The Spirit of ’45: a flawed but powerful message for contemporary politics

You would need a heart of stone – or to be Liam Byrne – not to shed a tear during The Spirit of ’45.  My moment came when the retired doctor – one of a number of individuals whose reflections and reminiscences punctuated the narrative, and whose demeanour might have been made for a white coat and stethoscope – recalled how on the first day of the NHS, he was making a house call to a family and heard a child coughing upstairs, and offered to help.  The mother demurred, obviously worried by the cost, until the doctor gently reminded her that his visits were now free. It’s a story that has all sorts of resonances, not least of tales from my own family history of when the arrival of the NHS  eased life so significantly for my grandmother and my semi-invalid, weak-chested grandfather.

Ken Loach’s film tells the story of how a nation mobilised for total war determined never to allow the squalor and poverty of the 1930s to be repeated and elected a Labour government on an avowedly socialist platform, and how that Government took the pillars of the economy into public ownership, built good quality social housing, and set up the National Health Service.  He then jumps forward thirty years to Thatcher and discusses how the structures that had been established after 1945 were dismantled and returned to management for profit, focussing in particular on the brutality visited on striking miners in the 1985 Strike,  and culminating in the destruction of the NHS under the Coalition.  But the film also shows the disappointment that the structures of the new nationalised industries did not mean workers’ control – although nationalisation brought huge gains (for example the ending of the priority of output over safety in the mining industry) the structures of management remained fundamentally unchanged, with the newly nationalised industries being managed from the top down (although paradoxically the union officials interviewed in the post-1970 sections of the film all argued that privatisation meant that the efficiencies of central strategic planning were no longer to be had). The narrative is carried on by archive footage and narration intermingled with comment from a number of people – a man who grew up in the pre-war Liverpool slums, a Welsh miner, a group of retired nurses and our doctor.  The post-Thatcher narrative was carried on by a succession of Union officials, who emphasised the key role of class in the politics of the era and argued that Labour had abandoned its working class roots.  It ends with a powerful and emotional message about the witness of those who lived through the post-war years, and the imperative of passing their hope and belief on to a young generation that had few reasons for either.

It is a powerful, emotional film – it is shamelessly polemical, often in revealing ways.  Footage of the 1945 election campaign shows Churchill not as the powerful war leader, but strangely glassy-eyed in front of the camera in what seemed like a precursor of a party political broadcast, or hesitant in front of a hostile, heckling crowd. Or the crucial fact – often overlooked in the trope of Churchill as triumphant war leader – that on the home front, and in the organisation of wartime production, Britain effectively already had a Labour government, in which Labour Ministers directed the command economy on which victory had depended.  Elsewhere the manipulation was more obvious – Margaret Thatcher’s conference speeches interspersed with the shots of the more grotesquely eccentric party faithful, or where at the end – after the film’s witnesses had expressed their optimism – the opening shots of VE Day celebrations were repeated, this time in colour in contrast to the monochrome of the rest of the film.

There were serious omissions, too.  Not just sociological oddities like the largely-forgotten fact that Britain was consumed by a crime-wave in the years immediately following the war, but most significantly the fact that the British economy was completely shattered by the war – a fact mentioned but whose implications (profoundly important, I’d argue, in making a contemporary link) were not considered.   Economics was barely mentioned – no more than a passing reference to Keynes.

There were a number of thoughts that I took away from the film:

First, following on from the point about how Labour had directed the domestic war effort, I wondered whether 1945 was a unique moment in history that made the achievements of the Attlee Government possible.  The war had demonstrated that a planned, centralised economy could work, in a way that was unparalleled before or since.  Perhaps – just perhaps – part of Labour’s triumph in 1945 was down to an acceptance of the use of such methods to avoid the chaos that followed the First World War; perhaps the return to the Tories in 1951 was a sign that the moment had passed, and that politics as usual – based around appeals to the individual rather than the collective – had returned.

Second, the film had almost nothing to say about economics, but the economic background of the Attlee Government is of central importance; and the comparison with the modern economic climate is instructive.  After six years of total war the British economy was shattered and its infrastructure was worn out.  At a time when we are being told that we must endure the economics of austerity because we lived beyond our means, and in response to the economic crisis of 2007-8, it is worth remembering that the creation of the NHS and the building of social housing to give working people decent, secure homes as of right took place against an immeasurably worse economic situation – albeit one that reflected the necessities of national survival rather than the casino economics of bankers’ Ponzi schemes.  The austerity of the late 1940s and the persistence of rationing were barely mentioned; but surely played a part in the return of politics as normal in 1951. It is additionally almost forgotten that the Attlee government presided over the most fundamental economic redistribution of modern times – in which wages for working people rose decisively in contrast to the wealth of the rentier class.  At a time when we are seeing the reverse taking place it seems important to make the link between social progress and redistribution. Moreover, there is an interesting parallel between the nationalisation of the coal, steel and transport industries and the original motivation behind Thatcher’s privatisations – the need to invest in infrastructure that was clapped out.

Third, the film does not consider the fact that the Labour Party of 1945 emerged from the split of 1931, in which the Labour leadership went into coalition to form a National Government.  It was a party that had explicitly rejected the fiscal orthodoxy and the reductions in the living standards of working people that Ramsay Macdonald had embraced as part of a flawed Westminster consensus.  It’s important because Labour’s leadership today looks much more like Ramsay Macdonald than George Lansbury; fiscally orthodox and apparently quite willing to live with cuts in living standards – including benefits – in the name of economic necessity.  The economics-free evasions of One Nation Labour (which I have blogged about here) look very much like the sort of thing that the Labour leaders of 1945 had consciously rebelled against in 1931; Labour in 1945 was confident in its theory.

Finally, there was a powerful sense that the witness of the participants in the film was undmediated.  Apart from a few comments about the way the media attacked Aneurin Bevan, there was almost no mention of the media.  We were firmly in the world of authentic experience – of consciousnesses formed by daily realities, not by the mediation of mass media.  This was a world of reality-based politics.

So, where  does this leave us in 2013, when the apparatus of decency that Attlee built has largely been dismantled, and we are living through the last days of the NHS as Bevan conceived it?  In a week in which a Labour front-bench, faced with a situation in which unemployed people were illegally stripped of their benefits, chose not to oppose a Bill that would nullify the redress that these people were entitled to under the law, the conclusion must be that Labour, in its present form, is not remotely capable of acting as the vehicle for any optimism that the tide against austerity economics can be turned.  Interviewees like Tony Mulhearn talked of the way in which Labour was no longer a working-class party, and no longer spoke for working people; the fact that the industries have changed and the people for whom Labour is failing to speak are now supermarket workers, contract cleaners, call-centre workers and indeed the unemployed forced on to workfare schemes rather than workers in giant, unionised industries does not negate the challenge (I could add from my own experience of my short and unhappy membership of the Labour Party in the late 1990s, what really motivated local party activists in my part of the world was not speaking for the vulnerable but expelling socialists – I remember one incident in which a local party panjandrum told us that the selection of a certain individual as a council candidate would be viewed with disfavour by No 10 –  leaving aside political considerations, an organisation that relied on such arrant nonsense to rationalise a witch-hunt had some pretty basic issues to deal with). Labour’s assimilation into the neoliberal mainstream means that it remains part of the problem, not the solution.

So where does the solution lie? Ken Loach has launched an appeal for unity on the Left to oppose austerity and to put into practice the calls for a new politics based around the values of 1945.  Leftish Labour figures like Owen Jones and Green MP Caroline Lucas are involved in launching the People’s Assembly to re-energise the Left and to recapture the values of 1945; it’s a huge but necessary task, and one that I cannot see the current Labour leadership tolerating; the challenge for the Labour left of recapturing a party that filleted its internal democracy in the 1990s to make way for new Labour looks pretty insurmountable, and Labour has long been a party intolerant of pluralism and dissent.  For me, part of the key lies in an issue that did not register in Loach’s film at all – the fact that any modern socialism must be Green, and conversely that Greens must be socialist, because the planet is under dire threat and the root of that threat is that power and wealth are in the hands of a minority determined to exploit the planet for their own benefit, rather than sustaining and nurturing it for the benefit of all; it is already obvious that in the global sense, environmental catastrophe is a matter of equality, or in Loach’s terms a class issue.  And the threat to our planet is as dangerous as the total war of 1939-45 – more so in fact – and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided without the sort of mass mobilisation that won that war, involving strong – but democratically accountable – state institutions.

Perhaps the real Spirit of ’45 is this; that people came together, worked collectively in war and for a brief few years managed to work collectively to change their society immeasurably for the better.  But over time our political culture shifted back towards individualism and lost that sense of the collective.  Faced with environmental degradation and what looks like a fundamental crisis of capitalism, we need to rediscover that collective spirit.  But we have a huge way to go.

Labour and the Ashcroft poll: winning the war as well as the battle

There has been a certain amount of excitement over a poll of marginal constituencies by Tory donor Lord Ashcroft, suggesting that Labour is on course for a thumping win at the 2015 General Election.  While it is no doubt encouraging for Labour and indeed for anyone who wants to see the end of the Coalition, it should be treated with much caution, and in some respects begs far more questions than it answers.

The first point, of course, is that this is a mid-term poll and should be treated as such.  Of course it focusses on marginal seats, which makes it more significant than polls that simply record voting intentions across the country as a whole; but with an election two years away, with the economy failing and with the omnishambles of the bedroom tax (a policy decision whose callousness shows every sign of  becoming an iconic symbol of Coalition inhumanity, not least because not even the DWP has been able to come up with a reasoned defence of it), it would be surprising if Labour were not ahead.

Hanging on to power is, after all, what the British (English?) Conservative Party does.  Following the scare at Eastleigh, and with the UKIP bubble clearly keeping Tory strategists awake at night, the Tories are already positioning themselves on the populist right on issues like immigration and human rights.  Expect more of this; the next election will be dirty, with a Lynton Crosby-inspired campaign designed to divert the undertow of anger in society against immigrants, Europe and above all into demonising the poor and vulnerable at home, with the populist Right claiming that failure in Government arising from being held back by the Liberal Democrats from doing what they want to do.  That’s one of the points about coalition – it allows populist politicians to by-pass the reality checks of reason and empirical evidence, by blaming failure on their partners.

But there is a deeper, more powerful problem.  It’s desperately important to distinguish between the battle and the war.  The 2015 election is the battle; the politics and economics of neoliberalism are the war.  By the time the 2015 election comes along, the neoliberals will have made enormous progress in the war.  Much of the NHS and nearly all schools, not to mention the provision of many policing services, will be in private hands.  The state will have been shrunk, real incomes of those who live by selling their labour rather than accumulating rent on assets will have fallen, and the balance of wealth and power will have shifted significantly.  And, above all, a mindset that economics – or to be more precise economic ideology – trumps democracy will have taken hold more powerfully; it is important to reflect that so much of Osborne’s Plan A is about taking economic policy out of the political sphere altogether, to a place where the language and practice of democratic accountability are no longer relevant.

And the big question remains – if the Tories lose the 2015 election, have they lost a battle or a war?  That depends on the will of a newly-elected Labour government to reverse the coalition’s changers.  It is heartening to hear Labour’s Andy Burnham commit Labour to reversing the NHS legislation on day one; less heartening to consider that on current plans – notwithstanding the reversal of Section 75 regulations – much of the former NHS will already be in the private sector by then.  And there is little comfort in Ed Balls’ commitment to keep Tory cuts, or in Liam Byrne’s “reinvention” of Beveridge which appears to combine an attack on universality with the appropriation of the language of Ian Duncan Smith.  Faced with the post-Eastleigh Tory rhetoric about immigration, Labour’s response was … triangulation, accepting the false premises of Tory rhetoric rather than challenging them..  And I have blogged before about how Labour’s One Nation language appears to skirt round the economic issues that define the battleground against neoliberalism.

So it is not an encouraging picture. I sense that there is fertile ground for a reasoned, passionate, cogent crusade against the neoliberal value system – but that Labour are not remotely close (yet) to that ground, and still use language and  symbolism that ties them into that value system rather than establishing them in opposition to that.  On the weekend after the 1997 election, when I was still in the Labour Party, I attended a post-election gathering at which I remember a strange atmosphere; excitement at the huge victory tempered by a sort of post-hoc rationalisation of how, despite the Blairite rhetoric, Labour would really change things – it came back constantly to the fact that “our people” were now in Government.  It was, with retrospect, a discussion rooted in avoidance, with, two days after an electoral landslide, an air of fear and mistrust; six years later, many of those same decent people were marching through London against war in Iraq.  Real progress means delivering something that brings conviction, not post-hoc rationalisation.

Now, outside the Labour Party, for me the issue is so often how badly the Left in Britain needs Labour to be better; to grasp the moment. In many respects the neoliberal project is on its knees, with the consequences of economic failure being visited on those least able to bear them; but that reality simply isn’t reflected in mainstream political discourse.  The war is still being lost; and Labour remains a party in which many of its activists know and understand at first hand those realities, but whose leadership still appears lost in avoidance.  Until Labour – and the left generally – learns to reconnect, the tide is not going to turn.

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?

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.

England’s dreaming – narratives of nationhood

Royal Wedding day, and a lot of mixed emotions for this lefty republican – fury and boredom at the hype in the weeks leading up to it; ironic reflection at the way those two old English revolutionaries, John Milton and William Blake, had their words appropriated by the Royal pageantry (while the designer of Ms Middleton’s dress sought to channel William Morris); as an ex-chorister, excitement at the thrill of the musical performance in the Abbey; horrified by the misreading of history and the witless cliches as BBC presenters describe Victorian propagandist rituals as the products of a thousand years of history; as a socialist, repelled and fascinated by the interaction between people, media and monarchy; as a Green, touched by the conflict between the appropriateness and the absurdity of the trees in the Abbey.

And yet it seems to me that there are two narratives in play here. One is the officially sanctioned one – the pomp and pageantry, the rhetoric of nationhood, the belief that we are all in this together and that we are somehow empowered as a nation by the opportunity to wave flags and hold street parties. The other – one that is just as much part of British and more specifically English history – is that of an overweening state, in which we are subjects of the Crown and not citizens, and in which the police (or perhaps their political masters) sanction the arrest and detention of people who they think might want to protest against the established order. even while the ceremony is under way, Cameron’s government announces a further set of cuts to the NHS. And all this, without irony, in the same breath as we talk about British freedoms.

It’s not new. Christopher Hill in his great history of the English revolution, The World Turned Upside Down, reports the case of a woman who was hanged for declaring that she “would not give a fart for his grace of Canterbury”; now, a professor of anthropology is arrested for the grievous offence of planning dissenting street theatre;

Thirty years ago, when William Windsor’s parents married, I was an undergraduate at an ancient university, the first member of my family to have the chance of a university education, paid for entirely by the state. Now, university is a luxury for those who can afford to pay, or who are prepared to contemplate a life mired in debt. In a corner of my ancient university lurked the Bullingdon Club, mocked by me and my contemporaries as a decadent adolescent irritation staffed by a class in decline; now their network is at the heart of the political and economic establishment, taking the jobs, services and benefits of the most vulnerable to pay for the failures of their chums in the city.

In the ensuing years, divisions in society have got vastly wider, which is why the establishment needs this narrative of social unity and is so determined to clamp down on dissent that threatens it. In 1981 the anger was against Thatcher; the anger now is against a corrupt, overweening system with Royalty – perhaps surpising itself in the process – at its apex.

The patriotic, one-nation narrative is seductive in a world where uncertainties mount by the day. But it’s false, and a true patriot – one who eschews flag-waving and the repetition of stale monarchist formulae – must believe that Britain deserves better than this. This is the rhetoric of a failed society, one that is afraid to look itself in the mirror and relies on nostalgia for a society that never really existed; we’re being drawn back into a past in which rights we take for granted were yet to be won, and we need to wake up and stop the dreaming now.

There is an alternative English narrative; one of struggle for democracy and political rights, one to which those arrested on suspicion that they might think republican thoughts clearly belong, as do the activists who occupy banks and turn them into creches. Dreamers, perhaps, but more honest and closer to reality than those who dose their despair with gorgeous pageantry.

Man overboard: the collapse of the NHS reforms

One of the advantages of being an ex-Civil Servant is that you can easily spot the symptoms of a good old-fashioned Whitehall panic. And the current shenanigans over the NHS reforms are clearly a prime specimen – a sweaty-palmed, swivel-eyed, world-falling-around-your-ears late-night-emergency-meetings outbreak of pure bureaucratic meltdown. Sir Humphrey’s phrase – “man overboard” – doesn’t begin to describe this one.  Indeed, I’d guess right now the mood in the Department of Health is less Sir Humphrey, more Corporal Jones.

The Government has apparently decided to use a “pause” in the legislative process to allow further consultation on the content of the Bill.  As someone who has been part of a team of civil servants taking a major piece of legislation through Parliament, I find this desperately unconvincing.  Behind the scenes there is no pause, as the legislation is refined further and the process grinds on; all legislation gets amended during passage (I recall an awkward conversation with one of the less intellectually confident  junior ministers in the Major government, telling him that, no, Government amendments didn’t necessarily mean the Civil Service got it wrong in the first place), especially when that legislation has been introduced in the first Parliament of a new Government.

And we know that this bill needs more work than many.  The Health and Social Care bill is a huge piece of legislation. Time and time again in its earlier Parliamentary stages it has become obvious that the Bill is unclear, and needs substantial clarifications just to make its existing provisions workable; it suggests hurried, messy drafting resulting from unclear instructions to the Parliamentary Counsel who prepare the legislation.  And that’s before even considering rethinking the policy.

The pause, then, is unlikely to produce any substantial change. The most likely outcome of this panic is more, late Government amendments leading to botched, inconsistent legislation which will receive no real Parliamentary scrutiny, and an increased risk that future health policy will be set not by Parliament but in the courts.  If this pause is anything other than a pre-local election ploy, the honest and democratic approach would be to pull the Bill now and go back to he drawing board.  It won’t happen, though, as the loss of face would be too much for the Government to bear.

As with the economy, it’s just another example of a Government of ideologues sleepwalking into disaster, unable and unwilling to engage with the realities of the world around them.

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.

Cameron, customers and the NHS

This morning on the BBC’s Breakfast programme, David Cameron gave the clearest possible indication of the Coalition mindset on the NHS when he referred to its users as “customers”. 

It’s revealing because it shows that Cameron’s immediate instinct – one that I have no doubt is shared by the large majority of Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians – is that using the NHS is essentially a commercial transaction.  To them it’s no different from buying and selling, and it’s about consumption.

And that’s clearly a nonsense.  In our society, our relationship with health care is something immeasurably deeper and richer than that.  We were born in NHS hospitals, our relationship with our doctor is a personal one, and our access to what the NHS provides is a matter of right rather than something to do with what we can afford.  It’s something of an entirely different order from buying a tin of beans at the local Co-op, but Cameron, the Tories and their Liberal Democrat useful idiots cannot comprehend that.

It may be a slip of the tongue, or it may be an attempt to enlist the language of the market to effect the intellectual and emotional privatisation of the NHS before the actual event.  But it speaks volumes about the Tories and their underlying attitude towards the healthcare that millions of Britons regard as a right.