December 5, 2010
The Most Odious Vice, or The Coalition’s Dangerous Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is an inevitable component of politics. Individuals must promote institutional and party commitments they personally disagree with. Parties must sometimes make dishonest pledges to attain power, in the name of achieving a putative greater good. Governments may sometimes secretly contravene their expressed public policies, in the name of national security or prosperity.
But as David Runciman reminds us, an essential task in modern politics is spotting which forms of hypocrisy are necessary costs of functioning government, and which cross the line into moral and political unacceptability.
Consider the dissonance between the Coalition’s plans for economic retrenchment and student finance.
On the one hand, our Government claims that debt is A Bad Thing. Accordingly, it aims to eliminate Britain’s structural deficit in four years. Apparently we must not “burden” future generations with debt. (Ignore for now that Britain has run a structural deficit since the 18th century, allowing us to build railways, urban centres, vast road networks, a free health service and world-class education provision, as well as fighting two world wars and lots of smaller ones. Apocalyptic pronouncements about national debt can be calmly offset by picking up a history book.)
On the other hand, the Government prepares to introduce legislation dramatically increasing the level of fees students must pay to attend university. This means graduates will likely start their careers burdened with £35-40,000 of debt. If debt is such a Bad Thing that a national sovereign state can’t run a structural deficit, why must young people seeking educations – educations which current cabinet ministers received for free – become personally indebted to such enormous levels?
Debt dissonance might not be so bad on its own – but it’s underpinned by a much bigger piece of hypocrisy.
The Tories have constantly insisted that we are “all in this together”. But clearly we are not. Disability living allowance and housing benefit are being cut. The unemployed will undertake forced labour for failing to work phantom jobs in a recession-stricken economy. Poor children will lose their EMAs. Mobility allowances for the disabled and elderly will be removed, confining them to care homes and ending their independence. The list goes on and on – but time and again it’s the poorest and most vulnerable who will suffer.
At the other end of the spectrum, Philip Green avoids billions in tax but is invited to advise the government on how to implement its cuts. Vodaphone systematically avoids billions, and the Treasury effectively gives them the green light. Kraft gives Britain the same treatment. Each year, rich individuals and mega-corporations use the world’s offshore hidey-holes to deprive our Revenue of at least £25billion.
We are blatantly not all in this together; the hypocrisy of telling us otherwise stinks. But hypocrisy is precisely an odious vice; it really gets up people’s noses. Although they are not reacting from revulsion to hypocrisy alone, the outrage that hypocrisy generates has surely animated the student protests and popular anti-avoidance campaigns of recent weeks.
Ordinary people have a formidably capacity to sniff-out intolerable hypocrisy. When even the Daily Mail starts slamming tax-dodgers, a Government should watch out. Politicians can get away with a lot, but outrageous hypocrisy is off the menu. Middle England – feeling the squeeze, and worrying about its kids’ futures – may soon lose all patience with this administration’s predilection for talking out of both sides of its mouth. The Coalition is more fragile than its core ideologues seem to recognise.
November 23, 2010
Pointless or Damaging, and Depressingly Boring
The Coalition has announced an immigration cap of 21,700 skilled non-EU workers to be allowed into Britain. Yet from an economic point of view, this looks like a very suspicious policy indeed. Consider:
“Last year 50,000 visas were issued for tier one (highly skilled) and tier two (skilled) workers from outside the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).”
Given that this is skilled workers we’re specifically talking about, these are not people coming here to “exploit” the British benefit system (which is anyway one of the stingiest in Western Europe). These 50,000 came last year seeking work. And presumably there was work, or else they wouldn’t have come in the first place (skilled workers who’ve obtained visas tend to arrive in foreign countries with jobs lined-up already).
Now, if that work has in fact all disappeared since last year, then the market signal for these skilled workers will cease. These skilled workers will therefore stop coming to Britain, of their own accord, making an immigration cap redundant.
So the Coalition’s cap is apparently either pointless or economically damaging. It’s pointless if the skilled jobs have already gone. It’s damaging if the cap represents a reduction of available workers for which there is in fact market demand. Because that means fewer skilled workers in Britain contributing to economic productivity, paying taxes, and spending money on British goods and services.
Of course, because the Coalition cannot cap EU-based immigration, it may simply be that some of the skilled jobs are taken by foreign workers from EU countries instead. Or that because of loopholes favouring corporations, the cap is in fact a facade because skilled foreigners will be let in through the back door (as some critics are already suggesting). But if so, the cap is simply back to pointlessness.
So what is the Coalition up to, with its pointless-or-damaging cap?
One likely solution is that this has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with politics. The Tories have long cultivated an electoral strategy based on appealing to (vicious) anti-immigration sentiment, successfully out-flanking even a very immigration-hostile New Labour. Having so long talked the talk, the Tories must now walk the walk.
The fact that most anti-immigration sentiment is not in practice aimed at highly-mobile, high-earning, skilled foreign labour – but at poor ethnic minority communities in inner cities, or “flocking” Eastern Europeans – is rather besides the point. What the Tories need is a concrete policy they can tout as being a restriction on immigration. That the actual consequences of the policy may be pointless or damaging isn’t relevant. What matters is precisely that there is an anti-immigration policy to be touted.*
And, ultimately, I’ve little interest in the sort of outraged commentary that now typically follows from sections of the left. The sort that denounces the Tories as risking Britain’s economic well-being by introducing a policy whose purpose is to placate and please an (essentially) racist anti-immigration constituency. Of course, that is all true. And it is, no doubt, rather distasteful. But it’s also utterly unsurprising, because basically this is just what happens in politics: economics (or whatever) is twisted to the purposes of the party in power.
What I find slightly more interesting is that Labour currently finds itself largely stumped in terms of articulating any kind of effective response. And that’s primarily because it has spent a lot of time cultivating the same (essentially) racist anti-immigration constituency the Tories are now pandering to. So even though New Labour is now officially over, we’ve yet to see how the party is going to move out from the shadow of Tony, Gordon, Peter and Alastair on this most divise and difficult of issues.
–
* One could of course expend some words regarding the Lib Dems too, but then what really is the point?
November 16, 2010
Domination and Welfare Reform
Over the past two decades, philosopher Phillip Pettit and historian Quentin Skinner have led a revival of interest in how freedom can be compromised when people lose their independence. Rather than freedom being lost only when a person’s actions are interfered with, Pettit and Skinner argue that freedom can also be lost if one is “dominated”, i.e. if one lives under the arbitrary power of another. As Stuart White helpfully put it:
“It is about not being subject to another’s power to intervene in one’s life at their discretion. Freedom is, in this sense, independence – the power to refuse dependency on others and their uncertain goodwill.”
Although Skinner and Pettit have tried to present this conception as a radical (and now somewhat lost) alternative to a “liberal” view of freedom, the historical story is rather complicated. In particular, theorists in the 18th century were very much alive to the threat that arbitrary domination posed to freedom – in the form of the power of rulers over subjects. Thus, Montesquieu made as a central pillar of his weighty treatise The Spirit of the Laws the claim that the state must be ordered by legal structures which constrained the actions of rulers just as much as of subjects, precisely to ensure the freedom of the latter from the dominating despotic ambitions of the former. (This vision has now come to be known as that of a “Rechtsstaat” – the state as ordered by law, not the whims of political rulers).
This view of liberty in modern mass-society was developed by French liberal Benjamin Constant, with his famous distinction between the liberty of the “ancients” (living in small, militarised, republican city-states) and that of the “moderns” who must appreciate the new and previously unknown conditions within which freedom could be practically and conceptually realised. Like Montesquieu, Constant saw legal structures as paramount: “[modern liberty] is the right to be subject only to the laws, such that one cannot be arrested, detained, executed, or mistreated in any way by virtue of the arbitrary will of one or more individuals”.
Indeed contemporary theorists are likewise alive to the changed conditions of freedom for “moderns”. Chris Brooke has specifically urged Pettit and Skinner to realise this point:
“[I]nsofar as we are egalitarian citizens today, or consider that perhaps we have a serious prospect of becoming such…this may owe a great deal to the “awesome” power (that is, quite straightforwardly, the power to keep us in awe) of the more or less Hobbesian social institutions that we have constructed for ourselves since Hobbes’s time; in particular, to the bureaucratic welfare state that is able, among other things, to humble the proud, to enforce the law, and to deliver a uniform mass education.”
But equally, we must remember that the “bureaucratic welfare state” may offer not only the potential for escaping or ameliorating domination, but also become a source of domination in its own right. And given the literally awesome power of the modern state, that domination can be profound and extremely serious – even if actualised in what may appear to be petty and minor ways.
Which brings me to my point. Amidst the new “get tough” reforms to welfare being pushed through by the coalition, there’s something that’s been widely overlooked:
“But unemployed people who persistently fail to turn up, or turned down and refused to apply for jobs, will lose their £65-a-week job seeker’s allowance for up to three years.
The allowance will be removed for three months on a first offence, six months the second time and three years on the third breach of the new rules – with no right of appeal.”
If that final caveat – that there will be no right of appeal – for those who have their benefits withdrawn is true, it is very worrying. Such reforms will put an enormous amount of arbitrary power into the hands of (presumably) administrators at Job Centres. As somebody who has had (albeit mercifully brief) experience of claiming unemployment benefit, the prospect of being made dependent upon the whim – and just as importantly, the mistakes – of Job Centre staff would fill me with dread.
For amongst the hard-working and well-intentioned, there are also the petty tyrants, the plain vindictive, and those who see everybody sat in the chair in front of them as a work-shy scrounging layabout – as well as the plain incompetent. To put the power of what is almost literally life and death – for what else is withdrawing the final safety net of meagre state support? – into the hands of individual petty bureaucrats, and not even enshrine a right of appeal, is a dangerous and profoundly troubling move. Not just for the welfare of individual claimants, but for their freedom from the arbitrary abuses of power by those placed over them, and their freedom in the independence they receive from having the guarantee of even the meagre bare minimum currently provided by the state.
The potential for individuals to become subject to domination is precisely what the modern welfare state should be trying to eradicate. The coalition is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
November 15, 2010
The Joys of Work?
In recent discussions of benefits reform, I detect two main strands of thought from advocates of getting the “workshy” – i.e. long-term unemployed – into jobs.
The first is a straightforward claim about desert: that the long-term unemployed are free-riding on the efforts of others. That it isn’t fair for the taxes of those who work to be used to support those who don’t. And at some level this is an eminently sensible thought. Yet I’m not going to explore it here, except to warn against the potential power of ressentiment.
The second strand I detect is that the “workshy” must be helped (of if necessary, coerced) into work for their own good. Andrew Rawnsley is an exponent:
“It helps that few question that Mr Duncan Smith is a serious-minded man genuinely moved to try to release people from the welfare dependency which impoverishes those trapped in it and their country…
…[IDS] has also received a generally warm reception because there has been a growing, but until now rather covert, cross-party consensus that welfare dependency is a terrible social and economic sickness.”
It’s OK to shunt people into work (perhaps forcibly) because work is good for them. Not only is it fair to lever people off benefits and into jobs – we’re doing them a favour too.
Sharper commentators have already pointed out that a far bigger problem in Britain than out-of-work poverty is actually in-work poverty. That millions cannot properly make ends meet even if they have a job. That low wages and inadequate state support mean 1.7 million children are growing up in poverty, despite hailing from working households.
But I suspect much of the belief that working is good for people rests not on a thought about higher remuneration at all, but about the benefits of work itself. Take Rawnsley’s piece again, where he acknowledges that UK out-of-work benefits are “quite stingy by western European standards”. Yet he immediately opines that: “The trouble is that too many people are on benefits.” It’s not lack of money that’s the problem, it’s lack of work itself.
A powerful (but unacknowledged) assumption here is that earning a crust is somehow inherently dignified and psychologically fulfilling. That it raises a person above the indecency of vegetating into the sofa prostrate before re-runs of Jeremy Kyle. Call this the unreflective assumption of a protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism, if you like.
But this belief in both the inherent and the instrumental dignity of work is plain wrong when applied to many of the so-called “work-shy”. Because for the long-term and persistently unemployed, assuming (as is likely) that they are extremely low-skilled and can therefore hope for no more than minimum-wage labour, the prospect of work is a rather bleak and unfulfilling one.
It is the prospect of a mundane 8-10 hours on the tills at Tesco, or stacking the shelves at Asda. It is back-breaking early mornings mopping floors, or cleaning shit off the inside of toilet bowls. It is standing around bored stiff on a shop floor, waiting only for the day to end. It is hours in the din of a call centre, being insulted by faceless clients. And mixed into all that is the reality of much every day labour for many ordinary workers: the petty tyranny of the line-manager; the bitching and gossiping of bored colleagues; the sheer futility and boredom of it all for the meagre reward of £5.93 an hour.
Work, for most people, is not enjoyable. Low-paid work, as a general rule, is even less enjoyable than most. Now you may reply: “that’s not the point, fairness dictates that the long-term unemployed pull their weight and stop living off our taxes”. And that may be a perfectly respectable position to hold. The right conclusion may indeed be that the long-term unemployed must be forced to work, whether they like it or not.
What I find far more suspicious, however, is the pious insistence that we will be doing the low-skilled, long-term unemployed a deep existential favour by introducing them to the unbounded joys of labour. Given the prevalence of in-work poverty, and the sheer nastiness of much actual low-paid work, that strikes me as patently self-serving nonsense.
November 11, 2010
In Praise of Riots
“I say that those who condemn the tumults between the nobles and the plebs, appear to me to blame those things that were the chief causes for keeping Rome free, and that they paid more attention to the noises and shouts that arose in those tumults than to the good effects they brought forth…And if the tumults were the cause of creation of Tribunes, they merit the highest praise, for in addition to giving the people a part in administration, they were established for guarding Roman liberty.”
So wrote Niccolò Machiavelli in his Discorsi, perhaps the first great work of modern political theory.
It would be misleading to extrapolate too much from Machiavelli’s concerns about the governing of a 16th century Italian city state. But regardless, like Machiavelli I have no inherent problem with “tumults” – or as we would now call them, riots.
Machiavelli’s core point is that rioting safe-guarded freedom. It was because the Roman plebs took arms against the nobles that the latter remembered not to push things too far. That made rioting a useful corrective, and a check against the abuses of the powerful.
It’s not clear that anything has changed today. If a party is elected to government on a series of manifesto pledges, and then reneges on them systematically, it may be no bad thing if the betrayed express their discontent via physical public unrest.
Indeed, Machiavelli also held a connected and crucially important view:
“If the object of the Nobles and the People is considered, it will be seen that the former have a great desire to dominate, and the latter a desire not to be dominated and consequently a greater desire to live free…so that the People placed in charge to guard the liberty of anyone, reasonably will take better care of it; for not being able to take it away themselves, they do not permit others to take it away”
Those in positions of power will seek to dominate the weaker. To defend freedom of the (city-)state, the ruled must possess the ability to strike back at the rulers.
You can see where this is going, even if it needs updating by 500 years.
If the NUS organises a 50,000-strong rally in London, and sections of the protest attack physical property owned by the powerful Conservative Party, then forcibly confront the police, this is not an inherently bad thing – and especially if nobody is seriously hurt.
Of course, the usual suspects sitting in their usual swamps have already spouted the tired old clichés about “a few troublemakers” and the importance of “peaceful protest”. But I disagree when the implication is that rioting can never be justified. There is no fail-safe reason why the populi cannot, at times of extreme discontent, employ physical force against the mechanisms of an authority which is committing violence against them.
And I do mean violence. Because when a government decides that (for example) the seriously diabetic are not “really” disabled, and can thus have their disability allowances halved over-night, rendering many unable to meet the rent – that is a form of violence.
When generations of young people suffer government policies rendering higher education more exclusive whilst reducing employment prospects for the millions already out of work – that is a form of violence.
When the unemployed are to be compelled into slave-like forced employment schemes (or rather, ultra-expensive hypocritical gimmicks aimed at a tiny minority of tabloid hate-figures) – that is a form of violence.
In short: if government systematically attacks the interests and well-being of citizens, this constitutes a form of violence. That such violence is achieved by bureaucratic mandate and the mechanisms of officialdom is irrelevant. The policies of the current Coalition Government are attacks of violence upon the fabric of British society, and the British people themselves.
Yesterday, tens of thousands of students gathered in London. Some of them fought the police, and attempted to damage the property of both the state and the Conservative party. Good. British citizens should do it again and again, until our lords and masters understand.
If rioting secured the liberty of Rome, perhaps it can salvage the welfare state of Britain. After all, who else is going to bring this radical and destructive juggernaut to a halt? Not Nick Clegg, that’s for sure.
October 28, 2010
Ideology vs. Fantasy
It’s been frequently suggested that our current Lords and Masters – messrs Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. – are pursuing a hyper-ideological agenda. How else to explain a government cutting public spending at a pace and depth that might make Old Maggie weep?
Some suggest that this ideology is forefront in the Lords and Masters’ minds; that they know exactly what they are doing. I’ve flirted with that explanation myself. Others, like John Gray, suggest that any ideology is deep and thereby virtually subconscious. That Cameron, Clegg et. al. are so wedded to a state-minimalist right-wing worldview that they do not see this to be ideological any more than fish see water to be wet.
In general there is a consensus (at least on the left) that our Lords and Masters must have some underlying coherent purpose. After all, it’s generally acknowledged that what is being done to the economy is – at best – astonishingly cavalier. Quick re-cap: economic theory and history indicate that Boy George’s cuts are more likely to slow down or reverse recovery than aid it, whilst suggestions that bond markets will punish Sovereign Britain if her deficit is not immediately and drastically reduced appear both false and incoherent.
But assuming that our Lords and Masters know this, the puzzle correspondingly emerges: why carry out the cuts regardless? “Ideological agenda” slips-in as the obvious explanation.
Yet it’s always important to guard against inadvertent projection (or at least recognise it when it’s happening). By that I mean: we must be careful about not reading ourselves into the world around us, then mistakenly believing we have found something new.
Right-thinking people look at the assault on the economy – including many measures which will save miniscule sums but have dramatic effects on the lives of thousands – and conclude that it must be motivated by something coherent, i.e. something like an ideological agenda. After all, that’s what might motivate them, if they were in equivalent positions of power.
But what if this is a mistake? What if our leaders are actually not motivated by anything coherent at all? What if they are actually…mad?
Hypothesise with me: what if our Lords and Masters are conducting this savage economic assault because they talked-up deficit reduction so hard in the run up to the last election that they now believe their own strategic rhetoric, and have forgotten that it was precisely that. Accordingly, they may have lost their grips on what the rest of us would class as reality.
We have evidence that this sort of stuff happens, after all. For a start, intense high-level politics apparently requires a certain level of insanity in order to function on a daily basis. Indeed, look at recent case studies. Gordon Brown is by some accounts a pretty deranged individual. Tony Blair appears to have taken a long vacation from reality. His wife appears to have joined him, as evinced by her mad-cap schemes to auction off Blair’s autograph for a tenner a pop.
It’s thus very possible that our current Lords and Masters are not crafty ideological head-bangers, but individuals who’ve become dangerously detached from reality. And that need not be because there is anything especially wrong with them; that would be to commit the fundamental attribution error. It may simply be that life at the top of politics pre-requires and necessitates a certain level of delusion. Mixed with the present context, however, this may have very unfortunate consequences.
But here comes the twist: does this alternative possibility actually matter?
We will probably never know whether Cameron, Osborne, Clegg et. al. are really ideological Thatcherite crusaders, or just delusional rightist fantasists. And one key reason we may never know is, precisely, because the outcome may well be the same either way.
October 22, 2010
The Unsensible Knave
Notorious internet liability Nadine Dorries MP was yesterday cleared of fiddling her expenses, but at the cost of compromising her credibility:
‘ [Dorries] was criticised for comments on her blog which “suggested that she spent the majority of her weekends in the constituency, whilst she had told the Commissioner that nearly all weekends were spent in her main home”.
Explaining the discrepancy, she told the watchdog: “My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact.
“It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire.
“I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.” ‘
Much merriment is already being had. But we can do more than poke fun – we can analyse.
Viewed retrospectively Dorries has acted very stupidly. With the 20:20 vision of hindsight, her claim that she used “fiction” on her blog to “reassure” constituents looks gloriously self-defeating. But that may not actually be the best way to look at things.
Before she was found out, Dories clearly made a set of calculations. That with the expenses scandal at full throttle – and having embarrassed herself on national TV in the middle of it – she needed to solidify her constituency position. Dorries thus calculated that some “poetic license” would boost her position. And indeed this might well have worked (as perhaps it did in the 2010 election), if she hadn’t eventually been caught.
That Dorries has indeed been stupid is not so much because she used “poetic license”, but because she antagonised enough people to prompt some of them to spend hours trawling through her expense claims and comparing them with her blog entries. If she’d been less of a high-profile pain in the backside, she might have got away with her “fictions”.
But what’s worth analysing goes beyond Dorries’ stupidity, wherever exactly that may lie. More interesting is her willingness to mislead constituents to serve herself.
In a parallel world where Dorries is less stupid, she would look very much like David Hume’s example of the Sensible Knave: a person who follows the rules of justice when they think they have to, but breaks them when they reckon they’ll get away with it. Although real-world Dorries is actually an Unsensible Knave, the relevant conclusions can still be summarised.
Firstly, whether sensible or unsensible, Dorries is a knave and as a general rule well-brought-up members of society a) do not like knaves and b) try to exclude them from as much public and private life as possible.
Secondly, although we probably can’t convince Dorries to stop being a knavish person (by this point she’s likely set in her ways), we can stop her being a knavish MP. In other words: over to you voters of mid-Bedfordshire; feel free to rid Parliament of this very silly woman.
But thirdly, should Dorries retain her safe Tory seat we need not trouble ourselves too much. In the end, we non-knaves are far better off, even if we can never make even the Unsensible Dorries Knave see why:
“I must confess that, if a man think that this reasoning much requires an answer, it would be a little difficult to find any which will to him appear satisfactory and convincing. If his heart rebel not against such pernicious maxims, if he feel no reluctance to the thoughts of villainy or baseness, he has indeed lost a considerable motive to virtue; and we may expect that this practice will be answerable to his speculation. But in all ingenuous natures, the antipathy to treachery and roguery is too strong to be counterbalanced by any views of profit or pecuniary advantage. Inward peace of mind, consciousness of integrity, a satisfactory review of our own conduct; these are circumstances, very requisite to happiness, and will be cherished and cultivated by every honest man, who feels the importance of them.
Such a one has, besides, the frequent satisfaction of seeing knaves, with all their pretended cunning and abilities, betrayed by their own maxims; and while they purpose to cheat with moderation and secrecy, a tempting incident occurs, nature is frail, and they give into the snare; whence they can never extricate themselves, without a total loss of reputation, and the forfeiture of all future trust and confidence with mankind.
But were they ever so secret and successful, the honest man, if he has any tincture of philosophy, or even common observation and reflection, will discover that they themselves are, in the end, the greatest dupes, and have sacrificed the invaluable enjoyment of a character, with themselves at least, for the acquisition of worthless toys and gewgaws. How little is requisite to supply the necessities of nature? And in a view to pleasure, what comparison between the unbought satisfaction of conversation, society, study, even health and the common beauties of nature, but above all the peaceful reflection on one’s own conduct; what comparison, I say, between these and the feverish, empty amusements of luxury and expense? These natural pleasures, indeed, are really without price; both because they are below all price in their attainment, and above it in their enjoyment.”
October 21, 2010
“The Road to Fairness”
Nick Clegg has told Lib Dem activists that the Coalition’s spending review “is one that promotes fairness”:
“We are not taking the decisions today because they are easy or because we want to see a smaller state, we are taking them because they are right. We have a hard road to recovery ahead, but we are determined to ensure it is a road that leads to fairness too.”
The problem is, “fairness” is a controversial term and can mean many things to many people. So to understand what Clegg apparently means by the term, we need to unpack it. Accordingly, here’s my public service for the day.
To Nick Clegg, “fairness” involves:
- Half a million public sector job losses, to be added to the existing 2.5million unemployed chasing an estimated 0.5million available jobs. This will take place in conjunction with…
- …a drastic assault on the provision of out-of-work benefits, as George Osborne abandons some of society’s most vulnerable under the dubious claim to be targeting those who see meagre state benefits as a “lifestyle choice”.
- A withdrawal of support for the permanently disabled, who will be plunged into poverty or forced into divorce in order to survive.
- Reductions in support for the elderly and most vulnerable, even more of whom will be left to die alone in their own filth.
- The use of Treasury accounting tricks to claim that the richest will be hardest hit by benefit withdrawals, on the ludicrous supposition that the loss of child benefit to a millionaire is more taxing than to those on lower incomes.
- Massive reductions in housing expenditure which will make it harder for people to find affordable housing and increase the likelihood of people becoming homeless.
- The dismantling of the NHS by the back door, with reductions in real school spending dressed up as an increase by cynically half-incorporating LibDem ideas of a pupil premium to mask what’s really happening. The result will be changes most severely affecting those on lower incomes, who depend on state-provided health and education far more than the affluent.
- Abuse of the word “progressive” such that it either means nothing at all and is simple political spin, or if employed as a technical economic claim about burdens falling heavier on those most able to pay, is transparent nonsense as slammed by the IFS, Fabian Society and Demos already. And as demonstrated by the Government’s own chart.
I could go on, but that’s a basic start. No doubt more will emerge as the hidden depths of George Osborne’s carefully disguised announcements are further explored.
But I’d like to end with a quick observation. Although “fairness” is an inherently contested concept, one near-permanent idea attached to it is that fairness involves getting what you deserve.
Accordingly, if Nick Clegg is remembered as the man who empowered a Tory government and then did nothing in office to restrain that party as it launched an assault on the heart of Britain’s economy and society, then it will be fair if people remember him as national disgrace.
If commentators disparage Clegg for inflicting vast pain on the lives of the worse-off – when he himself has never struggled nor worried about a bill-payment in his highly-privileged life – then it will be fair when people slam him as a life-wrecker, dispensing pain from the safety of his wealthy cocoon.
And when voters obliterate the Liberal Democrats at the next election, blaming them for making the Conservative’s ideological crusade possible, then it will be fair when Clegg is subsequently hated by the party he failed and destroyed, and remembered by history as a man who made all the wrong calls at all the wrong times.
Nick Clegg has told Lib Dem activists that the Coalition’s spending review “is one that promotes fairness”:
“We are not taking the decisions today because they are easy or because we want to see a smaller state, we are taking them because they are right. We have a hard road to recovery ahead, but we are determined to ensure it is a road that leads to fairness too.”
The problem is, “fairness” is a controversial term and can mean many things to many people. So to understand what Clegg apparently means by the term, we need to unpack it. Accordingly, here’s my public service for the day.
To Nick Clegg, “fairness” involves:
- Half a million public sector job losses, to be added to the existing 2.5million unemployed chasing an estimated 0.5million available jobs. This will take place in conjunction with…
- …a drastic assault on the provision of out-of-work benefits, as George Osborne abandons some of society’s most vulnerable under the dubious claim to be targeting those who see meagre state benefits as a “lifestyle choice”.
- A withdrawal of support for the permanently disabled, who will be plunged into poverty or forced into divorce in order to survive.
- Reductions in support for the elderly and most vulnerable, even more of whom will be left to die alone in their own filth.
- The use of Treasury accounting tricks to claim that the richest will be hardest hit by benefit withdrawals, on the ludicrous supposition that the loss of child benefit to a millionaire is more taxing than to those on lower incomes.
- Massive reductions in housing expenditure which will make it harder for people to find affordable housing and increase the likelihood of people becoming homeless.
- The dismantling of the NHS by the back door, with reductions in real school spending dressed up as an increase by cynically half-incorporating LibDem ideas of a pupil premium to mask what’s really happening. The result will be changes most severely affecting those on lower incomes, who depend on state-provided health and education far more than the affluent.
- Abuse of the word “progressive” such that it either means nothing at all and is simple political spin, or if employed as a technical economic claim about burdens falling heavier on those most able to pay, is transparent nonsense as slammed by the IFS, Fabian Society and Demos already. And as demonstrated by the Government’s own chart.
I could go on, but that’s a basic start. No doubt more will emerge as the hidden depths of George Osborne’s carefully disguised announcements are further explored.
But I’d like to end with a quick observation. Although “fairness” is an inherently contested concept, one near-permanent idea attached to it is that fairness involves getting what you deserve.
Accordingly, if Nick Clegg is remembered as the man who empowered a Tory government and then did nothing in office to restrain that party as it launched an assault on the heart of Britain’s economy and society, then it will be fair if people remember him as national disgrace.
If commentators disparage Clegg for inflicting vast pain on the lives of the worse-off – when he himself has never struggled nor worried about a bill-payment in his highly-privileged life – then it will be fair when people slam him as a life-wrecker, dispensing pain from the safety of his wealthy cocoon.
And when voters obliterate the Liberal Democrats at the next election, blaming them for making the Conservative’s ideological crusade possible, then it will be fair when Clegg is subsequently hated by the party he failed and destroyed, and remembered by history as a man who made all the wrong calls at all the wrong times.
October 20, 2010
Thatcher’s Children
Most people remember where they were on 9/11. Epoch-changing events have that effect, especially when they are so spectacular and obviously far-reaching in their ramifications. But not all epoch-changing events are spectacular, and they don’t always advertise themselves so obviously.
With that in mind, remember where you were today. The 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review may become a date historians return to.
Much of Britain’s post-war history can be summarised – simplistically, but with some accuracy – as follows. After the devastation of global war, and the realisation that unchecked economic and social strife leads to the violent recourse of desperate extremist politics, west European nation states erected new social settlements both to rebuild shattered economies and polities, and to serve as prophylactics against the politics of extremism.
During the 1970s the social settlement in Britain underwent extreme strain for complex reasons, but in particular due to economic difficulties of both domestic and international origin. In 1979 Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister, and the first phase of a radical re-settlement began. The position of organised labour within Britain was crushed, and the role of private enterprise was drastically increased. Deregulation of finance and industry expanded the scope of market provision, and contracted the role of the provider-state. However the core of the post-war social settlement – what we loosely call “the Welfare State” – was left essentially intact, although modifications were made to the way it provided services, reflecting moves towards a general market-default.
From 1997-2010 Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s New Labour put the Thatcher project on hold, but did not reverse it. If anything the role of private enterprise in particular was expanded. Although core components of the welfare state – in particular education and healthcare – saw enormous increases in spending from 2001 onwards, this was undertaken within the framework of accepting the Thatcherite re-settlement on the economy as a whole. Although laudable efforts to reduce poverty were undertaken – with some considerable successes – socio-economic inequality increased, as the marketisation of everything continued apace.
From May 2010 onwards, what can be described as the second phase of the Thatcherite resettlement began. Under the banner of massive fiscal retrenchment – justified (rightly or wrongly) as a necessary response to the devastation of the 2008 financial crisis – the Conservative-LibDem Coalition has proceeded to instigate massive spending cuts which are fundamentally over-turning the post-war “Welfare State” and attendant social settlement.
Indeed, it is worth noting what has already been pushed through since spring 2010.
Whilst Michael Gove’s highly ideological free schools programme, and parallel withdrawal of ordinary state school funds, has attracted much attention it has simultaneously distracted from the massive reconstitution of the NHS being conducted by Andrew Lansley (arguably without democratic mandate). Universal child benefits have already been withdrawn. The affordability of higher education for all may be finished as the LibDems U-turn on one of their oldest electoral promises. The system of state benefits has come under severe attack from Chancellor George Osborne, as dramatic welfare caps are introduced. And reports ahead of the CSR going official indicate that the Government already expects at least half a million new unemployed from public sector redundancies alone.
And this is only the beginning, the warm-up; the light shavings of the razor before the axe falls proper.
As John Gray has explained so well Cameron, Osborne and Clegg are Thatcher’s ideological children. They see this as the only way, for they have known no other way. And thus, it may very well come to pass that 20th October 2010 will be noted by future historians as the day the British social settlement completed the change of direction begun in 1979, entering new – and as yet, uncharted – waters.
So remember where you were. Your grandchildren may want to know.
October 19, 2010
The Corruption of our Moral Sentiments
Yesterday morning, 35 leaders of the UK’s “biggest companies” signed a letter to The Telegraph urging George Osborne not to slow-down his programme of austerity cuts. At one level Gary Dunion’s tweet gets to the heart of things:
“35 of the richest people in the world support ideological cuts to services they don’t use and jobs that aren’t theirs. Hold the front page.”
But there is more to be said. These outbursts by business leaders are hardly unheard of; before the last election Tory deficit tough-talk received a glowing endorsement from industry fat cats. Why do we collectively tend to give space to the views of super-rich big business leaders? Why do their pronouncements receive an apparently automatic level of respected deference, even when they spout partisan self-serving nonsense?
Part of the answer is simple politics: the right wing Telegraph pushes right-wing agendas, and business leaders are happy to partake in this. But that doesn’t go deep enough.
A more incisive answer lies in acknowledging the existence of a general misperception of “merit”, and a mistaken belief that industry leadership (often signaled by high pay) corresponds to unique and unmatched “talent” . This results in a common belief that big business leaders have some special, unrivaled insight to offer. But as Chris Dillow has repeatedly shown, “leadership” is a chimerical beast, because its usually organisational structure and contextual factors that determine success, not the special “talents” of fat cats lucky enough to climb to the top.
Nonetheless, a general (mistaken) belief that business leaders are supremely talented individuals is likely to generate a level of deference and toleration towards their opinion-spouting that other, more lowly-placed members of society, will not enjoy.
But there’s more, and like last week the Scottish Enlightenment may have something to teach us. Adam Smith was intrigued as to why ordinary people imagined the lives of the great and powerful to be full of happiness and pleasantry, when a little reflection shows that power and responsibility bring burdens of duty and the pains of intriuge and betrayal. Furthermore, Smith noted that ordinary people have a curious tendency to be more forgiving of the “vices and follies” of the great and powerful, than of even the “poverty and weakness of the innocent”.
Smith’s account of why this might be is (typically) complex. But one important factor is his belief that in modern commercial society people are presented with two competing paths along which to run their lives. The first emphasises “wisdom and virtue”, but the second promotes material gain. Yet we soon see that most people offer greater praise and encouragement to “the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous”. As a result, the path of material gain is privileged by most, even (crucially) those individuals who never get very far along it themselves. Growing up in societies where the “rich and the great” have their plaudits sung most widely, it is unsurprising that ordinary people come to imagine that those who are rich and great lead exceedingly more pleasant and happy lives, and their “vices and follies” are tolerated as being more forgivable in such outstanding characters.
But Smith was dubious about this conclusion; reflection on the lives of the “rich and the great” appears to reveal much that a contented soul would be better off without. Furthermore, Smith worried about the consequences for all our lives of this tendency to idolise the materially successful:
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”
For Smith, this represented a deep problem of modern commercial society that his moral theory attempted to navigate. 250 years later, it is far from clear that anything fundamental has changed. So you’ll forgive me if I give short shrift to the self-rightous pontifications of the Telegraph 35.
