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.

Why prize draws for voting miss the point

I have a lot of respect for Angela Eagle, Shadow Leader of the House of Commons (and, as it happens, my university contemporary).  So I was surprised to see her quoted as supporting a range of measures to encourage more voting, including incentives like prize draws and making election day a bank holiday.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The bedroom tax: where does Labour really stand?

Where does Labour stand on the bedroom tax?  The stance of many – probably most – Labour activists is clear; at a personal level they completely oppose this penalty on those whose social housing has a “spare” bedroom, and for very good reasons.  The implication of the penalty for “under-occupancy” is that social housing is an act of charity by the state (or, to use the rhetoric of the market consensus, the taxpayer) rather than a right; and that it should be viewed as something temporary that does not accomodate the longer-term life changes that affect families.  It is about as far removed from the vision of Aneurin Bevan, who is really the founding father of the idea of social housing as entitlement, as one can imagine.   And of course there is a simple, practical problem: the smaller homes into which people would be expected to downsize to avoid the tax simply don’t exist.

The Labour leadership – most notably in the person of Liam Byrne, Labour’s über-Blairite DWP spokesman, has not appeared ready to make a commitment to end the bedroom tax.  But now Helen Goodman MP, a Shadow Cabinet member, has said unequivocally that Labour will keep the bedroom tax in the case of those offered a smaller home.

It would be easy to criticise Helen Goodman, but one has to assume that she is merely the messenger for national policy.  And if she is correct, then Labour does not oppose the principle of the bedroom tax at all; it is arguing for retention in cases where a smaller home is available.  Now that is at one sense a cop-out; one of the reasons why the term “tax” has stuck to what is in fact a rerating of benefits is that it simply isn’t possible for most people to move, which means that in the scenario described by Helen Goodman very, very few people are likely to pay it.  So Labour’s policy appears to be to suspend the penalty in the case of what one might call “market failure”.  In other words, Labour’s response is part of the warp and weft of the neoliberal consensus.

Moreover, if Ms Goodman’s interpretation is correct, it is clear that this is all of a piece with Labour’s growing hostility to the universality principle that motivated Beveridge.  I’ve blogged before about the dangers of abandoning universality.  But most of all, the most effective way to reduce the levels of housing benefit – a benefit that is all too often a subsidy for greedy landlords – is not to impose a bedroom tax but to build more – much more – social housing, providing jobs and creating secure homes in the face of a private housing market which, in terms of both renting and ownership, has clearly failed.  But this simply appears to be nowhere near the agenda of a Labour Party whose Shadow Chancellor continues to insist that Coalition cuts will not be reversed.

Labour activists – appalled by what the Coalition is doing – surely know that the Labour leadership is part of the problem, not the solution; but appear to be impotent to do anything about it.  Opposition to the bedroom tax in Parliament has largely come from (in Parliamentary terms) the fringe – the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and a handful of Labour malcontents (notably from Scotland, where Labour’s acquiescence in the Westminster consensus is doing Scottish Labour enormous damage).

The issue remains clear.  The bedroom tax is appalling – yet another piece of collective punishment inflicted on the poor and vulnerable by a political system that serves the interests of those who caused the current economic crisis.  And without some pretty fundamental changes, the remedy will not come from any of the main Westminster political parties.

How to fight neoliberals: The New Zealand experiment revisited

The people behind the Think Left blog yesterday circulated a piece from the Independent about the way in which New Zealand has reacted to the imposition of an austerity agenda.  It’s an old piece, but the landscape is strikingly familiar – food banks, homelessness, benefit cuts, soaring crime.  The piece points out how New Zealand’s progressive traditions have been traduced.  The first country to give women the vote, the first country to introduce universal benefits, once held up by Aneurin Bevan as a model for the future.  Up until recently, if you wanted to sum up the New Zealand ethos in one phrase, it was the “Fair Go” – the belief that everyone had the right to share in the good things in society and make the best for themselves and their families.  Now, if you hear it at all, it’s likely to be a shallow justification for deregulating business.

The piece had me reaching for Jane Kelsey’s magnificent book on the neoliberal takeover of New Zealand, The New Zealand Experiment.  Not an easy book to find in the UK, I bought my copy in New Zealand back in the 1990s; it remains a vital and urgent book, because its themes resonate so powerfully with our experience of austerity in post-2010 Britain.

Two of Kelsey’s themes strike home particularly hard.  First, the use of crisis to undermine democracy.  Kelsey points out that neoliberalism does not win elections; crisis must be used to create the illusion of necessity and to invalidate alternatives.  She describes the proponents of neoliberalism as “technopols”, an uncanny prescience of the imposition of “technocratic” Governments in Greece and Italy to drive neoliberal reforms.  The spectacle of European governments lining up to join a neoliberal treaty that would effectively outlaw expansionary economic policy, the creation of secret trade agreements in which corporate tribunals will be empowered to overrule democratic governments, or the construction of the lie that austerity economics is the necessary antidote to profligate public spending; Kelsey foresaw all these.

Second, Kelsey points to the complicity of avowedly left-of-centre parties in bringing about the neoliberal coup.  Economic reform was instituted by a Labour government in New Zealand, and was generally known as “Rogernomics” after the then Labour finance minister, Roger Douglas.  Once again it’s a powerful reminder that, years later, British austerity economics was imposed because an apparently left-of-centre party was prepared to put into office a Conservative Party that had just failed to win an election (the Liberal Democrats being, of course, an example of a party that, having been captured for Neoliberalism by its Orange Book faction, sought to present a soft centrist image to the electorate).  But it’s also important to remember that many of the salient features of British austerity had their roots in Labour’s years in office.  NHS outsourcing, the introduction of private capital into education, workfare, university tuition fees, cutting benefits, asset sales; all of these are core Labour policies that the Coalition has simply taken to their logical conclusion.  Labour is committed to keeping the Coalition’s public spending cuts and considering more of its own; it offers no alternative to the austerity agenda.  It differs from the Coalition in degree and presentation rather than substance; Westminster remains a place of neoliberal consensus.

These are not of themselves startling insights in 2013 (although the prescience of a book written in 1994 is startling). What makes Kelsey’s book really compelling twenty years on is a four-page appendix entitled A Manual for Counter-Technopols.  It sets out a checklist of strategies for resistance: it seems to me to be just as important and apposite now as when it was written.

It’s obviously written from a New Zealand perspective, and recognises that in New Zealand in the 1990s, as in Britain and Europe in the 2010s, much of the pass had already been sold.  But the important thing is the conceptual framework, and the pointers it gives towards developing an effective critique of neoliberalism – especially when faced with parties of the centre-left that have thrown in the towel, but also perhaps to more radical groupings who find themselves going native once they’ve arrived in political office.

A quick Google search suggests that although excerpts have been reproduced on line, nobody has done so in its entirety.  So here it is: it’s a formidable piece of work.

Appendix: A Manual for Counter-technopols

If the architects of structural adjustment are pooling their experiences in a manual for technopols to help them impose their agenda on the rest of the world, those who want to stop them should do the same. A preliminary checklist of potential pitfalls and strategies for resistance, drawn from New Zealand’s experience, might include the following:

- Take economic fundamentalism seriously – what initially appears like extremism, if not effectively challenged and discredited, may in a short time be considered orthodox.

- Nip it in the bud – early changes can be the most fundamental and deliberately difficult to undo; once the structural adjustment agenda is under way, its internal logic has a domino effect on all policies and programmes.

- Be sceptical about ‘crises’ – anticipate a ‘crisis’ in the making, and move quickly to examine the real nature of the problem, who defines it as a crisis, and who stands to gain. Demand to know the range of possible solutions, and the costs and benefits of each to whom. If the answers are not forthcoming, burn the midnight oil to produce the answers for yourselves.

- Watch for the blitzkrieg  - constantly monitor, document and expose what is going on behind the scenes. Act on instinct and anticipate the logical next step. Waitng until all the facts can be documented will probably be too late.

- Remember the Tories are not always the worst – social democratic parties  and governments can neutralise potential opponents and initiate vital changes which provide the thin end of the wedge. Fighting to prevent  a party’s capture by zealots is important. But once the party has been taken over, maintaining solidarity on the outside while seeking change from within merely gives them more time. When the spirit of the party is dead, shed the old skin and create something new

- Take economics seriously – economic fundamentalism pervades everything.  There is no boundary between economic, indigenous, social, foreign, environmental or other policies. Those who focus on narrow sectoral concern and ignore the pervasive economic agenda will lose their own battles and weaken the collective ability to resist. Leaving economics to economists is fatal.

- Expose the illogic of their theory - neo-liberal theories are riddled with bogus assumptions and internal inconsistencies, and often lack empirical support. Agency and public choice theories in particular need to exposed as self-serving rationalisations which operate in the interests of elites whom the policies empower.

- Evaluate the argument carefully – acknowledge the valid aspects of arguments for change and meet them with alternatives which address the substance of the concern.

- Challenge hypocrisy – ask who is promoting a strategy as being in the ‘national interest’, and who stands to benefit most. Document cases where self-interest is disguised as public good.

- Expose ‘stacking of the deck’ – name the key players behind the scenes, document their interlocking roles and allegiances, and expose the personal and corporate benefits they receive.

- Maximise every political obstacle – federal systems of government, written constitutions, bicameral parliaments, complex voting systems, supra-national institutions and strong local governments provide barriers which can neutralise the blitzkrieg approach and slow the pace of, if not prevent, undesirable change.

- Maintain a strong civil society and popular sector – extra-parliamentary politics are essential to complement resistance through traditional party channels, and may become the front line once institutional politics fall captive.

- Work hard to maintain solidarity – avoid the trap of divide and rule; sectoral in-fighting is self-indulgent and everyone risks losing in the end.

- Do not compromise the labour movement – build awareness of the structural adjustment agenda at union branch and workplace level, so union members can demand accountability from their leadership. Openly debate the pros and cons of political party ties, and the costs and benefits of compromise. Concessions intended to forestall more radical change tend to deepen co-option and weaken the ability to resist the next step. Publicly challenge the failure of union bureaucrats to defend the interests of workers and the unemployed. If the leadership doesn’t listen, disobey.

- Employ the politics of international embarrassment – if the forums of institutional politics have been taken and local resistance neutralised, marginalised or suppressed, the most potent political arena may be the inremational stage. Neo-liberal governments and free market economies depend on foreign investment and international approval. Image is everything. The international sphere is one arena they cannot effectively control.

- Reinforce the concept of an independent public service – undercut attempts to discredit, sideline and colonise the public service by acknowledging deficiencies and promoting pro-active models for change. Create a constituency of support among client groups and the public which stresses the need for independence and professionalism, the obligations of public service, and the risks of the managerial approach

- Encourage community leaders to speak out - public criticism from civic and church leaders, folk heroes and other prominent ‘names’ makes governments uncomfortable and people think. The fewer public critics there are, the easier they are to discredit, harass and intimidate. Remind community leaders of their social Obligations, and the need to look themselves in the mirror in the morning.

- Avoid anti-intellectualism – a pool of critical academics and other intellectuals who can document and expose the fallacies and failures of a structural adjustment programme, and develop viable alternatives in partnership with community and sectoral groups, is absolutely vital. They need to be supported when they come under attack, and challenged when they fail to speak out or are co-opted or seduced.

- Establish well-resourced critical think-tanks – neo-liberal and libertarian think-tanks have shown the importance of Well-resourced and internationally connected institutes which can develop an integrated analysis and foster climates favourable to change. Unco-ordinated research by isolated critics can never compete.

- Develop alternative media outlets – once mainstream media are captured it is difficult for critics to enter the debate, and impossible to lead it. Alternative media and innovative strategies must be in place before people and financial resources come under stress. Effective communication and exchange of information between sectoral groups and activists are essential, despite the time and resources involved.

- Raise the level of popular economic literacy – familiarise people with the basic themes, assumptions and goals of economic fundamentalism. Insist that economic policy affects everyone, that everyone has a right to participate in the debate, and that alternatives do exist.

- Educate popular and sectoral groups in advance – draw on international experience, networks, publications, speakers and examples to put people on the alert. Identify the likely strategies, policies and effects of structural adjustment for sectors like labour, education, health, local government, community work, public service and the media. Encourage sectors to workshop counter-strategies in advance. There will be little time for this when people are struggling just to survive.

- Resist marketspeak – maintain control of the language, challenge its capture, and refuse to convert your discourse to theirs. Insist on using hard terms that convey the hard realities of what is going on.

- Be realistic and avoid nostalgia—recognise that the world has changed, in some ways irreversibly, and the past was far from perfect. Avoid being trapped solely into reaction and critique. Many neo-liberal criticisms of the status quo are justified and will strike a chord with people. Defending the past for its own sake adds credibility to their arguments and wastes opportunities to work for genuine change.

- Be proactive and develop real altematives – start rethinking visions, strategies and models of development for the future. Show that there are workable, preferable alternatives from the start. This becomes progressively more difficult once the programme takes hold.

- Rethink identity and alliances – combine a critical analysis of economic, political, cultural and social models of the past with a forward-thinking vision of what a socially just future might look like. Recognise that the legitimate expectations, insights and vision of indigenous peoples are no just a matter of social justice, but offer the foundation for an alliance which can forge a new way ahead.

It is impossible to tell in retrospect how far these strategies would have hindered, let alone prevented, the onset of economic fundamentalism inNew Zealand. They most certainly would have made the ‘successful’ implementation of the structural adjustment programme more difficult, and given time for opponents to rethink, regroup and resist

Sadly, the time for many of these strategies has passed. It is going to be enormously difficult and costly to bring about changes which genuinely empower people in Aotearoa New Zealand to take control of their lives, within communities where they can play an active, equal and valued part. Yet the potential is still there for alternative forms of economics, politics and identity to emerge, and there are strategies which can exploit the soft underbelly of the new regime to bring them into effect. The beginnings of a manual for counter-technopols in this post-structural adjustment phase might include the following:

- Challenge the TINA svndrome – convince people individually and collectively that there are alternatives. Carefully analyse present barriers and future trends to produce options that combine realism with the prospect of meaningful change. Actively promote them and have them ready to be implemented when the market fails.

- Promote informed debate and critique – build a constituency for change through alternative information networks and media; use tribal, community, workplace, women’s, church, creche, union and similar outlets, and harness technology where available, to balance the good-news machine with critical analysis of the economic and social costs.

- Promote participatory democracy – encourage people to take back control; empower them with knowledge to understand the forces affecting them and the points at which they can intervene. Stress that no one has a fail-safe recipe for change, and that everyone has a contribution to make. Recognise the skills, resources and insights of tribes, individuals, communities, sectoral groups and civil society, and the right to act both separately and in concert.

- Embrace the Treaty of Waitangi as a liberating force—moving forward means facing up to the past. Healing the wounds from over 155 years means restoring to Maori their economic and political power. Constructive debate on a treaty-based republican constitution can provide a liberating framework within which Maori and Pakeha can co-exist.

- Encourage progressive counter-nationalism – celebrate diversity rather than uniformity; Work to build identities and values which replace xenophobia, racism and nostalgia with multiple identities and progressive visions for the future.

- Develop multi-level strategies – take action at local, sectoral, regional, national and international levels, and co-ordinate those activities through informal networks and formal linkages.

- Hold the line – the structural adjustment programme is not yet complete; the state still plays an active role in providing social services and public goods. Sustained and co-ordinated action in communities, sectors and national politics can effectively hold the line.

- Localise politics – recognise the power held by regional and local authorities and the ability to secure information and influence decisions at that level. Encourage accountability of local officials and participation in local politics. Continue local struggles to maintain services which provide for local needs; build solidarity, political awareness and a belief in the possibility of change.

- Ginger up party politics – maintain pressure on political parties through popular mobilisation and public education campaigns, document failed policies and unacceptable practices, and use the politics of embarrassment at home and overseas to complement the work of party activists within.

- Invest in the future – provide financial, human and moral support to sustain alternative analysis, publications, think-tanks, training programmes and people‘s projects that are working actively for change. Create alternatives to state dependency by providing financial, personal and moral support for alternative economic developments.

- Support those who speak out – intimidation and harassment of social critics works only if the targets lack personal, popular and institutional support. Withdrawing from public debate leaves those who remain more exposed.

- Promote ethical investment – support overseas and local investors who genuinely respond to indigenous, ecological and social concerns. Expose and attack unethical investors who don’t. Boycotts have proved a powerful force internationally and in New Zealand, including anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear, environmental and safe product campaigns. ‘New Zealand’ companies can be most easily embarrassed and called to account. ‘Foreign’ companies are often targets of co-ordinated campaigns overseas that welcome information, participation and support.

- Think global, act local – develop an understanding of the global nature of economic, political and cultural power, and those forces which drive current trends. Draw the links between global forces and local events. Target local representatives, meetings and activities which feed into and on the global economic and political machine.

- Think local, act global – actively support intemational strategies for change such as people’s tribunals, non-state codes of conduct, non-governmental forums, and action campaigns against unethical companies, practices and governments. Recognise that international action is essential to counter the collaboration of states and corporations, and to empower civil society to take back control.

Ed Balls and workfare – still following Osborne’s agenda?

Ed Balls has announced that Labour plans to introduce a compulsory work scheme for those  over 25 who have been out of work for more than two years – in addition to its existing plans for the under-25s.  The proposal is being spun in two ways – both as giving “opportunities” but also as a demonstration that Labour is not “soft on benefits”.  Balls is quoted as saying:

“A one nation approach to welfare reform means government has a responsibility to help people into work and support for those who cannot, but those who can work must be required to take up jobs or lose benefits as a result – no ifs or buts.

“Britain needs welfare reform that is tough, fair and that works, not divisive, nasty and misleading smears from an out of touch and failing government.

“Day after day, we see Tory and Lib Dem ministers claim they are targeting the workshy and benefit ‘scroungers’. But it’s no wonder even cabinet ministers have told the newspapers they are uncomfortable with these smears. Because the truth is very different.”

And he goes on to argue:

“Of course we need spending cuts and tax rises to get the deficit down but, with the flatlining economy sending borrowing up by 10% so far this financial year, it’s clearer than ever that you cannot get the deficit down without a plan for jobs and growth which works.”

There’s some nice triangulation there.  Balls is trying to play both sides of the street on welfare and benefits, and manages to get in a bit of One Nation rhetoric as well.  But the point is that his underlying assumptions are both wrong and, in my view, counter-productive.

The problem with Ed Balls really lies in that second quote, where he continues to use the rhetoric of austerity.  Austerity is failing, and there is an increasing body of evidence to show why that is the case – I’ve referred to the IMF’s evidence about the multiplier before.  The evidence is increasingly showing that we need precisely the opposite of spending cuts, and that any tax increases should fall overwhelmingly on the wealthier, for reasons of both equity and to ensure that they do not damage demand (Balls’ argument that his scheme should be paid for by reducing the pension tax advantages of those on the highest incomes is very welcome, but misses the point – more spending and an end to austerity would increase tax revenues across the economy as a whole).

And Balls remains mired in the idea that you can create subsidised jobs without reducing pay for others, and that it is is somehow acceptable to subsidise big businesses willing to participate in such schemes without damaging smaller, more local businesses.  Workfare is not just a form of exploitation of those involved in the schemes; insofar as it is dominated by big businesses like chain retailers, it is sucking money away from local businesses and local economies, which is where sustainable recovery will be generated.  And the effect of these measures, by subsidising pay budgets of big businesses and providing them with what is in effect a flow of free or cut-price labour, is to bid down wages – in sectors in which low pay, often below the living wage, is already endemic. There are far more efficient and equitable ways of creating jobs; Balls seems intent on taking the low-pay, low-productivity route, at a time when austerity is ensuring that the productivity of the UK workforce is actually falling far and fast.

But most of all, he continues to allow the neoliberals in Government to set the terms of the debate.  He remains caught in the rhetoric of an economic theory that is visibly, palpably failing.  And it seems to me that not only does this illustrate a desperate lack of ambition; it fatally constrains Labour’s ability to offer a real alternative at the next election, and leaves the political initiative in the hands of the more explicitly neoliberal Coalition parties.  It not only means that Cameron and Osborne are setting the terms of debate, with all that implies for Labour’s electoral prospects; it begs the questions – what is Labour for? What real difference would electing a Labour government in 2015 make?   To be fair to Labour, there have been some encouraging signs lately – the clear opposition to the 1% cap on benefits (in reality a 4% cut) being one.  There are indications that the rhetoric is changing.  But Labour continues to give the impression of a party that is running scared of the Daily Mail, and that lacks the confidence to capture the growing intellectual and evidential swing against austerity economics.

If Labour is serious about looking like a credible alternative government there comes a time when triangulation has to stop – and when the deployment of vague and ultimately pretty meaningless slogans like “One Nation” and “predistribution” – the latter a classic piece of market defeatism which starts from the distinctly neoliberal assumption that the state can’t make a difference –  don’t cut it any more.  There is an evidenced alternative to the politics of austerity that is gaining ground by the day. When will that alternative break into the Westminster mainstream?

Nothing strange about the death of English liberalism

Reading Nick Clegg’s New Year message was a sad and sobering affair (leaving aside any impatience at the growing habit of politicians great and small issuing such messages).  It read as really little more than excuse-mongering and post-hoc rationalisation in defence of policies that appear to rub against the natural grain of the Liberal tradition; its ludicrous defence of an economic policy that is, by every objective standard, failing does not sit easily in a political tradition that has sought to define itself as moulding society in the service of the rational.  Surely Liberalism should aspire to something better than this.  And one then began to question whether, perhaps, this is not about one rather discredited politician’s traducing the political tradition for which he is apparently the spokesman, but perhaps something more deeply ingrained in the nature of English liberalism itself

I am someone who had Liberalism in their political blood from an early age.  An active Liberal Party member in my late teens and early twenties, sometime President of the Oxford University Liberals, and, after university, Liberal Party employee for a couple of years; contributor to Liberal debates about philosophy, confident that Liberalism was a coherent philosophy offered something radical, important, unique.  It gave the appearance at least of being a big, coherent narrative that could explain the world and guide its improvement.   Revisiting that philosophy with a critical eye, at a time when Liberal Democrats are in Government, and after a quarter of a century of reading and reflection, suggests that it is none of those things.  I have moved on, but I think now is a good time to consider why Liberalism appears increasingly irrelevant as a political philosophy capable of addressing contemporary political and economic issues.

Political parties are not always loyal to the ideas that their names and supporters profess (there are still apparently socialists in the Labour Party) and the Liberal Party, and then the Liberal Democrats, often trod a rather tentative path around the core beliefs of Liberalism – a party formed of an alliance with the old discredited Labour right was always going to involve compromises, although a confident and assured liberalism need not have worried about that.  And one could argue that the new party represented a coming together of a tradition that had been blown apart by the ferments that led to the creation of the Labour Party at the start of the twentieth century, when social liberals developing a more interventionist account of the state were divided between the new Labour party and sticking with an old Liberal Party that showed limited inclination to abandon the shibboleths of nineteenth-century laissez-faire – a debate taking place at a time when the cleavage lines of British politics were more about empire than economics.

One approach to understanding the issues around Liberalism is to take an inevitably brief tour around some of its historical themes.

Peace, retrenchment, reform

So where does one start to develop an account of what Liberalism was?  Gladstone, inevitably: peace, retrenchment and reform.  Even in the 1980s – arguably the high-point of social liberal influence in Party thinking – Gladstone was still a name that featured in Liberal discourse (the Liberal Party Headquarters in which I worked occupied a set of surprisingly grotty offices on the top floor of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall Place – an ostentatious pile that expressed Edwardian Liberalism in all its confidence, the building where Liberal grandees gathered to celebrate the 1906 landslide, and whose entry hall was stuffed with Gladstonian memorabilia, including an axe that the Grand Old Man had used in his favoured pursuit of tree-felling).  Peace and reform have remained Liberal themes – a sense of moral obligation in foreign policy, which still manifested itself in Liberal Democrats’ opposition to war in Iraq before the fighting started (although probably not in its capitulation to tabloid opinion once the fighting was under way); and a commitment to political reform which extended up to the point at which Clegg’s Liberal Party entered coalition (though, once again, not obviously afterwards). And it is worth re-reading the speeches of John Bright on the Crimean War – often held up as a beacon of Liberal idealism – to appreciate the extent to which  moral considerations could be contingent on protecting the public purse.

Retrenchment – there we reach the first and obvious problem with Liberalism; its equivocal attitude towards the state.  It originates in opposition to the corrupt oligarchy of Eighteenth- and early-Nineteeth Century England; the sense that while Britain advanced into an age of economic growth and prosperity, a corrupt and sclerotic state, run by placemen and which acted as a parasite on economic progress, was holding it back.

The New Liberalism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century began to see the state as something that could intervene positively in the economy, but much of the basic energy of that new thinking went into the Labour Party. It’s striking that the New Liberalism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s during a long depression that shares many characteristics with the post-2008 economic catastrophe, and a discontent with the narratives of economic liberalism that framed that depression while engaging with emerging Socialist thinking and activism.  In particular, there was a growing “condition of England” question – in which the hard evidence provided by writers like Stead and Mayhew, and the activist testimony of William Booth, tested the conscience of Liberal progressives.

But this was a movement that had little real purchase – even though the Liberal landslide of 1906 brought important social reform (modelled on the insurance of the private sector rather than a belief in state provision). A hostility to the state, and a refusal to see it as a mechanism that could ensure better outcomes for individuals in a more efficient way than, say, private philanthropy, with even modest levels of coercion through taxation, has long been lurking in Liberal thinking – even among the more socially progressive Liberal Democrats. In the 1980s, during my time in the Party, it expressed itself in a longing for decentralisation, without ever recognising that to achieve may liberal goals – especially in terms of personal and gender politics – a strong democratically accountable state was necessary.  Liberal Democrats – through the Orange Book and in Government – have shown that under pressure, they have no coherent theory of the state.

It’s an omission that sits uneasily with the emphasis on reform; a belief that improving the mechanisms through which politics is conducted can bring real benefits to society.  Once again the nineteenth-century roots are obvious – a belief that an educated, open polity could overturn the sclerotic oligarchy that governed early 19th Century England.  Gladstone’s civil service reforms – ensuring that Government selects its administrative corps on merit – represent a classic Liberal reform, grounded in theories of rationality (while at the same time defining “merit” in a fairly exclusive and conventional way, falling short of challenging norms of contemporary discourse).  It’s a discourse in which reform becomes a way, not of overturning the status quo, but of preserving the best of it and making it more efficient; it implies that the purpose of political action is not to challenge political systems as a whole, but to root out abuses that inhibit the smooth operation of an essentially benign political system.  The big questions remain unasked (and certainly unanswered).

But at the heart of Liberalism’s intellectual problem is that, beyond a vague commitment to open structures and scrutiny, it offers no theory or understanding of the collective.  Its concept of the public world is wholly atomistic. I would argue that one of the fundamental issues of political discourse is where the rights of the individual end and where the collective interests of society begin; classical Liberalism is barely capable of formulating the question, let alone providing a coherent answer to it.

Twentieth century giants – Keynes and Beveridge

It’s a pattern that underpins the two dominant Liberal figures of the twentieth century – Keynes and Beveridge.  British Liberalism has claimed both as their own (Beveridge was briefly a Liberal MP, Keynes held no office within the Party).  In both cases, Liberalism claimed them when it was expedient to do so, even though their reformism went beyond the bounds of traditional Liberalism.  Now that the old Liberalism has reasserted itself, they have been cast aside.

Keynes’ explicit mission was to save capitalism from the idiocies of its most fervent exponents.  Beveridge was horrified not just by the suffering of the British poor, but by the political instability that arose from that; both were acting, consciously or not, under the shadow of totalitarianism, of Hitler and Stalin.  There is a respectable case for saying that the urgency with which their ideas were taken up derives from the reality of competing ideologies, and hence a sense of the underlying fragility of liberal democracy; it contrasts with a mindset in which a claimed “end of history” appears to have removed the threat of alternative economic theories from the scene; in which the “other” has become a religious and cultural one rather than an attempt to redefine ideas of ownership and wealth.  It is an environment in which Liberalism’s traditional role – that of moulding society in the defence of rational ideas – becomes a defence of what are portrayed as democratic cultural norms against an Orientalist conception of barbarism and primitivism.  “Liberal imperialism” – another Party-splitting discourse from the early twentieth-century – has become something of a Western foreign policy norm, with all that implies.

The work of Keynes and Beveridge remains vitally important. Both, ironically enough, offer the basis of powerful critiques of the neoliberal society for which Britain’s Liberal Democrats have become such enthusiastic enablers and cheerleaders.  Beveridge, in particualr, offers a powerful corrective to the notion of citizenship that is implicit in Orange Bookers’ and Liberal Democrat Ministers’ enthusiastic advocacy of the belief that the right to state support is conditional on the attitude rather than the condition of the vulnerable, and should be administered on the basis of who those in power deem to be deserving.  The defining arguments against Clegg’s much-trumpeted assaults on universal benefits remain in the Beveridge Report, and Clegg’s speechwriters have yet to find a coherent narrative to support Clegg’s ludicrous claims that his party’s happy cheerleading for cuts in benefits for the vulnerable marks him as the true heir to Beveridge.

And Keynes demonstrates as powerfully as Marx why the policy of austerity is self-defeating: the most trenchant public critics of austerity tend to be Keynsians rather than Marxists (although the resemblance of late-capitalist austerity to Marx’s crisis of capital accumulation is striking and sobering).

The Personal and the Political

And that leads inevitably to another strand of contemporary Liberalism; its concept of personal freedom.  Liberalism traditionally talked in terms of rational, educated and informed individuals acting in a way that ensured maximum benefit from their interactions; it is a philosophy very much at one with the fundamental doctrines of the free market.  In more recent years it has become more closely identified with extending individual liberties, especially those related to identity; its progressivism has been rooted in its opposition to capital punishment, its belief that gender and sexuality should not be barriers to equality, its recognition of the right to “alternative” lifestyles.  All these are important things; they have hugely enriched our lives as a society.

But problems remain. The personal is undoubtedly the political; the problem arises when the political becomes the personal, without a concept of the collective.  It is a commonplace that the people who argued for and largely won greater personal liberties – both by overturning restrictive legislation and by living lifestyles that were more liberated – voted for Thatcher and Reagan in their droves.  The obvious reason, once again, is the idea of the state as something hostile; a belief that the liberal society was one in which you were left alone.  It’s a very negative, reactive concept of liberty.  Liberals have yet to demonstrate how such gains can be made without a strong, interventionist state and a discourse that is prepared to challenge popular opinion.

Community politics

The problems become clearer when one considers what was regarded by many Liberals in the 1970s and 1980s as their key political position, the thing that differentiated them from other political parties: community politics.  At its best and most pure it was an ideology that sought to empower and energise the citizen, by giving them power over the environment in which they lived; at its worst it often degenerated into the politics of mindless activism, based around endless oppositionist campaigning to achieve electoral success with no clear vision of how to handle office once it was achieved.  It is the basis for the sneer that Liberals were the party of pavement politics.

As I’ve argued before, re-reading its principal text – Gordon Lishman and Bernard Greaves’ The Theory and Practice of Community Politics – the thing that strikes one most forcibly is just how reactionary it is.  It reeks of hostility to the collective, to the state and – in particular – to Trade Unions (at which point it is worth noting that the Liberal ideal for the most part ignores collective action by workers, and demonises it on those few occasions when it emerges into Liberal discourse). Its distrust of the state and its belief that social objectives can be achieved through voluntarism make it read like a first draft for Cameron’s Big Society. Its combination of populism and activism brings to mind, as much as anything, the policy positions of UKIP.  (To be fair to my younger self, the Liberal obsession with decentralisation and localism always seemed to me to be intellectually weak. It’s only really since that I have come to realise just how anti-democratic such sentiments are, how tropes of localism can be used to argue against wider democratic will and how vital it is to have a strong theory of the state to manage such conflicts).

The Orange Book

Here Liberalism appears to have returned to its roots; here the hostility to the state and the reliance on market individualism, latent in community politics,  is made manifest in a document that has become a manifesto for Liberal Democrats in Government.  Why did Liberal Democrats do so little to oppose the marketisation of the NHS? Because it’s core Liberal Democrat policy, as set out in David Laws’ chapter in the Orange Book. There is a belief expressed by many people on the soft Left that Liberal Democrats have been weak in Government – that they went into Government on a coalition agreement that has long been left behind, and have been systematically worsted by a cynical Conservative Party whose unscrupulousness and instinct for power makes the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party look like a Sunday School advisory group.  Some of this is true – look for example at how the Liberal Democrats lost electoral reform and Lords reform.  In some ways the Tories have shown themselves to be weaker than that – look at how Cameron has to paper over the cracks on Europe and equal marriage.  But on the economic essentials that define the coalition, there is nothing between Tories and Liberal Democrats.  Economically, this is a Liberal Government, with the Orange Book as its instruction manual.

And the most important point to note about the status of modern Liberalism is that this position does not in any way reflect the politics of the Liberal grass roots.  I don’t suppose the grass roots have changed much since my days in the Party – decent, progressive people who are horrified by much of what the Party leadership is doing, rooted in identity politics and (a Liberal characteristic I have not really touched on here) their tradition of internationalism, but – by and large – clueless about economics and its role in shaping the political agenda, and without the big narrative to oppose the Orange Bookers.

Conclusion

So, where does this necessarily brief excursus in to the politics of Liberalism lead us? In general, then, the problem with the Liberal discourse is not that it fails to ask the big questions; it is that it looks increasingly like an ideological construct that is designed to prevent those questions from being asked.  It is a philosophy that is generally fearful of the state, and fearful of democracy; the constant fear that admission of the hoi polloi to real political influence will result in a decline into irrationalism.  J S Mill’s fear of universal franchise has never really gone away.  The lingering belief that if you temper the laws of the market with democracy, chaos will follow, seems to inform almost every pronouncement of the Liberal Democrat High Command. You may vote for ending tuition fees, but such a policy is, in retrospect, unaffordable.

The historical fate of Liberalism is inevitably bound up with the concept of market economics.  In the nineteenth century, when the unfettered operation of the market stood in opposition to the bloated jobbery of the state – in England in particular – Liberalism looked like – indeed was – a radical and progressive ideal.  Political reform and economic progress went hand in hand.  In the late nineteenth century our concept of the state changed – and the Liberal Party split and those who saw the state as an agent of change went into the Labour Party.  Ironically enough, Liberalism in fact provided many of the reforms that made the activist state possible; and the nonconformist conscience, formed in an age when religious exclusion was the norm for those who spurned Anglicanism, provided a radical edge (but also a sense of moral disapproval for the poor).  Prominent Liberals like Keynes and Beveridge provided the intellectual foundation of the welfare state, in which the state became an agency of progress and change.  The Liberal revival of the 1970s and 1980s coalesced around the idea of community politics, which offered the illusion of progress and empowerment while espousing an anti-state, anti-Union and pro-voluntarism stance which in many ways provides an ideological background for Orange Book Liberalism.

The decline and fall of Liberalism is at one level a tragedy.  At its best Liberalism offered an optimism, a belief in progress, a commitment to fairness and a belief in the power of human intellect in the face of ideology that represents the best of British political history. It sought to speak truth to power in a way that is wholly admirable and actually represents a necessary condition for progress. Many individual Liberal Democrat members doubtless continue to express those virtues. But, hobbled by a belief in market agency and its hostility to collective action in general and the state in particular, and faced with the crisis of late capitalism that Marx so strikingly foresaw, contemporary Liberalism has nothing to offer other than the perpetuation of that crisis.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson is that Liberalism has, since its Victorian and Edwardian days, been a strange and incongruous vessel for the aspirations and ideals of its progressive followers.  Midway through this coalition, the time has surely come for these decent people to invest their ideals elsewhere.

The choices before Labour: Tawney revisited

In a political life that has taken me from undergraduate Liberalism (in the days when Liberals challenged Tories rather than sustaining them in office), to the political neutrality of the Civil Service, to a brief (and deeply uncomfortable) flirtation with Labour, and now finds me comfortably at home in the Green Party, the towering figure of R H Tawney, historian and Socialist polemicist, has always been an influence and guide.  Tawney is a figure apparently forgotten in today’s Labour Party and his brand of moral integrity, unswerving socialism and sonorous prose, his unselfconscious and bracing morality, would certainly sit uneasily with the Labour Party today.  Faced with a world of complexity and a political system in decay, the question “What would Tawney have said?” is as good a starting-point as any for we on the left to get to grips with the current neoliberal hegemony.

As the Labour Party conference gets under way in Manchester it’s notable that Tawney’s concerns are strikingly contemporary.  As a Conservative Education Secretary prepares to abandon fifty years of educational progress, guided apparently by prejudice and misplaced nostalgia, Tawney’s essay Keep the Workers’ Children in their Place, published in 1918, provides a startlingly relevant commentary on the ideologies at work in English education.  It is a sobering criticism of the politics of education that the same issues – faith schools, class segregation, social mobility – form the core of the education debate nearly a century on.

Of all Tawney’s writings, none carries greater resonance today than his great essay The Choice Before  the Labour Party, written in 1931 response to Ramsay Macdonald’s National Government.  It is Tawney at his finest, his most challenging, his most coruscating – and at a time when Labour, more clearly than ever, appears to be throwing in the towel in the face of the most concerted assault on the living standards of ordinary people in general  and the vulnerable in particular since Ramsay Macdonald looked forward to being kissed on the cheek by every Duchess in London, it is a powerful corrective.

Early in the essay Tawney throws down the challenge:

The fundamental question, as always, is:  who is to be master? Is the reality behind the decorous drapery of political democracy to continue to be the economic power wielded by a few hundred thousand – bankers, industrialists and landowners? Or shall a serious effort be made – as serious, for example, as was made, for other purposes, during the war – to create organs through which the nation can control, in co-operation with other nations, its economic destinies; plan its business as it deems conducive to the general well-being; override, for the sake of economic efficiency, the obstruction of vested interests; and distribute the products of its labours in accordance with some generally recognised principles of justice? Capitalist parties presumably accept the first alternative. A socialist party chooses the second. The nature of the business is determined by its choice.

It’s a challenge that Labour today quite obviously fails. The last few weeks have seen pronouncements from Labour leaders that make it clear that Labour is simply not prepared to distance itself from the economics of austerity – it appears curiously comfortable with the economic assumptions that underly the Coalition.  Ed Balls has committed Labour not to restoring cuts to further long-term public sector pay freezes – a commitment echoed at the Labour Conference – and has promised ruthlessness in paring public expenditure.  Liam Byrne has called for an end to the Beveridge principles of universal benefits - even though that arguments for universality, forged in the aftermath of the 1930s, remain unchanged and more important than ever.

In other words – public sector workers, those on benefits, the poor and vulnerable must continue to pay for the crisis they did not create, while the financial sector which did create the crisis remains untouched, and continues to enjoy taxpayer funded payouts through bailouts and the subsidy of quantitative easing.  In the essentials of its response to the crisis, you cannot get a cigarette paper between the analyses of the Labour leadership and the coalition. And Labour’s response simply entrenches the neoliberal mythology that the crisis was caused by Labour’s profligate spending.  Whatever the views of many thousands of Labour members, who doubtless are profoundly uneasy at their leaders’ behaviour, the message is clear: the Labour leadership has neither the intellectual nor moral stomach for the fight, and is quite happy to allow the coalition to dictate the economic agenda.

Tawney realised – as did the Labour Government of 1945, whose name and spirit are apparently being invoked at this week’s Labour Conference – that control of economic policy remains the bedrock on which radical change is built.  The question is quite simply one of whether the productive capacity of a society should be moulded to produce greater equality and a decent sufficiency for all, or whether Government is prepared to take pot luck on whether a system based on the irresponsible maximisation of gain for the holders of capital can be relied upon to provide those things.  In other words, is the productive capacity of the economy to be guided democratically?  Or is it to be left to the desire of a wealthy minority to maximise their wealth to provide the crumbs for which the majority must scrabble to provide the decencies of life?

Moreover, it’s important to understand that many of the most controversial and, to we on the Left, obnoxious elements of Coalition policy have their roots in what Labour did in office.  NHS privatisation and outsourcing? Demonising those on benefits? ATOS? Tuition fees? Academies and the privatisation of education? The marketisation of public space?  All of them are legacies of New Labour, taken to their logical conclusion.  Were Labour to be a serious party of change it would need to face up to and repudiate that legacy.

And, in doing so, it would need to revisit the rapprochement with capital that was perhaps the signature of New Labour.  Tawney again:

If there is any country where the privileged classes are simpletons, it is certainly not England.  The idea that tact and amiability in presenting the Labour Party’s case – or the “statesmanship” of the last Government – can hoodwink them into the belief that it is also theirs is as hopeful as an attempt to bluff a sharp solicitor out of a property of which he holds the title-deeds.  The plutocracy consists of agreeable, astute, forcible, self-confident and. when pressed, unscrupulous people, who know pretty well which side their bread is buttered, and intend that the supply of butter shall not run short.  They respect success, the man or movement who “brings it off”.  But they have, very properly, no use for cajolery, and laugh in their sleeves – and not always in their sleeves – at attempts to wheedle them.  The way to deal with them is not to pretend, as some Labour leaders do, that, because many of them are pleasant creatures, they can be talked into the belief that they want what the Labour movement wants, and differ only as to methods.  it is, except for the necessary contacts of political warfare, to leave them alone until one can talk with effect, when less talking will be needed, and, in the meantime, to seize every opportunity of forcing a battle on fundamental questions.  When they have been knocked out in a straight fight on some  major economic issues, they will proceed, in the words of Walt Whitman, to “re-examine philosophies and religions”.  They will open their eyes and mend their manners. They will not do so before. Why should they?

One of the most impressive things about this passage is its self-confidence – a belief that Socialists have the moral force and intellectual argumens to win the support of millions on which a fundamental shift in society depends.  No question here of letting the parties of capital dictate the economic and social agenda.  Tawney was writing at a time of deep economic crisis – a crisis that has remained unmatched until the present day.  Tawney understands that the confidence of capitalists had been shaken – and that it is not the job of the Left to give them a hand up and to help dust off their clothes.  Yet today, across our four main political parties (I include the SNP) there is still the belief that businessmen and financiers who have orchestrated the current crisis are the best people to lead us out of it, but the language of political debate remains dominated by the language of market capitalism – the argot of failure.  It is one of the main reasons why people are alienated from mainstream politics; the language of politics is no longer their language, and Labour’s managerialism is a major issue in this.

And it is not as if there is any lack of intellectual alternative.  One only has to read Krugman on the economics of austerity and the vanity of appealing to the confidence fairy; Richard Murphy on the Courageous State (and, most importantly, on the moral imperatives of progressive taxation); Allyson Pollock on the dangers of marketising public services; The Spirit Level on the need for equality; Elinor Ostrom on the triumph of the commons; even, from within Labour’s whale, Owen Jones on the language and reality of social exclusion from those whom the prosperous turn into an underclass.  With that one exception the common thread is that all these voices are outside the political, academic and media mainstream; there is a nuanced, grounded and evidenced debate about austerity but the fact that it is taking place on the fringe is itself a symptom of how political discourse has failed.

Labour claims to be leading a rethink of alternatives to the Coalition, but it leaves the most persuasive and convincing voices outside.

It will not do. To kick over an idol you must first get up off your knees. [...] Either the Labour Party intends to end the tyranny of money, or it does not. If it does, it must not fawn on the owners and symbols of money.  If there are members of it – a small minority no doubt, but even one would be too many – who angle for notice in the capitalist press; accept, or even beg for, “honours”; are flattered by invitations from fashionable hostesses; suppose that their financial betters are endowed with intellects more dazzling and characters more sublime than those of common men; and succumb to convivial sociabilities, like Red Indians to firewater, they have missed their vocation.  They would be happier as footmen.  It may be answered of course that it is sufficient to leave them to the ridicule of the world which they are so anxious to enter, and which may be trusted in time – its favourites change pretty quickly – to let them know what it thinks of them.  But in the meantime there are such places as colliery villages and cotton towns.  How can followers be ironsides if leaders are flunkies?

Tawney was attacking Ramsay Macdonald’s obsession with social preferment. But today we could take that text and apply it to the way in which a party financed by Trade Union subscriptions appears to be led by people who are happier in the company of venture capitalists and media moguls – and happier to share their outlooks and perspectives on the world – than they are in the company of working people.  Labour invents the fictional and highly ideological construct of the hard-working family – usually as part of a rhetorical device to diminish  the least fortunate in society who look to the state for support – while disdaining those who lead lives less glossy, less padded than their preferred company; and feign surprise that five million of their core supporters have walked away from them since 1997.  The Labour Party’s relationship with the Trade Unions looks increasingly like a dysfunctional and abusive marrage, in Labour is quite happy to accept the Unions’ cash but will no longer defend union members’ rights.

Again and again, one is struck by Tawney’s prescience, the way in which he aniticipates the policy debates of the 2012 Party Conference season.  In one sense it is not surprising; the current economic crisis is strikingly similar to what Tawney faced in 1931, the policy nostra of all the main Westminster parties largely the same – as if the political culture of the West is incapable of learing from what went before.

After Labour

The question for those on the Left is whether clinging nostalgically to the Labour Party is going to bring change.  The prognosis is poor.  Labour’s leadership appears to be comfortable with the language and assumptions of market capitalism; it does not appear willing to challenge the Coalition’s agenda; it remains scared of the media.  Organisationally, it remains committed to upholding a brand – a brand whose essentials ceased to exist long ago – rather than challenging the assumptions of capital.  For example, in Brighton and Hove, where it has been outflanked from the Left by a resurgent Green Party, its response has been to back the Tories’ cuts agenda and snipe from the sidelines, happier to back council tax freezes for its middle-class membership than to support the administration in resisting cuts.

Can Labour change? The organisational change that led to the creation of New Labour appear to have been crafted to give the appearance of party democracy while denying the reality.  It is difficult to see any way in which the many thousands of decent Labour people who really do believe in changing society can bring their leaders to account.

Increasingly, I believe the Left must recognise that we are in a post-Labour era – a more pluralist, diverse and co-operative one, in which aspirations for economic and social change are not just channelled through a single brand.  “Socialism is what a Labour government does” is an arrogance that, mired in crisis as we are, we can no longer afford.  The Left must accept that Labour  is a party that can no longer act as an agent for real change, and which has – at the top at least – lost all real interest in making fundamental shifts in the balance of wealth and power in society.  Can you imagine where this lot would have got us in 1945? Would the NHS have been established with Ed Balls as Chancellor, cutting public sector pay and micro-managing public expenditure cuts while expounding on the values of private entrepreneurship?  The circumstances may be different, but perhaps the qualities and the intellectual understanding required are similar.  Can Labour be weaned off the seductive illusion that social justice can be achieved without changing the balance of power and wealth in society?

Increasingly, it seems likely that the challenge to the neoliberal hegemony must come from outside the Westminster bubble.  I have written before about the crisis of democracy that results when an apparently democratic political system can no longer represent the aspirations and needs of millions of citizens. Labour is part of that problem and clearly has no stomach for the fight to provide a solution. The ultimate frivolity in the face of our current crisis is to assume that because Labour has a glorious past and a Parliamentary presence, it provides a force for change.

The epic stupidity of Nick Clegg’s house deposit plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community politics revisited: Greens and Liberal Democrat tactics

The results of the Green Party’s leadership election are due to be announced tomorrow.  In anticipation, the Independent has today run a piece which suggests that Greens should follow the Liberal Democrats’ tactics for capturing local election seats, leading to Parliamentary gains.  It argues that disillusioned Liberal Democrats are likely to turn to the Green Party in greater numbers than Labour voters.

It’s a plausible and attractive argument.  Its proponents could point to the fact that the Green Party’s biggest successes have been in Brighton, which returns the party’s sole MP and has a minority Green administration.  In many ways, Brighton looks like a Liberal Democrat town; affluent, educated, with its two universities, its temper of diversity and its modern economy – the sort of place where Liberal Democrats tend to do well, and where it is mainly the fissiparous nature of the local Lib Dems and their tendency to fight each other into oblivion at the merest sniff of electoral success that has prevented them from making electoral advance.  It’s a narrative that Brighton and Hove Labour iteslf often uses, claiming that the Greens have mainly prospered in middle-class wards (a narrative that conveniently ignores big Green gains in traditional Labour wards in last year’s local elections).

It’s also a reminder that for many years the Liberal Democrats – and most notably the Liberal Party before that – were proponents of community politics, which brought together vigorous local campaigning with a set of beliefs about community and political representation which, in theory at least, went far beyond simple electoralism.  The essential text of this movement was a pamphlet by Gordon Lishman and Bernard Greaves, The Theory and Practice of Community Politics, published by the then Association of Liberal Councillors in 1980, which brought together ideas that Liberal campaigners had developed over the preceding decade.

As the Green Party thinks about strategy, and in the context of a call to use Liberal Democrat tactics, it’s a fascinating and important read.  There is much in it that goes to the heart of Green beliefs – about empowering individuals in communities, about democratic accountability, and about participation.  And there are ominous omissions and issues – revisiting the pamphlet thirty years after first reading it, its hostility to Government and advocacy of voluntarism sits surprisingly comfortably with the Con Dems’ Big Society agenda.  It is powerfully hostile to Trade Unions. Above all, like so much pre-Orange Book Liberal and Liberal Democrat thinking, it has almost nothing to say about economics – a crucial weakness in a text that claims to offer a systematic ideology.

The authors write emphatically that community politics was not a strategy for winning elections, but something far wider than that.  But this is what was lost, and this is what allowed the Liberal Democrats to be captured for neoliberalism.  It seems to me to be precisely the lack  of any theory, combined with the way in which Orange Bookers could appeal to the radical individualism of Greaves and Lishman and turn it into a consumerist economic narrative – that allowed the neoliberals in the door.  And it was the use of the term “community politics” to justify unthinking electoral opportunism that inhibited the development of a coherent and confident body of theory that would have given the old Liberal Democrat left a hope of resisting the neoliberal Orange Book tide.  It also of course compounded the problem that Liberal Democrats were often (with good reason) regarded as cynical opportunists for whom the end justified the often very dodgy electoral means.

All this is powerfully instructive for a contemporary Green Party that is facing many of the issues confronting Liberals at the time that Greaves and Lishman published their pamphlet.  In some respects the stakes are far higher than they were for Liberals in 1980; not just the urgency of climate change but, in the UK context, a Westminster political system dominated by three national parties (plus the SNP) who fundamentally believe in variations on the same ideology which is wreaking havoc on our society.

But it is instructive at a time when Greens in Brighton are facing their first taste of minority office. It’s a daunting prospect being Green trailblazers; a minority administration of the only national party opposed to cuts and austerity, trying to deliver progress against a background of savage cuts in local government funding.  Despite the cuts, despite the minority status, there are real gains being made: particularly in transport and public realm issues, in preserving subsidised bus routes and in attracting funding for innovative traffic schemes aimed at making the city more liveable.  In fact in Brighton it’s Labour that is following traditional Liberal Democrat oppositionist tactics; backing Tory budget cuts and supporting Eric Pickles’ council tax freeze con, opposing for the sake of opposition to the point where they casually ignore the legal and financial constraints under which the council operates to score easy points.  If you ever wanted a demonstration of electoral opportunism devoid of integrity, responsibility or intellectual engagement, you need only look as far as Brighton and Hove Labour.  As a Green, I’m fairly sure that the party that I want to be part of looks nothing remotely like that.

For me, the key task for Greens is not to chase the Liberal Democrat lost votes, but to understand why political participation has fallen, and in particular why Labour lost five million votes between 1997 and 2010.  I think the answer is fairly  straightforward – that Labour has embraced neoliberalism, remains a pro-cuts and pro-austerity party, and those – often the poorest and most vulnerable in society, who look to a strong state for support and empowerment – for whom this agenda offers nothing have walked away from Labour, and from electoral politics generally. These are the people whose daily life experiences are wholly outside the mainstream of political debate in the UK.  And as I wrote in an earlier blog post on the Green Party leadership election, these are the people to whom Greens, as the only significant party with an alternative to neoliberalism, must look; it is their voice that we must become.  It’s why in the leadership election that has just finished (and whose result at the time of writing I do not know) I voted for Peter Cranie as the candidate best able to break out of our middle-class comfort zone and reach out to those who have been left behind by the British political system.

So grass-roots activism is essential.  I think there is an argument for something that matches the finer aspirations of Greaves and Lishman, although I think we need to recognise that the spirit of community politics is something that died out long ago in the Liberal Democrats.  But I think we need to be more ambitious than reaching out to ex-Liberal Democrats.  Greens should aspire to be the voice of all of those who have been disenfranchised by the neoliberal consensus