Tory benefits campaign: ideology as a bridge of lies

The Conservative Party has launched a campaign which seeks to distinguish between hard-working families and scroungers, through a poster depicting an unshaven person lounging  on a sofa in contrast to a modest 2.4 children family who emphasise the virtues of diligent work.  It is all of a piece with George Osborne’s rhetoric about those who have their curtains closed during the day.  It’s not a new tactic – it harks back to 2010 election posters – but its timing is perhaps significant, representing a time when Government has taken a quite deliberate decision that the incomes on those on benefits will fall faster than those who do not.  It is also surely significant that it marks the arrival of Lynton Crosby into national Tory politics – this kind of rhetoric is mainstream on the Australian right.

It is of course a wholly false dichotomy.  In the real world of evidence and truth it is obvious that the majority of those receiving benefits are in work, but are not paid a living wage.  And there are no jobs – even for those who are capable of work. Coalition rhetoric about generations of worklessness has been shown to be utterly without foundation.

But it provides a narrative – one that is embraced by the media and politicians of all parties.  There is powerful ideology at work here.

To my mind, it evokes powerfully the writing of Vaclav Havel, describing the politics of late communism. Havel writes about how in the crisis of late communism, the authorities used ideology as a way of distorting the populace’s connection with reality – as a form of psychological and political manipulation.  In his essay The Power of the Powerless he refers to ideology as “a bridge of lies”:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo.

The lies here are about power, who wields it and for whose benefit – for example the rhetoric of how wealth derives from hard work rather than privilege, good fortune and accident of birth (the imperative, as Ivan Illich put it, of rationalising the head start as achievment); and the illusion of democratic power in a political system in which the mainstream parties share the same underlying economic assumptions; or when powerful and entitled groups like established churches and the alumni of private schools adopt the language of victimhood.  And above all, neoliberalism needs to maintain that illusion that wealth and power are functions of work and effort – to disguise the extent to which most work is alienated, and wholly irrelevant to a culture of declining living standards for the majority. Reading Havel in an age of neoliberal hegemony is to understand the irony of the great and the good of that hegemony turning out in force at Havel’s funeral.

Above all, we now live in the age of the ideological dog-whistle – something that powerfully demonstrates the common neoliberal assumptions at work across all parties.  The Tories’ latest campaign differs from Labour’s language of “hard-working families” in degree only, not substance; and I’d guess the Tories know that very well and are playing to that.  It’s interesting that in responding to the campaign, Labour Deputy Chairman uses exactly the same language as the Tories: he talks of “taxes on strivers” in the Budget.  The same words, the same assumptions, the same dichotomy: Labour choosing – consciously or not – to adopt the language and assumptions of power rather than speaking truth to it, and doing the Tories’ work for them.  I have no doubt that Mr Dugher – like so many decent people in the Labour Party – is appalled and disgusted by what the Coalition is doing to the most vulnerable in our society. But, whether wittingly or not, his language suggests an inability to step outside the neoliberal bubble and connect with the realities.

To kick over an idol, you must first get up off your knees.  Tawney’s 80-year-old message to Ramsay Macdonald’s Labour Party has never been more resonant; if we believe that neoliberalism is a dangerous, destructive and deluded ideology we have to stop using its language, and instead find a resonant narrative rooted in truth and experience, one that talks about the realities that mainstream Westminster politics consciously avoids.  The crisis of British democracy is exemplified by the fact that there is nobody in the mainstream willing to do that.

Vaclav Havel’s position is ultimately optimistic – ideology as a bridge of lies is inherently unstable, and only lasts for as long as people are willing to live within the lie:

Individuals can be alienated from themselves only because there is something in them to alienate. The terrain of this violation is their authentic existence. Living the truth is thus woven directly into the texture of living a lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response. Only against this background does living a lie make any sense: it exists because of that background. In its excusatory, chimerical rootedness in the human order, it is a response to nothing other than the human predisposition to truth. Under the orderly surface of the life of lies, therefore, there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real aims, of its hidden openness to truth.

The key, then, is for people who are not prepared to accept neoliberalism to challenge the language, to abandon it, and to learn to speak truth to power.  And it’s only when the politicians who are supposed to speak for the vulnerable and dispossessed learn to abandon neoliberal narratives that they will be able to do their job within the system.

So just which are those drifting schools?

David Cameron takes a pop at what he describes as failing middle class schools in a piece in today’s Daily Telegraph.  As ever with Cameron, it’s short on evidence, long on prejudice – has there ever been a Government which is less concerned about backing its assertions with hard facts? – and it’s always amusing to see the Tories’ implicit assumption that when a child from Hackney outperforms one from the Shires in exams, the natural order is under threat and the balance needs to be redressed. But the piece raised some interesting questions about efficiency and outcomes in schools.

The obvious one is what schools are for.  It will come as no surprise to anyone that Cameron publicly seems to regard the purpose of schools as purely economically instrumental – about producing a qualified, disciplined cadre of workers and consumers (and the comments about the shires bring irresistibly to mind Ivan Illich’s comment that formal education is about rationalising the head start as achievement). It’s a truism that one’s view of education really encapsulates one’s view of life, and Cameron’s is clearly based on economics.  But in that he’s hardly alone.  Hence the purpose of schools is qualifications, qualifications, qualifications – the certified abilities to do certain things, while other activities take second or third place.  (It’s interesting to see the obsession with school sports in that context).

But even if you accept the premise that exam results are what it is all about, where are these failing schools?  Where are the drifting schools?

I’d suggest you need to take a good hard look at the private sector.

Consider the facts. Unlike state secondaries, providing education at around £5,000 per pupil per year, private schools are awash with money.  Fees are likely to be more than twice that, and they enjoy generous tax breaks amounting to around £88m per year, according to the Education Review Group.  So what do parents (and taxpayers who are providing that generous subsidy) get for that money?  Not a huge amount in some cases – for example here in Brighton, even on that traditional performance of Oxbridge places and A-level results, our sixth-form colleges are performing as well as private schools.  Much of the money of course goes into the sort of character-building activities that our political masters regard as luxuries in the state sector – music, arts, trips and so on.  And it’s obvious that state schools in affluent areas like Brighton start with a big head start over their colleagues in poorer areas – but then private schools are highly selective; they cherry pick the exam fodder and can quietly kick out those who won’t make the grade.

And what about the public benefit from that subsidy.  Again, the Education Review Group’s work is worth reading.  As I’ve blogged before, it concludes that private education remains socially divisive;

• private schools cream off able pupils and teachers from state provision, having a disproportionate effect on it;

• importantly, that fees are increasing much faster than inflation and in particular average pay, exacerbating their exclusiveness;

• a reason for this is that many of the activities at those schools are “gold plated” like running beagling packs and golf courses, demonstrating that education is not their sole function and that they cannot claim simply to be covering the cost of education in those fees

• the costs of providing bursaries is small, and their impact is detrimental to the education system as a whole

In other words, that subsidy is supporting activities that are actually damaging to the common good.

So, private schools are expensive, awash with public money, are producing disbenefits, and, taking into account their ability to pick and choose their pupils, are, even on the terms within which Tories want to conduct the debate, not necessarily achieving results that are any better than many of their state competitors.  If Cameron was serious about educational efficiency, he might do well to start with Britain’s complacent private schools.

Corrupting the academy

David Willetts – the man they mystifyingly call “two brains” – has come up with yet another of his wheezes. He suggests that teenagers from the wealthiest families should be able to secure places at elite universities if they can pay the full fees up front. These extra students would not be eligible for student loans – hence only the very wealthiest would be able to take advantage (with fees at a minimum of £12,000 per year and an average national wage of under £25,000).

It has caused predictable outrage – and rightly so. It’s obvious – so obvious that it barely needs saying, but some people seem to miss the point – that the privileged have been buying preferential access to elite universities for decades. Private schools educate 8% of children but account for 50% of the intake at Oxford and Cambridge – a figure that has barely changed since I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the early 1980s. They’re better resourced, better prepared, better connected – and that’s before we get on to the state subsidy that private education enjoys through charitable status and VAT exemption. And – as anyone who has been through the system knows – it means that Oxbridge places are taken by a wealthy minority who can’t hack it academically, taking places from state school students who could.

In one sense, then, Willetts is merely proposing to make explicit something that has gone on for years. But at least the high entry requirements gave the appearance of meritocracy – it’s difficult to see how the arrival of a cadre of the super-rich exempted from the usual applications process will do anything other than reduce academic standards and lead to a the two-tier system of the nineteenth century, with scholars doing academic work and gentlemen commoners essentially loafing at an elite finishing school.

But this begs some pretty fundamental questions about what universities are for.

The Robbins Report of 1963, which paved the way for the expansion of higher education in Britain, was in no doubt. It argued that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment” (the so-called Robbins principle). There should be four principal aims:

instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship.

In other words, the aims of higher education were collective as well as individual. Economics – and especially the enrichment of the individual – take a back seat. Higher education should be made widely available because as a society we all benefit from it. And it follows that as a public good, it should be generously funded to ensure that the benefit is gained as widely as possible.

It is that principle that has been lost in the rush towards the marketisation of higher university. When I went to Oxford in 1980 I paid no fees and got a full maintenance grant. The move away from that provision has been justified in individual terms; the individual benefits and should pay. Graduates will earn more and will therefore be able to handle debt. And Universities are full, so why worry about whether people are being put off?

Allied with this is the quest for status and power. Degrees as the stepping-stone to higher salaries – elite universities not as places where study is undertaken but where useful contacts and the friendships that oil the wheels of political and financial institutions made, social refinements acquired and a certificate handed out at the end of it. The place where, as Ivan Illich put it, the head start is rationalised as achievement. If that’s what you think universities should be, then Willetts’ proposal is not without a certain logic. The logic only disintegrates when you start thinking that universities should be about learning and the collective good.

Posh and posher–how Andrew Neil missed the point

Andrew Neil’s BBC film about how politics in Britain has increasingly become a preserve of privately-educated privileged examined a real and important phenomenon.  He argued that for a brief period front-line Westminster politics, and hence government, had been opened up to a meritocracy drawing on a much wider range of social backgrounds, but now the ranks were closing again.  Apart from a sidewsipe at the Unions for failing to represent their members (an ironic comment from a Murdoch journalist), his solution lay in bringing back grammar schools.  While he re-iterated that nobody would want a return to the old secondary moderns, in which 80% of children were condemned to explicitly second-class institutions at the age of 11, selective secondary education was the key.

In my view his analysis was weak and tendentious. For example, he did not ask the question of how the narrowing social base of Parliament might reflect the fact that the three main Parliamentary parties have adopted an increasingly convergent political agenda, a set of variations on free-market economics which serves the interests of an affluent elite.  He did not consider how far the rise of what he calls the “meritocracy” – epitomised by politicians like Wilson and Heath – was the result of the Second World War, in which the imperatives of national survival meant that bright grammar-school boys rose through the officer ranks. 

In some respects he was just plain wrong.  For example, he suggested that the public schools had tightened their grip on Oxbridge in recent years – but the proportion of state-school entrants has not changed in thirty years.  Not good enough, but not what Neil argued.  And in repeating the clichés about state education and the lack of aspiration, he failed to mention the fact that many state schools in affluent areas are giving private schools a run for their money.  He simply didn’t seem to understand what a comprehensive school was or what it was for.  He had no understanding of how widening economic inequalities have affected aspiration.  And overall he seems chillingly indifferent to the fate of those who are not among the higher achievers at school.

And there was a clear absence of economics in his argument – he didn’t mention the huge financial advantages that private schools enjoy, and the fact that, through charitable status and VAT exemption, they are awash with public subsidy.  He could and should have made the point that it costs the taxpayer more to subsidise a place at Eton than it does to fund a child at a state secondary. 

Here then are two key questions about dealing with inequality that Neil didn’t address:

• Resources – one very simple and obvious point about private schools is that they are awash with money, much of it handed over by the taxpayer.  A radical approach to inequality would start with the abolition of charitable status and private schools’ tax breaks.  But it would need to go further, because children from affluent, achieving homes will always have an advantage (if there was one motto that might have underpinned Neil’s programme, it was Ivan Illich’s statement that education rationalised the head start as achievement).  State education must be properly financed, and Tory-Dem ministers need to start thinking of state education as an investment, not a drain on public finances.  It’s much more important than the ideological tinkerings with the syllabus that appear to obsess Gove.
• Institutional questions – Neil doesn’t explain why academic excellence requires the removal of the brightest children into separate institutions – the most successful comprehensives show that this need not be the case.  And to the extent that academic qualifications matter (there’s a separate debate about whether the traditional academic syllabus should dominate education) I’d argue that what is needed is a re-examination of the question of exams.  There’s no doubt that public exams have got easier, to the point where enormous numbers of candidates are getting the top grades.  While this might once have been egalitarian, it’s now seriously disadvantaging those from poorer and more difficult backgrounds; faced with being able to fill their places many times over with students with top grades, the so-called elite Universities will fall back on the other factors in which the confident and well-prepared will excel, especially when their own resources are under pressure.  There’s a paradox in education that needs to be resolved – pupils are facing more pressure than ever before in a race for degraded qualifications.  I’d suggest that breaking out of that bind is essential to opening up higher education and making the whole business of educational attainment fairer.  Paradoxically, more rigorous public examinations may be the key to doing that.

In conclusion, Neil identifies a real problem, and one that needs radical solutions that extend much more widely through social and political discourse.  But by adopting an essentially conservative solution, shot through with nostalgia with a system that only worked for a few, he’s missing the point.

It’s not about fees, it’s about democracy

Now that things are settling down after this week’s massive student demonstration in London – and the events at the Conservative HQ building that followed it, it’s worth reflecting a little on what was really happened, and what it tells us about the temper of Con Dem Britain.

The media reactions have been predictable. It’s either a case of privileged youth after a free ride, or a riot by the usual suspects who disgraced the 50,000 students who had marched earlier. Of course, it’s neither – one of the most interesting things about what happened on 10 November is the complete inability of most of the mainstream media to “get” it, to ask whether there might be something going on here that’s a bit more profound or interesting.

Small riot, not many hurt

The riot angle is of course what the tabloids led on. Actually, stand back from it, and it’s not much – a few minor injuries (more to protesters than to police), a few arrests, a bit of criminal damage. Always excepting the moron who threw the fire extinguisher, not much more than a Bullingdon Club night out, really. Nothing quite gets a lazy journalist going more than a picture of a youth putting an object through a plate glass window. And it allows them to retreat behind all the usual tropes about political motivation, hard-core anarchists, Class War and all the rest of it.

A much more interesting account of the events at Millbank – from an eye-witness – is here. It makes a convincing case that what we saw here was not the “usual suspects” at all, but a group of angry people in a confused and confusing situation:

The majority were just plain old students, but angry. The kind of students who go to their lectures, go to parties, play sport at the weekends and sometimes get a bit drunk and lairy. And there were a lot of very young students there. Maybe they were first years, but many of them looked like school students. They weren’t all middle class, they weren’t all white, they hadn’t all come in on the student union buses. They were never looking at the Russell group education that private and grammar school educated kids could, until now, take for granted. These are the people who made up the majority of the people at Millbank – ordinary young people, working class and middle class, from school age up to university age, who hadn’t been on many demos before, whose only encounter with the police, or with agitated crowds, had been Saturday night lairiness or sports matches.

And that set the mood. It felt like a rowdy night in a busy town. People were angry and frustrated, and they hadn’t had the training or the experience to deal with the situation. If it was true that a militant anarchist faction had led the violence at Millbank then here’s what it would have looked like:

Everybody facing the police line would have had a mask on. Nobody wouldplan to feature prominently in national newspapers with their face clearly exposed, throwing a stick at a police officer or smashing a window. But what did we actually see? A few make-shift bandannas slipping down people’s faces and a huge number of students who hadn’t even tried to hide their identity.

The police line would have been stormed. There was a large plate glass window missing, right in front of the crowd. There were hundreds of protestors, there were a laughably small number of police. Very little organisation would have been required for everybody to link up and just walk through the police line, with little damage done to either side. Instead there a mass of people hanging back, and a handful of angry people launching themselves one by one at the police with fists or sticks to be beaten back with batons.

When the snatch squad was sent in their targets would have been surrounded and protected by fellow protestors. Instead the crowd allowed the police to get to their targets and then to carry them back out, right through the bulk of the protestors. The reaction was angry, and violent, but completely ineffective. It was clear that people didn’t understand what was happening until it was over.

There would have been a sense of purpose. I did quite a bit of chatting and eavesdropping. People didn’t know what was going on. Not just the people milling around near the back. Students in university hoodies who were right up near the front, the ones who were launching sticks as if they were javelins, were confused. They asked each other if anyone was in charge, they wondered if they were going to miss their bus back, they talked about ‘kettling’ as something that they’d heard of but never experienced. They had a slightly dazed look, part exhilaration, part anger, but partly just the look of someone trying to cope with a situation that they’ve never been in before. There was no one in charge, so they made it up. And a number of them got it wrong.

Degree to go with fries, please

The other misunderstanding is that this protest was about privileged kids looking after number one. But this was actually about far more than that. It was about tuition fees, yes, but also about massive cuts in funding especially to arts courses, with the increase in fees being part of a strategy that looks horribly like the privatisation of higher education.

Behind that assumption is an insidious and dangerous interpretation of what higher education is about. The mainstream trope runs, you get a degree, you earn more, you pay. Education is a commodity like a Big Mac or an iPhone, something that students consume.

But it isn’t, and as soon as the Left falls into that trap it’s lost the argument. The pioneers of education in Britain, who were largely on the left, didn’t do it so that their kids could get a well-paid job in a multi-national. They did it because education is at the root of what a decent society should be, and because of a belief that it should be freely available to all who wanted it. It wasn’t a commodity, it was the mark of a decent society. It was a collective good, something we all benefitted from, not a badge to be bought by the affluent, to, as Ivan Illich caustically put it, to rationalise the head start as achievement.

So when did we vote for this?

I think to understand the anger, we have to think about democracy. Anybody who was there at the march would have been in no doubt that the most virulent anger was reserved for Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Tories are Tories; people expect nothing better of Cameron and Osborne.

But these were people to whom Clegg made a pledge that he would fight against tuition fees. Many of those students would have voted Liberal Democrat in May on that basis – voting, of course, for the first time. Some of them would have worked for Lib Dem candidates. And they’ve been shafted.

It is difficult to think of more pathetic examples of dishonesty turned to excuse-making than some of the attempts by Liberal Democrats to rationalise their sell-out. This extraordinary piece by John Hemming MP is fairly typical, its desperation of tone more illuminating than any of its content. (I should mention as an aside that I first met Hemming thirty years ago when he and I were at Oxford, and he was organising a rent strike at Magdalen College – something that makes me wonder just what sort of self-loathing and moral delinquency it takes for people who once believed in something to sit in Parliament meekly cheering as Osborne and Duncan Smith go to work on the most vulnerable in society).

I think this betrayal is part of a wider crisis in democracy. We now have three parties wedded to neo-liberal economics, whos political aim is not to serve the electorate but to get their aims past them. I think the electorate is beginning to wake up to it. The use of deficit scaremongering to override democratic accountability seems to me to be at the heart of the Con Dem agenda, and people realise this and are getting angrier. The spectacle of a handful of the extremely wealthy telling the rest of society to make sacrifices for the common good, while their chums in the banks continue to get their bonuses, is wearing thin. Is it any surprise that people are getting impatient with Westminster?

And in any case, given everything that’s happened, the broken pledges, the privatisation that the electorate never had their say on – given all that, who the hell are Clegg – not to mention people like Cameron and the ludicrous Boris Johnson, who as members of the Bulllingdon Club took a rather less rigid view of criminal damage in their student days – to lecture the students at Millbank about democracy? Who are they to tell students that they should channel their anger in establishment-approved ways?

Two brains or no brains?

Universities Minister David Willetts – a man whose intellectual achievements (in the context of the Tory Party, anyway)has led to him being known as “two brains” has given an interview to the Guardian in which he claims that the current system of student funding means that students are “a burden on the taxpayer”.  The context is that the new coalition government appears to be setting the scene for a huge hike in student tuition fees.

There are two approaches to this issue: the economic and the social.  I’ll look at each of these in turn.

From an economic point of view, it’s difficult to know what Willetts means by “burden”.  I live in a city with two universities.  Several thousand students, supported by loans, live here, rent homes here, spend their money in our supermarkets, and, yes, in pubs and clubs.   The two universities directly provide thousands of jobs, and indirectly many more.  While you get plenty of moaning from the usual gangs of reactionary miseries in the letters columns of our local paper, there’s no doubt that the funding behind these students plays an important role in sustaining the city’s economy.  While it’s quite possible to see how a government fixated with cutting expenditure might come to the conclusion that this is a “burden”, I’d argue that this was an ideological rather than an empirical conclusion.

Secondly, the social issues.

Tony Benn has consistently argued – and I agree with him – that recent trends in student funding, leading as they have to situations where students leave university tens of thousands of pounds in debt, ensure that graduates become good, compliant employees.  When you’re immediately burdened by huge debt you have to get your head down, accept corporate values, and work.

Willetts says in the interview I’ve referenced above that students should see student debt as a down-payment on higher tax, rather than a debt.  But that presupposes that graduates will earn more; not an assumption that stands up in many cases (which is why there is a desperate shortage of well-qualified science teachers).  In an society in which a first degree is becoming a default qualification the marginal value of that first degree is declining.  Many of the most lucrative jobs remain in sectors like the law and finance where there remain crucial financial barriers to entry – periods of unpaid internship or pupillage which ensure that only those backed by substantial parental wealth get the opportunity to participate.  And of course an increase in tuition fees at a time when the marginal value of a degree is falling will have the inevitable effect of pushing those who are not backed by parental wealth away from the more prestigious educational establishments – or out of higher education at all.

The only conclusion one can draw is that this approach – whether intentional or not – is to entrench yet further a situation in which higher education is based on parental ability to pay.  The coalition philosophy of higher education – at least – appears to be encapsulated by Ivan Illich’s comment about how formal education seeks to institutionalise the head start as achievement.

The effect of pushing up tuition fees will be to widen even further the gap between rich and poor, and to deny young people from poor and middle-income backgrounds access to the education to which  – on the basis of their ability – they would be entitled (let’s not forget that the average wage in Britain is £25,000 per year, and middle income is a long way from where the right-wing press pretends it is).  It means more Old Etonians at Oxbridge and the Russell Group universities taking the most lucrative (if perhaps not the most useful) jobs, and persuading themselves it’s because they’re cleverer.

It looks very much as if what is in effect a piece of social engineering is being dressed up as economics.