Time for more economics teaching in schools

During a less than complimentary Twitter exchange yesterday about the qualifications needed to be Chancellor of the Exchequer (with the present incumbent providing the context) I made a serious point about the lack of economics teaching in schools, and rather surprisingly got a negative response; it would just mean pupils learning (I paraphrase) more of the neoliberal stuff being spouted by the political class.

I disagree.  I worry when I read that economics is in decline in schools (although there seems to have been a small recovery in the number of A-level candidates in the last few years), and that there are almost no newly-qualified economics teachers: an understanding of economics seems to me to be really important in a democracy in which the key political issues of the day are economic as well.  And I think it is wrong to assume that it must be neoliberal in nature.  Certainly as an A-level student in the late 1970s and as an undergraduate in the early 1980s I ingested a good deal of Keynsianism; but, more importantly, I learned about the fallibility of economics.  Richard Murphy, in The Courageous State, describes eloquently the disillusion that encountering academic economics produced, as he realised that what were being presented as iron laws of the market were actually based on axioms that were really little more than unsupported generalisations about human behaviour.  I had a similar experience; Murphy’s book aroused a strong feeling of sympathy.

Moreover, you do not need to have studied economics at a particularly advanced level to understand the fallibility of many of the economic propositions that neoliberal politicians proclaim as unchallengeable fact.  Much has been made recently of the Reinhart-Rogoff debacle, in which the argument that high deficits lead to reduced growth has been found to rely on dubious assumptions and unchecked spreadsheet data; but there are more obvious questions that need to be asked about markets and about choice.  For example, influential constructs like public choice theory  rest on assumptions that are really open to any non-specialist to challenge.

Most of all, the issue that Keynes raised – about how decisions in economic policy can be influenced by politicians, and that, far from the elegant inevitabilities of the cruder kind of market theory, economic policy is messy and human – need to be exposed.  Politicians get away far less with proclaiming that There Is No Alternative (or its more subtle contemporary variations about deficits and debt) when people understand a bit of basic economics; a well-functioning democracy is one in which no politician could get away with describing the deficit as “maxing out the nation’s credit card”.  People need to understand the basic concepts, in a way that the current business studies curriculum simply doesn’t achieve.  And I’d argue that it’s perfectly possible to grasp those concepts at GCSE level.

It is almost impossible to imagine the current government making an intelligent decision about the school curriculum.  But the point remains that, at its best, economics opens the mind.  It means that, as part of their general education, people are equipped with the tools to challenge what politicians and advocates of big money want to present as fact.  It’s not obvious that increasing taxes means people move abroad, or that cutting the public sector increases confidence; people need the equipment and the confidence to question these sorts of proposition and to understand that the issues are not clear cut, and that the propositions of the neoliberal (or any other) economic consensus often rely on debatable social and psychological assumptions.  And in that sense a proper study of economics is a pretty good foundation for aspects of life going well beyond economic policy.

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.

How my window cleaner took down the British economy

David Gauke, junior Treasury Minister, has responded to the growing concerns about offshoring and tax avoidance by claiming that it is immoral to pay cash in hand to tradesmen.  The scales have fallen from my eyes.

Meet Mick, my window cleaner.  Once a month he comes to the house and cleans my windows, for payment in cash and kind (a large mug of strong brown tea, with three sugars.  International capitalism needs its sweeteners).  To be fair, being an immoral kind of chap, I’ve never asked him whether he’ll take a cheque, or Visa; somehow our conversations about the weather, gardening or daily Brighton life never quite got on to his tax obligations, or offshoring  (he did mention that he was taking a holiday on the Isle of Wight but, lax citizen that I am, I didn’t quite manage to raise the question of tax jurisdictions). It’s probably a failure of my lefty morals that I failed to realise that it is not HMRC’s sweetheart deals with the likes of Vodafone, or the trillions of dollars in offshore funds, or even the way that revenues fell off a cliff after the bank collapse of 2008, but my willingness – like other middle-class reprobates – to hand over used fivers to my window cleaner that has led to the current crisis in tax revenues.  We on the morally corrupted left should be so grateful that there is a coalition in power that will readjust our moral compass – we should be grateful to David Gauke, just as we are to Nick Clegg for his stand on tuition fees or for Ian Duncan-Smith’s moral courage in exposing the truth about thieving claimants in wheelchairs.

More seriously, for all the behaviour of the coalition, there are moments that reveal the temper of this coalition in all its horror.  I wonder which is the worst aspect of Gauke’s comments (which I assume were sanctioned by those higher up the coalition food chain) – the hypocrisy, the detachment from reality, the sheer abject triple-dyed stupidity. Gauke has a point of course – there is a shadow economy and the HMRC (which has been quietly sacking tens of thousands of tax enforcement staff) needs to get to grips with it.  But this is not where the big picture evasion is.  Offshoring – which is quite simply the attempt of big businesses to avoid paying their dues in the countries where they operate – is now regarded as routine business practice.  How about ending the homely moralism and going after this deeply anti-democratic practice? And how about putting the blame for evasion on the perpetrators, rather than indulging in this sort of deflection?

I’m beginning to think that the most culpable aspect of it all is the tacit assumption that we, the electorate, are stupid and gullible, and are only fit to be fed this drivel.  The fact that the tax debate is where it is now – a debate that the coalition never wanted, and which has been opened up by people as diverse as Richard Murphy and UK Uncut – is perhaps a reassurance that we, the people, are nowhere near as gullible as Tories and Liberal Democrats would like. And when the tax practices of big businesses are as clear and transparent as my windows, perhaps then Gauke can prioritise small tradesmen.  And employ a few more staff at HMRC to do it.

Agenda for a new Green leader

Caroline Lucas has announced that she will not seek re-election as Green Party leader later this year, in a move aimed at increasing the exposure of other leading Greens.  It’s a wise move; Caroline’s achievement has been enormous, raising the profile of the Party by gaining our first Westminster seat and providing what has at times looked like a lone Westminster voice against the politics of neoliberalism and austerity.  We have our first Green council, working to confront the huge issues of making a Green case in against parameters dictated by central Government.

The risks have always been that as a Party we could come to look like a one-woman band, and that Caroline could be stretched too thin. Her decision is as good a way as any to minimise those risks.

A leadership election provides an opportunity to reflect on what sort of a party we want to be.  Greens have always been rightly sceptical about cults of party leaders – it was a tough (but with hindsight surely right) decision for this party to adopt a single leader at all. But this election does give an opportunity to think and debate about what we want the party to be.

These, then, are the personal thoughts of just one not very active Green Party member about what he sees as the priorities of a new leadership.  I’m not talking about policy details here, and I’m certainly not criticising Caroline’s leadership which I believe has addressed these issues in a way that no other UK politician has come close to managing.  But these are themes that I believe an effective Green movement must address. Those thoughts fall naturally into three (inevitably linked) categories: dealing with the crisis in democracy, reshaping our economic agenda, and creating a sustainable, fair and cohesive society.  All of these lead naturally into a fourth – the need for a return to evidenced discourse and a challenge to the prevailing ideological narratives.

Dealing with a crisis of democratic legitimacy

If there is one theme that has run through everything I have written on this blog it is the depth of the democratic crisis we face, here in Britain and more generally in the developed world.  The situation in Britain is desperate: three main Westminster parties all pushing a neoliberal agenda and arguing over nuance and who is better qualified to implement it, with an electorate that is increasingly unwilling to vote at all, and a feral media united in an apparent determination to avoid intelligent debate that goes beyond the Westminster consensus.  Even in those parts of the UK where government is devolved, there is no real debate.  In the meantime, the failure of that Westminster neoliberal consensus is becoming clearer by the day.  And there is a quiet consensus to limit the scope of active democracy – for example a localism agenda that seeks to turn effective local government into commissioning bodies doling out contracts to companies providing services for profit.

It is a simple and overpowering fact that many of the measures that characterise this Government were things that neither Coalition party dared put explicitly to the electorate at the last election – the effective destruction of state-provided healthcare, savage public expenditure cuts, cuts in benefit for the disabled, £9000 tuition fees.  But all of them were there in the public domain if you looked below the surface – by reading the Orange Book for example – and every single one of them is effectively a continuation of what Labour did in office.  But nobody, explicitly, voted for these things.

It is almost as if the main parties are fomenting an active suspicion of democratic institutions and practices.  Britain must be the only country in the world in which politicians and the media actively campaign against existing human rights legislation, which does no more than enshrine basic convention rights.  Political dissent is being marginalised and in some cases criminalised; the pre-emptive arrest of a republican street theatre group before last year’s Royal Wedding is just one particularly telling example.  But the use of aggressive police tactics against dissent, like the collective punishment of kettling, and the growing privatisation of public space, are all examples of a society which increasingly seems afraid of those who challenge the consensus. All these are symptoms of a polity racked by fear, acknowledging tacitly its lack of legitimacy. Liberal Democrats used to claim to be upholders of civil liberties – on this issue, as in so many others, they have been shown up in Government as a party of time-serving liars.

The new Green Party leader must be an unequivocal defender of democracy – as, indeed, Caroline Lucas has been.  Most importantly the Green Party must reach out to those who have been left behind by Britain’s failing democracy, and must seek to re-engage them in a democratic process.  It’s a challenge about how we as a party conduct ourselves – not just through our own democratic processes, but by reaching out to people who are, frankly, not well-represented in our Party structures; the poorest and most vulnerable.  I believe we are a society that is ripe for a growth in fascism, and in which the democratic model that both the mainstream politicians and the media present is a sort of eviscerated consumerism, in which a concept of “choice” that has little to offer beyond decisions about whether to buy Jaffa Cakes or Hobnobs in the Co-Op has been elevated into a central mantra of Government. As Greens we have to reject X-Factor democracy and engage with people and ideas that are routinely dismissed or even demonised by the Westminster consensus; it means arguing that democracy is not about choices between market options but about mature collective decision-making, based on trust.

One of the most powerful facts about mainstream British politics is the way in which the Labour Party, which claims to speak for the poor and vulnerable, has long since ceased to do so in any meaningful way.  Labour luminaries from Ed Miliband to Liam Byrne are quite happy to speak the language of benefit scroungers, of feral underclasses and of forced workfare while still arrogantly assuming that they have a God-given right to the votes of the people from whom they have walked away and whom they casually demonise.  Understandably, those people have walked away from Labour in their millions since the high-water of 1997.  The new Green Party leader must understand – and act on the understanding – that Labour is a disgrace, and must understand that it is their duty, and the duty of the Party, to speak for and engage with those people – to give them a voice, and hope, and a stake in the democratic process.

Empowerment must be at the top of the Green Party’s agenda.  There is no other party that is seriously placed to act as an advocate of democratic renewal.

Reshaping the economic agenda

Austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity. That simple fact must be at the heart of the Green Party agenda.  Neoliberalism, for all its language about freedom, is a deeply anti-democratic creed; where the enrichment of the few clashes with democratic choice, neoliberals will always choose the former, as a growing track-record shows.   And we as a party need to see that the real fault-line in economic policy is not between Westminster parties but between those who believe in the neoliberal doctrine of austerity – the Conservative Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party leadership, the SNP, big business (obviously),the media, the academic economic establishment – and those who argue for another way – the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, many Labour people, quite a lot of people who have been Liberal Democrats (I’m assuming those with a sense of decency will have torn up their membership cards a long time ago), a growing number of economic commentators, and people of no party who consistently reject neoliberalism at the ballot box and who are the victims of what looks increasingly like the biggest Establishment wealth grab since the Enclosure Acts.

A Green Party leader must explicitly and resonantly reject the politics and assumptions of austerity – once again, Caroline Lucas has led the way, often appearing (along with a handful of Labour and Plaid backbenchers) to be the only voice raised at Westminster against the neoliberal consensus.  And we as a party must be absolutely unequivocal – austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity.  It is without empirical foundation and is manifestly failing.  And that leader must have the understanding and willingness to engage with the alternatives – whether those alternatives come from think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation, or from Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on the commons, or from Richard Murphy’s Courageous State.  There is a ferment in economic thinking and it is a populist movement – consider the way in which UK Uncut has ensured that corporate tax evasion is at the top of the political agenda.

Above all, Greens must be in the vanguard of arguing that market economics is based on illusion and unsustainable. There is a debate about the axioms and purpose of economics that the academy is largely ignoring, focussing instead on the refinement of mathematical models that embody assumptions that are really no more than unsupported ideological statements.  Economics must be at the heart of our agenda – we need to understand the narratives and fears that lead to the paradox that, at the very times that market economics is palpably failing, voters embrace the architects of that failure – the National Government in the 1930s, Thatcher in the 1980s.  Ed Balls has thrown in the towel; alternatives, promoting equity and hope, must come from outside the Westminster consensus – it is for us to create and lead the political opposition to austerity economics.  The evidence is ample and growing; and there is plenty of creative thinking about alternatives.  And we must reiterate – as Keynes did in the wilderness in the 1930s – that economics is a matter for democratic control, and is a matter that should not be the preserve of experts but should be opened up to the full glare of political debate.

And we need to be champions of the public sector.  We need to state clearly and firmly – as the three Westminster parties cannot – that privatisation is, in principle, wasteful and is about consolidation of wealth and power  in the hands of the few; we must learn to argue for a strong, enabling, democratically-accountable and, in Richard Murphy’s admirable phrase, courageous state.  Once again, Greens must stake their claim in the territory from which Labour has walked away.  Murphy’s cappucino cup analogy – the state as the strong black coffee on which the frothy milk of private accumulation sits – is simple, powerful and one that I argue must be at the forefront of Green thinking.

One of the most insidious political propagandas of our time is the belief – underpinning almost every piece of economic reportage – is that the advocates of the market, and of austerity, are economic “realists” – while those who challenge it are well-meaning, ungrounded idealists.  I’d suggest that a key task for the new Green leader is to attack that explicitly.  The Left has to learn to get to grips with economics again, and to press the case that economic policy is about political choices, and connect with the people the political classes have left behind to lead them out of economic fatalism.  It’s a huge task – but a necessary one.

Social cohesion

Not long ago, six children were brutally murdered in Derby by an arsonist. Because the parents were recipients of benefits, a good number of media commentators apparently believe they were asking for it.  The callousness and cruelty of those commentators is something that has come to characterise Con Dem Britain (as Owen Jones argues powerfully here); it is a political position, sanctioned by Ministers for whom off-the-record briefing against the vulnerable has become a legitimate political tool.   As a society we have to ask ourselves how such hatred and loathing has become absorbed into the political mainstream – and I want to see a Green Party leader who will take an unequivocal stand against such hatreds, whether they manifest themselves through racism, through the blaming of women who are victims of rape, to the demonising of those receiving benefits and unable to work.  I want a Green Party leader who is angry – angry, for example, at the spectacle of a private sector company certifying for profit the terminally ill as fit for work, or at politicians who seek to encourage the belief that those on receiving benefits to provide them with mobility are somehow scroungers, and who tacitly encourage abuse and violence against the most vulnerable in society.  If I wanted crocodile tears I’d join the Labour Party; I want real, visceral anger from someone who is willing to speak truth to power.  I want a leader who will stand up to the casual bullying that, more than anything, characterises the temper of Coalition Britain. I want to be part of a party whose leader will call out the most privileged Government in recent years when they make ideological statements about people of whose lives, struggles and problems they are wholly ignorant, making decisions from which they have been shielded by wealth and privilege.

A Green society is an empathetic society. The British political and (especially) media establishments seem to regard empathy as something that is weak and soft.  Greens need to show that it is the only possible basis of a good society; we need to demonstrate that it is the casual cruelty of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat leaderships that is every bit as damaging as their economic dogma.  And we have to have the moral courage – as Labour clearly does not – to resist the easy temptation of easy populism.  Leadership is about reminding people that the world is a more complex place than many people are comfortable believing.

A return to evidenced discourse

I have focussed on three main areas of debate – but underlying all of these is a bigger issue about political discourse, and what seems to me to be an abandonment of evidence in favour of ideological narrative.  We see it in almost every aspect of political life – the use of prejudice and unsupported assertion to rationalise the wealth and power grab of the 1%.  Political debate becomes not an attempt to understand and interpret reality, but a competition between unsupported narratives; the winner is the party that can make the most outrageous lie stick.

The most obvious example – and one which is close to the heart of all Greens – is climate change; an overwhelming scientific consensus challenged by a toxic combination of big oil and tin tabernacle religion.  In this, as in so much else, Greens are on the side of empirical knowledge against the narratives of the powerful.  We’re dismissed by the mainstream politicians as woolly and idealistic – the same politicians who accept all the axioms of market economics in the face of their disastrous consequences, who await the intervention of the confidence fairy, who haven’t got a clue about peak oil.  Sustainability is about the long-term – planning for the next seven generations rather than the next seven months – and that requires rigour and an engagement with the realities of the world around us.  In one sense we’re talking about the revival of the best of the liberal tradition – the adducing of evidence to mould society in the service of ideas, themselves grounded in reason and evidence.  In the face of neoliberalism, there is no more subversive doctrine than to bear witness and to speak truth to power.

It means self-discipline. It means that we need as a party to shed our New Age image – a willingness (figuratively speaking, of course) to ban homeopaths from our Republic.  In challenging market economics and responding to climate change, or in arguing that equality leads to better physical and mental health,  Greens must be the party of good hard evidence.  We have to resist the siren call of woo, whether economic, social or scientific (one of the best things that has happened to the Green Party in recent years has been the adoption of a science policy that points us back towards rigour).  And we need to demonstrate that in a political culture of parliamentary parties fighting illusory battles, while engaged in an ideological enterprise aimed at disguising a power and wealth grab in favour of the rich and powerful, we are the party whose ideals of sustainablility, equality and justice are grounded and realistic.  It’s a huge task – one that in my view Caroline Lucas has risen to magnificently – but we need more of it, and I believe that the new leader has to use his, her or their position to focus Party strategy on that task.

In a political system based on unsupported ideology, the Green moment may be when reality bites back – as inevitably it must.  In a sense that it what sustainability means.

Still no such thing as society?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The steady unravelling of Osborneomics

What’s the big headline message from the Budget? It’s that George Osborne’s economic experiment is, predictably, in tatters.

The Budget announcement provided the latest in a series of bad economic numbers for the Coalition.  Inflation running at 4.5% with, apparently, no prospect of its slipping back; a second consecutive Osborne Budget in which growth forecasts have been slashed; unemployment continues to rise.  The central premise of Osborneomics – that, once freed of the burden of public debt, the private sector will generate jobs in their hundreds of thousands, more than offsetting the jobs lost in the public sector – is looking more risible by the day.

Against this background, Osborne continued to promote regressive economic measures in a budget that benefitted corporations and non-doms, and at least gave the illusion of assisting motorists (one imagines that the 1p cut in fuel duty will very quickly be offset by the price effect of the Coalition’s Big Adventure in Libya).  And, according to indefatigable tax blogger Richard Murphy,  it’s looking increasingly clear that some of the biggest winners from the Budget will be tax evaders.

And elsewhere on his blog, Murphy provides the underpinning for the central critique of Osborneomics – that even if the deficit is the problem the Coalition says it is (and I’m on the side of those who argue that its importance has been hugely exaggerated), it’s a problem of tax revenues, not of spending.  Tax revenues fell off a cliff after the banking crisis of 2008 and the problem has been exacerbated by a huge problem of unpaid tax – the Tax Gap – with the numbers suggesting it’s far bigger than the Government’s (internally inconsistent) estimates suggest.  How will the long-term erosion of Corporation Tax and the gentle treatment of Non-Doms get to grips with this, at a time when cuts at HMRC ensure that tax enforcers are working with one hand tied behind their back?

In the face of this, the only rational conclusion appears to be that this Budget was not about economics, but about ideology and politics.  The few crumbs thrown at Middle England simply cannot disguise the fact that Osborneomics has locked us into a vicious spiral of cuts, falling output and increasing borrowing.  Osborne has form for talking up Ireland as a model economy but I guess this isn’t what he meant.

And the Liberal Democrat contribution to all this?  The cynic in me would like to think it’s the £100m for fixing potholes – an appropriate measure to represent a party of pavement politicians who have so clearly failed to hack the political big time.  Nick Clegg’s message to his activists suggests … clamping down on tax evasion, and the increases in tax allowances (more than offset, of course, by the VAT increase in January) But it’s difficult to see their role as anything beyond providing the lobby fodder that makes Osborneomics possible.