Eastleigh: a fascinating contest

After the lies, the by-election.  The resignation of Chris Huhne as MP for Eastleigh, following his guilty plea to a charge of perverting the course of justice, opens the way to what could be a defining by-election contest.

At the 2010 General Election Huhne held the seat with a majority of nearly 4,000 over the Conservatives – who had held the seat comfortably until a by-election in 1994.  Labour came in a distant third with barely 10% of the vote – a fall from a core vote of around 20% that suggested a tight tactical squeeze.  At local level the Liberal Democrats are dominant – holding 40 out of the 44 seats on Eastleigh District Council.

The big battle will inevitably be portrayed as that between the Coalition parties.  It’s the first by-election in which they have fought each other so closely, and the recent Liberal Democrat rebellion that brought down the proposed boundary changes will add piquancy to this battle.  Put briefly, if the Tories are going to form a majority Government at the next election, they must win seats like this in which Liberal Democrats are defending small(ish) majorities.  Moreover, Cameron desperately needs to regain some authority in the Conservative Party, in which he is perceived as a weak and failing leader.  Likewise, if the Liberal Democrats are to retain a significant presence in Parliament they must hold seats like this – although at the General Election they will be able to exploit incumbency.

But the real question here – where will the anti-Tory vote go?  Labour’s performance in 2010 was undoubtedly affected by a tactical squeeze – but likewise if Labour is to live up to its One Nation billing it’s going to have to do well in seats like Eastleigh.  For Labour to win would mean a swing that would dwarf those that Labour was achieving in the latter years of John Major – but if it is to live up to its own hype it has to be a serious contender here.   And the stakes are high for UKIP too – this election will demonstrate if the UKIP surge so beloved of media commentators has any substance, or whether it is so much media puff.

And this election will come at a critical time, with a raft of policy initiatives taking effect in April including the implementation of the Health Act and the realisation of many benefit cuts..  There appear to be real signs of a backlash against the Government’s benefit reforms, with growing concern over the bedroom tax – and of course there remains the ample evidence that austerity economics, which defines the coalition parties and still apparently holds Labour in its thrall – is failing.  And while Eastleigh is a largely middle-class constituency, it remains the case that austerity is hitting the hitherto affluent – especially those who are retired – very hard.  And the very fact of the Coalition – and the obvious and growing tensions within it – means that the traditional return to business as usual after an important by-election result is far less likely to happen.

Who will win? Impossible to say.  Unlike many on the left, I don’t think the Liberal Democrats are headed for electoral oblivion (however strongly I might feel that they deserve it).  I think it will be closely-fought, hard, ill-tempered and dirty campaign between two parties who have a long history of dirty, negative campaigning – and both of whom have an enormous amount of political investment riding on the outcome.  I think the Labour vote will pick up; if it does so to the level where Labour is seriously challenging the Coalition parties that will be a big win for Ed Miliband.  And I think UKIP may do well, and I think we will see more Tory hand-wringing at the prospect of UKIP undermining their core vote.

And the Coalition will emerge weaker, with the mutual recrimination and mistrust deeper than ever before.

Cameron’s referendum: a weak leader sleepwalking to EU exit

It is widely reported that David Cameron will today announce his intention to renegotiate Britain’s membership of the EU and hold an in-out referendum, assuming the Tories win a majority after 2015.

I intend to blog at greater length about this later, but it is important to understand the implications of what Cameron has conceded.  The policy is clearly dictated by fear – fear of UKIP and its apparent surge in the polls.  UKIP will tell us that they are about far more than EU membership, but this goes to the heart of UKIP’s appeal, and that of the tabloid press.

What will be up for renegotiation?  Tory and media rhetoric makes this obvious.  We’re talking about “repatriation” of social and employment protection legislation, health and safety, environmental protection, consumer protection.  In other words, this is all about shifting the balance of power in favour of corporate interests.  Its effect – and intention – would be to allow British business to cut costs, cut wages, cut standards.

And to the extent it does that, it completely violates a fundamental principle of the EU – that of a single market in which no member state is able to legislate to undercut the others, or to exclude their labour or produce.  It is inconceivable that the UK will be able to negotiate a treaty that allows it a privileged position on these issues, because they all affect the single market.  Cameron is a weak man whose entire political life has been an ode to entitlement – he, and his party, appear incapable of understanding that their case is essentially about British privilege.

He’s already trimming to the far right on Europe – it’s in his political DNA (witness his decision that the Conservatives in the European Parliament should sit with a motley group of Eastern European neo-fascists and anti-Semites rather than forming part of the mainstream Centre-Right grouping).

This is a policy born of fear, and the hard right in his party knows it and will exploit it. They also – I believe – know that a renegotiation that traduces such fundamental principles of the Union will fail. Because he is consumed by fear of UKIP and the toxic Eurosceptics in his own party, Cameron has handed them all the cards; they will be immeasurably strengthened by this. It is impossible, therefore, to see a situation in which a majority Tory government will be able to deliver a renegotiated settlement that it can support at a referendum.  And having tasted blood, the Tory right – unconstrained, as ever, by considerations of rationality or evidence – will continue to demand more and more from Cameron. At what point has Cameron in office ever shown the moral courage to stand up to the right on Europe?

The logic seems unescapable: a vote for the Tories in 2015 is, de facto, a vote for withdrawal from the EU.  And for a policy born out of ignorance, fear and overweening entitlement.

Horsemeat and class

The discovery that cheap burgers sold at Tesco contain horse DNA has been a major news story in Britain for the last couple of days – giving rise to a mix of revulsion and low humour.

It’s curious. Horsemeat has long been eaten in Europe without a second thought being given to it – the Boucherie Chevaline is a familiar sight in France.  Moreover, there can be few people who are unaware that cheap burgers are made from rendered carcasses and do not represent anything like prime quality.  There is something especially significant, it seems, about the ideas of finding traces of horse in a burger; something that does not apply to other substances, possibly less wholesome, that might be found in cheaply-produced food. The more significant discovery of pigmeat – something that could cause real issues for Muslims and Jews – has been given far less prominence.

It’s a reminder, perhaps, of the way in which horses are bound up with English narratives of class and power.  The horse – as conveyance, war machine or as outlet for sport – has long been a symbol of wealth and power; from the structures of medieval power, to the rituals around horse racing, the paintings of George Stubbs, the social rituals of hunt, gymkhana and point-to-point.  As George Bernard Shaw put into the mouth of Lady Utterword in that lampoon on English upper-class manners Heartbreak House: “Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find?  That the stables are the real centre of the household.”

It’s one reason why the image of David Cameron and Rebecca Brooks sharing the use of Raisa the retired police horse caused so much amusement in the UK – it fit so precisely with the class perceptions around Cameron and his set.

The reaction to the horsemeat in Tesco burgers seems to me to echo that cultural presumption – the contrast between the horse as symbol of wealth and power and the sad reality of cheap processed meat – the diet of plebs, no doubt, in the eyes of the horse-riding classes. As with so much else in contemporary English life, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the collective response is conditioned by class.

The Falkland Islands and the hypocrisies of lost empire

The Falkland Islands are in the news again, with Argentine President Cristina Kirchner taking full page advertisements in Britain’s press to argue that Britain’s continued claim to sovereignty in the Falklands is a hangover of imperialism that is no longer tolerable, and that sovereignty should be handed back to Argentina.

For those of us who came to political awareness in the early 1980s, the Falklands War remains a potent political symbol; speaking personally, it was for me a profoundly radicalising experience. It was like a sort of collective leave-taking from normality – from that extraordinary Saturday morning debate in the House of Commons after the invasions – Michael Foot’s vainglorious last stand in support of the military action that would end his hopes of becoming Prime Minister, John Nott’s disastrous defence of Government policy (and, after it was over, the Radio 4 continuity announcer apologising, without a hint of irony, for the postponement of I’m sorry I haven’t a clue) – to the sailing of the Canberra, turned into a troop ship for the duration, the reports of battle thousands of miles away, the ponderous MOD announcements, to the pernicious sinking of the Belgrano and Thatcher’s shameless appropriation of the war to support her battle against trade unions at home.  At the time the use of military force in this way (leaving aside its daily deployment in Northern Ireland) was novel – it’s perhaps a sign of how much things have changed that a Labour Government should send  British troops into action in spots as diverse as Iraq, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan without any sense that anything was abnormal here. To sense the tenor of it all, you had to be there.  I was a second year student at the time, and I mostly remember a baking hot summer in which a small group of us from around the non-Tory political spectrum conversed in necessarily muted tones about the sheer oddness of it all.

And it is clear that the Ruritanian aspects of it have not gone away.  The central issue for the British Government – and majority British opinion – was of course the right to self-determination of the Islanders; people at the other end of the world whose right to remain British demanded the despatch of a naval task force to deal with an invading dictatorship that was, we were told, opposed to the freedoms and rights that Britishness stood for.

And what Britishness! We were sold – and Cameron continues to sell – an idyllic image of a society that looked like a sort of conservative nirvana – an intensely loyal people in a far-away place, where phone boxes are red, the populace is white, where policemen are deferential towards their betters, where a portrait of the Queen hangs behind the bar of the local pub, and where there’s not a hoody or a wheelchair to be seen – all presided over benignly by a Governor in a silly hat using a converted London taxi to traverse his domain.  It’s a world that the Daily Mail could have invented, a world intimately bound up with the Thatcher legacy, and a Conservative leader as insecure in his position as Cameron is hardly going to traduce the reputation of the ailing former leader against whom his party compares him so unfavourably by challenging that illusion. The wishes of the islanders were, according to Thatcher, paramount, and if that meant the logistics and expense of retaining Fortress Falklands, so be it.  It is often forgotten that the basic democratic rights that Britons might be inclined to take for granted never really existed – the Falkland Islands Company, a private sector subsidiary of a multinational, effectively ran the place.

Of course it was never that simple.  British foreign policy has never been a respecter of the wishes of indigenous people – our whole imperial history demonstrates this amply, and less than a decade earlier the Chagossian population had been deported en masse from the British dependency of Diego Garcia to make way for an American naval base.  We are in the world of Liberal Imperialism, where apparently progressive-sounding tropes of self-determination and democracy are used to disguise the pursuit of naked power.  And in the South Atlantic, in 1982 – as with so many of the outbreaks of liberal imperialism since – it was, at least in part, about oil.

Today, Argentina is a democracy – there’s no doubt that defeat in the Falklands hastened the end of military dictatorship – but, from the Argentine side, the issue remains mired in post-imperial hypocrisy – as Professor Norman Geras points out in this blog piece.  One can debate the legacies of imperialism at length, but if we are going to get serious about dealing with the crimes of empire the expulsion of the Argentine garrison from the Falklands in 1833 is probably not where we would start.  Moreover, the Argentine authorities – especially in the Peronist era – were every bit as unscrupulous as Thatcher in using the Malvinas dispute for domestic political ends, cranking up the anti-British rhetoric whenever domestic politics hit a sticky patch.  Kirchner’s actions have a long, if not exactly reputable, pedigree – although historically and culturally Argentina’s links with Britain are closer than the Falklands dispute might lead one to believe (it’s one of the ironies of the Falklands War that the Argentine air force pilots who came closer to inflicting military defeat on the Task Force than the British authorities have ever been willing to admit had as their role models the moustachioed Spitfire pilots who fought the Battle of Britain).

There is a sensible, grown-up solution to all of this. It involves going to the UN, and negotiating a deal which protects the rights of the islanders while conceding joint sovereignty.  It would make life easier for the islanders, as it would secure their supply chains.  It would enshrine their rights to enjoy their chosen way of life in international agreements. It would be a stirring demonstration of the way in which trans-national institutions can secure long-term stability.  But it would require a maturity of outlook and an imagination – above all a willingness to stop clinging to national symbols –  that simply does not exist in the world of post-imperial politics – either in Britain or Argentina.

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.

The pseudo-science behind the political war on the disabled

It has been a bad week for those on benefits, with George Osborne announcing in his Autumn Statement that benefits will be uprated by less than inflation – in other words, cut in real terms.  Labour is promising to fight these cuts but the pronouncements of both Labour DWP spokesman Liam Byrne and Labour leader Ed Miliband do not exactly fill one with optimism.

People with disabilities have been in the forefront of the attack, and that attack has been reinforced by a narrative that unites all the mainstream players in Westminster politics.  If the cruelty and destructiveness of Coalition policy on benefits is to be exposed and combatted, it is essential that the story is understood.

There’s a detailed and referenced account of that narrative on the Disabled People Against Cuts website.  In summary, the piece indicates how the current approach, using a bio-psychosocial model of disability, is flawed and unsupported by evidence, but, encouraged by private sector organisations that see the potential for profit in carrying out bio-psychosocial assessments of those claiming benefits, has become a de facto orthodoxy.

The authors point out that the approach to disability has shifted from a social approach – one that emphasises to environment and context and sees society’s response to disability as the issue to be addressed – to a so-called bio-psychosocial approach that focuses on the individual and their reaction to the environment.  As the piece points out, it is an approach that can have value in dealing with individuals. But it’s all too obvious how such an approach can be picked up and abused by neoliberals.

Put briefly, the root of the ideological justification comes from the American sociologist Talcott Parsons’ concept of the sick role, which argues that sickness is in essence a form of social deviance, which needs to be policed by medical and other professions.  This is associated with the idea that work is essential to well-being (which is true in the sense that those denied the opportunity for meaningful work suffer mental and physical symptoms); it becomes very easy for neoliberals to conflate these into a doctrine in which you can argue that denying disabled people the ability to live without work is therapeutic (you can also use it to justify the idea of workfare in which benefits are contingent on unpaid work), and of course fits well with populist narratives of workshyness and scrounging.  The scarcity of meaningful jobs in long-term economic depression is not considered by this model).

Into this environment march private companies like ATOS and Unum, with experience of developing assessment regimes with a simple aim – that of reducing the number of people on benefits.  And add to this the recruitment of amateurs like banker Lord Freud, recruited to advise Gordon Brown on benefit reforms and now a Minister in David Cameron’s government; the potential for these companies to present a ready-made pseudo-scientific model to politicians and advisers in need of a quick result; and you have the current mess.  A policy that is obviously failing, but which has the appearance of scientific credibility and which flatters the ideological preconceptions and prejudices of those in power.  It is a subsititution of privately-generated pseudo-evidence – flatpack policy-making, as it were – for real evidence that is all too familiar to observers of how this coalition government conducts itself.

And as the authors of the DPAC piece make clear – this is pseudo-science, in which the work of the academics whose work underpinned the bio-psychosocial model has been misrepresented and distorted for profit by organizations who provide a convenient and potentially popular post-hoc rationalisation for what is the central policy goal – to reduce the amount paid in benefits to the disabled.  Political and media rhetoric, playing to the fears and prejudices of the ignorant, has done an astonishing job of destroying compassion and empathy in modern Britain, but one suspects that even for Tories and Liberal Democrats, stating openly that you want to cut the living standards of the disabled is a step too far.  It is one of the defining characteristics of the neoliberal project that it needs to subvert democracy, because open neoliberalism does not win elections; pseudo-science, like pseudo-economics, is what allows neoliberals to bridge that gap. And it allows the devaluaing of conflicting “expert” opinion.

The point about all of this is that none of it is surprising.  The devaluation of evidence is at the heart of coalition policy; evidence-based policy making is subordinate to ideology and profit.  But the point here is that this is not just a coalition policy; this kind of thinking was becoming mainstream under Labour government and underpinned Labour policy.  It quite obviously informs every pronouncement of Labour’s DWP spokesman Liam Byrne.  And it is one reason why I, for one, am deeply sceptical of Labour’s apparent change of heart on benefits – because I see no evidence that Labour’s underlying rationality has changed.

Is Cameron’s plan to tag offenders by GPS credible?

One of the most eye-catching aspects of David Cameron’s speech on criminal justice yesterday was the suggestion that GPS technology could be used to track offenders.  As someone who, during his time as a Civil Servant was actively involved in advising on the use of GPS technologies and has quite a bit of experience in the field I found myself unconvinced by aspects of  this proposal.  I’m not convinced that it is workable – yet – and I wonder whether No 10 has really sought good technical advice on this.

Politicians and the media in Britain do not, as a whole, exhibit a great degree of scientific or technical literacy. It means they are easily suckered by people selling technical solutions that give the appearance of being plausible; a lot of people in Whitehall spend quite a lot of their time telling Ministers that  the latest technical wheeze being offered by manufacturers, however impressive it may look in a small-scale trial,  is unsupported by any real evidence that it could be rolled out on a large scale in the messy real world

GPS is a  mature technology that has a huge range of real-world applications. Obviously it’s crucial to navigation systems but most smartphones contain a GPS chip, as do all ATMs (for date and time stamping rather than navigation).  The signs at bus stops telling you that the next 5A will arrive in 5 minutes use GPS technology.  But many commentators show themselves to be clearly clueless about how it works – witness this rather glorious piece of bad science from the Daily Telegraph following yesterday’s announcement. Put at its simplest, satellites do not track and cannot track anyone or anything; the same fallacy dominated the public debate over road pricing launched by the last Labour government.  Within Whitehall, Ministers and Special Advisers are notoriously susceptible to this kind of nonsense. A report in the Guardian today tends to confirm the suspicion that the work behind Cameron’s speech is worryingly light on evidence.

GPS works by taking location fixes from satellites.  It requires a clear sky view of at least three satellites to do this.  In order to track an offender, you would need to generate a series of such fixes, and  pass that information to the control centre.  Obviously, the more detailed the tracking, the more data you would need to store on the tag and the more frequently you would need to relay that information to the control centre.  And of course the tag would need a power source; GPS applications are notoriously battery-draining and the tag would need frequent charging.

Now obviously there is nothing here that couldn’t be done.  The most technically problematic part is generating fixes; GPS is notoriously susceptible to difficulties in streets with tall buildings, or where plate glass or water causes reflections and hence the possibility for false signals.  Now in the real world you can get round this either by map-matching (i.e. snapping the reads to digital mapping data stored in the tag) or simply discounting the odd outlying fix and using algorithms to approximate the missing data.  But in a world in which you are seeking to establish a criminal burden of proof, how far can you do this?  Equipment like safety cameras requires rigorous levels of type-approval before its output is admissible in court.  What level of locational accuracy would be required to sustain a prosecution of an offender who had broken the terms, say, of his bail?  And how much would it cost to produce a type-approved product that could demonstrate that an offender was in a particular place at a given time, beyond reasonable doubt?  Would you need corroborating evidence from eyewitnesses or cameras?

GPS does not work underground (obviously). Would London offenders be barred from using the Tube (which could be pretty counter-productive if one object of the scheme is to allow offenders to get back into jobs)?

And GPS can be spoofed, relatively cheaply and easily. How much security would be built into an offender tagging system? At what cost?

And what about data transfer?  How do you get data from the tag to the control room? The obvious answer is through mobile telephony, but to claim that you can pinpoint where an offender is at any given time requires real-time updating, and if tagging is to operate on any kind of scale you need to either transfer huge quantities of data in real time – and that can become seriously expensive (especially compared with the option of storing the information on the tag – memory is becoming very cheap – and transferring the data en masse when the networks are quiet).

In theory, there is nothing here that could not be overcome.  But it comes with a price-tag and there is the world of difference between running a successful pilot scheme and delivering something that is robust and cost-effective in the real world.  And – given that evidenced policy-making has not so far been the coalition’s strong point, I wonder just how far Special Advisers – for whom evidence is often the word of the last industry lobbyist who has bent their ear – are pushing this plan beyond its evidential base, and are relying on sales pitches from the private sector instead. I’d guess there are plenty of private sector providers who are very keen to get their foot in the door to get what could be some very lucrative contracts, and who are confident that they could lay off the risks on to the public sector.

It’s important, because in this case tagging seems to be the quid pro quo for moving towards a justice system which is based on rehabilitation.  I would argue for an approach based on rehabilitation and restorative justice; all the evidence I am aware of suggests that it is far more effective and way cheaper than prison, especially for less serious offences. But  I am concerned that a glib throwaway remark from a Prime Minister playing that old political trick of appearing to be tough on crime when things are not going well could lead to an expensive disaster, which could end up being used to discredit a move away from custodial sentencing.  And I have no confidence that either politicians or the media will give the idea of tagging the scrutiny it needs, or indeed that they are remotely capable of conducting a nuanced and evidenced debate around a really difficult issue.

Olympics: Cameron and Johnson show their class

If nations won Olympic medals for the stupidity of their leaders, Team GB would be a prime contender.  It’s difficult to conclude anything different following the comments of David Cameron – a Prime Minister whose attempts to hitch a ride on the bandwagon of British sporting success have been increasingly risible – and London’s part-time mayor Boris Johnson.  But it’s the casual assumptions these comments reveal that make them interesting.

First, Cameron on school sport, and his much-quoted remarks about Indian dancing on ITV’s Daybreak programme:

“The trouble we have had with targets up to now, which was two hours a week, is that a lot of schools were meeting that by doing things like Indian dance or whatever, that you and I probably wouldn’t think of as sport, so there’s a danger of thinking all you need is money and a target.

Now I know precious little about dancing – Indian or otherwise – as my friends and acquaintances who have never seen me on a dance floor will testify; but it’s surely obvious that dance provides excellent exercise and, when undertaken by groups, involves disciplines of co-ordination and team work.  What is fascinating is not just the casual racism of the India reference, but the claim that this is not sport; because, of course, it’s not inherently competitive (although we all know that it can be).  That failure to distinguish between exercise and competition seems to me (like the casual racism) to be one of those moments when Cameron’s mask slips and the easy assumptions of his class background comes through.

Now to Boris Johnson, and his assertion that state schools should be required to undertake two hours of compulsory sport per day, like he did at Eton.  It’s tempting to wonder whether this is one of those carefully-scripted casual asides that are apparently the hallmark of Brand Boris; but it’s an idea that is both inherently deeply stupid and, once again, reveals much about Johnson’s understanding of the world.

State schools aren’t Eton, obviously.  For a start, the students go home at night. And how on earth do you fit two hours a day of sport into the school day?  And where do you do it, given the long Tory history of selling off school playing fields?  And who do you pay to lead it, since relying on big society volunteers to staff a mandatory activity is an act of lunacy? The playing field can be a cruel and traumatising place for sensitive children – are we now being told by Old Etonians that we must return to the ideology that bullying toughens you up and makes a man of you?  Above all, are we being told that working-class children should have their energies focussed on sport rather than academic study, because that is (the subscript goes) what they are fit for?

Boris Johnson’s stupidities have long been given an easy ride by the media (witness the barking idea of moving Heathrow to the Thames Estuary); in almost any other politician this would have been career-finishing stuff.  That it isn’t is a rather sobering commentary on the state of political discourse today.

In making these comments, Cameron and Johnson show their profound ignorance of how the vast majority of people live and are, whether they realise it or not, consciously returning to the nineteenth-century origins of organised sports in Britain, with Dr Arnold’s model of work among the slum poor to create sports clubs which kept those on the margins of society out of Godless and criminal activity.  And Cameron’s reference to competitive sport fits closely with the social Darwinism that underpinned that ideal; the belief that life is a race in which the most able win, while conveniently ignoring the fact that a small minority of the populace are equipped by birth and wealth to run the race so much faster than their peers.  It’s the old reactionary game of, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, rationalising the head start as achievement.  And of course we know that modern management jargon is laced with the language of competitive sport – the presiding ideology of a thousand management courses and team-building exercises.

Britain is a country with an exercise problem.  We read almost daily of the childhood obesity problem; of coddled children parked in front of TV and games console, parents mesmerised by traffic and tabloid hysteria about paedophiles into keeping children indoors, while in term ferrying them across town to school by car in the name of school choice.  The Government whose leaders mather about competitive sport is the same one that is busy selling off school playing fields and degrading the nutritional standard of state school food.

Behind Cameron’s and Johnson’s statements are the old, desperate ideology that sports are really about producing the right school of chap, and the assumption that the public schools should teach the rest of us how to do it. Britain’s Olympians deserve better than to have their achievements hijacked in the name of class politics.

Gove, creationism and the war on reason

Sometimes in politics a line is crossed in a way that is particularly chilling.  The announcement that Education Secretary Michael Gove has allowed advocates of creationism to set up three free schools is one of those moments.  Not that it should come as any surprise – the seeds of this particular development were sown when Tony Blair as Prime Minister famously failed to condemn the teaching of creationism, and in New Labour’s adoption of the principle of academies, dealing state comprehensive education what looks increasingly like a fatal blow.

As the Guardian report I’ve linked to above is at pains to point out, creationism cannot be taught in science lessons.  But, honestly, who really believes that this is a safeguard?  Does anyone really believe that teaching it in religious education lessons instead will mean that children will place it in that context.  Having myself been educated in an Anglo-Catholic prep school suffused with ideal of hot sweet piety (by a school chaplain who is now serving a prison sentence for interfering with his charges) I find it hard to believe that such boundaries will be observed.  After all, why do creationist groups go into the provision of schools?

Why does this matter? It is because the apparent tolerance of creationsm – because it is a belief system held by some people who have wealth and power  - as a potential alternative to evolution, which has more than a century of rational underpinning and scientific method behind it, is antithetic to the very idea of education.  If the purpose of education is to allow people to grow up as informed, critical thinkers, then this can only be a deeply retrograde move.  And it is so obviously one that reflects political power – evangelical Christianity good, mudassars bad.  Would free schools run by homeopaths, scientologists and eugenecists (to pick three random forms of intellectual twaddle) be given anything like the same sort of free run as evangelical Christian schools?  Do we believe that climate change deniers should be given the right to use schools to preach their anti-science (provided of course that they only do it outside formal “science” lessons)?  But, despite their well-funded lobbying, they do not exercise the emotional power of organised religion.

But, leaving aside for a moment this debasing of intellectual standards, there is I think a deeper issue, one which is all of a piece with the way in which our political discourse generally is increasingly detached from a rational base.  Why – leaving aside issues of cultural dominance – are Christians given a free run?  Why do we accord religious convictions a special status?

There are some serious issues about freedom and society here.  I am certainly not going to argue that those with religious belief should not be allowed to practice those beliefs – but there is obviously a real issue when those beliefs influence wider society.  Look at the  good old Anglican church – where a liberal wing that is accepting of sexual diversity is locked in a permanent battle with an evangelical wing whose homophobia exhibits a hatred that we in a secular society find difficult to comprehend.  Ultimately this is a debate about faith and the revealed word of God through prayer and that personal relationship with the divine that suffuses religioius faith, and the unfounded dogma that the much-translated Bible is the definitive word of God.  These are private things, and – to use the Popperian phrase – unfalsifiable things.  Resort to these things and you have destroyed public discourse.

Related to this is the cult of sincerity.  Mainstream media tend to use phrases like “deeply-held” as a term of honour; there is a cult of emotionalism which seems to confer legitimacy on solipsism.  A functioning society has to be empathetic; it has to respect diversity and recognise that people have differing beliefs, but a civil society has to distinguish between private and public and needs to find a common language in which to express that distinction.  In Western society, evidence and rationalism largely provide that  language and allow us to find a balance between private and public.

But we are living through what looks like a time when rationalism has been abandoned in public discourse – instead we are living in a time of narratives, with the neoliberal myth as the most potent irrationalism of all.  We see speeches by Cameron – on welfare, for example, or immigration – in which a shallow emotionalism is substituted for a consideration of evidence; the discipline of evidence is disappearing and, with it, empathy disappears too.  There is no more telling example of this than the way in which the Con Dems have demonised the disabled and others on benefits.  The attack on empathy may have started with Margaret Thatcher, but she was a rank amateur compared with the unholy trinity of Cameron, Clegg and Murdoch, or the lies and evasions of Tony Blair.  Ultimately, the priest undermining the self-worth of the vulnerable girl discovering her sexuality is no different from the DWP spin doctor anonymously spreading lies about disability benefit fraud – both are indulging a politics of hate. Emotionalism and the denigration of empathy; in extreme circumstances the building blocks of totalitarianism, and if Britain remains for the most part an open and secular society it is because we continue to resist those things.

And this is why the admission of creationists into the academy is so dangerous.  Schools are public places, where we learn to develop the language and boundaries that make a society possible. By placing education into the hands of people whose methods  - indeed whose specific aim – is to replace discourse with faith, we are flirting with the destruction of the open society.  There is no place for the priest in the classroom.

Omnishambles, Chloe Smith and a Government without grip

On the internet today, in Britain at least, it is impossible to avoid comment about Economic Secretary Chloe Smith’s disastrous attempted defence in Newsnight last night of the Government’s decision not to implement a 3p per litre increase in fuel duty, due this autumn. The consensus is that she was utterly shredded by Jeremy Paxman, and completely failed to defend the tax change.

I’ve commented before on the unravelling of George Osborne’s budget proposals – drawing on my experience of working on Budget vehicle tax proposals in my Civil Service days.  Responding to Tory MP Douglas Carswell’s claims that the Civil Service had got hold of the Budget process, I concluded that that Budget process was so political that this was unlikely.  Since then I’ve seen a blog post by former Treasury official and adviser (and former colleague on a couple of Budgets) Damian McBride, whose explanation is closer to Carswell’s; that the politicians had lost their grip.  On the basis of yesterday’s events I conclude that Damian’s  thoughts were rather closer to the mark than mine originally were.

What was obvious from that interview was that Chloe Smith was appallingly badly briefed – something that suggests that the Treasury machine was caught badly on the hop.  The inability to specify beyond a vague reference to Departmental underspends where the money was coming from was an extraordinarily basic error; it’s difficult to believe that the Treasury machine, used to defending hard decisions and with a deeply-ingrained horror of unfunded commitments, could have swallowed that one.  That in turn suggests that this decision was a last minute political caving-in to a populist campaign run by the Murdoch media. As late as lunchtime yesterday, according to Newsnight’s Paul Mason, the Conservative line was to rubbish the deferral of the tax rise as opportunism.

The politics surrounding this decision are strange.  Labour chose to make this issue a point of attack, doubtless influenced by their old friends at the Sun.  It’s odd because  the recent falls in fuel prices have made the policy easier to defend; but in any event a cut in a tax which is overwhelmingly paid by the better-off (fuel use is closely linked to income) at the expense of spending on services which are more likely to be used by those on lower incomes is a curious position for Labour to take (even if it’s far from atypical – all of a piece, for example, with Labour’s backing for a council-tax freeze in Brighton at the expense of services).  And in real terms this is a tax cut – as Paxman pointed out repeatedly in the interview, if the Government is serious about deficit reduction, what business has it doing this?

And, yet again, a high-profile Budget measure is abandoned – this one at considerably greater cost than the others. I cannot think of any precedent for a Budget that has been so completely shambolic. If a Labour Chancellor had done this, you can only imagine the headlines.

The answer surely lies with Osborne, and the way in which he embodies what looks like the defining characteristic of this Government – that it wants to do politics, not government.  In a week when we have seen Cameron speculating in a wholly evidence-free way about ending housing benefit for the under-25s, based on a narrative which posits the hard-working against those on benefits when he knows that the vast majority of those receiving that benefit are in work, this is one more example of the bigger omnishambles at the heart of the coalition; the abandonment of evidence in favour of ideological narrative.  Labour Chancellors like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling – and indeed old-style Tory Chancellors like Kenneth Clarke – knew that the detail mattered.  Osborne, who substitutes arrogance and entitlement for intellect and application, appears incapable of understanding this.

At the heart of all this is a simple question. In the midst of the worst economic crisis in living memory, can Britain really afford a Chancellor who prefers to play at politics than getting to grips with his job?