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.

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.

How to fight neoliberals: The New Zealand experiment revisited

The people behind the Think Left blog yesterday circulated a piece from the Independent about the way in which New Zealand has reacted to the imposition of an austerity agenda.  It’s an old piece, but the landscape is strikingly familiar – food banks, homelessness, benefit cuts, soaring crime.  The piece points out how New Zealand’s progressive traditions have been traduced.  The first country to give women the vote, the first country to introduce universal benefits, once held up by Aneurin Bevan as a model for the future.  Up until recently, if you wanted to sum up the New Zealand ethos in one phrase, it was the “Fair Go” – the belief that everyone had the right to share in the good things in society and make the best for themselves and their families.  Now, if you hear it at all, it’s likely to be a shallow justification for deregulating business.

The piece had me reaching for Jane Kelsey’s magnificent book on the neoliberal takeover of New Zealand, The New Zealand Experiment.  Not an easy book to find in the UK, I bought my copy in New Zealand back in the 1990s; it remains a vital and urgent book, because its themes resonate so powerfully with our experience of austerity in post-2010 Britain.

Two of Kelsey’s themes strike home particularly hard.  First, the use of crisis to undermine democracy.  Kelsey points out that neoliberalism does not win elections; crisis must be used to create the illusion of necessity and to invalidate alternatives.  She describes the proponents of neoliberalism as “technopols”, an uncanny prescience of the imposition of “technocratic” Governments in Greece and Italy to drive neoliberal reforms.  The spectacle of European governments lining up to join a neoliberal treaty that would effectively outlaw expansionary economic policy, the creation of secret trade agreements in which corporate tribunals will be empowered to overrule democratic governments, or the construction of the lie that austerity economics is the necessary antidote to profligate public spending; Kelsey foresaw all these.

Second, Kelsey points to the complicity of avowedly left-of-centre parties in bringing about the neoliberal coup.  Economic reform was instituted by a Labour government in New Zealand, and was generally known as “Rogernomics” after the then Labour finance minister, Roger Douglas.  Once again it’s a powerful reminder that, years later, British austerity economics was imposed because an apparently left-of-centre party was prepared to put into office a Conservative Party that had just failed to win an election (the Liberal Democrats being, of course, an example of a party that, having been captured for Neoliberalism by its Orange Book faction, sought to present a soft centrist image to the electorate).  But it’s also important to remember that many of the salient features of British austerity had their roots in Labour’s years in office.  NHS outsourcing, the introduction of private capital into education, workfare, university tuition fees, cutting benefits, asset sales; all of these are core Labour policies that the Coalition has simply taken to their logical conclusion.  Labour is committed to keeping the Coalition’s public spending cuts and considering more of its own; it offers no alternative to the austerity agenda.  It differs from the Coalition in degree and presentation rather than substance; Westminster remains a place of neoliberal consensus.

These are not of themselves startling insights in 2013 (although the prescience of a book written in 1994 is startling). What makes Kelsey’s book really compelling twenty years on is a four-page appendix entitled A Manual for Counter-Technopols.  It sets out a checklist of strategies for resistance: it seems to me to be just as important and apposite now as when it was written.

It’s obviously written from a New Zealand perspective, and recognises that in New Zealand in the 1990s, as in Britain and Europe in the 2010s, much of the pass had already been sold.  But the important thing is the conceptual framework, and the pointers it gives towards developing an effective critique of neoliberalism – especially when faced with parties of the centre-left that have thrown in the towel, but also perhaps to more radical groupings who find themselves going native once they’ve arrived in political office.

A quick Google search suggests that although excerpts have been reproduced on line, nobody has done so in its entirety.  So here it is: it’s a formidable piece of work.

Appendix: A Manual for Counter-technopols

If the architects of structural adjustment are pooling their experiences in a manual for technopols to help them impose their agenda on the rest of the world, those who want to stop them should do the same. A preliminary checklist of potential pitfalls and strategies for resistance, drawn from New Zealand’s experience, might include the following:

- Take economic fundamentalism seriously – what initially appears like extremism, if not effectively challenged and discredited, may in a short time be considered orthodox.

- Nip it in the bud – early changes can be the most fundamental and deliberately difficult to undo; once the structural adjustment agenda is under way, its internal logic has a domino effect on all policies and programmes.

- Be sceptical about ‘crises’ – anticipate a ‘crisis’ in the making, and move quickly to examine the real nature of the problem, who defines it as a crisis, and who stands to gain. Demand to know the range of possible solutions, and the costs and benefits of each to whom. If the answers are not forthcoming, burn the midnight oil to produce the answers for yourselves.

- Watch for the blitzkrieg  - constantly monitor, document and expose what is going on behind the scenes. Act on instinct and anticipate the logical next step. Waitng until all the facts can be documented will probably be too late.

- Remember the Tories are not always the worst – social democratic parties  and governments can neutralise potential opponents and initiate vital changes which provide the thin end of the wedge. Fighting to prevent  a party’s capture by zealots is important. But once the party has been taken over, maintaining solidarity on the outside while seeking change from within merely gives them more time. When the spirit of the party is dead, shed the old skin and create something new

- Take economics seriously – economic fundamentalism pervades everything.  There is no boundary between economic, indigenous, social, foreign, environmental or other policies. Those who focus on narrow sectoral concern and ignore the pervasive economic agenda will lose their own battles and weaken the collective ability to resist. Leaving economics to economists is fatal.

- Expose the illogic of their theory - neo-liberal theories are riddled with bogus assumptions and internal inconsistencies, and often lack empirical support. Agency and public choice theories in particular need to exposed as self-serving rationalisations which operate in the interests of elites whom the policies empower.

- Evaluate the argument carefully – acknowledge the valid aspects of arguments for change and meet them with alternatives which address the substance of the concern.

- Challenge hypocrisy – ask who is promoting a strategy as being in the ‘national interest’, and who stands to benefit most. Document cases where self-interest is disguised as public good.

- Expose ‘stacking of the deck’ – name the key players behind the scenes, document their interlocking roles and allegiances, and expose the personal and corporate benefits they receive.

- Maximise every political obstacle – federal systems of government, written constitutions, bicameral parliaments, complex voting systems, supra-national institutions and strong local governments provide barriers which can neutralise the blitzkrieg approach and slow the pace of, if not prevent, undesirable change.

- Maintain a strong civil society and popular sector – extra-parliamentary politics are essential to complement resistance through traditional party channels, and may become the front line once institutional politics fall captive.

- Work hard to maintain solidarity – avoid the trap of divide and rule; sectoral in-fighting is self-indulgent and everyone risks losing in the end.

- Do not compromise the labour movement – build awareness of the structural adjustment agenda at union branch and workplace level, so union members can demand accountability from their leadership. Openly debate the pros and cons of political party ties, and the costs and benefits of compromise. Concessions intended to forestall more radical change tend to deepen co-option and weaken the ability to resist the next step. Publicly challenge the failure of union bureaucrats to defend the interests of workers and the unemployed. If the leadership doesn’t listen, disobey.

- Employ the politics of international embarrassment – if the forums of institutional politics have been taken and local resistance neutralised, marginalised or suppressed, the most potent political arena may be the inremational stage. Neo-liberal governments and free market economies depend on foreign investment and international approval. Image is everything. The international sphere is one arena they cannot effectively control.

- Reinforce the concept of an independent public service – undercut attempts to discredit, sideline and colonise the public service by acknowledging deficiencies and promoting pro-active models for change. Create a constituency of support among client groups and the public which stresses the need for independence and professionalism, the obligations of public service, and the risks of the managerial approach

- Encourage community leaders to speak out - public criticism from civic and church leaders, folk heroes and other prominent ‘names’ makes governments uncomfortable and people think. The fewer public critics there are, the easier they are to discredit, harass and intimidate. Remind community leaders of their social Obligations, and the need to look themselves in the mirror in the morning.

- Avoid anti-intellectualism – a pool of critical academics and other intellectuals who can document and expose the fallacies and failures of a structural adjustment programme, and develop viable alternatives in partnership with community and sectoral groups, is absolutely vital. They need to be supported when they come under attack, and challenged when they fail to speak out or are co-opted or seduced.

- Establish well-resourced critical think-tanks – neo-liberal and libertarian think-tanks have shown the importance of Well-resourced and internationally connected institutes which can develop an integrated analysis and foster climates favourable to change. Unco-ordinated research by isolated critics can never compete.

- Develop alternative media outlets – once mainstream media are captured it is difficult for critics to enter the debate, and impossible to lead it. Alternative media and innovative strategies must be in place before people and financial resources come under stress. Effective communication and exchange of information between sectoral groups and activists are essential, despite the time and resources involved.

- Raise the level of popular economic literacy – familiarise people with the basic themes, assumptions and goals of economic fundamentalism. Insist that economic policy affects everyone, that everyone has a right to participate in the debate, and that alternatives do exist.

- Educate popular and sectoral groups in advance – draw on international experience, networks, publications, speakers and examples to put people on the alert. Identify the likely strategies, policies and effects of structural adjustment for sectors like labour, education, health, local government, community work, public service and the media. Encourage sectors to workshop counter-strategies in advance. There will be little time for this when people are struggling just to survive.

- Resist marketspeak – maintain control of the language, challenge its capture, and refuse to convert your discourse to theirs. Insist on using hard terms that convey the hard realities of what is going on.

- Be realistic and avoid nostalgia—recognise that the world has changed, in some ways irreversibly, and the past was far from perfect. Avoid being trapped solely into reaction and critique. Many neo-liberal criticisms of the status quo are justified and will strike a chord with people. Defending the past for its own sake adds credibility to their arguments and wastes opportunities to work for genuine change.

- Be proactive and develop real altematives – start rethinking visions, strategies and models of development for the future. Show that there are workable, preferable alternatives from the start. This becomes progressively more difficult once the programme takes hold.

- Rethink identity and alliances – combine a critical analysis of economic, political, cultural and social models of the past with a forward-thinking vision of what a socially just future might look like. Recognise that the legitimate expectations, insights and vision of indigenous peoples are no just a matter of social justice, but offer the foundation for an alliance which can forge a new way ahead.

It is impossible to tell in retrospect how far these strategies would have hindered, let alone prevented, the onset of economic fundamentalism inNew Zealand. They most certainly would have made the ‘successful’ implementation of the structural adjustment programme more difficult, and given time for opponents to rethink, regroup and resist

Sadly, the time for many of these strategies has passed. It is going to be enormously difficult and costly to bring about changes which genuinely empower people in Aotearoa New Zealand to take control of their lives, within communities where they can play an active, equal and valued part. Yet the potential is still there for alternative forms of economics, politics and identity to emerge, and there are strategies which can exploit the soft underbelly of the new regime to bring them into effect. The beginnings of a manual for counter-technopols in this post-structural adjustment phase might include the following:

- Challenge the TINA svndrome – convince people individually and collectively that there are alternatives. Carefully analyse present barriers and future trends to produce options that combine realism with the prospect of meaningful change. Actively promote them and have them ready to be implemented when the market fails.

- Promote informed debate and critique – build a constituency for change through alternative information networks and media; use tribal, community, workplace, women’s, church, creche, union and similar outlets, and harness technology where available, to balance the good-news machine with critical analysis of the economic and social costs.

- Promote participatory democracy – encourage people to take back control; empower them with knowledge to understand the forces affecting them and the points at which they can intervene. Stress that no one has a fail-safe recipe for change, and that everyone has a contribution to make. Recognise the skills, resources and insights of tribes, individuals, communities, sectoral groups and civil society, and the right to act both separately and in concert.

- Embrace the Treaty of Waitangi as a liberating force—moving forward means facing up to the past. Healing the wounds from over 155 years means restoring to Maori their economic and political power. Constructive debate on a treaty-based republican constitution can provide a liberating framework within which Maori and Pakeha can co-exist.

- Encourage progressive counter-nationalism – celebrate diversity rather than uniformity; Work to build identities and values which replace xenophobia, racism and nostalgia with multiple identities and progressive visions for the future.

- Develop multi-level strategies – take action at local, sectoral, regional, national and international levels, and co-ordinate those activities through informal networks and formal linkages.

- Hold the line – the structural adjustment programme is not yet complete; the state still plays an active role in providing social services and public goods. Sustained and co-ordinated action in communities, sectors and national politics can effectively hold the line.

- Localise politics – recognise the power held by regional and local authorities and the ability to secure information and influence decisions at that level. Encourage accountability of local officials and participation in local politics. Continue local struggles to maintain services which provide for local needs; build solidarity, political awareness and a belief in the possibility of change.

- Ginger up party politics – maintain pressure on political parties through popular mobilisation and public education campaigns, document failed policies and unacceptable practices, and use the politics of embarrassment at home and overseas to complement the work of party activists within.

- Invest in the future – provide financial, human and moral support to sustain alternative analysis, publications, think-tanks, training programmes and people‘s projects that are working actively for change. Create alternatives to state dependency by providing financial, personal and moral support for alternative economic developments.

- Support those who speak out – intimidation and harassment of social critics works only if the targets lack personal, popular and institutional support. Withdrawing from public debate leaves those who remain more exposed.

- Promote ethical investment – support overseas and local investors who genuinely respond to indigenous, ecological and social concerns. Expose and attack unethical investors who don’t. Boycotts have proved a powerful force internationally and in New Zealand, including anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, environmental and safe product campaigns. ‘New Zealand’ companies can be most easily embarrassed and called to account. ‘Foreign’ companies are often targets of co-ordinated campaigns overseas that welcome information, participation and support.

- Think global, act local – develop an understanding of the global nature of economic, political and cultural power, and those forces which drive current trends. Draw the links between global forces and local events. Target local representatives, meetings and activities which feed into and on the global economic and political machine.

- Think local, act global – actively support intemational strategies for change such as people’s tribunals, non-state codes of conduct, non-governmental forums, and action campaigns against unethical companies, practices and governments. Recognise that international action is essential to counter the collaboration of states and corporations, and to empower civil society to take back control.

Nothing strange about the death of English liberalism

Reading Nick Clegg’s New Year message was a sad and sobering affair (leaving aside any impatience at the growing habit of politicians great and small issuing such messages).  It read as really little more than excuse-mongering and post-hoc rationalisation in defence of policies that appear to rub against the natural grain of the Liberal tradition; its ludicrous defence of an economic policy that is, by every objective standard, failing does not sit easily in a political tradition that has sought to define itself as moulding society in the service of the rational.  Surely Liberalism should aspire to something better than this.  And one then began to question whether, perhaps, this is not about one rather discredited politician’s traducing the political tradition for which he is apparently the spokesman, but perhaps something more deeply ingrained in the nature of English liberalism itself

I am someone who had Liberalism in their political blood from an early age.  An active Liberal Party member in my late teens and early twenties, sometime President of the Oxford University Liberals, and, after university, Liberal Party employee for a couple of years; contributor to Liberal debates about philosophy, confident that Liberalism was a coherent philosophy offered something radical, important, unique.  It gave the appearance at least of being a big, coherent narrative that could explain the world and guide its improvement.   Revisiting that philosophy with a critical eye, at a time when Liberal Democrats are in Government, and after a quarter of a century of reading and reflection, suggests that it is none of those things.  I have moved on, but I think now is a good time to consider why Liberalism appears increasingly irrelevant as a political philosophy capable of addressing contemporary political and economic issues.

Political parties are not always loyal to the ideas that their names and supporters profess (there are still apparently socialists in the Labour Party) and the Liberal Party, and then the Liberal Democrats, often trod a rather tentative path around the core beliefs of Liberalism – a party formed of an alliance with the old discredited Labour right was always going to involve compromises, although a confident and assured liberalism need not have worried about that.  And one could argue that the new party represented a coming together of a tradition that had been blown apart by the ferments that led to the creation of the Labour Party at the start of the twentieth century, when social liberals developing a more interventionist account of the state were divided between the new Labour party and sticking with an old Liberal Party that showed limited inclination to abandon the shibboleths of nineteenth-century laissez-faire – a debate taking place at a time when the cleavage lines of British politics were more about empire than economics.

One approach to understanding the issues around Liberalism is to take an inevitably brief tour around some of its historical themes.

Peace, retrenchment, reform

So where does one start to develop an account of what Liberalism was?  Gladstone, inevitably: peace, retrenchment and reform.  Even in the 1980s – arguably the high-point of social liberal influence in Party thinking – Gladstone was still a name that featured in Liberal discourse (the Liberal Party Headquarters in which I worked occupied a set of surprisingly grotty offices on the top floor of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Place – an ostentatious pile that expressed Edwardian Liberalism in all its confidence, the building where Liberal grandees gathered to celebrate the 1906 landslide, and whose entry hall was stuffed with Gladstonian memorabilia, including an axe that the Grand Old Man had used in his favoured pursuit of tree-felling).  Peace and reform have remained Liberal themes – a sense of moral obligation in foreign policy, which still manifested itself in Liberal Democrats’ opposition to war in Iraq before the fighting started (although probably not in its capitulation to tabloid opinion once the fighting was under way); and a commitment to political reform which extended up to the point at which Clegg’s Liberal Party entered coalition (though, once again, not obviously afterwards). And it is worth re-reading the speeches of John Bright on the Crimean War – often held up as a beacon of Liberal idealism – to appreciate the extent to which  moral considerations could be contingent on protecting the public purse.

Retrenchment – there we reach the first and obvious problem with Liberalism; its equivocal attitude towards the state.  It originates in opposition to the corrupt oligarchy of Eighteenth- and early-Nineteeth Century England; the sense that while Britain advanced into an age of economic growth and prosperity, a corrupt and sclerotic state, run by placemen and which acted as a parasite on economic progress, was holding it back.

The New Liberalism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century began to see the state as something that could intervene positively in the economy, but much of the basic energy of that new thinking went into the Labour Party. It’s striking that the New Liberalism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s during a long depression that shares many characteristics with the post-2008 economic catastrophe, and a discontent with the narratives of economic liberalism that framed that depression while engaging with emerging Socialist thinking and activism.  In particular, there was a growing “condition of England” question – in which the hard evidence provided by writers like Stead and Mayhew, and the activist testimony of William Booth, tested the conscience of Liberal progressives.

But this was a movement that had little real purchase – even though the Liberal landslide of 1906 brought important social reform (modelled on the insurance of the private sector rather than a belief in state provision). A hostility to the state, and a refusal to see it as a mechanism that could ensure better outcomes for individuals in a more efficient way than, say, private philanthropy, with even modest levels of coercion through taxation, has long been lurking in Liberal thinking – even among the more socially progressive Liberal Democrats. In the 1980s, during my time in the Party, it expressed itself in a longing for decentralisation, without ever recognising that to achieve may liberal goals – especially in terms of personal and gender politics – a strong democratically accountable state was necessary.  Liberal Democrats – through the Orange Book and in Government – have shown that under pressure, they have no coherent theory of the state.

It’s an omission that sits uneasily with the emphasis on reform; a belief that improving the mechanisms through which politics is conducted can bring real benefits to society.  Once again the nineteenth-century roots are obvious – a belief that an educated, open polity could overturn the sclerotic oligarchy that governed early 19th Century England.  Gladstone’s civil service reforms – ensuring that Government selects its administrative corps on merit – represent a classic Liberal reform, grounded in theories of rationality (while at the same time defining “merit” in a fairly exclusive and conventional way, falling short of challenging norms of contemporary discourse).  It’s a discourse in which reform becomes a way, not of overturning the status quo, but of preserving the best of it and making it more efficient; it implies that the purpose of political action is not to challenge political systems as a whole, but to root out abuses that inhibit the smooth operation of an essentially benign political system.  The big questions remain unasked (and certainly unanswered).

But at the heart of Liberalism’s intellectual problem is that, beyond a vague commitment to open structures and scrutiny, it offers no theory or understanding of the collective.  Its concept of the public world is wholly atomistic. I would argue that one of the fundamental issues of political discourse is where the rights of the individual end and where the collective interests of society begin; classical Liberalism is barely capable of formulating the question, let alone providing a coherent answer to it.

Twentieth century giants – Keynes and Beveridge

It’s a pattern that underpins the two dominant Liberal figures of the twentieth century – Keynes and Beveridge.  British Liberalism has claimed both as their own (Beveridge was briefly a Liberal MP, Keynes held no office within the Party).  In both cases, Liberalism claimed them when it was expedient to do so, even though their reformism went beyond the bounds of traditional Liberalism.  Now that the old Liberalism has reasserted itself, they have been cast aside.

Keynes’ explicit mission was to save capitalism from the idiocies of its most fervent exponents.  Beveridge was horrified not just by the suffering of the British poor, but by the political instability that arose from that; both were acting, consciously or not, under the shadow of totalitarianism, of Hitler and Stalin.  There is a respectable case for saying that the urgency with which their ideas were taken up derives from the reality of competing ideologies, and hence a sense of the underlying fragility of liberal democracy; it contrasts with a mindset in which a claimed “end of history” appears to have removed the threat of alternative economic theories from the scene; in which the “other” has become a religious and cultural one rather than an attempt to redefine ideas of ownership and wealth.  It is an environment in which Liberalism’s traditional role – that of moulding society in the defence of rational ideas – becomes a defence of what are portrayed as democratic cultural norms against an Orientalist conception of barbarism and primitivism.  “Liberal imperialism” – another Party-splitting discourse from the early twentieth-century – has become something of a Western foreign policy norm, with all that implies.

The work of Keynes and Beveridge remains vitally important. Both, ironically enough, offer the basis of powerful critiques of the neoliberal society for which Britain’s Liberal Democrats have become such enthusiastic enablers and cheerleaders.  Beveridge, in particualr, offers a powerful corrective to the notion of citizenship that is implicit in Orange Bookers’ and Liberal Democrat Ministers’ enthusiastic advocacy of the belief that the right to state support is conditional on the attitude rather than the condition of the vulnerable, and should be administered on the basis of who those in power deem to be deserving.  The defining arguments against Clegg’s much-trumpeted assaults on universal benefits remain in the Beveridge Report, and Clegg’s speechwriters have yet to find a coherent narrative to support Clegg’s ludicrous claims that his party’s happy cheerleading for cuts in benefits for the vulnerable marks him as the true heir to Beveridge.

And Keynes demonstrates as powerfully as Marx why the policy of austerity is self-defeating: the most trenchant public critics of austerity tend to be Keynsians rather than Marxists (although the resemblance of late-capitalist austerity to Marx’s crisis of capital accumulation is striking and sobering).

The Personal and the Political

And that leads inevitably to another strand of contemporary Liberalism; its concept of personal freedom.  Liberalism traditionally talked in terms of rational, educated and informed individuals acting in a way that ensured maximum benefit from their interactions; it is a philosophy very much at one with the fundamental doctrines of the free market.  In more recent years it has become more closely identified with extending individual liberties, especially those related to identity; its progressivism has been rooted in its opposition to capital punishment, its belief that gender and sexuality should not be barriers to equality, its recognition of the right to “alternative” lifestyles.  All these are important things; they have hugely enriched our lives as a society.

But problems remain. The personal is undoubtedly the political; the problem arises when the political becomes the personal, without a concept of the collective.  It is a commonplace that the people who argued for and largely won greater personal liberties – both by overturning restrictive legislation and by living lifestyles that were more liberated – voted for Thatcher and Reagan in their droves.  The obvious reason, once again, is the idea of the state as something hostile; a belief that the liberal society was one in which you were left alone.  It’s a very negative, reactive concept of liberty.  Liberals have yet to demonstrate how such gains can be made without a strong, interventionist state and a discourse that is prepared to challenge popular opinion.

Community politics

The problems become clearer when one considers what was regarded by many Liberals in the 1970s and 1980s as their key political position, the thing that differentiated them from other political parties: community politics.  At its best and most pure it was an ideology that sought to empower and energise the citizen, by giving them power over the environment in which they lived; at its worst it often degenerated into the politics of mindless activism, based around endless oppositionist campaigning to achieve electoral success with no clear vision of how to handle office once it was achieved.  It is the basis for the sneer that Liberals were the party of pavement politics.

As I’ve argued before, re-reading its principal text – Gordon Lishman and Bernard Greaves’ The Theory and Practice of Community Politics – the thing that strikes one most forcibly is just how reactionary it is.  It reeks of hostility to the collective, to the state and – in particular – to Trade Unions (at which point it is worth noting that the Liberal ideal for the most part ignores collective action by workers, and demonises it on those few occasions when it emerges into Liberal discourse). Its distrust of the state and its belief that social objectives can be achieved through voluntarism make it read like a first draft for Cameron’s Big Society. Its combination of populism and activism brings to mind, as much as anything, the policy positions of UKIP.  (To be fair to my younger self, the Liberal obsession with decentralisation and localism always seemed to me to be intellectually weak. It’s only really since that I have come to realise just how anti-democratic such sentiments are, how tropes of localism can be used to argue against wider democratic will and how vital it is to have a strong theory of the state to manage such conflicts).

The Orange Book

Here Liberalism appears to have returned to its roots; here the hostility to the state and the reliance on market individualism, latent in community politics,  is made manifest in a document that has become a manifesto for Liberal Democrats in Government.  Why did Liberal Democrats do so little to oppose the marketisation of the NHS? Because it’s core Liberal Democrat policy, as set out in David Laws’ chapter in the Orange Book. There is a belief expressed by many people on the soft Left that Liberal Democrats have been weak in Government – that they went into Government on a coalition agreement that has long been left behind, and have been systematically worsted by a cynical Conservative Party whose unscrupulousness and instinct for power makes the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party look like a Sunday School advisory group.  Some of this is true – look for example at how the Liberal Democrats lost electoral reform and Lords reform.  In some ways the Tories have shown themselves to be weaker than that – look at how Cameron has to paper over the cracks on Europe and equal marriage.  But on the economic essentials that define the coalition, there is nothing between Tories and Liberal Democrats.  Economically, this is a Liberal Government, with the Orange Book as its instruction manual.

And the most important point to note about the status of modern Liberalism is that this position does not in any way reflect the politics of the Liberal grass roots.  I don’t suppose the grass roots have changed much since my days in the Party – decent, progressive people who are horrified by much of what the Party leadership is doing, rooted in identity politics and (a Liberal characteristic I have not really touched on here) their tradition of internationalism, but – by and large – clueless about economics and its role in shaping the political agenda, and without the big narrative to oppose the Orange Bookers.

Conclusion

So, where does this necessarily brief excursus in to the politics of Liberalism lead us? In general, then, the problem with the Liberal discourse is not that it fails to ask the big questions; it is that it looks increasingly like an ideological construct that is designed to prevent those questions from being asked.  It is a philosophy that is generally fearful of the state, and fearful of democracy; the constant fear that admission of the hoi polloi to real political influence will result in a decline into irrationalism.  J S Mill’s fear of universal franchise has never really gone away.  The lingering belief that if you temper the laws of the market with democracy, chaos will follow, seems to inform almost every pronouncement of the Liberal Democrat High Command. You may vote for ending tuition fees, but such a policy is, in retrospect, unaffordable.

The historical fate of Liberalism is inevitably bound up with the concept of market economics.  In the nineteenth century, when the unfettered operation of the market stood in opposition to the bloated jobbery of the state – in England in particular – Liberalism looked like – indeed was – a radical and progressive ideal.  Political reform and economic progress went hand in hand.  In the late nineteenth century our concept of the state changed – and the Liberal Party split and those who saw the state as an agent of change went into the Labour Party.  Ironically enough, Liberalism in fact provided many of the reforms that made the activist state possible; and the nonconformist conscience, formed in an age when religious exclusion was the norm for those who spurned Anglicanism, provided a radical edge (but also a sense of moral disapproval for the poor).  Prominent Liberals like Keynes and Beveridge provided the intellectual foundation of the welfare state, in which the state became an agency of progress and change.  The Liberal revival of the 1970s and 1980s coalesced around the idea of community politics, which offered the illusion of progress and empowerment while espousing an anti-state, anti-Union and pro-voluntarism stance which in many ways provides an ideological background for Orange Book Liberalism.

The decline and fall of Liberalism is at one level a tragedy.  At its best Liberalism offered an optimism, a belief in progress, a commitment to fairness and a belief in the power of human intellect in the face of ideology that represents the best of British political history. It sought to speak truth to power in a way that is wholly admirable and actually represents a necessary condition for progress. Many individual Liberal Democrat members doubtless continue to express those virtues. But, hobbled by a belief in market agency and its hostility to collective action in general and the state in particular, and faced with the crisis of late capitalism that Marx so strikingly foresaw, contemporary Liberalism has nothing to offer other than the perpetuation of that crisis.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson is that Liberalism has, since its Victorian and Edwardian days, been a strange and incongruous vessel for the aspirations and ideals of its progressive followers.  Midway through this coalition, the time has surely come for these decent people to invest their ideals elsewhere.

Miliband, Balls and the death of functioning democracy

These have been dispiriting times for those who oppose the ideology that the Coalition Government is enacting with a brutality that should surprise no-one, but somehow always does (mostly because they haven’t read the Orange Book). In the week that we have seen the House of Lords approve a huge cut in the living standards of thousands of vulnerable people through the abolition of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) – with Liberal Democrat lords leaping happily through the division lobby to ensure that yet another piece of Orange Book ideology is slipped into place – and in which we have seen Government Ministers debating whether to award the Queen a new yacht for her Diamond Jubilee – we see the official opposition throwing in the towel.

There has been some controversy about what Ed Balls actually meant in his comments about a future Labour government and cuts in an interview in last Saturday’s Guardian. The fact that so much ink has been spilt in trying to decipher Balls’ gnomic utterances is in itself part of Labour’s problem; an opposition that cannot express itself clearly has obviously got a problem. Those who defend Balls argue that he is simply being realistic – that by the time Labour comes to office it will confront a situation in which deep cuts have been made and which will form the baseline for what Labour does. But Balls went much further than that – he stated that public sector workers will continue to take pay cuts and public expenditure decisions that have eviscerated the living standards of the most vulnerable will not be reversed. It’s all very well to talk about the need to preserve jobs, but in doing so Balls has failed to notice that it is the economics of austerity that is putting jobs at risk. The clear message from Balls is that the poorest in society will continue to bear the costs of the failures of economic elites, and talking about tax evasion is no more than a cosmetic sop. He’s adopted the Tory axioms and assumptions and has allowed Cameron, Osborne and the Orange Bookers to drive the economic agenda.

This is serious, but not surprising. Labour has long since ceased to be a party that challenges the neoliberal ideology, but in the past the complicity has gone by default rather than being explicit. It seems to mark something of a turning point, though, in the tone of political debate; after a year and a half of coalition government, the Tory party is resurgent and appears to dominate debate.

But there’s a subtext too – one that is reflected in the current debate about independence for Scotland. I have spent quite a lot of cyber-ink on this blog talking about crises of democratic legitimacy; this appears to be the moment at which Westminster politics finally took leave of its democratic pretence. It’s not just the fact that a ruling party which dared not expose the extent of its ambitions to the electorate, and which achieved a little more a third of votes cast in 2010, is now left without any meaningful opposition to its imposition of  a feral neoliberal agenda – it’s that the ethos of the ruling coalition is defined, not by what it told the electorate in 2010, but what it tried to conceal. And now the official opposition has joined in.

Whatever that may be, it is not a healthy democracy. The large majority of the electorate did not vote for this – which is why the Westminster neoliberals use the language of necessity, of realism, of common-sense to describe a set of ideas and values which are largely unsupported by any empirical evidence. Austerity is failing and the burden of that failure is falling overwhelmingly, and in some cases almost exclusively, on the people who are least able to bear it, while the perpetrators of the latest round of crisis continue to enrich themselves. It need not and should not be like that, but there are no voices in the political mainstream with the courage or insight to say so.

The obvious implication is that opposition to neoliberalism must now take place entirely outside the Parliamentary process. Three mainstream political party share the same assumptions and debate across ever-shrinking territory while the real questions facing our society are all about the validity of their consensus.  It is impossible to see any realistic prospect of change within the three-party system that is not forced from outside (and which depends on the mainstream media). The neoliberals realise this – the closing down of public space, the criminalisation of protest and the active promotion of hatred for the poor and vulnerable demonstrate this. Consider the case of the students – many of whom voted Liberal Democrat in 2010, the first time they were able to vote, on the basis of Clegg’s promise on tuition fees; when Clegg and his party of fools and liars pissed on their idealism they took the path of legitimate protest only to find themselves collectively punished by kettling and beating. Of course there was a strong element of self-interest in the student movement; but what I remember from that first demonstration in November 2010 was a belief that they were upholding democracy and had yet to learn that this was how Westminster politics worked.  Or we could ask why the neoliberals are so afraid of the Occupy movement and have, especially in the United States, deployed such extreme violence against it.  The threat is not about a few dozen people establishing camps; it’s about the risk that questions will be asked and answers proffered that blow apart the fictions on which the elite justifies its power and wealth.

Above all, this is the Government – and now the opposition – that chose to abandon evidence. I mentioned the way on which the political elite has sought to demonise the vulnerable. It has done this through a combination of spin, insinuation and downright dishonesty.  Its guiding principle is not truth but pandering to the prejudices of a mass media which is, at almost every level, a fantasy factory. Those of us who have long understood the evidential base for climate change, or watchers of the US Republican primaries in recent weeks, or even followed the genesis of the Tea Party, will recognise the methods; it seems that all mainstream Westminster parties are striving for a politics of unsupported ideological statements in which victory goes to the producer of the most attractive lie. For all the language of realism and common-sense it is those who criticise neoliberalism from the Left who remain grounded in the world of evidence.

The sight of a political elite abandoning wholesale the intellectual disciplines of empiricism is deeply disturbing.  It’s very easy to criticise the position of the Republican Right; but our political mainstream is, in essence, no different. What Labour has done is make that abandonment of empiricism public and obvious.

Returning to Miliband and Balls, I for one am getting very fed up with hearing special pleading by people whose loyalty to Labour as an institution is greater than to the people on whose behalf Labour used to speak. Labour, after all, began as a movement to give a voice to the voiceless – to bring the trade unions, with their everyday experience of the daily lives of working people, into Parliament.  It now joins in a political consensus that diminishes those authentic voices, and spins away the witness of ordinary people about their lives.

Welfare reform and the cultural production of ignorance

I’ve recently encountered an important and fascinating paper by Tom Slater of the Edinburgh University Institute of Geography which considers welfare reform and mythmaking.  It’s important because it goes right to the heart of the way in which policy is made on this – for the Right at least – totemic issue, and reveals much about the wider divergence between reality and ideology which sits at the centre of both coalition policy and the neo-liberal project at large.

It’s a paper that demands to be read in full but in summary Slater seeks to contrast the way in which Ian Duncan-Smith’s rhetoric and analysis changed between his investigation of poverty in Britain for the Centre for Social Justice  - especially his visit to the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow – and his actions as Secretary of State for Welfare and Pensions in the Coalition government.  He places this in the context of a programme of what he calls wilful institutional ignorance – or, to use a term derived from Robert Proctor, “agnotology”.  Slater cites Proctor on the need to understand

“how ignorance is produced or maintained in diverse settings, through (for example) media neglect, corporate or governmental secrecy and suppression, document destruction, and myriad forms of inherent or avoidable culturopolitical selectivity, inattention, and forgetfulness. The point is to develop a taxonomy of understandings and uses of ignorance, but also tools for understanding how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not or did not ‘come to be’ or are delayed or neglected at different points in history.”

He then seeks to apply this approach to the development of Coalition welfare policy – citing in particular the importance of right-wing think-tanks in capturing political discourse for market ideology,  and in particular the ways in which big government and the decline of traditional families have been presented as the cause of social breakdown; the use of results from loaded surveys to allow the authors to claim an evidence base while neglecting theoretical work; the way in which New Labour prepared the ground for the Coalition by undermining the belief that benefits were a matter of right, rather than something that had to be earned.

He indicates, crucially, that what characterises coalition policy is not the withdrawal of the state from welfare but the expansion of its coercive powers; and that New Labour is wholly acquiescent in this approach.  And he points to what he describes as irrefutable evidence that workfarist welfare reform does nothing to take families out of poverty, but simply removes swathes of the poor from the welfare system, with the use of aggressive sanctions often making it more difficult for those on benefits to move out of welfare into sustainable work.

Agnotology, according to Slater and the sources he cites, is about how a mythology has been developed around welfare that flies in the face of rigorously-established fact; it is about using media and political discourse to hammer out a mythology that serves particular ideologically-driven narratives, using resonant and morally-loaded language.  To those on the left who view society from outside the mainstream political and media consensus, there’s a strong sense of the bleeding obvious in much of this.  But it’s extremely important to have this documented with such rigour and force – it’s the starting point for a hard-headed analysis of our political situation.  I’d draw a number of conclusions:

• It points out the way in which political discourse is increasingly unrelated to empirical reality.  In political terms, the mainstream parties – competing as they are on increasingly narrow ideological grounds – simply cannot offer any challenge to neoliberalism; they can’t even handle the language which describes the everyday realities of life.
• This means that to challenge market capitalism means rejecting its language and rhetoric and finding something more grounded in experience – which is difficult because it means getting past an ideological use of language which is, in almost a literal sense, Orwellian.
• Crucially, New Labour and the coalition are part of the same project. For all the noise of political debate this is work that points to the consensus they share.  For people who want to change society it points to the utter futility of assuming that, in the current circumstances, the Labour Party is a force for change. As I’ve written before, the Left in Britain has got to get over the Labour Party.
• And, linked to this, it is in political activism outside the mainstream that hope lies (which, as I’ve suggested before, seems to account for the extreme hostility towards the Occupy movement and the extreme force used to suppress it).  Redefining politics in the language of everyday experience is an incredibly subversive and liberating thing to do.

Neoliberalism, seen from outside the whale, is an ideological system that has comprehensively failed.  Taking back political language for experience is a first step in exposing that failure.

Political reform and the irrelevance of AV

In a couple of weeks’ time the British electorate will be asked to vote on whether or not to adopt the Alternative Vote system for elections, with candidates ranked in order of preference and bottom candidates eliminated until one achieves a majority vote. The referendum was the price that the Liberal Democrats exacted from the Tories to go into coalition; the Tory party itself is strongly opposed.

The campaign so far has been an ill-tempered, largely irrelevant scrap which has looked like a rather weak proxy for the party politics that the Coalition can’t accommodate – the No campaign being largely made up of the sort of Tory who can’t stand Cameron and the coalition, the Yes campaign supported by Liberal Democrats and parts of the Labour Party.

It looks like a sideshow. I think it is – and here’s why.

Why electoral reform?

You change an electoral system when it doesn’t do its job any more. In the case of the UK, it’s long been obvious that the composition of the House of Commons simply doesn’t reflect the votes cast at a General Election. The Liberal Democrats (and the Liberal Party before them) have been campaigning for change for decades. The system clearly benefits two main parties, with parties on the fringe unable to get a foothold unless they can get a spike of support in particular constituencies. My own MP, Caroline Lucas, leads a party which under a proportional system would have 15 or so seats but is only represented in Parliament because she won a four-way contest with less than 30% of the vote. If you think that the role of Parliament is to represent the electorate, as distinct from allowing the executive to get its way, the current system is a disaster.

So will AV make a difference?

The short answer is, almost certainly not. In a recent Guardian piece, Vernon Bogdanor, doyen of British constitutional experts (and, as it happens, David Cameron’s tutor at Oxford) points out that it would only have changed the results in thirty or so seats. It’s not a proportional system at all. Even Nick Clegg, the author of the referendum, argues that it is no more than a baby step towards electoral reform.

Faced with this, some of the claims of the pro-AV camp are pretty feeble. It will end the corruption of the safe seat, they claim; but the proportion of safe seats won’t change very much. It will make MPs work harder – a bit desperate, that one; it will ensure that there is no repeat of the expenses scandal – irrelevant. Nobody is seriously arguing that this change will ensure a more diverse, representative Parliament. Because it won’t.

And nobody appears to be dealing with the question of what happens if the referendum supports AV – possibly on a derisory turnout. Will this be the impetus for further reform? Unlikely. It seems to me that the political establishment – which has no interest in promoting greater political diversity – will close ranks and argue that this is the end, not the start of the reform process.

Moreover, it’s only one part of a package of electoral reforms. A key part of the package currently before Parliament is a significant reduction in the number of MPs – from 650 to 600. Such marginal gains in diversity that AV brings could well be completely offset by this change. And we’re not being allowed to vote on that.

So where does this leave us?

AV is no more than a tinkering at the edges of political reform. It seems to me, though, that we need far more than this. One of the reasons why I support a proper system of proportional representation is because I believe there is a growing crisis of political legitimacy in Britain, in which Parliamentary politics is the preserve of a steadily narrowing social and political elite representing a narrowing economic and political consensus. Voices of dissent increasingly cannot be heard in Parliament.

Moreover, that political consensus does not represent consensus among the electors. All of the three major parties support market economics and cuts – whether Osborne’s drastic cuts now or Ed Miliband’s slightly smaller cuts over a longer period. Alternative voices are not heard, and the shock doctrinaires of the main parties have to face the simple fact that no political party has ever won a democratic election by offering the sort of slash and burn economics that we are experiencing now. When did we vote for the privatisation of the NHS or the Universities, or the evisceration of local government? None of these were on the agenda at the election, but they are what is happening. The fury of the students who had been sold by the Liberal Democrats is just one face of an electorate that has been systematically lied to by all the main parties.

Of course electoral reform won’t change everything overnight. But in my view it’s a pre-requisite to ensuring that dissenting voices are heard at the heart of the political system. The appeal of AV to the political establishment, in my view, is that it creates the illusion of reform while ensuring that the same people stay in control.

In other words, it’s irrelevant. As a society, we need far more than this bone tossed from the table where the big boys sit.

The money trick revisited

Today marks the centenary of the death of Robert Tressell, whose book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has for decades been an inspiration for the Left.  One of the very few authentic working-class voices from an era that is now more likely to be associated with costume dramas and the perceived opulence of the pre-war wealthy, it contains a classic passage in which the principal character, Owen, describes what has become known as The Great Money Trick, a passage worth quoting at length:

“Money is the real cause of poverty,” said Owen.

“Prove it,” repeated Crass.

“Money is the cause of poverty because it is the device by which those who are too lazy to work are enabled to rob the workers of the fruits of their labour.”

“Prove it,” said Crass.

Owen slowly folded up the piece of newspaper he had been reading and put it in his pocket.

“All right,” he replied. “I’ll show you how the Great Money Trick is worked.”

Owen opened his dinner basket and took from it two slices of bread, but as these where not sufficient, he requested that anyone who had some bread left should give it to him. They gave him several pieces, which he placed in a heap on a clean piece of paper, and, having borrowed the pocket knives of Easton, Harlow and Philpot, he addressed them as follows:

“These pieces of bread represent the raw materials which exist naturally in and on the earth for the use of mankind; they were not made by any human being, but were created for the benefit and sustenance of all, the same as were the air and the light of the sun.”

“Now,” continued Owen, “I am a capitalist; or rather I represent the landlord and capitalist class. That is to say, all these raw materials belong to me. It does not matter for our present argument how I obtained possession of them, the only thing that matters now is the admitted fact that all the raw materials which are necessary for the production of the necessaries of life are now the property of the landlord and capitalist class. I am that class; all these raw materials belong to me.”

“Now you three represent the working class. You have nothing, and, for my part, although I have these raw materials, they are of no use to me. What I need is the things that can be made out of these raw materials by work; but I am too lazy to work for me. But first I must explain that I possess something else beside the raw materials. These three knives represent all the machinery of production; the factories, tools, railways, and so forth, without which the necessaries of life cannot be produced in abundance. And these three coins” – taking three half pennies from his pocket – “represent my money, capital.”

“But before we go any further,” said Owen, interrupting himself, “it is important to remember that I am not supposed to be merely a capitalist. I represent the whole capitalist class. You are not supposed to be just three workers, you represent the whole working class.”

Owen proceeded to cut up one of the slices of bread into a number of little square blocks.

“These represent the things which are produced by labor, aided by machinery, from the raw materials. We will suppose that three of these blocks represent a week’s work. We will suppose that a week’s work is worth one pound.”

Owen now addressed himself to the working class as represented by Philpot, Harlow and Easton.

“You say that you are all in need of employment, and as I am the kind-hearted capitalist class I am going to invest all my money in various industries, so as to give you plenty of work. I shall pay each of you one pound per week, and a week’s work is that you must each produce three of these square blocks. For doing this work you will each receive your wages; the money will be your own, to do as you like with, and the things you produce will of course be mine to do as I like with. You will each take one of these machines and as soon as you have done a week’s work, you shall have your money.”

The working classes accordingly set to work, and the capitalist class sat down and watched them. As soon as they had finished, they passed the nine little blocks to Owen, who placed them on a piece of paper by his side and paid the workers their wages.

“These blocks represent the necessaries of life. You can’t live without some of these things, but as they belong to me, you will have to buy them from me: my price for these blocks is one pound each.”

As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the capitalist’s terms. They each bought back, and at once consumed, one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks, and so the net result of the week’s work was that the kind capitalist had consumed two pounds worth of things produced by the labor of others, and reckoning the squares at their market value of one pound each, he had more than doubled his capital, for he still possessed the three pounds in money and in addition four pounds worth of goods. As for the working classes, Philpot, Harlow and Easton, having each consumed the pound’s worth of necessaries they had bought with their wages, they were again in precisely the same condition as when they had started work – they had nothing.

This process was repeated several times; for each weeks work the producers were paid their wages. They kept on working and spending all their earnings. The kind-hearted capitalist consumed twice as much as any one of them and his pool of wealth continually increased. In a little while, reckoning the little squares at their market value of one pound each, he was worth about one hundred pounds, and the working classes were still in the same condition as when they began, and were still tearing into their work as if their lives depended on it.

After a while the rest of the crowd began to laugh, and their merriment increased when the kind-hearted capitalist, just after having sold a pound’s worth of necessaries to each of his workers, suddenly took their tools, the machinery of production, the knives, away from them, and informed them that as owing to over production all his store-houses were
glutted with the necessaries of life, he had decided to close down the works.

“Well, and wot the bloody ‘ell are we to do now ?” demanded Philpot.

“That’s not my business,” replied the kind-hearted capitalist. “I’ve paid your wages, and provided you with plenty of work for a long time past. I have no more work for you to do at the present. Come round again in a few months time and I’ll see what I can do.”

“But what about the necessaries of life?” Demanded Harlow. “we must have something to eat.”

“Of course you must,” replied the capitalist, affably; “and I shall be very pleased to sell  you some.” “But we ain’t got no bloody money!”

“Well, you cant expect me to give you my goods for nothing! You didn’t work for nothing, you know. I paid you for your work and you should have saved something: you should have been thrifty like me. Look how I have got on by being thrifty!”

The unemployed looked blankly at each other, but the rest of the crowd only laughed; and then the three unemployed began to abuse the kind-hearted capitalist, demanding that he should give them some of the necessaries of life that he had piled up in his warehouses, or to be allowed to work and produce some more for their own needs; and even threatened to take some of the things by force if he did not comply with their demands. But the kind-hearted capitalist told them not to be insolent, and spoke to them about honesty, and said if they were not careful he would have their faces battered in for them by the police, or if necessary he would call out the military and have them shot down like dogs, the same as he had done before at Featherstone and Belfast.

It’s in some respects a crude analogy, but it has a power and truth that resonate down the ages.

The Great Banker Trick

Today things have moved on.  Our modern Owen – let’s say, a librarian or a health-care worker faced with redundancy thanks to the Con Dem coalition – would describe something very difficult.  For a start, the capitalist would be a manipulator of debt too.  He’d happily lend the money to buy the essentials of life, because he has learned that the illusion of affluence built on credit and debt is a powerful tool to compel economic compliance. But since the workers are poor he would do so at usurious rates of interest against their next payday.

And, more significantly, he’d be explaining how he increased his wealth, not by investing in productive capacity but by speculating and gambling on the markets in which market was exhanged, or by buying raw materials and stockpiling them, creating shortages and therefore bidding up prices; or by developing huge, elaborate edifices of debt and lending.  And, once the fact that they were built on air was exposed, and the edifice collapsed around them, they would convince governments that they needed to be bailed out, with the taxes of the people who worked productively.  And then he would show how he would require that to pay for this bailout the decencies of life provided by taxes were unaffordable, and the people delivering them were doing non-jobs.  But he’d continue to pay himself, and just as Tressell’s Mugsborough had its comic pompous mayor, Londoners would have their own ponderous comedian saying that we had to grant even more tax privileges to the failed bankers to avoid their running away and failing to make their great contribution to their city’s wealth, even though that contribution is illusory.

And, just as in Tressell’s day, the power of capital was maintained by churchmen, brewers, and rentiers donating to charity while deciding who was deserving, the bankers’ friends in Government would reinvent themselves as makers of popular culture, advocates of the big society, floppy-haired Etonians with a sense of entitlement that they knew best.

And a future generation might, just might, realise the abject irrationality of what was being done, the damage and the waste.

Eric Hobsbawm and the future of socialism

Eric Hobsbawm’s piece in the Guardian on 10 April transcends its tendentious headline about the failure of socialism.  But it throws down a number of challenges to those of us who regard ourselves as being on the Green Left in understanding the current crisis and where it leads us.

Hobsbawm starts by characterising the current situation – planned state socialism failed, the free market has now failed, so the future lies with the mixed economy.  Even social democrats have been sucked into the free market illusion; but now that illusion has been laid bare, and things can change.

Looking to the future, he writes:

You may say that’s all over now. We’re free to return to the mixed economy. The old toolbox of Labour is available again – everything up to nationalisation – so let’s just go and use the tools once again, which Labour should never have put away. But that suggests we know what to do with them. We don’t. For one thing, we don’t know how to overcome the present crisis. None of the world’s governments, central banks or international financial institutions know: they are all like a blind man trying to get out of a maze by tapping the walls with different kinds of sticks in the hope of finding the way out. For another, we underestimate how addicted governments and decision-makers still are to the free-market snorts that have made them feel so good for decades. Have we really got away from the assumption that private profit-making enterprise is always a better, because more efficient, way of doing things? That business organisation and accountancy should be the model even for public service, education and research? That the growing chasm between the super-rich and the rest doesn’t matter that much, so long as everybody else (except the minority of the poor) is getting a bit better off? That what a country needs is under all circumstances maximum economic growth and commercial competitiveness? I don’t think so.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London’s economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain’s GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can’t, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can’t, don’t brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy – not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

Which is fine as far as it goes.  But there are some huge issues here.

The first and most significant is that of how hard the guardians of the market – the rich and privileged who have been the main beneficiaries of the market society – will be prepared to fight to maintain their position.  

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the G20 summit in London earlier this month was the way in which almost every nostrum of Anglo-Saxon capitalism has been abandoned.  Unfettered financial markets are no longer the path to wealth – not even for those who already hold it.  Banks and hedge funds must be regulated.  There’s a sense of leaders who have looked over the edge of the abyss, but whose response is to break out the rhetorical toilet rolls and sticky-backed plastic to cobble together something that looks like business as usual, and convince the public that the underlying system remains sound.  They can’t bring themselves to say “we were wrong”, even if they know it.  And of course to do so would undermine the basis of their wealth and power.  And here in the UK there is every sign that the victors at the next election will be a party whose explicit policy is to return to the deflation of the 1930′s – who appear to want to pretend that Keynes never existed.  

Against this background, it seems perverse to imply that the fiscal stimulus packages have changed very much.  They’re about shoring up the status quo, and helping to ensure that power and wealth stay pretty much where they are now.  There’s nothing radical here at all.

The second question is about democracy.  Hobsbawm perceives that things have changed – how widely is that view shared?  Governments and financiers are trying to ensure that the damage is limited; that we are facing a variant of “business as usual” (and, within the parameters of capitalism, perhaps we are).  Hobsbawm provides no more than the starting point.  The question the article begs is, “so what do we do next?”  

It seems to me that Hobsbawm asks most of the right questions.  It’s the answers that really matter, though.

Golden age of liberty?

I was fascinated by this piece by Rafael Behr in the Observer today; he argues that we are freer now than we have ever been, because taboos about personal behaviour have disappeared.  Behr regards this as much more significant than the fact that, in Britain at least, the level of surveillance has in the past few years increased hugely and the right to dissent has been curtailed.

I think what angered me about the place was its complacency; it’s very much the sort of thing that a relatively affluent media worker, engaged with the popular cultural zeitgeist, might write – a Pangloss for the twenty-first century.

So what’s the problem?

Behr’s analysis is entirely self-regarding and individualist; there’s no sense of the collective.  It’s a very market-driven, post-modern view of freedom; in the end he reduces the liberal critique to a fear of being ignored, the mentality of the toddler crying me, me, me.  And it comes dangerously close to the old policeman’s adage,”the innocent have nothing to fear.”  Try that one on the Guildford Four.

In many ways, Behr needs to get out more.  To Kingsnorth, perhaps,  where police used anti-stalking legislation to confiscate soap and clown costumes from peaceful environmental protestors, while making totally fraudulent claims about being victims of violence themselves.  Or to Britain’s borders, where it seems that increasingly intrusive checks are about to be introduced for travellers.

The inconsistencies in Behr’s analysis are made startlingly clear in this paragraph:

How much more freedom could we possibly have? Or, for that matter, how much more privacy? Our neighbours don’t grass on us, they don’t even know our names. You may feature somewhere as a number in a government database; you used to appear on carbon-paper duplicates in government filing cabinets. Before that, your ancestors were scratchily transcribed entries in leather-bound ledgers. So what? No one in government gives a monkey’s who you are or what you’re thinking. Whitehall knows less about you than Tesco. The Home Office holds the same data on you as you gave to Ryanair last time you booked a flight.

If it’s gathered by commercial organisations, Behr hints, it’s OK.  But what gets done with this information?  At what point, crucially, do the commercial interests of business and the political interests of Governments coincide?  And if Behr really understood the debate about personal data, he’d know that the real question is less that of what information is held by individual organisations, but what happens when that data is merged and mined.  Much of this information is held by private companies because legislation requires it.

Behr needs to understand that information is power; and that in an age when political dissent is bound up with the collapse of the economic and social assumptions that underpin the diminishing political space in which mainstream debate is undertaken in Western democracies, the risk that the information will be abused is growing.  The abuse is particularly clear when we see how legislation created for one purposeis  being used for another; legislation about stalking is used to stop peaceful protests.

And, above all, Behr fails to understand that one of the reasons why the personal taboos he mentions have gone in some societies – in secular Western democracies – is because they are no longer relevant to the maintenance of power.  Look at the culture wars in the US; the debates about gay marriage and abortion are still alive, and are about who wields power over whom.   In a week when an Afghan student journalist is imprisoned  for twenty years for downloading feminist literature from the internet, Behr’s view of this as a golden age of liberty looks particularly sick.

It’s an old truism that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.  Perhaps the lesson of this piece is that it’s too precious to be entrusted to zeitgeist-toting journalists.