Labour, spending and benefits: how to miss that open goal

Forget the funeral: this has been an atrocious week for the Con Dem economic experiment.  First, the UK’s credit rating has been downgraded by another ratings agency, thus demonstrating that even against its own success criteria – Osborne has repeatedly stated that his aim was to maintain the UK’s AAA rating – Coalition Economics is failing.

Second, the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, in which the classic paper arguing that a deficit of more than 90% of GDP has a depressing effect on growth has been shown to be based on unreliable data.  If it has been the failure to spot basic errors in the Excel spreadsheets used to underpin the argument that has hit the headlines, the really damaging criticisms have surrounded the assumptions underlying the argument in the paper, which have been shown just to be plain wrong.  There’s an interesting case study here in which a paper whose conclusions and assumptions have been hotly disputed in academic circles has been presented by mainstream politicians as unchallenged gospel; and perhaps the way in which a paper so full of errors managed to survive the peer-review process. [Edit - since writing the above I have learned that there appears not to have been a peer-review process.  Which is in itself an indictment of the way in which economics and policy interact]  It’s a fascinating example of confirmation bias at work, but also begs questions about the objectivity of the profession of economics itself – questions memorably raised in Inside Job, the film about the 2007 crash that showed the cosiness of the business, political and academic economics establishments.

And, still hanging over all of this is the IMF telling the UK to rethink its austerity plan, accompanied by its work on the multiplier and the growing empirical evidence that the austerity cheerleaders relied on the wrong assumptions in assessing the impact of the austerity agenda – I’ve blogged about this before.

In other words, in the UK Labour should be making the case against austerity with renewed vigour, pointing to the way in which, both in theory and practice, the consensus behind austerity is unravelling.

But they’re not.

In the context of the past week, this report in the New Statesman is jaw-dropping.  Labour is still flirting with the idea of signing up to the coalition’s post-2015 spending plans: it apparently cannot make up its mind to ditch the rhetoric of austerity and commit itself to reversing policies whose effect becomes more obvious by the day.  It looks like a failure of courage; not only is Labour failing to challenge the narrative that overspending caused the 2007-8 economic crisis, but, faced with austerity failing all around it, fails to challenge that agenda. Along with the kind of “supply-side Socialism” eloquently advocated by Chris Dillow here and here it should not be difficult to put together an attractive and economically-credible and empirically-founded programme as an alternative to austerity.  It is already moving in the right direction with its commitment to build more social housing. But on the big economic issues, Labour still looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights; it needs to find the courage of its conviction (which in turn means looking beyond the Westminster bubble).

And it certainly needs to rethink its narrative on benefits, which looks increasingly desperate and, frankly, idiotic.  The latest idea – a proposal that the unemployed should be offered loans in place of benefit – really achieves new levels of imbecility in a debate that has not been notable for its cool rationality.  It was unsustainable private debt (not public debt and spending) that led to the crisis of 2007-8; more personal debt is not the answer.  And talk of restoring the contributory principle is just dishonest; people still pay National Insurance.  It is deeply ironic that Labour appears to be rejecting the responsible borrowing by the state that could unlock economic recovery while apparently encouraging private borrowing against an uncertain future for those who become unemployed because of … fiscal austerity.  It’s the utter incoherence of all this that is so frustrating – there must be few things more heartbreaking than being an economically-literate member of the Labour Party just now.

It is the stuff of legend that in Gordon Brown’s Treasury, the group of central advisers was united by its enthusiasm for football.  Now, presented with an open goal, the Labour forwards – many of them, like Ed Balls, part of Brown’s team – appear to be passing the ball backwards before shooting through their own net.  When will they recover their sense of political direction?

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.

Revisiting the poor law: The Coalition, Liam Byrne and the language of sanction

On a hill, overlooking the centre of Brighton, sits the vast Victorian bulk of Brighton General Hospital. Many Brighton residents will be unaware that it is the former Brighton workhouse – built in the 1860s at a huge cost of £40,000, to serve a town that is far smaller than it is today (the 1831 census put the population of the Brighton parish at 40,000) and which covered a geographical area no larger than the current town centre.

Why was such a large amount spent on placing such a large, imposing building in such a prominent position? The answers, of course, were ideology and power. It was a constant reminder that the inevitable result of fecklessness and pauperism was the shame and disgrace of the workhouse. Godliness, sobriety and of course uncomplaining daily labour would ensure that you would never suffer the ignominy of indoor relief, the utter disgrace of being supported by the parish in a place whose day-to-day regime was designed to punish. And of course it was a reminder of precisely who was in charge. That invaluable repository of Brighton history, the My Brighton and Hove website, carries a story of an elderly lady due to go into the General Hospital for surgery but was unable to cross its threshold because her memory of the trauma of the workhouse was too vivid.

As an A-level history student in the late 1970s one read about such places – and such attitudes – as the remnants of a brutal and long-gone past, replaced by the decency of social welfare and the understanding that economic failure was systemic, not a matter of individual fault. We lived in altogether more rational and civilised times; out of the failures of the past came the Beveridge principles of universality and the belief that a decent sufficiency was a matter of right, not of desert.

One can no longer afford to be complacently optimistic. In the past decade attitudes towards welfare appear to have shifted decisively back towards the values of the workhouse, with rhetoric from the leaderships of all three main Westminster parties that fits strikingly with the Victorian rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor, and its underlying imperative that the provision of support should be punitive because the causes of poverty are down to the individual, not to the systemic economic failure. It was of course Labour that introduced the concept and rhetoric of workfare into social provision, but the Coaltion has pursued it with a ferocity that is astonishing. Moreover, even away from the concept of benefit provision, all major parties appear to have adopted the language of “hard working families”, of “aspiration”, with its poisonous implication that citizenship is something that is earned through your behaviour, rather than a matter of right; the implicit belief that you participate fully in society – and derive your social legitimacy – insofar as you do paid work (where do carers fit into this vision?), or live and procreate in the approved manner. I have said here before that of all the tropes of modern politics, the rhetoric of “hard-working families” is, in my view, among the most deeply obnoxious.

It is a framework that does much to explain the vote in Parliament earlier this week on compensating those who were illegaly sanctioned under the Government’s work schemes. Faced with the appeal court’s decision that sanctions had been applied unlawfully the Government’s decision was not to repay what they had unlawfully taken but to change the law retrospectively to avoid compensating those who had suffered loss. In other words, those who had been wronged were to be denied their legal recompense. And, to its infinite shame, Labour refused to take a stand but abstained on the vote.

The rationale, as set out by Labour’s DWP spokesman Liam Byrne in the House of Commons, is instructive and revealing. He deployed two arguments; that sanctions were necessary and should not be undermined, and that the cost of compensation would undermine the public finances.

The second of these is wholly fraudulent, and Byrne, as a former Treasury minister, knows it. The cost of the compensation would be £130m – barely the rounding error on a major Ministry of Defence procurement, in other words, and an insignificant sum compared with the DWP budget as a whole, and a small fraction of what the DWP gains through underclaiming of benefits. Moreover, the doctrine that Governments can use affordability as a reason for defying legal process and introducing retrospective legislation to undermine the judiciary is, to put it at its mildest, novel. Byrne’s argument is not only disgraceful in itself but gives succour to the implicit neoliberal belief that economics trumps considerations of due process and democracy. It reveals much about his banker’s mindset that it is this £130m, not the principle that those who are treated unlawfully have the right to redress, that really concerns him.

The first is more significant. It is obvious that Byrne is desperately anxious to retain a system of sanctions in the face of a system in which the DWP has effectively been turned into a gangmaster providing free labour, paid for by the taxpayer, for a number of undertakings including vast – and vastly profitable – supermarket chains. Sanctions have been at the heart of Labour’s visions of workfare ever since the Blair government introduced it – even where those concerned have a lifetime of national insurance contributions behind them. The rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of the Victorian Poor Law Guardians, arguing that relief for poverty must be made so undesirable, so humiliating that to seek support should put one beyond the pale of decency; Ian Duncan Smith differs from this only in that his rhetoric about “job snobs” is more clumsily explicit. The contempt is the same; forced shelf-stacking in Tesco for benefits, taking away paid jobs and undermining competing local business, has become the workhouse of late capitalism, with benefits reduced to a level where the day-to-day decencies of living are unaffordable. To have an extra bedroom is deemed luxury beyond the desert of the poor, and, as I have blogged before, Labour’s concerns have been about the implementation rather than the principle.

Byrne now argues that the decision to abstain is justified by the concessions wrung from the Tories, but, as Owen Jones points out in a fine and angry piece in the Independent, the promise of an independent review of the sanctions system is useless when Byrne is as notable an enthusiast for sanctions as any die-hard Tory backwoodsman.

I have blogged before about the theory of how austerity has sought to change the concept of citizenship to exclude those who are not economically “productive”; what we are seeing now is the practice, and Labour’s abstention in this week’s Parliamentary debate is a reminder that the neoliberal consensus at the heart of contemporary politics is enacting that denuded concept of citizenship with a speed and brutality that demonstrates its importance to the neoliberal project. And it is as much as anything a definitive statement that Labour’s leadership has no place for the party’s original purpose – to speak for working people, and defend and improve their living standards.

So, in my home town of Brighton, perhaps the best way to understand the temper of neoliberalism in general – and of Labour’s leadership in particular – is to look up to the big building at the top of Elm Grove, and to recall that the ideology of the workhouse is alive and well, and is once again mainstream; and to reflect on the way in which New Labour, or One Nation Labour, or whatever meme is current this week, has been complicit in destroying the decencies it once fought so hard to provide.

Tough on Frosties, tough on the causes of Frosties?

A statement by Labour Health spokesman Andy Burnham to the effect that a ban on high-sugar and high-fat foods, including breakfast cereals like Frosties, should be investigated, has led to a tide of ridicule across cyberspace, along with some fairly predictable responses about the nanny state and political correctness gone mad.  It’s unfortunate that what is a serious point about obesity has been picked up in this way, but this is the latest in a series of pronouncements by mainstream politicians about public health that, in my view, demonstrates many of the failings of mainstream political debate. Earlier this week, we heard Tory Westminster Council publishing a discussion document that raised the prospect of obese people being denied access to benefits should they not be able to demonstrate that they are taking regular exercise.

Of course nutrition is a problem – Anglo-Saxon capitalism has created the first society in history in which obesity is a mark of poverty.  And there are enormous economic and ecological implicartions of a food industry which is based on bulk rearing of livestock, and the export of mechanically-produced convenience foods around the world. There is a serious debate to be had here about this growing public health problem – but mainstream politicians today seem incapable of having it, not least since it will involve a critique of capitalism.

But there is more, far more, than this.  George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, described how sweet, unnourishing food could become a palliative for the poor and miserable – in the face of nutritional advice from the more privileged:

Now compare this list with the unemployed miner’s budget that I gave earlier. The miner’s family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes–an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.

To the extent that the mainstream English left understands Orwell at all, it is as the post-war critic of communism rather than the pre-war revolutionary socialist. But, amidst all the handwringing, the political mainstream – comprising a political class that is increasingly small, privileged and homogenous – might want to consider why sugary nutrition-lite is so attractive, and ask itself (perhaps while enjoying that second gin-and-tonic) why it is so incapable of understanding that poverty is hard, getting harder, and that people will inevitably seek palliatives. And they might just ask whether they might be better served by acquiring the empathy to understand that, and the determination to raise the condition of the poorest and vulnerable rather than demonising them.

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.

Policing and democracy: why you should vote in the sham election nobody wants

In a few days’ time, electors all over England will go to the polls to select Police and Crime Commissioners.  All the signs are that the turnout will be very small indeed, and there is little evidence that participants have been able to generate any real enthusiasm.

One of the reasons is that nobody really believes that these elections matter.  The Coalition’s line that these elections will make policing more democratic and accountable is not believed – with good reason, because it is palpably not true.  Local police authorities are obviously not directly elected, but are representative; they include local politicians, practitioners and lay individuals who can set priorities and hold police forces to account.  The idea that instead you vest those powers in a Commissioner  – directly elected but a sort of corporate chief executive who will appoint and sit alongside the Chief Constable  – is actually profoundly anti-democratic if you believe that democracy is a process in which elections are an obviously essential part, but far from being the whole story.  It fits much more closely with a model of localism promoted by the coalition in which local authorities and local democratic representation becomes simply a decision about who commissions services from the private sector, using budgets set by Whitehall.  The point of PCCs appears to be to substitute managerialism for democratic accountability, and to streamline the imposition of central Government cuts in policing on local police forces.

And this is what makes some of the rhetoric about the PCC elections so ironic. Many of those who are advocating abstention – or even spoiling ballot papers – are arguing that they want to take the politics out of policing.  But the point is surely that this is exactly what the PCC wheeze threatens to achieve, and by walking away from the electoral process critics are helping to undermine further the role of local political debate about policing and crime.

At one level, critics do have a point. The way in which the elections are run – £10,000 deposit, no free candidates’ mailshot – puts huge barriers in the way of independent and small-party candidates, before you even consider the size of the electorates (Sussex, where I live, has an electorate of more than 1.5 million).  In other words, these elections are inevitably going to be fought between large parties who have the necessary resources and organisation in place.  Independent candidates will need a deep pocket or well-heeled backers to get anywhere near a candidacy.

But they appear to ignore a key issue.  Policing and crime are political.  It’s not just the fact that the burden of crime falls overwhelmingly on the poor and vulnerable – in a way that is unrecognisable from the tabloid rhetoric designed to terrify the middle classes into buying newspapers.  Crime levels are powerfully driven by levels of deprivation; the way in which resources are disposed to prevent and deal with crime involves difficult decisions which recognise those factors – like how far do you prioritise enforcement of minor drugs offences.  As resources are taken away the political nature of decisions to allocate resources in a certain way will become all the starker.  High-profile policing issues here in Brighton involve how to manage marches by the EDL; how to manage protests at EDO; the role and remit of Police Liaison Officers; how to deal with possession of small amounts of cannabis; how to enforce 20mph speed limits being rolled out across the city; how to manage the criminalisation of squatting.  These are all political issues which ultimately involve resourcing decisions involving the PCC.

And certainly here in Sussex the only alternative to the main parties appears to be an independent candidate who is close to the Evangelical church movement – which itself begs political questions about the priority given to vital issues like hate crime, domestic violence and (a live issue here in Brighton) the harassment of women seeking abortion advice.

In other words, it seems to me that the idea that you can take the politics out of policing is a deeply reactionary one, and one that plays into the hands of the people who want to cut, privatise and outsource policing. As does failing to vote, or campaigning to spoil your ballot paper.  A low turnout in these elections (all too likely, I fear) will be a green light to those who want to privatise police provision, and who see policing as something that they can run for profit.  Which I suspect is what the Coalition wants – and the irony of course is that those who argue for abstention are ensuring that the bean-counters will drive out accountability.  Walking away from these elections – let alone the frivolity of spoiling ballot papers – helps the coalition achieve that aim.

I’d argue that the best way to resist the depoliticisation and managerialism that the PCC represents is to get out and vote – and vote for a candidate who will stand up against the privateers and outsources, and who has a strong background of working on the issues.  Like it or not, we’re stuck with PCCs for the next few years; we need to make the best of it while developing an alternative.

So, despite my deep misgivings about the PCC system, I shall certainly vote on November 15.  There is no Green candidate in Sussex – but for me there is one candidate who not only stands out from the field but frankly strikes me as the only credible contender: Godfrey Daniel, the Labour candidate.  As a long-standing member of the Sussex Police Authority, the Sussex Probation Board and a JP, he has a background and a knowledge that the other candidates simply lack.  As I’ve said here before, I have no confidence in the Labour Party nationally – I see it as complicit in, rather than opposing, the austerity agenda.  I think Labour in office had a poor record in terms of police powers and civil liberties. And I wouldn’t necessarily agree with every aspect of Daniel’s platform (I guess I’d argue for more liberalisation of soft drugs than is implicit in his agenda).  But in this case the individual is probably more important than the party; and that a strong vote for an experienced candidate who (in stark contrast to many in his party) explicitly opposes cuts and privatisation not only sends a message, but avoids the frivolity of abstention and ballot-spoiling.  This is a vote for the individual, not the party.

The epic stupidity of Nick Clegg’s house deposit plan

As the Liberal Democrat conference gets under way in Brighton, Nick Clegg used an interview on the BBC to announce a plan to allow parents to borrow against their pension funds to allow their children to get the deposit needed to get them on to the housing ladder.  Clegg claimed that this was the politics of not allowing the big hole in the public finances to re-open after the current struggle to fill it.

It’s an idea that, for that moment of pre-intellectual awareness before the thinking process starts, might have a certain appeal.  A moment’s thought reveals that it is quite possibly among the stupidest ideas to have emerged from a coalition that, time and again, appears to have eschewed evidence-based policy making.

It’s worth reflecting for a moment that two of the salient features of British economic life in 2012 are an ongoing pensions crisis and an ongoing housing crisis.  People are not saving enough for their old age – only about a third of those in work have any form of occupational pension – and we are being told that state provision is not affordable; and the cost of housing has, in recent decades, soared at a rate that far outstrips the increase in income.  In real terms, housing has never been more expensive.

So,  Clegg appears to be advocating that older people, with not long to go until retirement, should effectively gamble their savings in order to provide a subsidy which will in effect boost house prices even further.  If this was not bad enough, in an illustration of how desperately out-of-touch Clegg and his party are, an unnamed (possibly for his own safety) Liberal Democrat source has apparently told the media that £40,000 represents a decent-sized pension pot – enough to buy an annual pension of £2000.

The same Liberal Democrat spokesman has apparently said that the scheme will work because many people take a lump sum out of their pension at retirement, and that’s where the cash could come from.  Perhaps that’s true; but it’s not really an option for many people, especially for those who are retiring now and finding that, thanks to the 2008 crash, their pension funds are rather less than they had thought.  And it is hardly a prudent or responsible attitude at a time when life expectancy is increasing but so are the costs of old age, and when a Government in which Liberal Democrats play at least a minor role is cutting support for the vulnerable and privatising the NHS.  Is it intelligent or prudent policy effectively to strong-arm parents into reducing their pension funds when the financial uncertainties of old age are so great?

Moreover, it will do nothing to tackle the fundamentals of why housing costs are soaring – which are much more deep-rooted than anything that Clegg and his party seem willing to discuss. It does nothing to discourage the dangerous fiction that high house prices are a sign of prosperity; that houses are seen as an asset against which to borrow or secure our old age; or to remove the risk of bubbles from housing markets.  In fact, it encourages the attitudes that have turned the provision of the most basic commodity of life – a roof over one’s head – into a matter of speculation, which in turn have fed the deep instabilities in the housing market.  It makes the fundamentals worse, not better.

And our same hapless and anonymous Liberal Democrat spokesman is apparently claiming that this could help 12,500 households. In other words it’s barely scratching the surface.

This is not rational policy-making. It’s wrong in principle and it doesn’t address the problem in any event. It’s what happens when you ask a spin doctor to come up with a pre-conference soundbite.

Perhaps the most objectionable aspect of this policy is that it is a form of evasion – an admission that there is a housing problem but one that refuses to move beyond the belief that the market can solve it all.  It can’t.  I believe it is impossible to understand Britain’s housing crisis outside the context of the decline in the provision of social housing – and all the main Westminster political parties must take the blame for that.  It is almost blindingly obvious that the state has to take a lead in the provision of good quality, low-cost housing for rent – and a testimony to the way in which neoliberalism has blighted our national politics that not one of Westminster’s neoliberal triumverate of parties is capable of recognising this.

By the same token, the withdrawal of the state from the provision of a decent and secure old age is another policy where ideology has trumped evidence.  The intellectual convolutions of neoliberals determined to deny a role for the state are, as ever, astonishing to behold; but all of a piece with the flight from evidence-based and considered policy-making which is perhaps the single most striking characteristic of this coalition Government.

In other words: it’s stupid, frivolous, irresponsible and unworkable. And curiously typical of the contribution that Clegg and his party have brought to Government.

Railways, renationalisation and political risk

Recent announcements that rail fares will rise by up to 11% have produced a significant political reaction.  Formerly supine Tory MPs for commuting constituencies have been making subversive noises; on the left, the call for renationalisation has been strong.

It’s difficult to argue with renationalisation in principle.  Privatisation has resulted in a hugely inefficient structure based on a vastly complex system of contractual arrangements, from which private companies cream off profit while fares and subsidies soar and service standards fall.  Significant investment – which the privatisers would come from the entrepreneurial spirit of the private sector – comes from the public purse, with the benefits accruing to private shareholders.  Managing the contractual interfaces between providers becomes a vast, expensive task overseen by a bureaucracy of regulators.  The whole system is a mess, and it is clear that it is the structure designed to allow the private sector to run rail for profit that has done this.

Moreover, Network Rail is close to being a nationalised industry; it is a not-for-profit company without shareholders entirely dependent on Government-backed debt and Government subsidy.

So in principle the case for nationalisation is obvious.  But the practicalities of nationalisation are a nightmare for a number of reasons.   For a start, the law would have to be substantially rewritten; even if you allow franchises to lapse and Government decides not to let them again, the basic structure that creates the lunatic inefficiency of the current system would still be in place and would need to be repealed and replaced. It’s difficult to see anything other than a large and complex piece of legislation that would occupy a lot of Parliamentary time and effort.

And there would be huge financial implications.  Most franchises are being let for 15 years, and decisions would need to be taken on whether to allow those franchises to continue – with no possibility of renewal, thus incentivising operators to run down services and grab as much profit as they can, while perpetuating the costly inefficiencies of the current structure; or to buy them out at huge costs.  There is the problem of what to do with the rolling stock companies.  And of course all existing contracts are likely to have change-of-law clauses under which the nationalisation legislation would probably trigger large payments.  All of this implies huge costs.

None of which is to say that renationalisation could not or should not be done; simply that it would be a hugely complex and expensive undertaking, which would probably involve an incoming Chancellor being prepared to sink huge amounts of up-front funding to secure benefits that might not be apparent for years, with no PFI to squirrel the capital costs off the books (and if that incoming Chancellor were for example Ed Balls with a commitment not to reverse Tory cuts, it is difficult to see these decisions being taken).  It would be a massive and risky political investment  which would need a clear political commitment and a clear mandate.

One important point of this is how it relates to other privatisations.  The railways are important, but they are used by a minority of people – millions never go near a train – and  still represent a relatively small part of overall public expenditure.

Consider then the remnants of the NHS, farmed out by Condem ideologues to a range of private service providers, the legislative framework for state provision dismantled, and facing all the same issues of bloated costs and poor integration of the railways, but providing services that everyone uses, with vastly greater overall costs (and potential for profits), and for the first time subject to the constraint of EU procurement law.  How do you get that particular genie back into the bottle?  The costs and risks would be enormous.

Back in the 1970′s, when Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph were reclaiming the Tory Party for neoliberalism, there was a phrase that one used to hear all the time – “the ratchet effect of socialism”.  What this meant was that once the state expanded into an area of activity it was impossible to roll it back, because of the electoral popularity of state provision.  The genius of the neoliberals in the Westminster political mainstream has been to make state provision unpopular and to ensure that the media are indifferent – witness the BBC’s complete failure to report the full implications of the recent NHS reforms.  We now have a different effect – whereby even within the lifetime of a single Parliament, privatisation can become so structurally embedded that it becomes politically and economically hugely ambitious to reverse it.

And that assumes that opposition parties have that ambition.  Labour, as I’ve argued here many times before, is part of that neoliberal consensus; it showed itself quite content in Government to outsource and in opposition its leaders have simply not grasped the need for an alternative to a neoliberal narrative.  Ed Balls has said in terms that cuts will not be reversed and there is no ambition to look beyond austerity economics – even when there is ample evidence that it would be hugely popular to do so.  The spirit that established the NHS in the face of a far weaker economic position than we face today is singularly lacking in Labour’s leadership.

Renationalisation of any privatised service is difficult, costly, risky and in those circumstances requires a clear political commitment and mandate.  Where will that come from in Con Dem Britain?

Bradford by-election – time for respect?

You do not need to be an admirer of George Galloway, or to get mired in the politics of ethnicity, to realise that the Bradford West by-election result sent out important messages about the state of democracy in Britain.

Galloway was a high-profile candidate whose anti-war, pro-Palestine policies would inevitably strike chords in a constituency of Bradford West’s demographic.  But Respect only scored a modest vote there in 2010 – even allowing for the allure of a celebrity by-election candidate something deeper must have been going on here.

I see the Bradford vote as something much deeper – a profound vote of no-confidence in the Westminster political system.  The striking thing about the constituency’s demographic is perhaps not the ethnic mix but its economic and social deprivation – its high unemployment, its poor housing.

These are the people that the British political system has left behind – the people who are invisible in the Westminster village, and who are at the sharp end of austerity economics.  Faced with three main political parties offering no more than variations on the neoliberal narrative, and media that at worst demonise them and at best ignore them, people voted in their thousands for a candidate who, regardless of any alleged personal failings, at least offered an alternative.  Respect?  Whether Galloway offers the reality of that misused and maligned word remains to be seen, but at least, unlike the three neoliberal parties, he’s offering the appearance of respect to people who have long been denied it by the political mainstream.

In many ways the Bradford result epitomises the crisis of democratic legitimacy that seems to characterise the politics of Westminster, which pursues austerity and privatisation that nobody voted for, on economic grounds that are largely bogus – and which in recent days has been preoccupied with a fuel crisis that doesn’t exist and game-playing about tax on pasties. Already, a huge process of explaining-away, determined to avoid these issues and to reinforce the denial of political process implicit in the neoliberal agenda,  is under way.

Will Galloway’s victory change much? Probably not – Galloway’s track record suggests little inclination to move beyond the politics of narcissistic gesture (and to that extent he’s part of the problem rather than the solution). But it remains a powerful rejection of mainstream politics by people who have long been denied respect.

Fuel, pasties and pseudo-events

At the time of writing, my Twitter timeline is full of stories of panic buying of fuel, with police apparently advising petrol stations in some counties to close.  All in response to a Government which, in response to a threat of industrial action that has not yet been called, in a dispute over drivers’ heatlh and safety concerns that ACAS is trying hard to mediate, has made apocalyptic noises about fuel shortages and appears to be actively advising car owners to panic buy (although the advice has moved on from yesterday’s irresponsible and possibly illegal advice to motorists to store petrol around their homes in 20ltr jerrycans – advice which may yet prove to have come from the Minister concerned, Francis Maude, not having consulted his butler on what exactly a jerrycan might be).

Meanwhile, following the imposition of VAT on take-away hot food in last week’s Budget, a furore has broken out about pasties – most notably, a claim by the Prime Minister to have recently enjoyed a pasty at an outlet that closed down two years ago.  It’s not a saga that has been without its amusing aspects – a Liberal Democrat Minister joyfully admitting on Radio 4′s Today programme that he had once worked in a pork pie factory takes the episode into realms that transcend satire* – but given that the main theme of the Budget is a further wealth grab by the wealthy at the expense of the poor, it’s pretty footling stuff.

Welcome, then, to coalition Britain – a nation which the OECD has just confirmed is entering a double-dip recession, where the poorest in society are having their living standards cut as a result of austerity economics which, except in terms of enriching the few, simply isn’t working; in which the Treasurer of the ruling political party has just been found out offering access to the Prime Minister for cash; which has just effectively abolished its National Health Service, once seen as the envy of the world, by removing the obligation for the Secretary of State to provide healthcare and introducing the framework for a charging regime.  And the main topics of mainstream political discourse – an imaginary fuel crisis and a bust-up about pasties. It’s like an Ealing Comedy.  Any moment now one expects Margaret Rutherford to appear from the door of No 10, exhorting England to be a nation once more.

The American sociologist Daniel Boorstin developed the theory of pseudo-events – events in which events which serve to do little more than simulate an ideologically-generated reality become more “real” than reality itself.  It is clear that in coalition Britain we are far beyond that.  Faced with a reality that does not conform to the neoliberal narrative, events must be generated, using an ideologically-driven mass media and, recently, a BBC that is looking increasingly compliant in the Tory agenda. And that is what has happened.  Had hapless Ministers been realistic, and not started talking about fuel shortages, the tanker drivers’ dispute would have been quietly resolved.  This intervention raises the stakes for all parties and just causes more problems.  It’s ridiculous.

What it is not, of course, is government.  It’s actually an abandonment of Government – a deliberate abdication of responsibility in order to promote an ideological narrative.  A responsible, adult, empirically-based Government would not have advocated panic-buying, or indulged in idiotic stunts involving pasties. And sooner or later – even with an official opposition that appears to be wholly compliant in the ideological narrative – reality will bite back.  And the result may not be edifying or pretty.

*non-British readers may not be aware that “pork pie” is rhyming slang for a lie.