August 10, 2011
Riot of a Time
Very quick thoughts on the recent riots.
1. Clearly it is true that poverty, alienation, deepdisgruntlement with the police and lack of opportunity are important background facts that any serious attempt at understanding will have to take into account.
2. But these alone cannot explain what was clearly, in many cases, opportunistic theft and glee in destruction.
3. So where do we go from there?
4. I take these to be true and important components of any description of modern British politics and society: that it promotes self-interested greed, materialism, the possession of ostensive goods for status, immediate gratification, and a toleration (even encouragement) of ruthless competitiveness with a deep disregard for the welfare of others. (Call this the “no-such-thing-as-society society”, if you like.)
5. Putting 1 and 2 together with 4, and adding in conditions of spontaneity, anticipated impunity and evident opportunity, a basic yet broadly sufficient explanation appears to emerge.
6. Note that the things described in 4 above constitute the core tenets of the political ideology broadly known as ‘Thatcherism’ (or if you want to bring things up to date post-1997, ‘neo-liberalism’).
7. Also note that the conditions described in 1. have been massively and continuously exacerbated by Thatcherism (or ‘neo-liberalism’), especially if enormous inequality and its debilitating effects on individual well-being and self-respect are included too.
8. So actually this may not be such a mystery after all. If you constantly tell people to be selfish, ruthless, competitive, greedy and disregarding of the welfare of others, then you can’t really be surprised when they behave as they are told they fundamentally are and must be (even if they forget about the bits to do with obeying the law).
9. However, if you happen to be the prime minister just invoke some vacuous covering fluff about ‘moral responsibility’. Continue to condemn loudly, and then get back to promoting the elements in 4. on a daily basis. Without wondering about which ways the knife may cut.
March 27, 2011
On Violence and Recent Protest
As previously noted, I have no problem per se with political violence. Its use and justification must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, with reference to myriad factors such as likelihood to succeed, ability to justify harm to victims, long-term advantages gained, greater evils averted, and so on. Use and justification of violence – like any other tool of politics – depends on firstly the judgement of those who deploy it, and at a later stage the judgement of those (if different) who must assess it (and quite possibly, sentence it). As a general rule, it is wise to hope for better judgement than worse, and from all concerned.
Some situations allow for more judgement, particularly with regards to strategy, than others. The leaders of the ANC, or the ETA, or Hamas, typically control the means of violence in hierarchical command structures. A few men will decide when and where to use violence, and dictate orders to subordinates. In such cases, judgement (including strategic planning) is in the hands of specific individuals with relatively high degrees of control. In turn, moral judgement by other parties as to the justified or unjustified use of that violence will in large measure focus on the decisions of the commanding individuals. The same, incidentally, goes for the aparatus of the modern state – though for complex and important reasons we tend to shy away from recognising the deeply and necessarily coercive natures of the states we find ourselves in and under.
But certainly not all instances of political violence fit this model. When the so-called “Black Bloc” of anarchist militants attacked stores on Oxford Street yesterday they were not part of a (para)military organised hierarchy with a leadership exercising strategic-tactical judgement – still less the militant wing of the 250,000 peaceful marchers congregating in Hyde Park. When UK Uncut protestors launched their non-violent direct action against Fortnum and Mason, they can hardly be held responsible for the spontaneous vandalism that enthusiasts in the assembled crowd promptly launched.
In these latter cases the problem with considering the use of political violence from the perspective of strategic judgement in particular is that it quite simply doesn’t apply. Before Saturday’s outbursts of violent direct action no hierarchy of command could exercise the sort of command and control upon which strategic judgement is predicated. Yet after the violence talk of strategic judgement seems largely besides the point. Insofar as there was any, it was exercised by individuals or small groups in loosely organised ways, in a situation of mass happenings over which nobody had meaningful control.
In turn, this makes the task of passing retrospective moral judgement over the uses of political violence on Saturday a nuanced affair. For a start, we must distinguish between the actions of opportunistic vandals, committed anarchists, young enthusiasts caught up in the moment, and those goaded and provoked by police tactics (if any of the above indeed turn out to apply).
Nonetheless, it remains possible to assume a third-party perspective in order to analyse yesterday’s events. Specifically, we can adopt a position of hypothetical strategic judgement. It is quite sensible to ask: if I had absolute control over what actions people did and did not take yesterday, which would I permit? Personally, I would have preferred an entirely peaceful protest. Not because I’m opposed to all political violence (I’m not), but because yesterday’s outbursts were unambiguously counter-productive, and predictably so.
By contrast, my strong sense is that if the student movement had remained entirely peaceful at the end of last year, it would certainly have achieved absolutely nothing. The broken windows at Millbank and the riots in Westminster attracted levels of attention that peaceful marching never could have. And importantly, I believe that the student violence did not lead to the same outcomes that purely peaceful protest would have (failed to) achieve.
Certainly, the Parliamentary vote was passed and in that sense the student protests failed. Yet the carnage witnessed in Parliament Square – chronciled by myself, Jeremy Gilbert and others in Fight Back! – will have sent a shiver down many Coalition MPs’ spines. Lib Dems in particular must know that the ferocity of student anger means that particular constituency is lost for the very foreseeable future. Tory MPs must know deep down that if things can get that bad that quickly before the cuts have even started to bite, the next 4 years will contain some very difficult fights. Perhaps this will only make the present Government even more determined and bullish – but my sense is that it will quietly make key decision-makers more wary, and Lib Dems more skittish. And even if all of that is wrong, I still think that the student protests stood a better chance the way they actually happened than any peaceful alternative could have offered.
By contrast, Saturday’s march needed something entirely different. It needed the other face of protest: the face of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, reasonable and respectable people calmly registering their disapproval. As Paul Mason has noted, if you can get your entire workforce out to a Saturday demonstration, this means something. The scale of yesterday’s protest, quite obviously not made up of the “usual suspects”, would have been very powerful just because of its sheer size. If only it had been the main news story.
Instead, much coverage was given over to actions initially started by the “Black Bloc” idiots. I call them idiots because that is exactly what they are. Either they like to smash things just for the thrill (in which case they are Basic Idiots), or they are so politically deluded they think throwing paint bombs at TopShop will light the fuse of revolutionary explosion (in which case they are Advanced level Über-Idiots). Whichever camp of idiots yesterday’s Black Bloc thugs fell into, they did the anti-cuts campaign huge damage. By distracting attention to the loudly spectacular and meaningless away from the quietly awesome and meaningful they ruined it for everyone. Except the Tory Party.
Yet, crucially, there is more to say. For although the actions of the Black Bloc started the trouble – as Ryan Gallagher has noted – it is undeniable that many others quickly joined the violence without premeditation. Likewise the kids who stuck it out in Trafalgar Square, or who angrily confronted police outside Fortnum and Mason, cannot be dismissed as merely extended members of the Black Bloc.
Rather, they were the people who don’t any longer see the point of maintaining peaceful protest if the opportunity to descend into confrontation arises. And at a certain level they have my sympathy, for two reasons. Firstly, my generation learned quite spectacularly in 2003 that even enormous peaceful demonstrations of over a million people can make precisely zero difference. Tony Blair invaded Iraq, and didn’t give a flying damn what any of us thought.
Secondly, anybody who has been on even a handful of protests – especially in London – knows full well that the police do not hesitate to use violence, and frequently instigate aggressive confrontational situations amidst previously jovial and peaceful atmospheres. At the G20 protests in 2009, trouble only started when the police moved in – and it is probably significant that following that experience increasing numbers of protestors are drawing the obvious conclusion: if you know the boys in blue will baton you regardless, why wait around passively for them to do it?
It is significant and telling that so many recent protests have seen flare-ups of violence. The Black Bloc has been around a long while now and they cannot alone explain this. A better explanation is that many people – especially the young – are angry, justifiably untrusting of the police, and contemptuous of the old (failed) channels of political expression. As the cuts really start to bite, their numbers must surely increase.
So whilst I regret yesterday’s violence – if I could have had my way, there would have been none at all – I can understand why these outbursts of wider political violence are happening. And they do not make me optimistic about the future.
March 23, 2011
Deep Pathologies
According to Liberal Conspiracy:
“The TUC held a 60-second ad contest, with a theme of public spending cuts, last month and received a record-breaking 41 entries.
Fourteen entries were shortlisted – many of which will be shown on the big screen in Hyde Park at the March for the Alternative.”
This is the winner:
I hope you will join me in agreeing that it is absolutely terrible.
What, exactly, is the video’s message? That ordinary people are in the position of pre-pubescent infants? If so, that’s hardly a very flattering portrayal. Indeed why exactly is this a father-daughter relationship at all? Are the makers of the video implying that our rulers and masters stand in relation to us as controlling parents – more precisely, exploitative and abusive parents? Come to think of it, who is the father figure supposed to represent, exactly? A banker? The Government? If these are metaphors, they are mixed indeed.
And if that weren’t all bad enough, there’s the bombshell closing slogan: “Don’t burden your kids with a lifetime of debt – Oppose the cuts”.
I had to think for a good few minutes to figure out exactly what this was supposed to mean . For it appeared to make no sense at all. But I now think the reasoning is supposed to be as follows: if we force the next generation to bear the brunt of austerity measures now, that is effectively saddling our children with the effects of debt, manifested through the cuts, and that’s not fair, so we must oppose the cuts, so as to prevent the effects of the debt, as experienced via the impact of cuts.
Which is not exactly snappy. But what is worse, the Coalition response is likely to be far more effective, to wit: we quite agree that we must not burden out children with a lifetime of debt! Indeed that’s precisely why we are making these cuts – to bring down the debt!
On every level this video is a disaster. Yet apparently it will be screened at the end of Saturday’s major anti-cuts march in London. Which very much presses the outstanding question: how is it that such a bad video could not only be dreamed up and filmed, but then selected by the TUC as their prize-winner and flagship piece of propaganda?
It would be nice to explain this away as merely the work of “iPhone-wielding wonks“. That it is merely the product of the mental narrowness exhibited by those who spend a lot of time in Westminster, but very little time meeting real people and their real political concerns.
Yet I strongly suspect there’s a deeper pathology at work here. Namely, that many on the left are frankly uninterested in clarity, accuracy or political efficacy. What they are interested in is lumping all their preoccupations together in one ungainly amalgamation of thinly veiled incoherence, and then shoving it down the throats of passers-by whilst expecting them to happily agree and acquiesce.
So, for example, it doesn’t matter whether the father figure is supposed to represent a greedy banker or the Government. Because in the minds of rather a lot of over-enthusiastic and naive leftists, there’s basically no difference between the two anyway. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if depicting ordinary working people as exploited children is offensive to ordinary people and thus strategically stupid. Because what takes priority is not strategy, but coming up with a (supposedly) funny dig at the powers that be (whoever they might be), regardless of whether it alienates the constituency that needs to be convinced.
In short, the point of the video appears not to be the promotion of a well-thought-out political strategy to fight the cuts. Its point appears to be an enthusiastic thumping of the political drum with unreflective self-assured and self-righteous pride. The pathology runs deep: so deep that people involved in political activism can not only come up with it, but that the TUC can in turn endorse a video which shrieks of an incoherence likely to cash out in practical political suicide.
Welcome to politics on the left. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.
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Indeed what makes it all even more shocking is that there are manifestly better videos on offer, and yet which were passed over for the big prize.
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UPDATE – Here’s how to do it properly (nsfw):
March 1, 2011
Gew-gaws
For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, I’m subscribed to the emails of the “Yes to Fairer Votes” campaign. I tend to delete messages on sight, because if I want ill thought out tub-thumping, I can just log-on to the Compass website or read something by the nef.
But I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly it is about the upcoming referendum on voting reform that at best leaves me cold, and at worst makes me frustrated and angry. And I think I’ve worked out what it is.
A friend who knows about these things assures me that the political science literature indicates that moves towards proportional systems correlate with marginal increases in social democracy. Which, of course, is lovely. At least in and of itself. As a good leftist, I’m all for more social democracy.
But the important word in that paragraph is marginal. Because any improvements to our political system – and to our ever more unequal and unjust society – derived from voting reform are indeed going to be marginal. Especially given the way things appear to be going in terms of long-term political and economic direction. (And don’t forget that AV isn’t actually a proportional system, it’s just a marginally – that word again – less worse system than first-past-the-post).
So excuse me for not giving a fig about whether we get AV or not. Because in case you haven’t noticed, the wolves are at the door.
We live in a world in which national elected governments are increasingly unable – or unwilling (and therefore, in effect, unable) – to set economic and social policies as they would choose. Instead, tax rates, labour laws, redistributive policies, investment decisions, employment levels and decisions regarding national borrowing are increasingly subordinate both to the direct and indirect demands of global economic actors that do not answer either to electorates or their representatives.
What the great crash of 2008 taught multinational capitalist behemoths was that they can do whatever they want, and nation-states will bail them out if they fail. Indeed if they do fail, they can just keep doing whatever they want. Including leaning on national governments (directly or indirectly) to uphold and enforce domestic economic arrangements that benefit ever more detached sections of well-off individuals and private corporate actors.
What the great bail-out of 2008 has revealed is that it is certainly not multi-national corporate entities who will pay for the great mess. It is the little people whose collective will has less and less impact upon the determination of available economic – and thereby, social – futures. So because global financial capitalism collapsed under the weight of its own hubris, the British health service must be destroyed, British education must become a socially exclusive and divisive good, inequality must grow, unemployment must rise, care for the vulnerable must be taken away, the social safety net must be removed and millions of people’s lives must suffer.
Amidst all this destruction, the financial behemoths – in whose name your health service is being taken away, your social settlement renegotiated beyond your control – see fit to pay their privileged and favoured sons and daughters bonuses which could keep some families fed and sheltered for several years. Indeed, the terms of our new economic and social settlement are so unjust, so grotesque ,and so deeply unequal that this unashamed self-aggrandisement is simply the unreflective norm for its perpetrators. And rapidly it is becoming the unreflectinve norm – last gasp editorial outrage aside – for the rest of us, too.
It is usually false when people say that it makes no difference which party is in power. British society tends to be a somewhat fairer and less unjust place under Labour than Tories (recent obsessions with spying on everybody and dropping bombs on brown people not withstanding). But when it comes to caring about whether we have, in five years’ time, FPTP or AV to elect a marginally preferable centre-right Labour leadership to replace a vociferously destructive Coalition of right-wing ideologues, seems to me gloriously irrelevant.
And indeed for many its irrelevance may be precisely its attraction. Focusing on the gewgaws and shiny baubles of polling results, campaign tactics and collective enemy-hating serves as a far more enjoyable political pastime than staring into the abyss of what the present bunch of elected representatives is actually doing. It also puts to one side the frankly terrifying promise of a world in which it is increasingly irrelevant which bunch of bastards are elected to rule, and how they are elected, because their room for manoeuvre is so drastically – and increasingly – limited by the realities and dominant conceptions of the ever more global new economic order.
But having said all that, there is perhaps one reason to care about the AV referendum. Which is that a loss would be a terrible blow to the Lib Dems, and would indeed be a fine poke in the eye for Nick Clegg. Clegg. That scion of immense privilege; that craven political bastard-child. The man who under the guise of a Liberal party has enabled and assisted the reversal of a welfare state the likes of which his political forbearers dreamt of, and fought to make reality.
And suddenly, the AV vote acquires a certain sort of meaning – even if only a human, all-too-human one.
January 27, 2011
BMJ Slams Coalition NHS Reforms
I am disgustingly busy at the moment, and for the next two months. So apologies for simply copying and pasting – but this deserves attention.
The British Medical Journal is currently running an editorial about NHS reform, called “Dr Lansley’s Monster”. It is accompanied by a picture of Frankenstein’s laboratory. Here are some passsages:
What do you call a government that embarks on the biggest upheaval of the NHS in its 63 year history, at breakneck speed, while simultaneously trying to make unprecedented financial savings? The politically correct answer has got to be: mad.
The scale of ambition should ring alarm bells. Sir David Nicholson, the NHS chief executive, has described the proposals as the biggest change management programme in the world—the only one so large “that you can actually see it from space.” (More ominously, he added that one of the lessons of change management is that “most big change management systems fail.”) Of the annual 4% efficiency savings expected of the NHS over the next four years, the Commons health select committee said, “The scale of this is without precedent in NHS history; and there is no known example of such a feat being achieved by any other healthcare system in the world.” To pull off either of these challenges would therefore be breathtaking; to believe that you could manage both of them at once is deluded.
Like all the other structural reorganisations of the NHS, this one aims to improve health outcomes. What’s lacking is any coherent account of how these particular reforms will produce the desired effects, a point only underlined by the prime minister’s attempts to justify the reforms earlier this week.
On GP commissioning:
Whatever the eventual outcome, such radical reorganisations adversely affect service performance. As Kieran Walshe wrote, they are “a huge distraction from the real mission of the NHS—to deliver and improve the quality of healthcare” that can absorb a massive amount of managerial and clinical time and effort. Even the earliest days of the transition have proved disruptive, with employees of the doomed primary care trusts and strategic health authorities choosing to jump ship rather than to go down with it.
With an estimated one billion pounds of redundancy money in their pockets, many of the survivors are likely to be employed by the new GP consortiums in much their same roles. It raises the question: if GP commissioning turns out to be simply primary care trust commissioning done by GPs, aren’t there less disruptive routes to this destination?
It ends:
Given their scale, securing these efficiency savings should take priority over the massive upheaval proposed in the new bill. For the time being, we agree with the King’s Fund that those GPs who are successfully involved in practice based commissioning should be given real rather than indicative budgets for some services and their performance monitored closely. All other proposals should be kept on hold, pending an evaluation of whether this iteration of GP commissioning can bear the responsibility that the new bill seeks to place on it. If it turns out that it can, then the full introduction of the government’s ambitious health reforms will have been delayed a few years. If it can’t, then the country—and its government—will have got off lightly.
When what is essentially the official mouthpiece for British doctors is expressing this kind of alarm at government policy, it indicates that a dispositionally conservative body is very out of step with the present administration. Which reinforces a point I’ve already made: that this is a government of radicals, led by some most unconservative Conservatives.
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(Hat-tip to Stuart White, on Facebook).
January 23, 2011
Thatcher or Kafka? A Question of Influence
Ignore – if you can – the intellectual incoherence of this Government’s economic policy. On the one hand it endorses free cross-border capital flows, relatively free-trade in goods and services, minimal financial regulation, and floating exchange rates. But it simultaneously seeks enormous restrictions on the supply of labour. When it comes to immigration, market mechanisms are deemed unacceptable.
The latest front in the war on immigrants is actually another attack on overseas students. In this case, eliminating the Tier 1 Post Study Work Visa that allows international students to live and work in the UK for up to 2 years after obtaining their UK degree or qualification.
As well as being particularly unfair on those who pursue professional degrees (Law, MBAs, Accounting) as it deprives them of the opportunity to receive qualifications through their training contracts, this is likely to disincentivise foreign students from coming to the UK.
The official Coalition position is that it only wants to deter students from staying after they’ve completed their degrees, thus reducing net worker migration. But this is very odd. After all, newly qualified graduates are likely to be the most economically productive and highly-skilled immigrants in Britain. Why, exactly, do we want to turn those people out? Especially as very few are likely to be eligible to claim state support if they can’t get work, hence will likely leave of their own accord.
Admitedly, I don’t know the foreign-student elasticity of demand for UK degrees. But unless the government can show that it is highly inelastic, we have to assume that this measure will have a deterrent effect upon foreign nationals planning to study in the UK in the first place.
So as well as losing potentially highly-skilled workers, we may also loose highly skilled students. Students who pay far more in fees than their domestic peers, at a time when sections of UK higher education funding are being cut by up to 80%. Students who – if they are graduates – make significant contributions to the output and performance of their academic departments, boosting UK institutions vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
It seems likely, therefore, that Coalition policy has little to do with economics, and lots to do with politics. Namely, that anti-immigration sentiment runs high (in no small part thanks to the propagandising efforts of both Labour and Conservatives) and this Tory-led government wants to be the anti-immigration party par excellence.
An apparent problem with this “strategy”, however, is that restricting immigration numbers will only assuage angry voters if they come to believe the immigration “problem” is being dealt with. But they will only come to think that if the dominant social and political narrative deems that immigration is no longer a “problem”.
Except, on this front, the national media has a significant ability to set the general tone and mood. But tabloid newspapers – or more precisely, their owners – have no interest in whether immigration is really “out of control”, or whether Britain is really “full”. What they care about is maintaining the perception that Immageddon looms, and pandering to it. Because that mantra shifts a lot of units.
The media has no incentive to change the anti-immigration narrative, regardless of whether or not the Government really does reduce immigration level. It’s worth remembering, after all, that New Labour’s own highly restrictive anti-immigration laws made absolutely no difference on this front.
Thus: the Tory-led government instigates anti-immigration policies which will not appease anti-immigration sentiment, but which may well exacerbate the UK’s dire economic conditions, in turn further fuelling anti-immigration sentiment. A sentiment which the Tories may (but equally, may not) be able to harness in future elections.
You are now forgiven for thinking: “The inspiration for the Coalition isn’t Thatcher at all. It’s Kafka”.
January 18, 2011
Coalition Lies and the Corrosion of Politics
The sheer scale and breadth of the present government’s pre-election lying and post-election u-turning is quite something to behold. Let’s trot through the big ones, that we actually know about.
First and foremost, the stupendous Lib Dem betrayal on tuition fees. From categorical pledges to oppose all fee rises, to backing a lifting of the cap to £9,000 a year. Quite spectacular, and utterly impossible to hide.
Further down the list and marginally less egregious: Cameron denouncing as “Labour lies” any suggestion that the Tories would restrict bus passes for the elderly, cut the Winter Fuel allowance, or get rid of the pension credit. After promising to protect all these things on national television, the Coalition has done the exact opposite.
There’s also the general category of systematic dishonesty about the NHS. The Tories explicitly promised not to touch “frontline services” and to protect the NHS before the election. They are now instigating massive back-door changes. Changes described by “seriously concerned” leading healthcare experts as “unnecessary risks” which are “damaging” and “potentially disastrous”.
Less enormous (but by no means less important) lies that may have escaped your attention include: pledges from Cameron and Clegg to end child detention for those seeking asylum in Britain which have been totally reneged on, and the recent joke of the departure of Control Orders by the front door and their immediate return via the side window.
Oh, and the emergence of a video showing Cameron claiming he wouldn’t cut EMAs. And pledges to protect school funding from cuts, but instead playing jiggery-pokery with the accounts to disguise reduced funding beneath the veneer of a hollowed-out pupil premium. And Tory promises to protect child benefit. And the building of a massive snooping database both Liberals and Conservatives promised they wouldn’t pursue.
Well, you get the picture. Those are really just the ones that came most quickly to hand. I’m sure there’s plenty more.
But don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with some sop that it Pains Me Dearly to see such dishonesty and untruth in our political class. The magical optimism fairy didn’t pay me a visit last night; I’m still as cynical as ever. Politicians lie (often by unavoidable necessity), and being a Tory/Tory-lite Coalition, this bunch lied even more than usual in order to get their paws on power.
What concerns me, however, is the sheer scale and audacity of the Coalition’s reneging on earlier promises. I know the standard line is that none of this is done joyfully, but is the necessary price to pay for “Labour’s deficit”. (Or even more ludicrously, that this is all the outcome of “coalition policy” produced by party compromise, thus wholly divorced from any pre-election pledges.) But fewer and fewer ordinary voters will believe this (if any still do), and such justification will increasingly have traction only with the already-converted.
The real problem is that systematic large-scale dishonesty in politics is corrosive. The present government’s flagrant disregard for its own promises threatens to undermine even the minimal levels of trust Britons place in their political system. If this goes too far, there’s the very real risk that lying and dishonesty will become normalised. And that spells trouble.
Because if voters conclude that all politicians are lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other, then it eventually becomes acceptable for politicians to be lying mendacious bastards who just say one thing and do the other. As voters become disillusioned and resigned, all political sides play the same dirty game because only suckers remain honest. It’s a downward trajectory from there. And where do you end up? Well, basically, you end up in Italy. Which is not a good place to be.
So whilst I’m not surprised that Nick and Dave are presiding over a pack of lies dealt by a pack of liars, I do wish they would lie a little less – or at least, a little less obviously.
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Thanks to Guy and Paul for helping to assemble and source the compilation of lies in under 30 minutes.
January 5, 2011
Towering Over the Dilletantes
Max Weber worried extensively about the rise of bureaucracy in modern mass democracies. One particular reason was that bureaucracies bred experts, whilst politicians always had to be generalists. Specialist bureaucrats could “tower over” politicians, reducing them to mere “dilettantes”, forced to accept the mandarins’ words as gospel truth.
Yet this was a serious problem: bureaucrats are, by their nature and purpose, anti-political creatures. Their function is to protect and preserve their own departments (and in turn, jobs). What bureaucrats cannot offer is the calling for politics; an appreciation of the grave ethical responsibilities incumbent upon political decision-makers. To the extent that bureaucrats dominate politicians, Weber thought, political nihilism threatens.
After George Osborne’s recent appearance on the Today Programme, however, I’m wondering if in fact politicians are making dilettantes of voters.
Osborne defended the Tory-led government’s deeply regressive VAT rise on the grounds that it would lead to growth in jobs. This set economists like Philippe Legrain spitting feathers:
“The notion that raising VAT will boost employment, as Osborne claimed on #r4today , is voodoo economics.”
And you can understand Legrain’s frustration, having only the day before written a column explaining why VAT rise is likely to increase unemployment.
But here’s the rub. If I’m honest, I just don’t know if Osborne is telling porkies. Because I’m not an economist. Sure, I can think over the rudiments of simplified macroeconomic theory, picked up at A-Level and first-year undergraduate. That higher VAT is likely to depress consumer spending, reducing aggregate demand (ceteris paribus), thus likely reducing aggregate levels of employment.
Yet that’s all very basic and sketchy; I don’t honestly know whether VAT will likely boost or hurt employment. And you don’t either, unless you are a fairly well-qualified economist with lots of good data about the current state of the economy.
Of course, I can go and read economic journals, newspapers and blogs. I can thus try to educate myself, and form a balanced opinion. (And perhaps I should. Though, given that I’m disposed to distrust anything that comes out of Boy George’s pie-hole, I’ll probably come down against him in any case. If he announced that “Madagascar is an Island”, I’d instinctively take that with a pinch of salt.)
But the point is, most voters won’t go and do detailed research (and in all honesty, I probably won’t either). Not because they are (all) lazy and stupid, but because time is precious and life is short. Osborne can make the statement “a VAT rise will boost employment”, and many may simply take him at his word (or do the opposite, depending on their political leanings). In practice, most people have little alternative.
Which raises a problem. When it comes to (especially) economic policy, politicians can play the expert card, and most voters have no choice but to assume that they are not telling brazen porkies.
Now you might think this is ok: that if unemployment doesn’t fall, people will spot the falsehood and kick Boy George out of office. Except there’s 4 years until the next election; employment trends will do a lot of funny things between now and then. And anyway, Tory electoral prospects will be determined by much more than VAT porkies (if indeed they are such). And Dave and Co. know this.
The jargon of economics in particular offers numerous opportunities for politicians to turn voters into dilettantes. At one level, this simply illustrates that democracy is imperfect. (Though the fat man was doubtless right regardless: it remains the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.)
At another level, however, this does illustrate a point I was getting at recently: that democracy (whatever that complex thing turns out to be in the end) may not match up cleanly with one’s other ethical and political values. For example, if we have lots of equal participatory democracy, but a very uneven spread of knowledge and expertise, there’s no guarantee that the illuminati won’t “tower over” the ignorant, regardless.
And it’s simply not clear that introducing more “deliberation”, or “participatory frameworks”, or any other favoured procedural gewgaws of the idealistic left, is going to significantly change that.*
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Isn’t the word gewgaws simply fantastic? Thus, another benefit of reading the classics for yourself. If I hadn’t tackled the obscure Book III of the Wealth of Nations, where would I have come across such a wonderful term?
December 20, 2010
The Conservative Party and Britain’s Universities
When the Browne Review was greeted by the Conservative-led government as a welcome model for higher education reform, it was possible to believe it wasn’t anything personal against Britain’s universities.
Sure, Lord Browne knew nothing about higher education before being appointed. (Though he had been forced to quit as boss of BP after, er, lying in court.) And the rest of the committee consisted of two policy wonks, a journo-turned-economist, a banker and two vice-chancellors…but no student or working academic representatives.
Yet this was a Labour-appointed committee. And if a Labour-appointed committee argued for the tripling of tuition fees and the thorough marketisation of higher education, it was surely harmless co-incidence that such proposals fitted the ideological preferences of the Tory Party like a glass slipper.
When the Conservative immigration cap kicked-in – causing administrative chaos at British universities – it was natural to assume that the Tories just hated foreigners. (“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”) Indeed, when the Home Office website recently appealed for ideas on how to prevent foreign students entering the UK – even though foreign students pay vastly more in fees, and contribute enormously to academic research – this conclusion looked pretty certain.
And when the Browne Review fee-hike was recently passed, it could be similarly concluded that this Government just dislikes the poor. That whilst lecturing us on the unfairness of passing debt to future generations, the ConDems could nonetheless square a cabinet of millionaires (who received their university educations for free) saddling tomorrow’s students with £40,000 of financial obligation.
Thus, the willingness to introduce this headline figure of debt (despite the prospects of dettering those from lower income backgrounds) could be explained under the mechanisms of good, old-fashioned, top-down class war, as waged by the traditional party of privilege.
But when it was revealed that universities would be facing overall cuts of 40% – with 80% cuts to most teaching budgets – it became harder to keep believing that the present government is simply motivated by a ferocious ideological preference for marketisation, plus a desire to kick foreigners and disregard the poor.
Indeed, with the latest announcement that University funding is to be slashed several months before the fee-hike kicks in – leading to a massive shortfall in funding, and some institutions warning they will face bankruptcy – the obvious conclusion seems increasingly unavoidable.
That despite offering fantastic value for money, being consistently rated amongst the top institutions in the world, and playing host to no less than the top-ranked bastion of learning on the face of the planet, this Conservative-led government simply hates Britain’s universities. And quite possibly wants to destroy them.
Or is there some other, more irrational explanation? One perhaps better-fitted to the manic character of this most unconservative Conservative party.
December 14, 2010
EMAs and Real Politics
I am increasingly drawn to the view that politics is not – and can never be – an exercise in “applied ethics”. That means having something like the following views:
By necessity politics is about horse-trading between political actors, and the juggling of competing interests. In particular, “competing interests” will relate both to groups who directly support one’s cause or position (e.g. by voting for, or funding, it), as well as those who oppose it but who nonetheless possess power to be reckoned with now and in the future. Achieving any kind of political decision or action means mediating between competing interest groups, to reach compromises that look nothing like what individual groups would have chosen in an ideal world of directly-applying their preferred outcomes.
What makes things even more difficult is that competing groups will at some level not share the same ethical priorities, commitments or beliefs. After all, if they did share (all) such things, we wouldn’t have any politics in the first place – politics being, by definition, the phenomenon of groups who hold different values attempting to triumph over each other (sometimes by force).
Further, individual political actors by necessity each bring personal histories to the negotiating table (or street rally). As a result, whatever individual actors say and demand is refracted through the prism of their past actions, and judged accordingly by other political agents. For example, if Tony Blair tomorrow called for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, other political actors would not interpret this as a simple application of politically-worked out principle, but as a suspicious u-turn out of step with Blair’s previous commitments and actions.
Given these factors – and more – politics is not, and can never be, the simple application of ethical principles. It is inherently about the struggle of irreconciled values, powers and interests, and then of the search for compromise which (in western democracy at least) stops short of dominating violence.
Within the academy, such considerations are increasingly used to urge a re-thinking of political philosophy, which has for the past 40 years predominantly been conducted as though its core purpose is to distil essential abstract “values”, regardless of whether they can or cannot be applied to the currently existing “facts” of the real world. (See, for example, some of the late work of G.A. Cohen, as well as the vast industry of Rawlsiana). Against this, recent political “realists” claim that if political philosophy is actually to be about politics at all, it would do better to theorise about the process of politics as it actually occurs, not just as some would like it to, in an ideal world.
Of course that doesn’t mean somehow abandoning value assessments. That would be very odd – arguably impossible – and also defeat the point of any political theory that aspires to the name. But it does mean moving away from an emphasis on “ideal theory”, and the formulation of ethical propositions which (purposefully?) bare no relation to the realities of practical politics as it occurs on a daily basis.
Interestingly, the latest findings of the Institute for Fiscal Studies – and my anticipation of the Coalition Government’s response – push me further into this “realist” camp.
The IFS has slammed Coalition plans to remove the Education Maintenance Allowance from Britain’s poorest kids. In brief: the EMA is good value for money, it’s removal is likely to have adverse affects on the attainment and schooling rates of the poorest kids in society, and even if it doesn’t improve educational standards for the worse-off it nonetheless represents a valuable redistributive measure from rich to poor.
I anticipate, however, that the Coalition will respond to this awkward IFS finding the way it’s responded to other reports criticising the regressive and unfair economic policies emerging from the Treasury. Namely, by either ignoring the IFS, or by dispatching Nick Clegg to redefine “fairness”, or “progressivity”, or whatever other word needs to have its meaning re-arranged, so as to save the Coalition (and particularly the LibDems) some face.
And it’s not hard to see why this will (probably) happen. If the Government were to back down on EMAs, it would arguably look weak. After going through the fire of recent protests – which, after all, turned rather violent – the Government is unlikely to want to appear as though it lacks resolve. It is also unlikely to want to appear as though its policy terms are dictated by some poxy little think-tank. And in particular, the men who lead this Government – proud egomaniacs all, as by necessity politicians generally must be – are unlikely to want to admit that they have gotten a big, controversial policy decision wrong – especially at this late stage of the game.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Most (and I stress “most”) Conservative and LibDem MPs are not out to intentionally hurt the poor. It’s just that they have very specific ideas about how best to help the poor (ideas which are usually wrong – but that’s another story). And it happens that for whatever reasons (multiple cognitive biases not withstanding) many have already decided that scrapping EMAs is compatible with these pre-existing ideas of how to help the poor.
Unfortunately, this means that the IFS report is not going to change anything – even though it shows that if politicians do want to help the poor they should keep EMAs.* The reality of politics as it happens in practice is thus that even when ethical principles (“help the poor”) are agreed upon, it does not mean policies which promote those principles are actually enacted (or in this case, kept). Other principles – including (especially) power-considerations and demands of strategy and positioning – trump ethical principle.
If that’s not a demonstration of how politics quite quickly and easily becomes anything but “applied ethics”, then I don’t know what is. Of course, it doesn’t follow that there will be no value in formulating principles of abstract ethical value in the academy. But it may well bear on the question of whether the formulating of such abstract values has anything to do with politics, and thus whether such an activity can really be called political philosophy.
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* And as a general rule, if the IFS says something, it’s a much better guide to reality than any political party’s approved policy documents.
