Left, right and centre
Wednesday, 16 February 2011 17:25 | 
Author: Administrator | 
Ages of Reform: Dawns and Downfalls of the British Left
Kenneth O. Morgan
IB Tauris, 328pp, £27.50
Kenneth Morgan is a leading historian of 20th-century Britain, as well as a Labour peer. His books cover a wide range. He has published biographies of three Labour leaders – Keir Hardie, James Callaghan and Michael Foot. His account of the post-war Labour government still holds the field. Moreover, as befits a great Welsh historian, he has published several studies of the greatest Welshman of modern times, David Lloyd George – including a notably revisionist account of the peacetime Lloyd George coalition that demolished the hostile stereotype bequeathed by embittered Asquithians and self-interested Conservatives. Morgan’s forays into Welsh history have thrown brilliant light on the rebirth of Wales, now given tangible form in the beautiful Assembly building in Cardiff Bay.
His latest book is a collection of essays, yet it Is by no means a hotch potch. The first 120pages are devoted to Liberals, mostly British, but with a fascinating glance at the rich traffic of ideas between American progressives and the British left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The remaining pages explore the highways and by ways of British Labour history from the end of the 19th century to our own day. A rich miscellany of evocative figures marches through his pages: Lord John Russell, the diminutive mover behind the Reform Act of 1832; the richly ambiguous but consistently Wales-friendly William Gladstone; the inevitable, protean Lloyd George; the “tiger” Georges Clemenceau; the Atlanticist Hugh Gaitskell; the prophetic pragmatist “Nye” Bevan; and even the dour Gordon Brown. But they don’t march in step. Morgan’s title speaks of “the” British left, but his contents show that there have been several British lefts, not one.
The collection opens with an essay on the Reform Act 1832. As Morgan points out, the prevailing interpretation has emphasised the act’s limitations: the minimalism of its extension of the suffrage, the survival of rotten boroughs, the continued prevalence of wholesale bribery at election times and the survival of aristocratic power and privilege. He concedes that all of this is true, but adds that the charge misses the point. The “Great” Reform Act deserved its name. It was both product and cause of an “explosion of politics” whose contemporary monuments include movements such as Charter 88 and Democratic Audit, and the devolution statutes passed at the end of the 20th century. It did not give Britain’s ancien régime its quietus – we are still waiting for that 180 years later, as the continued existence of the House of Lords amply demonstrates – yet it was the first big breach in the dyke surrounding it. The road from 1832 to universal manhood suffrage in 1918 and universal adult suffrage in 1928 was circuitous and stony. But once the first step had been taken, further steps were inevitable – sooner, or later.
Morgan concedes that this is old-fashioned Whig history; but it is none the worse for that. As A J P Taylor pointed out, the alternative to Whig history is Tory history. However, it has some unexpected implications. Morgan is a Labour man through and through, and yet, perhaps unintentionally, he gives the great Liberal emancipators of the 19th and early 20th centuries a more exalted place in his pantheon than their Labour successors. His best writing comes in his accounts of the extraordinary symbiosis between Whigs and Radicals that made the Reform Act possible, of the somewhat similar relationship between Gladstone and a later generation of Radicals, and of the creative duumvirate of Asquith and Lloyd George that tamed the Lords and laid the foundations of the welfare state.
His account of Labour’s “age of reform” is more complicated. Morgan traces the evolution of British socialism, from the pioneers’ emphasis on fraternity, through the planning enthusiasms of the new Fabians of the 1930s and Anthony Crosland’s egalitarianism, and on to the “verbiage of extreme vacuity” espoused by Tony Blair. He argues convincingly that Labour intellectuals and politicians contributed more to the astonishingly peaceful liquidation of the British empire than they have been credited with giving. He charts the rise, fall and rise again of Labour’s fond belief in the American special relationship from the days of Ernest Bevin to those of Blair and Brown. More skittishly, he wonders why republicanism has figured so little in Labour’s mind-set, and concludes that a time may yet come when the monarchy will follow the pound sterling and the established Church into“the dust-bin of history”. The tone of joyous enthusiasm that resounds through his treatment of the Whig, Liberal and Radical reformers of the era before Labour’s coming of age is
largely absent from this section, however.
Particularly revealing is Morgan’s treatment of the two great left Labour heroes of the recent past, Bevan and Foot. Neither, he shows, was quite what he seemed. Bevan was not the wild Welsh wrecker, driven by a monstrous ego and Incapable of compromise, that embattled Labour right-wingers imagined he was. But nor was he the turbulent tribune of an insurgent proletariat, locked into the unchanging verities of his socialist faith, that his supporters took him to be. As his skilful handling of the British Medical Association in the late 1940s showed, he was a pragmatist and an accomplished negotiator.
He belongs in “Labour’s Valhalla”, as Morgan nicely puts it, but as “a giant as much of the centre ground as of the left”. In the author’s depiction, the same is true of Foot. For most of his political life, Foot was an outsider looking in: the keeper of the Bevanite holy grail, the scourge of Gaitskellite revisionists, and the unyielding champion of unilateral nuclear disarmament. But in the 1970s, and particularly during the ill-starred Wilson-Callaghan regime of 1974-79, he became an insider looking out. He was, as Morgan puts it, “central to the existence” of that regime, first as employment secretary and then as leader of the Commons. With the possible exception of Callaghan, no one did more to keep that increasingly leaky ship afloat – even to the point of accepting the punitive public expenditure cuts imposed by the IMF in 1976. Party unity came first, socialism a long way second. There is a melancholy symmetry to Morgan’s mosaic. As he depicts them, the leading Whig and Liberal reformers of the 19th century were bolder than they seemed, their20th-century socialist and Labour successors less so. The emancipatory tide let loose in 1832 flowed on – albeit feebly at times –until the Attlee government of 1945.
After Labour’s defeat in the 1951 election, however, it petered out. The first Wilson government was a disappointment, and the second a disaster. Despite significant constitutional reforms, the Blair-Brown regime made its peace with the voracious, masterless capitalism that goes by the name of globalisation. Yet if ever there was a time for a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism, it is now. Liberal emancipation is no longer enough. Marx has more to teach us today than Gladstone or Lloyd George.
DavidMarquand was MP for Ashfield (Labour) from 1966-77. His most recent book is “Britain Since 1918: the Strange Career of British Democracy” (Phoenix, £14.99)
Review originally published in The New Statesman 14th Feb 2011
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 16 February 2011 18:32 )
Towards a Realignment of the Mind Wednesday, 16 February 2011 17:18 | Author: Administrator |
Compass Lecture: ‘Towards a realignment of the mind’
4. No single school of thought or political tradition can offer an adequate explanation of the crisis or an alternative to the neo-liberal world-view that has now collapsed. But clear that Marx has more to say to the world we now live in than Keynes, or Hayek, or their followers. Of course, Marx was wrong about many things. The proletariat has not become the grave digger of the bourgeoisie and is not going to. But he was supremely right about the essential dynamic of capitalism: the restless, voracious, all-consuming search for profit that replaces traditional social ties with the cash nexus, commodifies social institution after social institution and breaks down what Marx and Engels called the ‘Chinese walls’ dividing nations, traditions, and ways of life from each other. ‘Globalisation’ we call it now. Marx foresaw it 160 years ago! 5. Now look at three major implications for our own country: (i) for the public realm or public domain; (ii) for the distribution of resources and life chances; (iii) for democracy.
6. First the public domain or realm – the realm of equity, citizenship, professional duty and civic virtue – as opposed both to the market domain of buying and selling and the private domain of love, family and friendship. One of the greatest achievements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was to carve out such a public domain from the private and market domains. Examples include a career civil service, recruited on merit, with a professional obligation to tell truth to power; the so-called ‘gas and water socialism’ that transformed living conditions in London and the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North; Ll.G.’s National Insurance Act and Bevan’s NHS among many others. But a dangerous flaw: the architects and guardians of the public domain did not take adequate account of the inherent voracity of capitalism that Marx diagnosed. They assumed that their achievement was safe; that the institutions and norms of the public domain were and would remain inviolate; that its frontiers could only expand, and would never contract. They failed to see that the market domain is inherently expansionist; that, given half a chance, it is likely to invade or annex parts of the public domain, twisting it out of shape and corrupting its institutions and guardians. 7. As untamed capitalism roared ahead that is precisely what happened. Gingerly at first, but then with mounting confidence, first the Thatcher governments, and then the successor New Labour governments, pushed back the frontiers of the public domain in order to enlarge the market domain. An enormous range of public assets were sold off to private purchasers. More insidiously, privatization went hand in hand with marketization: a long-drawn-out process of rhetorical and ideological colonization of what had been the public domain, uncannily reminiscent of the Soviet party state’s colonization of the institutions of civil society. Wherever possible, public bodies and institutions that embodied the non-market values of service and commitment to the public good were forced into a market mould. The political world increasingly took it for granted that the private corporate sector provided the sole model for the efficient management of resources. In short, globalisation abroad; privatisation and marketisation at home. As the parliamentary expenses scandal showed, the result was an ominous slide back to the ‘Old Corruption’ of early capitalism. 8. The coalition has followed where the Thatcher and New Labour regimes led. A classic example: the Browne review of university finance and its sequel. Student protests over threefold fee increase, and the accompanying public debate, missed the crucial point. Debaters focussed almost entirely on the impact of the proposed fee increase on individual students and potential students from different backgrounds. The larger questions – about the university's contribution to the common good and the health of Britain’s public realm – were hardly asked. But the fee increase was a logical consequence of the review’s recommendation that state funding for undergraduate teaching in the arts and social sciences should be eliminated – and of the assumptions underpinning it. For Browne and his colleagues, higher education – higher education in the humanities and social sciences, anyhow – is a private good. It gives graduates a higher individual standard of living than they would otherwise have had. Since it is a private good – a commodity – it should be traded in the market place like other commodities. Subsidies and controls over student numbers that distort the market for higher education should be eliminated. The market for higher education should be freed up in the way in the way that markets in sectors such as electricity, gas, telecommunications and financial services have been freed up. Then free choice by economically rational students, and competition between universities for their custom, will (horrible phrase) ‘drive up standards’. 9. The kindest word for this is barbarism! The university should be, and has historically been, a place where young people have learned to think critically, to question assumptions, to see the world and themselves in new ways, to grow. In helping students to develop in this way, universities have served public purposes, defined by a conception of the public good encompassing the whole society and not just university graduates themselves. They have belonged, by definition, to the public realm. First, Browne and his review team, and then the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have sought, quite deliberately, to change all this: to remove universities from the public domain and transfer them to the market domain. The university is to become a kind of supermarket satisfying individual wants. The very words ‘public good’ have disappeared from the higher education policy-makers’ lexicon. 10. If the Browne Review were an isolated example, that would be bad enough. But it’s not. It’s part of a syndrome that goes back to the early 1980s. (It was the last Labour Government that set up the Browne review, remember.) Michael Gove’s education policies and Andrew Lansley’s health white paper are other examples. As of now, the consequences are uncertain. What matters is the social vision they encapsulate. At its heart lies the totemic term, ‘choice’ – free choice by atomistic individuals, satisfying individual wants through market competition. As a gnomic phrase in the government’s health white paper puts it, ‘People want choice’. Not long ago, Alan Milburn used exactly the same phrase in a speech defending his health policy, explaining that ‘we’ lived in a ‘consumer age’. In short, choice by individual students in higher education, choice by individual parents in the school system and choice by individual patients in the health service.
11. Britain never egalitarian. But thanks to ‘war socialism’, it was more egalitarian in WW2 than ever before or since. Rationing, price controls, food subsidies, free school meals, huge increases in direct taxation (standard rate of income tax at 50% plus top rate of surtax of 48%) and, not least, full employment. Real wage incomes rose substantially, salary incomes and income from property fell. Labour was explicitly egalitarian, Conservatives not. BUT little change in income distribution in post-war period. Under Conservatives in 1950s, social spending kept share of GDP; real wages rose; tax-benefit system made household incomes less unequal than they would otherwise have been. Measure of income equality is Gini coefficient’. Don’t have figures pre-1961 when coefficient was 0. 261. BUT note: it fell very slightly in 1970s; by 1980 only 0.257. 12. BUT in 1980s, inequality rose markedly. By 1990, Gini was well over 0.3. Under Major, it stayed on a plateau; and under New Labour it rose again – not as far or as fast as under Thatcher, but still significantly. (By 2007/8 it was 0.36.) Much lower than US, but higher than all EU member states except Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal and Rumania. And of EU member states, UK is 8th in numbers living in poverty. Only Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Greece, Spain and Estonia have more. Summary: (i) UK has become markedly more unequal in income distribution since mid-80s, and is more unequal now than when New Labour came to power. The trend towards greater inequality has continued irrespective of party holding office. (ii) The UK is an outlier in Europe, both on poverty and on income distribution. Only a fringe of eastern, southern and one far western countries have more poverty and less income equality. We have more poverty and more inequality than any country in heartland Europe. NB. This did not happen because evil New Labour ministers knowingly betrayed their egalitarian convictions. It happened because they were dazzled by the fetish of economic growth and assumed that runaway capitalism offered the only sure path towards it. 13. Social consequences. A lot of evidence that inequality breeds dysfunctional societies and that, in the developed world, wealthy societies with high levels of inequality are more dysfunctional than less wealthy ones with lower levels of inequality. On virtually every indicator – life expectancy, mental illness, drug abuse, crime rates, obesity, educational achievement – the US is one of the most dysfunctional societies in the developed world. It is also one of the richest and least egalitarian. The UK is not in the same league as the US, but on many indicators it is an outlier in Europe on social indicators as well as on inequality: more drug abuse, lower levels of trust, more mental illness, shorter life expectancy, more obesity, more teenage births, higher rate of imprisonment.
14. Often assumed that capitalism and democracy are natural bed fellows. This explains Western approach to the ex-Communist world after the Soviet empire collapsed: if capitalist market economies were installed there, democracy would automatically follow. The truth was (and is) very different. TRUE that democracy flourishes only in capitalist countries. BUT the converse patently untrue. China, Pinochet’s Chile, apartheid South Africa, Russia, etc. etc. etc. If democracy and capitalism are bed fellows they are very quarrelsome ones. Why? Because they are intrinsically in tension. Basic promise of democracy: equal citizenship; power accountable to all those affected by it; no one has the right to rule over others without their consent. Basic reality of capitalism: unequal rewards; power is not accountable. 'Exit', but not 'Voice'. AND there is an in-built tendency for the inequalities generated by capitalism to spill over from the economy into the polity: unequal resources for political competition undermine the promise of equal citizenship, despite lip service to it. MOREOVER, on some assumptions (Hayek; early opponents of democratisation like Lord Salisbury) the equality which democracy brings to the political sphere generates pressures for resource redistribution to override market outcomes – which break the mainspring of the capitalist market economy. 15. But in the modern world regimes have to look democratic to be legitimate. [China the big exception?] So a dilemma. How can we get the quarrelsome bed-fellows to lie peacefully together? How reconcile the outward appearance of democracy with the inner reality of untamed capitalism? Answer in the contemporary UK: Stefan Collini’s ‘market populism’. Citizens become customers. Voting becomes shopping. Politicians become pedlars of illusion, promising ever greater individual benefits that no one can deliver. Disembodied, charismatic leaders float above a population of atomistic individuals, and derive their legitimacy from their claim to have a direct line to the popular will. Thatcher and Blair the prime examples, obviously. And the fates of Major and Brown show what happens to leaders who can’t hack it in this nasty new world. Cameron’s none too subtle appeal to Islamophobia suggests that he is determined to avoid that fate.
16. The total picture is bleak: a partially crippled public realm; one of the least egalitarian and most dysfunctional societies in Europe; a debased version of democracy that mocks the dream that democrats have cherished from ancient Athens to modern Cairo; the virtual disappearance of the language of the common good. BUT not unrelieved gloom: in contemporary Britain, with all its ills, you can detect growth points of a better society. I shall turn to them in a moment. 17. But a word of warning. Turbo-capitalism has been legitimised by a peculiar, passionately held moral vision. According to this, the unhindered, rationally calculated pursuit of individual self interest in free, competitive markets is not just economically efficient, but also morally right. Only if individuals are free to pursue their rationally chosen interests as they wish will they be moral beings. Collectivist interference would turn them, in Mrs Thatcher’s famous phrase, into ‘moral cripples’. This vision was enormously powerful, and enormously seductive. It bathed flagrant disparities of reward in the odour of sanctity. It told the ultra-rich that they were morally entitled to their riches and the aspirant middle and working classes that if they obeyed its precepts, they too would be rich – or at least richer. Above all, it ran with the grain of a culture increasingly in awe of the Holy Trinity of Choice, Freedom and the Individual, in virtually every sphere from the most intimate to the most public. 18. It is time to dispel the cloud of unthinking reverence that now surrounds the Holy Trinity. Not all choices are morally equal. Freedom as a source of human flourishing is one thing; freedom to ignore the common good quite another. The Individual, yes: but not as a bloodless abstraction detached from society and history. We can’t go back to the highly structured, hierarchical and in many ways oppressive society of the past even if we want to; and I don’t. But we should challenge the debased moral vision that permeates the culture of the twenty-first century. 19. The question is how? This is not a manifesto; I carry no magic bullets. But I offer two thoughts. First, there are resources in our public culture, informal institutions and social movements on which we can build. London Citizens is an example. The nationwide protests against library closures are another. Compass itself is a third. The burgeoning environmental movement is a fourth. These show that though the language of the common good barely figures in political discourse any longer, the notion itself is still alive. 20. Second, the same is true of each of our three main political traditions. Edmund Burke, often called ‘the father of conservatism’, thought society was a ‘partnership’ between between the living, the dead and the unborn – implying an ethic of stewardship that challenges turbo-capitalism at its heart. John Stuart Mill, the prophet of social liberalism, is rightly seen as the champion of individual freedom. But the freedom he prized was not freedom to accumulate or exploit. It was freedom to develop and grow, through arduous practice in civil associations and local bodies, and in doing so to contribute to the ‘worth’ of society. And the ethical socialists of 100 years ago espoused a vision of ‘fellowship’ or fraternity, rooted in the lived experience of the Labour movement, and immeasurably different from the statism and economism of New Labour. In different ways, all of these point the way to a democratic republican politics of civic engagement, mutual learning and public reasoning. 21. In Not for Profit, a philippic against instrumentalism in higher education, the American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, spotlights what I see as the moral foundations of such a politics. Democracy, for her, is not just head-counting. It must be informed by ‘critical thinking’, ‘daring imagination’ and ‘empathetic understanding’. It depends on ‘rich human relationships’: on ‘the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects’. So here is another trinity, human rather than holy: imagination, empathy and critical thinking. The task for us is to make that trinity sing. Last Updated ( Wednesday, 16 February 2011 18:18 ) The Changing Social Structure of Society Wednesday, 16 February 2011 17:08 | Author: Administrator |
Lecture delivered to the College of Bishops,
1. Begin with a favourite quotation from George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: [The English revolution] will not be doctrinaire, or even logical….It will show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened. But all the same, it will have done the essential thing. It will have nationalised industry, scaled down incomes, set up a classless education system. Its real nature will be apparent from the hatred which the surviving rich men of the world will feel for it. 2. The title I’ve been given is a bit confusing. What is the difference between ‘social structure’ and ‘society’? I shall interpret it as follows: I shall focus on three themes: (i) The decay of structure; (ii) The rise of inequality: (iii) The paradox of choice.
The decay of structure 3. When I was growing up in the still war-scarred Britain of the 1940s, the social world seemed composed of massive, seemingly impervious, above all lasting structures. Some were big privately owned companies: ICI; Richard Thomas and Baldwins; Woolworths; Marks and Spencers; Morris Motors; Rolls Royce; Courtaulds; the ‘Big Five’ high street banks. Complemented by newly nationalised concerns like British Rail, National Coal Board, National Health Service, BOAC, and, of course, the BBC (nationalised in 1927). 4. Flanking these were mass trade unions: the NUM, the TGWU, the NUGMW, the AEU among others. Trade-union density of around 45% Mass political parties: Conservative Party with nearly 3 million members in 1951; Labour Party with nearly 900,000. (Liberal Party had virtually disappeared after failure of Ll G’s attempt to re-vitalise it in 1920s.) Classes: ‘middle class’ and ‘working class’ roughly 1/3 to 2/3. All this reflected UK’s position as, above all, an industrial society, dominated by manufacturing: total employed in manufacturing was more than 8 million. 5. These structures shaped most people’s lives, expectations, hopes. They also shaped the assumptions of the politicians and officials who ran the state. Fundamental to thinking of left and right was assumption that history was moving inexorably from small to big – from buccaneering entrepreneurial capitalism to managed corporate capitalism. (Baldwin and ‘Peace in Our Time’ speech.) 6. Other apparently solid structures in the background: the monarchy, the Church of England, Parliament, the Civil Service, the Cabinet, the self-regulating professions. National Service (not permanent, of course; only introduced in 1938 (?), but general assumption was that it would last for a very long time if not for ever.) Above all, the family (the most basic structure of all, and in outward appearances the most solid and permanent). N.B. Don’t idealise the highly structured society of the past. In many ways very cruel. Homosexuality and abortion illegal; death penalty. Turing driven to commit suicide; backstreet abortions. Innocent people were hanged. BUT structures did provide a context and meaning for individuals. 7. Now all changed, ‘changed utterly’. (BUT no ‘terrible beauty’ has followed, as in the Yeats poem.) List the most obvious changes: * Virtually all the firms I mentioned have disappeared; only M&S remains. Big Five banks have all undergone mergers of many kinds, and no longer confined to retailing – as became clear in 2007/8 crash. Of nationalised concerns only NHS and BBC remain – though BBC has been subject to heavy pressure to commercialise. * Trade unions I mentioned have either disappeared (NUM) or merged to form new, octopoid giant unions. Trade-union density down to 28%. Political parties more like ageing discussion groups than mass parties in the old sense. Conservative Party down to 250,000 and Labour to 166,000. (Liberal Democrats are 60,000). * Class still exists, but its meaning transformed. Essentially UK now has vast middle class, fringed by a tiny class of super-rich (on which more later) and a more substantial but still minority under-class, more like Marx’s lumpenproletariat than the working class of the post-war period. NB Accent! More precisely: the salariat is now bigger than the working class; the largest single occupational group are ‘managers and senior officials’ (15%). ‘Process, plant and machine operatives’ are the smallest.(7%) and ‘elementary’ 12%. * And, cliché of clichés, massive de-industrialisation has transformed economy and occupational pattern. A post-industrial rather than industrial society (though beware simplifications here: are we a ‘post-agricultural society?), in which services hugely outweigh manufacturing. 1978-2007 manufacturing jobs down from 6.9 million to 3.0 million. Finance and business services up from 2.5 million to 5.7 million – getting on for twice the manufacturing figure! (Mining, which accounted for more than 800,000 in post-war period, now accounts only for 3,000.) * Other apparently solid structures: National Service abolished in the 1950s. Church – you will know more than I do, but NB churchgoing in 15-19 age group falls by 69% since 1979; in 20-29 age group by 61%. The monarchy still exists, and Queen very popular, but strange personality of Prince Charles and antics of younger royals have undermined respect for the institution. Not at all certain it will last; unlikely to do so without drastic changes. * Cabinet now part of the ‘dignified’ rather than ‘efficient’ constitution. (Though not very dignified, by all accounts!) Self-regulating professions have been subject to repeated assaults by government, and have lost much of old autonomy. Parliament and Civil Service, particularly the former, have slumped steadily in public esteem since 1960s. Govts. not trusted to tell the truth; civil servants not trusted to withstand illegitimate political pressure; support for the system at an all-time low – even before explosion of popular rage at parliamentary expenses scandal. Election turn-out tells the same story. In 2005 Labour Party won the election with 35% popular vote and 22 % of those eligible to vote. Non-voters outnumbered Labour voters. * Family: badly battered too. Births outside marriage up from 12% in 1980 to 43% in 2005. Divorce up from 24,000 in 1958 to 155,000 in 2005. Proportion cohabiting approximately doubled since mid-eighties. Marriage rate plummets. Abortion rate in 20-24 female age group up from under 10 per cent in 1969 to 30 per cent in 2005. Proportion of children in lone parent families tripled since 1972, and is now 24%.
The rise of inequality 8. Britain never egalitarian. But thanks to a form of ‘war socialism’, it was more egalitarian in WW2 than ever before or since. Rationing, price controls, food subsidies, free school meals, huge increase in direct taxation, with standard rate of income tax at 50% and top rate of surtax of 48% and, not least, full employment. Real wage incomes rose substantially, salary incomes and income from property fell. That was the context of Orwell’s pamphlet, and set the scene for post-war. 9. Labour was explicitly egalitarian (though more so in 1950s, when HTNG said ‘socialism is about equality’ than in 1940s). Conservatives not. BUT little change in income distribution in post-war period. Under Conservatives in 1950s, social spending kept share of GDP; real wages rose; tax-benefit system made household incomes less unequal than they would otherwise have been. Measure of income equality is Gini coefficient’. Don’t have figures pre-1961 when coefficient was 0. 261. It fell very slightly in 1970s; by 1980 only 0.257. 10. BUT in 1980s, coinciding with the dissolution of structure, inequality rose markedly. By 1990, Gini was well over 0.3. Under Major, it stayed on a plateau; and under New Labour it rose again – not as far or as fast as under Thatcher, but still significantly. (By 2007/8 it was 0.36.) Much lower than US, but higher than all EU member states except Greece, Lithuania, Latvia, Portugal and Rumania. 11. Gap between income shares of top and bottom quintile of population shows a similar pattern. 1977, bottom fifth got 10% total disposable income; top got 36%. By 2007/8 bottom got 7% and top 42%. And gap between ‘very, very rich’ at the top end of the income distribution and the mean is now enormous. 47,000 in top 0.1 per cent of population (enough to fit into Manchester City’s football ground.). Their average pre-tax income is £780,000; average for all income taxpayers is around £25,000. 12. Other indicators. Of EU member states, UK is 8th in numbers living in poverty (ie. incomes below 60% of median income,) Only Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Greece, Spain and Estonia have more. Marketable wealth: top 1% have 21% of marketable wealth, v. 17% in 1991. 13. Summary: (i) UK has become markedly more unequal in income distribution since mid-80s, and is more unequal now than when New Labour came to power. The ownership of marketable wealth is also somewhat more unequal. Ie. the trend towards greater inequality has continued irrespective of party holding office. (ii) The UK is an outlier in Europe, both on poverty and on income distribution. Only a fringe of eastern, southern, and (on one indicator) far western countries have more poverty and less income equality. We have more poverty and more inequality than the whole of what might be called ‘heartland Europe’. 14. Social consequences. A lot of evidence that inequality breeds dysfunctional societies and that, in the developed world, wealthy societies with high levels of inequality are more dysfunctional than less wealthy ones with lower levels of inequality. On virtually every indicator – life expectancy, mental illness, drug abuse, crime rates, obesity, educational achievement – the US is one of the most dysfunctional societies in the developed world. It is also one of the richest – and the least egalitarian after Singapore. The UK is not in the same league as the US, but on many indicators it is an outlier in Europe on social indicators as well as on inequality: more drug abuse, lower levels of trust, more mental illness, shorter life expectancy, more obesity, more teenage births, higher rate of imprisonment.
The Paradox of Choice 15. The great paradox is that, contrary to much journalistic comment, large majorities in all occupational groups and among supporters of all parties – Conservative as well as Labour – believe gap between rich and poor is too large. And disapproval of size of the gap has grown since early-1980s! In other words, we – the people – have not wished to arrive at the destination we have reached. So how can we make sense of the path we have in fact followed as a nation? I can’t answer that question with any certainty. All I can do is to offer some thoughts. 16. I suggest the key lies in my first theme, the decay of structure. The ties that bind give way to the ties that fray; Exit takes the place of loyalty. Choice becomes the supreme good: Fate is spurned. The massive, solid structures of the past offered context, meaning and shape to individual lives, but they were also constraining and even inhibiting. The security they offered was a security of fate, of destiny. If you were born in a mining village, you followed your father down the pit: only an extraordinary mixture of luck, ability and tenacity would enable you to escape that fate. To a lesser extent the same applies to the other structures – private as well as public – that I mentioned. London printers were as fated as miners: you couldn’t get a job as a compositor unless you’re father had been one. 17. So too with class. Class was a fate; class loyalty was almost a fate (though there were deviants); party loyalty was a sort of fate as well. (Think of canvassing in housing estates where ‘our people’ lived: the activity was a ritual re-enforcement of the ties of fate.) Trade unions tried, with varying degrees of success, to become institutions of fate and of the loyalty implied by fate. And the same applied, in different ways, to the institutions of the state, in part, no doubt, because of the experience of war and of victory in it. It also applied to the family. 18. The decay of structure has gone hand in hand with – is both cause and consequence of – the shift to Exit and to Choice. Everything is in flux: liquid. Jobs for life have gone. (They never really existed, of course, but they were an aspiration, and for a long time an achievable aspiration for many.) Class is no longer a fate in the old way: nor is party. Electorates are volatile; sexual partnerships are volatile; for an increasing number marriages, like jobs, are no longer for life. Church-going ceases to be part of a way of life, and becomes an optional extra. The monarchy is there, but the royals (apart from the Queen) are inglorious bit players in a soap opera. 19. And all this applies to the economy and to the public culture. The market-place is exalted as the realm of choice; state intervention, still more state control, is denigrated as an impediment to choice. So is collective action; and therefore (not intentionally, but nevertheless inescapably) political action, and in a very profound sense politics as such. The shift in the culture and the public discourse started in the 1970s, in response to the crisis of stagflation that overwhelmed the interventionist governments of Heath, Wilson and Callaghan and to the excesses of trade union power and of the misplaced loyalties that sustained it. But it swept through the political and moral economy only in the 1980s – and became dominant in the 1990s and 2000s. 20. But there is a built-in paradox about choice, as some economists and democratic theorists have long known. A myriad of freely-made, rational individual choices can produce a collective outcome that no one wanted. This was the essence of Keynes’s critique of free-market capitalism: it was rational for individuals (and firms) to cut back their spending in bad times, but the net effect was to make bad times worse. There is a further paradox as well. Once choices are made, it is hard to unmake them; once a given path is chosen, it becomes more and more difficult to diverge from it. (Economists call this ‘path determinacy’.) In other words, choice becomes fate: Exit, as Hirschman pointed out, erodes Loyalty – and so encourages more Exit. 21. That, I believe, is where we are now. We don’t like being here. We would like to go somewhere else. But we don’t know how. We are caught in a trap that none of us made individually, but that all of us made collectively. 22. The great question: can the trap be sprung? Two thoughts: (i) Andrew Gamble’s brilliant Spectre at the Feast points out crises bring opportunities as well as pain. They can sweep away old mental lumber and lead to new directions. So far, this hasn’t happened this time. Political and economic leaders are all trying desperately to return to a cleaned-up version of business as usual. At present they seem to be succeeding. BUT wrong to assume permanent success. The deeper forces that led to the crisis are still in play, and tightening environmental constraints will make them sharper and stronger. (ii) We can’t go back to the heavily structured society of the past. But we can, and should, re-think the Holy Trinity of Choice, Freedom and the Individual that has dominated public discourse in the last 30 years. I believe that there are resources in our traditions and culture that might enable us to do this. (In his quirky way, Orwell was one exemplar.) Another was John Stuart Mill; and I want to end with my favourite quotation from On Liberty. ‘The worth of a State’, he wrote, ‘is the worth of the individuals composing it. A State which dwarfs its men will soon find that will small men, no great thing can be accomplished’. Mill’s vision of the individual was essentially republican; and I think we may now be approaching a republican moment. It’s up to us to make the most of it. Why the left is losing the crisis Friday, 21 January 2011 03:52 | Author: Administrator |
The coalition government has been in power for six months. It has attracted endless speculation but, as Churchill said of Russia, it remains 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. The last election was a watershed of some kind, but no one knows where the path ahead now leads. By the narrowest of margins, the Labour Party has elected an accomplished and steely new leader, on a ticket of change, but it remains to be seen if he can wean his party away from the tribalism and statism which have cursed it for ninety years. For the moment, the Liberal Democrats are locked into the coalition, but the social-liberal tradition represented by Simon Hughes and Charles Kennedy may yet prove strong enough to break the lock. We know what the Coalition's ferocious Spending Review contained, but we don't know if the projected cuts will actually be made. Despite his macho rhetoric, Osborne has left himself much more wriggle room than many assume. My hunch is that there will be plenty of such revisions before the end of this parliament. Above all, we don't know what project the Coalition hopes to pursue, or even if it has a project beyond staying in power. Yet three things are reasonably clear. The first is that ministers have so far shirked the hard task of bringing David Cameron's enticing vision of a 'big society' down to earth. If the term means anything, it means diversity, pluralism, a freer rein for the 'little platoons' once hymned by Edmund Burke and a correspondingly more modest state. At first, the coalition seemed to be moving in that direction. It hoped – or said it hoped – for a more consensual, open-ended and grown-up way of doing politics than what we have been used to. It has delivered something, but not enough. The coalition partners seek consensus between themselves, but they treat the opposition in the old, adversarial way. The taunting and shouting in the Commons chamber is as tiresome as it used to be. True, the chief fault lies with Labour. To take just one example, its charge that the coalition is bent on destroying the welfare state risible. Osborne hopes to bring the ratio of public spending to GDP back to what was before the crash – not exactly Armageddon. Meanwhile, the government parties have made no attempt to meet the opposition half-way on the central issue of deficit reduction, or to involve civil society and the House of Commons in the search for solutions. Imagine a Government that really wanted a new kind of politics, fit for the big society of Cameron's dreams. How would it have approached the biggest hole in the public finances since the end of the Second World War? Surely it would have encouraged searching select committee enquiries, preferably in public, into its macro-economic thinking and the options that implied before completing the Spending Review. Leading supporters and opponents of the Government's approach would have been cross-examined; local authorities, non-governmental organisations, local authorities, industrialists and trade-union leaders would have given evidence; parliament and the public would have had a chance to appraise their arguments. Nothing of the sort took place. The Spending Review was preceded not by open discussion in a non-partisan setting, but by the secretive arm-twisting and shady horse-trading that are the hallmarks of the old politics; the deliberate opacity of its small print is reminiscent of Gordon Brown at his worst. And that is only one example of the hole at the heart of Cameron's dream. For the Liberal Democrats, the projected referendum on the alternative vote (AV) is the harbinger of and a vehicle for a new politics. As a hardened supporter of proportional representation, I hope that the referendum goes through and that AV is carried. Yet the notion that AV would create a vibrant and pluralistic democracy is poppycock. It would be a great improvement on the present system: at least, no more MPs would be returned on minority votes. Besides, the mere fact of a change to the electoral system would probably make further changes easier to achieve. But it is not proportional representation and it may produce less proportional outcomes than the present system, though The Liberal Democrats would probably (but not certainly) do better than they do now. That leads on to the second point of clarity. Despite the blue-skies rhetoric beloved of David Cameron, and echoed less and less plausibly by Nick Clegg, this is a government spawned by fear: indeed, by a wave of fear that has washed across the entire European continent and lapped the shores of the United States. As everyone knows the Liberal Democrats campaigned against the Conservative line on deficit reduction during the election. After the election, they changed their minds. Had they remained true to their election promises the coalition would not exist. So why the volte face? There are two possible justifications for it – first, that a swollen, wasteful, oppressive public sector is crowding out a lean and hungry private sector, eager to expand employment and increase investment; second that it was essential to promise drastic spending cuts to fend off a Greek-style sovereign debt crisis. The first is low-grade saloon bar economics: a throwback to the so-called 'Treasury View' of the 1920s that Keynes demolished eighty years ago. As he showed, crowding out cannot take place when private demand is flagging. So far from crowding out the private sector, public spending kept it alive in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and deserves the credit for its growth in the first three quarters of this year. The Conservative Party is not exactly famed for economic literacy, and it may well be that their spokesmen believed what they said during the election. But it is inconceivable that Chris Huhne and Vince Cable, two of the most economically literate members of the House of Commons, believed – or still believe – anything of the sort. Unlike the crowding-out theory, fear of a sovereign debt crisis was not self-evidently absurd. Markets are notoriously fickle and foolish beasts, and it is conceivable that adverse market sentiment might have plunged Britain into a Greek-style crisis had the British government seemed unwilling to make any economies. Unfortunately for the fear-mongers, however, the choice was not between Osborne's cuts and no cuts. It was between Osborne's cuts and Alistair Darling's. To make the confidence argument stick, the Coalition has to show that Darling's cuts would have precipitated the confidence crisis from which Osborne's bold, brave cuts have saved us. It has shown no such thing. On the contrary, it has insisted ad nauseam that Labour was planning cuts too (which, of course, it was), and that the difference between its plans and Osborne's is not all that great (which is also true). But that means that Darling's cuts sufficed. Quite apart from that, the coalition has sedulously ignored the immense differences between the volume and nature of Greek and British indebtedness before the Greek crisis broke. Britain's public debt is long-term; and the creditors are mostly British. The kindest interpretation of the Liberal Democrats' volte face is that they succumbed to panic along with their coalition partners. If they were alone, that would be the end of the story. Sadly, they are not. The British experience is part of a wider European, indeed North Atlantic, experience. In the immediate aftermath of the crash of 2008-9 it looked as if the neo-liberal hegemony of the preceding thirty years was over. Keynes had come in from the cold; government walked tall; space had opened up for collective action, liberal social democracy and a revitalised public domain. That, it seemed, was the meaning of Barack Obama's victory in the United States and of Gordon Brown's glory months as global economic saviour. We know better now. All over Europe, 'fiscal consolidation' – code for spending cuts – is the order of the day. The neo-liberal hegemony of the recent past was not destroyed, only dented. This is not quite true in America – at least, not yet. But only the very brave or very foolish would bet much on continued economic literacy in Washington in the years ahead. In truth, most of the developed world seems bent on marching back to the deflation of the 1930s. The procession is not confined, as left-wing commentators tell themselves, to private-sector elites and their hangers-on in the media, the prosperous middle class, and right-of-centre think tanks,. Everywhere, and not just in Britain, liberal social democracy is in retreat. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party vote share is back to where it was in 1914. In Italy, Berlusconi still commands the political stage, despite repeated scandals and grotesque vulgarity. In 2009 the German Social Democrats achieved their worst result since the foundation of the Federal Republic. In France, the Socialists are in demoralised disarray. In Spain, the odds are that José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will lose the next election. In the US, the only question is how much damage the Republican resurgence will do to the Obama administration. As the social costs of the crash make themselves felt, the voters of the developed world are turning right, not left. True, fiscal consolidation – or, rather, the social consequences of fiscal consolidation – has provoked angry and sometimes violent protests all over Europe. But the protests testify to the weakness, not the strength, of liberal social democracy. They are safety valves for the bitterness and despair of the defeated, kicking against the untamed capitalism of our time, not harbingers of a left-of-centre renaissance. Clear too are the stark implications for what used to be called the left. The untamed capitalism that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s was not forced upon reluctant societies by sinister vested interests and hidden persuaders. It was the work of freely elected governments, backed, for most of the time, by the peoples that had elected them. It was resisted by society's losers, but these were a minority. Faced with a choice between liberal social democracy and an increasingly confident and aggressive right, the winning majority opted for the latter, not because anyone forced them to, but because the right had a better story to tell. For a while, Blair bucked the trend, but he did so by stealing the right's clothes. He was right-wing in economics, and left-wing in culture: that was what the term 'New Labour' meant. In a society suspicious of established authority and yearning for personal authenticity and self-fulfilment, and at a time when the Conservatives seemed sunk in homophobia, xenophobia and Europhobia, it was a winning formula. But once the Conservatives had succeeded in repackaging Blairism for their own purposes, under a leader who was patently more comfortable with the culture of authenticity and self-fulfilment than Blair's buttoned-up successor, the New Labour game was up. The great question for the future is whether liberal social democrats can learn the lesson, not just of their recent set-backs, but of the wider story I have tried to tell. It will not be easy. The ancient Marxist myth of false consciousness dies hard on the left. It says that, if hitherto left voters swing to the right, it is because they have been led astray by racists or demagogues, or because they have been seduced by false promises, or both: in short, because they don't understand what their true interests are. Unfortunately for its purveyors the myth does not stand up. There was plenty of false consciousness around, but its chief repositories were the leaders of the social-democratic left, not the voters who deserted them. The deserting voters sensed that the statist paradigm in which their erstwhile leaders were trapped was a busted flush: that, as the American political economist, Charles Lindblom, once put it, the central state consists of 'strong thumbs and no fingers'; and those strong thumbs were no longer enough to induce lasting change. New Labour's sad fate is a classic illustration. It began well. The Human Rights Act, the Belfast Agreement, devolution in Scotland and Wales and, to a lesser extent, the creation of the London mayoralty took power away from the central state, implying a politics of power-sharing in place of the power-hogging that had been part and parcel of the British social-democratic tradition for as long as anyone could remember. But power-sharing did not last. In its second and third terms New Labour turned back on its tracks. Ministers and officials succumbed to a corrosive culture of mistrust, and the fetish for targets and audits that reflected it. Initiative after was designed to force centrally-determined 'reforms' on the harassed professionals who knew more about the issues involved than did the reformers. The strong thumbs of the state remodelled intermediate institutions from hospitals, to police forces, to schools, to local authorities, to universities; and curbed civil liberties in the name of the so-called 'war on terror'. The results were bizarre. New sites for civic engagement emerged in the non-English periphery of the Kingdom, embedded in diverse new political cultures. England suffered relentless centralisation at the hands of an increasingly hubristic state. And – irony of ironies – the results were nugatory. At this point, the big society comes back into the story. At the moment, it is little more than an attractive slogan. Most Labour politicians and Labour-friendly commentators have either ignored it or rubbished it as camouflage for a return to the bad old days of the dreaded Margaret Thatcher. Less partisan commentators have generally dismissed it as rhetorical flim-flam, with no practical meaning. The truth is both far more complicated, and far more interesting. Despite its Conservative provenance, the social vision it implies is not uniquely Conservative – with either a big or a small 'C'. It certainly chimes with a well-worn conservative tradition, going back to Macmillan, Churchill and Disraeli. But it also chimes with the social liberalism of the later John Stuart Mill – and with the non- or anti-statist socialist tradition of G.D.H. Cole, the syndicalists, William Morris and Robert Owen. To have any hope of recapturing the initiative, liberal social democracy must drink again from that spring. Ed Miliband, over to you. By David Marquand, originally published on the 22 November 2010 in The New Statesman Last Updated ( Wednesday, 02 February 2011 05:29 ) |
