in front of the camera in what seemed like a precursor of a party political broadcast, or hesitant in front of a hostile, heckling crowd. Or the crucial fact – often overlooked in the trope of Churchill as triumphant war leader – that on the home front, and in the organisation of wartime production, Britain effectively already had a Labour government, in which Labour Ministers directed the command economy on which victory had depended.  Elsewhere the manipulation was more obvious – Margaret Thatcher’s conference speeches interspersed with the shots of the more grotesquely eccentric party faithful, or where at the end – after the film’s witnesses had expressed their optimism – the opening shots of VE Day celebrations were repeated, this time in colour in contrast to the monochrome of the rest of the film.

There were serious omissions, too.  Not just sociological oddities like the largely-forgotten fact that Britain was consumed by a crime-wave in the years immediately following the war, but most significantly the fact that the British economy was completely shattered by the war – a fact mentioned but whose implications (profoundly important, I’d argue, in making a contemporary link) were not considered.   Economics was barely mentioned – no more than a passing reference to Keynes.

There were a number of thoughts that I took away from the film:

First, following on from the point about how Labour had directed the domestic war effort, I wondered whether 1945 was a unique moment in history that made the achievements of the Attlee Government possible.  The war had demonstrated that a planned, centralised economy could work, in a way that was unparalleled before or since.  Perhaps – just perhaps – part of Labour’s triumph in 1945 was down to an acceptance of the use of such methods to avoid the chaos that followed the First World War; perhaps the return to the Tories in 1951 was a sign that the moment had passed, and that politics as usual – based around appeals to the individual rather than the collective – had returned.

Second, the film had almost nothing to say about economics, but the economic background of the Attlee Government is of central importance; and the comparison with the modern economic climate is instructive.  After six years of total war the British economy was shattered and its infrastructure was worn out.  At a time when we are being told that we must endure the economics of austerity because we lived beyond our means, and in response to the economic crisis of 2007-8, it is worth remembering that the creation of the NHS and the building of social housing to give working people decent, secure homes as of right took place against an immeasurably worse economic situation – albeit one that reflected the necessities of national survival rather than the casino economics of bankers’ Ponzi schemes.  The austerity of the late 1940s and the persistence of rationing were barely mentioned; but surely played a part in the return of politics as normal in 1951. It is additionally almost forgotten that the Attlee government presided over the most fundamental economic redistribution of modern times – in which wages for working people rose decisively in contrast to the wealth of the rentier class.  At a time when we are seeing the reverse taking place it seems important to make the link between social progress and redistribution. Moreover, there is an interesting parallel between the nationalisation of the coal, steel and transport industries and the original motivation behind Thatcher’s privatisations – the need to invest in infrastructure that was clapped out.

Third, the film does not consider the fact that the Labour Party of 1945 emerged from the split of 1931, in which the Labour leadership went into coalition to form a National Government.  It was a party that had explicitly rejected the fiscal orthodoxy and the reductions in the living standards of working people that Ramsay Macdonald had embraced as part of a flawed Westminster consensus.  It’s important because Labour’s leadership today looks much more like Ramsay Macdonald than George Lansbury; fiscally orthodox and apparently quite willing to live with cuts in living standards – including benefits – in the name of economic necessity.  The economics-free evasions of One Nation Labour (which I have blogged about here) look very much like the sort of thing that the Labour leaders of 1945 had consciously rebelled against in 1931; Labour in 1945 was confident in its theory.

Finally, there was a powerful sense that the witness of the participants in the film was undmediated.  Apart from a few comments about the way the media attacked Aneurin Bevan, there was almost no mention of the media.  We were firmly in the world of authentic experience – of consciousnesses formed by daily realities, not by the mediation of mass media.  This was a world of reality-based politics.

So, where  does this leave us in 2013, when the apparatus of decency that Attlee built has largely been dismantled, and we are living through the last days of the NHS as Bevan conceived it?  In a week in which a Labour front-bench, faced with a situation in which unemployed people were illegally stripped of their benefits, chose not to oppose a Bill that would nullify the redress that these people were entitled to under the law, the conclusion must be that Labour, in its present form, is not remotely capable of acting as the vehicle for any optimism that the tide against austerity economics can be turned.  Interviewees like Tony Mulhearn talked of the way in which Labour was no longer a working-class party, and no longer spoke for working people; the fact that the industries have changed and the people for whom Labour is failing to speak are now supermarket workers, contract cleaners, call-centre workers and indeed the unemployed forced on to workfare schemes rather than workers in giant, unionised industries does not negate the challenge (I could add from my own experience of my short and unhappy membership of the Labour Party in the late 1990s, what really motivated local party activists in my part of the world was not speaking for the vulnerable but expelling socialists – I remember one incident in which a local party panjandrum told us that the selection of a certain individual as a council candidate would be viewed with disfavour by No 10 –  leaving aside political considerations, an organisation that relied on such arrant nonsense to rationalise a witch-hunt had some pretty basic issues to deal with). Labour’s assimilation into the neoliberal mainstream means that it remains part of the problem, not the solution.

So where does the solution lie? Ken Loach has launched an appeal for unity on the Left to oppose austerity and to put into practice the calls for a new politics based around the values of 1945.  Leftish Labour figures like Owen Jones and Green MP Caroline Lucas are involved in launching the People’s Assembly to re-energise the Left and to recapture the values of 1945; it’s a huge but necessary task, and one that I cannot see the current Labour leadership tolerating; the challenge for the Labour left of recapturing a party that filleted its internal democracy in the 1990s to make way for new Labour looks pretty insurmountable, and Labour has long been a party intolerant of pluralism and dissent.  For me, part of the key lies in an issue that did not register in Loach’s film at all – the fact that any modern socialism must be Green, and conversely that Greens must be socialist, because the planet is under dire threat and the root of that threat is that power and wealth are in the hands of a minority determined to exploit the planet for their own benefit, rather than sustaining and nurturing it for the benefit of all; it is already obvious that in the global sense, environmental catastrophe is a matter of equality, or in Loach’s terms a class issue.  And the threat to our planet is as dangerous as the total war of 1939-45 – more so in fact – and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided without the sort of mass mobilisation that won that war, involving strong – but democratically accountable – state institutions.

Perhaps the real Spirit of ’45 is this; that people came together, worked collectively in war and for a brief few years managed to work collectively to change their society immeasurably for the better.  But over time our political culture shifted back towards individualism and lost that sense of the collective.  Faced with environmental degradation and what looks like a fundamental crisis of capitalism, we need to rediscover that collective spirit.  But we have a huge way to go.

Tea Party at the DWP: why the Coalition is desperate to redefine child poverty

The DWP has recently consulted on changing the way in which child poverty is defined, seeking – quite consciously – to broaden the definition away from that of relative poverty.  It’s a move that has attracted controversy among those working in the field, who argue that it is right to consider factors other than income in defining poverty, but that the current DWP proposals go too far (here, for example, is Save the Children’s eloquent and tightly-argued case for retaining relative poverty as a key indicator of child poverty)

But it seems clear that there is a fundamental, ideological reason why this redefinition is being pushed through now.  The DWP remains the Coalition’s Ideology Central, the home of the Coalition’s Tea Party tendency; and it seems obvious to me that there is a clear and fundamental ideological aim behind this proposal.

First, there is the obvious factor: under coalition proposals – and in particular the unprecedented range of benefit cuts due to be implemented in April – many thousands of families are being pushed further into poverty.  A recent Parliamentary Answer from Steve Webb MP – the token Orange Booker inside the Coalition’s Ministry of Love – indicated that of the 200,000 children who would be pushed into poverty by the 1% cap on benefits, 100,000 would come from families where at least one person was in work.  For a Government – or for that matter a Parliamentary consensus – that speaks the language of strivers and shirkers, that is a desperately embarrassing admission.  But it comes as no surprise – the creation, inadvertant or not, of a low-wage economy that matches falling pay with increasing living costs – especially housing costs – has meant that Government has been obliged to top-up low pay with tax credits; an effective subsidy for low-paying employers.

But there is far more than this.  The recently-closed Government consultation proposes a measure of child poverty based on eight variables:

Income and material deprivation

Worklessness

Unmanagable debt

Poor housing

Parental skill level

Access to quality education

Family stability

Parental health

Obviously, income and material deprivation is only one of these; and of the others, only two are obviously and directly linked to income.  The important issue here is the way in which the others have become part of the rhetoric of the Right, which talks in terms of low aspiration, of self-inflicted health issues, of generations of unemployment (the latter being effectively skewered by the Joseph Rowntree trust) and the language of workfare programmes.

In other words, the whole thrust of Coalition policy is to move towards a definition of poverty based on blame; a list that can be spun as things that people get themselves into, rather than things beyond their control that they cannot get out of.  In other words, it is essentially an ideological shift – an attempt to bring the definition of policy in line with neoliberal politics rather than empirical reality.

And it is an important reminder that for neoliberals and austerity economists – not least for the maintenance of the neoliberal consensus among the main Westminster political parties – it is absolutely essential to redefine poverty as something that arises from the failures and fecklessness of the indvidual, rather than something that results from capitalist economics.  It’s a rhetoric that is as old as capitalism itself- the belief that you can work your way out of poverty, and that application and effort bring riches (a proposition that can be disproved by walking into any NHS hospital ward and counting the millionaires among the nurses and ancillary staff).

Ian Duncan Smith was at it again yesterday, declaring that outrage about workfare programmes was essentially the result of middle-class and educated people whingeing that shelf-stacking was too good for them.  Duncan Smith’s comments ignored the reality of big business being subsidised by using free forced labour of people – who had often paid National Insurance for decades – under threat of using their benefits; he was free, unchallenged as ever by the mainstream media, to develop this disgraceful narrative (the most eloquent response to which is perhaps not the deluge of outrage that followed but the silence of the Labour leadership).

And this is all of a piece with narratives of scrounging and fecklessness, the demonisation of the poor and hate-speech towards the disabled that sits at the heart of modern British political discourse.  In the USA, the wealthy managed to create the Tea Party movement, which mobilised the poor and insecure against the big government that, in fact, remains the bulwark between waged individuals and exploitation.  In Britain we have our own Tea Party mentality, in which successive Governments have sought to demonise the poor and insecure as creators of their own misfortune.  It is now the Coalition, but Labour, with their talk of strivers, are equally guilty; workfare is of course core New Labour policy.

Austerity is a state of mind; defeating it means rejecting it as a default economics.  And to do so, resisting the recasting of poverty as something people do to themselves is absolutely fundamental.