Neoliberalism is killing our love lives

Dependency and power imbalances brought on by capitalist financial insecurity are the enemies of true romance writes Bhaskara Sunkara in The Guardian


 

A broken heart drawn by a patron is shredded at Bottom Line, a bar and dance place in downtown D.C., which invites people to come and shred photos and cards from ex-spouses and lovers in honor of Valentine’s Day. 


For many of us, Valentine’s Day is a reminder that our love life sucks. Maybe we just had an unhappy end to a relationship, maybe we’re struggling to keep alive an existing one. For those of us, the conventional advice we receive is drab and unconvincing. Sure, having a regular date night to “keep the love alive” is just fine, I suppose. But if you really want to get the sparkle back, why not engage in a militant class struggle this Valentine’s Day instead?

You see, countries with powerful working-class movements tend to have more social rights and guarantees. And those protections can make your love life a lot less stressful.

Most Americans feel overwhelmed by their financial obligations, and it’s the leading cause of friction in relationships. That’s no surprise in a country where life is so precarious – where a trip to the hospital, a layoff, or shifts in the housing market can change everything. We’re overworked at our jobs and underpaid. Powerless to bargain for a better deal from our bosses, we zero-in on our partners’ spending habits or priorities instead.

Our financial insecurity also keeps us unhappily wedded to relationships we should leave. The median wage for a worker in the United States is $857 a week before taxes – most of us would struggle to take care of children on one income. For women, shouldering most of the burden of unpaid household work and dealing with workplace pay disparities, the situation is especially bad. What’s more, a quarter of women under 64 get their health insurance from their spouse’s plan. Loving marriages can be wonderful, but dependency and power imbalances are the enemies of true romance. 

Things don’t have to be like this. And we needn’t imagine what a better alternative looks like – it already exists, just not here. A century ago, life in Scandinavia was just as cutthroat as it was in the United States. A 1902 New York Times articles describes Sweden as “the most feudal and oligarchical country in Europe” – only rivaled by Tsarist Russia. Contemporaries called the country an “armed poorhouse”. But, over time, capitalism in the region was humanized by socialists and trade unionists. Working people joined vast labor confederations to collectively demand higher wages and shorter workdays from their employers. They also joined new parties set up to fight for the interest of regular people in government.

As well as more fairly distributing income for workers, the system allowed people to meet their basic needs outside the workplace. Even at the peak of social democracy, life wasn’t perfect, but the changes were especially profound for women. Child allowances, family leave, child care, even the provision of school meals – all eased the pressures placed on them by society. Beyond such legislation, the principle of “equal pay for equal work” and industry-level trade union bargaining favored sectors that disproportionately employed women.

During the 1960s in Sweden, still not content with the progress toward sexual equality, the governing social democrats and feminists took steps to generate policy that encouraged “free development” for women, challenged traditional sex roles, and expanded abortion rights. Despite rollbacks to its welfare state, the country is still one of the most equal in the world (and parents there are still entitled to 480 days of paid parental leave, compared to zero days in most of the United States).

Kristen R Ghodsee, in her book Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, observes a similar phenomenon in the Eastern Bloc. “Women [had] no economic reason to stay in abusive, unfulfilling, or otherwise unhealthy relationships” in countries where state guarantees meant that “personal relationships could be freed from market influences.” Of course, states like East Germany and Czechoslovakia were marked by political repression. But the experience of European social democracy shows that the same positives can be achieved in a far more liberal political environment.

And yes, as far as Ghodsee’s book title goes, there is proof that more secure people have better sex and are more sensitive lovers.

Will all these protections cure heartache? Are all your relationship woes rooted in economic anxiety? Absolutely not. But by organizing collectively, we can become more empowered as individuals. And when strong, free individuals decide to love they make for better partners.

What is love – and is it all in the mind?

Hannah Devlin in The Guardian


What do you get when you fall in love?

We crave romantic love like nothing else, we’ll make unimaginable sacrifices for it and it can take us from a state of ecstasy to deepest despair. But what’s going on inside our heads when we fall in love?

The American anthropologist Helen Fisher describes the obsessive attachment we experience in love as “someone camping out in your head”.

In a groundbreaking experiment, Fisher and colleagues at Stony Brook University in New York state put 37 people who were madly in love into an MRI scanner. Their work showed that romantic love causes a surge of activity in brain areas that are rich in dopamine, the brain’s feelgood chemical. These included the caudate nucleus, part of the reward system, and an ancient brain area called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA. “[The VTA] is part of the reptilian core of the brain, associated with wanting, motivation, focus and craving,” Fisher said in a 2014 talk on the subject. Similar brain areas light up during the rush of euphoria after taking cocaine.

 MRI scans of the brains of those in love found surges of activity of dopamine. Photograph: Daisy-Daisy/Alamy

During the early stages of love, the emotional excitement (or some might say stress) raises the body’s cortisol levels, causing a racing heart, butterflies in our stomach and inconveniently sweaty palms. Other chemicals in play are oxytocin, which deepens feelings of attachment, and vasopressin, which has been linked to trust, empathy and sexual monogamy.

So it’s a total eclipse of the head, not the heart?

Actually … in a case of science imitating poetry, the heart has been found to influence the way we experience emotion.

Our brain and heart are known to be in close communication. When faced with a threat or when we spot the object of our affection in a crowded room, our heart races. But recently, scientists have turned the tables and shown that feedback from our heart to our brain also influences what we are feeling.

What the heart is doing can influence how strongly our brain processes emotion. Photograph: Borja Suarez/Reuters

One study, led by Prof Sarah Garfinkel of the University of Sussex, showed that cardiovascular arousal – the bit of the heart’s cycle when it is working hardest – can intensify feelings of fear and anxiety. In this study, people were asked to identify scary or neutral images while their heartbeats were tracked. Garfinkel found they reacted quicker to the scary images when their heart was contracting and pumping blood, compared with when it was relaxing. Her work suggests that electrical signals from blood vessels around the heart feed back into brain areas involved in emotional processing, influencing how strongly we think we’re feeling something.

Finally, in what must be a contender for one of the most romantic (or mushy) scientific insights to date, couples have been shown to have a tendency to synchronise heartbeats and breathing.

Why is it a crazy little thing?

Love is merely a madness, Shakespeare wrote. But it is only recently that scientists have offered an explanation for why being in love might inspire unusual behaviour.

Donatella Marazziti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pisa, approached this question after carrying out research showing that people with obsessive compulsive disorder have, on average, lower levels of the brain chemical serotonin in their blood. She wondered whether a similar imbalance could underlie romantic infatuation.

She recruited people with OCD, healthy controls and 20 people who had embarked on a romantic relationship within the previous six months (it was also specified that they should not have had sexual intercourse and that at least four hours a day were spent thinking of the partner). Both the OCD group and the volunteers who were in love had significantly lower levels of serotonin, and the authors concluded “that being in love literally induces a state which is not normal”. When the “in love” group were followed up six months later, most of their serotonin levels had returned to normal.

A separate study found that people in love have much lower activity in their frontal cortex – an area of the brain crucial to reason and judgment – when they thought of their loved one. Scientists have speculated an evolutionary reason for this which could be termed the “beer goggles” theory: the suspension of reason makes coupling, and hence procreation, far more likely.

So all in love is fair – regardless of sexual orientation?

Sexual orientation has several components, including behaviour, identity, attraction and arousal.

Many scientific studies have been based on who people say they are attracted to, and surveys typically find that same-sex attraction accounts for fewer than 5% of the population, and this figure has remained relatively stable over time. But people’s behaviour and the labels they use to describe their sexual identity appear to be influenced to a greater degree by social and cultural factors.

For instance, in the UK there has been a sharp rise in the proportion of women reporting having had a sexual experience with another woman, from 1.8% in 1991 to 7.9% in 2013, according to the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which is carried out each decade.

As with any scientific investigation, the way questions are framed also makes a difference to the answer. So studies that ask people to pick between two or three categories would miss any more subtle gradations. As Kinsey wrote in 1948: “The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behaviour, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.”

Women are considerably more likely than men to rate themselves on a continuum of sexuality, Photograph: Sam Edwards/Getty Images/Caiaimage
There is growing support for the idea of a continuum, in particular for women who are considerably more likely than men to rate themselves as intermediate categories such as “mostly heterosexual” (10% v 4%), when given those options.

It’s worth noting that a 2011 study found no differences between brain systems regulating romantic love in homosexuals and heterosexuals.

Is there a gay gene?

It has been known for decades that sexual orientation is partly heritable in men, based on studies of identical and fraternal twins. In the 1990s, a specific region of the X chromosome was linked to male homosexuality and more recent two specific genes have been found to be more common in gay men.

However, the genetic factors that have been identified so far only play a small part in determining sexuality – not all men who have these genes are gay. Research on the genetic basis of female sexuality lags behind, which some have attributed to it being more difficult to study. Others might conclude that there has simply been less effort to understand this topic.

There are other biological factors at play as well. One of the most robust findings in sexual-orientation research is the fraternal-birth-order effect: gay men tend to have a greater number of older brothers compared with straight men. This is a biological influence rather than a social one and is a big effect, increasing the odds of a man being gay by roughly a third. In women, there is evidence that pre-natal hormone exposure can make a difference to sexual orientation.

Let’s get chemical: do humans give off pheromones?

Pheromones are chemical signals that are used to communicate and alter the behaviour of others. The first pheromone discovered, in the 1950s, was a substance called bombykol that female silkworms emit to attract males. Ever since then, the search has been on – not least by perfume manufacturers – to find a human equivalent. There have been some tentative claims.

A pheromone present in male pigs, androstenone, has also been found in the human armpit. Photograph: Joe Pepler/Rex Features

For instance, a known pig pheromone, androstenone, has been found in the human armpit. When female pigs on heat get a whiff of the substance, which is found in boars’ saliva, they adopt the mating stance. However, there is not yet any convincing evidence for real-life “Lynx effect” chemicals in men and women. The strongest contender to date for a human pheromone is a chemical secreted from glands in the nipples of breastfeeding mothers. When wafted under any sleeping baby’s nose, the child responds with sucking and rooting behaviour.

Your cheating heart – how uncommon is it?

Cheating is widely disapproved of, but is not that uncommon. According to the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, men are on average more likely than women to be unfaithful – 20% of men and 13% of women reported that they’ve had sex with someone else while married.

However, the figures shifted across age ranges, with women in the youngest age range (18-29) being marginally more likely (11% v 10%) to have cheated, with the widest gender gap in the 80+ range where 24% of men and just 6% of women said they had been unfaithful.

Recently scientists have shown that some people may be genetically predisposed to being unfaithful. One study of nearly 7,400 Finnish twins and their siblings found a significant link between the vasopressin gene and infidelity in women.

Another study, by scientists at the Kinsey Institute, in Indiana, showed that certain variants of the gene for the dopamine receptor were more likely to be unfaithful and also more likely to be repeatedly unfaithful.

"IF A MAN HAS THESE 9 QUALITIES NEVER LET HIM GO" Do you agree?

Rachel Hosie in The Independent

There are certain traits that the majority of heterosexual women look for in a man: kindness, GSOH, an understanding that the fight for gender equality is very much still ongoing.

But other aspects of your personality could be a deal-breaker for one woman and simultaneously the reason another falls in love with you.

Beauty of all kinds really is in the eye of the beholder, and human uniqueness is what makes the search for ‘the one’ all the more interesting (and difficult).

That said, with scientists having spent decades trying to work out the key to why we fall in love, there are certain things you should look for in a potential suitor which suggest you may have found a keeper.

With the advent of dating apps meaning another love interest is never more than a right swipe away, it can be hard to commit.

So if you're wondering whether to settle down with your current partner, it might be worth taking a step back and asking yourself whether he ticks the boxes below.

If he doesn’t, that doesn’t mean he isn’t the one for you. But if he does, you’ve likely got a pretty good egg on your hands.


1. He’s smart

While some of us are naturally brainier than others, a new study from the Hanken School of Economics in Finland suggests that the smarter the man, the less likely he is to be unfaithful. According to the research, more intelligent men are more likely to get married and stay married.

So if you’re worried your boyfriend might be too brainy for you, a) don’t be intimidated because intelligence isn’t everything, and b) know that you may have a guy who’s more likely to be faithful on your hands. 

2. He makes you laugh

Finding someone you can have a laugh with is crucial - even if everyone else rolls their eyes at his dad jokes, if they crack you up, that’s all that matters.

And a study has shown that men are more likely to have “mating success” if they have a GSOH. 

3. He actively supports your career

A study found that husbands were a deciding factor in two-thirds of women’s decisions to quit their jobs, often because they thought it was their duty to bring up their children.

Even when the women in the study described their husbands as supportive, they also revealed that the men refused to change their own work schedules or offer to help more with looking after children. 

4. He makes as much effort with your friends and family as you do with his

It’s not uncommon for a woman to end up giving up her own social life to slot into her new man’s. But it’s rare that a man does the same once entering a relationship.

In fact, a recent study found that young men get more satisfaction out of their bromances than their romantic relationships with women. While this is clearly ludicrous, maintaining your friendships is important. So make sure you’re with a man who not only wants you to make time to see your friends but also makes an effort to get to know them too.

5. He’s emotionally intelligent

If stereotypes are to be believed, it is women who are always desperate to talk about feelings and never men who fall hard. Whilst this definitely isn’t true, it’s important each person in a relationship has a certain level of emotional intelligence.

Studies suggest that women are better at taking the opinions and views of their partner into consideration than men, which is essential for a healthy relationship.

6. He respects your opinions and listens to what you have to say

Being closed-minded isn’t a trait that’s exclusive to a particular gender, but if a man is convinced he’s always right and will never consider your argument, it’s not a good sign.

If a man rejects his female partner’s influence, it may be a sign that he has power issues, according to Dr John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

7. He’s willing to put the work in

A study from the University of Texas found that the most successful relationships weren’t down to compatibility, but rather making the relationship work. “My research shows that there is no difference in the objective compatibility between those couples who are unhappy and those who are happy,” study author Dr. Ted Hudson said.

So if you or your partner is always looking for the next best thing rather than committing to make your relationship last, it may not bode well. 

8. He celebrates your achievements

Whether it’s deadlifting your bodyweight or learning enough German for a trip to Oktoberfest, it’s important to have a partner who celebrates your achievements.

But this isn’t just to make you feel great - a study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that couples who did so were more satisfied with their relationships than those who reacted negatively or were indifferent.

9. He shares your values

Having a similar outlook in life could be crucial to a successful relationship, according to a study. The more alike your personalities are, the more likely you are to approach problems in the same way.

You and your partner will share similar approaches to everything from socialising to working if your priorities are the same, and this is likely to lead to a greater level of respect for one another.

Of course, if your partner doesn’t have all the above qualities that doesn’t mean you should necessarily dump him immediately - we all look for different things in a partner and a relationship, after all.

But if he does tick all these boxes, he could be one to hold on to.

Let Hadiya take charge of her life

Brinda Karat in The Hindu

The Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday as it heard the Hadiya case. The counsel for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) supported by the legal counsel of the Central government made out a case of indoctrination and brainwashing in a conspiracy of ‘love jehad’ which they claimed rendered Hadiya incapacitated and invalidated her consent. The NIA wanted the court to study the documents it claimed it had as evidence before they heard Hadiya. For one and a half hours, this young woman stood in open court hearing arguments about herself, against herself and her chosen partner. It was shameful, humiliating and set an unfortunate precedent. If the court was not clear that it wanted to hear her, why did they call her at all? She should never have been subjected to that kind of indignity. She is not a criminal but she was treated like one for that period of time.


The right to speak

The court remained undecided even in the face of the compelling argument by lawyers Kapil Sibal and Indira Jaising representing Hadiya’s husband Shafin Jahan that the most critical issue was that of the right of an adult woman to make her own choice. The court almost adjourned for the day when the Kerala State Women’s Commission lawyer, P. V. Dinesh, raised a voice of outrage that after all the accusations against Hadiya in the open court if the court did not hear her, it would be a grave miscarriage of justice. In khap panchayats, the woman accused of breaking the so-called honour code is never allowed to speak. Her sentence begins with her enforced silence and ends with whatever dreadful punishment is meted out to her by the khap. Fortunately the Supreme Court pulled itself back from the brink and agreed to give Hadiya an opportunity to speak.

There was no ambiguity about what she said. It was the courage of her conviction that stood out. She wanted to be treated as a human being. She wanted her faith to be respected. She wanted to study. She wanted to be with her husband. And most importantly, she wanted her freedom.

The court listened, but did it hear?

Both sides claim they are happy with the order. Hadiya and her husband feel vindicated because the court has ended her enforced custody by her father. She has got an opportunity to resume her studies. Lawyers representing the couple’s interests have explained that the first and main legal strategy was to ensure her liberty from custody which has been achieved. They say that the order places no restrictions on Hadiya meeting anyone she chooses to, including her husband. It is a state of interim relief.

Her father claims victory because the court did not accept Hadiya’s request to leave the court with her husband. Instead the court directed that she go straight to a hostel in Salem to continue her studies. He asserted this will ensure that she is not with her husband who he has termed a terrorist.

The next court hearing is in January and the way the court order is implemented will be clear by then.

The case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.

One of the most disturbing fallouts is that the term ‘love jehad’ used by Hindutva zealots to target inter-faith marriages has been given legal recognition and respectability by the highest courts. An agency whose proclaimed mandate is to investigate offences related to terrorism has now expanded its mandate by order of the Supreme Court to unearth so-called conspiracies of Muslim men luring Hindu women into marriage and forcibly converting them with the aim of joining the Islamic State. The underlying assumption is that Hindu women who marry Muslims have no minds of their own. If they convert to Islam, that itself is proof enough of a conspiracy.

This was clearly reflected in the regressive order of the Kerala High Court in May this year which annulled Hadiya’s marriage. Among other most objectionable comments it held that a woman of 24 is “weak and vulnerable”, that as per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” Equally shocking, it ordered that nobody could meet her except her parents in whose custody she was placed.

Not a good precedent

Courts in this country are expected to uphold the right of an adult woman to her choice of a partner. Women’s autonomy and equal citizenship rights flow from the constitutional framework, not from religious authority or tradition. The Kerala High Court judgement should be struck down by the apex court. We cannot afford to have such a judgment as legal precedent.

The case also bring into focus the right to practice and propagate the religion of one’s choice under the Constitution. In Hadiya’s case she has made it clear time and again that she converted because of her belief in Islam. It is not a forcible conversion. Moreover she converted at least a year before her marriage. So the issue of ‘love jehad’ in any case is irrelevant and the court cannot interfere with her right to convert.

As far as the NIA investigation is concerned, the Supreme Court has ordered that it should continue. The Kerala government gave an additional affidavit in October stating that “the investigation conducted so far by the Kerala police has not revealed any incident relating to commission of any scheduled offences to make a report to the Central government under Section 6 of the National Investigation Agency Act of 2008.” The State government said the police investigation was on when the Supreme Court directed the NIA to conduct an investigation into the case. It thus opposed the handing over of the case to the NIA. In the light of this clear stand of the Kerala government, it is inexplicable why its counsel in the Supreme Court should take a contrary stand in the hearing — this should be rectified at the earliest.

Vigilantism by another name

The NIA is on a fishing expedition having already interrogated 89 such couples in Kerala. Instead of inter-caste and inter-community marriages being celebrated as symbols of India’s open and liberal approach, they are being treated as suspect.

Now, every inter-faith couple will be vulnerable to attacks by gangs equivalent to the notorious gau rakshaks. This is not just applicable to cases where a Hindu woman marries a Muslim. There are bigots and fanatics in all communities. When a Muslim woman marries a Hindu, Muslim fundamentalist organisations like the Popular Front of India use violent means to prevent such marriages. Sworn enemies, such as those who belong to fundamentalist organisations in the name of this or that religion, have more in common with each other than they would care to admit.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will act in a way which strengthens women’s rights unencumbered by subjective interpretations of tradition and communal readings of what constitutes national interest.

Why Is India In Denial On "Love Jihad"?

Operation Conversion Factory - India Today

The con behind every wedding

Anon in The Guardian

A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce.

That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.”

It’s bittersweet, this clash of romantic hope and lived experience. I am living it now, yo-yo-ing between the wedding plans of my daughter and son, both in their 20s, and the fragility and disappointment of my own long marriage. My days seem to be divided between excited chat about embryonic relationships that are absolutely perfect, and definitely going to last for ever, and remote and cold exchanges with a husband who has disentangled himself emotionally from me, and shows no signs of wanting to reconnect (I have suggested Relate many times; he is simply not interested).

To some extent, this juxtaposition of young love and old cynicism was ever thus: throughout time, weddings have featured, centre-stage, a loved-up duo who believe their devotion to one another will last for ever, while observing from the wings are two couples 30, 35 or more years down the line, battle-scarred by experience, and entirely devoid of rose-tinted spectacles – the parents of the bride and groom. And in the generation of “silver splitters”, these sixtysomethings are more likely than ever to be in the process of uncoupling, at the precise moment when their offspring are embracing the dream of lifelong partnership.

So how do we reconcile our cynicism – or, at best, our scepticism – for marriage and long-term love, with our offsprings’ enthusiasm to tie the knot, and embark on a life of seeming marital bliss? On one level, the phenomenon is heartwarming. It is testament, you could argue, to the resilience of the human spirit: however difficult our own marriages turned out to be, we war veterans look at our kids staring into each other’s eyes, and we melt inside. Yes, we think to ourselves, we made mistakes; we took paths that turned out to be wrong. Even, we think, we made fundamentally bad choices: we married the wrong men.

As a result, love was seriously skewed for us: but in the next generation – we nod our heads vigorously to this, while cheerily agreeing to a no-holds-barred expensive wedding – things will be different. True love will be theirs; the fairytale that eluded us will work for them, at last.

What hokum. As the survivor of a difficult marriage, this much I know: the biggest burden is the disappointment. And it is a disappointment born on my own wedding day in 1985: more than three decades later, the hopes of that morning still glint from the shadows. The expectations heaped on us, including by my in-laws whose own miserable marriage still had another two decades left to torture them, are the ghosts around the sad embers of our once-glowing fire.
So what can we do differently? Here’s the truth of it, as a wise friend said to me recently: in the 21st century, in a world in which women as well as men have choices and independence and long lives (all good), it will be increasingly difficult for one individual to answer the emotional, spiritual and physical needs of another, across many decades. Life is different now: we have bigger imaginations, we have higher expectations, we have more opportunities and, crucially, those opportunities continue well on into our 50s, 60s and 70s – and for all I know, into our 80s and 90s too. Even more significantly, we women have these opportunities: for men, they are less of a novelty. But their more widespread existence is the agent of seismic change in intimate relationships. We no longer need to put up with misery; we can alter the way we live.

I suggest that we, the parental generation, take a subtle lead in being honest with our twenty- and thirtysomethings about the realities of relationships, and love, and longevity, and choices. That we stop buying into the burgeoning and ever-more-elaborate wedding industry, a giant luxury liner that sails full-steam ahead, oblivious to the lifeboats and shipwrecks all around it in the water. At least begin to ask questions of the commercial interest that operates that liner, of its intentions and its fallout (not to mention its profits). There is more than coincidence, surely, in the way we seem to invest more and more resources in marriages that are less and less likely to survive.

How we introduce these notes of caution into our children’s lives is a much more difficult task. As parents, we want nothing more than happiness for our offspring: none of us wants to burst their bubble, at the precise moment it is so expanded.

As so often with parenting, though, we have to take the longer view. Sometimes I think that, even though my children may not understand or welcome some of the messages they get from me now, with me in my mid-50s and them in their mid-20s, there may be moments in the future when what I said, or how I behaved, suddenly makes sense. Parenting means filling your children’s backpack with supplies, and some of the supplies down the bottom of the bag may not be needed for many years to come.

One important factor in all this was raised by Sylvia Brownrigg in these pages earlier this year, and it is this: children are not interested in their parents’ relationships. They’re not interested in their parents’ marriage (beyond hoping that it is incident-free, and as calm as possible) and they are certainly not interested in their parents’ other relationships, if those happen or are ongoing. So we cannot weigh them down with the detail of why our marriages are failing, or unhappy, or disappointing – and yet, we must somehow signal to them that life is a long journey, and that it may be a mistake to invest too much in one central relationship on into the far distant future.

We are pioneers, us fifty- and sixtysomething mothers; we are walking a tightrope, and it is difficult to get the balance right. Sometimes we wobble; sometimes we fall right off. But the fact that we are walking the tightrope at all is the important bit. We are trying to be authentic, to our burnt-out marriages and to ourselves, as well as to our children and the realities of their future.

And choices cut both ways, too. Remember those mothers at the wedding party? My friend, as I say, is now divorced; but the bridegroom’s parents are having counselling, and have not ruled out the possibility of sharing their lives again.

Being more ambitious for ourselves doesn’t mean our marriages can’t survive, but it does mean a bad marriage can only survive if it can change. And that surely is the message, and the hope, we want to give our children, as they taste the realities of long-term love, or long-term what-was-once-love, and what just possibly might be love once again.

How Britain fell out of love with the free market

Andy Beckett in The Guardian


Twelve years ago, shortly after winning his third consecutive general election, Tony Blair gave the Labour party a brief lecture on economics. “There is no mystery about what works,” he said, crisply, speaking from a podium printed with the slogan “Securing Britain’s Future” at the party conference in Brighton. “An open, liberal economy prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.”

Blair rounded on critics of modern capitalism: “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They’re not debating it in China and India.” He went on: “The temptation is … to think we protect a workforce by regulation, a company by government subsidy, an industry by tariffs. It doesn’t work today.” Britain should not “cling on to the European social model of the past”. 

Most of his conference speech was vigorously applauded. But the passage on economics was received with solemn looks and silence. There was no heckling, as there had been when previous Labour leaders and chancellors delivered what they saw as home truths about the economy. Instead, there was a sense of resignation in the hall: an acceptance by a party of the left that the right had won the economic argument.

In the early years of the 21st century, the inevitability of an ever more competitive, deregulated, internationally orientated market economy, to which both government and society were subordinate – a doctrine often called neoliberalism – was accepted right across the mainstream of British politics: from the Thatcherites who still dominated the Conservative party; to the increasingly pro-business Liberal Democrats, who would soon form a coalition government with the Tories; to the Scottish National party, whose then leader Alex Salmond praised Ireland and Iceland for their low corporate taxes; to the Blair cabinet itself, where, I was told by a senior Labour figure in 2001, “You won’t find a single member with anything critical to say about capitalism.” It was assumed by the main parties that most voters felt the same way.

Margaret Thatcher’s government had overcome fierce opposition to install a free-market economy in Britain. But under Blair, seemingly more consensual and less dogmatic, the extending of markets into ever more areas of everyday life was presented as unavoidable, or simply practical: “what works”. The British housing market was thriving, with home ownership reaching an all-time high in 2003. There had not been a recession since 1991, a blissfully long time for the previously fitful British economy. Compared to the sometimes tatty, depopulating country of the 70s and 80s, much of Britain in the early 2000s looked successful – a society of regenerating city centres and steadily rising wages.

The free-market ascendancy was acknowledged even by some of its strongest critics. In 2000, the Marxist historian Perry Anderson declared: “The only starting-point for a realistic left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat … Neo-liberalism as a set of principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world history.” In 2007, Naomi Klein wrote in her book The Shock Doctrine that capitalism was “conquering its final frontiers”.

In 2017, that aura of invulnerability has evaporated. Disenchantment with the economic status quo has been potently expressed in elections across the world, from France to the US. But in no democracy has the political shift against the free market been as stark as in Britain.

Since Thatcher’s election in 1979, Conservative and Labour governments have privatised and deregulated, reduced taxes for business and indulged its excesses, opened up the economy to foreign capital and commercialised the national psyche, until Britain became one of the world’s most thoroughly neoliberal societies. And yet, at last year’s EU referendum, the votes of those “left behind” by all this played an unexpectedly pivotal role. Then, at this year’s general election, both the Conservatives and Labour campaigned – or appeared to campaign – against the economic system that they themselves had created.

The Conservative manifesto attacked “aggressive asset-stripping” of British companies by foreign buyers; “perverse pricing” by privatised rail companies; “exploitative” markets in energy, property, insurance and telecommunications; and “the remuneration of some corporate leaders … [which] has risen far faster than some corporate performance”.

Theresa May launching the 2017 Conservative election manifesto. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

“We reject the cult of selfish individualism,” the manifesto declared, in language seemingly calculated to insult Thatcherites. “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets.” Instead, the Conservatives now believed that “regulation [was] necessary for the proper ordering of any economy”. They would “enhance workers’ rights and protections”, and create an “economy that works for everyone”. The obvious implication was that the free market had created the opposite.

The Labour manifesto opened with almost exactly the same words: “Creating an economy that works for all”. Like the Tories, Labour attacked executive pay and promised to strengthen workers’ rights. Like the Tories, they offered an “industrial strategy” through which government – long depicted by free-marketeers as largely irrelevant or actively harmful – would help modernise the economy. And like the Tories, Labour said companies should no longer be run primarily for their shareholders, as free-market doctrine has insisted since the early 80s, but also for the benefit of their employees, customers and the public as a whole.

While the Conservatives offered mostly rhetoric, Labour offered policies – nationalisation, restored trade union rights, restrictions on the City of London – which would undo much of British neoliberalism. It is these policies that, on 8 June, helped Labour achieve its largest vote since Blair’s landslide in 1997, and now leaves the party possibly on the verge of power. John McDonnell, who lists one of his recreational activities in Who’s Who as “generally fermenting the overthrow of capitalism”, could soon be chancellor.

Amid all the current political turmoil in Britain and the wider world, the shift against free markets has yet to register fully with much of the media or many voters. But the most ardent neoliberals have noticed. “Free marketeers have been gobsmacked,” says Mark Littlewood, director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has supplied British politicians with pro-capitalist arguments for 62 years. “Things we thought of as like the laws of gravity are now up for grabs.”

The end of the free-market monopoly in British politics is part of an even bigger change. After almost a quarter of a century when it was widely agreed that the fundamentals of the economy were too important to be meddled with by politicians, or be subject to democratic scrutiny, the contest to shape that economy has restarted.

One clue as to why Britain fell out of love with the free market is in the tone now adopted by its defenders. Gone is the capitalist triumphalism of the Thatcher and Blair eras. Instead, there are apologies. “Markets can be brutal,” concedes the Conservative MP James Cleverly, leader of the Free Enterprise Group, a Commons pressure group with three dozen members (all Tories) that was founded in 2010. “The benefits of free markets have not spread themselves between the generations as equally as many of us would like,” he says. “Part of the reason Corbyn got so much support in the election, for policies which I regard as economically illiterate, is that many people don’t value the impact my kind of economic values have had on their lives. The big wins we had with market reforms in Britain were back in the 80s.”

These days, many free marketeers are highly critical of how British capitalism operates. “The City is incorrectly incentivised,” says the Tory peer Nigel Vinson, who has been a leading player in Britain’s free-market thinktanks since the formative days of Thatcherism in the mid-70s. “We have sold far too many companies to foreign owners. A lot of corporate takeovers are personal megalomania, not corporate efficiency. There are abuses of market power, such as [the zero-hours employer] Sports Direct. Meanwhile you see [the advertising executive] Martin Sorrell taking home £70m in 2015. That sets a rotten example.”

Littlewood lists other dysfunctions: “Wage stagnation, poor GDP growth, crony capitalism in the contracting-out of public services, endless gaming of the system by corporations, a general ennui about the prevailing economic system … ” Finally, he cites the event that did more than any other to discredit free-market capitalism in Britain: “the 2008 crash”, the banking crisis caused by the deregulation and hubris of the financial markets.

The day the credit crunch began, 10 years on: 'the world changed'



That crisis and what followed – recession, prolonged weak growth, ballooning public and private debt, and seemingly endless austerity – has already destroyed or severely damaged the governments of Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Theresa May. It has necessitated contortions that suggest an economic system on life support: bank bailouts, unprecedentedly low interest rates, and quantitative easing – ie the Bank of England simply printing money and pumping it into the economy.

“The architecture of neoliberalism has had huge holes blown in it,” says Will Davies, reader in political economy at Goldsmiths, University of London. He argues that free-market capitalism has suffered a two-stage collapse: “First, in 2008, it was revealed as financially unviable. Then, in 2016 and 2017, it went into political crisis.” One symptom of the latter, he says, has been a rupture between big business and the main British political parties.

But this is not the first time that the economic failings and social costs of neoliberalism have led people to forecast its demise. Repeatedly in the past three decades, critiques and alternatives have been conceived and promoted, refined and combined by innovative thinkers and politicians of both main parties – and then frustrated and largely forgotten, until the re-emergence of many of their themes and advocates under May and Corbyn.

In the meantime, the free market has survived, and worked its way into more aspects of Britons’ daily lives, becoming in many ways progressively more efficient and thorough in its commodification of our activities, our homes, our minds. In fact, it might be this inhuman efficiency, and its social consequences, that has provoked the current political revolt against modern capitalism.

Is this revolt just another episode in a long resistance to neoliberalism, or is it a breakthrough? And if so, do Labour or the Conservatives have another viable economic model, which might make capitalism less dominant in our lives?

The first chance to change the economic order that Thatcher and John Major’s governments had imposed on Britain came 22 years ago. In January 1995, a few months after Blair was overwhelmingly elected Labour leader, the then Guardian economics editor Will Huttonpublished a panoramic book about the British economy, The State We’re In. Hutton had spent years exploring the economic ideas and social consequences of Thatcherism, and had decided that both were disastrous. He was a follower of John Maynard Keynes, the early-20th-century economist whose vision of a milder, state-regulated capitalism had shaped the postwar Britain that Thatcherism largely erased. Hutton was also close to the Labour party: two rising young Blairites, Yvette Cooper and David Miliband, gave him comments on the book’s manuscript.

The State We’re In depicted British economic life after a decade-and-a-half of Conservative free-market reforms as “meaner, harder, and more corrupting”. It also saw the economy as a failure in business terms: short-termist, low in productivity, over-reliant on the City of London and old technology, prone to boom and bust. Britain was falling behind other capitalist countries. “The individualist, laissez-faire values which imbue the economic and political elite,” wrote Hutton, “have been found wanting.” His solution was to import the best practices of other economies, particularly Germany, which he admired for its more patient, more socially inclusive economic approach. He called his vision “stakeholder” capitalism.

The book had a cautious initial print run of 3,500. But its timing was good: Britain was emerging sluggishly from a long recession, and was tired of Tory government. The State We’re In sold 250,000 copies, making it one of the bestselling economics books in Britain since the second world war. Among its readers were much of the New Labour government-in-waiting: Gordon Brown, Ed Balls, John Prescott, Robin Cook and Tony Blair himself.

“Tony was not a man of settled opinions, nor someone who knew a lot about economics,” says Hutton, “but David Miliband persuaded him to read it. This may be apocryphal, but apparently there is a picture of Blair reading it on holiday.” During 1995 and 1996, Blair’s speeches began to refer to the limitations of the free market, and to the desirability of a “stakeholder” economy, “run for the many, not for the few” – an almost exact prefiguring of the title of the 2017 Labour manifesto.

But then these themes were abruptly dropped. According to Hutton, as the 1997 election neared, Blair was told by his more nervous advisors that any talk of reforming British capitalism would be presented by the Conservatives as a return to the economic interventionism of the troubled Labour governments of the 70s. For decades, they had been crudely but effectively caricatured by the Tories, and much of the media, as bullyingly leftwing and disastrous. Meanwhile Brown, who as shadow chancellor had spent years trying to win over the City, decided Hutton’s book was too hostile to bankers; and Prescott, a Labour traditionalist, decided it was not anti-capitalist enough. “I was frozen out,” Hutton says.

  Gordon Brown as chancellor in 1997. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

In the late-90s, the economy started growing more consistently, as part of a technology-driven boom across the western world, and Hutton’s view of Britain began to seem too pessimistic. On winning power in 1997, Labour left most of the structure and practices of Thatcherite capitalism in place, and rather than question its rationale, they used swelling tax revenues to soften its social effects, for example through tax credits to subsidise low wages.

Outside Britain, the free market had more doubters. In 1997, the World Bank, previously an uncritical advocate of its state-shrinking orthodoxies, published a report conceding that “an effective state is the cornerstone of successful economies”. In South America, the failures of market-driven economic policies began to move electorates dramatically leftward. And in 1999, an even wider mass movement formed around the world against the environmental and social damage done by globalisation, as the spread of free-market capitalism was euphemistically called by its advocates. Enormous protests took place, from Genoa to Seattle. Smaller, but still vibrant, anti-capitalist demonstrations began to occur regularly in London.

But still most British politicians did not take them very seriously, regarding the movement as backward-looking and naively utopian. In a brief book published in 2001, the Financial Times journalist John Lloyd, a former communist who had become a New Labour associate, described the activists’ annual summit at Porto Alegre in Brazil as “a ragbag of declamation, hot air and vapidity”. The contempt was mutual: most of the protestors showed no interest in forming alliances with centre-left politicians in order to slightly civilise capitalism. “It’s not our job to suggest alternatives!” one prominent activist told me in 2000.

By the mid-00s, the protests were tailing off. Rather than listen to the anti-capitalists, the Blair government and its centre-left counterparts regulated their sometimes violent demonstrations with ever more riot police – while regulating the more powerful anarchic forces of finance capitalism less and less. The British public, meanwhile, seemed to have largely accepted the reign of the free market: during the mid-00s, the annual British Social Attitudes survey found that dissatisfaction with its impact on society and the workplace, while still substantial, had dipped to the lowest levels ever recorded.

With the economy still growing, year after year, the mass benefits of unfettered capitalism – ever wider property ownership, low inflation, cheaper consumer goods, and “no more boom and bust”, as Brown put it – appeared secure. “For most people under 20,” wrote the cultural critic Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”

And yet, even during these boom years there were signs that the free-market economy might be brittle. In 2001, the rail infrastructure company Railtrack – which had been one of the Conservatives’ most high-profile privatisations seven years earlier – went into administration after the Hatfield train crash and a botched modernisation of the west coast mainline. In 2002 the company was effectively nationalised by the Blair government – a policy approach supposedly discredited and abandoned in the 70s – and became Network Rail.

Meanwhile, the short-term British business culture identified by Will Hutton persisted. Investment by companies fell almost continuously between the late-90s and the late-00s. With trade unions weak, many employers became meaner. “Around 2003, wages for most Britons started to flatline,” says Will Davies. This was usually a sign of a recession rather than a boom, and had not happened since the early 80s. In order to keep shopping, people borrowed: outstanding private debt, already high by international standards in 2003, at about twice the national GDP, began rising, faster and faster, towards a peak of more than two-and-a-half times GDP in 2008.

“Much of the apparently benign [economic] growth … did not in fact represent a sustainable expansion,” wrote the economists Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato in their introduction to the 2016 book Rethinking Capitalism. “Rather, it reflected an unprecedented increase in household and corporate debt … lax lending practices … [and] an asset price bubble, which would inevitably burst.” Large elements of the neoliberal British economy were going to prove unsustainable.

In Dagenham, on the eastern edge of London, the local Labour MP Jon Cruddas noticed pressures building. The area has some of the cheapest housing in London – worn but sought-after 1930s semis – but “around 2002, 2003”, Cruddas says, “the economic status quo stopped working: wages, property prices, competition for public services … People were not living the lives they had been promised by the politicians.” In 2007, he stood for the Labour deputy leadership.

Cruddas was (and is) on the left of the party, but had a reputation for free thinking and building unexpected alliances. After working in Downing Street in the 90s, and helping introduce the minimum wage – one of Blair and Brown’s few alterations to the economic status quo – Cruddas had become frustrated by their refusal to confront corporate power. He based his deputy leadership bid around attacks on “free-market dogma”, and warnings about “the material insecurities” and proliferation of low-skilled jobs in his and other working-class constituencies. Once famous for highly unionised car manufacturing, Dagenham was becoming a patchwork of derelict former factory sites and casualised, low-paid work in retail. Standing against five other less radical, better-known candidates, Cruddas won the election’s first round. But subsequent rounds of voting narrowly eliminated him from the contest.

Regardless, the tempo of the revolt against free-market Britain picked up. The following year, the activist and thinker Maurice Glasman, whom Cruddas knew well, began to conceive of a movement he called Blue Labour. Glasman had worked for years with people who felt bullied by the modern economy, through the community organisation London Citizens. “I was just channelling what I was hearing,” he says. “People would say to me, ‘I’ve got to work two jobs to survive,’ or ‘I’ve had to move to London to find a job, but my mum is in Derby and she’s dying.’”

A social conservative, Glasman saw capitalism as “a criminal, dominating thing” that fractured families and communities. Glasman is an intense, compelling talker, and as with Will Hutton a decade earlier, his ideas intrigued senior New Labour figures, many of whom were becoming more interested in the importance of community themselves. But when he properly laid out his critique of capitalism, he remembers, “their faces would go a bit blank. Then they would say: ‘You don’t understand. It’s the goose that lays the golden egg.’”

Along with close allies such as Ed Balls, Brown saw the deregulated City of London as a source of tax revenue to fund more generous state spending. During his premiership from 2007 to 2010, despite the City’s major part in causing the 2008 financial crisis, Labour could never quite bring itself to turn against the free-market capitalism it had inherited and furthered.

Instead, improbably, the denunciation came from the right. Phillip Blond was a conservative philosopher and theologian with a declamatory, slightly old-fashioned persona and prose style who had lectured for years at a small Church of England higher-education college based in Cumbria and Lancashire. In 2008, he began publishing newspaper articles attacking the Thatcherites and New Labour as co-conspirators. “The lesson of the last 30 years,” he told Guardian readers in May of that year, “is that neither the state nor the market is able to alleviate poverty or deliver opportunity for all.” Cleverly branded as Red Toryism, Blond’s ideas caught the attention of David Cameron. He was then still a relatively new Tory leader, and was energetically and shamelessly looking to differentiate his approach from Thatcherism.

In January 2009, Blond wrote much of a speech that Cameron delivered to the annual summit of the global business elite at Davos. “This is what too many people see when they look at capitalism today,” declared the Tory leader, who had until recently been an enthusiastic free-marketeer himself. “Markets without morality … wealth without fairness … recklessness and greed … lives [that] feel like little more than flotsam in some vast international sea of business.”

 

David Cameron at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2009. Photograph: Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty

Cameron’s solution was almost laughably vague and ambitious: the creation, by unspecified means, of a new “capitalism with a conscience”. But he and Blond caught a mood. Thanks to the financial crisis, during 2008 and 2009 Britain suffered its worst recession since the calamitous first years of Thatcher’s market experiment in the early 80s.

In 2010, as Brown’s government ended and Cameron’s began, Westminster was suddenly crowded with competing critiques of the free market. As well as Red Toryism and Blue Labour, there was “fake capitalism”, an idea promoted by the Conservative MP Jesse Norman. It said that, in Britain, corporations lived too easily off earnings from privatised state functions. There was also a run of acclaimed books about the costs and flaws of neoliberalism: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in 2009, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang in 2010, and The New Few: Or a Very British Oligarchy, published in 2012 by Ferdinand Mount, who in the 80s had been one of Thatcher’s senior advisors. And over the winter of 2011-12, there was Occupy London, a raucous anti-capitalist encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral. During its first weeks, Occupy London received strikingly plentiful and respectful media coverage.

The culmination of all these revolts, some hoped, would be the party leadership of the one senior New Labour figure who had never been fully converted to the free market, Ed Miliband. “When Ed and I worked for Gordon at the Treasury,” says the Labour peer Stewart Wood, who became a Miliband advisor, “we used to sneak off for a drink at the end of the day, and say to each other, ‘Why isn’t the government doing anything to challenge the market?’”

Miliband unexpectedly won the Labour leadership in 2010, after campaigning against “brutish US-style capitalism” and for a more controlled, egalitarian British economy. As leader, he consulted Hutton and Glasman, whom he made a Labour peer. He appointed Cruddas to lead a review of all Labour’s policies. And he made high-profile speeches attacking corporate “asset-strippers” and “predators”, the treatment of customers by the privatised utilities, and the worsening living standards of “the squeezed middle”. He condemned neoliberalism in more concrete terms than Cameron’s generalities at Davos.

Cruddas was energised: “We were beginning to change lanes as a party.” Even some of the small residue of older Labour MP’s who had never accepted any aspect of Blairism were intrigued. John McDonnell told me: “In some of his criticisms of the market, Ed Miliband was ahead of his time.”

But Miliband’s judicious, qualified critique of capitalism had to compete for political space with other, more primal forces unleashed or strengthened by the financial crisis: resentment of immigrants and the European Union; resentment of MPs after the expenses scandal, and of elites in general; and above all, Cameron’s appealingly simplistic austerity policies.

Even though the cuts in state spending made the daily experience of neoliberalism worse for many Britons – by weakening the initiatives introduced by New Labour to soften it – the rhetoric used to justify austerity helped make the general discourse about the economy more cautious, not more adventurous. Rather than talking about the bankers, and how to reduce their power, people increasingly talked about scroungers. The economic views of many voters initially moved rightwards, not leftwards.

With his modest communication skills, Miliband faced a huge task in advocating a different kind of economy. The few reforms he proposed were either too abstract and technical-sounding (“predistribution”, or creating a capitalism that requires less redistribution of income by government), or too short-term (a temporary price cap on energy bills) to form a coherent picture.

Like Blue Labour and the Red Tories, he wanted to remove the worst excesses of the free market while leaving the rest of it intact. The ambivalence of the Labour mainstream towards capitalism, an ambivalence as old as the party itself, “played out inside him,” says Cruddas. Last month, Miliband told the Guardian with a characteristically opaque mix of self-confidence and self-criticism: “I think what Jeremy [Corbyn’s success] teaches me is that when I had instincts that we needed to break with the past, and we needed more radicalism, I was right.”

In 2015, whatever Miliband’s true intentions, the many remaining neoliberals in the Labour hierarchy, such as then shadow chancellor Ed Balls, had other economic priorities. So, increasingly, did Glasman, who became controversially preoccupied by the idea that a reformed British capitalism would involve drastically less immigration. At that year’s general election, after an internal struggle that Cruddas and Miliband lost, Labour presented a manifesto that emphasised cutting the national deficit in language little different from that used by the Tories. The manifesto only criticised the deregulated capitalism that had effectively created that deficit in the first place in coded terms: “We will build an economy that works for working people,” it promised blandly. Even though more and more politicians and commentators agreed that free-market Britain was working less and less well, the anti-capitalist moment seemed to have gone.

But even rigid, insular Westminster politics has to bend to economic realities in the end. In 2017, after two more years of thin growth and austerity, with British wages in their longest slump since the Napoleonic wars, and home ownership at a 30-year low, neoliberalism is no longer producing enough winners to be an utterly dominant set of political ideas. An opportunity has been created – bigger than any before – for the anti-capitalist counter-revolution that has been stopping and starting since the mid-90s.

Phillip Blond senses it. “I go into No 10 [Downing Street] a lot,” he says. “They really do get it about the failures of the market.” Glasman has been to No 10 in recent months too. “There is a stirring among genuine Conservatives,” he says. “A realisation that capitalism is against place and home.”

Cruddas quite liked the 2017 Conservative manifesto: “Some of it was very well written. I thought: ‘Spot on. Confront the market. Make government more interventionist.’ It was an attempt to acknowledge that the world is now challenging the old Thatcher certainties.” But he liked the Labour manifesto a lot more. “It has set up the possibility of … a different kind of economy. There are more continuities between the manifesto and Ed’s than people assume, but under Ed we had to smuggle our anti-free-market stuff in. It wasn’t spoken to properly. Corbyn and McDonnell are more explicit. Some of the people and energy from the anti-globalisation movement of the 2000s have fed into [the pro-Corbyn movement] Momentum. And some of the concerns of those activists are being reconciled with the economic concerns of people here, in Dagenham. Everything’s in play. It’s fantastic.”

In early July, not long after Labour’s far better than expected election performance, I went to a party rally in Parliament Square. During the 90s and 00s, I had been there repeatedly for slightly sparse anti-capitalist demonstrations, which felt, at best, defiant. But now the atmosphere was expectant. “We are winning, and the battle is now on our terms,” said one of the warm-up speakers, to a mass of young and much older faces – the potent Corbyn electoral coalition made flesh. McDonnell made a short, fierce speech attacking “the bankers and profiteers” and “neoliberal trickle-down economics”. He ended with a promise: “Another world is in sight!”

 

Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Afterwards, I asked him why it had taken so long. The financial crisis began exactly 10 years ago this month. “When a crash occurs, people are in survival mode,” he said. “It’s when growth returns that people get angry.” What did he think of the Conservatives’ apparent break with the free market? “The Tories are opportunists.” Then he talked fluently for several minutes about Labour’s plans to “learn from Germany” about how to create a more high-tech, more long-term economy. It sounded like a passage from The State We’re In. With his neat silver hair, and wearing a striped shirt with a bright summer jumper slung over his shoulders, McDonnell even looked like an off-duty German industrialist.

But wasn’t he meant to be interested in replacing capitalism rather than reforming it? He gave a big, knowing smile. “It’s a staged transformation of our economic system.” Then he continued less gnomically: “Public ownership. A fairer distribution of wealth than in Germany. A society that is radically more equal … ”

Even economic thinkers close to McDonnell wonder if a Corbyn government could effect such a transformation. Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism, says: “They have a big task with a small team. We face problems – climate change, information technology destroying jobs, a market economy that in many sectors is not capable any more of generating value – that were not faced by Keynes,” the last economist to shift British capitalism to the left, more than 70 years ago.

Mazzucato is probably McDonnell’s favourite contemporary economist. In her much-cited 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State, she argued convincingly – as the Labour manifesto did – that through state-funded research and other investment, government acts as an essential accelerator of capitalism rather than a drag on it, as free-marketeers usually claim. Last year, she gave the first lecture in an ongoing series of Labour events intended by McDonnell to set out a “New Economics”. According to the website LabourList, “McDonnell sat [in] rapt attention throughout.”

In a hot meeting room at University College London, where she is director of a new institute for innovation, the Italian-American Mazzucato told me that the 2017 Labour manifesto was “a turning point” in British economic policy, “full of good stuff, a new energy”. She advises McDonnell. Yet she also advises the Conservative business secretary, Greg Clark, and the SNP. She thinks Labour could do better: “I say to them, ‘You sound defensive. You sound like you know what’s wrong with the economy, rather than what could happen.’” She says Labour needs to explain its economic policies more compellingly: “When you do bold things, if you don’t have the language to describe them, you’re going to be in trouble.”

The Conservative reformers of British capitalism have the opposite problem. So far, their rhetoric dwarfs their solutions. “Their promises to put workers on company boards, to stop high executive pay, haven’t really gone anywhere,” says Tim Bale, a leading historian of the party. Many observers, on both the left and the right, interpreted the 2017 Tory manifesto’s anti-market talk as solely a ploy to attract Labour voters – a ploy that failed so badly that it led to the resignation of one of its devisers, Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy.

Blond insists that many senior Tories besides Timothy oppose neoliberalism. Before Thatcher, there was a recurring Conservative impulse to soften capitalism during hard times – from the future prime minister Harold Macmillan’s influential 1938 book The Middle Way to Edward Heath’s centrist government in the 70s. But that impulse has weakened. “Most Tory MPs are Thatcher’s children,” says Bale. “Most Tory thinktanks are still in a free-market phase.” So is the Tory press: “I could more easily imagine an asteroid hitting the earth,” says Mason, “than the Sun and the Mail coming out for state intervention.”

Many Tory activists and voters have also become free-market diehards. During the election, when the usually revered editor of the website ConservativeHome, Paul Goodman, told readers “to get over Thatcher” and embrace the Tory manifesto, because “the world has moved on”, the response was prickly. One post accused May of being “a Labour sympathiser”. Another pointed out that Heath’s policies failed.

Moreover, the current government might respond to Brexit – an even bigger economic shock than Heath suffered in the turbulent 70s – by becoming more neoliberal, not less, having freed British business from the EU’s limited restrictions on capitalism. Tory economic policy has swerved suddenly rightwards before. Faced with the aftermath of the financial crisis, Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, quickly dropped Red Toryism and instead told Britons to toughen up for “the global race” – their phrase for an ever-more competitive capitalism. Osborne had never lost his faith in the free market. “Cameron turned out to be just a standard Thatcherite,” Blond now says.

As Cameron, the son of a wealthy stockbroker, knew well, Britain is still home to plenty of neoliberalism’s beneficiaries: hedge funders, homeowners with the right kind of property, disproportionately rewarded “top talent” from footballers to management consultants, and companies built on cheap labour and loose regulation. They will not give up their supremacy easily, and after Brexit, a Tory government – or a Labour one – might be desperate for economic growth from any source.

As an idea, the free market retains a simple power. “Neoliberalism was sold as capitalism perfected,” says Mason. That has made its diminishing returns politically explosive, but it has also made a reformed capitalism hard to sell. “The idea that markets work well in very limited circumstances, that economic life is about compromise, imperfectability – that’s not an argument you can present easily in a tabloid or a political advertisement,” says Abby Innes, assistant professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics.

Critics of neoliberal Britain have long dressed their texts and speeches with rosy images of other countries’ kinder economies. “Following the successful example of Germany and the Nordic countries,” says the 2017 Labour manifesto, “we will establish a National Investment Bank … that unlike giant City of London firms, will be dedicated to supporting inclusive growth.” In today’s spivvy Britain, how grown-up and enlightened that sounds. But on reflection, the idea that Britain should become more like Germany – its profoundly different capitalism the product of a different geography, culture and history – feels both very ambitious and yet also underwhelming. Can’t we come up with our own economic vision?

Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world



Somehow, it would have to reconcile the intensely competitive, commercialised daily existence of many Britons with the fact that the economic system that created that individualistic world no longer works very well. But perhaps the children of Thatcher’s children have an answer. Many of them are already living with this tension: working ambitiously but often for nothing; sharing living space and possessions as well as racing to buy them; jostling with each other for the smallest economic opportunities, but also marching together for Corbyn.

The emerging outline of a new economic order is often present, not much noticed, amid the final stirrings of the old. In the 70s, the City traders and sharkish entrepreneurs of the Thatcher era to come were often already at work, even as trade unions and Keynesians still held court in Downing Street.

If Brexit proves a disaster, or another crisis soon hits our largely unreformed financial system, as an increasing number of commentators predict, the political space for alternatives to neoliberalism may open further. But Glasman predicts that working out exactly what comes after modern British capitalism will be “the job of the rest of our lives”. He is 56 years old.

SUGAR BABIES REVEAL WHY THEY WANT TO FIND A SUGAR DADDY AT ANNUAL EVENT

Kashmira Gander in The Independent

“What if I want to be a trophy wife?” asks a woman in the audience at the Sugar Baby Summit at the plush Ham Yard hotel in central London. Self-confessed sugar baby Clover Pittilla, who is addressing the room at a podium on stage, pauses for a moment and replies “I say do it. Just live your dreams.”

Pittilla is a 21-year-old pharmaceutical student, and one of the speakers at the third Sugar Baby Summit event organised by dating app and website Seeking Arrangement. The app enables sugar daddies, and some mummies, to seek out so-called sugar babies to shower with gifts, cash and luxury experiences. In return, sugar babies knowingly provide a pretty face and good company. Today, both experienced and wannabe sugar babies have paid £150 to learn how to attract high-net-worth-individuals. They’ll put these skills into practice at a party in the evening. The competition is intense, as Seeking Arrangement permits sugar daddies to have four sugar babies at once. 

And this complicated world of course has its own vocabulary. The sugar babies are told that vanilla, or conventional, relationships are not what sugar daddies are into. And salt daddies are men who just want attention but don’t want to part with their cash.

To some, the oh-so-romantically named Seeking Arrangement is empowering women and men to be brutally clear about what they want in their relationships. The website and the summit are places where they can find one another and forge, more often than not, relationships with massive age gaps without judgement. It offers privacy for the 40 per cent of sugar daddies and mummies who are married. Sugar babies, meanwhile, find lovers, friends and mentors. Others might argue that Seeking Arrangement users might pretend that the power balance between babies and daddies is equal, but in a world where it lies with the person with the fattest wallet it is therefore, well, creepy as hell.

Stood on stage in a short blue gingham dress and glittery silver stilettos, her long blonde hair swept to one side, Pittilla fits the ultimate stereotype of a sugar baby. She tells the around 70 people in the audience that her sugar daddies have enabled her to travel the world and study without having to resort to eating beans on toast to make her student loan stretch. Her spiel mirrors the adverts on the Seeking Arrangement website, which invite students to sign up and lessen the load of their crippling debt. Students are given further incentive to join with free premium membership.

But the crowd is more varied than one might assume. The (mainly) women here are of all ages, body-types and ethnicities. Some, like Pittilla, are dressed in stunning, hyper-feminine clothes, with towering heels, long hair and spotless makeup. But there are plenty of women in casual clothes that wouldn't be out of place in an office. And one guy with blonde hair dressed in black with a man bun. And they're hanging on Pittilla’s every word. When at one point she scrolls quickly through her presentation slides, one woman shouts “you’re going too fast!” Other panels cover cyber-security, fashion and making a first impression, staying motivated, and how to manage finances. 

Clover Pittilla advised shared her tips at the Sugar Baby Summit

First off, Pittilla stresses to the audience that being a sugar baby isn’t sex work and that the men are not paying them. She then reels off bullet points on from her presentation which unintentionally highlight that finding and keeping a sugar daddy is a little complex. Have your own life and don’t put everything aside for a man, but be flexible, she says. Be honest and assertive, but don’t be argumentative. Perhaps hint at what you want and don’t ask for money outright because you’ll seem entitled, and no one likes that. If he doesn’t call you or doesn’t text back, “don’t be argumentative because no one likes that, either”. “Make him feel needed, because guys like to be needed,” she adds.

“He’s paying you,” Pittilla lets slip during her presentation, quickly correcting herself to add “well, no he’s not. He’s definitely not paying you. What he gives are gifts”.

Emma Gammer, a 28-year-old sugar baby who married and divorced a sugar daddy, follows Pittilla's presentation. Gammer advises women to include keywords in their profiles that attract sugar daddies. "Student, model, nurse." Some professionally shot “sexy and sassy” photos to send to potential sugar daddies are also useful, but she urges the audience to avoid men who talk too much about sex and ask for photos but never to meet. Those who flake repeatedly are also a waste of time, she adds. “Some will even go as low as pretending there’s been a family death to avoid meeting you.”

Doesn’t it all make dating seem a bit cold and businesslike? But that’s the beauty of it, suggests Seeking Arrangement founder Brendon Wade, who thinks he’s nailed the formula for successful relationships. Asked why people should become sugar babies rather than finding a match the conventional way he tells The Independent: “You could do that. You could make numerous mistakes and you could fail that way. I’ve been married and divorced three times. Or you could learn the faster way. A lot of sugar babies are teaching the newbies the sorts of mistakes they have made and what they've found to be the most successful way to finding relationships that they truly enjoy.”

Wade adds that he’s going through a “messy divorce” so he’s using the website himself at the moment. As the founder, he’s the original sugar daddy, he adds.

As a younger man, he was “shy, dateless and incapable of finding a woman” he recalls. His mother told him that if he concentrated on his studies and became successful, women would flock to him.

“But when I was in my thirties I had a Bachelor degree and an MBA and I was still dateless. I tried to solve that and date. I was not successful. I would create profiles on dating apps and write hundreds of message but still had no luck. So I thought 'why not base a concept on my mother's idea?'” 

Wade compares using Seeking Arrangement to honing your career skills. “Your career is very important. That’s why you create a CV. But romantic relationships are equally important. But people aren’t using the same goal oriented approach. Most of us beat around the bush, date, and don't specify what we want. We fall in love, and then perhaps months or years later we realise ‘wow this is a mismatch’. What we need is to do is teach people how to date effectively,” he argues. After all, he goes on, in the past parents would set up arranged marriages based on what their child had to offer on paper, so what’s the harm in modernising that approach?

Among the women taking a punt on Ward’s idea is Natalie Wood, a 31-year-old beautician. She has has been using Seeking Arrangement for a few years. One man whom she met on the website flew her to Indonesia to meet him, gave her £10,000 and money for shopping, she says, beaming. Unfortunately, that relationship broke down a few months in because of the man’s circumstances, but he continued to look after her afterwards, she says. At the summit after-party she hopes to pin down some sugar daddies who might otherwise be too busy to meet her. 

Natalie Wood was given £10,000 by a sugar daddy (Seeking Arrangement)

“I really like this website because you can be honest about what you want. I want someone successful, an older mentor. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money, and enjoys a luxury lifestyle. And if he’s not in London I can go on this website and find him internationally.”

In the end, she hopes to find a man to help her set up a salon and, ultimately, someone to marry. Her friends recommended that she try the website in the first place, and she’d happily do the same, she adds.

Others are more nervous about people knowing that they are at this event, presumably because of the stigma attached to unconventional relationships based around money.

I want someone successful. Someone who doesn't mind spending their money
Natalie Wood, beautician and sugar baby

Donna Summer, a 32-year-old beauty therapist based in Hastings, says she’s nervous about being here today, and hasn’t told her friends or family that she’s using Seeking Arrangement.

“I was very apprehensive before I came here that there would be more beautiful women than me,” she says quietly. “I'm going to the party after this and I'm a bit nervous.” Summer was scared the event would be “dodgy”, but is now happy to seek advice from veteran sugar babies on whether or not she needs to declare the money she is given for tax, and other financial questions.

“I’m getting older I don’t have much time left to find someone, so I thought ‘let’s just take the plunge and do it’. Life’s too short, and you’ll probably end up in some horrible relationship anyway. So why not do this?” she reasons.

One 26-year-old from London, who asks to be identified as Nina Sky, has been using Seeking Arrangement for four years, and forged one two-and-a-half-year relationship, and one which lasted under a year. “I’ve been to many countries, gotten gifts. You name it: bags, pets, furs. Loads of things,” she says.

Sky has always been attracted to older men, and is foremost looking for a “gentleman”. A man who is settled emotionally, financially and mentally. She doesn’t have an age limit, but draws the line at someone with poor hygiene.

“I had a Tinder profile up until recently but I just think this is so much better for me. I’m very direct and I like to know where I stand from the beginning. It just avoids confusion,” she says. But Sky disagrees that she takes a businesslike approach to dating. “It’s not a business. It’s finding a mutually beneficial agreement and if it leads to love, then amazing. But I think you need to know what you want.”

The women add that they are unfazed by people who want to judge them, or accuse them of being gold diggers. And of course the sugar daddies aren’t here to defend themselves against anyone who might accuse them of taking advantage of people. They’re at the party, where the press aren’t allowed.

“I would say to someone who might call me a gold digger that I’m reaching out to find what I want. If I want a better life and to make my life the best, I will,” says Wood. “Maybe they're just jealous of my fantastic lifestyle.” And who said romance is dead?