'People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right - especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.' Thomas Sowell
There has been quite a bit of noise about the current dispensation being against what is referred to as “civil society”. One expects this kind of diatribe from illiberal Lefties. But such is the stranglehold of these ideas and ideologies that this slanted view has now started gaining wider traction. The principal objection seems to be that the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act 2010 is being weaponised against some NGOs. This and related issues are worth examining in some detail.
When the Congress-led UPA 2 introduced draconian provisions in the FCRA law in 2010, I had gone on record opposing it. My article on that issue is available in the public domain. I mention this because I want it to be clear that I am not the usual adversary — the “fascist” supporter of the FCRA.
The FCRA is supposed to regulate foreign contributions. It has a provision that if foreign funds are received by an NGO, then the latter is required to use it for its own charitable purposes. The funds are not to be diverted to other NGOs or charity organisations. Based on the advice of some dubious and clever chartered accountants, some NGOs, instead of making contributions to other non-profits — which they are now prohibited from doing — have come up with an “innovative” solution. They are “paying” other NGOs for “services”. These services are usually in the grey and ambiguous domain of “consultancy”. Now, clearly, the NGOs are trying to “indirectly” achieve what the law prohibits them from doing “directly”.
None of these NGOs are babes in the woods. They are acquainted with common law cases. There are hundreds of cases in the US, a country close to the purse strings of these NGOs, saying that it is impermissible to do indirectly what is not permitted directly. How can it be that if the Indian State invokes a common law principle so clearly enunciated in the US, it suddenly becomes a fascist enemy of decent NGOs? As it turns out, virtually all the regulatory action against foreign-funded NGOs has been for this reason.
Don’t tread where MNCs failed
As someone who has dealt with tax authorities in nine different countries over the last 49 years, let me assure the clever chartered accountants advising these NGOs that corporations and banks have been experimenting with these devices and playing with these loopholes for decades and have rarely, if ever, succeeded. The amateurish attempts by these NGOs to fool the tax department are going to get them nowhere. Where large multinational corporations (MNCs) have failed, NGOs should not tread.
Several ill-advised NGOs have gone one step further. They have tried to pretend that contributions received from their foreign donors have not been donations but payments for the elusive consultancy services rendered by their Indian arms for their foreign payments. Such obviously foolish attempts are bound to get them into trouble. There is no point in complaining after the fact.
Foreign-funded NGOs are welcome in our country if they wish to perform “charitable” acts like helping the visually challenged, the terminally ill, or the differently abled. As a country, we have been reasonably kind in supporting causes like leprosy alleviation or livelihood creation, even if the ultimate aim behind these good deeds has been religious proselytisation. In this regard, we have gone against the dictums of MK Gandhi who vociferously opposed “do-good” missionaries. But when foreign-funded NGOs start getting involved in political lobbying in India, we have a problem.
Some of us are old enough to remember that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subsidiary, the NGO known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, funded Indian magazines like Quest in the ’50s and ’60s. Some of us have also read the testimony of Soviet Union archivist Vasili Mitrokhin who regularly made sure that more copies of Russian translations of Hindi poets were printed and “sold” than their Hindi originals. This too happened in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Again, some of us remember that the head of the Ford Foundation in Delhi could get on to Jawaharlal Nehru’s calendar easily and that some of our tragicomic policy initiatives came from this august institution. Foreign-funded NGOs trying to tell us what taxation policies we should follow are really pushing their luck. And that is exactly what several of them have done before and are doing right now. Fortunately, one of them is now under a regulatory scanner. The Indian State, as is usually the case, has been dilatory. But better late than never.
The anti-State menace
Foreign-funded NGOs and foreign media have been against the Indian State and any strong dispensation for more than 70 years now. They prefer pusillanimous clientelist governments in India. They pilloried Panditji for his soft stance with the Soviets during the 1956 Hungarian revolution. They are now upset that we are not as anti-Russia as they would like. They have also made a devil’s bargain with blatantly Islamist organisations such as the US-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
This is why they prefer to refer to Indian Muslim gangsters as politicians. They talk of trigger-happy police officers in India. There are, of course, no such officers in the US. They prefer to characterise the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 as obnoxious and anti-Muslim. I beg to differ. The Act is in favour of persecuted religious minorities in India’s neighbouring countries. These NGOs and the media do not bleed for Sikh shopkeepers, Hindu girls, and Parsis in our neighbourhood. They support the quixotic “farmers’” agitation in India when everybody knows that it was a “middle-man” affair. And they are silent about Canada’s blatant persecution of its truckers.
Let us now revert to our own domestic uncivil society. Under the previous dispensation, a bunch of impractical Lefties got together. They had never run factories or created jobs but managed to ingratiate themselves with the powers that were and became members of the pompous National Advisory Council (NAC). Their “advice” usually resulted in the active sabotage of the intelligent policies that Manmohan Singh was trying to implement. One feels sorry for Singh, who had to constantly look over his shoulders to avoid being bitten by this overweening Dracula. The combined NGO menace got so bad that the hapless former PM, in an interview to Science journal, blamed American NGOs for sabotaging the India-US nuclear deal, which had the support of the elected governments of both countries.
The simple fact is that the so-called civil society NGOs, who had support from the NAC and who could defy Singh quite easily, are now defanged and stand without protection. All that they can do is write strong pieces in the English press in India and appeal to their patrons in foreign papers to give them some oxygen. There is an old English saying: “They say, let them say…”
Call them by their right name
It is interesting to note that for the illiberal Left, references to “civil society” almost invariably mean references to NGOs, many with explicit political agendas. Are Sangeetha Sabhas, Bhajan Mandalis, regional associations (like Kannada Sangha in Mumbai, Maratha Mandali in Chennai, Odiya Sahitya Sabha in Bengaluru, Durga Puja Association in Pune), and traditional charities (like the Red Cross, Saint Judes, National Association for the Blind) not part of civil society? If any of them run afoul of tax authorities, will there be any media coverage? The French traveller Alexis de Tocqueville makes reference to voluntary organisations as being central to the American democratic experience. To this day, more the three-quarters of the fire brigades in American small towns and suburbs are manned by volunteers. Churches and synagogues organise charitable activities. Rotary, Lions, and Giants clubs are part of civil society as also oddly enough is the Masonic Lodge.
All of these institutions derived their funding from members of their immediate physical communities. This is the civil society that de Tocqueville praised. He would be shocked if told that quasi-political lobbying groups who obtain money from foreign countries in order to influence American politics were to be referred to as members of the voluntary, citizen-supported civil society, which he held up as exemplars of grassroots democracy.
We need to get our vocabulary right and refer to political lobbyists by their correct name. Our ancients told us that getting the right “nama-rupa” or “word and form” will automatically make our arguments solid. When we revert to that tradition, it will be clear that genuine members of civil society are not complaining. Political lobbyists are indulging in grievance-mongering, which I hope and pray we quietly ignore.
While many agree that private education is at the root of inequality in Britain, open discussion about the issue remains puzzlingly absent. In their new book, historian David Kynaston and economist Francis Green set out the case for change in The Guardian
The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored.
For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).
In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.
What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds. They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.
Some of the public figures of the past 20 years to have attended private schools (l-r from top): Tony Blair, former Bank of England governor Eddie George, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Charles Spencer, businesswoman Martha Lane Fox, Dominic West, James Blunt, former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Paxman, fashion journalist Alexandra Shulman, footballer Frank Lampard, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and cricketer Joe Root. Composite: Rex, Getty
And so what, accordingly, does Britain look like in the 21st century? A brief but expensive history, 1997–2018, offers some guide. As the millennium approaches, New Labour under Tony Blair (Fettes) sweeps to power. The Bank of England under Eddie George (Dulwich) gets independence. The chronicles of Hogwarts school begin. A nation grieves for Diana (West Heath); Charles (Gordonstoun) retrieves her body; her brother (Eton) tells it as it is. Martha Lane Fox (Oxford High) blows a dotcom bubble. Charlie Falconer (Glenalmond) masterminds the Millennium Dome. Will Young (Wellington) becomes the first Pop Idol. The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty (Eton) sorts out Baltimore. James Blunt (Harrow) releases the bestselling album of the decade. Northern Rock collapses under the chairmanship of Matt Ridley (Eton). Boris Johnson (Eton) enters City Hall in London. The Cameron-Osborne (Eton-St Paul’s) axis takes over the country; Nick Clegg (Westminster) runs errands. Life staggers on in austerity Britain mark two. Jeremy Clarkson (Repton) can’t stop revving up; Jeremy Paxman (Malvern) still has an attitude problem; Alexandra Shulman (St Paul’s Girls) dictates fashion; Paul Dacre (University College School) makes middle England ever more Mail-centric; Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh) makes non-middle England ever more Guardian-centric; judge Brian Leveson (Liverpool College) fails to nail the press barons; Justin Welby (Eton) becomes top mitre man; Frank Lampard (Brentwood) becomes a Chelsea legend; Joe Root (Worksop) takes guard; Henry Blofeld (Eton) spots a passing bus. The Cameron-Osborne axis sees off Labour, but not Boris Johnson+Nigel Farage (Dulwich)+Arron Banks (Crookham Court). Ed Balls (Nottingham High) takes to the dance floor. Theresa May (St Juliana’s) and Jeremy Corbyn (Castle House prep school) face off. Prince George (Thomas’s Battersea) and Princess Charlotte (Willcocks) start school.
The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.
Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.
The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.
Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.
A famous image of school privilege: Harrovians Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson and local schoolboys George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young photographed outside Lord’s cricket ground in 1937 by Jimmy Sime. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Allsport
There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.
Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”
If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.
First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.
The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy. Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”
Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.
The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.
Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.
What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.
On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.
Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.
The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education. Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.
We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.
We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.
All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.
The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.
It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.
Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform? Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.
The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.
Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?
• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
How to do it: feasible reform options
There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.
1. Handicaps
Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.
Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).
Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).
2. Crossing the tracks
There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.
In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.
When David Cameron delivered his resignation speech outside No 10 on Friday, he said he would leave the task of triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty – the untested procedure governing how an EU member state leaves the bloc – to his successor.
This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.
By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?
One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.
This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”
Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.
They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).
In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.
Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, expects Cameron to formally announce Britain’s EU exit on Tuesday evening.But there seems to be no immediate legal means out of the stalemate. It is entirely up to the departing member state to trigger article 50, by issuing formal notification of intention to leave: no one, in Brussels, Berlin or Paris, can force it to. But equally, there is nothing in article 50 that obliges the EU to open talks – including the informal talks the Brexit leaders want – before formal notification has been made.
“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”
The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.
The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.
Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others, that an increasingly frustrated EU could, if push comes to shove, decide to consider the referendum result itself as “an official wish to leave” seem unreliable. “The notification of article 50 is a formal act and has to be done by the British government to the European council,” an EU official told Reuters.
“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.
The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.
‘Greece is being sacrificed to maintain a set of delusions that enfeebles us all.’ Illustration by Robert G Fresson
‘This is our political alternative to neoliberalism and to the neoliberal process of European integration: democracy, more democracy and even deeper democracy,” said Alexis Tsipras on 18 January 2014 in a debate organised by the Dutch Socialist party in Amersfoort. Now the moment of deepest democracy looms, as the Greek people go to the polls on Sunday to vote for or against the next round of austerity.
Unfortunately, Sunday’s choice will be between endless austerity and immediate chaos. As comfortable as it is to argue from the sidelines that maybe Grexit in the medium term won’t hurt as much as 30 years’ drag on GDP from swingeing repayments, no sane person wants either. The vision that Syriza swept to power on was that if you spoke truth to the troika plainly and in broad daylight, they would have to acknowledge that austerity was suffocating Greece.
They have acknowledged no such thing. Whatever else one could say about the handling of the crisis, and whatever becomes of the euro, Sunday will be the moment that unstoppable democracy meets immovable supra-democracy. The Eurogroup has already won: the Greek people can vote any way they like – but what they want, they cannot have.
On Saturday the Eurogroup broke with its tradition of unanimity, issuing a petulant statement “supported by all members except the Greek member”. Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, sought legal advice on whether the group was allowed to exclude him, and received the extraordinary reply: “The Eurogroup is an informal group. Thus it is not bound by treaties or written regulations. While unanimity is conventionally adhered to, the Eurogroup president is not bound to explicit rules.” Or, to put it another way: “We never had any accountability in the first place, sucker.”
More striking still is this line of the statement: “The Eurogroup has been open until the very last moment to further support the Greek people through a continued growth-oriented programme.” The measures enforced by the troika have created an economic contraction akin to that caused by war. With unemployment at 25% and youth unemployment at nearly half, 40% of children now live below the poverty line. The latest offer to Greece promises more of the same. The idea that any of this is oriented towards growth is demonstrably false. The Eurogroup president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, has started to assert that black is white.
And that brings us to the crux of the troika’s programme: what is the point of reducing this country to rubble? The stated intention at the start of the austerity package was to restore order: allow Greece to take a short hit to its GDP in the interests of building a stronger, more balanced economy in the long run. As it became clear that growth was not restored and that even on its own terms – the creditor must come first – the plan was failing, the line changed. It became a moral crusade, a collective punishment of the Greeks.
In 2012 the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said in an interview with this newspaper, “Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax. And I think they should also help themselves collectively.” How? “By all paying their tax.” At the time, it sounded strange: how, in a country of cripplingly high unemployment, with whole families living off the depleted income of one pensioner, was the answer going to come from tax?
She was offering not a solution but a narrative: the Greeks were in this situation because they were bad people. They wanted a beneficent state, but they didn’t want to pool their resources to create one. The IMF was merely the instrument of a discipline they dearly needed. This line has broadly held – the debtors are presented as morally weaker than the creditors. To give them any concessions would be to reward their laziness and selfishness. The fact that debt is a two-way street – that the returns on debt exist because of the risk that the money might be lost, and creditors have their own moral duty to accept losses when they arise – is erased by this telling of the events.
Also airbrushed out of that story is what the late economist Wynne Godley called (in 1992!) the “lacuna in the Maastricht programme”: that while its single-currency proposal made provision for a central bank, it had nothing to say on the matter of what would replace the democratic institutions – the national governments whose power, once they had no control over their own currency, would be limited. Now we have our answer: the strongest takes control. At the moment, Germany knows best. How do we know they know best? Because they are the richest. The euro was founded on the idea that the control of currency was apolitical. It has destroyed that myth, and taken democracy down with it.
These talks did not fail by accident. The Greeks have to be humiliated, because the alternative – of treating them as equal parties or “adults”, as Lagarde wished them to be – would lead to a debate about the Eurogroup: what its foundations are, what accountability would look like, and what its democratic levers are – if indeed it has any. Solidarity with Greece means everyone, in and outside the single currency, forcing this conversation: the country is being sacrificed to maintain a set of delusions that enfeebles us all.
In the upper reaches of the Euro elite, where leaders are forever driving up to summit meetings in shiny German cars and looking grave and self-important for the cameras, where smooth diplomats know that the way to get business done is to do it discreetly with fellow officials, there is no surer sign that a colleague has gone stark raving mad than him announcing that he is going to hold a referendum on matters European.
It is bad enough that David Cameron has decided to put Britain’s future in the EU to the voters. But at least the UK Prime Minister has given warning several years in advance and has enlisted the support of the British business establishment to win his vote in 2017. By contrast, the Greek leader, Alexis Tsipras, announced on Friday that he wants to hold a referendum in Greece on the eurozone crisis on July 5.
In the eyes of the Euro elite, this momentous decision made Mr Tsipras the instant winner of the European madman of the year competition. Several years ago, when his now forgotten predecessor in Athens attempted a similar manoeuvre, demanding a public vote, the Germans ordered Georges Papandreou not to be silly. Indeed, the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, told President Obama that the Greek leader was a “madman”. Truly, that was the pot calling the kettle noire.
Now, Mr Tsipras wants his own vote. What does he think he is doing? Does he realise that this is not how the eurozone and the European Union work? Who knows what will happen if Greek voters are asked whether they approve of the final offer of new terms from stricken Greece’s creditors. Goodness, the voters might say no. So exasperted were the other Eurogroup leaders that on Saturday they decided that the referendum move means their latest offer is void and Greece is on its own. It looks as though the referendum will go ahead regardless.
That fear of referendums on the part of EU leaders and officials is rooted in bitter experience, of course. The messy attempt to smuggle the integrationist Maastricht Treaty past European electorates in the early Nineties was followed by the long-running wrangle over the abandoned EU constitution and the Lisbon Treaty. Voters are awkward. Sometimes they do not do as they are told by the leaders and officials who do the deals. Why take the risk?
But Mr Tsipras is certainly not mad, or not in the sense that he has lost his marbles. Despite his Marxist beliefs and trainee demagogue antics, there is something rather compelling about the cunning way in which he has handled this crisis and declined to be railroaded by the corporatist EU powers-that-be, even though he has been slapped in the face (literally, last week) by the atrocious Jean Claude Juncker, the president of the EU commission. This is to say nothing of the ineffective behaviour of the over-rated German chancellor, Angela Merkel, cooed over by diplomats and the foreign policy community despite no one ever being able to name a single great achievement or convincing act of leadership in her career other than the knifing of her mentor Helmut Kohl.
But surely the real madmen here are not the Greek Marxists at all. The real madmen are those who created the euro, this cock-eyed construct, who thought political dreams and vanity could trump economic sense and cultural and national differences, by creating a currency union on a vast continent without the necessary safeguards.
Yet instead of facing these realities, and accepting that the EU model as currently constituted has had it, the Europhile leaders intone pompously about European Union values being agelessly sacrosanct. It is as though these men and women believe themselves to be functionaries of the Holy Roman Empire, rather than representatives of a modern botched-together political experiment that was only created in its latest form when German and French politicians misdiagnosed the consequences of the end of the Cold War as recently as 1989 and prescribed the euro.
This weekend, as those in the markets brace for the likelihood of Grexit, and a mammoth default on debts of more than 300 billion euros, it seems likely that Mr Tsipras has wanted Greece out of the eurozone all along, pretending throughout the negotiations that he is trying for an accommodation and debt relief when really he wanted to leave. That is what observers of Syriza, his party, believe.
But Mr Tsipras had a problem when he came to power. Although many Greek voters like his style, they also liked the euro because it meant membership of a supposedly democratic club that confers respectability. That is why he had to be seen to try for a deal, to create the illusion of good faith, so that he can say to the Greek electorate that while he did his best, the wicked architects of austerity – the central bankers and International Monetary Fund technocrats who want to make poor Greek pensioners (age: 57) homeless – would not see sense.
Now, Mr Tsipras may win either way. Either the creditors retreat in the next few days, because European financial institutions are exposed and the IMF is looking at a giant hole in its books, thus enabling Syriza to proclaim victory. Or, much more likely, Greece defaults on its debts and reintroduces the drachma as its currency against a backdrop of grievance and anti-German feeling that will serve the Greek Left well for generations to come.
The Greek people certainly won’t be winners, or at least not in the short term. On Saturday they were jogging to their banks in preparation for a full-blown bank run, in the expectation that the government will have to introduce capital controls, restricting the flow of money out of the country. If it does not do this, then the banks will have to close their doors. On Tuesday, Greece will start defaulting on the first chunk of 9.7 billion euros it owes the IMF this year. And that is all before the expected referendum on Sunday, which is a vote on a deal that eurozone finance ministers are declaring void already. What a mess.
Leaving will not be easy, contrary to the predications of British Eurosceptics, or at least not straight away. The experience of previous major defaults and hasty reorganisations suggests that it is extremely difficult to hold down inflation. It is also unlikely that the high-taxing socialist Mr Tsipras will introduce the capitalist policies and reforms that will attract inward investment and grow the economy.
At this late hour, in the final act of the Greek drama, enter David Cameron, like a man who arrives at a pub when the other customers and staff are administering the kiss of life to a regular who has collapsed on the floor next to the bar after consuming way too much ouzo.
Mr Cameron clears his throat and asks if someone wouldn’t mind awfully getting him and his British friends a pint. There is silence, until someone points out that they have their hands full at the moment.
In a similarly fraught atmosphere, Mr Cameron was given a few minutes to read out his proposals for reform to EU leaders last week as they grappled with Greece and the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean. His demands – on benefits and the promise of a post-dated cheque guaranteeing who knows what from the other countries after the referendum – are pathetically small.
There remains one fascinating other possibility, however, which may get the escapologist Mr Cameron off the hook in that style of his to which we have all become so accustomed. If Greece does leave and the effects are explosive, then it might – just might – finally persuade the Euro elite that their approach is bust, and that what is needed instead is a way for Europeans to trade and be friends without the architecture of an integrationist, incompetent, failed super-state.
Over the last three decades, leftwing parties in the English-speaking world have taken on much of the right’s antidemocratic programme and lost their souls
‘Capital showed precious little gratitude to centre-left parties, and none to their successors.’ Australian prime minister Tony Abbott with British prime minister David Cameron.Photograph: AAP
Besides the 5-Eyes spying agreement, the English-speaking democracies of the North Atlantic and the South Pacific are frequently said to have a few things in common. British prime minister David Cameron recited them perfectly before the Australian parliament on Friday: “open economies and open societies”, a free press, and “real democracy and the rule of law” safeguarded by liberal institutions.
These fantasies underpin the canonical history of what the rightwing calls the Anglosphere. Conservative thinktankers get misty-eyed when they hear speeches like these, which downplay the way in which these English traditions were imposed by settler colonists on countries stolen from their indigenous inhabitants. The Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, did just that in his introduction to Cameron’s visit:
It’s hard to think that back in 1788 [Sydney] was nothing but bush and that the marines and the convicts and sailors ... must have thought they had come almost to the moon.
Right now the Anglosphere nations share another institution: everywhere, the political right is in charge, despite the times offering us reasons to vote for parties emphasising leftwing notions of environmental responsibility, equality, and military restraint.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just reminded us again that the planet is frying beneath our feet. Economic inequality has widened in the Anglosphere over the last 30 years, and even more sharply in the last decade. In the “recovery” from the global financial crisis, in the UK and the US middle class incomes have declined, with the gains going to the very rich. In former welfare states like the UK, austerity policies are literally starving vulnerable citizens. Conservatives in other Anglosphere countries, like Australia’s treasurer Joe Hockey, would dearly like to follow the Tories’ example.
The only exemption to the defunding of public services are military and intelligence agencies — the air forces of Australia, Canada, the US and Britain are busy fighting in a new phase of the endless, profligate, unwinnable war in the Middle East. Over the course of this war, intelligence cooperation between the proud liberal democracies of the Anglosphere has evolved into what Edward Snowden has called a “supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn’t answer to the laws of its own countries”.
‘Stephen Harper, having first transformed Canadian conservatism into a simulacrum of the US Republican party, is now remodelling the country itself as a petro-state.’Photograph: AAP
Despite all this, the right are enjoying a new heyday that puts the Thatcher and Reagan years in the shade. Australia is ruled by the most reactionary national government in its history. Stephen Harper, having first transformed Canadian conservatism into a simulacrum of the US Republican party, is now remodelling the country itself as a petro-state. In New Zealand, a scandal implicating prime minister John Key’s staff in the smearing of political rivals did not prevent his National party government being returned in September. In the UK an austerity-mad Tory-led coalition government is drifting further right, as it (and Labour) dance to a tune set by the golf club bigots in Ukip. In the US, Republicans — who have spent the last four years obstructing Obama’s painfully modest agenda — are now making conciliatory and cooperative noises because they are effectively the party of government, and are seeking to clear the way for their own agenda.
Each country has its own internal political dynamics. In each case the right has come to power in different ways. But these groupings share a lot of ideological common ground. This is no accident — multinational corporate lobbying, a global network of thinktanks, and the planetary echo chamber afforded by organisations like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation keeps right wing ideas circulating and resonating throughout the English speaking world.
Anglosphere conservatives want to erode whatever remains of their respective welfare states, with a particular emphasis on wrecking social security, education and public health. They have profited by scapegoating immigrants or refugees, and stoking paranoia about border security. More so than in previous eras of rightwing ascendancy, they are joined at the hip to the carbon merchants whose products are worsening the climate disaster already under way. While Abbott waxes lyrical about the civilising properties of coal, Harper redesigns Canada’s foreign policy around getting the products of its dirty oil sands industry to market. In the US, the Koch brothers and other carbon moguls bankroll the Republican party. If New Zealand and UK conservatives are less strident on this topic, it’s because their carbon industries are nonexistent or were deliberately destroyed. Right now, they’re all committed to the negotiation of a Trans -Pacific Partnership that economist Joseph Stiglitz says benefits “the wealthiest sliver of the American and global elite at the expense of everyone else”.
The funny thing is that — with the exception of Key’s relatively moderate government — all of these rightwing majorities are unpopular. Obama’s approval ratings may be catastrophically low, but Congress’s are even lower — the Republican takeover is based on the consistent support of a small, well-mobilised, conservative fraction of the electorate and the refusal of erstwhile Democrat supporters to turn out to vote. Since their failure to win a majority in their own right, the UK Tories — whose MPs are virtually all stationed in the countryside and comfy suburbs of England — have only declined in their standing. In Australia the Liberals’ polling has been in an election-losing position almost since they came to government, and the electorate have resolutely disliked Abbott since before he assumed power. In Canada, Harper has been in negative electoral territory for well over a year.
Their ideas aren’t well-liked, either. In Australia, the Abbott government has sustained most of the damage to its standing following the passage of a budget that the electorate correctly judged to be unfair to the most vulnerable. In the recent mid-terms, despite returning Republican candidates, US electorates passed a raft of progressive initiatives, including several mandating a rise in the local minimum wage, a couple making recreational marijuana legal, and even some mandating maximum class sizes in public schools.
‘The funny thing is that — with the exception of the relatively moderate government of NZ prime minister John Key (pictured) — all of these rightwing majorities are unpopular.’Photograph: AAP
Alaska, for example, returned a Republican senator and congressman at the same time that it legalised marijuana, voted for a minimum wage, and restricted mining to protect salmon refuges; a measure aimed at re-imposing taxes on oil companies only narrowly failed. In the UK, you could be forgiven for thinking from media coverage that immigration is the uppermost priority for voters. In fact, it’s increasing funding to the NHS, which the Tories would like to eviscerate even more thoroughly than they have. In all of these countries, polling shows that the decline of public services, privatisation, and economic insecurity are perennial concerns for large swathes of their respective electorates.
The main reason the right finds itself in this position is not their own strength, or the broad acceptance of their ideas, but the weakness of mainstream leftwing parties. Partly this is down to a lack of effective political leadership. While Republicans ran against the president in the US midterms, so, often enough, did his Democrat colleagues. So desperate were they to avoid any association with him that some were led to refuse to admit that they had ever voted for him. Not only were candidates distancing themselves from what Jeb Lund called Obama’s “one major legislative achievement”, the Affordable Care Act, but they also gave only lukewarm support to the progressive ballot measures (and attendant social movements) that any sensible centre-left party might have viewed as a source of potential renewal. In the UK, Ed Miliband’s personal unpopularity is equalling the records previously set by Lib-Dems leader Nick Clegg. In Australia, Labor leader Bill Shorten’s bizarre communication style is good fodder for comedians, but perplexing for everybody else.
‘In Australia, Labor leader Bill Shorten’s bizarre communication style is good fodder for comedians, but perplexing for everybody else.’
Leaders tend to look better when they are moving in a discernible direction. The real problem for centre-left parties in the Anglosphere is that it’s very difficult to tell what their objectives are, and what, if anything, they stand for. (If any Australian can provide me with a succinct account of contemporary “Labor Values”, I’m dying to hear it).
Having spent the last three decades chasing conservatives rightwards in pursuit of a mythical centre, it may be that politicians are as confused as voters are. Between them the social democratic governements of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair redefined progressive policy, seeking to effect social change through market-based, capital-friendly mechanisms. Capital showed precious little gratitude to them, and none to their successors. But the habit of trying to please everyone, including the vested interests who actually need to be confronted in order to bring about lasting change, dies hard.
A few recent examples show how this tends to play out. In Australia, Kevin Rudd was elected to the prime ministership in 2007 with a mandate to address climate change. With the country in drought, and the conservatives reeling from a devastating loss partly driven by climate concerns, the opportunity was there to act. Unfortunately the main game — constraining the ability of powerful industries to continue polluting the atmosphere — became somewhat obscured. The ALP had only one plan on the table, an emissions trading scheme. Emissions trading represents the mainstream international progressive consensus, but actually has its origins in the interactions between economics and the emerging environmental movement in the 1970s. Green groups seeking victories by speaking in the respectful tones of economics have also made emissions trading a cause celebre. (Recently published books by Naomi Klein and Philip Mirowski are informative on this point.)
As soon as Rudd’s government introduced legislation, emissions trading began to do the political work it is designed to do. The political energy and momentum attached to climate action was, as Mirowski puts it, “diverted into the endless technicalities of the institution and maintenance of novel markets for carbon permits”, while “emissions [continued] to grow apace in the interim”. In effect, a government with a strong mandate to curb carbon emissions was destroyed by the politicking around the technical settings of a scheme which tried to avoid alienating voters, consumers and the carbon industry, and wound up pleasing no one. The incoming Abbott government has dismantled Labor’s scheme just as it was beginning to curb emissions. Now the likelihood of Australia implementing any meaningful action any time in the next decade seems remote. So much for centrist pragmatism.
In the US, what was the Democrats’ proudest progressive achievement — universal health insurance — was, in the mid-terms, a millstone around their necks. Progressives like to blame such reversals on the perversity of voters who do not properly recognise their own interests, and to be sure, many of those who vociferously opposed the scheme before its introduction did so on the basis of rumours about doctors being forced on them and speculation about “death panels”. The lasting unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act, however, is as a result of its failing to deliver the progressive goal of universal, equitable health care.
‘It’s evident that unabashed antagonism has underpinned the right’s most significant victories.’Photograph: Reuters
Instead of a “single-payer” scheme — of the kind that Obama himself supported before 2004 — a Democrat controlled congress and White House implemented a scheme designed in outline by the Heritage Foundation and first applied by Mitt Romney. The origins are important when we notice what the scheme does: maintains a transactional, privatised model of healthcare rather than a public one, and allows the insurance industry to continue extracting rents while paying out as little as possible.
Though it extends at least some coverage to those who may otherwise have had none, it also imposes high mandatory costs on low- to middle-income earners (up to 9.5% of their income). It does this without removing the risk of bankruptcy in the case of serious or debilitating illness, and without getting rid of high out of pocket expenses. That means that in a bad year, up to a third of a household’s income could disappear in health costs.
Many argue that the mainstream left favours these doomed schemes because they have been corrupted by the money politics of contemporary democracies, so that appeasing corporate donors has become more important than serving voters. To some extent, that’s no doubt true. But there is something more fundamental happening that goes to a suffocating Anglophone policy orthodoxy, and a lack of confidence in real progressive ideas.
Since the end of the Cold War (or even slightly before in Australia) centre-left parties have become essentially defensive, while the social democracies they helped build are eroded, sometimes by their own hand. In the view of the Blair-Clinton-Keating “third way”, the hangover from which still informs our centre-left parties, markets can only ever be negotiated with – never controlled. Economics is understood to be the authentic language of politics.
This orthodoxy is reinforced in the schools of government, economics and law that serve as political finishing schools for professional politicians, cut off from the social movements that once nourished their parties. It is repeated to them by the political advisers who attended the same schools. Even after the recession hollowed out the middle class, and increased the ranks of the poor, it has been assumed that the interests of the many can be made to coincide with the prosperity of the few. The left are terminally shy of picking fights.
The right have no such aversions. Whereas it’s difficult to say who centre-left parties see as their enemies outside the narrow field of electoral politics, the right target public sector workers, public broadcasters, academics and environmentalists for public attack. As the debate over economic issues has collapsed into consensus, it’s become easier for conservative parties sponsored by billionaires to mobilise their supporters on cultural issues, and to offer an inverse populism based on a hatred of elites. Fearing above everything the accusation of “class warfare”, the official left fails to ameliorate the condition of those going backwards, who will be hit hardest by looming environmental crisis.
‘The left are terminally shy of picking fights.’ Tony Abbott with Republican speaker John Boehner.Photograph: AAP
It’s evident that this unabashed antagonism has underpinned the right’s most significant victories, which consist in making their opponents take on their positions. The addiction of the centre-left to neoliberal economic orthodoxy is the least of this; the US Democrats and labour parties in the UK and Australia have taken on many of the right’s most frankly antidemocratic stances from sheer political timidity. In Australia, Liberal race-baiting has led Labor to mostly endorse the punitive treatment of asylum seekers, and they’re fully signed up to a continued war in the middle east. Labour in the UK are currently tracking right on immigration, having spent their last period in government refining methods for disciplining and surveilling those left behind by a deindustrialised economy. In the US, Obama has authorised extrajudicial drone executions, left Guantanamo open, and is leading the Anglosphere back into Iraq. The official left shows a contempt for the values of its natural supporters that the right would never dare to, or think to.
When Rudd and Obama were elected in quick succession, commentators rushed to draw a line under the neoliberal era that began with Reagan and Thatcher. They spoke too soon. On current form, if anyone is to do that, they will either will not be a part of mainstream left wing parties, or they will come from outside the advanced liberal democracies of the Anglosphere, where politics is less hostile to new and radical ideas.
Third parties like the Greens are attracting support in the UK and particularly in Australia, where Labor appears to have permanently conceded a quarter of its primary vote to the environmental party. But in those countries and in the US, the most inspiring initiatives may come from the citizenry itself. While ossified progressive parties actively reject the vitality of newer social movements concerned with the environment, inequality and new forms of identity politics. The desire for relevance may eventually persuade them that they need to pay closer attention to those demanding that capital be reined in, in the interests of the people and the planet.
Elsewhere, and particularly in Latin America, it’s evident that democratic socialism is still a possibility, and a field of experimentation. Their leaders’ commitment to basic economic justice is not only something that the Anglosphere’s left ought to take on, but which may be necessary for its survival. Those who say we have nothing to learn from still-developing economies have not paid enough attention to regressive developments closer to home. The millions who have been and soon will be immiserated by the machinery of liberal capitalism will have little time for the morality tales of neoliberalism. If existing centre left parties do not speak to their demands, who will?
© Reuters 
© PA 10 highest votes for LeaveBut reports in German newspaper 
