Liberal Democrats and the triumph of neoliberal entryism

Following the Liberal Democrat conference last weekend was fascinating for what I guess many Liberal Democrats would regard as the wrong reasons.  Votes on the Coalition’s Health Bill have revealed not only a deeply divided party, but one whose members and leaders are working from completely different assumptions about leadership, policy and democracy.

On the one hand, we have the party membership.  Many – though by no means all – are progressive people of what might be labelled as leftish inclinations.  Not necessarily on economics – Liberal Democrat politics have been notable for a real lack of any economic grip – but on issues like the balance of the state and the individual, individual liberties and so on.  Against them is ranged a Parliamentary leadership that takes its ideological cue from the Orange Book, and is part of a governing coalition that has adopted crudely neoliberal economic and social policies – the politics of shrinking the welfare state, of privatisation and of redistribution of wealth and power in the direction of those who already hold it.  The resulitng clash over the Health Bill – which is very much the front line between these two conflicting traditions – has inevitably been messy and confused.

It is a battle, however, of a sort that has been fought many times in centrist and centre-left parties throughout the world, with much the same outcome – a Faustian pact in which party memberships are induced to rubber-stamp a neoliberal agenda because they are told that it’s the way to achieve the things they believe in.  No doubt many of those making the argument are sincere – but it’s a process that has a long track-record – going right back to the neoliberal seizure of the New Zealand Labour Party in the 1990s and with a powerful precedent in the New Labour experience.

It is of course a profoundly anti-democratic doctrine; neoliberals believe – in theory at least -  that change and progress are driven by iron economic laws that democratic mandates are powerless to change, and thus democracy is an obstacle to their objectives, even though those objectives are often expressed in terms of personal liberty.  Moreover, no neoliberal has ever won a clear, unambiguous mandate at an election – it is either imposed (as in the case of the conditions for bailing out indebted economies, most recently with the imposition of “technocratic” governments in Italy and Greece) or enacted by governments who ditch their election rhetoric in the name of crisis management.

Of course it happened to Labour long ago – and ironically enough, it was the botched entryism of the largely harmless Militant Tendency that helped Labour party managers to ensure that the left was neutered (when I was briefly a member of the Brighton Pavilion Labour party in the 1990s its officers seemed far more interested in expelling socialists than fighting the Tories).  It’s striking that nearly all the really (in my view) obnoxious things that the Coalition has done – huge spending cuts, privatisation of the NHS, tuition fees, cuts in benefits for disabled people, workfare – are all really the continuation to their logical conclusion of things Labour did in office.

And yet for parties of the centre and centre-left it’s imperative to maintain the appearance of party democracy, because party memberships remain what keeps political parties alive.  The kiddies are still allowed to play in the sandpit and pass the odd radical motion – but the real decisions will always be taken elsewhere, by grown-ups in suits meeting away from the public gaze.  Which is why you can pass as many conference motions as you like – the essence of the Health Bill, with its privatisation and its powers to charge for healthcare – will continue, even in the unlikely event that Liberal Democrats discover the guts needed to mount political opposition to this particular Bill

To Liberal Democrat members who seem genuinely shocked by these events, I’m afraid there is no comforting answer.  Where have you been these last twenty years? Have you been so busy delivering Focus and campaigning to fix pavements that you have completely missed what has been happening in the world?  Neoliberalism has  been able to get its foot in the door, manage your party processes, and to use the language of economic emergency to trash all the things you claim you really believe in.  You can read – look at the Orange Book and you’ll see that it’s all there in black and white.  (On which subject I once had a revealing exchange with a Liberal Democrat activist on Twitter – when I pointed out that the Orange Book made it clear  that private sector healthcare was at the core of Liberal Democrat policy, the activist replied that the Orange Book was not policy as Conference had not voted for it.  It is that sort of naivety that demonstrates that the Liberal Democrats, a party without a theory and notoriously weak on economics, were ripe for the slaughter)

Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander no longer (to the extent that they ever did) owe their loyalty to you – they owe it to David Cameron and George Osborne, to the CEOs of the private healthcare companies who have poured funds into the party, and to the financial and political elite who, under the pretext of economic emergency, are currently engaged on a wealth-grab of epic proportions.

There are decent progressive people in the Liberal Democrats.  For the sake of your self-respect, there is a way out.  It only takes a moment or two to tear up a membership card.

Abusing Beveridge’s legacy

According to the Daily Mail (NB clicking on that link will contribute to the Mail’s advertising revenues), Ed Miliband and Liam Byrne are about to launch an attack on the “evil” of benefit scroungers.  The Left blogosphere and Twitterati have been driven into overdrive by this; some condemning the way in which an alleged party of the Left bows to cheap populism and lets Tories and their papers drive their agenda; and Labour loyalists trying to dissemble.  My own view is that a political system in which politicians jockey for votes by demonising the poorest and most vulnerable in society is badly broken, and those politicians who do so are beyond condemnation; it’s cheap, cowardly and even New Labour should know better.

However, one of the stranger aspects of the whole business is that Liam Byrne makes these comments in the context of a forthcoming lecture on William Beveridge, and tries to portray himself as Beveridge’s legitimate heir.  It’s an interesting parallel to Nick Clegg trying to do the same in front of the Liberal Democrat conference last March.

It’s strange because Beveridge was a powerful advocate of universal benefits. And, following Beveridge, there are two types of  arguments; the practical and the political.

First, the practical – obviously if a benefit is universal it cannot be claimed fraudulently.  The moment you means test a benefit you have to set up an apparatus to evaluate claims, process paperwork, manage changes in circumstances, enforce against abuse (the last of which turns the state into enforcer where it should be enabler).  Universal benefits are cheap to administer, fair and in principle free of abuse.  Indeed the very act of means-testing introduces abuse into the system – abuse happens because people try to beat the rules and the suggestion that you can exclude abuse by tinkering with those rules is asinine.  More seriously – since there is little hard evidence of deliberate abuse – you introduce the risk of mistakes in the system, and you raise barriers that make it more difficult for people to claim their entitlement.  That is the position in Britain, where the amounts of benefit that go unclaimed are vastly greater than the amount of fraud.

Second, there is a serious political point about how universal benefits emphasise what one is entitled to as a citizen – the citizen is not a supplicant, and although some of those benefits may go to the middle classes who do not, in the strictest sense, need them they help make society more cohesive and ensure that those who depend on those benefits are not stigmatised.  It emphasises that we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together.  It is about society establishing that everyone is entitled to a decent minimum as a matter of right.

Where would Beveridge stand today? It’s worth remembering that for Beveridge, enforced idleness was a terrible social evil.  The level of mass unemployment among young people in particular under the Con Dems would have horrified him; the idea that mass unemployment was a price worth paying for clearing a deficit caused by the fecklessness of the bankers would have repelled Beveridge’s old-fashioned sense of morality and probity. And he saw a National Health Service as an absolute condition of a decent society.

The narrative of benefit scroungers is an ideological myth. Yes, there is undoubtedly abuse, but compared with the £16 billion of unclaimed benefit each year and the squalor and despair of mass unemployment, it is minor.  If Labour was a decent party, true to its roots in Trade Unionism, in Christian socialism and Fabian improvement, and retained a shred of the decency and compassion that drove its founders, it would have the moral courage to stand up to the myth and debunk it.  As R H Tawney wrote in his great essay on the choices before the Labour Party following the split of 1931, “to kick over an idol you must first get up off your knees.”

But Labour’s leaders no longer have that decency – the latest pronouncement reflect their policy in Government and in opposition.  They’re quite happy it seems to dance along to the Tories’ ideological tunes and abandon the people on whose behalf they once spoke.  The poorest in society – single mothers on benefits – have seen their real income fall by nearly 20% in the past year. There are many people for whom Miliband and Byrne’s latest pronouncement are enough, and have packed up their Labour membership.  Others who choose to stay should examine their consciences – and understand why a growing number of people on the Left see Labour as part of the problem, and nothing to do with the solution.

And, please, could they, and Clegg, have the decency to leave Beveridge out of this.

Gordon Brown and the Labour debacle

One could be forgiven for feeling that more than enough cyber-ink has been spilled over Labour’s disastrous showing in the local elections and the events leading up to them. But there are some quite important things going on here, with roots in events long before Brown’s ill-starred assumption of the Labour leadership. So here are a few thoughts.

The 10p tax band

This, of course, is the big one. It was obvious a year ago that this was going to hit Labour’s core support hard. With hindsight it looks like the most appalling misjudgement; one wonders why on earth Brown, Prime Minister in waiting, decided to do it, and why Tony Blair – fatally compromised by the Iraq disaster but still with a political nous that Brown all to evidently lacks – concurred.

One interpretation is hubris. Perhaps an Autumn 2007 election was already in the offing; here was a nice tax bribe to the middle classes that could be presented as tax reform (the 2007 Budget documents describe the measure as being about fairness). Labour felt confident that it could count on the support of its heartlands while bringing along suburbia with a bribe.

What sort of mindset does this reveal? Is there anyone in the New Labour high command who understands life on £18,000 per year – not least given the huge increases in energy and food costs in recent months, and the utter impossibility of buying a house on those sorts of earnings (more of which in a moment)? People don’t like being taken for granted, and New Labour appears to have no understanding of the sort of pride and solidarity that lies at the heart of the old Labour movement. This was an insult. New Labour is made up of people who simply haven’t been there.

The real economy

House prices are coming down with a crash. Now that hurts the middle classes – but Labour’s core supporters on lower incomes have been denied the prospect of ever owning a house, in a society whose obsession with property ownership can be seen on every news-stand and across hours of television scheduling.

New Labour and the like-minded media have failed to answer a simple question – in what way can Britain be said to be a prosperous society when the ability to own the most basic necessity of life – a roof over one’s head – is denied to an increasing number of people?

And there’s more – how can Britain be said to be a prosperous society when the economy has been driven by record levels of personal debt? And when commodities that were once free (like higher education) attract an ever increasing cost? And when public services are perceived to be declining, but are increasingly run for profit by unaccountable businesses?

There is a powerful contrast between the rhetoric of New Labour politicians, of the media and of the interminable lifestyle programmes on TV, and the reality for many people. And who is the Iron Chancellor who has presided over all this?

Now I’m not going to get into the rhetoric about “tax and spend” Labour. A lot of the rhetoric about high taxation is in my view essentially middle class whingeing, and unsupported by the facts (for example the cost of motoring has fallen substantially, and continues to fall, in real terms. Fact.) And I’m not going to defend Cameron’s Tory Party, which seems to be about putting a new gloss on the same old people and policies. But there is a real feeling that people have got poorer, and have less power, under New Labour. And it seems to me that that is what really did the damage.

And Gordon Brown’s mea culpas on network TV today showed no sign of recognising this, and it is not really possible to see how they could.