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 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.
September 24, 2010
Cable’s Calling
For many, Vince Cable has gone from saint to sinner. The former hammer of the Banks and scourge of Osborne now finds himself kowtowing to high finance and dancing to the tune of Boy George.
Last night’s Question Time showed that anger at the Lib Dems is mounting. As reflected in falling polls, the Lib Dems are seen as Tory-enablers deeply complicit in the most vicious programme of spending cuts in living memory. For the first half of last night’s broadcast, Cable repeatedly got it in the neck.
But rather than seeing Cable as a traitor, I would urge a little more nuance. There has been no Jekyll and Hyde transformation. The same exceptionally laudable politician remains – but circumstances dictate he play the devil.
Let’s assume – as seems most likely – that Cable meant all he said pre-May 2010. Like most Lib Dems he assumed he’d never get near power and so could say whatever he liked. Including the truth, something mostly off-limits to those expecting a hand in government. All that stuff about controlling banks, protecting the economy from over-zealous cuts, the myth of pain-free “efficiency savings”, clamping down on tax avoiders and evaders? He almost certainly meant it all.*
But now Cable finds himself not only in government, but subordinated to a dominant Tory party that is acting just as manically as it promised before being elected. A Tory party demanding exactly the opposite of much of what Cable previously advocated.
And at this point, questions of personal integrity arise: should Cable – as a man of purported decency and integrity – consent to working with a rabid Tory party inflicting cuts that will cause widespread social and economic pain?
The answer, I think, is “yes”. Certainly, Cable himself might prefer not to be doing this. That he’d rather have “clean hands” and not be personally responsible for any of the Coalition’s overly-vicious cuts. But the fact is, whatever Cable does now his hands can never be clean.
If Cable were to walk from the Coalition, there would still be consequences pinned to him. For a start, he is the only high-profile non-Conservative member of the Coalition apart from Nick Clegg (now so close to Cameron as to be effectively Tory). Without Cable, the Lib Dems would likely lose even the paltry influence within the Government they currently possess.
Although Cable is labouring under the dictates of Osborne’s Treasury, he is attempting to fight his corner as Business Secretary. Given his experience and public standing, it is extremely unlikely any lesser Lib Dem could do a better job – let alone a Tory. And if Cable abandoned the Government now, the public blow to the Lib Dems would likely be fatal.
Given what we know about Cable pre-2010, we can safely assume he is deeply unhappy with the role he is personally playing in the Coalition’s austerity programme. And yet, he continues. Not, I would suggest, because of any lust for power. But because Cable exhibits Max Weber’s “calling for politics”.
Cable realises that to try and do some good, he must consciously do bad; that he must pursue policies he personally opposes. And judging from his body language last night, he knows the gravity of the situation. But “here he stands, he can do no other”.
That is the marking of a “truly moving” politician, who has the “calling for politics”. There is nothing impressive about Tory ideologues cutting spending with glee, complete with disregard for the pain this will cause. There is, however, something tragically moving about Cable’s position. He deserves your personal respect, even if your political condemnation flows regardless.
I predict that this experience will break Cable; that he will leave office disillusioned and wracked with guilt about what he’s found himself complicit in. And therein lies another tragedy: that apart from the self-pityingly vainglorious, there is a way in which politics can only break good people.
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*In fact I know he did (and here’s a disclaimer) because I did a little bit of work for his office during my 2009 Parliamentary researcher odyssey.
September 17, 2010
Taking Individuals Seriously
Luis Enrique alerts me to the excellent article Ideology in Economics by Robert Solow (which you can get here). This part got me thinking:
“No one can deny that advertisers advertise, and must have some effects (though one could argue about how much) on the preferences of consumers. It is certain that our preferences are far more social than biological or individual in origin. What should we conclude from these propositions? From the first, perhaps that advertising ought to be limited by taxation or regulated as to truth. From the second, what? Not, I hope, that individuals’ judgments about their own welfare should not be respected, whatever their origin. One need only ask what could be put in their place—presumably the judgments of an elite. The attack on consumer sovereignty performs the same function as the doctrine of “repressive tolerance.” If people do not want what I see so clearly they should want, it can only be that they don’t know what they “really” want.”
Solow raises an important point. Adult individuals are usually the best at identifying both their own desires, and the means of satisfying them. But even when they are bad at doing one or both of these things, it rarely follows that other agents are consistently and reliably better. History shows that whenever the right and responsibility for securing what individuals (“really”) want is taken out of their hands and placed in those of what must inevitably be political elites, disaster often follows. The Jacobin-initiated Terror of the French Revolution, or the horrors of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, serve as extreme but unignorable reminders.
Historically, the political right has been less prone to giving people what they “really” want by means of taking away individual decision-making than the left.* This, I think, is for two main reasons. Firstly, a conservative disposition against radical change coupled with a suspicion of state power as undermining private property. Secondly, a 20th century rightist preference for market capitalism which privileges individual choices in a market economy, compared (especially) with state-planned socialist (or communist) alternatives.
But I wonder if the lesson that people are the best judges of their own desires and wants may need to be (re)learned by the political right in the early 21st Century.
Consider the aggressive cuts programme of the current Coalition government. As Julian Glover has recently argued this is driven more by ideological preference for a small state than economic necessity. (Notice connectedly that Nick Clegg recently demonstrated how far rightward he has dragged the Liberal Democrats by arguing that the State must not “compensate the poor for their predicament”).
The cabal that run the ConDem Coalition are pro-market and state minimalist. They believe (rightly or wrongly) that a Britain with a smaller state will be better, and that if extreme socio-economic pain is required to get there then that is a price worth paying. Yet the correlate thought must go: individuals suffering that pain are making a mistake if they think it’s not a price worth paying – and they must come to see that what they “really” want is indeed a market-liberal, small-state Britain achieved by these means.
Like Bernard Williams I am deeply suspicious of dismissing people’s concerns – over unemployment, (lack of) healthcare and opportunity, disenfranchisement, inequality, poverty, unfairness, or whatever – by insisting that such concerns are founded on “mistakes”, and that the complainants would renounce their objections if they simply got clear in their own thinking. Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett may be a thug (or an idiot), but his warnings about riots should nonetheless be heeded. When people experience debilitating socio-economic problems, it will (at the very least) be unwise strategy to dismiss those concerns as irrational or mistaken.
Connectedly, I fear that the Coalition’s state-minimalist preference – and its desire to impose this regardless of objections from below – is based on a worrying historical ignorance. Tony Judt put it well:
“Moreover, and here the memory of war played once again an important role, the twentieth-century ‘socialist’ welfare states were constructed not as an advance guard of egalitarian revolution but to provide a barrier against the return of the past: against economic depression and its polarizing, violent political outcome in the desperate politics of Fascism and Communism alike. The welfare states were thus prophylactic states. They were designed quite consciously to meet the widespread yearning for security and stability that John Maynard Keynes and others foresaw long before the end of World War II, and they succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. Thanks to a half-century of prosperity and safety, we in the West have forgotten the political and social traumas of mass insecurity. And thus we have forgotten why we have inherited those welfare states and what brought them about.”
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* The exception here may be 20th Century Fascism and Nazism. However, the stong nationalist aspects of these ideologies tends to elevate the success and glory of the fatherland as the supreme good in itself, as oppose to claiming that “The People” (or “The Workers”) will benefit most by having their decisions made by an enlightened political elite.
August 26, 2010
The Banality of Institutions
I’m increasingly interested in the role of institutions in people’s lives, and the way those institutions affect the moral choices and outcomes people find themselves committed to – or implicated in.
In particular, I think we should pay attention to the ways in which people find themselves compelled to do questionable acts, or participate in dubious programmes, because of institutional allegiances they’ve already committed to.
I have two examples in mind.
Nick Clegg now finds himself in a sticky situation. Having played king-maker and put the Conservative Party into office, the Lib Dems are complicit in a programme of “austerity” heavily criticised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for being deeply regressive. (Indeed it’s worth stressing – as Larry Elliott does – that George Osbrone’s “emergency budget” is set to hit the poor hardest not just proportionally, but in straight cash terms).
Clegg’s is faced with holding together a party most of whose members would never have agreed to the Coalition if they’d known this would be the outcome. The Lib Dems were supposed to be a “moderating” influence on the Tories – but this increasingly looks like a naive, self-serving fantasy the Liberals told themselves to justify a share of power.
Nonetheless, many senior Lib Dems are committed to supporting policies they deeply disagree with. Even if only by remaining silent, figures like Vince Cable and Charles Kennedy are compelled to support ends they would rather oppose. To figures like Clegg, the burden falls heavier. He must go into print, publishing a nonsense attack on Britain’s leading impartial economic think tank (which he’d formerly heaped praise on). Clegg must ludicrously claim that regressive impacts on the poor will be offset by job creation, despite Osborne’s emergency budget being most likely to increase unemployment.
But the phenomenon goes wider than politics, and here’s another example. Increasing numbers of my friends are training to become teachers. Some of these friends – though of course not all – have previously been known to indulge in some light substance recreation. Usually just a spliff here and there, or maybe the occasional E on special occasions. No scenes from Scarface, just party prescriptions.
None of these friends ever died, killed anybody, raped anybody, committed serious crimes or did anything untoward when under the influence. They simply had a good time, left everybody else alone, and went about their evening. Yet when these friends become teachers, they will be compelled – by the institutional system they marry into – to stand in front of dozens of teenagers every year, and lecture them about the life-destroying evils of illegal drugs.
In other words, my friends will have to become systematic liars and hypocrites. Yet their lies will be disbelieved by future generations of kids, whose personal experiments will teach them far more than the propaganda of the school room. More widely, the bizarre social hysteria about recreational substances – other than violence-inducing alcohol, of course – will go on. Those who know very well that society’s attitude to drugs is founded on bullshit, will become the proverbial bulls.
As regards Nick Clegg’s dubious actions, we can perhaps be harsh. He played king-maker, this is politics, and now he must live with the consequences. We might, however, have more sympathy for more reluctant coalition figures like Cable and Kennedy. Surely not even in their worst nightmares did they expect it to be this bad after just a 100 days. Nonetheless, Lib Dem members who ever believed their party could be a force for social justice ought now to be considering their positions.
As regards my friends who must become hypocrites, they’ll no doubt learn to live with it – just as their own teachers did before them. And yet the consequence of everyone learning to live with this hypocrisy is the perpetuation of a drugs policy exhibiting collective social madness.
Hannah Arendt famously concluded that evil is characterised by banality. She was talking about something far worse than what I’ve drawn attention to today. But nonetheless, insofar as we want to understand life’s little lesser evils, and the banality that lies behind them, an examination of the commitments individuals find themselves reluctantly fulfilling because of the institutions they’ve pledged allegiance to will take us a long way.
August 2, 2010
Choice and Empowerment
Embarrassing for Michael Gove:
“Michael Gove faced fresh accusations of exaggerating the level of interest in his education reforms yesterday after it emerged there had been just 62 applications for his “free schools” policy.
Before the election the education secretary said he wanted hundreds of parent-and-teacher groups to open their own schools. Once in government he told parliament there had been 700 expressions of interest to the New Schools Network (NSN), a charitable organisation helping to set up the scheme.”
I’ve previously made my dislike of Ed Balls known, but he’s got a point:
“The vast majority of parents just want a well-funded good local school and do not have the time or the wherewithal to set up their own.”
Quite.
When I was working in Parliament last year, a group of Lib Dem MPs were convinced that a top priority should be allowing NHS patients to own their medical records on portable USB sticks. The rationale was that this would allow patients to change GP surgeries and hospitals at whim, rather than being tied to one. This would allegedly increase “choice” and be “empowering”, and was accordingly a “liberal” policy.
But what appears “empowering” to busy MPs regularly commuting between Westminster and their constituencies might look rather different to others. To those struggling to hold down day-jobs, bring up the kids and pay the bills, owning medical records on little USB sticks might be rather lower on the list of health priorities.
By contrast having a safe, reliable and free health service is likely to be very “empowering” indeed. Such a thing frees people from the stress and worry of providing in times of ill-health. It allows them to devote time, energy and resources to more enjoyable or rewarding activities – secure in the knowledge of a guaranteed safety-net should things go wrong.
Concentrating on improving the provision of guaranteed health-care to the point where people don’t have to think about it at all thus appears far more “empowering” than pouring billions into IT systems that would allow people to own their medical records on data pens.
The same goes for schools. The “choice” that parents want when it comes to schools is apparently not that of setting up and running the damn things themselves. By contrast what would “empower” most British families would arguably be a society in which whatever school parents chose for their kids, sufficient funding and provision would guarantee high-quality education.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, “choice” and “empowerment” are complicated ideas, as all interesting concepts are. Different perspective on what “choice” and “empowerment” mean, or which senses of “choice” and “empowerment” should be deemed most important, can thus directly affect policy-making.
Yet for at least the past 20 years British politics has been dominated by a rather narrow, short-termist view of choice and empowerment which effectively treats citizens as economic consumers. Citizen needs and requirements have become increasingly viewed as equivalent to the tastes and preferences of rational economic consumers demanding goods and services from suppliers.
Out of this attitude has quite naturally grown a view by which the important “choices” are the ones that resemble market transactions. So the “choice” assumed to matter to citizens when it comes to education and health is that of picking competing hospitals or schools (perhaps even helpfully ranked in official league tables). Correspondingly the view of choice outlined above – the wider view pertaining to what is made possible when basic quality of things like education and health are guaranteed – increasingly drops-out of the picture. Similarly “empowerment” is assumed to be whatever policy promotes short-term consumer-style choice in service provision, rather than what citizens are enabled to do when living in a society where the worry and stress of (for example) health and education provision are taken care of.
“Choice” and “empowerment” are two of the watchwords of modern British politics; they dominate policy-making, debate and thinking. Yet the dominant understanding of both these concepts is clearly not their only possible interpretation. This matters.
In a parallel world where consumer-style understandings of “choice” and “empowerment” were laughed out of the room, Michael Gove’s free schools would never have made it past the focus groups (not least because politics in such a world might not tolerate focus groups either).
Of course that world might also have significant problems. The state can be a clunking, heartless and overly-bureaucratic provider, and there are good arguments for checking those tendencies too. But the point, as I’ve argued before, is that in politics ideas matter precisely because it’s ideas that shape the decisions we make.
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Hardcore enthusiasts can enjoy some further reading of my views on the issue of “choice” in politics here and here.
July 29, 2010
Abolishing ASBOs
The Coalition is abolishing ASBOs. This is a good thing. Not (necessarily) because ASBOs are frequently ignored, or allegedly worn as “badges of honour” by feral yoofs. But because they exemplified some of the worst aspects of New Labour.
As I’ve previously commented much of New Labour’s approach to society was rooted in American-style communitarian thinking, in part due to emulating Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” strategy. This was clearest in Blair’s (then Brown’s) rhetoric of “rights and responsibilities”.
As previously argued the NewLab approach to society was deeply opposed to a philosophically liberal (and I’d say, preferable) view of citizen rights.
For (philosophical) liberals, citizens have rights just because they are citizens. These rights act as checks and constraints on state power. Rights certainly correlate to duties and responsibilities – but these duties and responsibilities fall incumbent upon other agents apart from the right-holder, including the state. So for example if I have a right to association, the responsibility is on you to not stop me freely associating.
The communitarian Blair-Brown view was different. It held that you only had rights if you proved you were “responsible” enough to deserve them. With “responsible” defined by the state. Rights were things only good boys and girls had; naughty boys and girls refusing to play nicely alienated or failed to achieve their rights. New Labour’s much-commented-upon authoritarianism and distrust of the individual arguably stemmed from this basic picture of the state-citizen relationship.
This all fit extremely well with media-management and centre-ground squatting designed to steal Daily Mail and Sun votes from under the Tories’ noses. Implying that pikeys, chavs, gypos and other undesirables shouldn’t get any rights until they behaved nicely was certainly a vote winner. That a mentality which made citizens dependent upon the state quickly led to the mass erosion of civil liberties didn’t particularly bother the New Labour leadership. Which was unsurprising, given that their dominant philosophy implied that they were personally doing ordinary people a favour by allowing them to have any rights at all.
Into all this ASBOs fitted perfectly. For a start, look at the name: anti-social behaviour order. Under New Labour you no longer needed to commit a full-blown crime to attract the attention and chastisement of the state, your behaviour simply had to be anti-social. Anti-social, defined by who? By “the community”, or rather its dominant power-wielding individuals and their dominant prejudices, wherever it was you happened to be acting “anti-socially”.
There’s no denying that ASBOs were often meted out to particularly unpleasant and problematic individuals. But their creation signalled the institution of a new form of quasi-crime that could be usefully applied against (typically) the working class poor. In sum: a Daily Mail crowd-pleaser that exemplified New Labour’s worst communitarian attitudes towards the status of the individual in society and his or her relationship to the wielders of organised power.
Commentators have been arguing that something needs to fill the gap between “a stern telling off from the local bobby” and a criminal conviction, which ASBOs allegedly achieved. Apart from pointing out that the police can already administer cautions, I’m really not sure I agree.
As a squealing leftie, I reckon a more effective long-term solution than slapping people with resentment-inducing punishments is to remove the poverty, desperation and boredom that underlie the vast majority of low-level crime and nuisance-making. You know, “Tough on the Causes of Crime”. That second part of their clever slogan which New Labour so quickly forgot when scraping the bottom of the barrel for votes.
July 20, 2010
Ireland and Lib Dem Soul Searching
Having just managed to crawl out of a two year recession, the Irish economy was recently branded the sickest of all advanced nations by the IMF. And despite the Fund making noises that Ireland will not default on its debt, its credit rating has just been downgraded regardless, to Aa2 according to Moody’s.
As the New Statesman’s Mehdi Hasan put it:
“Ireland, of course, cut like crazy to appease the gods of the bond markets but evidently it didn’t work out for them. Please note Mr Osborne.”
But the Lib Dems need to look in the mirror too.
That Ireland has just had its rating cut blows away the fig leaf which has so far been covering the ConDem cuts: that severe retrenchment of public finances is essential if Britain isn’t to lose its AAA credit rating and see the cost of borrowing soar in the long term. This talk was always highly dubious in itself – not least because Britain’s situation was always far healthier than Ireland’s (or Greece’s) – but it now looks ridiculous. Plus there is the very real risk that cutting too hard and too soon will cripple economic recovery.
The attack on Britain’s public services is ideologically-driven Tory opportunism; slashing the state in ways the Conservatives have always wanted, but previously lacked the pretext to carry out. Which raises the question: what on Earth are the Lib Dems getting out of their Faustian pact?
Pipsqueak Gove has merrily taken the axe to Britain’s education system – whilst protecting funds for his Free Schools experiment which will advantage the upper middle classes, if it manages to help anyone at all. Osborne’s hard-cutting emergency budget is going to impact disproportionately on the poorest in society – and the biggest cuts are still reserved for the autumn.
Yet all we’ve had out of the Lib Dems is a front bench minister resign over financial impropriety, and a welcome but ultimately timid and non-committal suggestion of a graduate tax. In truth, you’d be hard pressed to know this was coalition government at all.
The downgrading of Ireland’s credit rating should now serve as a moment of reflection for the Lib Dems regarding their future path. I see three options:
- Use greater influence within the coalition to rein-in the Tories
- Quit the coalition and have no more to do with the Conservative assault on public finances
- Remain in the coalition and continue to facilitate the Tory programme.
Option 1 looks an obvious non-starter; as junior partners the Lib Dems appear to exercise virtually no significant influence over the Tories.
The problem with 2, of course, is that whilst it might be highly principled the Tories will quickly accuse the Lib Dems of destabilising the country. They will then have a good chance of returning a Conservative majority in a fresh election which the Lib Dems (and Labour) probably can’t afford to fight anyway.
But as for 3, the long-term risk is that when the Tory cuts really start to bite the Lib Dems will take the flak as the enablers of a vicious programme which hurts ordinary people’s lives.
So although Ireland should be a prompt for Lib Dem soul-searching about the bed they’ve chosen to make, whether or not they continue to lie in it may end the same: that they are held accountable for making possible a political programme of pain that wasn’t even their own.
But if you’re tempted to sympathy it’s worth remembering that the history of Lib-Con coalitions is very much one where Tories gain and Liberals lose. The warning signs were there, and if the Lib Dems had bothered with a bit of self-knowledge they might have hesitated before putting themselves in this mess. And it definitely is a mess, even if it will only become fully apparent as the post-election honeymoon fades.
