potlatch

Leveson and the cultural contradictions of conservatism

With the usual half-hearted apologies for recycling my own chat, watching the delightful spectacle of the Murdoch clan and the Tories knocking chunks out of each other reminds me of this piece on the cultural contradictions of conservatism I wrote last summer, when Hackgate first exploded:

The greater significance of ‘hack-gate’ will lie in how it affects the character of British conservatism more generally. Conservatism, as a cultural and political movement, is intrinsically unwieldy and self-destructive, as hack-gate may now be demonstrating once more. From Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution onwards, conservatism has achieved its identity through what it rejects and despises. It projects a pessimistic scepticism towards political deliberation as a basis for authority, insisting that modern societies are too complex, human beings too different, and language too frail, for us to reason our way towards a collective destination...

All modern conservatives have a love-hate relationship with the establishment, which ultimately is their undoing. They can never really make up their mind whether they want more government or less. Complaints about bureaucrats, ‘red tape’ and tax are matched by despair that the state has lost its nerve in various ways, until this ambivalence is eventually overwhelmed by events. Political leaders and parties that appeal to ‘traditional values’ are undermined by revelations of fraud and sexual intrigue; financial markets that are untouchable because ‘self-correcting’ end up costing the taxpayer a figure that is (according to the National Audit Office ^↑ ) more than eight times the annual budget of the NHS; military efforts to impose democracy eventually retreat into actual negotiation. That News International profited fabulously from highlighting all of these hypocrisies and U-turns in the past does not mean that the public won’t take some glee in witnessing the latest contradiction of conservatism: Rupert Murdoch’s inner circle being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, cheered on by the families of murdered children, military charities and – no doubt – the vast majority of the ‘great British public’. How loudly the Conservative Prime Minister is prepared to cheer may be crucial to how this conflict plays out.

To paraphrase the old American political adage, we might now say: "watch two pigs mud-wrestling; they both get dirty, but you can enjoy it."

what do banks and prisons have in common?

I've published an article at openDemocracy, as part of the Uneconomics debate, in which I attempt to stand back and take a wide-ranging look at the policy dilemmas posed by the banking system. There is, I suggest, a serious problem in that the state has become an under-writer for a wasteful and ineffective risk management system, on which it cannot now easily turn its back. In that respect, the financial system has become like the prison system: a poorly calculated strategy for reducing risk, which may have the exact opposite effect, but which the taxpayer has become entangled with. As I argue:

Nearly five years after the dawning of the financial crisis, we can now identify one of its possible long-term legacies: the implicit association between the modern state and large financial institutions has become an explicit one. It is no longer possible to specify exactly where the state ends and the banking system begins...

We are living with a situation in which billions of pounds of public money is still being effectively siphoned into the pockets of private individuals, via quantitative easing and other forms of support for the banking sector. The on-going hand-wringing over the 'fairness' of bankers' pay tends to ignore the graver public insult, that billions of pounds are being removed from the banking system in the form of bonuses, which the taxpayer will have to provide if the system collapses again. Gordon Brown cites figures ^↑ showing that if bankers had reduced their pay by a mere 10 per cent between 2000-2007, the banks would have had £50bn more of capital available to them when the crisis struck, which is the same amount that the government injected into RBS and Lloyds-TSB in October 2008.

There is a structural problem here that has still not been dealt with. If this situation is to change, the government will need to take risks with its modus operandi of risk management. While regulators and policy-makers view the future via traditional risk management techniques, they will effectively endorse traditional risk management institutions of the City of London. Only with an ethos of experimentation can anything genuinely new be anticipated and valued.

You can read the rest of the article here. Comments might be better placed underneath the article itself, rather than on this blog.

capitalism as a policy problem

The current British policy and media vogue for debating 'capitalism' may well be unprecedented. There have long been rolling public debates about specific institutions and practices, such as banks, markets, debt, financial markets and trade. But to focus on capitalism implies a more political-economic perspective, which is alert to questions of hierachy, ownership, power and institutional evolution. At least it should do. Historically, the question of 'capitalism' has been more often debated by its critics (from Marx onwards), or else by those such as Milton Friedman who have used it to attack socialism. Even then, neoliberals have preferred to refer to 'markets', 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurship' when providing the gloss to their economic argument.

The new debate is to be welcomed, but it is inevitably throwing up misunderstandings and strange representations. The Financial Times has been running a sophisticated series of op-eds on the crisis of capitalism, which only really hit the intellectual rocks with a piece published yesterday, entitled 'It's a crisis of confidence, not of capitalism' (the stupidity of the article's headline turned out to be well-matched to the identity of its author, the Chancellor of the Exchequer).

The first thing to note, as if it needed saying, is that of course capitalism is in crisis. The denial of this fact seems to go hand in hand with two intellectual errors. Firstly, it misunderstands the meaning of the word 'crisis', which it hears as equivalent to 'end' or 'death'. Nobody has yet plausibly suggested that capitalism is coming to an end. But quite clearly there is a crisis, in the literal sense of a judgement, turning point or critique. Capitalism is in a critical condition, which will determine what sort of future it has. This is what 'crisis' refers to. For evidence that it is in crisis, one need only point to the fact that policies which once alleviated its shortcomings, now appear only to exacerbate them. To his credit, Gordon Brown appears in this piece to grasp the historic importance of the current period that we're living through, and the vast scale of any potentially adequate political response.

Second, the crisis deniers get lost in is/ought distinctions. They seem to believe that announcing a 'crisis of capitalism' means advocating socialism. They then very swiftly fall into making abstract and irrelevant moral-psychological claims about how competition and self-interest are 'still' the only plausible bases for organising the economy. Take this Newsnight debate from last week for example. The inevitability of capitalism, in roughly its current form, is asserted on the back of a philosophical anthropology, which is derived from... well, the think tanks and ideologues whose job it is to defend the freedom of capital. Typically this freedom is also erroneously dressed up as the freedom of markets, with endless mis-readings (and more likely, non-readings) of Adam Smith to buttress it.

Yet the ideologues are partly responding to the way in which the question of 'capitalism' has been posed by politicians and pundits alike, which is in heavily moralistic terms. Nick Clegg, David Cameron and Ed Miliband are competing to find ways to attack the morally noxious bits of capitalism, and not merely the useless bits, though Miliband's notion of 'predatory capitalism' suggested that the two go hand in hand. I've heard it suggested that politicians' sudden obsession with the 'c' word may be a strategy to avoid talking about immoral 'business', which swiftly invites questions of which businesses in particular, the same questions which floored the entire shadow cabinet after Miliband's conference speech.

It seems that the main reason 'capitalism' has been put on the table as a policy problem is that this distinguishes the problem as a moral one of principles, not a utilitarian one of economics. British politics is suddenly experiencing a classically ordo-liberal moment, in the sense that economic 'right' and 'wrong' no longer map cleanly on to 'efficient' and 'inefficient'. This partly explains why the collapse of economic growth is having so little impact on the Conservative Party's poll-ratings: for the time being, debates have shifted on to liberal questions of form and structure, away from utilitarian questions of output. Other bizarrely non-utilitarian behaviours abound, such as governments and firms seeking to pay off debt at a time of negative real interest rates, producing a 'balance sheet recession'.

To this, some nuance could be added, by recognising that all capitalist crises are also moral crises, but in a very particular sense. From the 18th century onwards, liberalism has functioned on the basis of an illusory split (famously criticised by in Polanyi's Great Transformation) between the amoral realm of the 'economic' and the moral realm of the 'social', also represented as a dichotomy between the sphere of value and the sphere of values. This illusion is propped up by an associated split between economics (the study of rational choice) and sociology (the study of association and rules).

Ultimately this split is a useful fabrication or fantasy that serves policy-making, rather than one emanating from institutions or agents themselves. 'Economic' institutions (such as banks) are awash with moral judgements, rituals and norms; 'social' institutions (such as families) are equally awash with rational and monetary calculation. But the split does some work, in preventing us from subjecting everything to constant moral judgement, which would be hugely time-consuming and inefficient. Neoliberalism has frequently committed the opposite error of seeking to subject everything to rationalist audit, which turns out to be equally time-consuming and inefficient, though when the target is lefty professions and academics, that may be its underlying purpose.

Every stable era of capitalist development rests on its own distinctive way of separating economics from moral judgement (or 'efficiency' from 'equity', as welfare economists like to put it). The critique of capitalism involves challenging this split (for example, through arguing that labour markets are unjust regardless of their efficiency, or that GDP measures bad things) but these critics can typically be rebuffed for decades at a time. However, a crisis of capitalism, like the one we're living through, brings about a collapse in the liberal divide, from both sides at once, as it becomes unclear what is worth measuring and valuing in the first place. Once economics and economic institutions cease to work in a utilitarian sense, their supposed insulation from sociology, moral judgement and political economy fails too.

This is why crises are so exciting and frightening at the same time. They involve a fundamental uncertainty as to what is going on, how long it will take and what types of technologies, institutions and policies will bring it to an end. As I argued in this New Statesman piece, one feature of our current predicament is that we don't yet know what we've come to the end of precisely. A new fluidity opens up, between moral problems of values and economic ones of value, and we confront the strange truth that the entire realm of 'the economy' as a separate thing is really a fiction. This uncomfortable realism only be suppressed again once a new settlement is established, in which a new form of socio-economic division is established, which is both economically effective and morally acceptable.

If current questions of 'responsible' and 'popular' capitalism are to be posed seriously, then we need to be clear about how far moral critique can (and must) currently penetrate. During times of stability, businesses and politicians raise moral questions of values, almost as matters of consumer preference.* This is the function of corporate social responsibility, which is a form of self-regulation at best, and green-washing at worst. During times of crisis, things are far more profound. It is no long a question of what moral values are to be added to utilitarian economic structures, but what moral values are to constitute a future definition of economic value.

This is what I was trying to communicate in my recent paper on employee ownership. In arguing that 'wellbeing' and 'patience' must be central business 'values' of any post-crisis capitalism, I was not intending that these are somehow nice things, which we really ought to think about a bit more. More fundamentally, the fact that the previous model had failed to account adequately for human psychology on the one hand, and for long-term outcomes on the other, was actually at the heart of how and why the crisis occurred. It follows that any resolution of the crisis will necessarily rest on a new notion of economic value, which somehow factors in these moral values.

If the new public debates about capitalism are to be more than rhetorical, they will need to move beyond obviously moral issues, such as inequality and who 'deserves' what. The term 'fairness', like 'equity', keeps morality safely confined to certain classically moral issues, from where it is unlikely to interfere in the distribution of political power (as I argued in this openDemocracy piece. I was delighted to discover amongst The Browser's quotations yesterday Scott Adams' "fairness is a concept so dumb people could participate in arguments"). Instead, it needs to take on economic institutions of ownership, governance, democracy, valuation, audit and performance measurement. There are some encouraging signs that this might be beginning to happen.

 

* I once worked at a research consultancy which was in the process of re-branding itself, and wanted to engage its staff in identifying its core 'values'. This resulted in a hilarious, Python-esque all-staff meeting in which one individual would opine "I think 'trust' should be one of them", which would then be met with a response from elsewhere "'trust' is rubbish! 'Integrity' is far better!", which in turn would be shot down by "nonsense! 'Leadership' is clearly the best". And so on, depressingly confirming Milton Friedman's famous dictum that "over values, men can only fight".

'political correctness' revisited

We live in the age of 'transparency' or what I once heard Michael Power describe as 'the age of permanent audit'. This is thanks to the presence, sometimes ubiquity, of technologies which make audit the default option, and inaudit (or privacy) a form of specified opt-out. For celebrities, these include legal and quasi-legal forms of media surveillance; for the powerful, it means the constant threat of leaks, the publication of money-grabbing memoirs and Freedom of Information Requests; for the rest of us, it means facebook and digital cameras.

Under these conditions, words, actions and decisions have a nasty habit of catching up on one. Interestingly, we've largely forgotten about the intrusion of the Big Brother state (for the time being), and discovered that the public sphere can be a far more brutal and effective mechanism for surveillance than the all-seeing, expert panopticon. This is partly thanks to the on-going furore around 'hackgate' in the UK, but also because of a strange new form of political correctness that appears to be emerging, as the public etiquette of the twitter age.

As Chris Dillow argues, a number of recent events suggest that the British have become incredibly over-sensitive recently. Despite having been one of the marchers that Jeremy Clarkson said he would like to shoot (in front of my family) in November, I was depressed by the scale of reaction against a man who (as Stuart Lee points out) is paid specifically to recite predictable rightwing slogans in public. The saga over Luis Suarez's finger - which hilariously now gets reported with the offensive gesture concealed - suggests that we're reviving an Edwardian sensibility. This at a time when no Guardian or Observer op-ed is complete, without an anonymous cabinet minister being quoted that someone or other is "completely fucked" (serving only to demonstrate the intimacy of quoter with quoted).

Levels of rudeness, obscenity and pornography are becoming normalised everywhere, while the stakes surrounding a stray finger or badly-judged joke are also rising rapidly. It's hard not to feel sorry for the BBC and Channel 4, who have to muster unprecedented levels of confidence (that are impossible to defend, if challenged persistently enough by enough people) that Franky Boyle or someone is within his rights to use a certain word or sentence.

Clearly, twitter and chatrooms have changed things in two obvious ways. Firstly, registering disgust has become massively easier, a problem which afflicts various service and hospitality industries, via user feedback websites. Secondly, movements of disgust can gather momentum and experience tipping points, until they dominate the headlines. This means that complaints can far outstrip the number of initial viewers, as 'Sachsgate' demonstrated best of all.

All of which turns public offence and defence into a game, involving strategy, scores, winners and losers. Offence can be measured partly in terms of how many people claim to be offended. But there are also PR-type strategies at work in terms of getting things into and out of the public 'conversation'. If they hang around for long enough, then it becomes apparently insensitive for political leaders to avoid confronting them (as both Ed Miliband and David Cameron seemingly felt in relation to Jeremy Clarkson's joke). Because the threat of over-reaction by the public is now so great, authorities often opt to over-react in the first place. For instance, this mildly irreverant Tim Minchin Christmas song was apparently pulled by ITV, before any offence had been taken. OfCom, which ironically was set up according to the most boldly technocratic principles of any regulator, is now in the unfortunate position of having to adjudicate over many such moral issues. Humour experts cannot be far behind.

What gets forgotten in amongst all of this is a fairly simple question: what does offence consist of in the first place? This NYRB article, reviewing two books on digust, might be a good place to start. I am perfectly willing to call Jeremy Clarkson a 'tosser', or even - if I thought I could get a cheap laugh - suggest that he be chopped into slices and fed to the rest of the Top Gear team. But I would find it difficult to watch the clip of him asking for marchers to be 'shot', and report that I am experiencing 'offence' or 'disgust'. To do so would be to descend to another form of moral failing: it would make me a 'liar'.

So what about the recent scandals surrounding racism by Premier League footballers? Maybe all of this over-sensitivity is a price worth paying, if it helps to out John Terry and Luis Suarez as racists and condemn them accordingly. But the problem is that these cases still feel like they're part of a game. The moral repugnance of racism gets almost overlooked, in favour of empirical questions, such as who said what, how do we know, what does the camera or microphone pick up, whose responsibility is it to act, what does the FA (or police) have to do in order for the issue to go away again, how will this affect his football or the England football team. It's almost as if John Terry's greatest mistake was to be so easily lip-read. Quite how or why a multi-millionaire England football captain thinks like that in the first place (or whether he really does) gets left in the shadows, by debates about what can be seen and confirmed as true.

As a result of all this, the age of transparency is also the age of the choreographed grovelling apology. The most disgusting - yes, I think I really mean that - aspect of the Aiden Burley 'nazi-themed stag party' scandal was the report that:

Aides tried to arrange for him to join a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. But the Tory leadership moved against Burley after the newspaper reported on Sunday that he was responsible for hiring the Nazi uniform.

So their ruse didn't quite work. But the point is this: in the game of public offence and defence, Aiden Burley's aides sought to instrumentalise a Nazi concentration camp as a strategy to wrong-foot his opponents (perhaps in time for the lunchtime news). Personally, I hope Aiden Burley and his aides suffer serious disappointments in their careers, leading to prolonged regret and self-doubt. In front of their families. I'm not joking, but I am being offensive.

John Terry's PR team pulled off an equivalent coup, with this surreal headline. Is this where we're all heading to? Mobilising children, monuments and history as a means to distract the twittersphere for a few hours? Some bizarre logic of equivalence is underway, that one regrettable photograph or youtube clip can be cancelled out with one carefully planned (and photographed) gesture towards transcendent political ideals or tragedies. I suspect that Princess Diana may have set the stage for the politics of this new era.

The first wave of political correctness was idealistic, with shades of Orwellian mind control, but too technologically naive to tip into totalitarianism. It sought to police how people spoke, but with no means of achieving this, other than traditional education, debate and disapproval. As the inverse of this, the new wave of political correctness is technologically sophisticated, but with no ideals attached. It is purely concerned with catching people out, making them look foolish, putting them through the ringer for a few hours, days or weeks (depending on how much they are considered to deserve it).

But as a result, it has no concern with the unseen, the undetected or the not-yet-detected. It can work in tandem with professional investigative journalism (as with hackgate, MPs expenses and wikileaks), but it only judges what it can see. It reduces crimes and misdemeanours to their visible evidence, which can be cancelled out by the creation of equivalent visible counter-evidence.

the demise of football

Thomas Friedman famously offered the 'Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention', on the basis that no two nations with a McDonalds within their borders had ever gone to war. Allow me to offer its successor: the 'White Goalposts Theory of Crisis Resolution'. This theory states that we will know that our present economic crisis is being resolved (rather than deepened), once a front-bench politician comes out and publicly attacks football, in terms of its business models, culture and economic norms, and not only for its sporadic eruptions of racism or corruption. My prediction, for what it's worth, is that this event will occur in October 2013, and that the politician in question will be Yvette Cooper, Leader of the Labour Party.

Football was once such worthless political currency that Margaret Thatcher publicly questioned whether England should be allowed to compete in the 1990 world cup, due to the threat of hooliganism. Euro96 was the turning point, although English hooliganism was still rife at the Euro 2000 championships. Since Euro96, no politician has had the guts to question any aspect of the game or its status within our media, public sphere or national self-image. The 'old' aspects of the game - racism and FIFA corruption - are routinely attacked, but the 'modern' game cannot be questioned.

But look how grizzly things are getting. I read last week that Carlos Tevez may be prepared to take a pay cut from his £250,000 a week job at Manchester City, on the one condition that his new club has it written into his contract that he remain the highest paid player in the squad. Wayne Rooney's behaviour regarding his Manchester Utd contract was criticised by many, but politicians repeatedly duck these issues, despite viewing consumerism, (some) advertising and (recently) X Factor as fair game. Energy oligarchs have removed whatever sense of 'level playing field' may have remained in the English Premier League, turning the top of the football labour market into a far less dignified version of what goes on in boardrooms, as players shamelessly strategise towards remuneration increases (hilariously still termed 'wages') through any means possible.

What precisely are we celebrating when we enthuse about football? Increasingly it is referred to as 'athleticism', in which case lets all start following Usain Bolt. If we have to turn our backs on the tediously-adored Barcelona at the same time, then so be it. It's a price worth paying. The football-obsessed sports shops in British high streets have nothing to do with athleticism or even physical exercise any longer. Just try buying some new laces, socks or functional trainers in JD Sports. You could come out dressed from head to toe as Michael Jordan, but there are much cheaper ways to get a fancy dress outfit.

Football is more interesting as a bellwether of contemporary capitalism, and should be criticised accordingly. Not long ago it was PLC ownership structures that looked like they were stripping the heart out of clubs, seeing them run 'for profit'. Now the problem is the opposite: they are owned by private billionaires, run 'for power', but at a vast loss. Roman Abramovich's takeover at Chelsea in 2003 thefore anticipated the broader trends that I've argued the present crisis will unleash.

Regulation School Marxists define a capitalist crisis as a situation where neither 'more of the same' nor 'less of the same' will resolve the situation. Our present debt crisis is a case in point. More debt makes it worse; paying off debt also makes it worse. Resolving such situations requires a fundamental revaluation - innovation not only in policy measures and mechanisms, but in the culture and values that underpin how government and business institutions operate.

The challenge of resolving a serious crisis is that it involves a degree of truth and reconciliation regarding the past. One often has to accept that critics (sometimes quite eccentric ones) are right, and even that they have been right for a long time. The demise of Keynesianism was as slow as it was because it involved coming to terms with the fact that full employment was no longer a useful goal of policy. This was a severe moral revaluation, not simply a technical paradigm shift. The enemies of Keynesianism (the monetarists) had to be welcomed in to the fold. This takes time and much pride swallowing. There is also some first mover advantage on these occasions, just as Britain seemed to benefit from giving up on the ERM, before its terms were loosened anyway.

To accept that football - or should we say 'Football' as an idea - may actually be part of the disease, and not a harmless supplement to our economy would take some pride-swallowing. The idea that 'talent' has its 'desert' in very large amounts of money is so ingrained, we so want it to be true, that we carry on adhering to it no matter how grotesque the spectacle it generates. The media maintains the pretence of separating Ashley Cole the 'talented' footballer from Ashley Cole the unruly working class 'yob' (as if the latter is just his unfortunate inheritance), ignoring the obvious liklihood that football is far more responsible for his noxious personality than his upbringing.

Those on the liberal-left are able to see through the rhetoric of bankers, when they demand that London remain a 'level playing field' so as to ensure that their industry's 'David Beckhams' are still attracted to work here. The liberal-left is able to debunk football as a metaphor. But why not go a stage further, and attack the whole sorry charade that's been making fools of so many people (me included) for the past 15 years?

Why must Jonathan Freedland write a sensible argument about extreme inequality in pay, but in the same article offer a justification for Wayne Rooney's £250k a week? Once you give in to the neo-classical vision of a labour market, that wages are simply a reflection of 'demand', then the door has been left ajar for the likes of Fred Goodwin. Why not just take the bull by the horns, and accept that the whole thing should just be shipped off to a vast in-door Nike sports complex in Dubai where it belongs? Is it not possible that the constant news reports of footballers attacking women, of fans being charged £50 a ticket and replica shirts being 'outdated' every 9 months, of Manchester Utd's Nani having a life-size marble sculpture of himself in his house do not happen inspite of the vast sums of money that are now at stake in this game, but because of it?

At some point in the future this will appear obvious. Soon after that, we will find it difficult to ever believe we tolerated, even celebrated, this circus in the first place - just as, by the 1990s, it seemed extraordinary to think that governments once targeted full employment. For the time being, any politician would shudder at the thought of criticising the game, as opposed to its undesirable 'externalities' or its metaphorical distortions. Which, according to the White Goal Posts Theory of Crisis Resolution, only goes to show how far into our current crisis we are: not even half way.

The new conservatism began/ In nineteen seventy three...

Amidst the fall-out from David Cameron's European veto, whose logic I cannot compute (I have always considered myself far too nice to fully understand either statecraft or Tories), I've been struck by an analogy between American and British conservatism. For rightwing parties and conservative movements, Britain's membership of the European Union has a number of parallels with the US Supreme Court's abortion ruling in Roe v Wade. Just think...

In 1973, at the fag-end of the 1960s, the state takes a historic modernising, cosmopolitan, liberal decision, in keeping with the spirit of an age which is drawing to a close. The decision is supported by many modernising elites from across the political spectrum, but creates strong feelings amongst traditional conservatives, including those who had traditionally voted for the centre left party. This contributes to a conservative victory at the close of the 1970s, led by a conviction politician who spoke the language of traditional social values, winning working class support despite economic policies that later destroyed working class jobs. The rhetoric of family values and nation was turned against both left-liberals and establishment elites, both of whom were held guilty of having betrayed core national values, as manifest in that 1973 decision.

However, the conservative victors of the 1980s did very little to reverse the liberal legacies that they'd inherited, including the 1973 policy itself. They were able to blame unelected, rule-obsessed liberals, for the aspects of modern society that offended traditional values and angered the rightwing media, to great effect. The 1973 decision itself was not really a politically live one until the 1990s, when it became the cause celebre of an entirely new generation of conservatives. Until the 1990s, socialism had been the main preoccupation of conservative animosity, but this spectre swiftly disappeared after 1989. By the mid-1990s, a centrist government was finding that a new, angrier, unreasonable strain of conservatism was making governing almost impossible. The executive was in daily war with the legislative. And it was the historic 1973 ruling that got them angriest of all.

This new, less reasonable conservatism posed a serious problem to the rightwing party. It was both tempting to pander to it, but also dangerous, in view of its unpredictability and its slightly messianic commitment to a single moral issue, to the exclusion of economics or utilitarian policy analysis. The rightwing party wanted its energy, but also feared how its seething anger and obsession with matters of constitutional principle might alienate swing voters. What should they do?

There is a huge amount about the analogy that doesn't work. I don't know exactly how democratically popular abortion is in the US, but I suspect that it is much more popular than Britain's membership of Europe, which attracts very little public support. There is also a vast difference between a secular issue of national sovereignty and a metaphysical issue of 'life' (as it is defined by US conservatives). I doubt Britain's entry to the single market did much to further Thatcher's cause in 1979, whereas Roe v. Wade did much to encourage the 'Reagan Democrats'. Plus entry to Europe was carried out by an elected government, not by an unelected judiciary.

And yet the historic rhythm of each issue is similar, especially the way in which the 'angry white men' appeared twenty years after the crucial (liberal modernising) decision had been taken, and appeared hell-bent on subverting sensible government, without regard for public opinion. The removal of the socialist bogey-man led conservatives in search of a new enemy, which they found in the fallout from the 1960s. The new breed of Tories are just as hostile to their 'wet', pro-European Conservative forbears as The Tea Party is to the GOP establishment.

Today, I can see three reasons why a young, aspiring politician would want to join the Conservative Party. Firstly, because it offers them a comfortable rural existence, combined with access to London's toff circuit. Secondly, because they are ruthlessly opportunistic, and would happily have stood as Labour candidates if they'd been born 10 years earlier (this applies more to political advisors than to MPs). Thirdly, because of animosity to Europe, or at least some commitment to the British establishment that has recently become re-framed in anti-Europe, patriotic terms. Cameron and George Osborne betray elements of all three; but the point is that there is no longer a pool of Geoffrey Howe or Michael Heseltine types, for whom the Conservative Party offers opportunity for respectable and traditional public service. Ken Clarke is last man standing (would his equivalent be John McCain?).

Europe has become crucial to the identity of contemporary British conservatives, just as abortion is to American conservatives. This is not a rational or economic issue any longer, and David Cameron must have believed that his European veto would grant him the form of power over his party that Thatcher and Major never achieved. He appears to be banking on the notion (contradicted repeatedly by Tony Blair) that the adoration of his party would be an invaluable political asset.

But has he fully understood conservatism? Perhaps not. The genius of the US Republican Party over the past 20 years has been to stoke the flames of conservative anger, rather than to douse them with the policy changes they demand. Much of the Republican's political strategy has been neo-conservative, not conservative, that is, cynically and cleverly exploiting 'values' and religious belief, in the service of secular realpolitik - the lesson of Leo Strauss. Karl Rove, I'm guessing, would never have wanted to see Roe v Wade repealed (were that even possible), for that would have immediately dampened the ire of millions of angry, Republican voters. Tony Blair, also, recognised that if politics is fundamentally about 'friend-enemy' distinctions, that destroying enemies is a far smarter route to keeping friends on board, than simply giving them what they clamour for.

Cameron has opted for a far less strategic route, suggesting that he may be more 'con' than 'neo-con' - a naive position to hold, in a modern capitalist global society. His back-benchers will demand more concessions from him, leading eventually to a full withdrawal from Europe, whereupon the cause celebre that drew them from their rural idyls and their Mayfair hedge funds in the first place will be lost for good.

Marxism Today remembered

The ippr's edition of Public Policy Research, dedicated to remembering and learning from Marxism Today, is now out. The individual articles can be downloaded here, for those with university log-ins.

The purpose of the edition is to ask how the approach taken by Eric Hobsbawm (interviewed in it), Martin Jacques, Stuart Hall et al might be updated for the Left's current purposes. How might the 'new times' of post-2008 political economy and post-Blairite politics be understood today, so that the Left can work with sociological forces, and not against them? This question isn't without some controversy, seeing as how it typically credits the Left's opponents with considerable cultural credibility and political authority. At a discussion of this legacy at the ippr last night, a number of former contributors noted the curiosity of the fact that this was a journal that was both tightly disciplined, fiercely edited and bankrolled by the British Communist Party, while also injecting a form of pluralism, lightness and open-mindedness into the Left that represented an exit route from the macho ideological infighting of the early 1980s.

My contribution has already been trailed in The New Statesman, and David Miliband's was trailed in The Observer on Sunday. You can also read an edited version of Tristram Hunt's contribution on the ippr website.

Update: You can watch Martin Jacques, David Miliband, Charles Clarke and Graeme Cooke discussing all of this below.

macro-economic falsification

Here are three intriguing insights from economic conservatives:

Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments. As Keynes says, it deals with "what is," not with "what ought to be." Its task is to provide a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances. Its performance is to be judged by the precision, scope, and conformity with experience of the predictions it yields.

Milton Friedman, The Methodology of Positive Economics [pdf] (1953)

 

We should cut early, as deep as is feasible given time-tabling constraints. We need growth, and early cuts are likely to promote growth, even in the short term. There are three reasons why. First, at lower levels of public spending the economy is likely to grow faster. If the economy grows faster, then wages will grow faster. So households today will feel safe to borrow and consume more and to save less, knowing that their (pre-tax) incomes will be higher later, allowing them to pay off their debts. Investors will also expect better returns if growth is faster...

Andrew Lilico, Chief Economist, Policy Exchange, The Observer, June 2010

 

[The Office for Budget Responsibility] expect GDP in Britain to grow this year by 0.9% – and by 0.7% next year...The OBR have significantly reduced their assumptions about the spare capacity in the economy – and the trend rate of growth. And this increases their estimate of the proportion of the deficit that is structural – in other words, the part of the deficit that doesn’t disappear even when the economy recovers. So our debt challenge is even greater than we thought because the boom was even bigger, the bust even deeper, and the effects will last even longer.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Autumn Statement, November 2011

I trust that any followers of Milton Friedman will have the good grace to accept when an economic hypothesis has been disproven.

Update: The New Statesman points towards a speech David Miliband made from the back benches yesterday, dismantling Osborne's claims about the sources of growth.

Further update: Andrew Lilico has explained why his theory hasn't yielded the expected results. It rather confirms IanC's intuition in his first comment below.

poppies as national cultural audit

Poppies are providing an excellent annual opportunity to take our nation's temperature. Or at least, our nation's media's temperature. Every November, the imagined community of 'Britain' receives a ritualised cultural audit, by an unholy alliance of the tabloids, advertising agencies, the monarchy and - this time round - the England football team. Somewhere in amongst all of this, ex-soldiers get a look-in, though the results aren't very pretty. 

This year it's been especially gruesome. How's this for a clash of illegitimate powers: Prince William and David Cameron have been arguing with FIFA as to whether or not John Terry, Ashley Cole, et al, should be permitted to wear poppies during the hiding they are due to receive at the hands of Spain later on this afternoon. A less appealing bunch of unwanted oligarchs it would be difficult to imagine. If Fred Goodwin were mud-wrestling with Rush Limbaugh over which of them had rightful claim on an old lady's dropped purse, it would be a more dignified and worthy form of political argument than this.

Last year, I felt that the British Legion's advertising campaign was actively re-engineering what was involved in national mouring, reducing it to a form of sympathy and sentimentality, which was locked in the present. The images contained in those advertisements obliterated the past, rather than remembered it. This might help explain how it is that poppy-fever is experiencing a crescendo, at a time in history when the First World War (from where the symbol of the poppy was originally taken) is just fading from living memory. For a teenager today, the First World War is the equivalent of what the Crimean War was to the baby-boomer generation. This is no longer something that one's grandparents can report on.

This enables the symbol of the poppy to acquire a form of timelessness, that enables it to be used in a mildly fascistic fashion, to represent various sentiments and forms of nationalism, independently of any relationship to history. Nationalism always depends on sufficient forgetting, such that a relationship to the past can be reinvented for the purposes of the present and the future. Accurate history or empirical remembering, is an obstacle to nationalism. So how is our imagined community progressing? Here are this year's offerings:

Helen Mirren and Andy Murray are presumably employed here as famous and successful representatives of Britain. Mirren glitters at the Oscars. Murray nearly wins various major tennis tournaments. They are offered as international envoys we can feel proud of. What grates about these posters is the fact that the advertising creatives behind them have entirely failed to eschew their brain-numbingly repetitive tool of choice, namely the pun.

Advertising successfully gets under the skin through double entendre. Every leading slogan has a duck-rabbit element to it, whereby it changes meaning inside the mind, producing a form of psychological tinnitus which continues to reverberate enfuriatingly. 'Enjoy More' (McDonalds), means more enjoyment or more food. Extract any sensible grammar from a sentence and the opportunities only escalate, hence the grammaturgical jingle 'Every Little Helps' (Tescos), whose efficacy is testimony to the psychological power of total nonsense, and which turns its target  into a form of idiot consumant.

The problem with performing this trick on behalf of the fallen and the wounded is that it generates some rather horrific forms of equivalence. The statement that 'Our troops are the real stars' only works in this context, because it assumes that the reader already knows that Helen Mirren really is a 'real star'. If a member of the public were depicted saying 'Our troops are real stars', this would carry a single meaning, namely that our troops are real stars. The only reason they have put these words in a Hollywood actress's mouth is because, that way, they're not entirely true. In all honesty, Helen Mirren is a real star, while our troops are anonymous working class boys. It is only because we all, ultimately, know that to be true, that the advertising slogan works at all.

The Murray advert is more absurd. The pun here - and someone in Soho must have hit the Columbian marching powder a little too hard the day this one was invented - is that, ahem, tennis players sometimes 'don't return' a serve. In case this is too awful to fathom, lets be entirely explicit about this: that advert, the one with Andy Murray in it selling poppies, is making a play on words, which compares our feelings towards a tennis player who's just been beaten by an ace, with our feelings towards a soldier who has been killed in Afghanistan. 'Those who don't return'. Oh yes, I get it! Oh, actually, no, I don't get it at all.

So here we are, the proud British of 2011, parading our chosen Hollywood crumpet, alongside our embarrassingly Scottish Wimbledon semi-finallist, in the hope that we'll all join hands and applaud a series of rituals that are being lifted out of history, and plonked into the middle of a football match, thanks to the intervention by an unelected and a sort-of elected political leader. Yep, that's us. See you next November.

the onward rise of technocracy

It is now firmly established (contrary to the naive Keynesian celebrations of 2008-09) that the crises of neoliberalism are working in favour of their architects, and not against them. The banks are more powerful, three years after their historic suicide attacks, not less. What is now also becoming clear is that the same is true for neoliberalism's preferred mode of sovereign ruler: the technocrat. Both Greece and Italy are to become nations governed not just via economics (as Foucauldian theorists of liberal governmentality have long witnessed) but by economists. Potentially this is a wholly new epoch emerging, in the interplay between the modern state and liberal economics.

This makes Woolfgang Streeck's recent article in The New Left Review all the more prescient. As he argues there:

There are various ways to conceptualize the underlying causes of the friction between capitalism and democracy. For present purposes, I will characterize democratic capitalism as a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align...

In the liberal utopia of standard economic theory, the tension in democratic capitalism between its two principles of allocation is overcome by turning the theory into what Marx would have called a material force. In this view, economics as ‘scientific knowledge’ teaches citizens and politicians that true justice is market justice, under which everybody is rewarded according to their contribution, rather than their needs redefined as rights. To the extent that economic theory became accepted as a social theory, it would ‘come true’ in the sense of being performative—thus revealing its essentially rhetorical nature as an instrument of social construction by persuasion. In the real world, however, it did not prove so easy to talk people out of their ‘irrational’ beliefs in social and political rights, as distinct from the law of the market and the right of property. To date, non-market notions of social justice have resisted efforts at economic rationalization, forceful as the latter may have become in the leaden age of advancing neoliberalism.

It is also worth noting that the march of the technocrats in 2011 is (at least on the face of it) just as startling as the onward march of the investment banks in 2010. Wasn't the financial crisis also a vast humiliation for economic expertise? Didn't the risk modelling techniques, the stress tests and the forecasts turn out to be about as 'objective' as a gut feeling about the Grand National? And can't we now accept that any social scientist who projects an arrogant refusal to discuss their methods, their presuppositions and their own perspective, is ultimately more politically dangerous than the apparently 'post-modern' ones who are frank enough to discuss the interplay of power and knowledge?

Under the new circumstances, the description of economics as a 'social science' becomes less tenable. Economics has undergone various mutations in its time (though of course this would be the last thing that would be discussed in an economics class), from a branch of political theory in the mid-18th century, to something approaching economic sociology in the mid-19th century, to a professional academic discipline by the early 20th century, before descending into mathematical formalism by the late 20th century. The new technocrats, on the other hand, do not - and importantly can not - abide by Milton Friedman's Popperian vision of economics, as the generator of falsifiable predictions. In the face of an uncertain future, the technocrats do not use economics to produce models of risk, but to shape and control it via sovereign powers. These are two separate pragmatic responses to uncertainty as identified by Frank Knight - but Knight never foresaw that economics would be used in pursuit of the latter.

Economics and sovereignty are merging. If Prime Ministers Mario Monti or Lucas Papademos ever turn out to be 'wrong' in their economic analysis, this might, from now on, be beside the point.