Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Outside was panic. Barely a couple of hours after Donald Trump had been declared the next president of the United States and even the political columnists, those sleek interlocutors of power, were in shock. At the National Gallery in London, however, one of the few thinkers to have anticipated Trump’s rise was ready to see some paintings. Over from Germany for a few days of lectures, Wolfgang Streeck had an afternoon spare – and we both wanted to see the Beyond Caravaggio exhibition.

Nothing in his work prepares you for meeting Streeck (pronounced Stray-k). Professionally, he is the political economist barking last orders for our way of life, and warning of the “dark ages” ahead. His books bear bluntly fin-de-siecle titles: two years ago was Buying Time, while the latest is called How Will Capitalism End?(spoiler: not well). Even his admirers talk of his “despair”, by which they mean sentences such as this: “Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

What does such gloom look like in the flesh? Small glasses, neat side parting and moustache, a backpack, a smart anorak and at least a decade younger than his 70 years. Alluding to Trump’s victory, he cheerily declares “What a morning!” as if discussing the likelihood of rain, then strolls into the gallery.

Decadence… Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. Photograph: The National Gallery London

You don’t merely look at a Caravaggio; you square up to one. The scenes are tightly cropped, with characters that jostle and stare at the viewer. Their mordancy is a tonic to Streeck, who laughs with delight. He pauses in front of Boy Bitten by a Lizard and admires how the lizard clings on with its teeth to the boy’s finger. At a scene of cardsharps he exclaims, “Feel the decadence! The threat of violence!”

He notes how many paintings date from just before the thirty years’ war: “They’re full of the anticipation that the world is about to fall apart.”

Then comes The Taking of Christ, a dark, dense painting that shows Jesus just after his betrayal by Judas. Gripped by his treacherous former disciple, Christ looks down, ready to be bundled off by the armoured Roman centurions. “Caravaggio is always there just before the explosion,” Streeck observes. “This morning might have been a Caravaggio moment: just before the election of Trump.”

Like Caravaggio before the explosion, Streeck has been hanging around this crash scene for years – long before the plane came hurtling down and the centrist politicians and pundits began rushing around.

At a time when macroeconomists have failed and other academics have retreated into disciplinary solipsism, Streeck is one of the few (other exceptions include Mark Blyth, Colin Crouch and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change) to have risen to the moment. Many of the themes that will define this year, this decade, are in his work. The breakup of Europe, the rise of plutocrat-populists such as Trump, the failures of Mark Carney and the technocratic elite: he has anatomised all of them.


Why should oligarchs be interested in their countries’ democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it?

This summer, Britons mutinied against their government, their experts and the EU – and consigned themselves to a poorer, angrier future. Such frenzies of collective self-harm were explained by Streeck in the 2012 lectures later collected in Buying Time:

Professionalised political science tends to underestimate the impact of moral outrage. With its penchant for studied indifference … [it] has nothing but elitist contempt for what it calls “populism”, sharing this with the power elites to which it would like to be close … [But] citizens too can “panic” and react “irrationally”, just like financial investors … even though they have no banknotes as arguments but only words and (who knows?) paving stones.

Here he is in 2013, foreshadowing the world of LuxLeaks, SwissLeaks and the Panama Papers and their revelations of a one-sided class war – by the 1% against the rest of us:


Why should the new oligarchs be interested in their countries’ future productive capacities and present democratic stability if, apparently, they can be rich without it, processing back and forth the synthetic money produced for them at no cost by a central bank for which the sky is the limit, at each stage diverting from it hefty fees and unprecedented salaries, bonuses, and profits as long as it is forthcoming – and then leave their country to its remaining devices and withdraw to some privately owned island?

And in a 2015 essay, he warns that resentment against such elites will not be wholesomely Fabian but will instead take the form either of “public entertainment” or “some politically regressive sort of nationalism”. It will look less like Hillary than Donald:

Politicization is migrating to the right side of the political spectrum where anti-establishment parties are getting better and better at organising discontented citizens dependent upon public services and insisting on political protection from international markets.

In such long, precise, comfortless sentences, Streeck sets out the crises facing Britain, the US and the continent. His diagnosis is both political and economic, and it makes him what Chris Bickerton, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge, thinks might be “the most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism”.

 Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York’s Times Square, 2008. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Which makes him the most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times. Eight years after Lehman Brothers keeled over and nearly took the entire banking system down with it, capitalism remains broken. British workers are suffering their most severe pay squeeze in at least seven decades. And even though politicians and the policymakers have pulled on every lever – cuts, investment, housing boom, hundreds of billions pumped into the markets – still the engine refuses to purr. The failure is international: the Bank of International Settlements, the central banks’ central bank, warned a few months ago that “the global economy seems unable to return to sustainable and balanced growth”.

Not for the first time, the sandwich board-wearers are declaring the end of capitalism – but today Streeck believes they are right. In its deepest crises, he says, modern capitalism has relied on its enemies to wade in with the lifebelt of reform. During the Great Depression of the 30s, it was FDR’s Democrats who rolled out the New Deal, while Britain’s trade unionists allied with Keynes.
Compare that with now. Over 40 years, neoliberal capitalism has destroyed its opposition. When Margaret Thatcher was asked to give her greatest achievement, she nominated “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” The prime minister who declared “There is no alternative”, then did her damnedest to extirpate any such alternative. The result? The unions are withered, the independent tenants’ associations have disappeared along with the stock of council housing, the BBC is forever on the back foot, and local, regional and national newspapers are now the regular subjects of obituaries. A similar story can be told across the rich world.

Public discontent is fitful and fragmented, ready to fall into Trump’s tiny hands. Meanwhile, capitalism – unrestrained and unreformed – will die.

This isn’t the violent overthrow envisaged by Marx and Engels. In The Communist Manifesto, they argued that capitalism’s “gravediggers” would be the proletariat. Nearly 170 years later, Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.

And, yes, his latest book is out just in time for Christmas. Not so long ago, such catastrophism would have been the stuff of Speakers’ Corner. Today, it goes right to the brokenness of politics.

Streeck is admired by the team around Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, and was invited to this year’s Labour conference in Liverpool (work commitments forced him to decline). One senior adviser described his relevance to British politics thus: “He is pretty blunt about how serious the situation is, for social democracy and capitalism.”


That we could modify capitalism towards equality and tame the beast – now those are utopian ideals
What gives Streeck’s analysis extra force is that he comes from the very establishment he now attacks. He has played many key roles: joint head of Germany’s top social science institute, an adviser in the late 90s to Gerhard Schröder’s government, one of Europe’s most eminent theorists of capitalism. While never a Third Way-er, he was friendly with David and Ed Miliband.

“I spent a long time in my life exploring the possibilities for an intelligent social democratic solution of the class conflict,” he explains over lunch. “The idea that we could modify capitalism towards equality and social justice. That we could tame the beast. Now I think those are more or less utopian ideals.”

He is thus a case study in the very thing he writes about: the demoralisation of centrist politics – and its radicalisation.

The great disillusionment came upon returning to Germany in 1995, after years teaching industrial relations in the US. It was the era of Germany being labelled “the sick man of Europe”, when one in five east German workers were unemployed. Through the metalworkers’ trade union, Streeck was invited to join a committee of trade unions, employers and government. Called the Alliance for Jobs (Bündnis für Arbeit), its task was to reform labour laws. Streeck believed this was “the last call for trade unions and social democracy”: the final chance to get more people into work without stripping workers of their rights.

“We came up with a good model, but everything we proposed was blocked – not just by the employers but by the unions, too.”

The Alliance fell apart and within a couple of years, Schröder had brought in the Hartz reforms – policies drawn up by a former Volkswagen executive that set up a new regime of workfare and benefit sanctions, and kicked the bottom out of the labour market.

A member of the Social Democratic Party, Germany’s counterpart to Labour, since the age of 16, Streeck finally cancelled his subs a few years ago. Would he still place himself as a social democrat? He quotes Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” In another interview he has described “the most urgent task for the left” as “sobering up”.

The constant sobriety might prove wearing, were it not for his easy companionship. Listening back to the recording, the primary sound is Streeck’s laughter – that and “Jajaja!”, a Bren gun enthusiasm for any new idea or argument.

He also gives good gossip. A “power breakfast” with financial policymakers and investment bankers is dismissed as “clueless and so stereoptypical. They complained about the stupidity of the masses who didn’t understand the expertise that someone like Alan Greenspan was able to bring to central banking.” This is the same Greenspan who, as head of the US central bank in the bubble years, believed financiers could regulate themselves.

On this trip he went to a conference on Brexit. “I was shocked by the unanimous sense of guilt.” One former British ambassador “began by saying we have to apologise to our foreign friends for the vote to leave Europe. I said, ‘You ought to be happy to have sent a warning to the European Union.’”

He sees the support for Brexit and Trump as stemming from the same source. “You have a growing group of all people, who, under the impact of neoliberal internationalisation, have become increasingly excluded from the mainstream of their society.

Visions of London wealth … Canary wharf financial district. Photograph: DBURKE / Alamy/Alamy

“You look out here,” He gestures out of the windows of the National Gallery, at the domes and columns of Trafalgar Square, “And it’s a second Rome. You walk through the streets at night and you say, ‘My God, yes: this is what an empire looks like’.” This is the land of what Streeck calls the Marktsvolk – literally, the people of the market, the club-class financiers and executives, the asset-owning winners of globalisation.

But this space – geographic, economic, political – is off-limits to the Staatsvolk: the ones who fly yearly on holiday rather than weekly on business, the downsized, the indebted losers of neoliberalism. “These people are being driven out of London. In French cities it’s the same thing. This both reinforces them as a political power structure, and puts them completely on the defensive. But one thing they do know is that conventional politics has totally written them off.” Social democrats such as the outgoing Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi are guilty, too. “They’re on the side of the winners.”

International flows of people, money and goods: Streeck accepts the need for all these – “but in some sort of directed, governable way. It has to be, otherwise societies dissolve”.

Those views on immigration landed him in another fight this summer, when he wrote an essay attacking Angela Merkel for her open-door policy towards refugees from Syria and elsewhere. It was a “ploy”, he said, to import tens of thousands of cheap workers and thus allow German employers to bring down wages. Colleagues accused him of spinning a “neoliberal conspiracy” theory and of giving cover to Germany’s far right. Streeck’s defence is simple: “It is impossible to protect wages against an unlimited labour supply. Does saying that make me some proto-fascist?”

What gives this back-and-forth a twist is the little-known fact that Streeck is himself the child of refugees. Both 25 years old when the second world war ended, his parents were among the 12 million displaced people to arrive from eastern Europe in West Germany. Streeck was born just outside Münster in a room requisitioned by the state from a shoemaker. His parents were poor. “I remember they stole vegetables from the fields and coal from passing trains.”

His mother was a Sudeten German in Czechoslovakia, who was given 24 hours’ notice to leave when the war ended, taking only what she could carry. After Streeck left home she began to study the Czech language. “It was a sense of ‘If I can’t go back there I at least want to speak the language of those people who now live where I used to’.”

Her son went to a grammar school founded by Martin Luther, where he was taught Greek and Latin and expected to become a theologian. Instead, he fell in with the then-illegal Communist party. Aged 16, he was in charge of organising the reading circle – “suppressed literature such as the Communist Manifesto and Rosa Luxemburg” – and held it at the local employers’ association “because no one would ever suspect”.

In 1968, he was a student radical at Frankfurt, “but I never had any truck with the ‘marijuana left’. I felt closer to the working class than to the pot-smoking classes”.

Now he lives with his wife in part of a farmyard of a castle in Brühl, a small town just outside Cologne. The retiree is still up by six every morning and at his desk for 8.30. “I have learned to write only till 1pm. After that I give myself over to academic intrigues.” And to novels: when we meet, he is reading I Hate the Internet, by Jarett Kobek, a Silicon Valley engineer who claims that the internet has “fucked up” his life.

After lunch, we cross the Thames to King’s College where Streeck is to deliver a lecture. There is more gossip, this time about Greek politics and the hollowing out of the Syriza government. As teenagers, Streeck’s class travelled to Greece to look at antiquities. Instead, he began reading local newspapers on the king’s attempts to chuck out prime minister Georgios Papandreou. “I wrote a report in the school newspaper that was almost entirely concerned with the emerging military dictatorship.” Sixty years later, he is working on a book about democracy in southern Europe.

The lecture room is packed, students spread across the floor and peering around the wall at Streeck, absent-mindedly playing with a paperclip and quoting Gramsci: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. [pause] In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms can appear.” In the lecture’s interval, a variety of students buy his books and hover about for him to sign them. At the end, a student asks: “what should the left do?”

Occupy protest in Frankfurt, 2011. Photograph: Arne Dedert/EPA

It is the same question I’d put a few hours earlier. Both times, Streeck warns he is about to disappoint us. To me he cites an Occupy protest in Frankfurt. Days before that, he says, thousands of police were deployed to Germany’s capital of finance. “The authorities were scared shitless. I think more such scariness must happen. They must learn that in order to keep people quiet they need extraordinary effort.”

No mention of ballot boxes; nor of any need for a bigger vision “because the others don’t have a blueprint”.

But, I say, Nigel Farage and the rest are at least pretending to have an answer.

“And we should criticise them.” The press always talks of a lack of business confidence, he says; now is the time for the voters to demonstrate a lack of public confidence.

The analogy doesn’t work and, listening back to the tape, I can hear agitation in my voice. A businessperson can go on an investment strike; he or she can hoard cash. Even if voters sat out an election, they would still face the consequences. Muslim mums would get their headscarves ripped off, a Polish man could get stabbed to death for going in the wrong kebab shop.

In a phone call a couple of weeks later, I press Streeck again. “If I look 10 or 20 years out, I don’t like what I see,” he says. Nor is he alone: he quotes a new book by the former head of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, and his projection of “great uncertainty” ahead.

But doesn’t he want something better than a new dark ages for his grandchildren? “If I am honest, now I am thankful for every passing year that is good and peaceful. And I hope for another one. Very short-term, I know, but those are my horizons.”

Welcome to the age of anger

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian


The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States is the biggest political earthquake of our times, and its reverberations are inescapably global. It has fully revealed an enormous pent-up anger – which had first become visible in the mass acclaim in Russia and Turkey for pitiless despots and the electoral triumph of bloody strongmen in India and the Philippines.

The insurgencies of our time, including Brexit and the rise of the European far right, have many local causes – but it is not an accident that demagoguery appears to be rising around the world. Savage violence has erupted in recent years across a broad swath of territory: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, insurgencies from Yemen to Thailand, terrorism and counter-terrorism, economic and cyberwar. The conflicts, not confined to fixed battlefields, feel endemic and uncontrollable. Hate-mongering against immigrants and minorities has gone mainstream; figures foaming at the mouth with loathing and malice are ubiquitous on old and new media alike. 

There is much dispute about the causes of this global disorder. Many observers have characterised it as a backlash against an out-of-touch establishment, explaining Trump’s victory – in the words of Thomas Piketty – as “primarily due to the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States”. Liberals tend to blame the racial resentments of poor white Americans, which were apparently aggravated during Barack Obama’s tenure. But many rich men and women – and even a small number of African-Americans and Latinos – also voted for a compulsive groper and white supremacist.

The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman admitted on the night of Trump’s victory that “people like me – and probably like most readers of the New York Times – truly didn’t understand the country we live in”. Since the twin shocks of Brexit and the US election, we have argued ineffectually about their causes, while watching aghast as the new representatives of the downtrodden and the “left-behind” – Trump and Nigel Farage, posing in a gold-plated lift – strut across a bewilderingly expanded theatre of political absurdism.

But we cannot understand this crisis because our dominant intellectual concepts and categories seem unable to process an explosion of uncontrolled forces.

In the hopeful years that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the universal triumph of liberal capitalism and democracy seemed assured; free markets and human rights would spread around the world and lift billions from poverty and oppression. In many ways, this dream has come true: we live in a vast, homogenous global market, which is more literate, interconnected and prosperous than at any other time in history.

And yet we find ourselves in an age of anger, with authoritarian leaders manipulating the cynicism and discontent of furious majorities. What used to be called “Muslim rage”, and identified with mobs of brown-skinned men with bushy beards, is suddenly manifest globally, among saffron-robed Buddhist ethnic-cleansers in Myanmar, as well as blond white nationalists in Germany. Violent hate crimes have blighted even the oldest of parliamentary democracies, with the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a British neo-Nazi during the venomous campaign for Brexit. Suddenly, as the liberal thinker Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism” can no longer adequately “explain the world we’re living in.”

The largely Anglo-American intellectual assumptions forged by the cold war and its jubilant aftermath are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos – and so we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility. It is a moment for thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, who warned in 1915 that the “primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual”, but are simply waiting for the opportunity to show themselves again. Certainly, the current conflagration has brought to the surface what Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment” – “a whole tremulous realm of subterranean revenge, inexhaustible and insatiable in outbursts.”

By contrast, the fundamental premise of our existing intellectual frameworks is the assumption that humans are essentially rational and motivated by the pursuit of their own interests; that they principally act to maximise personal happiness, rather than on the basis of fear, envy or resentment.

The bestseller Freakonomics is a perfect text of our time in its belief that “incentives are the cornerstone of modern life,” and “the key to solving just about any riddle”. From this view, the current crisis is an irruption of the irrational – and confusion and bewilderment are widespread among political, business and media elites. The ordinarily stolid Economist has lately lurched from dubious indignation over “post-Truth politics” to the Rip Van Winkle-ish declaration of “The New Nationalism”. Many other mainstream periodicals now read like parodies of New Left Review, as they attend belatedly to the failings of global capitalism – most egregiously, its failure to fulfil its own promise of general prosperity.
We can now see, all too clearly, a widening abyss of race, class and education in Britain and the US. But as explanations proliferate, how it might be bridged is more unclear than ever. Well-worn pairs of rhetorical opposites, often corresponding to the bitter divisions in our societies, have once again been put to work: progressive v reactionary, open v closed, fascism v liberalism, rational v irrational. But as a polarised intellectual industry plays catch-up with fast-moving events that it completely failed to anticipate, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that our search for rational political explanations for the current disorder is doomed. All of the opponents of the new “irrationalism” – whether left, centre, or right – are united by the presumption that individuals are rational actors, motivated by material self-interest, enraged when their desires are thwarted, and, therefore, likely to be appeased by their fulfilment.

This notion of human motivation deepened during the Enlightenment, whose leading thinkers, despising tradition and religion, sought to replace them with the human capacity to rationally identify individual and collective interests. The dream of the late 18th century, to rebuild the world along secular and rational lines, was further elaborated in the 19th century by the utilitarian theorists of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people – and this notion of progress was embraced by socialists and capitalists alike.

After the collapse of the socialist alternative in 1989, this utopian vision took the form of a global market economy dedicated to endless growth and consumption – to which there would be no alternative. According to this worldview, the dominance of which is now nearly absolute, the human norm is Homo economicus, a calculating subject whose natural desires and instincts are shaped by their ultimate motivation: to pursue happiness and avoid pain.

This simple view always neglected many factors ever-present in human lives: the fear, for instance, of losing honour, dignity and status, the distrust of change, the appeal of stability and familiarity. There was no place in it for more complex drives: vanity, fear of appearing vulnerable, the need to save face. Obsessed with material progress, the hyperrationalists ignored the lure of resentment for the left-behind, and the tenacious pleasures of victimhood.

And yet modern history provides enormous evidence for the persistent power of unreason. It was not so long ago – in the early 19th century – that French pretensions to a rational, universal, and cosmopolitan civilisation first provoked resentful Germans into the militant expression of what we now call “cultural nationalism”: the assertion of authentic culture rooted in national or regional character and history.

One revolution after another since then has demonstrated that feelings and moods change the world by turning into potent political forces. Fear, anxiety and a sense of humiliation were the principal motive of Germany’s expansionist policy in the early 20th century – and it is impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation.

Yet a mechanistic and materialist way of conceiving human actions has become entrenched, in part because economics has become the predominant means of understanding the world. A view that took shape in the 19th century – that there is “no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” – has become orthodoxy once again in an intellectual climate that views the market as the ideal form of human interaction and venerates technological progress and the growth of GDP. All of this is part of the rigid contemporary belief that what counts is only what can be counted and that what cannot be counted – subjective emotions – therefore does not.



 
A Brexit supporter, and a Vote Remain campaigner exchange views in Market Square, Northampton, on 31 May Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images


Our current disregard of non-economic motivations is even more surprising when we learn that less than a century ago, the Enlightenment’s “narrow rational programme” for individual happiness had already become “the butt of ridicule and contempt” – as the Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil observed in 1922. Indeed, the pioneering works of sociology and psychology as well as modernist art and literature of the early 20th century were defined in part by their insistence that there is more to human beings than rational egoism, competition and acquisition, more to society than a contract between logically calculating and autonomous individuals, and more to politics than impersonal technocrats devising hyper-rational schemes of progress with the help of polls, surveys, statistics, mathematical models and technology.

Writing in the 1860s, during the high noon of 19th-century liberalism, Fyodor Dostoevsky was one of the first modern thinkers to air the suspicion, now troubling us again, that rational thinking does not decisively influence human behaviour. He pitted his Underground Man – the quintessential loser dreaming of revenge against society’s winners – against the idea, of rational egoism, or material self-interest, then popular in Russia among eager readers of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Dostoevsky’s protagonist obsessively assaults the shared rationalist assumptions of both capitalists and socialists: that human beings are logically calculating animals, driven by perceived incentives:

Oh, tell me who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else?

Dostoevsky defined a style of thought that was later elaborated by Nietzsche, Freud, Max Weber and others – who mounted a full-blown intellectual revolt against the oppressive certainties of rationalist ideologies, whether left, right or centre. This is an intellectual revolution that is barely remembered today – but it erupted at an emotional and political moment that would seem eerily familiar to us: a period of uneven and disruptive economic growth, distrust of politicians, fear of change, and anxiety about rootless cosmopolitans, aliens and immigrants.

This was an era when the disaffected masses – recoiling from the 19th century’s prolonged experiment in laissez-faire economic rationalism – had begun to fall for radical alternatives, in the form of blood-and-soil nationalism and anarchist terrorism. This anti-liberal political uprising forced many of those we now regard as central figures of 20th-century intellectual life to question their fundamental notions of human behaviour, and to discard the positivist nostrums that had taken root in the previous century.

By the late 1850s, Charles Darwin had already shattered the notion that human beings could control how they develop – let alone build a rational society. Novelists, sociologists and psychologists examining the turbulent mass societies of the late 19th century concluded that human actions could not be reduced to single causes, whether religious and ideological faith, or the rationality of self-interest.

Freud, who lived in turn-of-the-century Vienna while demagogues were scapegoating Jews and liberals for the mass suffering inflicted by industrial capitalism, came to see the rational intellect as “a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our impulses and emotions”. “One gets the impression,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927) “that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.” Long before the 20th century’s explosions of demagoguery, Max Weber, as he observed Germany’s hectic industrialisation, presciently speculated that individuals, unmoored by socioeconomic turmoil and alienated by bureaucratic rationalisation, could become vulnerable to a despotic leader.

The problem for these critics of Enlightenment rationalism, as Robert Musil defined it, was not that we “have too much intellect and too little soul”, but that we have “too little intellect in matters of the soul”. We suffer even more from this problem today as we struggle to make sense of the outbreaks of political irrationalism. Committed to seeing the individual self as a rational actor, we fail to see that it is a deeply unstable entity, constantly shaped and reshaped in its interplay with shifting social and cultural conditions. In our own time, amid what Hannah Arendt described as a “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else”, this fragile self has become particularly vulnerable to ressentiment.

Ressentiment – caused by an intense mix of envy, humiliation and powerlessness – is not simply the French word for resentment. Its meaning was shaped in a particular cultural and social context: the rise of a secular and meritocratic society in the 18th century. Even though he never used the word, the first thinker to identify how ressentiment would emerge from modern ideals of an egalitarian and commercial society was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An outsider to the Parisian elite of his time, who struggled with envy, fascination, revulsion and rejection, Rousseau saw how people in a society driven by individual self-interest come to live for the satisfaction of their vanity – the desire and need to secure recognition from others, to be esteemed by them as much as one esteems oneself.

But this vanity, luridly exemplified today by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, often ends up nourishing in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and it can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby individuals feel acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection. (As Gore Vidal pithily put it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”)

Such ressentiment breeds in proportion to the spread of the principles of equality and individualism. In the early 20th century, the German sociologist Max Scheler developed a systematic theory of ressentiment as a distinctly modern phenomenon – ingrained in all societies where formal social equality between individuals coexists with massive differences in power, education, status, and property ownership. In an era of globalised commerce, these disparities now exist everywhere, along with enlarged notions of individual aspiration and equality. Accordingly, ressentiment, an existential resentment of others, is poisoning civil society and undermining political liberty everywhere.

But what makes ressentiment particularly malign today is a growing contradiction. The ideals of modern democracy – the equality of social conditions and individual empowerment – have never been more popular. But they have become more and more difficult, if not impossible, to actually realise in the grotesquely unequal societies created by our brand of globalised capitalism.
The past two decades of hectic globalisation have brought us closer than ever before to the liberal Enlightenment ideal of a universal commercial society of self-interested, rational and autonomous individuals – one that was originally advocated in the 18th century by such thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Kant. In the 19th century, it was still possible for Marx to sneer at Jeremy Bentham for assuming “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper, as the normal man”. In our own time, however, the ideology of neoliberalism – a market-centric hybrid of Enlightenment rationalism and 19th-century utilitarianism – has achieved near total domination in the economic and political realm alike.

The success of this universal creed can be attested by many innovations of recent decades that now look perfectly natural. The rational market is expected to ensure the supply of valuable products and services, while the task of governments is to ensure fair competition, which produces “winners” and “losers”. The broad intellectual revolution in which an all-knowing market judges failure and success has even more forcefully insisted on the rationality of the individual.

Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.

But this abstract conception has no room for the emotional situation of real, flesh-and-blood people – and how they might act within concrete social and historical settings.

One of the first people to notice the disturbing complex of emotions we now see among self-seeking individuals around the world was Alexis de Tocqueville – who was already worried in the 1830s, that the American promise of meritocracy, its uniformity of culture and manners, and “equality of conditions” would make for immoderate ambition, corrosive envy and chronic dissatisfaction. The passion for equality, he warned, could swell “to the height of fury” and lead many to acquiesce in a curtailment of their liberties, and to long for the rule of a strongman.

As De Tocqueville pointed out, people liberated from old hierarchies “want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery.”

We witness a universal frenzy of fear and loathing today, because the democratic revolution De Tocqueville witnessed has spread from its American centre to the remotest corners of the world. The rage for equality is conjoined with the pursuit of prosperity mandated by the global consumer economy, aggravating tensions and contradictions in inner lives that are then played out in the public sphere.

“To live in freedom,” De Tocqueville warned, “one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change and danger.” This kind of life is barren of stability, security, identity and honour, even when it overflows with material goods. Nevertheless, it is now commonplace among people around the world that rational considerations of utility and profit – the needs of supply chains and the imperatives of quarterly shareholder returns – uproot, humiliate and render obsolete.

The widespread experience of the maelstrom of modernity has only heightened the lure of ressentiment. Many new individuals now “live in freedom”, in De Tocqueville’s words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence of the media and the internet.

Never have so many free individuals felt so helpless – so desperate to take back control from anyone they can blame for their feeling of having lost it. It should not be surprising that we have seen an exponential rise in hatred of minorities, the main pathology induced by political and economic shocks. These apparent racists and misogynists have clearly suffered silently for a long time from what Albert Camus called “an autointoxication – the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of prolonged impotence”. It was this gangrenous ressentiment, festering for so long in places such as the Daily Mail and Fox News, that erupted volcanically with Trump’s victory.

Rich and poor alike voting for a serial liar and tax dodger have confirmed yet again that human desires operate independently of the logic of self-interest – and may even be destructive of it. Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise. Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism – the famous “end of history” – is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.

It is clear now that the exaltation of individual will as something free of social and historical pressures, and as flexible as markets, concealed a breathtaking innocence about structural inequality and the psychic damage it causes. The contemporary obsession with individual choice and human agency disregarded even the basic discoveries of late-19th-century sociology: that in any mass society life chances are unevenly distributed, there are permanent winners and losers, a minority dominates the majority, and the elites are prone to manipulate and deceive.

Even the terrorist attacks of 9/11 left undisturbed the vision in which a global economy built around free markets, competition and rational individual choices would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace. In this utopia, any irrational obstacles to the spread of liberal modernity – such as Islamic fundamentalism – would be eventually eradicated. Fantasies of a classless and post-racial society of empowered rational-choice actors bloomed as late as 2008, the year of the most devastating economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Today, however, the basic assumptions of cold war liberalism lie in ruins – after decades of intellectual exertion to construct flimsy oppositions between the rational west and the irrational east. The political big bang of our time does not merely threaten the vanity projects of an intellectual elite, but the health of democracy itself – the defining project of the modern world. Since the late 18th century, tradition and religion have been steadily discarded, in the hope that rational, self-interested individuals can form a liberal political community that defines its shared laws, ensuring dignity and equal rights for each citizen, irrespective of ethnicity, race, religion and gender. This basic premise of secular modernity, which earlier only seemed menaced by religious fundamentalists, is now endangered by elected demagogues in its very heartlands, Europe and the US.

Where do we go from here? We can of course continue to define the crisis of democracy through reassuring dualisms: liberalism v authoritarianism, Islam v modernity, and that sort of thing. It may be more fruitful to think of democracy as a profoundly fraught emotional and social condition – one which, aggravated by turbo-capitalism, has now become unstable. This might allow us to examine the workings of ressentiment across varied countries and classes, and to understand why ethno-nationalist supremacy has grown alongside economic stagnation in America and Britain, even as it flourishes alongside economic expansion in India and Turkey. Or, why Donald Trump, the flashy plutocrat tormented by his lowly status among Manhattan’s cultivated liberals, obsessively baits the New York Times and calls for a boycott of the Broadway show Hamilton.

That a rancorous Twitter troll will soon become the world’s most powerful man is the latest of many reminders that the idealised claims of western elites about democracy and liberalism never actually conformed to the political and economic reality at home. A rowdy public culture of disparagement and admonition does not hide the fact that the chasm of sensibility between a technocratic elite and the masses has grown. Everywhere, a majority that was promised growing equality sees social power monopolised by people with money, property, connections and talent; they feel shut out from both higher culture and decision-making.

Many people find it easy to aim their rage against an allegedly cosmopolitan and rootless cultural elite. Objects of hatred are needed more than ever during times of crisis, and rich “citizens of nowhere” – as Theresa May dubbed them – conveniently embody the vices of a desperately sought-after but infuriatingly unattainable modernity. And so globalisation, which promotes integration among shrewd elites, helps incite ressentiment everywhere else, especially among people forced against their will into universal competition.

In search of a balm for these wounds, many intellectuals have embraced nostalgic fantasies of vanished unity. Earlier this year, the New York Times columnist David Brooks returned from communist Cuba gushing about Cubans’ “fierce love of country, a sense of national solidarity and a confident patriotic spirit that is today lacking in the United States.” More recently, Simon Jenkins, in this newspaper, and the intellectual historian Mark Lilla – in a widely circulated New York Times opinion piece – have urged the rejection of “identity liberalism” and the necessity of embracing national unity and common identity. As Trump’s victory was declared, Simon Schama tweeted that we need a new Churchill to save democracy in Europe and America.

 
A Trump supporter in Ambridge, Pennsylvania during the presidential election campaign. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Such breast-beating amounts to a truly irrational demand: that the present abolish itself, making way for a return to the past. Ideally, to the time when paternalistic white liberals occupied the vital centre, little disturbed by the needs and desires of history’s forgotten, humiliated and silenced people.

These lamentations for simpler times – that all we lack is the right sort of spine-stiffening democratic leader, or rational culture, or cultural unity, or patriotic spirit – ignore the fragmented nature of our politics. Social and technological developments are not liberal or conservative, democratic or authoritarian; they are as prone to enshrine LGBT rights as to reinstate torture and disseminate fake news. Nor does the longing for the good old days adequately respond to the massive crisis of legitimacy facing democratic institutions today.

Political antidotes to the sinister pathologies unleashed by Putin, Erdoğan, Modi, Brexit and Trump require a reckoning with the bad new days – something a lot more forward-looking than models of solidarity inspired by Cuba or Churchill, nationalist pedagogies for the oppressed, or dauntless faith in globalisation eventually delivering the promised goods.

This work is necessary – but it can only proceed with a more sophisticated analysis of how today’s landscape of hyperrational power has coerced a new and increasingly potent irrationalism into existence. And such analyses would require, above all, a richer and more varied picture of human experience and needs than the prevailing image of Homo economicus. This intellectual effort – which was first undertaken more than a century ago by the thinkers cited here – would necessarily take us beyond liberalism and its faith in the curative power of economic growth.

What Robert Musil called the “liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress” have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musil’s great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being – his “immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence’ – is “the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul”.

For nearly three decades, the religion of technology and GDP and the crude 19th-century calculus of self-interest have dominated politics and intellectual life. Today, the society of entrepreneurial individuals competing in the rational market reveals unplumbed depths of misery and despair; it spawns a nihilistic rebellion against order itself.

With so many of our landmarks in ruins, we can barely see where we are headed, let alone chart a path. But even to get our basic bearings we need, above all, greater precision in matters of the soul. The stunning events of our age of anger, and our perplexity before them, make it imperative that we anchor thought in the sphere of emotions; these upheavals demand nothing less than a radically enlarged understanding of what it means for human beings to pursue the contradictory ideals of freedom, equality and prosperity.

Otherwise, in our sterile infatuation with rational motivations and outcomes, we risk resembling those helpless navigators who, De Tocqueville wrote, “stare obstinately at some ruins that can still be seen on the shore we have left, even as the current pulls us along and drags us backward toward the abyss”.

We called it racism, now it’s nativism. The anti-migrant sentiment is just the same

Ian Jack in The Guardian

Nativism, according to the OED, is prejudice in favour of natives against strangers, which in present-day terms means a policy that will protect and promote the interests of indigenous or established inhabitants over those of immigrants. This usage has recently found favour among Brexiters anxious to distance themselves from accusations of racism and xenophobia. Officially, at least, it’s a bad thing. To Ukip’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, his party’s posters of queuing refugees represented nativism at its worst, and in his Clacton-on-Sea constituency he had them all taken down. To him, and others such as the MEP Daniel Hannan, Brexit has its foundations in the philosophies of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, and absolutist beliefs in free trade and sovereignty: race and immigration have nothing to do with it.

Carswell appears a solitary and rather friendless figure: an officer who got into the wrong, rough-crewed lifeboat. But at least he’s probably sincere. Others use “nativism” to signify a more elevated approach to the immigrant/refugee question; it offers something more opaque and less cliched than a simple disavowal of racism. As the writer Jeremy Seabrook once noted, one effect of the 1965 Race Relations Act was to make people preface anything they might say about migrants with the words, “Well, of course, I’m no racialist”, before going on to provide “a sweeping and eloquent testimony to the contrary”. Half a century later, when immigrants are as likely to be white as black or brown, the sentence, “Well, of course, I’m no nativist”, may be emerging as that preface’s overdue replacement.

Seabrook’s observation appears in his 1971 book City Close-Up, composed mainly of interviews conducted in Blackburn, Lancashire, during the summer of 1969 and serialised on Radio 3 as a portrait of life in a fading industrial town, with its cobbled streets, derelict mills and ornate and oversized railway station. In Seabrook’s account, a tripe shop – “with its aspidistra and diploma to certify best-quality thick-seam tripe” – still stands open for custom, but elsewhere terraces of back-to-backs have been demolished to leave “fragments of crumbled brick and the smell of earth turned over for the first time in a century” while the willowherb spreads its fire over everything.

  Blackburn 

The book left an impression on me that has lasted 40-odd years. That was partly due to its accurate mention of the too-big station, where I’d once changed trains as a little boy and noticed through the crowd on the platform a glass case containing a splendid model of a two-funnel steamer, later identified as the boat that took you to the Isle of Man. What struck me most on first reading – and didn’t let me down on the second – was the frankness and intelligence with which the book recorded attitudes to immigration.

In 1969 the textile industry hadn’t quite died in Blackburn, which in Edwardian times had been the biggest cotton-weaving centre in the world. Imports of cotton goods to Britain began to exceed exports in 1958; the Blackburn industry employed two-thirds fewer people in the late 1960s than it had in the early 1950s. But more than 20 mills survived in the town, staffed largely by migrants from India and Pakistan whose willingness to work inconvenient shifts had prolonged the industry’s life and, in Seabrook’s words, relieved the indigenous working class of some of the least-desirable employment.

 About 5,000 mainly Asian migrants then made up 5% of Blackburn’s population. Relations between established residents and newcomers weren’t easy. Seabrook noted that “an elaborate system of legends, myths and gossip” had evolved around the immigrants, “to legitimate a sustained and unflagging resentment of their presence, and of their allegedly harmful influence on the community”. One story told how a woman, thinking she’d heard rats scuttling overhead, opened her trapdoor one night to discover that the loft ran the whole length of the street, so as to be easily accessed via the end house where a Pakistani family lived. They had furnished this elongated attic with mattresses that could sleep 100 secret lodgers. In another story, a man known as “Packie Stan” slaughters goats and chickens in his backyard and depresses property prices wherever he goes.

Often, Seabrook talked to people in groups. Many of the attitudes and complaints he records seem timeless. “I don’t believe all this bunkum that I’m being repeatedly told, that if you take all the immigrants out of the NHS, it would collapse,” says someone at a Labour party meeting. “Why are they allowed to get social security and child allowance and all the rest of it when they’ve never paid anything into our country?” asks a woman who, despite “20 years’ stamps”, says she can’t get a pension at 60. “I don’t approve of them coming to this country at all, unless they have special high qualifications,” says the wife of a businessman. “But I wouldn’t like it to be thought that it was because they were coloured. I wouldn’t mind if they’d conform to our way of life, but they don’t.”

Not everyone agrees. Not everyone has a view. Seabrook writes that Blackburn “is not a town full of racists, any more than it is a stronghold of liberal humanitarian values”, and that one strongly committed person in a group can influence the standpoint others will take. Some interviewees point out that immigrants work hard and Britain needs to take responsibility for the consequences of its empire. The dominant themes, however, are familiar: immigration needs controlling; migrants exploit the welfare system and put strains on housing and schools; and when in Rome they should do as the Romans do – “they should be more like us”.

In the front room of her terraced house, a Mrs Frost gathers some neighbours to meet Seabrook. It is as good a bit of writing on the subject as I have ever read. They talk angrily and emotionally about immigration until the paroxysm spends itself and “a certain uneasiness [comes over] the room, a sense of shame, the shame of people who have unburdened themselves to a stranger”.

Seabrook believes he has witnessed an expression of pain and powerlessness brought on by the “decay and dereliction” of their own lives and surroundings as much as by the unfamiliar dress, language and behaviour of their new neighbours. This feeling had found no outlet, politically or otherwise. All the writer can say is that it’s “something more complex and deep-rooted than what the metropolitan liberal evasively and easily dismisses as prejudice”.

Interestingly, Seabrook never felt he had to talk to the immigrants themselves. Talking to me this week, he said he was ashamed they felt marginal to his interest at the time, which was the fate of the English working class. In later books, the product of frequent visits to south Asia, he has completed a great historic and economic circle by describing the garment factories of Bangladesh. First, the cheap cotton spun and woven by Lancashire’s steam-powered mills wipes out the handloom cotton industry of Bengal. Second, less than two centuries later, the even cheaper cotton cloth made in the factories of Bengal and elsewhere in south and east Asia wipes out the steam-powered mills of Lancashire. Perhaps nowhere else offers such a symmetrical illustration of the way the world has changed.

Did any of us understand what we were caught up in? At the time it seemed something small and local that if ignored might go away. Seabrook remembers the late Barbara Castle, who was then Blackburn’s MP, warning him against writing about social discord and getting things “blown up out of proportion”. In the destruction of the world’s first industrial society, years before the rust belt began to rust, the foundations of the west’s recent troubles were laid.

Money isn’t restricted by borders, so why are people?

Giles Fraser in The Guardian

Theresa May won’t be around in the early 22nd century when, according to Star Trek at least, Dr Emory Erickson will have invented the transporter – a device that will be able to dematerialise a person into an energy pattern, beam them to another place or planet, and then rematerialise them back again. In such a world people will be able to move as quickly and freely as an email.

The philosopher Derek Parfit has rightly questioned whether such a thing is even philosophically possible: will the rematerialised person be the same person as the dematerialised one, or just a perfect copy. (What would happen if two copies of me were rematerialised? Would they both be me?) Parfit thus raises a fascinating philosophical question about what we mean by personal identity – or what makes me me.

But, just for the sake of argument, imagine what such a device would do to Mrs May’s keep-them-all-out immigration policy. With the transporter, there could be no border controls and no restrictions on the free movement of individuals. Economic migrants would love it. People will be able to live and work where they like, beaming instantly from Syria to Sussex or indeed to Saturn. And because of this, the whole concept of the nation state will eventually wither away. People will have become more powerful than the state.

Fanciful? Of course. Forget about the technical problems. The fundamental problem is that human beings are not fungible. A copy is not the same as its original. A person cannot be dematerialised into a series of digital zeros and ones, get beamed over space and be rematerialised as the same person.

But – and here is the really big thing – money can be. For the whole point about money is that it is fungible. It can be converted into zeros and ones and it can be digitally shot across space. And since the late 1970s, when capital controls were relaxed all around the world, and then even more so since the digital revolution, money has been able to go where it pleases, unimpeded, without any need for a passport or reference to border control. Every day, trillions of dollars are economic migrants, crossing boundaries as if they didn’t exist, pouring in and out of countries looking for the most economically advantageous place to be. And, just as with the fanciful people-transporter example, this free movement of capital is how the nation state is dissolving.

This week the OECD published a report on international companies and tax avoidance. Big companies like AstraZeneca are able to pay next to no tax in the UK because they just transport their profits to a low-tax regime in another country. Indeed, some countries, pathetically prostrating themselves before the gods of finance, exist for little other than this purpose. And so the situation we find ourselves in is that money is free to travel as it pleases but people are not. We have got used to this as the new normal, and it largely goes unremarked. Yes, there are a few on the libertarian fringe who recognise this as a contradiction and argue that people should be as free as capital. But the majority on the right do everything they can to protect the free movement of capital and restrict the free movement of people.

Which is why the neoliberal right in Britain has utterly contradictory instincts over Europe – they want the free trade bit but they don’t want the free people bit. And they scare us with how the free movement of people threatens our national identity but refuse to face the fact that the free movement of capital can be seen as doing exactly the same. They talk a good game about the importance of freedom: but it’s one rule for capital and another for people.

Of course the transporter won’t happen. But with the internet, the imagination can travel where it will. And that means poor people will always see and want what rich people have. And not even Mrs May will be able to stop them crossing dangerous seas and borders to find it.

Theresa May to 'kick out foreign graduates' in new immigration plans

Foreign graduates could face being sent back to their home countries under plans to “move towards zero net student migration” reportedly being considered by Home Secretary Theresa May.

Students from non-European Union countries would have to subsequently apply for a work visa while abroad in order to continue living in the UK after finishing a course of study, The Sunday Times reported, instead of being able to apply for one while still on British soil.

A source close to the Home Secretary told the newspaper: “Making sure immigrants leave Britain at the end of their visa is as important a part of running a fair and efficient immigration system as controlling who comes here in the first place.”

Mrs May is also pressing for the power to be able to penalise colleges and universities that would have low success rates in ensuring the departure of foreign graduates and to deprive them of their right to sponsor overseas students, the source added.

Under current rules most students can apply for a work visa while still living in the UK, rather than having to leave the country to apply for one before potentially returning.

We are being lied to about immigration - it is politicians, not migrants, who have run down our public services

Ian Birrell in The Independent

Myths and mantras are swirling around the increasingly-toxic immigration debate as mainstream parties flounder in the face of Ukip’s insurgency. These include the old favourite that no-one is ever allowed to discuss the issue due to political correctness, when papers and political discourse have been swamped by the subject for years. Or claims the British public was never asked about allowing in floods of foreigners, despite elections contested by parties displaying a range of stances from sympathy to outright hostility.

But perhaps the biggest falsehood, frequently heard reverberating around the Westminster echo chamber, is that immigrants undermine Britain’s public services. We hear this charge from across the spectrum as panicking parties chase after Nigel Farage, the Pied Piper of pessimism. Yet the truth is rather different. If there is a cover-up committed by Westminster as large chunks of the electorate seem to believe, it is by politicians abusing the issue of immigration to hoodwink voters and hide their own deficiencies.

Take the health service. There is regular tiresome talk of crackdowns on ‘health tourism’, although the young European migrants moving to this country are far less likely to be a drain on health care than the one million mainly-elderly Britons who have moved to Spain. Indeed, some Polish acquaintances say they fly home even for dental treatment rather than risk our rickety health services.

Yet as Stephen Nickell from the Office for Budget Responsibility reminded MPs last week, the NHS would be in dire straits without migrant staff. They have come from more than 200 countries. More than one quarter of doctors and one in seven of all qualified clinical staff in hospitals and surgeries are foreign nationals - along with a huge number of carers (as I have seen from grateful personal experience with my profoundly disabled daughter).

Instead of condemning immigrants for threatening the welfare state, politicians should be praising them to the heavens for supporting the nation’s most precious public service. And this is ignoring the dry economic reality that they contribute more to the exchequer than they take out, as shown by scores of studies, as well as being more likely than native-born Britons to set up businesses and less likely to claim benefits.

Then there are schools. One of the most remarkable recent stories in global education has been the astonishing turnaround of London schools, improving much faster than those elsewhere in the country. The performance gap between rich and poor children has also narrowed, with pupils from some of the capital’s impoverished areas now outperforming their peers from far more affluent areas. For all the scaremongering about schools under pressure from migrants, standards soared at a time when the capital bore the brunt of Britain’s recent heavy influx of newcomers.

Academics are grappling with this phenomenon. And their studies indicate immigration lies behind this transformation, as well as helping drive London’s economic and cultural dynamism. One report found an arrival of Polish pupils lifted overall school results and boosted classmates’ performance, even when they had little or no English. Another from Bristol University last month concluded the improvements were down to diversity, saying schools with high numbers of ethnic minority and migrant pupils gained best results because of their higher aspirations.

So much for Farage’s claims that immigrants are wrecking public services and ruining the quality of life in Britain. In truth, they are doing the precise opposite - propping up the health service he professes suddenly to revere and driving up school standards. Perhaps this was what Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, meant when he spoke on the radio recently about children with poor English changing the character of schools? Sadly, I fear it not; it was just another salvo in a crude political arms race.

 

Clearly there are pressures when a country’s population increases fast - although our rise is also down to welcome increases in life expectancy and birthrates. Yet migrants have become the proxy for any problem, the easy target for almost any issue. But if there are too few doctors’ surgeries and primary schools, whose fault is that? Who should be blamed for decades of failure to build enough houses? Or for the low skills of too many school leavers and the shameful poverty of expectation that failed generations of working class kids? Immigrants contributing to our prosperity and public services - or politicians who failed to plan for the future?

This stench of hypocrisy wafts perhaps most strongly over the issue of housing. For at least two decades, Britain has been building about half the number of new homes needed; last year, for instance, only 110,000 of the 250,000 needed new homes were completed. Yet despite a few tentative attempts by the coalition, politicians have ducked difficult - and potentially unpopular - questions over planning, social housing and green belts, resulting in severe shortages of homes, soaring prices and rising rents.

Now immigrants get the blame and there are complaints of over-crowding; in fact, less than one-tenth of England is urban development and nearly half this is gardens and parks. There has been a slight lift in house building this year - although few will thank those Polish plumbers and Estonian electricians doing much of the work. Sadly, it is far easier to scapegoat foreigners than it is to face up to political failure and tackle tough questions on public services.

Does Britain really want to be the country nobody would migrate to?

When net migration falls, David Cameron can take the credit: for making Britain poor, hostile and pessimistic

• 
• • Zoe Williams
  • The Guardian, Sunday 30 November 2014 18.30 GMT

‘Migrants are less likely to be on benefits than non-migrants, not more likely.’ Illustration by Robert G Fresson

In 2011, I interviewed a Polish barista in a Starbucks: it wasn’t about what had brought him to London, nobody was obsessed with that then. It was about what life was like in Krakow. But those two things are, necessarily, related: he told me how much a kilo of sugar was, and how long you’d have to wait for a bus. He said some things were better, but overall, life was quite hard. In fact, I was writing about feminism in Europe, and was just interviewing him to be polite, while I waited for his female colleague: but it stayed with me for the immediacy of the image. It tells you everything you need to know, about why people choose to live in prosperous nations over poor ones: how much of your life are you going to spend waiting for things?

The immigrant of David Cameron’s imagination, who roams the continent looking for the taxpayers who will most generously fund his idleness, doesn’t exist. The strongest the Labour party has been, in its alarmingly mild response to a wave of sudden, strident xenophobia, is to point out that the numbers are wrong.

Migrants are less likely to be on benefits, not more likely. The benefits they do claim tend to be in-work benefits, made necessary by a bizarre new status quo in which it’s possible for huge numbers of people to work full time and still need a cash benefit to pay rent. But it would be nice to hear someone in mainstream politics say that benefit tourism doesn’t exist because … who does that? What scheming fainéant uproots himself, slogs across Europe to forge a new life in an unfamiliar land, just to be work-shy on somebody’s sofa? It doesn’t make sense on a human level. How does the bold, optimistic person who took the risk become the lazy, withdrawn person who’s on the make?

The political stage is peopled with characters who wouldn’t get past a script meeting in Emmerdale: the woman who has an abortion at 28 weeks because she’s suddenly not that into the idea; the perfectly well person who would rather fake debilitating depression than get a job; the homo economicus who goes to a food bank even though he can afford food, because it’s free. The standard opposition is nerdy: we crunch the numbers and say, that only applies in 0.7% of cases, or we can only find 0.01 examples. A better retort would be: this characterisation is too senseless and implausible to warrant our attention. Go back to the drawing board, and rejoin the debate when you have concocted a bogeyman who at least has his arms and legs in the correct place.

All of us understand perfectly what would make this country look attractive to other EU nationals. Bus waiting times are a handy reckoner of the infrastructure, but they are also a metaphor for economic vigour – is this a place where the hardworking can thrive? Or is everyone constantly thwarted by circumstances they can’t control, which slow them down? Does this place look as though it would welcome strangers and present them with opportunities, or is it closed, narrow-minded, suspicious and racist? Do people earn enough not to worry about the price of sugar?

In fact, whatever Nigel Farage tells you, whatever hot anxiety spews out of Migration Watch, the government is doing a brilliant job at making the UK a place where nobody would ever want to live. While London remains the most prosperous city in Europe,nine out of the 10 poorest places in northern Europe are all in the UK, according to Inequality Briefing. Wages are low, housing costs are high – two-thirds of the people who found jobs last year were earning less than a living wage. Incomes at the bottom have dropped 10% in real terms over the past decade. Sugar prices have stayed pretty constant, but I don’t imagine that’s much consolation.

Far more off-putting than the grinding poverty, though, is the prevailing attitude of hatred and paranoia. Ukip wants to refashion the children of migrants as “hidden migrants”, even though this includes one of their two MPs and the offspring of their leader. Elderly racists are being dragged out of the conservative closet and dusted down to give their answering views on what kind of migration we should welcome.

Norman Tebbitt has suggested a new test – who did your grandfather fight for in the second world war? This is the man who argued that organ donors ought to be able to dictate, in the event of their death, that their kidneys are only given to white people. “Of course,” he wrote in 2000, “the race relations industry will come out beating its racist drum if a white person says their body may only be used to help others of their ethnic origin.” The only people making the case for immigration are doing so on the basis of their tax receipts and how much business depends upon them, which is code for “depends upon low wages”. Who would go to a country that talks about foreigners like that? What does it say about how they see their own people, that their politicians can make a business case but can’t make a human case?

The only thing maintaining the flow of migrants is that nobody reads the Daily Mail until they arrive, and only then do they realise how coarse and brutal our politics have become, how pessimistic. Why is a country that claims to be booming behaving like a country in the grip of a depression? Are its leaders lying about the boom, or failing to distribute its fruits? A bit of both, in proportions we can analyse at leisure. Meanwhile, when net migration starts to fall, as I have no doubt it will, David Cameron will be right to take the credit. He couldn’t cap the moths, so he put out the flame.