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.

Railways, renationalisation and political risk

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

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

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

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structure that creates the lunatic inefficiency of the current system would still be in place and would need to be repealed and replaced.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

50p tax rate and Tory triumphalism

Widely-circulated predictions that George Osborne is about to announce the end of the 50p top income tax rate for those earning more than £150,000 have attracted much comment.  The obvious one is fury at the naked unfairness – here is a handout to the wealthiest in society that comes at the same time that those on the lowest incomes are seeing their living standards cut (for example the estimated 900,000 people on low incomes who will lose nearly £4000 per year due to changes in tax credits in April).

Then there are also concerns about the economic justification. There’s no real evidence that this will do anything to stimulate the economy; this looks like a case for the confidence fairy if ever there was one.  Moreover, macroeconomic theory suggests that increasing the incomes of the poorest is much more likely to stimulate the economy, as they spend all (or nearly all) their income; cutting tax for the lowest-paid, or increasing public expenditure is a far more effective stimulus.  And there’s  the Treasury spinning of the figures  - in the absense of any hard numbers for tax take, claiming that the 50p tax rate is raising “hundreds of millions rather than billions” despite predicting that it would raise £3 billion per year (with tax expert Richard Murphy arguing convincingly that the take could be as high as £6 billion - the TUC paper to which that article links is essential reading).  At a time when benefits and services for the poorest and most vulnerable are being slashed in the name of deficit reduction, it’s an astonishing policy – a naked, obvious wealth grab on behalf of the wealthiest paid for by the poor and those on middle income, at a time when Coalition rhetoric still claims that we are “all in it together”.

And it’s a sign of Tory self-confidence and triumphalism.  I wonder whether the the events of last weekend’s Liberal Democrat conference were on Osborne’s mind as he contemplated the policy – a conference voting in two different ways on the NHS as their MPs and Peers prepared to trip happily through the Parliamentary division lobbies in support of a bill that effectively breaks up our National Health Service.  Perhaps he was reading the opinion polls, which showed that even when presiding over economic policies that have eviscerated the living standards of the vulnerable, hit Middle-England hard and enriched the 1%, or when presiding over the effective privatisation of Britain’s once-beloved NHS, the Tories are only a few percentage points behind Labour (with the added advantage that boundary changes and the deserved collapse of Liberal Democrat support will, in terms of seats in the House of Commons, greatly benefit the Tories).  Or perhaps the decisive moment was when Ed Balls signalled the raising of the white flag on economic policy, implicitly accepting the neoliberal economic agenda by effectively backing tax cuts.

Every one of these represents a Westminster political culture in which the Tories are utterly dominant.  Of course there is opposition outside the political class – all the evidence suggests that Coalition policies on health, on tax, on public expenditure are widely unpopular, although one of the most sordid aspects of the Coalition’s tenure has been its casual demonisation of the disabled, the sick and the vulnerable who depend on benefits.  But that is outside the Westminster bubble – and one can hardly avoid the conclusion that nearly all the most obnoxious aspects of Coalition policy – NHS privatisation, benefit cuts, workfare, tuition fees, the privatisation of public space – are simply the policies that Labour followed in office taken to their logical conclusion.  Ed Miliband wrote the 2010 Labour manifesto in which many of these policies – in a softer, cuddlier form – were advocated;  New Labour luminaries like Liam Byrne continue to trash the legacy of Beveridge and the welfare state.  No wonder Labour has been so utterly useless in opposition.  The Liberal Democrats, allegedly a moderating influence on the Tories (which they were never going to be – read the Orange Book), are in disarray.  The best they have to offer in response to the abolition 50p tax rate is Clegg arguing for raising tax thresholds at the bottom – which of course will ensure that the rich benefit twice – or a possible commitment to a Mansion Tax. In principle.  In the long term.  If it’s workable.  ”All in this together” is a slogan that accurately describes the position of the British political class.

It’s been sad to read some of the comments on Twitter to the effect that the Tories really have blown it this time.  They are not stupid – they are resurgent.  All they have learned from the events of the last two years in Government – helped along of course by their yellow-tied useful idiots, and assisted by Labour’s refusal to argue for a real alternative  - is how easily they can get away with it.

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.

The illusion of choice

As the House of Lords prepares to debate the Health Care Bill, there’s an important piece in the Guardian today by John Middleton arguing powerfully that the concept of choice will make the NHS more bureaucratic, more expensive and less able to offer a comprehensive service:

Choice is an illusion created by people to sell you something. The egalitarian utopian market in which social businesses and the mightiest US private healthcare companies compete and provide health services in a mixed economy is a fallacy. Competition creates mega, monopoly suppliers. Many of the private companies are faceless, unaccountable, remote – like Southern Cross. Once in charge of a big health tender they will be very difficult to dislodge. Private companies have to grow, have shareholders to satisfy and are not immune to failure. When they fail – like Southern Cross – who picks up the pieces? However flawed our NHS and social care system, it is there and it is accountable.

Competition is the supreme example of waste in health services. Private health and health insurance systems generate enormous transaction costs. It’s an expensive process billing for health care, challenging what you are getting for your money, litigating for wound infections – and paying clever underwriters to squirm out of paying patients or hospitals. NHS management costs run at not much more than 3%, compared with nearly 20% for the US.

The very nature of private healthcare systems generating choice requires surplus capacity – empty beds – so that patients can exercise that choice. It requires the separation of “cold” from emergency work, something the NHS has not generally achieved. So it requires more investment up front to serve the fewer patients better.

But there is yet more waste: as the NHS faces draconian cuts in management costs we are urged to “market test” ever more services. Who is going to do this? Every substantial tender will require months of management time: people to write specifications for services, people to scope how big the budget should be, and how to measure the quality of the work; how to involve the public who will use the service, and how to ensure fairness and equality of access.

This process is also generating huge amounts of work for procurement accountants, lawyers and due diligence negotiators for the successful bidders and the NHS commissioners. These people, not on the employer’s books, are hidden from management costs – so don’t feature in the staffing reductions we face in NHS management. So there may be an impression of management cost reductions while transaction costs increase.

It’s a sobering dissection of the cost of the ideology of choice – and it’s worth remembering that this is about breaking up what is one of the most efficient and cost-effective healthcare systems on the planet.  But there’s nothing new in this.  As Middleton points out, it follows the example of the railways and the other privatised utilities, in which commercialisation has meant a culture in which decisions are regulated through contracts, which require an enormous amount of bureaucracy to manage and are hugely inflexible in dealing with the day-to-day realities of life.  Everyone who uses trains is familiar with the blame culture as train operators and infrastructure managers seek to pass off the responsibility on to their contractors for delays to the service.  It’s part of the failure of the Coalition vision that their rhetoric about concentrating resources on the front line so contradicts the reality of the bureaucracy needed to run a system of competing service providers.

And it’s also ironic that Cameron’s Tories get hugely exercised about the role of the EU in national decisions at the same time as opening up healthcare – which the Lisbon Treaty reserves as a matter for national governments – to EU rules on competition and procurement.

The alternative to choice is a system of universal, cost-effective excellence.  If your local school offers a high standard of education, and is part of an integrated system, why is it rational (issues of snobbery apart) to go through the agonies of the school selection process and the drudge of bussing (or more likely) driving children across town – that of course is assuming you live in a town large enough to offer a choice?  Likewise, if the NHS is offering a reliably excellent service, why go elsewhere?  And how does a layman with limited medical knowledge choose a doctor anyway.

That’s the problem with choice.  It’s not about providing better services – it’s actually a rationale for not doing so, because even as costs soar and quality declines, politicians can always fall back on the claim that people have a choice.  It’s an ideological rationalisation of the act of walking away.  And the evidence shows that it has absolutely nothing to do with improving services.

Tories are trashing their core supporters too

On the eve of the Tory Party conference, the anger among their opponents is very much – and rightly – focussed on the impact the coalition is having on the most vulnerable in society.  Unemployment, cuts in jobs and services, privatisation of the NHS, the bullying of the sick and disabled by Atos.  Single mothers are set to lose 20% of their overall income; of course the Left (an ambiguous term, I know) is bound to focus on what looks like a systematic attack on the old, the poor, the sick, women and children.  Tory populists respond by measures to allow faster driving, more bin collections, easier sacking – no Tory prejudice is left unstroked.

In the face of all this, it’s easy to overlook that the poor and vulnerable are not the only victims.  One of the most interesting outcomes is the way in which Tory policies are having a really devastating effect on some of the party’s most loyal supporters; older, hitherto affluent people, living in comfortable suburbia or in the nicer bits of the countryside, often on fixed incomes from private pensions, or from savings.  They’re people who have all the accoutrements of financial comfort, but are increasingly finding life very difficult.

Income from their savings has fallen drastically – and many of them are living off the sort of pension provision that was gambled away by speculating bankers before 2008 (there’s a trope about Gordon Brown’s raids on pension funds, but the total cost of Brown’s dividend tax is about £5bn per year. The cost of the bankers’ crash of 2008 to pension funds is likely to be around £500bn, and that’s before you consider the costs of the contributions holidays that companies regularly awarded themselves).  Many of them are people who were economically active in the Thatcher years, and heeded the calls to privatise their pension provision.  Now they’re facing huge increases in costs of living – double-digit increases in fuel costs – while their income stagnates and falls.  Ironically enough, these people are the backbone of charitable giving, the authentic heroes of the Big Society – but not for long as their income falls and they need to cut back to pay for their daily necessities, or prepare for an uncertain future of NHS cuts and private sector provision.  Some will still have children at university, or who cannot afford a home and are still living with them.

And even their environment is being threatened, as Tories eschew the obvious answer to Britain’s housing crisis – a massive social housing programme focussed on brownfield sites – to allow their friends and donors in the property business to build developments unhindered by considerations of sustainability or local impact on sensitive environments.

In other words, these stalwarts of Tory middle England are being trashed.  No, it’s not the same as the daily struggle faced by the low-paid, or those dependent on benefits as a result of disability, or single mothers. After all, we’re talking about people who own their homes outright and still enjoy a quality of life that is beyond the dreams of the poorest in society.  But the fact that people in their later years are having to count the pennies for the first time does not make their worries any less real.  It’s a telling comment on contemporary Conservatism that the Tory party no longer speaks for these people – in Cameron’s Britain, it’s the financiers and bankers who trashed the economy in 2008 who matter.  It emphasises that for all its attempts at populism, the Tory Party really only speaks for a tiny, financially-empowered minority.

Will these scions of middle England rise up against the party that has deserted them? It remains to be seen.

Where does progressive politics stand after 5 May?

Elections last Thursday saw conflicting fortunes for political parties across Britain – an SNP landslide in Scotland, annihilation for the Liberal Democrats in many parts of the country, Labour gains but the Tories taking enough seats from the Liberal Democrats for them to claim (with help from the supine media) they’re holding their ground, and a resounding defeat for AV in the referendum.

So, for progressives, where does this leave us?

On the face of it, the really big winners from this have been the Tories. They’ve got the election system they wanted, the one which gives the political establishment the smoothest ride and ensures the narrowest representation. This, combined with the reduction in the number of seats in the House of Commons, the mass appointment of Peers and the what appear to be strong hints that they will block House of Lords reform, means that they have consolidated their grip on power. Moreover, the balance of power within the ruling coalition has been made clear. The Liberal Democrats have been skewered – Vince Cable’s complaints about the Tories being ruthless and tribal (he’s only just noticed?) are no more than distant warblings from the bottom of the dustbin of history.

The position of the Liberal Democrats bears some examination. The question that they must answer is whether they have driven the Coalition in a progressive direction; essentially, whether life would have been substantially different under a majority Conservative government. In most of the essentials, the answer is no. Massive public expenditure cuts and NHS privatisation have not been prevented; the Liberal Democrat agenda on constitutional reform and civil liberties has been brushed aside; university tuition fees will be £9000 per year. All they have done is provided the means for the Tories to enact the shock doctrine, and been wasted in the process; a text-book model of useful idiocy.

The important thing to grasp about the Liberal Democrats, though, is that none of this is a sell-out. This is an Orange Book government – cuts and NHS privatisation were Lib Dem themes long before they got into government. The real betrayal is that Clegg managed to convince electors that his party was progressive. The lies were told during, not after, last year’s election campaign.

Labour did well – better than you would think from reading the mainstream media – but this was not a breakthrough performance. And, as I’ve argued before, Labour’s progressive credentials are weak. If you believe that the Tories’ cuts agenda is economically illiterate, then Labour’s policy of slower, fluffier cuts equally fails to deal with the causes and effects of economic crisis. And Labour remains the party of Iraq, Afghanistan, the party that introduced tuition fees, demonised those claiming benefits and rammed through legislation increasing police powers which criminalised dissent (the pre-emptive arrests of “known subversives” before the Royal Wedding – so reminiscent of how Eastern European states handled dissidents before the fall of Communism – took place under Labour powers). There are progressive people in the Labour Party but collectively it is a party that defends, rather than challenges the status quo, one eye always focussed on the Daily Mail. To adopt Tawney’s language, it has not yet got up of its knees.

But it wasn’t all bad news for progressives. The SNP landslide in Scotland is at one level a rejection of the shock doctrine, as Scots had the option of voting for a party that could claim to have defended Scotland from its worst excesses. More interesting was the steady advance of the Green Party – it still (outside Brighton and Norwich) has no more than a handful of councillors, but becoming the largest party in Brighton on an agenda that explicitly refuses to accept the arguments for cuts and privatisation. In Brighton there is no doubt that Caroline Lucas’ almost lone advocacy of economic and political alternatives at Westminster struck a chord, but here the Greens have built up their position over a number of elections, indulging in what looks like old-fashioned Liberal community politics (before it degenerated into the mindless activism that fuelled the Liberal Democrats’ reputation as the dirtiest fighters in British politics).

It’s an illustration, though, that the best hope for progressives now appears to lie outside the main party system, building a radical analysis within which to tackle individual issues. The student protests, the campaigns against corporate tax evasion and local opposition to cuts have had some success in driving the political agenda. It looks as if we’re in for a long haul – and there are some signs that the future of progressive politics will depend on building structures that will challenge the values of mainstream politicians, and break open the market consensus.

A party dying on its feet

Nearly thirty years ago, a politically-engaged student and president-elect of the Oxford University Liberals, I sat in a dingy hall in Llandudno with several hundred of my fellow party members and heard my then leader, David Steel, tell us to go back to our constituencies and prepare for government.  It was heady, inspiring – and unrealistic.  Nevertheless there was pride and passion in that party – admittedly some of the pride related to passing a pro-CND motion, moved by one Cllr Paddy Ashdown, on the conference floor earlier in the week – and radicalism.  Our mission on the radical wing of the party was to change the world, not to preserve its inequalities and power structures.

Over the ensuing thirty years, the Liberal Party and I went our separate ways – the Party moving to the Right  into merger with the SDP and eventually into government in alliance with the Tories, while I spent much of the next thirty years in Whitehall as a politically neutral Enemy of Enterprise, watching, thinking, reading and moving to the Left as my knowledge and experience deepened, and now in retirement engaging with the debate.

Following the Liberal Democrat conference this week, then, has produced mixed emotions.  Overwhelmingly, there is a sense of despatches from the front line of the shock doctrine.  They don’t quite know what’s hit them – from the intemperate reaction to the protests outside the conference to the growing realisation of their deep unpopularity.  Like Macbeth faced with Banquo’s Ghost demanding to know “which of you have done this”, there is a deep denial of the reality of what their party has done.

For anyone with a knowledge of history it was astonishing to hear Clegg referring in his closing speech to Beveridge and Keynes. Seventy years ago, William Beveridge was starting work on the most important document in British social history.  His report paved the way for the creation of the welfare state and identified five Giant Evils in society – squalor, ignorance, want, idelness and disease.  Keynes had warned of the futility of tackling economic crisis by cutting public expenditure.  Clegg claims that “ours is not a government of cuts”. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, from Ireland and elsewhere, Clegg is part of a government that is slashing and burning the public sector, while promoting the cruel lie that you can take £80bn out of the economy in expenditure and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.  He sounds like – is – one of the boneheaded fiscal conservatives that Keynes so excoriated in the 1930s.  It is not difficult to see him as one of the wing-collared Tories that had done well out of the First World War, arguing for cuts in the face of the depression and rationalising it by claiming that unemployment is down to the fecklessness of the poor.  Keynes and Beveridge knew those people, and their Liberal tradition opposed everything they stood for.

And what sort of failure of awareness does it take for a man who styles himself as a radical not to realise that, thanks to his Government, Beveridge’s five Giant Evils are more prevalent than they have been for a generation?  Squalor, Ignorance, Want, Idleness and Disease.  The assault on welfare, the effective privatisation of the NHS, and perhaps above all – because this lies at the heart of Beveridge – a belief that benefits for the most vulnerable are not a matter of right but are charity, the hand-me-downs of a Big Society of the wealthy and privileged.  It takes a special kind of self-deception for the Deputy Prime Minister of this coalition government to portray himself as the heir of Beveridge.

So what of Liberal Democrat activists?

No doubt activists like to laugh at their predecessors.  I’m sure that there is no lack of smooth young folk in PR and marketing – people to whom the free market has been good – sitting in the bars at Liberal Democrat gatherings, patronising their bearded and sandaled predecessors.  But we stuck to the task and fought for what we believed in.  Do you?  Is it really more honourable or more adult to be the Tories’ useful idots? You may not have liked the protesters outside your conference, or for that matter the students who marched in London last autumn, but at least they had got off their knees. Have you?

I have no doubt that many of those in the hall in Sheffield were decent, progressive people.  But the record makes it clear: a government in which Nick Clegg is comfortable is one that no decent progressive could support.  And I’d say to those delegates – stop whining. You may not like what this Government is doing, but you have made it possible.  By going into formal coalition with the Tories, you’ve made it possible for them to pursue their shock doctrine.  Privatising the NHS and the Universities? Cleansing the poor from the inner cities? Do you really believe any of this would have happened had your party been deciding its position in the Commons on a vote-by-vote basis, rather than going into full coalition with the Tories?

And do you really think that Clegg, let alone the Tories, will take any notice of your vote on the NHS?  Yes, Lansley’s been talking the language of compromise, but you know that the die has already been caset.  The private sector providers are already looking for the opportunity to profit from the GP commissioners, just as the private sector has leached public provision through privatisation and PFI for the last two decades.  The fact is, Clegg’s loyalty – and Laws’ and Alexander’s loyalty – is not to you.  It’s to the Tories who control the coalition, and the ideology that drives them.  The electorate knows that, and it’s why you’re coming sixth in by-elections.

And if you believe in tackling Beveridge’s Five Giants, every Liberal Democrat leaflet you deliver, every sub you collect, is an expression of moral delinquency.  It’s over.  Your party is no more than the fading figleaf on a decaying Victorian statue – if you really believe in anything better, tear up your membership card and get out now with your integrity reasonably intact and before the denial poisions your soul.