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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The aims are laudible – better pay, a real multiplier effect (which somewhat contradicts Ed Balls’ austeritarian view of public finances, but we’ll leave that one aside for the moment), a boost to the economy and a smaller benefits bill.  Everyone would benefit – and there can be little doubt that lifting wage levels for the low-paid would both boost the economy and reduce the benefits bill.  We are clearly in virtuous circle territory, especially when one considers that real pay in the UK is falling – and falling faster than in any of the other top 10 world economies.

But the plan is deeply flawed – in ways that are revealing about Labour’s economic mindset. The obvious objection is that, as with any proposal that tops up low wages, it effectively subsidises employers for doing the right thing.  It’s a bit like reducing VED for drivers who obey the speed limit.  And it ignores the fact that even firms employing staff at less than the living wage will still employ staff who are paid more than it – who are indeed paid well.  How do you define both the level of, and the criteria for receipt of, the tax break, in such as way as to ensure that businesses do not receive subsidies for simply paying their staff what the market will take?  And as soon as you find yourself offering tax breaks to business that are significantly in competition with others elsewhere in the EU, how do you stop this from turning into an illegal State Aid?  And what of the cost of administering all of this, and assessing who is eligible for the tax break?

You do not have to dig too far below the surface to find that this proposal unworkable. The discipline of turning a bright idea into a workable legislative proposal is cruelly exposing (and I speak as someone who in my Civil Service days had plenty of experience of developing Finance Bill legislation).  Like so many ideas that form part of Labour’s “predistribution” package, the whole structure starts to fall apart once you start to ask the awkward questions that turning policy into workable practice must beg.

More significantly, it exposes a long-term issue for wages and working conditions.  The number of people working in the public sector has fallen substantially, not least through outsourcing, and is expected to continue to fall substantially.  The largest employer in the UK – the NHS – has just effectively been privatised, which will mean that the number will fall considerably further as many NHS functions are transferred to the private sector.  Previously, the public sector has been a benchmark for decent pay and conditions – including of course pensions.  Decent pay and conditions in the public sector has driven standards of pay in the private sector as employers compete for staff – which is of course one of the reasons why the right wants to reduce it in size, because its shrinkage is a factor driving falls in pay (along with an explicit policy of reducing public sector pay in real terms).  Moreover, a large public sector payroll has an inherently stabilising effect on economies.

But with an incoming Labour government committed to keeping the Coalition’s cuts and possibly making more of its own, that trend will continue; and in it adherence to austerity economics Labour is actually throwing away the best tool it has to bid up real wages; an expanding, dynamic and decently-paid public sector.

Obviously simply expanding the public sector won’t do the trick on its own.  It needs the courage to argue for decent public sector pay as a good thing, when public sector pay and pensions have always been an easy targets for Blairites as well as Condems.  And it does need supply-side adjustments – better education, better training, career development (all of which come at a price and might be a better target for tax breaks – it remains the case that a firm pays VAT when it sends an employee on a training course but a public school education is VAT-free and heavily subsidised) and a mentality that sees labour flexibility as a managed process of improvement rather than a driver of low pay.

The trouble for Ed Miliband is that dealing low pay in a coherent and intelligent way means dragging Labour off the neoliberal yellow brick road. And that appears as far away as ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.