April 30, 2010
Eurotroubles
In the 1999 book Both Sides of the Coin, Oxford economist James Forder argued against European Monetary Union. Like any good economist, he recognised that a valuable analysis necessarily combines economics with politics:
“Politically, poor economic performance is sure to reflect badly on the European ideal. Enthusiasm for European integration cannot possibly follow from economic failure created by EMU. But there is more to it than this simple fact. It is necessary to consider the case of a damaging economic policy being imposed from a foreign city. Imagine the scenario where inflation is a problem in Germany, France and some of the other countries. Interest rates rise, leading to a recession in one of the poorer countries which, let us suppose, did not have an inflation problem, and perhaps even needed lower interest rates. Most of the advocates of EMU, who are also hoping for closer political ties, apparently believe that using the same money will bind Europeans together more than the fact that rich countries will be seen to be imposing pointless recessions on poor ones to push them apart. The truth must be that such circumstances will lead to a growth of nationalist and perhaps even secessionist political movement in the recession-bound countries.”
Forder added:
“I fear, too, that the political movements arising from these circumstances will not all be in most things moderate. High, persistent unemployment breeds racism, not just separatism…It may then, if generally adverse circumstances develop or divergences between country’s interests become too great, not be inappropriate to doubt the hold of liberal democracy on the European political process. This is the greatest fear of all.”
Ten years later we appear to have the makings of an economic situation far worse than the recession-inducing scenario Forder imagined. With the collapse of Greece – and the threat of Spain and Ireland following suit – the Euro looks like it could be in terrible trouble. Things are made worse if Oliver Kamm is to be believed: that there is no procedure for Greece to exit EMU, and that doing so would also induce a devastating run on Greek financial institutions. The Eurozone is, apparently, stuck with the Hellenic albatross. Yet if measures to rescue failed EMU members mean recession-inducing policies in other member states, Forder’s warning of political consequences will be extremely prescient.
But there is more. On yesterday’s Newsnight, UKIP candidate and former leader Nigel Farage was simply delighted. He was able to point out that Nick Clegg had gone on record in the leaders’ debate to point out that proposed Tory migrant caps are largely redundant because 80% of immigrants come from EU member states. Accordingly, the British government cannot legally restrict these people’s movement. [Update: the Clegg figure is apparently wrong].
Many voters, like Gillian Duffy, are already resentful and angry about immigration; the issue was raised in all three leaders’ debates, after all. Furthermore, the last Euro election revealed a predominantly Eurosceptic electorate. As it becomes ever more politically-profitable for anti-Europeans to fear-monger about immigration, and to point out that whilst we remain EU members there is little we can do about it, what will the political outcomes be for British EU membership? Especially if we end up with a eurosceptic Tory government? And what if similar patterns of immigration-resentment are replicated in other EU member states – but are also combined with political resentments rooted in enormous economic failings?
The Treaty of Rome originally sought to bind leading European nations together economically. In large measure this was a bid to prevent the possibility of another devastating European war. However, the aspiration of “ever closer union” and ever-increasing political integration of the EU – with enormous democratic deficits in the EU presidency, commission and ECB, let alone the corruption and unaccountability of the EU Parliament – paradoxically runs the risk of inflaming member state resentments. It is too early to predict anything, but the Eurozone crisis centring on Greece surely has the potential to balloon out into a massive political crisis across the continent.
“Euroscepticism” normally brings to mind distasteful little-Englander xenophobes like Farage, the sorts who typically make-up UKIP and the Tory right. But anybody with an ounce of sense should be deeply concerned about the European project at this crucial juncture. As James Forder put it, he “always thought of himself as a Euroenthusiast until the Maastricht Treaty came to dominate European politics and made that position impossible for a liberal economist.”
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Disclaimer: I was taught by James Forder as an undergraduate.
April 29, 2010
The True Conspiracy of Silence
The Mail today screams of “censorship” of “any debate” on immigration and “contempt” for “millions of voters”. But if anything, “Bigotgate” is proof that the right-wing media holds all the cards – which our politicians have consistently handed over.
Rather than confronting Mrs Duffy on the question of immigration, Gordon Brown dodged her queries and ran away. This is instructive as he did not even need to stake an argument for the many benefits of inward economic migration to the UK: he could have simply pandered to anti-immigration sentiment. His Government has 13 years’ experience, after all. Why not point to 5 restrictive immigration acts, the prevention of asylum seekers from working thus enforcing poverty upon them, and the creation of detention centres for children?
Yet immigration is such a politically sensitive issue that Brown just wanted to get away from the question: any discussion risked handing the Daily Mail et. al. a stick with which to beat him. There is a conspiracy of silence on immigration alright – it centres on the fact that right-wing media hysteria has helped make any sensible balanced discussion impossible. Accordingly, politicians refuse to be drawn if they can help it and offer tough-sounding incoherence if they can’t. The perverse result is that the same right-wing media making sensible discussion of immigration impossible points to the situation of muffled silence they have helped create as proof of a conspiracy that doesn’t exist, but belief in which reinforces the anti-immigration narrative.
So what might a sensible discussion on immigration look like? Those who defend, in particular, Eastern European migrant workers should take the lead of Chris Dillow:
“Such immigrants are contributing to the public finances and have helped the economy grow whilst keeping inflation down. And east European migration is not new; Poles have lived in England for decades with no ill-effects. Far from it; they made a significant contribution in the Battle of Britain.”
One might also add that free movement of labour within the EU allowing Eastern Europeans to work in the UK also allows 2 million Britons to live and work abroad, as well as hundreds of thousands to retire to the coasts of Spain.
On the other hand, a balanced debate needs to recognise the anxieties of people like Mrs Duffy. Many working class communities have experienced rapid change since the 2004 expansion of the EU. Large influxes of foreign European workers have arrived, often forming their own communities and not always “integrating” with the locals. For people who have been born and bred in an area, the sight of their safe-and-known way of life being apparently pushed out by foreign newcomers can be alarming and troubling. In a time of high unemployment, this can also lead to frictions as native people perceive scarce jobs as being monopolised by foreigners undercutting wages.
Of course, justified and understandable concerns about loss of identity and changed community have to be tempered with facts. When people are interviewed on Newsnight (17.45 mins) declaring that foreigners automatically come first on housing waiting lists and are given free beds and TVs, it should be morally (if not legally) incumbent upon every local council to immediately deny these claims and provide the evidence that they are untrue. Likewise national newspapers should ideally stop perpetrating such myths (though the profitability of peddling hate and fear admittedly makes this highly unlikely). When people complain that “foreigners are taking all the jobs”, it should be pointed out that migrant workers are legally paid the same wages as Brits, but that employers may simply be employing harder workers.
That’s what aspects of a sensible debate about immigration might look like. Yet no mainstream politician even attempts to make the detailed case in favour – let alone explain that preventing Eastern European migrant workers coming here is in fact impossible under the terms of the EU.
The conspiracy of silence is partly foisted upon us by a hysterical tabloid press demonising immigration and immigrants. Yet this silence has been happily colluded in by mainstream politicians, who for years have preferred to pander to the press whilst promising – and in New Labour’s case, actually delivering – “tough” immigration measures, albeit only for those unlucky enough to come from outside of the EU.
This, however, reflects more than just fear of the press. It also reveals a fundamental mistrust of voters, and a working assumption that the electorate is too stupid to follow reasoned arguments or come to balanced opinions on immigration. People’s legitimate anxieties about community fragmentation and employment restriction are left to fester rather than being discussed in the open, and set against the benefits that migration brings. Voters are assumed to be nothing more than idiots and bigots. Indeed the most revealing thing about Brown’s gaffe was that “bigot” was his view of an ordinary Labour voter expressing very common views.
Unsurprisingly, bigoted rhetoric and legislation was what aloof politicians presumed allegedly bigoted and stupid voters needed to be placated. Manifestly, it hasn’t worked.
April 28, 2010
Gordon’s Gaffe? How politics makes hypocrites of us all.
Today Gordon Brown called a woman a “bigot” when he thought he was off-air. Here’s the video, courtesy of gloating Paul “Guido Fawkes” Staines:
Staines is predictably having a field day. Like most of the Tory blogosphere, Iain Dale is predictably wallowing in schadenfreude:
“Put Gordon Brown with ordinary members of the public and it was bound to end in tears. He has just been caught on mic calling a woman he had just had an encounter with a “bigoted woman”. Her crime was to question him about core Labour party policies. She had always voted Labour but was deeply unhappy. In the clip I heard, she said nothing which could be said to be ‘bigoted’. Interestingly, Brown’s first instinct was to cast blame to whoever had got him to talk to her. He called it “ridiculous”.”
Brown’s gaffe however reminds me of the issues I raised last week about political hypocrisy, and how fiendish a thing it is. Let’s start from the top.
Is Brown a hypocrite for calling a woman, whom he’d just been nice to on camera, a “bigot” when he thought he was off camera? At one level obviously so: surely if anything counts as hypocrisy, it’s being nice to someone’s face and then saying the exact opposite when you think they’re out of earshot.
But is this the sort of hypocrisy we should or can condemn…without being hypocrites? The answer is pretty obviously no. To say otherwise, we would have to entertain the belief that (say) Nick Clegg or David Cameron don’t sometimes complain in private about the people they’ve just met in public. It’s only human to whinge, after all. When you’re on the campaign trail in a very stressful election, letting off steam when you think you’re in private is what everybody short of sainthood does. What’s special about the case of Brown is that he got caught. Clegg, Cameron and pretty much every other politician in the world will have done what Brown did – they were just alert enough to check their mics were off first.
Accordingly, the Tory condemnation – ironically centering on the claim that Brown is a hypocrite – is itself utterly hypocritical. It could just as easily have been Cameron caught out today. Imagine: a gay activist challenges him on his party’s lack of tolerance for homosexuals, and when D-Cam gets into the waiting car he mutters about “the whining gays”. Hardly beyond the realms of possibility, is it? So the Conservative assault on Gordon Brown stinks of hypocrisy because they all know it could just as easily have been their man instead.
But it doesn’t end there. Because we all know this is politics. What matters, ultimately, is precisely who gets caught. If it had been Cameron putting his foot in it, I and the rest of the left-wing blogosphere would be whooping with pleasure. So in calling the Tories hypocrites for calling Brown a hypocrite, I guess that means I am also a hypocrite. Except that I just admitted it, so maybe now I’m not. Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.
Political Nasties
The Daily Mail has taken a brief break from smearing Nick Clegg, and reverted to type to attack Labour and Gordon Brown. The story in question is particularly distressing. It concerns the awful treatment of Mrs Clara Stokes, who after suffering a stroke was admitted to Luton and Dunstable Hospital. Whilst there she was left unattended and lying in filth, for hours at a time. Understandably, Mrs Stokes’ family are outraged and justifiably they are calling for heads to roll. If I was in their position, I would be overwhelmingly angry too.
But what’s the Mail up to? Unsurprisingly, it’s happily putting the outrage and grief of a bereaved and justifiably emotionally distressed family to politically partisan ends. Yet there’s something odd in the report:
“Outraged at her treatment, Mrs Stokes’s family removed her from the hospital in Luton. She died in a nursing home just days later on February 28.”
Now that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because it’s now the 28th of April. Of course, maybe the Daily Mail only just heard about this story. It’s also possible that they’ve been keeping it on the back-burner, craftly deciding to deploy it the week before an election.
In fact it makes little difference either way. I want to stress again that I entirely understand that Mrs Stoke’s family are outraged, and with complete justification. I can also understand that because they are angry, they want to go all the way to the top and put pressure on the Prime Minister himself:
“Mrs Chambers said: ‘Gordon Brown said the country depended on her for survival but when she depended on her country for her survival where was it? I cannot stand to see Gordon Brown spouting off about the good he has done for the health service. It sickens me. He would never say the same if it were his own mother being treated in such an inhumane way’.”
But the fact is, this is not Gordon Brown’s fault. As Prime Minister he is not in charge of the day-to-day running of any hospitals. He is not even in direct control of the Department for Health. Of course, the PM he bears ultimate responsibility for making Britain a better place – and that’s ultimately what we judge him and his party on at election. But that does not mean that individual responsibility for each individual failings rests at the door of Number 10.
An important reason why this is so is that a Prime Minister can only be judged responsible for the overall achievements of his government; what his party manages to do on average, the “big picture”. And when it comes to the NHS it is simply undeniable that Labour has made big improvements since 1997:
“A review by the King’s Fund shows there have been significant reductions in waiting times and improvements in access to primary care since 1997. Access to drugs and treatments has become more consistent and rates of ‘superbug’ infections have fallen. There have also been sustained reductions in deaths from cancer and cardiovascular disease, and the number of smokers has fallen.”
Of course, there have been failings too. Health inequalities between socio-economic classes are apparently up. And tragedies still happen, as the case of Mrs Stokes so painfully attests. Yet it is simply wrong to blame individual failings on Brown personally, or to simply generalise from one individual case to conclude that Labour as failed. And trumpeting the grief of a distressed family does not change this. Mrs Stokes’ family are rightfully distressed, and they are justified in expressing their anger – but that doesn’t make their testimony the final word. It is cynical politicking for the Mail to exploit a grieving family for their partisan ends.
Which of course is absolutely nothing new. This is the Daily Mail we’re talking about. So why raise it at all? Well, after the election we mere bloggers will reappear from behind the tribal barricades and stop hurling party rocks with such ferocity (some of which will, I suspect, look rather embarrassing post-May 7th). The Mail won’t. It will continue as the mouthpiece of vicious right-wing nastiness.
As I’ve previously remarked, the presence of a viciously right-wing media prepared to distort or condition the truth for political ends is problematic for the workings of democratic societies. Yet the age of declining newspapers poses new problems. The great 19th Century democratic theorist Alexis de Tocqueville was himself no great fan of the free press – he thought it mostly led to libel and inaccurate partisan propaganda. But he believed that it had to be tolerated, as otherwise one would have to embrace outright despotism. And ultimately, Tocqueville was sanguine: the sheer number of newspapers produced in 19th Century America led to all the libel and disinformation cancelling itself out, as each side shouted at the other.
But that correction mechanism is absent from modern Britain. We retain a handful of national newspapers as locals go into apparently terminal decline. Newspapers are now increasingly owned by foreign billionaires, holding expressly political agendas. There are big question-marks over the futures of papers like the Guardian, the Independent and even the FT. The Telegraph is not entirely healthy, and we’re yet to see how Murdoch’s experiment of charging for the Times works out. There is a very real possibility that in five years all we’ll have left are tabloid nasties like the Mail. Blogging will be too disparate to rival the readership of these national organs – and those that cling-on will lack the competition required to drown out their drivel.
The future: looking decidedly bleak on rather a lot of fronts.
April 27, 2010
BBC and Me
The BBC has finally started giving me the respect I deserve, putting me up there with the Foreign Secretary. From their election coverage live text thing:
Shame the BBC can’t get their sources right. I was actually up at Liberal Conspiracy. Hilariously, the Beeb have actually linked to Liberal Conspiracy whilst writing Lib Dem Voice Blog. Oh dear.
(H/t to Alex of Interns Anonymous for putting me onto this one).
LibCon? Be my guest.
I’ve no doubt that Nick Clegg probably does want to kill Labour. He’s certainly to the right of his party, and his brand of “Orange Book” liberalism sits closer to the Tories than the Government. Accordingly, I’m fairly sure that in the event of a hung Parliament Clegg will be inclined to take his party into a coalition with the Conservatives. For whilst Clegg’s weekend rumblings indicated only that he wouldn’t sit in a government with Gordon Brown (leaving the door open, even only slightly, to a de-Gordoned Labour party), he seems serious in his mutterings that if Labour comes third in the popular vote, he will go and sit in the blue corner.
Like Dan Paskins, I think that’s something Labour supporters should just accept:
“It doesn’t matter if the weirdnesses of the voting system mean that Labour end up with the most seats – people would have made it quite unambiguously clear that they don’t want Labour in government. I absolutely shudder to think what would happen if they tried to do a deal with the Lib Dems and stagger on while presiding over the massive cuts to public spending of the kind that Clegg and Cable have repeatedly said that they want.”
Indeed. But what of the excited voices claiming that a Labour defeat will translate into oblivion for the party? I beg to differ.
First of all, even if Labour comes third in the popular vote thanks to our idiotic electoral system Labour will probably retain the largest share of seats. What really matters to a party’s long-term sustainability is not whether they crumple in one popular vote, but whether they can retain a national presence. And with the most seats as the main opposition, Labour will retain just that. Thanks to the unfairness of FPTP, Labour can and will survive even a humiliating third-place finish next week.
What of Lib Dem fortunes should they find themselves at the big table? Clegg claimed at the weekend that he’d want to be PM if a deal was done. Manifestly this would not happen, but Clegg knows this and is bargaining well by opening with a high price. More likely is a Cameron premiership with Vince Cable as Chancellor and Ken Clarke as Treasury Secretary. Which let’s be honest, doesn’t look all that bad. Big cuts are coming, whoever is in power. I’d rather they were made by two serious politicians with economic expertise and experience – it’s certainly preferable to giving Boy George the axe.
But given what the next party/parties in power is/are going to have to do to public services – and the likely jump in unemployment that will follow – one has to look doubtful about Mr Clegg’s long-term popularity. He bounced 10 points in the polls after the first leaders’ debate. Now, perhaps all those new Lib Dem voters have all gone and read the party’s manifesto and thought “hey, yeah, this is the party for me!” More likely, Clegg is popular because he is new, and he is neither Cameron nor Brown – and most voters know next to nothing about his party’s policies. But there’ll be nothing like slashed services and rising unemployment to take the sheen off the Lib Dem’s popularity. Especially as economic hardship will be the first association voters make between that party and power.
And somewhat unfairly this will open the door for Labour to re-appear, sans-Gordon. A coalition government is unlikely to last more than 18-36 months, and if a general election is called within the midst of economic strife Labour will be able to claim – however disingenuously, however opportunistically – that when they were in charge unemployment stayed manageable and the economy did better. With a new leader, that will look strong.
Of course, the Tories may concede something on the electoral reform front. Clegg is hardly likely to budge on this. But then neither is Cameron. So most likely is the promise of a referendum at the next general election. Yet either way the subsequent election will have given Labour enough time to recover – with the added advantage of being the biggest party in Westminster.
The end of Labour nigh? Maybe not, because life just isn’t fair. Lib Dems should be careful what they wish for next week.
April 26, 2010
On Tim Worstall and the Hill’s Report
In response to my post about equality of outcome and its complex relation to equality of opportunity, Tim Worstall left a lengthy comment criticising the methodology of the recent Hill’s Report, which argues that the wealthiest Britons are 100 times better-off than the poorest.
Tim subsequently fleshed-out that comment into a full-blown article for the Adam Smith Institute, which you can read here. His criticism’s being worthy of further consideration, I contacted (upon the recommendation of Stuart White) Dr Karen Rowlingson, Professor of Social Policy and Director of Research at the School of Social Policy, Birmingham University, asking how much there is to Tim’s critique.
Reproduced with kind permission, here’s what she said regarding Tim’s claim that when assessing the wealth of individuals we should also include the effects of the welfare state (as itself a source of wealth):
“I agree with Tim Worstall that we need to consider state pensions and other forms of state ‘wealth’. In a study for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation some years ago we did indeed include state pensions though we did not include social housing (as it is difficult to measure the value of this in the same way as private housing). So I have some sympathy with the point, but do not think this wrecks the Hills report at all because it is standard practice to measure (private, personal) wealth in this way. We may then wish to consider other forms of ‘social/public’ wealth but this is quite complex in relation to housing at least. A key point that I would make here, however, is that there has been a major transfer of wealth from public to private hands in the last few decades, as council housing and nationalised industries have been sold off. The benefits of these transfers have gone to the middle classes leaving those without private wealth further behind. Social housing is now residual and as another blogger on your site [Don Paskini] suggests, worth very little compared to the rising house prices in the private sector.”
Food for thought, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Also, I want to know why the following is – or is not – a silly thought. One justification for not getting too preoccupied with addressing the wealth-effects of the welfare state is that they are in principle available to everyone. Sure, the rich don’t need social housing right now, and can happily go to Bupa for their healthcare. But should they fall upon hard times then the welfare state will be there to house them and treat their ailments. Things do not work the other way around. Hence it’s not clear that the wealth benefits of the NHS are enjoyed only, or simply, by the poorest. The guarantee of those wealth-benefits for all British citizens must be taken into account too, and that surely means that to some degree it makes more sense to focus on private wealth as the relevant measure of inequality.
As usual, responses and vitriolic slander in comments. Hopefully today we can avoid terms like “maximal preference satisfaction” and “positive liberty understandings of choice-selection”. But I don’t hold out too much hope.
April 25, 2010
Jealousy of Trade?
I have a genuine question regarding Lib Dem immigration proposals. Specifically, that employers can only employ foreign workers who have permits to work in that employer’s particular locality.
Presumably this is to stop legal migrants concentrating their labour in one area. But this seems bizarre: don’t legal migrant workers just go where the jobs are? So isn’t telling them they have to stay in one place going to make labour supply more rigid, and thus the labour market more inefficient? Won’t this counter the economic benefits of migrant workers that Nick Clegg rightly trumpets? Aren’t the Lib Dems being, erm, statist and refusing to let the market do it’s thing – like, y’know, liberals would advocate?
More generally, isn’t this proposal reminiscent of Elizabethan poor laws that effectively forced potential workers to stay in their home parish and not follow the jobs – thus restricting economic growth tremendously? And wasn’t the over-turning of those poor laws a major aim of 18th Century economists like Adam Smith and David Hume? Thinkers who stand at the foundation of modern political and economic liberalism?
Presumably Lib Dem proposals can’t be aimed at illegal immigrants, however. Because by definition you don’t ask for an illegal immigrant’s work permit. So telling employers they must ask for such permits won’t affect the employment of workers here illegaly.
Hence I’m struggling to see why Lib Dem policy is not guilty of being either illiberal and economically counter-productive, or just pointless. And honestly, I’m not being snide: I’m genuinely confused.
And I’m not trying to give support to Labour or the Tories. They are dancing to Nick Griffin’s tune far more enthusiastically than Clegg and Co.
But could this be a modern manifestation of what Hume called ‘Jealousy of Trade’? When economic logic dictates one thing but political demands dictate another…and politics trumps economics. To everyone’s disadvantage?
Answers in comments.
One Way to Rape and Get Away With It
There’s an interesting review by Neal Ascherson in the latest LRB (behind the pay wall). Ostensibly it’s of Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual by Michael Scammell. But the essay reads more like a summary of Arthur Koestler’s life, and discusses Scammell’s biography only to agree with it in heaping lavish praise upon Koestler.
Few now know of Arthur Koestler, but suffice to say he was one of the infamous globe-trotting intellectuals of the mid 20th Century. A zionist, then a communist, imprisoned – and tortured – by Franco, he later denounced the evils of Stalinism (particularly in his acclaimed novel Darkness at Noon) and established the first radio station in America broadcasting anti-Soviet propaganda into communist Europe. Jumping from country to country, he spent some time in post-war France in the company of the great intellectuals – Satre, Camus and Beauvoir – arguing politics and taking lovers.
Except, “lovers” isn’t the right way to describe it. At all. As Ascherson’s review makes clear Koestler, the great intellectual and freedom fighter, was a rapist. Or rather, a serial rapist. Here’s some extracts from the essay:
“On separate occasions, a drunken Koestler blacked the eyes of both Mamaine and Camus and punched Beauvoir into bed (she, at least, never forgave him)”.
“Brutally bullied, treated as a secretarial slave and a sex slave when [Koestler] felt like it, Cynthia meekly submitted to a string of abortions over the years”.
“It was now, in 1952, that he apparently raped Jill Craigie, the wife of Michael Foot, on her Hampstead kitchen floor. Scammell is uneasy about this scene, which Craigie didn’t reveal until the mid-1990s, and remarks that ‘the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time.’ True enough, but rape it pretty clearly was, and – as Scammell’s biography shows – Koestler had abundant form in that particular ‘exercise of male strength’”.
So far, so stomach-churning. What you might expect is for Ascherson to condemn Scammell’s biography as being too forgiving. For effectively offering-up an apologist’s account of the Great Koestler’s deeds, masking his brutality behind the facade of intellectualism. Instead, we find Ascherson colluding:
“A pretty woman was not there to be admired, but to be instantly besieged and rushed to her destiny in his bed”
“Women fell too. Koestler was insatiable, lusting especially for upper-class English girls, and he was frank about enjoying a bit of rough. ‘Without an element of initial rape, there is no delight’, as he put it. Most of his conquests seem to have hated that part, but forgave him for the sake of his charm, the electric excitement of his company.”
Koestler was evidently a serial rapist, a man who belonged not in the cafes of Paris but in a jail cell. Yet Ascherson prefers to mitigate his crimes, turning attention to the pretty women who had a “destiny” in Koestler’s bed, where they no doubt secretly enjoyed the “bit of rough”, “conquests” duly forgiving Koestler thanks to his irresistable charm.
Ascherson’s remarks are immersed in such depths of rape-apology that they recall to mind the words of High Court judge Glanville Williams. Commenting upon the possibility of marital rape in 1991 (that’s three years before it was outlawed in the UK, believe it or not) Williams pontificated:
“Occasionally some husband continues to exercise what he regards as his right when his wife refuses him, the refusal most probably resulting from the fact that the pair have had a tiff. … The fearsome stigma of rape is too great a punishment for husbands who use their strength in these circumstances.”
This kind of rape apology has a long history. That women are just complaining about nothing; that “real” rape is conducted by unknown strangers hiding in the bushes at night. When it comes to fêted intellectuals, however, there is a marked tendency for the self-congratulating intelligentsia to airbrush sexual crimes, focusing instead upon the shining genius of the dazzling protagonist. Thus we have Ascherson opening and concluding his article with these choice gushes:
“[F]linging dazzling light into dim minds, Koestler’s career left scorch marks and illuminations across the 20th century. When it finally stopped and the flames died, the darkness suddenly seemed absolute.”
“Elizabeth Jane Howard, who had a brief affair with [Koestler], called him ‘a noble little goblin’. She wrote after his death that he was ‘entirely brave; had courage on every level, physical, moral and spiritual…His capacity for indignation – that invaluable ingredient for making things happen – remained with him always.’ Koestler, who often hated himself, would have been consoled by that epitaph”.
One doubts that the scores of women brutalised by Koestler would have been likewise so consoled. But who cares about them when the intelligentsia is out with its buckets of whitewash? And look, a woman can even be found to write the glorious epitaph. Want to be a serial rapist and have posterity laud you? Just make sure you’re a risqué intellectual first.
April 24, 2010
The Universal Panacea
Yesterday Johann Hari declared “a fact that is usually kept obscure: Britain is a country with a large liberal-left majority.” The evidence? Hari assures us that 85% of Britons want greater equality, 58% support “dramatic” minimum wage increases, and the same number want to ditch Trident. 77% want to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and 53% reckon people are worse when they leave prison than enter it.
We know Hari has problems with statistics. (This is the man who once claimed 90% of the world’s fish have been destroyed by commercial fishing. Certainly the devastation to our oceans has been immense – but just think about what it would mean for 90% of the world’s fish to be gone). Unfortunately for Hari, this latest batch doesn’t straightforwardly translate into a “left liberal majority”. He is conveniently leaving out results from (for example) the British Social Attitudes Survey, which told us that only 21% think unemployment benefits are too low and cause hardship, and that only 38% think the Government should do more to redistribute to the poorest. As the saying goes, you can prove anything with statistics so long as you pick the right ones.
What’s interesting about Hari’s piece, however, is the conspiracy theory running through it. It’s declared loud-and-clear by the title: “The Forces That Have Been Blocking British Democracy Are Becoming Visible in This Election”. Hari’s culprits are foreign-born newspaper-owning billionaires who distort our political discourse to the right, and the electoral system which rewards the entrenched parties of the old right-wing politics.
Of course Hari has something of a point. The extent to which our media is right-wing and pushes an agenda which overwhelmingly benefits a privileged few is profoundly troubling for leftists. And the electoral system certainly needs reform. But what’s interesting in Hari’s piece is the assumption that there is a “real” British democracy that is being supressed by sinister interests and institutional mechanisms. Interests and mechanisms which if over-turned would allow the real democracy to flourish. A real democracy which it just so happens would deliver the left-liberal political values that Hari himself holds. How interesting. How convenient.
As I’ve remarked before, democracy is in many ways the modern cardinal political virtue. Despite being synonymous with anarchy, mob-rule and chaos for most of the past 3,000 years (excepting a 100 year experiment in Ancient Athens, and then 20th Century North America and parts of Europe), it is now seen as the only legitimate political system on the planet – as well as the highest political value. Indeed if you want to smear somebody you don’t like, it’s easy to follow Rod Liddle and tar them as anti-democratic. It’s a guaranteed winner.
It is exceedingly common for people to assume that all their values coincide with democracy. And if those values are at present un-realised, then there must likewise be some unrealised “true” democracy to fight for. There’s a piece up today at Liberal Conspiracy demonstrating exactly this sort of mind-set.
Josh Mostafa wants us to move beyond the false democracy we have now: where voters are not (as we are misleadingly told) “apathetic”, but “disillusioned: they see through the charade, and they feel powerless and angry. It’s not because politicians are ‘not listening’, but because our input as citizens is limited to a choice.”
Apparently we need a more authentic democracy. One that involves lots of civic participation, and a socio-economic base that allows for people to participate frequently in democratic institutions. Some vague reference to the Ancient Athenian practice of assigning public posts by lot is cited in support. Without noting that the Athenians could do this because they had slaves and disenfranchised women to do all their manual labour thus providing a lot of free time for the male citizenry to sit around in the Assembly.
Accordingly Mostafa is pretty thin on details of what the true democracy would look like. A bit like David Cameron and his big society, actually. Something which has apparently been dying on the doorsteps, as voters tell the Tories that they don’t want to run their own services in their free time – they want to walk their dogs and play tennis and have paid-up professionals deliver services for them.
Yet Mostafa is undeterred. The real democracy (still undefined) would apparently be a better Britain. Why else advocate the “complete reinvention of the idea of what it means to be a citizen: a much greater responsibility, a demand on our time”? If the real democracy didn’t promise a better future, why else “can’t [Mostafa] help but look back with admiration on a society that-for all its faults-coined the word ‘idiot’ to mean someone who does not participate”?
But contrary to Hari and Mostafa’s animating assumptions, democracy just doesn’t necessarily track all our values. And it is not always the case that more or more authentic democracy – whatever exactly that might mean – is a panacea for a better society. An excellent illustration of this is provided in Richard Bourke’s book Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas.*
Bourke’s thesis is clear and compelling: that lying behind the Northern Irish “troubles” were rival – and incompatible – understandings of democracy. Loyalists understood democracy as the ratification of institutions and elected governments by simple majority. This was convenient, as the majority of Ulster was protestant and loyalist-leaning – meaning loyalist-leaning protestants dominated politics and manipulated institutions to the advantage of loyalist-leaning protestants.
By contrast, Republican-leaning Catholics were marginalised and disenfranchised by the political set-up of Northern Ireland. For them, a system of elections that kept them in a permanent minority, meant they never had a chance at wielding power and were systematically passed-over in the scheme of patronage and resource-allocation, could not bear the title of democracy. To steal a phrase, this was but the tyranny of the majority.
In Ulster both sides advocated “democracy” and claimed that peace could only be achieved if “democracy” were respected. But with their rival – and incompatible – understandings of what democracy meant this led only to further bloody conflict. It wasn’t until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement radically altered the institutional set-up of Northern Ireland that both sides (and the scores of actors with competing value and power-bases within those sides) could come to apply their respective understandings of democracy to the political set-up of Ulster, without coming into bloody conflict.
The lesson is that democracy is not a panacea for all political ills. On the contrary Northern Ireland shows that there can be many understandings of democracy and which in certain circumstances can clash with spectacularly murderous force. There is likewise no guarantee that simply advocating the monolith of “democracy” (whatever exactly that might mean) will result in all one’s favoured political values ripening to fruition. Not least because one man’s democracy may easily be another man’s tyranny.
In similar vein, we should not forget that a potential result of giving “power to the people” is always that “the people” can use their power in ways we may not like. If we had a referendum on hanging – and what could be more democratic than that? – it would almost certainly be restored. But how would that look for Mr Hari’s left-liberal “silenced majority”? Democracy is not a simple value, and we cannot assume that simply shouting “more” or “better” democracy will give us the happy world we all dream of – in our different ways. Just ask the people of Northern Ireland.
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* Disclaimer: I know Richard. He was going to be my PhD supervisor if I’d stayed in London.
