UKIP, neoliberalism and the revolt of the moderately entitled

Much cyber-ink has been spilled following last week’s strong UKIP showing in the English County Council elections – it might seem superfluous to add to it.  I think the strength of UKIP’s “surge” is overrated – these were partial elections in which the major centres of population did not vote (along with Scotland and most of Wales, where nationalism has a very different political hue), and UKIP gained 25% of the vote on a 30% turnout.  Such little evidence as there is suggests that UKIP has very little traction in the big conurbations.

The real story is the way in which the Coalition parties – and particularly the Liberal Democrats, who once located their real strength in local government, have been decimated; counties that the Liberal Democrats controlled or were close to controlling no more than a few years ago (like Devon or Oxfordshire or East Sussex) no longer return more than a handful of Lib Dem councillors. Labour did not lose a single seat to UKIP – this looks less like a politcal surge, more like a realignment on the Right.  There is certainly nothing here to justify the wall-to-wall Farage-fest that the BBC in particular has launched (and one can only reflect on the irony of the BBC claiming that UKIP had “come from nowhere” when barely a day has passed in the last six months without Farage appearing on a BBC news programme).

But I have yet to see an analysis that decisively links the rise of UKIP to the political and economic failure that Britain has experienced in the last couple of decades – the post-Thatcher age.  There has been much talk of specific issues – Europe and immigration – and some about demographics (UKIP supporters as white, male, older, without university education) and nostalgia.  Above all, it’s seen as a protest vote against the existing political system, seen as remote and corrupt.  There are varying degrees of truth in all of these. But how does one tie all these together?

I think the starting point has to be austerity economics, and the way in which a generation that had come to expect security in later life has been shafted by the current economic and political orthodoxy.  I’ve blogged before about how people who took out private pensions in the Thatcher era in a mood of big-bang optimism have found their retirement funds devastated by the 2007 collapse and by the naked greed with which fund managers have helped themselves to fees and commissions and bonuses; but the issue of a secure old age goes much further than that.  The real value of state pensions is falling and the cost of essentials like power has soared; moreover, uncertainty over the future of a privatised NHS hits older people hardest, as they are the people who need to rely on it most.  Yes, the changing cultural mix in society presents challenges to some older people’s perceptions; memories of Imperial red on schoolroom atlases die hard.  But it seems to me that the cultural nationalism can be seen as a proxy for economic uncertainty; in this case by people who, in many cases, are not poor (but may have very low fixed incomes) but fear poverty and uncertainty.  Others may be people who fall for the rhetoric of “hard working families”, or even just work very hard for low pay and cannot get past the capitalist  rhetoric that hard work brings rewards, and look for other reasons why in a world of falling wages and mass unemployment it often appears to bring the opposite.

History, as that incomparable exponent of  ”history from below” Raphael Samuel wrote, begins at twilight.  He could have said the same about nationalism.  It is a truism that you see the flag of St George far more these days – especially during football tournaments – but I think the same is true of all sorts of national symbolism (including last year’s Jubilee celebrations).  None of this seems to me to be the behaviour of a confident nation; and it seems to me that the changes at the root of that uncertainty are not immigrants, or European bureaucrats, but white men in suits advocating a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon economic model that has seen the optimism that, on the whole, one’s material circumstances would improve over time replaced by uncertainty and the reality of falling living standards.  It is often said that UKIP is fuelled by nostalgia for the 1950s; yes, one can point to the fact that we were a whiter, less cosmopolitan, more culturally limited society, one that still saw itself as completely separate from Europe and which saw a white Commonwealth as its natural ally.  But it was also a society with full employment, decent affordable housing, an expanding welfare state and educational provision, with the Robbins report and the mass expansion of higher education around the corner; a society in which there was grounds for optimism that, year on year, the future would be better and that one could look forward to a reasonably secure old age.

And the contrast with what had gone before was so positive; a depression that had given way to war.  No wonder with hindsight it can look like a golden age.  The genius of the Right – whether UKIP or the right-wing newspapers that express many of its values – is to strip away the economic dimension from that nostalgia; to present that society as if its was its whiteness, its deference and its social hierarchies and accepted gender role, pulled apart by the pernicious Sixties, that were the things that produced that contentment, not the fact of growing economic security.  Indeed, as the economic consensus moves away from the kind policies that made such security – in the West at least – possible, it is almost inevitable that nostalgia will be rationalised in this way. One of the advantages of flag-waving and nationalism is that it provides capitalists with somewhere to hide, someone else to blame.

Moreover, the increasing homogeneity of the British political (and media) class – more remote, more privileged and less politically differentiated than at any time since the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee first made possible the election of working class MPs at the very end of the nineteenth century – has provided a focus for the discontent.  It is this homogeneity that has made possible UKIP’s positioning of itself as a party of protest challenging the British establishment, when in reality it is nothing of the sort – as Chris Dillow has shown in this brilliant blog post,  UKIP’s policies are neoliberal and pro-establishment to the core – for example its advocacy of flat taxes.  For all its sabre-rattling about immigration and Europe and even (faced with the Etonian tendency at the heart of Cameron’s government) class, it offers nothing to assuage the root causes of the discontent of slightly-privileged England – the economic dislocation that has been wrought by the neoliberal experiment.

At one level, then, UKIP is a threat to the prevailing political order; it strikes at the heart of the modern Conservative party, not least because its appeal is primarily to those who form the Conservative Party’s organisational base. (It’s interesting to note that one of the areas in which UKIP polled best was along the route of HS2, the high-speed rail grand projet that brings no real economic or environmental benefits, threatens huge destruction along its route through hitherto true-blue Tory middle England – and which is backed unanimously across the Westminster political spectrum).  David Cameron is a fundamentally weak leader who is mistrusted by many in his Party – the same people who see UKIP as being much closer to their idea of a true Conservative.  At another level, UKIP is about the continuation of the existing political order; not only does it not challenge a political consensus build around the market, privatisation, reducing the welfare state (including universal provision) and the size of the state – it actually endorses all those things. Its position on Europe and immigration lie outside the consensus, but represent no more than extreme positions on a policy continuum that the Westminster consensus can unite around (immigrants are valuable insofar as they serve economic ends). Of course, UKIP has more than its fair share of colourful bigots and fringe neo-Nazis; it draws on a similar constituency to the EDL and the now largely-defunct BNP; their politics is, in my view, deeply obnoxious and must be resisted at all costs. But they’re not perhaps the most important thing about UKIP.  UKIP is the party that sets itself up as anti-Establishment, the party that says the things that “political correctness” would make unsayable, but in reality is no more than a cheerleader for the biggest Establishment stitch-up of all. It is about mainstreaming and neutralising the sort of dissent that might interrupt the sleep of those who wield real power.  Looking at UKIP, Aneurin Bevan’s comment  that the art of conservative politics lies in persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power comes overpoweringly to mind.

The point about UKIP then is that they are part of the same essential phenomenon as the mainstream Westminster consensus – by promoting a political economy that is based on ideology rather than empirical reality, and which concentrates power in the hands of an increasingly homogenous and privileged political class.  While they act as the vehicle for a group of essentially quite privileged people who see their privileges being eroded, their role as a party is to reinforce, not challenge, the things that erode those privileges.

Abolishing the universal state pension – the new Westminster consensus?

Over the weekend, Ian Duncan Smith made widely reported comments that wealthy pensioners should be prepared to return some of their benefits – notably winter fuel payments and free bus passes.  This morning on the BBC Today programme, Labour DWP spokesman Liam Byrne (unsurprisingly) refused to defend the principle of universality. Nick Clegg and his party have for some time been advocating removing some benefits from wealthier pensioners.  It’s increasingly obvious that there is a Westminster consensus emerging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Thatcher: mythologies and legacies

The past week was inevitable. It was always going to be the case that when Margaret Thatcher died, there would be a torrent of Thatcherabilia in the media; much of it adulatory, some of it reopening the old wounds from the 1980s.  The State Funeral question had been well-trailed; it was always clear that the Westminster political class would unite in eulogy (although the recall of Parliament for seven-and-a-half hours of expensive rhetoric probably went further than many predicted).  It was, too, always going to be an important moment in the Conservative Party’s uneasy dialogue with itself; David Cameron, a weak leader held in open contempt by much of his party (not least for his failure to win a decisive election in 2010) would inevitably be measured by his response to the passing of the iconic Conservative figure of recent history, who famously never lost a General Election.

As one of the Thatcher generation (I cast my first vote, a few weeks after my eighteenth birthday, in the 1979 General Election) it has been fascinating to see the divisions of those years re-open, and to read the various opinion pieces on her legacy.  It has also been interesting to see the generational divide; the diffierence between those of us who lived through the Thatcher years and those who came after.  Not just the experience of explaining the Miners’ Strike, or the Falklands War, or even free school milk, to people who were not born when those were live issues; but the sense of a newer post-Thatcher generation for whom the things she did are part of the background.  But I’d argue that in order to understand the politics of the Coalition it is essential to bear witness to Thatcherism and remember it for what it was, not the sanitised version that the media and political establishment want to present.

Thatcherite legacies

The Conservative-led political establishment are now busily engaged in building the mythology, the strong leader who saved Britain and transformed the economy.  I think the legacy is real, but rather different; for all her divisiveness there are key elements of our mainstream political society that are essentially Thatcherite.  I list some thoughts on these in turn below.

1.  Markets trump democracy

In some ways this is the most fundamental of all.  If there is one phrase that one associates with Margaret Thatcher, it is that there is no alternative – the imperatives of the market rule.  In our post-2008 austerity, this has come to mean that the demands of economic orthodoxy will always triumph over expressions of democracy.  Economic activity runs according to iron rules rather than democratic mandates – as Italy and Greece with the imposition of “technocratic” governments to impose austerity packages to ensure that the risk associated with lending to governments is borne, not to any extent by the lending institutions, but by the people of those countries without any risk of their having any democratic say in the matter.  David Harvey, among others, has pointed out how the erosion of democracy is at the heart of the neoliberal project; more recently we have seen the EU seeking to create a treaty which would effectively surrender member states’ ability to set deficit budgets, and hence to make macro-economic decisions.  Although there is a growing reaction against this mechanistic view of economics and the unquestioning acceptance of assumptions about the operation of markets that underpins it – following Keynes’ view that policy-makers can influence economic outcomes for both good and bad – the assumptions of austerity, supported by intellectually-dubious constructs like public choice theory, occupy a position of hegemony in policy decisions.  And, importantly in the UK, that consensus is shared across all the main political parties.  Ed Balls has made it  clear that there will be no relaxation of austerity if Labour wins the 2015 election; but more generally celebration of the market was among the salient features of New Labour.

2. War and the cult of the military

It seems to me that one of the most interesting social changes in recent years concerns the way the military is viewed in Britain.  In that underrated masterpiece The Lion and the Unicorn, Orwell – writing during wartime – describes the British indifference towards war and militarism; he suggests that if the British Army ever adopted the goosestep, people would laugh.  My father’s generation did National Service; it was a generation that joked of the imbecility and pointlessness of military life.  It seems to me that since the Falklands War we have seen a complete change in public attitudes towards the military – something that has gone hand-in-hand with British involvement in successive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an almost Orwellian acceptance of permanent war (although not of course the total war that Orwell envisaged in Nineteen Eighty-Four).  It is a different type of war, in which a relatively small army of professional soldiers achieve heroic status by fighting wars from which the civilian population is thousands of miles distant, in pursuit of war aims that are described as “liberal” – about freedom and dealing with dictators – but whose aims are anything but.  The talk of heroes is proportionate to the distance from the front line.

Moreover, as the generations who fought in the century’s two total wars pass away, the attitude to remembrance has notably changed.  The comments of the last British survivor of the First World War, Henry Allingham, who had experienced the reality of war and loathed it, contrast powerfully with the gung-ho Poppy Fascism and the sheer theatricality of modern remembrance.  Nobody much cared if you wore a poppy, and there was no two-minute silence on the 11th November as well as on Remembrance Sunday.  Thatcher was both the first British Prime Minister in modern times not to have served in war, but also the first – through the victory in the Falklands – to understand its potential as a political weapon.  In a notorious speech at Cheltenham Racecourse in the weeks after victory in the Falklands, Thatcher coined the phrase “the Falklands Factor” to contrast the bravery of British servicemen with the attitudes of striking railway workers.  It seems to me that before the Falklands War, there was a general assumption that a political leader who led Britain into war would have lacked popular support; it is possible that without the post-colonial narratives of beleagured Brits in the South Atlantic who wanted nothing more than to be part of Britain (although, crucially, the management of the Falkland Islands before the 1982 conflict was in the hands of a private company and had nothing whatsoever to do with democracy), war would still have been intolerable; but Thatcher, in the Falklands, normalised British involvement in war.  Moreover she popularised it and made it into a rallying cause for the tabloid press.  It was perhaps the experience of the Falklands in the back of Blair’s mind (it is often forgotten that his debut on the political stage was as Labour candidate in a by-election in Beaconsfield during the Falklands War) while lying his way into an illegal war into Iraq while a million people marched through London in protest.  And Thatcher had already made the poisonous link between backing “our boys” and neutralising dissent at home, with the backing of a feral tabloid press.

One aspect of this militarisation that may become clearer as the funeral progresses – if the expected dissent is shown – is the militarisation and politicisation of the police.  It is an irony that as the rhetoric of policing has shifted away from the idea of force to the language of service, policing of dissent has become more systematic and militarised, often drawing on practice from the brutalisation of occupied Palestine.  During the Brixton riots the police notoriously protected themselves with dustbin lids as makeshift shields; by the Miners’ Strike the police were using force of numbers; now tactics like the collective punishment of kettling and the practise of “pre-arresting” those likely to indulge in visible dissent (like the arrest of a street theatre company before a royal wedding) are routine.  Thatcher came to power weeks after the murder of Blair Peach by illegally tooled-up police officers; the use of officially-sanctioned police violence is now central to the maintenance of the Westminster consensus.  Students, betrayed by politicians who had lied about fees, took to the street to protest and were kettled and beaten, learning, perhaps, an early lesson in the limits of democracy in the eyes of the Westminster consensus.  This – and the Orwellian tale of Alfie Meadows, beaten by police until he bled into his brain and then charged with violent disorder – is a key legacy of Thatcher; one that nobody in the Westminster consensus is willing to disown.

3. The marginalisation of compassion and solidarity: no such thing as society

In almost every respect political discourse in post-1979 Britain has become harder, crueller, less compassionate.  Hugo Young’s magisterial piece on Thatcher’s legacy - written in 2003 but reprinted in the Guardian the day after Thatcher died – made the important point that Thatcher did not much care about being liked; it is part of a wider aspect of her politics, which is that she ended the pretence that government was conducted on behalf of the people as a whole.  Thatcher was overtly partisan; there were whole swathes of people that did not matter – people who were not going to vote for her, or to vote at all, and who could therefore be disregarded – or demonised for the gratification of her supporters.  Of course, it helped to have a supine media; Thatcherism represents the triumph of tabloid values erected into a system of Government.  But at a more basic level, Thatcherism elevated the psychopathology of the playground bully into a principle of public administration, providing legitimacy and cover for some of the most feral tabloid journalism on the planet.  (When conservatives – of all parties – call for “respect” in the run-up to her funeral, it is worth remembering the “respect” that Thatcher and her media cronies showed for the 96 victims of police stupidity and negligence at Hillsborough)

If you stand back, and try to listen dispassionately, it becomes clear that casual brutality has become the dominant tone of political discourse, right across the political spectrum: the language used to describe people who are not quite like us.  Owen Jones has of course written eloquently about the “Chav” phenomenon and the language used to describe the poor at a time when economic and social policy seems calculated to make life more difficult, more marginal for people who do not enjoy the security of privilege.  And the rhetoric of demonisation goes across the political spectrum; listen to New Labour’s adoption of the “strivers versus shirkers” rhetoric, or the way in which so much political rhetoric argues the case for “hard working families”; the language of exclusiveness and exclusion appears increasingly hard-wired into our political discourse.

Above all, the legacy of Thatcherism is that you have to earn the right to a say, through conformity to certain values and practices.  One of the most potent of Thatcher’s legacies is the way in which the Westminster establishment – regardless of party – has returned to the language of the deserving and undeserving; Thatcher’s hankering after Victorian Values made into the centrality of political discourse.  Hard work as a precondition for acceptance when, for millions, there is no work at all; or when the grinding hard work of caring for, or even being, physically or mentally disabled counts for nothing because no exchange of cash is involved.  I have blogged before about how the Westminster establishment has re-adopted the values of the workhouse, and how citizenship has become contingent on conformist contribution.  When Labour luminaries use the language of individual effort and personal sanction in their response to mass unemployment, the legacy of Thatcherism is all too clear.

4. Class Warrior and enemy of the establishment

One of the most insightful of the many pieces that appeared following Thatcher’s death was a piece in the Glasgow Herald which, for all its value, made the fundamental error of claiming that Thatcher was not a class warrior.  Perhaps not in the sense that Cameron and Osborne – scions of an old aristocracy reclaiming what they think of as their heritage – but, as ever with discussions of class in England, it’s complicated.  It is difficult to think of the young Margaret Roberts, the bright and driven grammar-school girl at Oxford, viewing the antics of the Bullingdon Club with anything but distaste; Thatcher was undoubtedly a warrior for her class, but it was not the class that had run the Conservative Party for so many decades (although it was of course the class of her predecessor Edward Heath).

A small cameo from my own student days: a debating contest at the Oxford Union in which first-year students hoping to make their mark on that smug and over-rated institution vied for attention.  The subject of debate was Margaret Thatcher and no sneer was spared by the young future masters of the universe: she was provincial, shallow, narrow-minded, with a vision that extended no further than the double-entry ledger of the grocer’s shop over which she had grown up.  Of course, what they – we – lacked was the wit or maturity to understand that these things were the core of her strength; the certainty that she spoke for a class of English people who believed themselves to be misunderstood and undervalued, and how she became the medium by which the frustration of an entire class could be released.  It’s very easy to make generalisations about Poujadism, but that missed the point.  We now of course know that the policy of selling council houses is one of the root causes of a deep housing crisis that blights modern Britain, but of course in the 1980s it was seen as a sign of genius.  The great strength of Thatcher was that she knew her supporters and played to them, and empowered their values in her politics; it represents a powerful contrast to a Labour Party that has abandoned its aim of acting as a voice for organised labour, the poor and dispossessed.  In her ability to tune into and mobilise the discontent of the relatively-privileged, Thatcher’s strengths closely mirror New Labour’s weaknesses.

Aneurin Bevan famously wrote that the art of twentieth-century conservative politics lay in persuading poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power.  Thatcher offers a powerful exemplar of that; how to capture the discontents and aspirations of a discontented middle-class to ensure that wealth keeps power, but in a way that suggested that power was being taken away from old aristocracies and oligarchs (including erecting a whole new category of trade union barons who were portrayed as having the real power in society).  One of the fascinating things about Thatcherism is how it managed to reel in the radicalism and discontent of the sixties generation; how swinging London swung behind Thatcher in 1979.  One answer of course is that, for all the discontents of 1968, the popular radicalism of the 1960s was often hedonistic and lacking in any theory or grounding – it was essentially selfish, and a fertile ground for the denial of any such thing as society.  The redefinition of aspiration in hedonistic and individualistic terms – the mythology of home ownership as independence and freedom, the great car economy, the idea of higher education as an investment to be purchased rather than as something that defined a good society, the idea of a vibrant neighbourhood as one containing cafes and bars rather than collectively-provided libraries, parks and schools –  was a Thatcherite triumph that has never really gone away.  We idolise celebrities – pop stars, sports people and so on – who articulate a content-free, safe and wholly solipsistic ideal of aspiration; the X-Factor, with its competition, its sentimentality and its grandstanding of sincerity and effort, is the purest Thatcherism. When Labour agonises about aspiration, it is showing that it simply lacks the intellectual and moral equipment (not to mention the grasp on its own history) to get away from the Thatcherite terms of reference.

Cementing the mythology: Thatcherism and the redefinition of Britishness

Those seven hours of Parliamentary eulogy, the official funeral with full military honours, even the absurd debacle over whether the BBC should play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead - driven to the top of the charts by sales to anti-Thatcherites; it is clear that something way beyond the usual commemoration of a deceased Prime Minister is happening.  This is ideological; it is about taking the most divisive Prime Minister in modern times and cementing her divisive and bitterly-contested ideology into the canon of British identity.  The political and media establishment are uniting around a single idea – that we are all Thatcherites now.

And, if your concept of Britishness simply includes the political and media class, that’s probably true. The simple fact is that a political class drawn from a steadily-narrowing – and privileged –  social spectrum remains predominantly loyal to the Thatcher doctrine.  But of course the ambition of this funeral is to go much further than that.  This is about power, and about the boundaries of legitimate citizenship.

Milan Kundera famously wrote that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.  The pageantry of the past week – the Parliamentary tributes, the tabloid adoration, the Ruritanian excesses of the taxpayer-funded funeral – are much more than the excesses of a political establishment that, in its economic weakness and its reliance on myth rather than fact, has never really looked weaker.  They are a ritual of forgetting; a mechanism for pretending that the divisions and resistance never happened, or at best represented the discontent of deviance.  While Orgreave, the Belgrano and the riots in Brixton and Toxteth fade into grainy black-and-white, the fundamental unity of the British political class is to be paraded through central London in full, if respectfully muted, technicolor. This is Britain coming together, and you’ll damn well celebrate your freedom by mourning. And if you turn your back on the procession there’s a kindly bobby with a baton to set you right.

And here is the irony.  For all the establishment rhetoric of respect and solemnity, the real message of this funeral (appropriately enough) is – rejoice.  The political establishment is saying – these are your values now, and this is your identity – whether you like it or not. Rejoice.  And unless we learn to resist we are all Thatcherites now.

Margaret Thatcher’s greatest achievement? One Nation Labour and the politics of fear

Notoriously, when asked what was her greatest achievement, Margaret Thatcher answered: “Tony Blair and New Labour”.  Margaret Thatcher was not known as a humorous woman, so one has to assume that she was not being facetious.  And the point remains; Labour was swept to power in 1997 and, despite some distinctly non-Thatcherite legislative achievements (the minimum wage) the rationality underpinning the Labour government – privatisation, the free market, interventionist foreign policy – remained similar to that of the Thatcher years.

Now, in 2013, with the financial collapse of 2007-8 and the formation of a Conservative-led coalition in 2010, things are very much starker.  The boom years which allowed a general feeling of well-being to cover the continuities have given way to an economic crisis in which the conflicts are much starker.  Yet in the midst of what is quite clearly a systemic failure of the economics that Thatcher championed, Labour’s reaction to it – and to the ideology of austerity that is being promoted as the route back to “business as usual”  -remains shot through with fear.  Faced with the effect of cuts, Ed Balls’ response is to promise that Labour will keep the cuts and possibly make more of its own.  Faced with the effective destruction of state education, Stephen Twigg’s response is a near-Trappist silence.  Faced with an unprecedented assault on the living standards of the poor and disabled, Liam Byrne’s reaction is to parrot Tory language of sanction and desert, of “hard-working families” rather than citizens empowered as of right. Faced with a society in which low pay is endemic and living standards in free-fall, it falls back on vague language about “predistribution” which, as far as I can see, amounts to little more than asking big business to play nice (some chance).  This is an opposition that could not get its Peers out to amend the Health and Social Care Bill, but whips its MPs into line to attend Parliament’s tributes to Thatcher.

It’s the politics of fear.  The irony of course is that one of Thatcher’s principal legacies is a feral tabloid press, that has up until recently been allowed to operate effectively outside the law, and whose symbiosis with the Tory Party has been cemented over Oxfordshire hacks and kitchen suppers; but Labour in government was just as guilty of cosying to media empires.  Labour is notable for not standing up to tabloid bullying; some, like Liam Byrne, appear to have made their life’s work out of parroting its lies.

Labour needs to decide where it stands. Is it prepared to offer serious alternatives to the failed economics of austerity, and to learn to speak once again for the most vulnerable in society, rather than joining in the chorus of demonisation?  Is it prepared to argue once again for an active, interventionist state which can become the engine of real improvements in the lives of ordinary people, as well as driving sustainable economic recovery?

At the moment the signs are not good.  Labour happily whips its MPs to attend more than seven hours of eulogies to Thatcher, as part of a Parliamentary system that devoted a small fraction of that time to voting through measures which have blighted the most vulnerable people’s lives.  Rather than joining in the tributes, a party which predominantly represents those communities that Thatcher destroyed might make more impact by staying away; the rows of empty opposition benches as an eloquent testimony to the fact that Thatcher divided Britain like no other leader in modern history, and that Labour will not accept this particular variety of cant.

But that would require courage, and above all the courage to realise that at this late stage of capitalism, we are not living through “business as usual”.  As Tawney famously wrote, to kick over an idol you must first get off your knees: this is no time to be frit.

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.

The EU Budget: deconstructing Parliament’s vote

Unsurprisingly, the first major Commons defeat for the Coalition reflects the Conservative Party’s dysfunction over Europe, as Labour MPs join the Tory Eurosceptic fringe in the lobbies to vote down the proposition that the EU’s Budget should be frozen in real terms, demanding real-terms cuts instead.

Much of the subsequent comment has focussed on Labour’s position – the incongruity of its joining with the swivel-eyed nationalist wing of the Tory party.  Oppositions are there to oppose, we are told (although that argument is a selective one – note Labour’s failure to oppose cuts in public sector pensions); commentators point to John Smith’s  Labour Party voting alongside the Maastricht rebels).  Faced with the accusation that this is a vote against the EU – partly arising from the triumphalism of anti-Europe Tories – Labour, as Polly Toynbee reports, is desperately trying to trot out its pro-European credentials, with limited success.

Part of the background to this is the almost pathological inability of British politicians – especially on the right – and the British media to have an intelligent conversation about Europe.  I spent much of my civil service career negotiating EU legislation, and spent more hours than I would ever care to count sitting in meetings in Brussels with colleagues from around Europe, and in the margins of those meetings conversation often turned to what can only be described as the psychopathology of Britain’s view of Europe; the tendency of British politicians (not least Tory and UKIP MEPs) and the media to behave like the unruly child waving his willy through the park railings at the civilised adults walking past.  Urbane Swiss and Norwegian colleagues expressed their astonishment that being forced to sit on the sidelines as guests at the European table, able to watch their destiny being formed without having any power to shape it, could be represented by rational people as “reasserting our sovereignty”.  UK negotiators in Brussels became used to the idea that negotiation – often in alliance with other Member States who took strikingly similar positions to our own on things like fiscal autonomy, but did so without the red-topped flag-waving hysteria – needed to be conducted with little regard to the public rhetoric.

It’s also worth noting that the arrival of the Coalition in May 2010 made no difference whatsoever to the fundamentals of Britain’s negotiating position in Brussels.  There was a subtle shift in tone – backing British business would be emphasised more explicitly, although there’s obviously a limit to what you can do in a single market – but the basic red lines, especially around EU competence on fiscal issues, remained unchanged.

So to this week’s vote.  The EU Budget has long been a battleground, going back to the days of Margaret Thatcher and the rebate.  This vote was about the size of that Budget, and whether it should be cut in real terms.  The rhetoric that surrounded Labour’s vote in favour of real terms cuts was revealing, with MPs arguing that the Brussels bureacracy needed to face the same austerity that ordinary voters around Europe faced.  It’s an attractive line, drawing on all those media tales of armies of bureaucrats contemplating the curvature of bananas, but – as Labour ought to know well – it’s mostly drivel.  This is not about the cost of running the Brussels bureaucracy, which contrary to the popular rhetoric is no larger than a large county council (and in my experience was on key issues dangerously under-resourced, leaving policy-makers in the Commission covering large and complex briefs far more open than is wise to the information stream provided by lobbyists and think-tanks); it’s about EU programmes, especially in the regions and often dealing in areas like infrastructure and technology, with much of those resources being focussed on the newer Member States in Central and Eastern Europe that British politicians of all parties were (I think rightly) so keen to welcome into the Union.

Now there are serious debates about the way in which the money is spent – the issues around agricultural spending are all too familiar – but this is about the amount; Labour is effectively arguing for real-terms cuts in those programmes.  And if we stop regarding the recipients as foreigners and start thinking of them as markets (I’d prefer to think of them as fellow citizens but that’s another debate) the short-sightedness of Labour’s position appears obvious.

And there are further questions about the longer-term development of the EU. British rhetoric about the EU is still rooted in the old days of Jacques Delors and the use of European powers to drive social goals. There’s still a lot of that about – and the European Commission, like bureaucracies the world over and regardless of their size, is far from averse to the odd power-grab – but the European world has changing, reflecting political changes in the Member States.  EU rhetoric is now far more about the power of markets, much less about a social agenda; the astonishing moves towards a new Treaty to entrench a Europe-wide system of financial discipline is a powerful symptom of this.  By supporting a cut in the real EU budget, and by couching it in the terms they have, Labour is – wittingly or not – helping to entrench a neoliberal agenda in Brussels and across Europe as a whole.

So, Labour in opposition is seen to be exercising its duty to oppose.  But let’s be clear about this – like so much of what Labour does this is safe opposition, because rather than challenging the assumptions of neoliberalism it reinforces them and legitimises them – just like Ed Balls endorsing the Coalition’s cuts and committing Labour to retaining them, or when Liam Byrne dog-whistles about hard-working families.

Therein lies Labour’s problem. By voting as it did this week, it’s not so much that it is siding with the swivel-eyed flag-waving fantasists of UKIP and the Tory Right, it’s more that it’s siding – as ever – with the grey-suited men who are bleeding Greece and Spain and who are salivating over the prospect of adding the NHS to their bottom line.  It’s a moment of a Party imprisoned in a neoliberal rhetoric and further illustration – if any were needed – that Westminster is locked in a neoliberal consensus in which nationalistic flag-waving is a permitted distraction from the grey realities underneath.

Lions led by donkeys: October 20 and the sheer dysfucntion of British politics

Yesterday, around 150,000 people marched through central London to protest against austerity and job cuts.  Similar marches took place in Glasgow and Cardiff.  In almost every respect, the marchers represented everything that is decent about Britain; people cutting through the political and media narratives and responding to the reality of austerity and the direct effect it has on people’s lives.  Many of them would have been public sector workers, forced to implement austerity every day while working desperately against mounting pressures to protect the dignity and wellbeing of those they serve.

And yet, at the heart of the event, there was a  morass of conflict and inconsistency that showed clearly how British democracy has lost its way.   The most obvious was of course Labour leader Ed Miliband addressing the rally; leader of a Party that has promised not only to keep all the coalition’s cuts in place after 2015 but to make additional cuts of its own.  Miliband’s presence was of course a symbol of the relationship between the TUC, who organised the march, and the Labour Party.  The strangeness of this event is not so much the fact that Labour looks increasingly like an echo-chamber for the coalition’s neoliberalism, but that Labour remains largely funded by unions whose members appear to oppose the neoliberal consensus of which Labour is an integral (and, on the basis of Ed Balls’ recent pronouncements, enthusiastic) part.  The relationship between Labour and the unions looks increasingly like a dysfunctional marriage in which the maintenance of appearances and patterns of behaviour has long superseded any sense of common purpose; without that troubled relationship Miliband addressing yesterday’s rally is about as likely a spectacle as Margaret Thatcher addressing a symposium on the benefits of free school milk.

None of this would be so puzzling if there were not a nuanced, evidenced case against austerity economics; indeed, if austerity economics were not failing in its own terms.  As many of us predicted at the outset, cuts and austerity are not reducing the deficit but increasing it; a slower version of what is happening in Greece and Spain is happening here, and all Labour’s economic policies are set to do is to speed the process.  Much of the austerity narrative is astoundingly economically illiterate; every time a Coalition politician solemnly intones banalities about paying down the nation’s credit card, or talking about Labour’s profligate legacy, they are showing their inability to grasp – or at least to articulate – the most basic economics.

A fine example of that illiteracy can be found in comments by Hove MP Mike Weatherley, who was reported a while ago celebrating benefit cuts of £10 million in Brighton and Hove without apparently the slightest inkling that this was £10 million taken out of the local economy – hitting businesses both large and small (although the small ones do not have access to the cheap labour of workfare, pioneered by Labour and implemented with zeal by Tories.

And also note in that piece how Tories continue to  press the lie that housing benefits are paid to those on benefits rather than lining the pockets of landlords, and repeats the lie that those who receive benefits are not working, when that is simpy not the case.  These lies continue to gain traction, and not only do they build on the rhetoric of Labour in office but continue to inform its public positioning.  It’s not as if the language is quite the same as that of the Tory party – which at its recent conference often appeared to be only two gin-and-tonics from labelling the recipients of benefits as “useless eaters” – but is couched in terms of that insidious dog-whistle phrase “hard working families”.  Labour’s rhetoric on benefits is almost a dictionary definition of moral cowardice.

And the technical understanding of how shifts in public expenditure affects economies is increasingly undermining the case for austerity.  One of the stranger aspects of yesterday’s events was a Labour leader addressing a TUC rally from a position that appears to be substantially to the right of the IMF.

The dysfunction we saw yesterday was that of tens of thousands of decent people – people who know that there is an alternative that is better, fairer, more efficient, more grounded – being betrayed and abandoned by the Westminster elite; and by a Labour leadership that really has nothing to offer beyond more of the same.  Yes, Labour politicians do make all sorts of noises about fairness and justice; but they simply appear incapable of understanding that fairness in society depends above all on economic justice, and on reversing the transfer of resources from the poor and vulnerable to the wealthy and owners of property – a transfer that Labour presided over in office, which the Coalition has accelerated and which, rather than the deficit, looks like the rationale for austerity and cuts. Labour’s leadership looks like nothing so much as a First World War general, straight out of Blackadder, whipping up enthusiasm for the big push while the poor bloody infantry try to rationalise away their anticipation of the likely reality.

The real debate in Britain – and elsewhere in the rich world – is not between political parties in the establishment, but between a political establishment that is united around a neoliberal programme and the people who understand and experience the realities of austerity – who see their livelihoods destroyed, their experience devalued, their votes ignored.  Five million people have walked away from Labour since 1997; quite a lot more will walk away from the Liberal Democrats in 2015.  But the anti-austerity case is not necessarily a left-wing one; its advocates include people like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, former Clinton advisers and no socialists; the authors of the Spirit Level, whose programme looks like a traditional centrist social democracy; increasingly the IMF appears to be accepting the anti-austerity logic.

I have written here many times before that a political system based on a main-party consensus that does not reflect wider opinion cannot be a healthy democracy.  Yesterday, in Hyde Park, accompanied by all the accoutrements of the traditional Labour-TUC link, that conflict was manifested in a very obvious way.  There is a very strong, evidenced and clear case against austerity economics, based on fairness and economic justice.  The people who marched yesterday understand that case.  Labour lacks the intellectual and moral courage to articulate it. Those who want real social and economic justice in Britain need to look elsewhere.

Railways, renationalisation and political risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still no such thing as society?

Watching the coalition take an electoral thrashing is very gratifying.  Two parties who have executed a feral neoliberal programme for which they have no electoral mandate getting a tanking at the ballot box is good to see – and it emphasises their lack of any mandate – but the story is not really that rosy.

Most commentators have reflected on the record low turnout.  Part of this is because local government simply matters less than it did – funding decisions are taken by central Government and Eric Pickles’ localism agenda is really about the emasculation of local authorities, turning them from actively functioning government into commissioning bodies.  More people, surely, would vote if they were confident that doing so would make a difference in their communities.  And it’s clear that city mayors – rejected on low turnouts in cities like Nottingham – are a busted flush; it’s not so much that people reject the undemocratic nature of the project – itsel a symptom of the atomisation of political debate in its underpinning assumption that a powerful individual governs more effectively than a collective elected authority – that they just don’t care.

Lack of confidence in the state as an agent of progressive change runs through the warp and weft of our society.  On the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, it’s easy to see that as her most poisonous legacy – a poison that continues to affect all three main Westminster parties.  Of the three, Labour remains deeply conflicted – its active members often taking a very different line from its largely neoliberal leadership – but the fact remains that a narrative that emphasises the collective, that talks about society and the need for collective institutions, is largely absent from mainstream political debate. Instead we have hollow claims about big societies and all being in it together, and expressed through grand-projet patriotic elite extravaganzas like the Olympics and the Jubilee.  We remain a society in which the National Health Service – long portrayed as Britain’s best-loved institution – has been effectively dismembered with no effective opposition, and in which the demonisation of the poor and vulnerable as scroungers responsible for national decline is seen as both clever and acceptable.  Blaming the poor – how far have we really progressed as a political culture?

Richard Murphy’s book The Courageous State proposes a powerful analogy for society – the cappuccino cup, in which the strong black coffee is the state while the frothy milk above it is the private sector.  It’s a potent reminder that for all the rhetoric about individualism, it is collective institutions that make the expression of individualism possible; and that it is the state which allows decisions to be made democratically that control the licence of those with wealth and power.  But without a strong democracy, in all the meanings of that word, the strong black coffee becomes rancid and poisonous; it’s simply a measure of social control.  It’s a cumulative process; when 65% of the electorate stays at home, that poison is clearly at work, and allows the ideological narrative that the financial interests of the few – dressed up as the operations of the market – trumps democracy to take hold.  Who voted for the coalition’s neoliberal agenda?  Nobody.  But democratic apathy allows them to dress up neoliberalism as something to which there is no alternative.

Yesterday’s vote – I am writing this before the result of London’s X-Factor mayoral election is known – sends a powerful message within the political system.  Those who turn out to vote are rejecting an ideological agenda that has no electoral mandate in the first place.  But defeating what I regard as the toxic, anti-democratic fiction of neoliberalism needs far more than this.  It needs a real engagement, a sustained political and social movement that refuses to accept the Westminster consensus and learns how to participate again.  Democratic renewal is an atrocious cliché; but, yes, that’s what we need.  A popular, democratic – and, yes, courageous – state has to be the last best hope of getting out of this mess.

Bread, circuses and the smell of fear

David Cameron has today delivered a speech on education, at the opening of the Norwich Free School.  It offers an astonishingly reactionary and in many respects deeply ill-informed view of what schools are about.  But it’s just the latest in a line of utterances in which huggie-hooding Dave, a man whom the Telegraph Blogs regarded as not quite one of us, has fallen in line with the ethos and values of the tabloid right.

So what’s happening?

One explanation is that this is the real Cameron emerging.  I think there’s some truth in that – I’m not sure anyone really fell for the “compassionate conservatism” inclusiveness schtick before the election, and here he seems to be reverting to type – the red-faced Bullingdon boy spluttering about feral youth and health and safety destroying the fabric of society.  You can take the boy out of Eton …

But I think there’s something much deeper than that, and I think a comparison with Margaret Thatcher is quite instructive.

Watching Cameron and Co, one’s respect for Thatcher as a political operator increases.  That old Cromwellian quote about the russet-coated captains, who knew what they fought for and loved what they knew, comes strongly to mind.  Thatcher made sure her people were looked after – she tapped into a deep populism through her sales of council houses, her attacks on unions, and so on.  On Maggie’s farm they always fed the pigs – Cameron expects the police to be the front-line against the effects of his policies while cutting jobs and pensions.  Thatcher was supremely shrewd at picking her battles. And she knew how to appeal to her natural support in middle England, even when the actions of her government conflicted with their interests.

Cameron and his cabinet of millionaires cannot seem to manage that.  Middle England is taking a colossal economic hit as a result of his – and more specifically Osborne’s – politics.  We’re seeing double digit increases in domestic fuel prices; the cost of a university education soaring; cuts to libraries and other services that Middle England relies on; house prices are falling;  changes to child benefit are hitting middle-class families hard; older people on fixed incomes, with interest rates close to zero, are being tanked. Of course the poor are being hit far harder – homelessness rose by a staggering 17 per cent last year, and cuts in benefits and services are taking as much as 20 per cent of the poorest’s incomes away – but Conservatives and Liberal Democrats do not care about the poor, except when it comes to making examples of them.

It’s impossible to imagine Thatcher attacking the living standards of her core supporters so hard.  In part there’s a difference in background; whatever one may think of Thatcher, for someone of her gender and her class to become Tory leader – a Tory icon, indeed – required energy, work, sheer guts.  It’s a world away from the monied ease of this cabinet of millionaires.  Thatcher knew something of adversity (despite enjoying huge personal privilege, especially by marrying a very wealthy man); Cameron and his cabinet know nothing of it, and lack the moral and intellectual capacity to deal with it.  Look at Cameron’s red-faced anger in the House of Commons when Labour people attack him; and his treatment of women MPs at PMQs suggests that there’s a rather nasty strand of misoginy behind the shiny mask.

So faced with the obvious fact that economic policy has become a disaster, and is hitting his supporters hard, it seems to me that Cameron has retreated into a world where life is easier. He’s taken up political residence in Daily Mail land, where he can rally his supporters by pandering to the atavistic instincts of his media supporters.  It’s an environment where the nasty tendency of the real world to bite back can be minimised, and where the inconveniences of contrary evidence can be comfortably ignored.  It’s the world where things are simple and that bloke Delingpole has a point.  He’s saying – you may not be able to afford to heat your house this winter, and your children are going to graduate with £50k of debt and no job prospects, but at least we’re articulating your values and standing up against political correctness gone mad.  It’s a world where he and his orchestra of Telegraph bloggers and Daily Mail leader writers can fiddle calmly while the economy crashes, and while the democratic deficit in our society acquires proportions that the economic deficit never possessed.

And it’s not about strength, or realism, or being honest, or any other of the words that Conservatives like to use when they’re indulging in fantasy.  It’s ideological bread and circuses, to distract Middle England from failures that Tories in Government cannot comprehend or begin to deal with.  And it’s a symptom of stark, staring fear.