Showing posts with label conservative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservative. Show all posts
Sunday 3 December 2023
Friday 22 September 2023
Wednesday 16 August 2023
A level Economics: Conservatives are attacking Capitalism
The Economist writes about four new books that show how the reactionary right and Luddite left have converged
2. Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It By Sohrab Ahmari. Forum Books; 288 pages; $28
3. Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. By Patrick Deneen. Sentinel; 288 pages; $30. Forum; £22
4. Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security and Prosperity. By Marco Rubio. Broadside Books; 256 pages; $32 and £20
Two decades ago Johan Norberg, a Swedish liberal, wrote a bracing polemic called “In Defence of Global Capitalism”. Leftists hated it and sniffed that he was “on the ‘crazy right’”. Now, when he makes exactly the same arguments, people on the right accuse him of being “woke left”. “I’m not the one who’s changed,” he writes.
The angriest critiques of global capitalism come increasingly from the populist right. This is true in several Western countries, but especially so in America. Republicans used to extol the benefits of free trade and free markets. Now, following Donald Trump’s lead, Republican candidates demand higher barriers, especially to goods from China, and berate corporations for their “wokeness” in supporting greenery and diversity. Four new books illuminate this shift, which fans of economic liberty find alarming.
Their critiques target two villains: corporations and liberalism. Sohrab Ahmari, a socially conservative Iranian-American journalist, is part of the anti-corporate crowd. In “Tyranny, Inc”, he claims that we live in “a system that allows the asset-owning few to subject the asset-less many to pervasive coercion—coercion that, unlike governmental actions, can’t be challenged in court or at the ballot box.”
Many of his complaints sound lefty. Amazon uses intrusive cameras to monitor its warehouse workers; other firms snoop on their minions’ private emails and web browsing. Employers set unpredictable working hours, which staff cannot easily refuse because they need to put food on the table. Life for the bottom 50% in America is precarious, stressful and unjust.
Other complaints reflect Mr Ahmari’s social conservatism. He disapproves of unpredictable working hours partly because of their effect on family life. He rages that woke corporations such as Disney and American Express “train” workers to accept controversial progressive ideas on race and gender.
He is a deft storyteller. A favourite trick is to describe some terrible injustice as if it occurred in a dictatorship like China or Iran and then to reveal—hey, presto!—that it happened in America. He highlights genuine injustices, such as the way some firms abuse gag clauses, non-compete agreements and the arbitration process.
His analysis, however, is flawed. Private firms in America have far less power over workers than he claims. When they behave abusively, they are often challenged in court. More importantly, with unemployment at 3.5%, disgruntled employees can credibly threaten to quit.
To tame corporate tyranny, Mr Ahmari would supercharge the state. It should encourage unionisation in every sector, play “a far more active role in co-ordinating economic activity” and require financial speculators who buy a company and want to change things to submit to the veto of “workers, local communities and other stakeholders”.
This is a recipe for slower growth and less innovation. Indeed, it is often hard to distinguish Mr Ahmari’s economic proposals from those of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders on the Democratic left. Yet he thinks his mix of social conservatism and economic populism is the future of the Republican Party, helping it win elections long after Donald Trump has retired or gone to jail. He may be right. This was the calculation made by jd Vance, who first rose to prominence as the author of “Hillbilly Elegy”, which explained the plight of America’s forgotten white working-class, before he ran in Ohio for a Senate seat—and won.
In “Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future”, Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, gives voice to a gloomy, reactionary strain of thinking. On the first page he laments America’s blighted cities, family breakdown, inequality and “psychic despair”, noting “a growing chorus of voices [reflecting] on the likelihood and even desirability of civil war”.
For all this, he blames liberalism: both the classical sort, which seeks material progress through creative destruction, and the progressive sort that aims to upend family and tradition. To turn back the clock, he would have the state support bigger traditional families (as it does in Hungary) and manufacturing (as it does under Joe Biden). He would restrict immigration, which he says elite liberals support in order to undercut the wages of the native-born and supply themselves with cheap servants.
None of this will work. Plenty of evidence suggests that immigration has little effect on native wages (so curbing it will not raise them); that industrial policy is generally wasteful; that pro-family policies have little effect on fertility; and that Hungary is a kleptocracy.
“Conservative” parties in the West have championed free markets at least since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But free markets are profoundly unconservative. They bring rapid change, usually making people better off, but also disrupting old ways of doing things. Serious conservatives aim to minimise this disruption without impeding growth too much. Demagogues, however, pretend there is no trade-off: that you can have all the benefits of progress without changing the way you live.
For an idea of how ideas like Mr Ahmari’s and Mr Deneen’s might sound when stripped of nuance for the campaign trail, try “Decades of Decadence”. When Marco Rubio first ran for the United States Senate in 2010, he talked about how wonderful it was that he, the son of penniless Cuban immigrants, could aspire to high office in America. Now, still aspiring to even higher office from within a much-changed Republican Party (despite losing to Donald Trump in the Republican primary in 2016), he has embraced his erstwhile rival’s nativist clichés.
He decries America’s “open southern border” and yearns for the good old days when “we took it for granted that most of the things we bought…were made right here at home by our fellow Americans.” He blames China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation for the fact that “Too many Americans who want to live normal decent lives are unable to do so.” To those who say that imports from China might improve American lives, he retorts that such people think of Americans not as “workers, fathers and citizens” but as “consumers…nothing more”.
“The Capitalist Manifesto” by Mr Norberg of the Cato Institute, a think-tank, offers a joyful counterblast to Mr Rubio’s Trumpy stridence. The three decades after 1990, when globalisation took off, have seen greater improvements in human living conditions than the previous three millennia, he shows. Poverty is down, lifespans are longer and technology that only the Pentagon could afford in 1990 is now on every smartphone. “I am not saying that the era has been unequivocally good, only that it has been better than any other era humanity has experienced,” comments Mr Norberg.
When imitation isn’t flattery
Both the new right and the old (and new) left share a zero-sum view of economics, imagining that one person’s gain must be another’s loss. The old left hated free trade and free markets because they supposedly let rich countries exploit poor ones. Now that many of those poor countries have debunked this argument by prospering, the new right complains that free trade and free markets let China exploit the West.
Mr Norberg shows that all of their proposed solutions have been tried before, with dismal results. One study of 50 countries with populist leaders found that 15 years after they take control, their economies are a tenth smaller than those of comparable countries.
In a book packed with vivid examples, one of the most compelling concerns covid-19. Pandemic lockdowns, though widely opposed by the new right, actually achieved many of their stated aims. Borders were closed, migration halted, supply chains disrupted. Global poverty soared—and life became miserable in rich countries, too. Mr Norberg concludes: “It is difficult to imagine a stronger and more tragic proof that progress depends on open societies and economies.” If only his was the last word.
Saturday 6 August 2022
The people about to choose Britain’s next prime minister
Despite rumours to the contrary, the Tory faithful are exactly what you might imagine writes The Economist
It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.
The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.
What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.
According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.
Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.
But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.
The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.
The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”
Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.
Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.
It might be a queue for Marylebone Cricket Club, or perhaps an upmarket prostate clinic. There is ample linen. There are panama hats and pink cheeks and pink trousers; there is white hair and bald heads and a lurking suspicion that someone in the vicinity might bear the title “Major”. There are few women. There is almost no one, except the staff, who is not white.
The identity of the Tory party membership is a matter of national importance. The contest between Rishi Sunak, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to become the leader of the Conservative Party will also decide Britain’s next prime minister. The franchise for this choice belongs to members of the Tory party, at least 160,000-odd of them. Probably. For no one can or will say how many Tory party members there actually are.
What is clear is that they are gathering. In Exeter and Eastbourne, in Cardiff and Cheltenham, Tories are mobilising to attend the hustings for their new leader. Go to these hustings and you can see them queuing, punctually, outside. Some say that the Tory faithful are not what you might think. The queues put paid to that idea: the Tories are precisely what you might think.
According to research from academics at Queen Mary University and Sussex University, 68% of Tory members are over 50; 96% are white; 21% belong to the National Trust or English Heritage; 66% are male (see chart). They are not quite as aristocratic as the panamas and perceptions might suggest: policemen and teachers are among those queuing to get into the hustings. Women are manifestly in the minority. Many are unwilling to speak to a journalist, scattering like startled fish when approached and proffering their husbands as spokesperson instead. The term “Tory wife” appears to be less misogyny than justifiable taxonomy.
Tories may be mockable. That does not mean that they are malignant (or that unusual for members of political parties; Labour’s are 93% white). It is a trope that deviancy lurks behind the upstanding Tory exterior. George Orwell wrote that for a murder to make a truly entertaining news story it should have been perpetrated by a pious Christian preacher or a “chairman of the local Conservative Party branch”. Edward Heath, a former Tory prime minister, felt his party consisted of “shits, bloody shits and fucking shits”.
But the mood at the hustings is benevolent. Mike Trevor, working at the Exeter event as a security guard (and one of the few non-white people there), considers the Tories a “very easy crowd”. Mr Trevor usually does arena concerts. Tories, he says, are “very nice” to deal with. Another guard pulls a face: some members had become stroppy when she took away their water bottles. In the queue, Tories—polite, if prone to the odd harrumph—shuffle forwards.
The hustings do reveal two misconceptions about the Tory party race. The first is the idea that it is about Mr Sunak and Ms Truss. There are, as it were, three of us in these hustings. Many members are there less to elect a new leader than to mourn their old one—and to berate his killer. As one Tory, a fan of Mr Sunak, regretfully observes, in the assassination of Boris Johnson Mr Sunak has been cast as Brutus. On this reading Mr Johnson’s fall was not caused by his own incompetence and duplicity; it was caused by Mr Sunak. It is notable that the largest cheer of the evening in Exeter comes when, during a montage film of past Tory highlights, Mr Johnson pops up celebrating his 2019 election victory. Banquo’s ghost rarely made a better entrance.
The other misconception involves a confusion over conjunctions. Ms Truss is currently well ahead of Mr Sunak—the favourite among mps and the public—in polling of Tory members. A recent YouGov poll put her support at 58%, and his at just 29%. Surveying such a small, opaque electorate is hard but commentators still wonder how, “despite” jibes that she is “bonkers” and a “human hand grenade”, this lead apparently yawns. Speak to Tories at the hustings and it is clear that with Ms Truss—as with Mr Johnson before her—the correct conjunction is not “despite” but “because”. Ms Truss may be “bonkers”, says Colin Trudgeon, a Tory member, but “I love a bit of bonkers. Boris…was nutty as a fruitcake.”
Inside the venues, preconceptions about the candidates are generally confirmed. Ms Truss is, as a now-famous clip in which she discussed British cheese made clear, a friend of the full stop. She peppers her speeches with them. Often even stopping. Midway through a sentence. For effect. She discusses emotive issues: Vladimir Putin, fishermen and proper crops. In our fields.
Mr Sunak, meanwhile, is a man who speaks in subclauses. Sentences and ideas accumulate; complexity is embraced; nuance noted. He discusses corporation tax with enthusiasm. Neither fully wows the audience. Afterwards, Tory members who speak to your correspondent consider that Mr Sunak was more “statesmanlike”. But inside it was Ms Truss’s pauses for which they whooped more.
Saturday 25 December 2021
What is Modi-Shah BJP’s ideology? You’re wrong if you say Right wing, because it’s Hindu Left
Modi-Shah BJP government is Right only on religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other.writes SHEKHAR GUPTA in The Print
Prashant Kishor, who prefers to be described as a political aide rather than a strategist, which is generally the preferred usage for him, featured in our serious conversational show ‘Off The Cuff’ this week. Neelam Pandey, a senior member of our political reporting team at ThePrint, co-hosted it with me.
At some point, we asked him the question that’s always intrigued us. Does he have an ideology? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that he’s worked with Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Congress-SP (Uttar Pradesh, 2017), M.K. Stalin, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amarinder Singh and more?
To our surprise, he said no, I am not ideology-agnostic, you can call me Left-of-Centre. And then went on to elaborate what he meant, by using Mahatma Gandhi’s example. And so on. I noticed later, incidentally, that Kishor’s Twitter bio begins with the words “Revere Gandhi…”
His claim to a Centre-Left ideology set us thinking. What if we asked any of the other key political leaders the same question today? What is your ideology? Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Andhra’s Jagan, Tamil Nadu’s Stalin, Telangana’s KCR and so on. If any of them chooses to answer that question — the answer, honest or not, will be about the same. Everyone in Indian politics now wades in the waters of varying depth somewhere on the Left side of the pool. Nobody will say I stand on the Right.
Which brings us to the trick question. What would Narendra Modi’s answer be? We are, of course, making a brave and far-out presumption that he lets us or anyone ask him such a direct question: What’s your ideology, Prime Minister sir? Now, whether you are fan or a critic, chances are, your immediate response will be, of course the Right wing.
Over the past seven years since the Modi-Shah BJP has been in power, “Right wing” has become the widely accepted usage for the party, and the ideological forces behind it. We need to examine if this passes the test of facts. And fasten seat belts. Because, I will then make the case to you that what Modi and his BJP represent today is not a domineering national force of the Hindu Right. It is, on the other hand, the Hindu Left.
The Left-Right descriptors over time have become mixed up and confusing. In governance terms, the Right means first of all, social conservatism, strong religiosity, hard nationalism, low threshold for criticism, an authoritarian outlook. On all these parameters, the Modi government and today’s BJP pass the test of being Right wing. The reason I qualify it here is that we do not get caught in simplistic binaries. On all of these, this BJP and Modi are no different from, say, the Republicans in the US or the British Conservatives. Then, we enter contentious zones.
How do we, then come to our argument that the Modi-Shah-Yogi BJP is not a force of the pure Right or even the Hindu Right, but of the Hindu Left?
Check out the many steps the Modi government has taken on the economy in the past seven-plus years. For historical reference, look back at the previous BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It made its commitment to getting the government out of business explicit, and set up a disinvestment ministry. When the party returned to power in 2014, you would have expected it to bring that ministry back. No such thing happened, although now there is a department, DIPAM, in the finance ministry with a full secretary.
It is only now that there is heady talk of disinvestment, but not so much has happened yet, with the sterling exception of Air India. Much other privatisation is still merely talk, or sleight of hand. As in, getting one public sector giant to acquire a smaller one, and the government, as the majority shareholder, cashing out to balance its deficit. But it is, as we had said in an earlier National Interest, like genius Milo Minderbender of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 trading with himself and making a profit. Of course, using the state’s products and cash.
Actually, this gets worse than a sleight of hand often enough. Think of the LIC, or even ONGC, being made to buy another PSU the government wants to ‘disinvest’ from. A bunch of money is paid out to the government. Our complaint isn’t that it disappears into that bottomless pit called the Consolidated Fund of India. If you believed in a market economy, you would have no complaint if the LIC or ONGC paid out dividends from its profits to its only, or overwhelming, shareholder, the government. But when the government makes them buy assets from it, these companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the policy holder or the minority shareholder. We are not saying that it always works out to their detriment, but the fact is these are not decisions these companies’ boards are taking with these non-sarkari shareholders’ interests at the top of their minds. This is a characteristic of the Left, not Right.
The Left is also known for handout economics, large, ambitious, welfare schemes involving redistribution of large chunks of the revenues. Which is precisely what the Modi government has been doing, from the MGNREGA it inherited to Gram Awas, toilet-building, Ujjwala, direct cash transfers to farmers and the poor, free grain and so on. Have you noticed, in fact, how muted as the opposition criticism of this governments’ Budgets has been?
There is some usual sniggering about being “pro-rich” etc. But everybody also notices that taxes on individuals now are the highest — almost 44 per cent — since reform began. Add to that an average of 18 per cent or so GST on goods and services that people, especially the rich, consume. The Left would applaud this. Of course, they’d want this to be even higher. Hopefully not the 97 per cent it was at Indira Gandhi’s socialist peak, when the foundation of the parallel black economy was laid.
An expanding, large, maai-baap (mom & dad) sarkar is something the Leftists love. See the expansion of our government in the Modi era. More and more Bhawans have come up in Delhi to accommodate a burgeoning government. Now the new Central Vista will create space for more. A comparison again with Vajpayee government. He had no hesitation selling the loss-making Lodhi Hotel in the heart of Delhi. An even bigger PSU dud was Hotel Janpath. Which, instead of being sold, has now become another set of offices and government accommodation. Samrat Hotel, next to Ashoka, ceased to be a hotel a long time ago. It has become a sarkari bhawan too. In fact, almost everyone here will be surprised when I tell you that even the new Lok Pal (do you remember we had appointed one? Okay, what’s his name?) has been given half a floor here.
Our taxes are higher than in a generation, our government is bigger than two generations and still growing, we ‘privatise’ our companies often by selling one PSU to another, now our government also decides for all of the country which Covid vaccine to have when, to be allowed boosters or not, and what can be sold in India. In a genuinely free market, there will be shops and buyers for Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik, Pfizer and Moderna.
As with cars, consumers can choose a Maruti or a Mercedes. But not vaccines. Why? Because ours is a maai-baap sarkar. It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other. The reason we call Modi-BJP ideology as the Hindu Left.
Prashant Kishor, who prefers to be described as a political aide rather than a strategist, which is generally the preferred usage for him, featured in our serious conversational show ‘Off The Cuff’ this week. Neelam Pandey, a senior member of our political reporting team at ThePrint, co-hosted it with me.
At some point, we asked him the question that’s always intrigued us. Does he have an ideology? Doesn’t that follow from the fact that he’s worked with Narendra Modi, Mamata Banerjee, Congress-SP (Uttar Pradesh, 2017), M.K. Stalin, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, Amarinder Singh and more?
To our surprise, he said no, I am not ideology-agnostic, you can call me Left-of-Centre. And then went on to elaborate what he meant, by using Mahatma Gandhi’s example. And so on. I noticed later, incidentally, that Kishor’s Twitter bio begins with the words “Revere Gandhi…”
His claim to a Centre-Left ideology set us thinking. What if we asked any of the other key political leaders the same question today? What is your ideology? Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Andhra’s Jagan, Tamil Nadu’s Stalin, Telangana’s KCR and so on. If any of them chooses to answer that question — the answer, honest or not, will be about the same. Everyone in Indian politics now wades in the waters of varying depth somewhere on the Left side of the pool. Nobody will say I stand on the Right.
Which brings us to the trick question. What would Narendra Modi’s answer be? We are, of course, making a brave and far-out presumption that he lets us or anyone ask him such a direct question: What’s your ideology, Prime Minister sir? Now, whether you are fan or a critic, chances are, your immediate response will be, of course the Right wing.
Over the past seven years since the Modi-Shah BJP has been in power, “Right wing” has become the widely accepted usage for the party, and the ideological forces behind it. We need to examine if this passes the test of facts. And fasten seat belts. Because, I will then make the case to you that what Modi and his BJP represent today is not a domineering national force of the Hindu Right. It is, on the other hand, the Hindu Left.
The Left-Right descriptors over time have become mixed up and confusing. In governance terms, the Right means first of all, social conservatism, strong religiosity, hard nationalism, low threshold for criticism, an authoritarian outlook. On all these parameters, the Modi government and today’s BJP pass the test of being Right wing. The reason I qualify it here is that we do not get caught in simplistic binaries. On all of these, this BJP and Modi are no different from, say, the Republicans in the US or the British Conservatives. Then, we enter contentious zones.
How do we, then come to our argument that the Modi-Shah-Yogi BJP is not a force of the pure Right or even the Hindu Right, but of the Hindu Left?
Check out the many steps the Modi government has taken on the economy in the past seven-plus years. For historical reference, look back at the previous BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It made its commitment to getting the government out of business explicit, and set up a disinvestment ministry. When the party returned to power in 2014, you would have expected it to bring that ministry back. No such thing happened, although now there is a department, DIPAM, in the finance ministry with a full secretary.
It is only now that there is heady talk of disinvestment, but not so much has happened yet, with the sterling exception of Air India. Much other privatisation is still merely talk, or sleight of hand. As in, getting one public sector giant to acquire a smaller one, and the government, as the majority shareholder, cashing out to balance its deficit. But it is, as we had said in an earlier National Interest, like genius Milo Minderbender of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 trading with himself and making a profit. Of course, using the state’s products and cash.
Actually, this gets worse than a sleight of hand often enough. Think of the LIC, or even ONGC, being made to buy another PSU the government wants to ‘disinvest’ from. A bunch of money is paid out to the government. Our complaint isn’t that it disappears into that bottomless pit called the Consolidated Fund of India. If you believed in a market economy, you would have no complaint if the LIC or ONGC paid out dividends from its profits to its only, or overwhelming, shareholder, the government. But when the government makes them buy assets from it, these companies are not necessarily acting in the best interests of the policy holder or the minority shareholder. We are not saying that it always works out to their detriment, but the fact is these are not decisions these companies’ boards are taking with these non-sarkari shareholders’ interests at the top of their minds. This is a characteristic of the Left, not Right.
The Left is also known for handout economics, large, ambitious, welfare schemes involving redistribution of large chunks of the revenues. Which is precisely what the Modi government has been doing, from the MGNREGA it inherited to Gram Awas, toilet-building, Ujjwala, direct cash transfers to farmers and the poor, free grain and so on. Have you noticed, in fact, how muted as the opposition criticism of this governments’ Budgets has been?
There is some usual sniggering about being “pro-rich” etc. But everybody also notices that taxes on individuals now are the highest — almost 44 per cent — since reform began. Add to that an average of 18 per cent or so GST on goods and services that people, especially the rich, consume. The Left would applaud this. Of course, they’d want this to be even higher. Hopefully not the 97 per cent it was at Indira Gandhi’s socialist peak, when the foundation of the parallel black economy was laid.
An expanding, large, maai-baap (mom & dad) sarkar is something the Leftists love. See the expansion of our government in the Modi era. More and more Bhawans have come up in Delhi to accommodate a burgeoning government. Now the new Central Vista will create space for more. A comparison again with Vajpayee government. He had no hesitation selling the loss-making Lodhi Hotel in the heart of Delhi. An even bigger PSU dud was Hotel Janpath. Which, instead of being sold, has now become another set of offices and government accommodation. Samrat Hotel, next to Ashoka, ceased to be a hotel a long time ago. It has become a sarkari bhawan too. In fact, almost everyone here will be surprised when I tell you that even the new Lok Pal (do you remember we had appointed one? Okay, what’s his name?) has been given half a floor here.
Our taxes are higher than in a generation, our government is bigger than two generations and still growing, we ‘privatise’ our companies often by selling one PSU to another, now our government also decides for all of the country which Covid vaccine to have when, to be allowed boosters or not, and what can be sold in India. In a genuinely free market, there will be shops and buyers for Covaxin, Covishield, Sputnik, Pfizer and Moderna.
As with cars, consumers can choose a Maruti or a Mercedes. But not vaccines. Why? Because ours is a maai-baap sarkar. It is in no way a government of the economic Right. The Right is limited to religion and nationalism. The rest is as Left as the Congress or any other. The reason we call Modi-BJP ideology as the Hindu Left.
Tuesday 28 July 2020
Indian Matchmaking Only Scratches the Surface of a Big Problem - A Critique
Sonia Saraiya in Vanity Fair
Every reality show has at least one villain. In Indian Matchmaking, that villain is 34-year-old Aparna Shewakramani, a prospective bride who’s critical of every man she meets and vocal about disliking things like the beach, relaxing, and podcasts. Early on, she tells the camera she hasn’t regretted a decision she’s made since the age of three. In her finest moment, presented with a suitor with a sense of humor, she sighs: “You know how I hate comedy.”
In reality, Aparna’s probably not as insufferable as she seems. But her apparent unsuitability for the dating world makes her a perfect subject for Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai–based matchmaker Sima Taparia as she tries to get every single and reasonably well-to-do Indian in her path married to a heterosexual partner of her, and their parents’, choosing.
Okay, I’m being a little flippant. As Sima and the show itself frequently remind us, arranged marriage is not quite the form of social control it used to be; everyone here emphasizes that they have the right to choose or refuse the matches presented to them. But as becomes especially clear when Sima works in India, that choice is frequently and rather roughly pressured by an anvil of social expectations and family duty.
In the most extreme case, a 25-year-old prospective groom named Akshay Jakhete is practically bullied by his mother, Preeti, into choosing a bride. Somehow, she claims, Akshay’s failure to choose a bride by the ripe old age of 25 is a disappointment to his parents, an obstacle to the conception of his older brother’s as yet nonexistent firstborn baby, even a drag on Preeti’s own physical health. She breaks out her home blood pressure monitor, telling him that her high numbers are a direct result of the stress he’s causing her. I’ve always thought of my mom as a champion of desi guilt, but Preeti really puts her to shame. (It should be said that despite all of this, Akshay says on the show that his ideal bride is “someone just like my mother.”)
Indian Matchmaking smartly reclaims and updates the arranged marriage myth for the 21st century, demystifying the process and revealing how much romance and heartache is baked into the process even when older adults are meddling every step of the way. But for me, at least, the show’s value is as a vibrant validation of how brutal the gauntlet of Indian matchmaking can be—a practice that begins with your parents’ friends and relatives gossiping about you as a teenager and only intensifies as you get older. Though these families use a matchmaker, the matching process is one the entire community and culture is invested in. In this context, romance is not a private matter; your love life is everyone’s business.
Let’s start by clearing up some terminology. Netflix’s unscripted show is called Indian Matchmaking, but it takes place both in India and America, with matchmaker Sima, based in Mumbai, flying back and forth as well as handling clients via FaceTime. The Indians and immigrants represented aren’t really a cross section of the country’s vast diversity: The show focuses almost entirely on upper-caste, well-to-do, North Indian Hindu families. (That’s also my background, so Indian Matchmaking is playing tennis in my backyard.) A few families show off a level of wealth that borders on obscene: At one point, Preeti pulls out a king’s ransom of precious jewelry, emeralds and diamonds and gold, and proudly brags that the display is just “20%” of what her future daughter-in-law will inherit on her wedding day.
Altogether, it’s a little alarming that Indian Matchmaking features not a single Muslim match, just one or two individuals with heritage from South India, and only one whom we could call low-caste, though the show takes pains to not present it so bluntly.
Director Smriti Mundhra told Jezebel that she pitched the show around Sima, who works with an exclusive set of clients. Perhaps that narrow focus expresses more about the stratification of Indian culture than it does about the producers’ biases—but Indian Matchmaking touches lightly on the culture that creates these biases. The most explicit it gets is with the story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.
The parents task Sima with following multiple stringent expectations. Some are understandably cultural, perhaps: A preference for a certain language or religion, or for astrological compatibility, which remains significant for many Hindus. Other preferences, though, are little more than discrimination. They demand that prospective brides be “slim,” “fair,” and “tall,” a ruthless standard for female beauty that’s also racialized—and while the demands are most exacting in India, they are not exclusive to the subcontinent. Houston–based Aparna, for example, euphemistically states her preference for a “North Indian”—which might sound innocent enough to the average listener, but to me sounded like just another way of saying light-skinned. In the final episode, a new participant, Richa, makes it explicit: “not too dark, you know, like fair-skinned.” As Mallika Rao writes at Vulture, it’s not exactly surprising, but whew.
Divorced clients are also subjected to particularly harsh judgment. Sima bluntly tells one fetching single mom, Rupam, that she would typically never take on a client like her. The options she finds for Rupam are pointedly, pathetically slim pickings; Rupam ends up leaving the matchmaking process after meeting a prospective match on Bumble instead.
In Delhi, Ankita Bansal’s story takes on multiple dimensions of exclusion and judgment. She’s both a career woman and one who doesn’t adhere to the Indian beauty standard; previous efforts to find a match have returned the feedback that she’s too independent or not attractive enough. Which is mind-boggling, because Ankita is gorgeous. But she’s also darker, curvier, and shorter than is ideal, and the fact that she started and runs her own company is a threat to men who are looking for a wife to run their household.
To Ankita’s credit, she rejects suggestions that she needs to change herself; she’s become a sort of heroine for Indian Matchmaking viewers, who cheer her for speaking out against this process’s constrictive standards while trying to find love. During her first date on the show, though, Ankita hits it off with a suitor only to have a meltdown, a few scenes later, upon learning that he’s divorced. Granted, some of the anxiety seems to stem from the matchmakers not informing her before their date that he had previously been married. But the failure of what was otherwise a charming first date goes toward illustrating how harsh the stigma can be in Indian matchmaking—and how discrimination cuts both ways.
What I want from Indian Matchmaking is probably impossible: Not just an exploration of arranged marriage, but a true reckoning with its limitations. Mundhra, the director, addressed some of these limitations in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl. But Indian Matchmaking turns the tradition’s hypocrisies and frailties into a carnivalesque background for individual stories to take place in front of. To a degree, that’s how it works for those of us who are in the culture; whether or not you participate, the expectations and biases of arranged marriage are always just an arm’s length away. But it’s charitable—outright propaganda, arguably—to frame it merely as a fun, silly circus of chattering parents and matchmakers with spreadsheets.
The proponents of arranged marriage are quick to point to India’s low divorce rate and various success stories—and undoubtedly, in the past and today, there are countless happy couples who were set up through some version of traditional matchmaking. But that doesn’t change the fact that arranged marriage is a family-sanctioned form of social control—a way for a community’s elders to enforce certain norms onto their children. Quite literally, it regulates reproduction by determining the bounds of their descendants’ gene pool. It diminishes the individual’s personal choice in favor of the collective’s stability.
To many young men and women looking to get married, that’s precisely the appeal: They love their families, and want to match with someone who will mesh with the religion, traditions, and values that they practice. As Sima says frequently in Indian Matchmaking, a wedding unites two families, so it’s only natural that the two families would have a say in what happens to their child. Yet this sunny view of arranged marriage glosses over a lot of potential complications, ranging from individual heartache and loss to the wholesale porting of familial dysfunction and despair from one generation to the next. The stigma around divorce is so high—the show does not dance around that, at least—that the choice of partner is typically permanent, regardless of how unsuitable a pair might be for each other. The combination of tradition and unhappiness can be extremely dangerous: In 2005, India’s large-scale National Family Health Survey found that over 37% of women in India had experienced some kind of physical or sexual spousal abuse. Beyond violence, women in India are often cut off from access to household funds, and are not permitted to make decisions up to and including family planning.
It is the great irony of a country that churns out love songs in its melodramatic Bollywood musicals, that turns weddings into three-, five-, or seven-day affairs: Indian marriage is frequently unhappy and unequal—less romantic, more another building block in a patriarchal society. Yet the passion for traditional arranged marriage is so intense that when couples marry outside the strictures of their familial norms, they may be disowned or ostracized. And as the show never even acknowledges, there is no place in arranged marriages—or much of traditional Indian society—for any sort of queer partnership.
This last detail might be why Pradhyuman Maloo, a self-described “rich pretty boy,” is both one of the show’s more loathsome characters and possibly one of its heroes. His well-connected family is eager for him to get married; a bevy of dark-skinned service staff hover out of frame in every scene. He’s a professional jewelry designer and enthusiastic amateur chef, with impeccable hair in every scene. Pradhyuman has reportedly been offered more than 150 proposals from eligible girls, and has turned every single one down. On one hand, he seems like a self-centered asshole—at one point, he tells his sister he feels deep love only for himself. On the other hand, you wish someone on the show would simply ask him if he’s even interested in women.
Irony isn’t dead: None of the participants in Indian Matchmaking found a spouse on the show. The eight-episode first season doesn’t end so much as run out of time—but there’s plenty of room for a season two, if Netflix wants one.
In the meantime, I’m left with my own thoughts. My parents had an arranged marriage, and it has been an unhappy one. I decided at a young age I wouldn’t go through the same process, with all the confidence and American privilege only a five year old can have. Neither my refusal nor their own unhappiness stopped my parents from trying to set me up—more and more feverishly as I passed 30 and still hadn’t “settled down,” as they put it.
It wasn’t just them—it was everyone. I wore high heels and a sari to a pre-event for a cousin’s wedding in India and got a marriage proposal by the end of the day, from another guest who had a relative in America. My cousin told me I should have expected it because I wore clothes that looked so adult. I was barely 22. An American college student has no context for marriage proposals from complete strangers; I didn’t even know how to talk about this phenomenon with friends. I just did my best to ignore it.
At a low point for all of us, my mom made a profile for me on shaadi.com, a popular matchmaking site for Indians abroad. I was a little astounded to find not only was she messaging potential suitors—“everyone does it for their kids,” she informed me—but that she’d also radically altered my physical type for the website; I had grown a couple of inches taller and lost 30 pounds. Weight came up again and again in this world. I grudgingly went on a date organized by my mom’s cousin, only to discover after we decidedly had no sparks that the guy I met had to be talked into meeting someone who weighed more than 125 pounds.
I did get married; my matchmaker was Tinder, and to my delight, my husband satisfies none of the search criteria my mother put into the shaadi.com search engine. I’m lucky that my parents came around to having a white son-in-law, and I know that if he were Black, Muslim, or low-caste, it would have been a much harder path to acceptance. He and I watched Indian Matchmaking together, and though the show has its limitations, I am grateful that it offered him a window into the pressures I grew up with. (He says while he would like to end up with me in “all possible timelines,” he would also pay good money to see me on the show.)
My parents have split up now, which is still incredibly uncommon, even in the Indian diaspora. But it interested me that in Indian Matchmaking, two different participants have parents who divorced: Aparna’s one, and a charming, nerdy guy named Vyasar Ganesan is the other. Even where the arranged marriage model hasn’t worked, the appetite for it is outsized.
Indian culture makes marriage so central to society—and so vital to an individual’s path—that it tends to ignore the potential downsides. The people who don’t fit into tradition’s methodology get sifted out, left not just without a picture-perfect marriage but without the acceptance and cultural identity that accompany it. I know that by opting out of the arranged marriage pathway, I have made it much harder for my future child to speak the language or practice the religious traditions of my ancestors; he’ll have to navigate the annoying cultural straddling of being from many places at once. It was the right choice for me, but it’s a hard thing to live with. The price of belonging to an Indian culture is to leave some of your individuality behind—and for me, at least, it was a price I was not willing to pay.
By the end, Aparna became a tragic figure for me. When we see her at home—dressed in outfits that seem identical to her mother’s, pushing her two tiny dogs in a stroller—she looks like an oversize little girl. There’s something so sad about her narrow ideas of what her future partner should be like; it reflects how little latitude she allows herself in her own life. Her mother, Jotika, is another meme-able figure: The production cuts together a proclamation that all she wants for her daughter is happiness and a serious monologue, directed at the camera, about how “all” she asked of her daughters is to never make her look bad and to get not just one or two degrees, but “nothing less than three.” A few episodes later, Aparna tells a suitor that she hates being a lawyer, and has been trying to do something else for years.
The tradition in India and the Indian diaspora seems to be less about marriage and more about this intense, all-consuming pressure to mold your children. Nothing seems to fuel the marriage complex more than the fear of social stigma, of being somehow outside, somehow othered. In this context, it’s no wonder that matchmaking brings out the worst colorism, casteism, and classism that Indians have to offer. I wish Indian Matchmaking said anything about that. But at least it gives the world a view into the false promise of arranged marriage, even if, by the end, the series is still starry-eyed, committed to a fantasy. Aparna, my parents, all of the frantic parents who catch Sima’s wrist at a party and whisper biodata into her ear; they just want what was promised. They just want to belong.
Every reality show has at least one villain. In Indian Matchmaking, that villain is 34-year-old Aparna Shewakramani, a prospective bride who’s critical of every man she meets and vocal about disliking things like the beach, relaxing, and podcasts. Early on, she tells the camera she hasn’t regretted a decision she’s made since the age of three. In her finest moment, presented with a suitor with a sense of humor, she sighs: “You know how I hate comedy.”
In reality, Aparna’s probably not as insufferable as she seems. But her apparent unsuitability for the dating world makes her a perfect subject for Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai–based matchmaker Sima Taparia as she tries to get every single and reasonably well-to-do Indian in her path married to a heterosexual partner of her, and their parents’, choosing.
Okay, I’m being a little flippant. As Sima and the show itself frequently remind us, arranged marriage is not quite the form of social control it used to be; everyone here emphasizes that they have the right to choose or refuse the matches presented to them. But as becomes especially clear when Sima works in India, that choice is frequently and rather roughly pressured by an anvil of social expectations and family duty.
In the most extreme case, a 25-year-old prospective groom named Akshay Jakhete is practically bullied by his mother, Preeti, into choosing a bride. Somehow, she claims, Akshay’s failure to choose a bride by the ripe old age of 25 is a disappointment to his parents, an obstacle to the conception of his older brother’s as yet nonexistent firstborn baby, even a drag on Preeti’s own physical health. She breaks out her home blood pressure monitor, telling him that her high numbers are a direct result of the stress he’s causing her. I’ve always thought of my mom as a champion of desi guilt, but Preeti really puts her to shame. (It should be said that despite all of this, Akshay says on the show that his ideal bride is “someone just like my mother.”)
Indian Matchmaking smartly reclaims and updates the arranged marriage myth for the 21st century, demystifying the process and revealing how much romance and heartache is baked into the process even when older adults are meddling every step of the way. But for me, at least, the show’s value is as a vibrant validation of how brutal the gauntlet of Indian matchmaking can be—a practice that begins with your parents’ friends and relatives gossiping about you as a teenager and only intensifies as you get older. Though these families use a matchmaker, the matching process is one the entire community and culture is invested in. In this context, romance is not a private matter; your love life is everyone’s business.
Let’s start by clearing up some terminology. Netflix’s unscripted show is called Indian Matchmaking, but it takes place both in India and America, with matchmaker Sima, based in Mumbai, flying back and forth as well as handling clients via FaceTime. The Indians and immigrants represented aren’t really a cross section of the country’s vast diversity: The show focuses almost entirely on upper-caste, well-to-do, North Indian Hindu families. (That’s also my background, so Indian Matchmaking is playing tennis in my backyard.) A few families show off a level of wealth that borders on obscene: At one point, Preeti pulls out a king’s ransom of precious jewelry, emeralds and diamonds and gold, and proudly brags that the display is just “20%” of what her future daughter-in-law will inherit on her wedding day.
Altogether, it’s a little alarming that Indian Matchmaking features not a single Muslim match, just one or two individuals with heritage from South India, and only one whom we could call low-caste, though the show takes pains to not present it so bluntly.
Director Smriti Mundhra told Jezebel that she pitched the show around Sima, who works with an exclusive set of clients. Perhaps that narrow focus expresses more about the stratification of Indian culture than it does about the producers’ biases—but Indian Matchmaking touches lightly on the culture that creates these biases. The most explicit it gets is with the story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.
The parents task Sima with following multiple stringent expectations. Some are understandably cultural, perhaps: A preference for a certain language or religion, or for astrological compatibility, which remains significant for many Hindus. Other preferences, though, are little more than discrimination. They demand that prospective brides be “slim,” “fair,” and “tall,” a ruthless standard for female beauty that’s also racialized—and while the demands are most exacting in India, they are not exclusive to the subcontinent. Houston–based Aparna, for example, euphemistically states her preference for a “North Indian”—which might sound innocent enough to the average listener, but to me sounded like just another way of saying light-skinned. In the final episode, a new participant, Richa, makes it explicit: “not too dark, you know, like fair-skinned.” As Mallika Rao writes at Vulture, it’s not exactly surprising, but whew.
Divorced clients are also subjected to particularly harsh judgment. Sima bluntly tells one fetching single mom, Rupam, that she would typically never take on a client like her. The options she finds for Rupam are pointedly, pathetically slim pickings; Rupam ends up leaving the matchmaking process after meeting a prospective match on Bumble instead.
In Delhi, Ankita Bansal’s story takes on multiple dimensions of exclusion and judgment. She’s both a career woman and one who doesn’t adhere to the Indian beauty standard; previous efforts to find a match have returned the feedback that she’s too independent or not attractive enough. Which is mind-boggling, because Ankita is gorgeous. But she’s also darker, curvier, and shorter than is ideal, and the fact that she started and runs her own company is a threat to men who are looking for a wife to run their household.
To Ankita’s credit, she rejects suggestions that she needs to change herself; she’s become a sort of heroine for Indian Matchmaking viewers, who cheer her for speaking out against this process’s constrictive standards while trying to find love. During her first date on the show, though, Ankita hits it off with a suitor only to have a meltdown, a few scenes later, upon learning that he’s divorced. Granted, some of the anxiety seems to stem from the matchmakers not informing her before their date that he had previously been married. But the failure of what was otherwise a charming first date goes toward illustrating how harsh the stigma can be in Indian matchmaking—and how discrimination cuts both ways.
What I want from Indian Matchmaking is probably impossible: Not just an exploration of arranged marriage, but a true reckoning with its limitations. Mundhra, the director, addressed some of these limitations in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl. But Indian Matchmaking turns the tradition’s hypocrisies and frailties into a carnivalesque background for individual stories to take place in front of. To a degree, that’s how it works for those of us who are in the culture; whether or not you participate, the expectations and biases of arranged marriage are always just an arm’s length away. But it’s charitable—outright propaganda, arguably—to frame it merely as a fun, silly circus of chattering parents and matchmakers with spreadsheets.
The proponents of arranged marriage are quick to point to India’s low divorce rate and various success stories—and undoubtedly, in the past and today, there are countless happy couples who were set up through some version of traditional matchmaking. But that doesn’t change the fact that arranged marriage is a family-sanctioned form of social control—a way for a community’s elders to enforce certain norms onto their children. Quite literally, it regulates reproduction by determining the bounds of their descendants’ gene pool. It diminishes the individual’s personal choice in favor of the collective’s stability.
To many young men and women looking to get married, that’s precisely the appeal: They love their families, and want to match with someone who will mesh with the religion, traditions, and values that they practice. As Sima says frequently in Indian Matchmaking, a wedding unites two families, so it’s only natural that the two families would have a say in what happens to their child. Yet this sunny view of arranged marriage glosses over a lot of potential complications, ranging from individual heartache and loss to the wholesale porting of familial dysfunction and despair from one generation to the next. The stigma around divorce is so high—the show does not dance around that, at least—that the choice of partner is typically permanent, regardless of how unsuitable a pair might be for each other. The combination of tradition and unhappiness can be extremely dangerous: In 2005, India’s large-scale National Family Health Survey found that over 37% of women in India had experienced some kind of physical or sexual spousal abuse. Beyond violence, women in India are often cut off from access to household funds, and are not permitted to make decisions up to and including family planning.
It is the great irony of a country that churns out love songs in its melodramatic Bollywood musicals, that turns weddings into three-, five-, or seven-day affairs: Indian marriage is frequently unhappy and unequal—less romantic, more another building block in a patriarchal society. Yet the passion for traditional arranged marriage is so intense that when couples marry outside the strictures of their familial norms, they may be disowned or ostracized. And as the show never even acknowledges, there is no place in arranged marriages—or much of traditional Indian society—for any sort of queer partnership.
This last detail might be why Pradhyuman Maloo, a self-described “rich pretty boy,” is both one of the show’s more loathsome characters and possibly one of its heroes. His well-connected family is eager for him to get married; a bevy of dark-skinned service staff hover out of frame in every scene. He’s a professional jewelry designer and enthusiastic amateur chef, with impeccable hair in every scene. Pradhyuman has reportedly been offered more than 150 proposals from eligible girls, and has turned every single one down. On one hand, he seems like a self-centered asshole—at one point, he tells his sister he feels deep love only for himself. On the other hand, you wish someone on the show would simply ask him if he’s even interested in women.
Irony isn’t dead: None of the participants in Indian Matchmaking found a spouse on the show. The eight-episode first season doesn’t end so much as run out of time—but there’s plenty of room for a season two, if Netflix wants one.
In the meantime, I’m left with my own thoughts. My parents had an arranged marriage, and it has been an unhappy one. I decided at a young age I wouldn’t go through the same process, with all the confidence and American privilege only a five year old can have. Neither my refusal nor their own unhappiness stopped my parents from trying to set me up—more and more feverishly as I passed 30 and still hadn’t “settled down,” as they put it.
It wasn’t just them—it was everyone. I wore high heels and a sari to a pre-event for a cousin’s wedding in India and got a marriage proposal by the end of the day, from another guest who had a relative in America. My cousin told me I should have expected it because I wore clothes that looked so adult. I was barely 22. An American college student has no context for marriage proposals from complete strangers; I didn’t even know how to talk about this phenomenon with friends. I just did my best to ignore it.
At a low point for all of us, my mom made a profile for me on shaadi.com, a popular matchmaking site for Indians abroad. I was a little astounded to find not only was she messaging potential suitors—“everyone does it for their kids,” she informed me—but that she’d also radically altered my physical type for the website; I had grown a couple of inches taller and lost 30 pounds. Weight came up again and again in this world. I grudgingly went on a date organized by my mom’s cousin, only to discover after we decidedly had no sparks that the guy I met had to be talked into meeting someone who weighed more than 125 pounds.
I did get married; my matchmaker was Tinder, and to my delight, my husband satisfies none of the search criteria my mother put into the shaadi.com search engine. I’m lucky that my parents came around to having a white son-in-law, and I know that if he were Black, Muslim, or low-caste, it would have been a much harder path to acceptance. He and I watched Indian Matchmaking together, and though the show has its limitations, I am grateful that it offered him a window into the pressures I grew up with. (He says while he would like to end up with me in “all possible timelines,” he would also pay good money to see me on the show.)
My parents have split up now, which is still incredibly uncommon, even in the Indian diaspora. But it interested me that in Indian Matchmaking, two different participants have parents who divorced: Aparna’s one, and a charming, nerdy guy named Vyasar Ganesan is the other. Even where the arranged marriage model hasn’t worked, the appetite for it is outsized.
Indian culture makes marriage so central to society—and so vital to an individual’s path—that it tends to ignore the potential downsides. The people who don’t fit into tradition’s methodology get sifted out, left not just without a picture-perfect marriage but without the acceptance and cultural identity that accompany it. I know that by opting out of the arranged marriage pathway, I have made it much harder for my future child to speak the language or practice the religious traditions of my ancestors; he’ll have to navigate the annoying cultural straddling of being from many places at once. It was the right choice for me, but it’s a hard thing to live with. The price of belonging to an Indian culture is to leave some of your individuality behind—and for me, at least, it was a price I was not willing to pay.
By the end, Aparna became a tragic figure for me. When we see her at home—dressed in outfits that seem identical to her mother’s, pushing her two tiny dogs in a stroller—she looks like an oversize little girl. There’s something so sad about her narrow ideas of what her future partner should be like; it reflects how little latitude she allows herself in her own life. Her mother, Jotika, is another meme-able figure: The production cuts together a proclamation that all she wants for her daughter is happiness and a serious monologue, directed at the camera, about how “all” she asked of her daughters is to never make her look bad and to get not just one or two degrees, but “nothing less than three.” A few episodes later, Aparna tells a suitor that she hates being a lawyer, and has been trying to do something else for years.
The tradition in India and the Indian diaspora seems to be less about marriage and more about this intense, all-consuming pressure to mold your children. Nothing seems to fuel the marriage complex more than the fear of social stigma, of being somehow outside, somehow othered. In this context, it’s no wonder that matchmaking brings out the worst colorism, casteism, and classism that Indians have to offer. I wish Indian Matchmaking said anything about that. But at least it gives the world a view into the false promise of arranged marriage, even if, by the end, the series is still starry-eyed, committed to a fantasy. Aparna, my parents, all of the frantic parents who catch Sima’s wrist at a party and whisper biodata into her ear; they just want what was promised. They just want to belong.
Friday 17 July 2020
Tuesday 28 April 2020
Should we be scared of the coronavirus debt mountain?
The pandemic has necessitated huge borrowing – but post-crisis austerity would be the very worst way to deal with it
When the central bank buys the debt it does so by creating money. Under ordinary circumstances one might worry about that causing inflation. But given the recession we face that is a risk worth running. Indeed modest inflation would help us by taking a bite out of the real value of the debt.
Of course, ensuring that the central banks continue their crisis-fighting methods into the recovery period will itself require a political battle. Fearmongering about inflation is the close cousin of fearmongering about debt. We should resist both blackmails. We have the institutions and techniques to neutralise the coronavirus debt problem. We owe it to ourselves to use them.
‘A world in which coronavirus debts are repaid by a wealth tax would look very different from one in which benefits are slashed and VAT is raised.’ Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA
We do not know how this pandemic will end. We do know that we will be poorer when it’s over: GDP is plunging around the world.
We also know that there will be a towering pile of IOUs left from the bills run up during the crisis. When it is over we will have to figure out how to repay them – or whether to repay them at all. That question will decide the complexion of our politics, and the quality of our public infrastructure and services for years to come. Unless we tackle this issue, coronavirus debts will be the battering ram for a new campaign of austerity.
The scale of the challenge is huge. Hard cases like Italy grab the headlines. Its debt currently stands at 135% of GDP. As a result of the crisis it will likely rise to 155%. But it is no longer an extreme outlier. According to the IMF, the debt ratio of the average advanced economy will exceed 120% next year. In the US, the debt to GDP ratio may soon surpass that at the end of the second world war.
These numbers are impressive, daunting even. They offer an open door to conservative scaremongering. The first move in that tradition of debt politics is to invoke the tenuous analogy to a household. In this picture, debts are a burden on the profligate; a moral obligation that must be honoured on pain of national bankruptcy and ruin.
There are some circumstances in which this analogy is apt, specifically when you are an impoverished and desperate country dependent on foreign creditors who will lend to you only in the currency of another country, most commonly that of the US. Many poorer countries are in this position. Few rich countries are. Indeed, one of the definitions of being an advanced economy is that you are not.
Advanced economies borrow in their own currency and overwhelmingly from their own citizens. For them, the household analogy is profoundly misleading. In fact, those seeking to rebut the misconceptions of the household analogy sometimes say we merely owe government debts to ourselves.
That is a liberating thought. It makes clear that we are not in the position of a subordinate debtor nation. But it has a dizzying circularity to it. If we are our own creditors, are we not also our own debtors – master and slave at the same time? Ultimately, it is a bon mot that relies on treating the economic nation as a unit. That may look like liberation, but it is an illusion achieved by removing the real politics of debt – which are about class, not nationality.
Historically, government debts were assets owned by the middle and upper classes, the famous rentiers. And taxes were overwhelmingly indirect and thus fell disproportionately on lower incomes.
Today, the richest still own a disproportionate share of government debt. But the liabilities of the government are now widely distributed. They are staple investments for pension funds and insurers. Government debt is not simply a burden; it is a highly useful financial asset, offering modest interest rates in exchange for safety. It is all the more useful for the fact that the government lives for ever and will generate revenue for ever through taxation. So it enables very long-term planning.
The tax base today is much broader than it was a century ago. But who pays taxes – and who does not – remains one of the most urgent questions of the moment. A world in which coronavirus debts are repaid by a wealth tax or a global crackdown on corporate tax havens would look very different from one in which benefits are slashed and VAT is raised. And it is very possible that debt service will be taken out of other spending, whether that be schools, pensions or national defence.
As the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked in the aftermath of the first world war, “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies”, the truest reflection of the distribution of power and influence.
It is a distributional issue. But not only that. Debts may also affect the size of the cake itself. As we know only too well, a regime of austerity that keeps taxes high and government spending low is not conducive to rapid economic growth. And yet for debt to be sustainable, what we need is growth in GDP – to be precise, growth in nominal GDP, which includes real economic growth and inflation. Inflation matters because it acts as a tax on debts that are owed in money that is progressively losing its value. Price stability, the objective of monetary policy since the 1970s, no doubt has benefits for everyone, but most of all the creditor class.
This is the awesome dilemma we will face in the aftermath of Covid-19. This is the battle for which we must brace. Not right now, but once the immediate crisis has passed. After the financial crisis of 2007-08, it was in 2010 that the push for belt-tightening began. Like revenge, austerity is a dish best served cold.
Progressive politics cannot, of course, shrink from a battle about budgetary priorities. But it should resist fighting on the terms set by austerian debt-fear. In the circumstances of the UK or the US, alarmism about debt is false. And how false is being demonstrated by the crisis itself.
There is one mechanism through which we can ensure we truly owe the debts to ourselves. That mechanism is the central bank. Its principal job is to manage public debt – and at a moment of crisis central banks do what they must. They buy government debts or, in what amounts to the same thing, they open overdraft accounts for the government.
That has two effects that, acting together, have the potential to negate debt as a political issue. Central bank intervention lowers the interest rate. If interest rates are held down, debt service need not be an onerous burden. At the same time, the central bank purchases remove government IOUs from private portfolios and put them on the balance sheet of the central bank. There, they are literally claims by the public upon itself.
We do not know how this pandemic will end. We do know that we will be poorer when it’s over: GDP is plunging around the world.
We also know that there will be a towering pile of IOUs left from the bills run up during the crisis. When it is over we will have to figure out how to repay them – or whether to repay them at all. That question will decide the complexion of our politics, and the quality of our public infrastructure and services for years to come. Unless we tackle this issue, coronavirus debts will be the battering ram for a new campaign of austerity.
The scale of the challenge is huge. Hard cases like Italy grab the headlines. Its debt currently stands at 135% of GDP. As a result of the crisis it will likely rise to 155%. But it is no longer an extreme outlier. According to the IMF, the debt ratio of the average advanced economy will exceed 120% next year. In the US, the debt to GDP ratio may soon surpass that at the end of the second world war.
These numbers are impressive, daunting even. They offer an open door to conservative scaremongering. The first move in that tradition of debt politics is to invoke the tenuous analogy to a household. In this picture, debts are a burden on the profligate; a moral obligation that must be honoured on pain of national bankruptcy and ruin.
There are some circumstances in which this analogy is apt, specifically when you are an impoverished and desperate country dependent on foreign creditors who will lend to you only in the currency of another country, most commonly that of the US. Many poorer countries are in this position. Few rich countries are. Indeed, one of the definitions of being an advanced economy is that you are not.
Advanced economies borrow in their own currency and overwhelmingly from their own citizens. For them, the household analogy is profoundly misleading. In fact, those seeking to rebut the misconceptions of the household analogy sometimes say we merely owe government debts to ourselves.
That is a liberating thought. It makes clear that we are not in the position of a subordinate debtor nation. But it has a dizzying circularity to it. If we are our own creditors, are we not also our own debtors – master and slave at the same time? Ultimately, it is a bon mot that relies on treating the economic nation as a unit. That may look like liberation, but it is an illusion achieved by removing the real politics of debt – which are about class, not nationality.
Historically, government debts were assets owned by the middle and upper classes, the famous rentiers. And taxes were overwhelmingly indirect and thus fell disproportionately on lower incomes.
Today, the richest still own a disproportionate share of government debt. But the liabilities of the government are now widely distributed. They are staple investments for pension funds and insurers. Government debt is not simply a burden; it is a highly useful financial asset, offering modest interest rates in exchange for safety. It is all the more useful for the fact that the government lives for ever and will generate revenue for ever through taxation. So it enables very long-term planning.
The tax base today is much broader than it was a century ago. But who pays taxes – and who does not – remains one of the most urgent questions of the moment. A world in which coronavirus debts are repaid by a wealth tax or a global crackdown on corporate tax havens would look very different from one in which benefits are slashed and VAT is raised. And it is very possible that debt service will be taken out of other spending, whether that be schools, pensions or national defence.
As the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked in the aftermath of the first world war, “the budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies”, the truest reflection of the distribution of power and influence.
It is a distributional issue. But not only that. Debts may also affect the size of the cake itself. As we know only too well, a regime of austerity that keeps taxes high and government spending low is not conducive to rapid economic growth. And yet for debt to be sustainable, what we need is growth in GDP – to be precise, growth in nominal GDP, which includes real economic growth and inflation. Inflation matters because it acts as a tax on debts that are owed in money that is progressively losing its value. Price stability, the objective of monetary policy since the 1970s, no doubt has benefits for everyone, but most of all the creditor class.
This is the awesome dilemma we will face in the aftermath of Covid-19. This is the battle for which we must brace. Not right now, but once the immediate crisis has passed. After the financial crisis of 2007-08, it was in 2010 that the push for belt-tightening began. Like revenge, austerity is a dish best served cold.
Progressive politics cannot, of course, shrink from a battle about budgetary priorities. But it should resist fighting on the terms set by austerian debt-fear. In the circumstances of the UK or the US, alarmism about debt is false. And how false is being demonstrated by the crisis itself.
There is one mechanism through which we can ensure we truly owe the debts to ourselves. That mechanism is the central bank. Its principal job is to manage public debt – and at a moment of crisis central banks do what they must. They buy government debts or, in what amounts to the same thing, they open overdraft accounts for the government.
That has two effects that, acting together, have the potential to negate debt as a political issue. Central bank intervention lowers the interest rate. If interest rates are held down, debt service need not be an onerous burden. At the same time, the central bank purchases remove government IOUs from private portfolios and put them on the balance sheet of the central bank. There, they are literally claims by the public upon itself.
When the central bank buys the debt it does so by creating money. Under ordinary circumstances one might worry about that causing inflation. But given the recession we face that is a risk worth running. Indeed modest inflation would help us by taking a bite out of the real value of the debt.
Of course, ensuring that the central banks continue their crisis-fighting methods into the recovery period will itself require a political battle. Fearmongering about inflation is the close cousin of fearmongering about debt. We should resist both blackmails. We have the institutions and techniques to neutralise the coronavirus debt problem. We owe it to ourselves to use them.
Friday 20 December 2019
Maybe Corbyn was right and Labour ‘won the argument’ after all?
The Conservatives have not had transformative ideas since Thatcher in the 1980s wtites JOHN MCTERNAN in The FT
Jeremy Corbyn has been much mocked for his claim that the Labour party “won the argument” in the UK general election. A defeat of historic proportions — Labour’s worst result since 1935 — would seem to prove otherwise. But what if Mr Corbyn wasn’t wrong? What if Labour has, in his words, “rewritten the terms of political debate”?
Consider the evidence. Just this week Boris Johnson’s newly elected government restored bursaries to student nurses and vowed to put into law its commitment to increased funding for the National Health Service. The concession on nursing is a significant reversal of direction, but is being packaged with other policies as an acknowledgment of the new electorate that the Conservatives now represent.
Winning seats that were formerly solidly Labour will shift the balance within the parliamentary Conservative party. New Tory MPs will find that many Labour arguments were driven more by place than by ideology.
Yet something deeper is going on. From corporate capitalism to housing, from climate change to transport, Labour’s ideas are framing the decisions the new government is making.
Take business. A common attack on Mr Corbyn is that he is “anti-business” — and there is plenty of evidence for that in the interventionist manifesto on which he stood. Yet how does one describe the reported comments of Mr Johnson at a diplomatic gathering when he was foreign secretary? “Fuck business” may be of a piece with Michael Gove’s quip that people “have had enough of experts”, but it is not far from the Corbynite narrative.
Delegitimising business has traditionally been a fringe far-left position. It is now bipartisan. Think back to the general election campaign. Did either party reflect in their rhetoric or policies the fact that only 16 per cent of people in the UK work in the public sector? When both parties campaign as though the public sector is the norm and the benchmark, who speaks for competitive markets?
Mr Johnson’s promise to intervene, to buy British and to use state aid to protect UK industries was interpreted as another example of parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn. But at what point does the mask actually become the face? When does Michael Heseltine-style intervention before breakfast, lunch and dinner become Bennite control over the commanding heights of the economy. As we learnt to our cost in the 1970s, government can’t pick winners but losers can sure pick governments.
This is not a new process. It started with Mr Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, and became a dance as formal as a gavotte. Labour would propose a policy. The Tory government would denounce it as extreme. The tabloid press would pile in. Then the government would adopt it after all. It happened with energy price caps. And it happened with the living wage.
The problem for the Tories is that they have not had ideologically transformative ideas for public policy since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. The trifecta of right to buy, privatisation and ending union power were fundamental in impact and irreversible. And, in truth, those ideas were developed in the 1970s and set out in policy documents in opposition.
This is not to say there haven’t been other Tory-initiated policies that have been a lasting success. But they’ve all been bipartisan. There is a continuity between Norman Fowler, Peter Lilley and, say, Alistair Darling and John Hutton on welfare. The same continuity is discernible between Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis on education, Kenneth Clarke and Alan Milburn on health.
The core of political leadership is having a strong point of view — a question that you ask in every situation. For Thatcher’s policy unit it used to be: “Is there a more market-based solution to this problem?” And there always was. To Mr Corbyn’s Labour party it was: “Is there a way this policy can help build a socialist economy?” And there always was.
The government was elected on the promise of fulfilling a process — “getting Brexit done” — rather than answering a question. It has not formulated the challenge about the future to which it is the only answer.
The worst of the Conservative attempt to devise an agenda aimed at working people was shown in an infographic after a recent budget in which they boasted about cutting tax on beer and bingo. That one-dimensional vision of working-class needs and desires has been ditched, thankfully. But the void has to be filled — and that is where Labour policies present themselves.
When Tory plans for new council house building are announced or the remake of rail franchising begins, it will all be the hand of Mr Corbyn. The Conservative party won the election, but they are far from winning the battle of ideas.
Jeremy Corbyn has been much mocked for his claim that the Labour party “won the argument” in the UK general election. A defeat of historic proportions — Labour’s worst result since 1935 — would seem to prove otherwise. But what if Mr Corbyn wasn’t wrong? What if Labour has, in his words, “rewritten the terms of political debate”?
Consider the evidence. Just this week Boris Johnson’s newly elected government restored bursaries to student nurses and vowed to put into law its commitment to increased funding for the National Health Service. The concession on nursing is a significant reversal of direction, but is being packaged with other policies as an acknowledgment of the new electorate that the Conservatives now represent.
Winning seats that were formerly solidly Labour will shift the balance within the parliamentary Conservative party. New Tory MPs will find that many Labour arguments were driven more by place than by ideology.
Yet something deeper is going on. From corporate capitalism to housing, from climate change to transport, Labour’s ideas are framing the decisions the new government is making.
Take business. A common attack on Mr Corbyn is that he is “anti-business” — and there is plenty of evidence for that in the interventionist manifesto on which he stood. Yet how does one describe the reported comments of Mr Johnson at a diplomatic gathering when he was foreign secretary? “Fuck business” may be of a piece with Michael Gove’s quip that people “have had enough of experts”, but it is not far from the Corbynite narrative.
Delegitimising business has traditionally been a fringe far-left position. It is now bipartisan. Think back to the general election campaign. Did either party reflect in their rhetoric or policies the fact that only 16 per cent of people in the UK work in the public sector? When both parties campaign as though the public sector is the norm and the benchmark, who speaks for competitive markets?
Mr Johnson’s promise to intervene, to buy British and to use state aid to protect UK industries was interpreted as another example of parking his tanks on Labour’s lawn. But at what point does the mask actually become the face? When does Michael Heseltine-style intervention before breakfast, lunch and dinner become Bennite control over the commanding heights of the economy. As we learnt to our cost in the 1970s, government can’t pick winners but losers can sure pick governments.
This is not a new process. It started with Mr Corbyn’s predecessor, Ed Miliband, and became a dance as formal as a gavotte. Labour would propose a policy. The Tory government would denounce it as extreme. The tabloid press would pile in. Then the government would adopt it after all. It happened with energy price caps. And it happened with the living wage.
The problem for the Tories is that they have not had ideologically transformative ideas for public policy since Margaret Thatcher’s government in the 1980s. The trifecta of right to buy, privatisation and ending union power were fundamental in impact and irreversible. And, in truth, those ideas were developed in the 1970s and set out in policy documents in opposition.
This is not to say there haven’t been other Tory-initiated policies that have been a lasting success. But they’ve all been bipartisan. There is a continuity between Norman Fowler, Peter Lilley and, say, Alistair Darling and John Hutton on welfare. The same continuity is discernible between Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis on education, Kenneth Clarke and Alan Milburn on health.
The core of political leadership is having a strong point of view — a question that you ask in every situation. For Thatcher’s policy unit it used to be: “Is there a more market-based solution to this problem?” And there always was. To Mr Corbyn’s Labour party it was: “Is there a way this policy can help build a socialist economy?” And there always was.
The government was elected on the promise of fulfilling a process — “getting Brexit done” — rather than answering a question. It has not formulated the challenge about the future to which it is the only answer.
The worst of the Conservative attempt to devise an agenda aimed at working people was shown in an infographic after a recent budget in which they boasted about cutting tax on beer and bingo. That one-dimensional vision of working-class needs and desires has been ditched, thankfully. But the void has to be filled — and that is where Labour policies present themselves.
When Tory plans for new council house building are announced or the remake of rail franchising begins, it will all be the hand of Mr Corbyn. The Conservative party won the election, but they are far from winning the battle of ideas.
Sunday 1 December 2019
WHY DO EXPATS VOTE DIFFERENTLY?
Nadeem F Paracha in the Dawn
Some nine years ago when, I was heading the media department of a British organisation, I got the chance to observe how most British expats in Pakistan voted in the UK 2010 parliamentary elections. Even though most of the Karachi-based British expats that I managed to talk to in this regard were somewhat reluctant to divulge which party they voted for, some eventually did tell.
Nine out of the 12 expats who agreed to reveal the party that they voted for, cast their votes for the Conservative Party. Two voted for the Liberal Democrats and just one claimed to have voted for the Labour Party. Two of them told me that, since the early 1980s, a majority of British expats around the world have preferred to vote for the Conservative Party. British expats have the right to vote in their country’s parliamentary elections, but this right lapses if the expat has remained resident outside the UK for more than 15 years.
Last year in Washington DC, during a round-table session that I attended on the electoral behaviour of expat Americans, most speakers were of the view that a majority of expat Americans tend to vote for the Republican Party. No significant data was shared to corroborate this, but some former US ambassadors attending the session claimed that most expat Americans working in Asian and South American countries vote for the Republican Party and that this has been the trend since 1980.
The session concluded that expats — at least American and British — were likely to vote for conservative parties. This is interesting, because over the last few years, there have been many reports published and columns written about expat Pakistanis and Indians overwhelmingly exhibiting support for centre-right parties such as the PTI and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Indian expats were given the right to vote in Indian elections only in 2010, but those holding dual nationalities still cannot. Pakistani expats were given this right in October 2018, during the by-elections. Whereas 7,461 expats registered online to vote, only 6,233 cast their votes.
The phenomenon of most Indian and Pakistani expats demonstrating support for the BJP and the PTI has been repeatedly observed by many, but never fully studied. The answers may lie in a hefty study published in the May 2019 issue of the Oxford Academic Journal.
The study conducted by two American political scientists, A.C. Goldberg and Simon Lanz, concentrated largely on European countries. But Goldberg and Lanz argue that the results of the study can be relevant for other countries as well. One of their conclusions was that the voting/support preferences of expats are often contrary to those at home.
This is because their social, political and economic contexts are different. An issue in the country of origin will have a more abstract impact on expats residing in a different environment, hundreds or thousands of miles away. The impact of the same issue on those living in the home country is more tangible and immediate. This might be the reason behind the somewhat different understanding of the issue among the two sets of voters.
An earlier 2006 study, by the Dutch economist Dr Jan Fidrmuc and econometrist Orla Doyle, came to the same conclusion after studying the voting behaviour of Czech and Polish migrants/expats in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The results of this study indicated that the political preferences of immigrants change significantly because the migrants adapt to the norms and attitudes prevailing in the host country.
Fidrmuc and Doyle found that most Czech and Polish migrants living in European countries tended to vote for right-wing parties at home but, interestingly, those living in African and Middle-Eastern countries preferred left-leaning parties.
The economic and political environments in Europe and Africa and/or the Middle East differ. So expats/migrants in Europe, after experiencing the advantages of developed economies, are likely to understand ‘progress’ in their home country through the lens provided to them by their lived experience in developed countries. Thus they tend to support home parties promising progress along these lines.
But what about expats from developed countries opting to vote for conservative parties? Studies suggest that British and American expats voting for the Conservative Party and Republican Party largely vote to retain their countries’ rarely-changing external policies rather than the more fluid internal matters. They are more impacted by the foreign policies of their home countries than by their countries’ internal, more localised issues.
Findings of both the mentioned studies also more than allude to the fact that, outside the voting patterns of US and UK expats, expat voting can be fickle. Since most expats are likely to vote for the opposition, they can be quick to withdraw their support once the opposition comes to power and is slow to deliver.
Both PTI and BJP enjoyed overwhelming support from Pakistani and Indian expats before both were voted into power. However, the support for the two ruling parties is now receding at home, and there is restlessness within the pro-PTI and pro-BJP Pakistani and Indian diasporas respectively.
Indian PM Narendra Modi and Pakistani PM Imran Khan now apply separate rhetorics for their supporters within and outside the country. Outside their countries, to retain the diaspora’s attention and support, they have to continue sounding like they did when they were in the opposition, whereas the same rhetoric is now failing to stand up to a plethora of economic and political problems at home.
Indian historian Meera Nanda writes in The God Market that the changing worldview of the Indian middle classes (and diaspora) is being shaped by the “state-temple-corporate complex.” Rich Indians are heavily investing in this by fusing Hindu nationalism with modern economics. This combination excites the Indian diaspora and they identify it with Modi. But what happens when the corporate is finally swallowed by Hindu zealotry and leaves behind only Hindu nationalism?
On the other hand, what excited the Pakistani diaspora about PM Khan was the manner in which he tapped into the Pakistani diaspora’s engagement with contemporary identity politics, especially in the West. He did this by clubbing together displays of religiosity, anti-corruption tirades, populist post-colonialist rhetoric and lofty allusions to Scandinavian social democracy — which is curiously explained by him as an Islamic concept.
Whereas identity politics can lead to some awkward ethnic and sectarian tensions in Pakistan, it works well on the Pakistani diaspora. Therefore, the gap between the understanding of present-day Pakistani politics between the expats and the locals has continued to grow. Some locals have lamented that expats are still stuck in 2014, or in PTI’s more glamorous dharna years.
Some nine years ago when, I was heading the media department of a British organisation, I got the chance to observe how most British expats in Pakistan voted in the UK 2010 parliamentary elections. Even though most of the Karachi-based British expats that I managed to talk to in this regard were somewhat reluctant to divulge which party they voted for, some eventually did tell.
Nine out of the 12 expats who agreed to reveal the party that they voted for, cast their votes for the Conservative Party. Two voted for the Liberal Democrats and just one claimed to have voted for the Labour Party. Two of them told me that, since the early 1980s, a majority of British expats around the world have preferred to vote for the Conservative Party. British expats have the right to vote in their country’s parliamentary elections, but this right lapses if the expat has remained resident outside the UK for more than 15 years.
Last year in Washington DC, during a round-table session that I attended on the electoral behaviour of expat Americans, most speakers were of the view that a majority of expat Americans tend to vote for the Republican Party. No significant data was shared to corroborate this, but some former US ambassadors attending the session claimed that most expat Americans working in Asian and South American countries vote for the Republican Party and that this has been the trend since 1980.
The session concluded that expats — at least American and British — were likely to vote for conservative parties. This is interesting, because over the last few years, there have been many reports published and columns written about expat Pakistanis and Indians overwhelmingly exhibiting support for centre-right parties such as the PTI and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Indian expats were given the right to vote in Indian elections only in 2010, but those holding dual nationalities still cannot. Pakistani expats were given this right in October 2018, during the by-elections. Whereas 7,461 expats registered online to vote, only 6,233 cast their votes.
The phenomenon of most Indian and Pakistani expats demonstrating support for the BJP and the PTI has been repeatedly observed by many, but never fully studied. The answers may lie in a hefty study published in the May 2019 issue of the Oxford Academic Journal.
The study conducted by two American political scientists, A.C. Goldberg and Simon Lanz, concentrated largely on European countries. But Goldberg and Lanz argue that the results of the study can be relevant for other countries as well. One of their conclusions was that the voting/support preferences of expats are often contrary to those at home.
This is because their social, political and economic contexts are different. An issue in the country of origin will have a more abstract impact on expats residing in a different environment, hundreds or thousands of miles away. The impact of the same issue on those living in the home country is more tangible and immediate. This might be the reason behind the somewhat different understanding of the issue among the two sets of voters.
An earlier 2006 study, by the Dutch economist Dr Jan Fidrmuc and econometrist Orla Doyle, came to the same conclusion after studying the voting behaviour of Czech and Polish migrants/expats in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The results of this study indicated that the political preferences of immigrants change significantly because the migrants adapt to the norms and attitudes prevailing in the host country.
Fidrmuc and Doyle found that most Czech and Polish migrants living in European countries tended to vote for right-wing parties at home but, interestingly, those living in African and Middle-Eastern countries preferred left-leaning parties.
The economic and political environments in Europe and Africa and/or the Middle East differ. So expats/migrants in Europe, after experiencing the advantages of developed economies, are likely to understand ‘progress’ in their home country through the lens provided to them by their lived experience in developed countries. Thus they tend to support home parties promising progress along these lines.
But what about expats from developed countries opting to vote for conservative parties? Studies suggest that British and American expats voting for the Conservative Party and Republican Party largely vote to retain their countries’ rarely-changing external policies rather than the more fluid internal matters. They are more impacted by the foreign policies of their home countries than by their countries’ internal, more localised issues.
Findings of both the mentioned studies also more than allude to the fact that, outside the voting patterns of US and UK expats, expat voting can be fickle. Since most expats are likely to vote for the opposition, they can be quick to withdraw their support once the opposition comes to power and is slow to deliver.
Both PTI and BJP enjoyed overwhelming support from Pakistani and Indian expats before both were voted into power. However, the support for the two ruling parties is now receding at home, and there is restlessness within the pro-PTI and pro-BJP Pakistani and Indian diasporas respectively.
Indian PM Narendra Modi and Pakistani PM Imran Khan now apply separate rhetorics for their supporters within and outside the country. Outside their countries, to retain the diaspora’s attention and support, they have to continue sounding like they did when they were in the opposition, whereas the same rhetoric is now failing to stand up to a plethora of economic and political problems at home.
Indian historian Meera Nanda writes in The God Market that the changing worldview of the Indian middle classes (and diaspora) is being shaped by the “state-temple-corporate complex.” Rich Indians are heavily investing in this by fusing Hindu nationalism with modern economics. This combination excites the Indian diaspora and they identify it with Modi. But what happens when the corporate is finally swallowed by Hindu zealotry and leaves behind only Hindu nationalism?
On the other hand, what excited the Pakistani diaspora about PM Khan was the manner in which he tapped into the Pakistani diaspora’s engagement with contemporary identity politics, especially in the West. He did this by clubbing together displays of religiosity, anti-corruption tirades, populist post-colonialist rhetoric and lofty allusions to Scandinavian social democracy — which is curiously explained by him as an Islamic concept.
Whereas identity politics can lead to some awkward ethnic and sectarian tensions in Pakistan, it works well on the Pakistani diaspora. Therefore, the gap between the understanding of present-day Pakistani politics between the expats and the locals has continued to grow. Some locals have lamented that expats are still stuck in 2014, or in PTI’s more glamorous dharna years.
Wednesday 9 October 2019
Brexit is a necessary crisis – it reveals Britain’s true place in the world
A determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism is bringing about a long-overdue audit of British realities writes David Edgerton in The Guardian
Why not? One answer is that the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond – both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole economy. This is very unlikely to be correct, but it may point to a more disconcerting truth.
The fact is that the capitalists who do support Brexit tend to be very loosely tied to the British economy. This is true of hedge funds, of course – but also true for manufacturers such as Sir James Dyson, who no longer produces in the UK. The owners of several Brexiter newspapers are foreign, or tax resident abroad – as is the pro-Brexit billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe of Ineos.
But the real story is something much bigger. What is interesting is not so much the connections between capital and the Tory party but their increasing disconnection. Today much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the Conservative party – where for most of the 20th century things looked very different. Once, great capitalists with national, imperial and global interests sat in the Commons and the Lords as Liberals or Conservatives. Between the wars, the Conservatives emerged as the one party of capital, led by great British manufacturers such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. The Commons and the Lords were soon fuller than ever of Tory businessmen, from the owner of Meccano toys to that of Lyons Corner Houses.
After the second world war, such captains of industry avoided the Commons, but the Conservative party was without question the party of capital and property, one which stood against the party of organised labour. Furthermore, the Tories represented an increasingly national capitalism, protected by import controls, and closely tied to an interventionist and technocratic state that wanted to increase exports of British designed and made goods. A company like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) saw itself, and indeed was, a national champion. British industry, public and private, was a national enterprise.
Since the 1970s things have changed radically. Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business – no longer one where British capitalism does the world’s business. Everywhere in the UK there are foreign-owned enterprises, many of them nationalised industries, building nuclear reactors and running train services from overseas. When the car industry speaks, it is not as British industry but as foreign enterprise in the UK. The same is true of many of the major manufacturing sectors – from civil aircraft to electrical engineering – and of infrastructure. Whatever the interests of foreign capital, they are not expressed through a national political party. Most of these foreign-owned businesses, not surprisingly, are hostile to Brexit.
Brexit is the political project of the hard right within the Conservative party, and not its capitalist backers. In fact, these forces were able to take over the party in part because it was no longer stabilised by a powerful organic connection to capital, either nationally or locally.
Brexit also speaks to the weakness of the state, which was itself once tied to the governing party – and particularly the Conservatives. The British state once had the capacity to change the United Kingdom and its relations to the rest of the world radically and quickly, as happened in the second world war, and indeed on accession to the common market.
Today the process from referendum to implementation will take, if it happens, nearly as long as the whole second world war. The modern British state has distanced itself from the productive economy and is barely able to take an expert view of the complexities of modern capitalism. This was painfully clear in the Brexit impact sectoral reports the government was forced to publish – they were internet cut-and-paste jobs.
The state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work. That would require not only an expert state, but one closely aligned with business. The preparations would by now be very visible at both technical and political levels. But we have none of that. Instead we have the suggestion that nothing much will happen on no deal, that mini-deals will appear. The real hope of the Brexiters is surely that the EU will cave and carry on trading with the UK as if nothing had changed. Brexit is a promise without a plan. But in the real world Brexit does mean Brexit, and no deal means no deal.
Brexit is a necessary crisis, and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics and the weakness of the state. It brings to light, in stunning clarity, Brexiters’ deluded political understanding of the UK’s place in the world. From a new understanding, a new politics of national improvement might come; without it we will remain stuck in the delusional, revivalist politics of a banana monarchy.
The Commons in 1966: ‘The Conservative party was the party of national capitalism.’ Photograph: Bentley Archive/Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images
Who backs Brexit? Agriculture is against it; industry is against it; services are against it. None of them, needless to say, support a no-deal Brexit. Yet the Conservative party, which favoured European union for economic reasons over many decades, has become not only Eurosceptic – it is set on a course regarded by every reputable capitalist state and the great majority of capitalist enterprises as deeply foolish.
If any prime minister in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force a change of direction. Yet today, while the CBI and the Financial Times call for the softest possible Brexit, the Tory party is no longer listening.
Who backs Brexit? Agriculture is against it; industry is against it; services are against it. None of them, needless to say, support a no-deal Brexit. Yet the Conservative party, which favoured European union for economic reasons over many decades, has become not only Eurosceptic – it is set on a course regarded by every reputable capitalist state and the great majority of capitalist enterprises as deeply foolish.
If any prime minister in the past had shown such a determined ignorance of the dynamics of global capitalism, the massed ranks of British capital would have stepped in to force a change of direction. Yet today, while the CBI and the Financial Times call for the softest possible Brexit, the Tory party is no longer listening.
Why not? One answer is that the Tories now represent the interests of a small section of capitalists who actually fund the party. An extreme version of this argument was floated by the prime minister’s sister, Rachel, and the former chancellor Philip Hammond – both of whom suggested that hard Brexit is being driven by a corrupt relationship between the prime minister and his hedge-fund donors, who have shorted the pound and the whole economy. This is very unlikely to be correct, but it may point to a more disconcerting truth.
The fact is that the capitalists who do support Brexit tend to be very loosely tied to the British economy. This is true of hedge funds, of course – but also true for manufacturers such as Sir James Dyson, who no longer produces in the UK. The owners of several Brexiter newspapers are foreign, or tax resident abroad – as is the pro-Brexit billionaire Sir James Ratcliffe of Ineos.
But the real story is something much bigger. What is interesting is not so much the connections between capital and the Tory party but their increasing disconnection. Today much of the capital in Britain is not British and not linked to the Conservative party – where for most of the 20th century things looked very different. Once, great capitalists with national, imperial and global interests sat in the Commons and the Lords as Liberals or Conservatives. Between the wars, the Conservatives emerged as the one party of capital, led by great British manufacturers such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. The Commons and the Lords were soon fuller than ever of Tory businessmen, from the owner of Meccano toys to that of Lyons Corner Houses.
After the second world war, such captains of industry avoided the Commons, but the Conservative party was without question the party of capital and property, one which stood against the party of organised labour. Furthermore, the Tories represented an increasingly national capitalism, protected by import controls, and closely tied to an interventionist and technocratic state that wanted to increase exports of British designed and made goods. A company like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) saw itself, and indeed was, a national champion. British industry, public and private, was a national enterprise.
Since the 1970s things have changed radically. Today there is no such thing as British national capitalism. London is a place where world capitalism does business – no longer one where British capitalism does the world’s business. Everywhere in the UK there are foreign-owned enterprises, many of them nationalised industries, building nuclear reactors and running train services from overseas. When the car industry speaks, it is not as British industry but as foreign enterprise in the UK. The same is true of many of the major manufacturing sectors – from civil aircraft to electrical engineering – and of infrastructure. Whatever the interests of foreign capital, they are not expressed through a national political party. Most of these foreign-owned businesses, not surprisingly, are hostile to Brexit.
Brexit is the political project of the hard right within the Conservative party, and not its capitalist backers. In fact, these forces were able to take over the party in part because it was no longer stabilised by a powerful organic connection to capital, either nationally or locally.
Brexit also speaks to the weakness of the state, which was itself once tied to the governing party – and particularly the Conservatives. The British state once had the capacity to change the United Kingdom and its relations to the rest of the world radically and quickly, as happened in the second world war, and indeed on accession to the common market.
Today the process from referendum to implementation will take, if it happens, nearly as long as the whole second world war. The modern British state has distanced itself from the productive economy and is barely able to take an expert view of the complexities of modern capitalism. This was painfully clear in the Brexit impact sectoral reports the government was forced to publish – they were internet cut-and-paste jobs.
The state can no longer undertake the radical planning and intervention that might make Brexit work. That would require not only an expert state, but one closely aligned with business. The preparations would by now be very visible at both technical and political levels. But we have none of that. Instead we have the suggestion that nothing much will happen on no deal, that mini-deals will appear. The real hope of the Brexiters is surely that the EU will cave and carry on trading with the UK as if nothing had changed. Brexit is a promise without a plan. But in the real world Brexit does mean Brexit, and no deal means no deal.
Brexit is a necessary crisis, and has provided a long overdue audit of British realities. It exposes the nature of the economy, the new relations of capitalism to politics and the weakness of the state. It brings to light, in stunning clarity, Brexiters’ deluded political understanding of the UK’s place in the world. From a new understanding, a new politics of national improvement might come; without it we will remain stuck in the delusional, revivalist politics of a banana monarchy.
Thursday 1 November 2018
Finally, the Tories are discovering the state can be a force for good
Martin Kettle in The Guardian
Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.
But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.
Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.
May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.
These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.
The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.
Illustration by Mitch Blunt
According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.
The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.
This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.
His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.
This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.
May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.
May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.
This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.
The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.
The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”
According to WH Auden, all good dramas consist of two contrasting acts: “First, the making of a mistake; then, the discovery that it was a mistake.” A similar corrective arc often also applies in politics. On the issue of the progressive role of the state, the late-20th-century Conservative party made a historic mistake. Now it is struggling with the dawning of discovery.
The single most obvious thing to say about the Tory party in autumn 2018 is that it is split over Brexit. But the significance of the Tory divide on Brexit, and its tendency to dominate all aspects of domestic political coverage, masks another internal argument – one that is more important in terms of the party’s history, and may hold the key to its future too.
This second argument is about the necessary role of government in shaping economic and social policy. One way or another, this is an issue that has woven its way through Conservative history since the late 18th century. Tory leaders from William Pitt the Younger to Theresa May have confronted it. Philip Hammond’s budget this week was a striking embodiment of why the issue is both enduringly important and still politically unresolved.
His budget was not the end of austerity. But it was unquestionably a decisive move away from it. If the austerity doctrine of 2010-18 had still been in full force, the £68bn windfall in government receipts over the next five years announced this week would have been overwhelmingly used to get the finances back in the black by the mid 2020s as planned. Instead, the normally cautious Hammond chose to spend the lot, mainly on the NHS, but also in a cluster of short-term giveaways and to pump another £15bn into the economy next year.
This would not have happened in the previous eight years. It has happened because May is trying to reposition her party more centrally on domestic policy in the aftermath of the Brexit deal she hopes to secure. May herself would probably have gone further this week.
May and Hammond are not trying to “out-Corbyn Corbyn”, as former chancellor George Osborne put it this week in an interview in which he offered a mea culpa on the EU referendum but not on austerity. But they see the need to counter the Labour leader. This was in many respects a holding budget, but it placed anti-austerity options in tax and spending and in the role of government back on to the Tory agenda.
May and Hammond are a bit like a couple circling a roundabout in their car, debating which route to follow, but clear which one they should no longer take.
This is where Auden’s point comes in. Many times in its pre-1975 history, the Conservative party found its way, often against its supporters’ instincts and interests, towards strengthening the role of government in rebalancing the economy in favour of the poor and the moderately waged. From Robert Peel’s reintroduction of peacetime income tax in 1842 onwards, the one-nation tradition was the key to the party’s famous ability to reinvent itself.
The problem the modern Tory party faces is not confined to the unpopularity of austerity. Its roots lie in the period after 1975, when Margaret Thatcher – massively aided by the press – captured the party with her rejection of postwar Keynesianism in favour of an agenda of privatisation, small government, tax cuts and individualism. It won the Tories four successive elections. But it was also massively destructive and divisive.
The Conservatives have not won a decisive general election majority since Thatcher did so in 1987. John Major, David Cameron and May have all led weak governments. In spite of efforts by all three, the party seems unable to move decisively beyond Thatcherism or to reconnect fully with its one-nation past at a time when it is needed. As one senior Tory put it bluntly to me recently: “We will never win a clear majority while we remain in thrall to Margaret Thatcher.”
Harold Macmillan: many of today’s Conservative MPs relate to his approach. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images
Brexit is tightly bound in to this problem. Most ardent Brexiteers are ardent Thatcherites, just as most Thatcherites are Brexiteers. Many of the most threadbare of the Brexit fantasies – those about easy free trade deals, a no-deal break with the EU, Singapore-style deregulation and Britain’s supposedly enhanced standing in the world – contain ghostly echoes of Thatcher.
But the central issue is political economy. In 1938, Harold Macmillan warned the Tory party: “Unless we can continue this peaceful evolution from a free capitalism to planned capitalism, or, it may be, a new synthesis of capitalist and socialist theory, there will be little hope of preserving the civil, democratic and cultural freedoms.” No Tory MP would write in such terms today. But the essence of this warning remains valid on many levels 80 years on.
Today’s party contains more MPs who relate to Macmillan’s approach than you would ever guess from the constant publicity given to the Brexiteers. The most prominent of these is May herself, with her repeated – but unfulfilled – commitment to the section in the 2017 manifesto that said “government can and should be a force for good – and its power should be put squarely at the service of this country’s working people”.
May is not alone. Justine Greening said this week that the Tories should “get into the centre ground” and that they had not properly connected with the public in more than 30 years. George Freeman wrote in September that aspirational professional voters under 45 are rejecting the old politics. “Unless the Conservative party reconnects with them, we risk becoming a rump party of nostalgic nationalists,” he claimed. Nicky Morgan wrote last month that “we cannot secure growth in the 21st century by following a 20th-century model”. Jesse Norman, in his recent book on Adam Smith, writes: “It is easy to forget the central importance of the state in his thought, as protector of the nation, adjudicator and enforcer of justice … provider of public works, infrastructure and local schools, and, yes, as regulator of markets.” Most of the 2010 and 2015 Tory intakes share these instincts.
These MPs do not have identical views. But they all share the crucial recognition that government is, as the US writer Garry Wills puts it, “a necessary good not a necessary evil”. If Labour people tend to be too starry-eyed about government, too many Tories, influenced by Thatcher’s aberrant period of power, tend to be unduly distrustful of it. The public, who depend on good government, do not share either view.
The most interesting current question in British politics is this: what comes after May’s Tories and Corbyn’s Labour? My guess is that a large part of the answer will depend on the road May and Hammond decide to take off the roundabout to which they have belatedly returned this week.
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