Britain’s private school problem

While many agree that private education is at the root of inequality in Britain, open discussion about the issue remains puzzlingly absent. In their new book, historian David Kynaston and economist Francis Green set out the case for change in The Guardian 


The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored. 

For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).

In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.

What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds.
They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.

 

Some of the public figures of the past 20 years to have attended private schools (l-r from top): Tony Blair, former Bank of England governor Eddie George, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Charles Spencer, businesswoman Martha Lane Fox, Dominic West, James Blunt, former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Paxman, fashion journalist Alexandra Shulman, footballer Frank Lampard, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and cricketer Joe Root. Composite: Rex, Getty

And so what, accordingly, does Britain look like in the 21st century? A brief but expensive history, 1997–2018, offers some guide. As the millennium approaches, New Labour under Tony Blair (Fettes) sweeps to power. The Bank of England under Eddie George (Dulwich) gets independence. The chronicles of Hogwarts school begin. A nation grieves for Diana (West Heath); Charles (Gordonstoun) retrieves her body; her brother (Eton) tells it as it is. Martha Lane Fox (Oxford High) blows a dotcom bubble. Charlie Falconer (Glenalmond) masterminds the Millennium Dome. Will Young (Wellington) becomes the first Pop Idol. The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty (Eton) sorts out Baltimore. James Blunt (Harrow) releases the bestselling album of the decade. Northern Rock collapses under the chairmanship of Matt Ridley (Eton). Boris Johnson (Eton) enters City Hall in London. The Cameron-Osborne (Eton-St Paul’s) axis takes over the country; Nick Clegg (Westminster) runs errands. Life staggers on in austerity Britain mark two. Jeremy Clarkson (Repton) can’t stop revving up; Jeremy Paxman (Malvern) still has an attitude problem; Alexandra Shulman (St Paul’s Girls) dictates fashion; Paul Dacre (University College School) makes middle England ever more Mail-centric; Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh) makes non-middle England ever more Guardian-centric; judge Brian Leveson (Liverpool College) fails to nail the press barons; Justin Welby (Eton) becomes top mitre man; Frank Lampard (Brentwood) becomes a Chelsea legend; Joe Root (Worksop) takes guard; Henry Blofeld (Eton) spots a passing bus. The Cameron-Osborne axis sees off Labour, but not Boris Johnson+Nigel Farage (Dulwich)+Arron Banks (Crookham Court). Ed Balls (Nottingham High) takes to the dance floor. Theresa May (St Juliana’s) and Jeremy Corbyn (Castle House prep school) face off. Prince George (Thomas’s Battersea) and Princess Charlotte (Willcocks) start school.

The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.

Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.

The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.

Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.

A famous image of school privilege: Harrovians Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson and local schoolboys George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young photographed outside Lord’s cricket ground in 1937 by Jimmy Sime. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Allsport

There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.

Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”

If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.

First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.

The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy.
Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”

Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.

The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.

Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.

What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.

On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.

Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.

The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education.
Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.

We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.

We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.

All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.

The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.

It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.

Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform? Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.

The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.

Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?

• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

How to do it: feasible reform options

There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.

1. Handicaps

Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.

Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).

Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).

2. Crossing the tracks

There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.

In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.

Quick Quiz May Reveal If You're At Risk For ALZHEIMER’S

by Fiona Macrae for The Daily Mail 3/2/2012

A quick test that tells if your loved one is at risk of Alzheimer’s disease has been devised by doctors. The 21-question test distinguishes between normal absent-mindedness and the more sinister memory lapses that may signal the early stages of dementia.

The questions are designed to be answered by a spouse or close friend. The Alzheimer’s Questionnaire, which is almost 90 per cent accurate, measures mild cognitive impairment – the slight memory lapses that can be a precursor of the disease.

Up to 15 per cent of people with MCI develop Alzheimer’s within the next year.

The lack of a cure for dementia means that some may not want to take the test, which was devised by Banner Sun Health Research Institute in Arizona, which specializes in the disease.

Some questions, including one about making the same statements over the course of a day, known as repetitiveness, were found to be particularly valuable.

The 21 questions are answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. A ‘yes’ is given a score of one or two and a ‘no’ always scores zero, giving a maximum possible score of 27.

Someone who scores under five is advised that there is no cause  for concern. A score of five to 14 suggests mild cognitive impairment – or memory lapses that could be the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Any higher than this and the person may already have it. Writing in the journal BMC Geriatrics researcher Michael Malek-Ahmadi said: ‘As the population ages, the need for a quick method of spotting the disease early will grow.’

Mr Malek-Ahmadi stressed that it is up to GPs rather than patients to interpret the results of the test. That said, anyone who scores five or above should seek expert help.

DEMENTIA OR SIMPLE ABSENT-MINDEDNESS?

How To Score

Pick 1 answer each of the 21 questions & note down the corresponding number of points. Then add up all the points to give a total score out of 27.

1. Does your loved one have memory loss?      Y = 1     N = 0

2.  If so, is their memory worse than a few years ago?      Y = 1     N = 0

3.  Do they repeat statements or stories in the same day?      Y = 2     N = 0

4.   Have you had to take over tracking events or appointments, or does the patient forget appointments?      Y = 1     N = 0

5.   Do they misplace items more than once a month?      Y = 1     N = 0

6.   Do they suspect others of hiding, or stealing items when they cannot find them?      Y = 1     N = 0

7.   Does your loved one frequently have trouble knowing the day, date, month, year, and time; or check the date more than once a day?      Y = 2     N = 0

8.   Do they become disoriented in unfamiliar places?      Y = 1     N = 0

9.   Do they become more confused when not at home or when traveling?      Y = 1     N = 0

10 .  Excluding physical limitations, do they have trouble handling money, such as tips or calculating change?      Y = 1     N = 0

11.  Do they trouble paying bills or doing finances?      Y = 2     N = 0

12.  Does your loved one have trouble remembering to take medicines or keeping track of medications taken?      Y = 1     N = 0

13.  Do they difficulty driving; or are you concerned about their driving?      Y = 1     N = 0

14.  Are they having trouble using appliances, such as the stove, phone, remote control, microwave?      Y = 1     N = 0

15.  Excluding physical limitations, are they having difficulty completing home repair or housekeeping tasks?      Y = 1     N = 0

16.  Excluding physical limitations, have they given up or cut down on hobbies such as golf, dancing, exercise or crafts?      Y = 1     N = 0

17.  Are they getting lost in familiar surroundings, such as their own neighbourhood?      Y = 2    N = 0

18.  Is their sense of direction failing?      Y = 1     N = 0

19.  Do they have trouble finding words other than names?      Y = 1     N = 0

20.  Do they confuse names of family members or friends?      Y = 2     N = 0

21.  Do they have trouble recognizing familiar people?      Y = 2     N = 0

What the score means

0 to 4: No cause for concern

5 to 14: Memory loss may be an early warning of Alzheimer’s

15 and above: Alzheimer’s may already have developed

Contrast between two parliaments - Why was the reservations bill not scrutinised?

The passage of the quota Bill highlights grave gaps in India’s parliamentary procedures writes M R Madhavan in The Hindu


Parliament ended the penultimate session of this Lok Sabha with both Houses passing the Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill, 2019, that enables 10% reservation in education and employment for economically weaker sections. The process by which this was done illustrates the collective failure of parliamentarians to review the government’s proposals and hold it to account.

Hasty steps

Let us review the sequence of events. On Monday (January 7), it was reported that the Cabinet had approved a Bill to provide reservation to poor candidates regardless of their caste, and that this would be introduced in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, the last day of the winter session. News reports also suggested that the Rajya Sabha would extend its session by a day, so that this Bill could be discussed on Wednesday. There was no formal press release by the Press Information Bureau.

The rules of procedure of the Lok Sabha require every Bill to be circulated at least two days ahead of introduction. This is to give time for MPs to read the Bill and discuss it (or make objections) when the vote on the motion to introduce the Bill is taken up. This Bill was not circulated, even on Tuesday morning. At 11 a.m., when unstarred questions are tabled, one question concerned whether the government was “exploring the scope of providing reservation for poor candidates from forward communities for education and employment” and the details. The Ministry categorically denied that there was any such proposal under consideration. Then at 12.46 p.m., the Bill was introduced, with copies having been circulated to MPs a few minutes earlier.

The usual practice is to refer Bills to the respective standing committee of Parliament. This step allows MPs to solicit public feedback and interact with experts before forming their recommendations. In the case of this Constitution Amendment — clearly one with far-reaching implications — this scrutiny mechanism was bypassed.

The debate started around 5 p.m., just a few hours MPs had been given a copy. The debate ended around 10 p.m.

Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha hardly functioned that day due to repeated disruptions. Finally, the chair adjourned the House till the next day — the first official indication that the sitting was extended by a day. The next day, Wednesday, the Rajya Sabha took up consideration of the Bill around 2 p.m. and ended the debate just past 10 p.m. A motion was moved by some members to refer the Bill to a select committee, but this motion was defeated by a wide margin, and the Bill was then passed.

Let us summarise the number of ways in which due oversight was skipped. The Bill was not circulated ahead of being introduced, it was not examined by a committee, there was hardly any time between its introduction and final discussion. Barring a few small parties, none of the larger Opposition parties asked for the Bill to be carefully considered by a parliamentary committee — even in the Rajya Sabha where they might have been able to muster the numbers to ensure this.

The British contrast

Contrast this with the incidents in the British Parliament the same day (Wednesday) when the Speaker ensured parliamentary supremacy over the government. A member of the ruling Conservative Party wanted to move an amendment to set a deadline for the Prime Minister to put forward new plans if she loses the Brexit vote next week. When the government objected that such amendments to set the business of the government in the House can be moved only by a Minister, the Speaker differed. He said that every member had a right to move an amendment. The motion was won by 308 votes to 297.

This case highlights three important ways in which the British Parliament works better than ours. First, the absence of an anti-defection law, so that each MP can vote her conscience. Note that the motion that put the government in a spot was moved by a former attorney general and a member of the ruling party. Second, it is known exactly how each MP voted. In India, most votes (other than Constitution Amendments that need a two-thirds majority to pass) are through voice votes — just 7% of other Bills had a recorded vote over the last 10 years. Third, the Speaker insisted on the supremacy of Parliament, and allowed a motion against the wishes of the government. Unlike in India, the independence of the Speaker is secured in the U.K. as no party contests against the Speaker in the next general election.

Parliament has a central role to secure the interest of citizens. It is the primary body of accountability that translates the wishes and aspirations of citizens into appropriate laws and policies.

Falling short

However, our Parliament often falls short of these goals due to some structural reasons. These include the anti-defection law (that restrains MPs from voting according to their conscience), lack of recorded voting as a norm (which reduces the accountability of the MP as voters don’t know which way they voted on each issue), party affiliation of the Speaker (making her dependent on the party leadership for re-election prospects), frequent bypassing of committees (just 25% of Bills have been referred to committees in this Lok Sabha), insufficient time and research support to examine Bills, and the lack of a calendar (Parliament is held at the convenience of the government). We need to address each of these issues to strengthen Parliament and protect our democracy.

Understanding Kashmir

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‘We the people’: the battle to define populism

The noisy dispute over the meaning of populism is more than just an academic squabble – it’s a crucial argument about what we expect from democracy writes Peter C Baker in The Guardian


When populism appears in the media, which it does more and more often now, it is typically presented without explanation, as if everyone can already define it. And everyone can, sort of – at least as long as they’re allowed to simply cite the very developments that populism is supposed to explain: Brexit, Trump, Viktor Orbán’s takeover of Hungary, the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The word evokes the long-simmering resentments of the everyman, brought to a boil by charismatic politicians hawking impossible promises. Often as not, populism sounds like something from a horror film: an alien bacteria that has somehow slipped through democracy’s defences – aided, perhaps, by Steve Bannon or some other wily agent of mass manipulation – and is now poisoning political life, creating new ranks of populist voters among “us”. (Tellingly, most writing about populism presumes an audience unsympathetic to populism.) 

There is no shortage of prominent voices warning how dangerous populism is, and that we must take immediate steps to fight it. Tony Blair spends his days running the Institute for Global Change (IGC), an organisation founded, per its website, “to push back against the destructive approach of populism”. In its 2018 world report, Human Rights Watch warned democracies of the world against “capitulation” to the “populist challenge”. The rise of “populist movements”, Barack Obama said in a speech last summer, had helped spark a global boom for the “politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment” that pave a path to authoritarianism. “I am not being alarmist. I am just stating facts,” Obama said.

When populism is framed this way, the implication is clear. All responsible citizens have a responsibility to do their part in the battle – to know populism when they see it, understand its appeal (but not fall for it), and support politics that stop populism in its tracks, thereby saving democracy as we know it. “By fighting off the current infection,” writes Yascha Mounk, until recently executive director of Blair’s IGC and a prominent anti-populist writer, “we might just build up the necessary antibodies to remain immune against new bouts of the populist disease for decades to come.”

But as breathless op-eds and thinktank reports about the populist menace keep piling up, they have provoked a sceptical backlash from critics who wonder aloud if populism even exists. It is now relatively common to encounter the idea that, just as there were no real witches in Salem, there are no real populists in politics – just people, attitudes and movements that the political centre misunderstands and fears, and wants you, reader, to fear too, although without the burden of having to explain exactly why. Populism, in this framing, is a bogeyman: a nonentity invoked for the purpose of stirring up fear. This argument has even made its way to the centrist mainstream. “Let’s do away with the word ‘populist,’” wrote the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen in July. “It’s become sloppy to the point of meaninglessness, an overused epithet for multiple manifestations of political anger. Worse, it’s freighted with contempt, applied to all voters who have decided that mainstream political parties have done nothing for their static incomes or disappearing jobs or sense of national decline these past two decades.”

It is hard to deny that much talk of populism obscures more than it illuminates, and tells us more about anti-populist crusaders than any real live populist parties or voters. But long before populism became an object of transatlantic media fascination – before it became a zeitgeisty one-word explanation for everything – a small group of academics was studying it, trying to figure out exactly what it is and what lessons it holds for democratic politics. The debate they have produced is, like many academic debates, knotty and self-referential – and will always live in the shadow of the muddled media and political discourse. But it helps us see that the idea of populism is something more than just a centrist fairytale.

Thanks in large part to the persistent failure of governments across the west to enact anything resembling a credible vision of shared prosperity and security in the post-manufacturing era, we are now living through a time when familiar webs connecting citizens, ideologies and political parties are, if not falling apart, at least beginning to loosen and shift. As a result, the question of populism is not going away. The coming years are likely to include all of the following: more movements being labelled as populist, more movements calling themselves populist, more movements defensively insisting that they are not populist, and more conversations about the extent to which populism represents the problem or the solution.

The academic debate on populism shows us that making sense of this landscape requires more than just a usable definition of the P-word. In short, it shows us that we can’t really talk about populism without talking about our conflicting conceptions of democracy – and the question of what it truly means for citizens to be sovereign.

It may be telling that very little of the public discussion of the alleged populist threat to democracy has been devoted to the workings of democracy itself. Perhaps we assume, without much thought, that democracy is such a self-explanatory idea that we already know all there is to know about the subject. Or perhaps we have come to regard democracy in its existing western form – basically liberal democracy – as the only possible endpoint for the evolution of politics. Populism, though it comes in many forms, always reminds us that nothing could be further from the truth.

In 2004 a young Dutch political scientist named Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, a paper that proposed a new and concise definition of populism – one that would become the backbone of academic populism studies, a field that hardly existed at the time. Mudde was convinced that populism was a useful concept, which meant something more specific than “democracy, but practised in a way that I find distasteful”. He was especially keen to challenge two common intuitions about populism: that it is uniquely defined by “highly emotional and simplistic” rhetoric, and that it primarily consists of “opportunistic policies” that aim to “buy” the support of voters.

Populism, Mudde argued, is more than just demagogy or opportunism. But it is not a fully formed political ideology like socialism or liberalism – it is instead a “thin” ideology, made up of just a few core beliefs. First: the most important division in society is an antagonistic one between “the people”, understood to be fundamentally good, and “the elite”, understood to be fundamentally corrupt and out of touch with everyday life. Second: all populists believe that politics should be an expression of the “general will” – a set of desires presumed to be shared as common sense by all “ordinary people”. (Implicit in this belief is another: that such a thing as this “general will” exists.)

A populist movement, then, is one that consistently promises to channel the unified will of the people, and by doing so undercut the self-serving schemes of the elite establishment. As the National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen put it in 2007: “I will give voice to the people. Because in democracy only the people can be right, and none can be right against them.” (Note how, in this formulation, there is no disagreement among “the people”.) Or, in the more recent words of Donald Trump, speaking at his inauguration: “We are transferring power from Washington DC and giving it back to you, the people … The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.” (Note how members of “the establishment” are implicitly excluded from “the citizens”.)

For decades, attempts at clear-headed conversations about populism had been stymied by the question of how it could be attributed to parties and politicians that were so obviously different: how can Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, for example, both be called populist? In what way are Occupy Wall Street and Brexit both possible examples of populist phenomena? Mudde’s simple definition caught on because it has no trouble answering this type of question. If populism is truly ideologically “thin”, then it has to attach itself to a more substantial host ideology in order to survive. But this ideology can lie anywhere along the left-right spectrum. Because, in Mudde’s definition, populism is always piggybacking on other ideologies, the wide variety of populisms isn’t a problem. It’s exactly what you would expect.

“The people” and “the elite”, Mudde wrote, are groupings with no static definition from one populist movement to another. These categories are, first and foremost, moral: people good, elites bad. The question of exactly who belongs in which group, though, depends on the character of the populist movement, and which “thick” ideology the populism ends up attached to. A populist “people” can define itself by an ethnic identity it feels is under threat, but just as easily by a shared sense of being victims of economic exploitation. What matters is that it blames a perceived class of corrupt elites; in the case of rightwing populisms, it may also heap scorn on some underclass, whether immigrants or racial minorities, whom the elites are accused of favouring with special treatment as part of their plot to keep power away from “real people”.

 

Bernie Sanders supporters in California in March 2016. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

When The Populist Zeitgeist was published, populism wasn’t a hot topic: in all of 2005, Mudde’s paper was cited only nine times. But as the field of populism studies has ballooned alongside mainstream interest in the subject, the paper has become widely recognised as a classic. By a wide margin, Mudde is now the populism scholar most likely to be cited or interviewed by journalists – as often as not, for articles in which his definition intermingles with the same old sloppy generalisations he set out to overturn.

Today, no academic disputes the dominance of Mudde’s definition, especially among the growing number of scholars hoping to be part of the conversation about populism as a global phenomenon. One major factor in its success, in fact, is the way that it anticipated events in world politics. The market crashes of 2008 led to the emergence of anti-austerity movements – such as Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and Occupy worldwide – motivated by rage at financial institutions and the small class of people who benefited from their profits. These movements were obviously animated by a sense of opposition between “the people” and “the elite” – but old theories of populism that defined it specifically as rightwing, racist or anti-immigrant were insufficiently capacious to describe these new developments in populist politics.

The thin-ideology definition is also extremely congenial to the landscape of contemporary academic political science, which places a considerable premium on broad frameworks that enable young scholars to do empirical, quantitative work. Many new scholars of populism no longer feel the need to argue over definitions. Instead, they perform textual analyses designed to detect how often populism’s core ideas, as laid out in Mudde’s 2004 article, pop up in party platforms, political speeches, manifestos and tweets. Or they administer surveys designed to track the prevalence of the core tenets of populism in different populations, searching for profiles of archetypal populist voters.

Every time another paper relying on the ideological framework is published, it becomes a little more entrenched – a matter of some frustration to the minority of academics who still think it misses the point.

The rise of the thin-ideology definition, and its increasing influence in the still-ballooning public conversation about populism, has consistently provoked the objections of a small but persistent camp of dissenters within populism studies. These academics think defining populism in terms of core beliefs is a deep methodological error: many of them also think defining populism as an ideology runs the risk of making effective and worthwhile political strategies seem irresponsible, even dangerous.

These academics are likely to stress the extent to which mainstream political parties in the US and Europe have converged in recent decades, narrowing the range of opinions that find real purchase in national decision-making. They take as a given that this has swelled the ranks of people who feel that what gets called democracy responds to their concerns much less than it caters to the whims of a small, wealthy, self-dealing class of elites – elites who vigorously deny their own complicity in this state of affairs, often by insisting that there is no alternative.

As you might expect, these scholars tend to be most interested in challenges to the status quo that come from the left – from “the 99%” of Occupy Wall Street and the Sanders campaign, to the “many not the few” of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party – and foreground an insistence that politics is not yet serving the correct constituency. They are also instinctively alert to the possibility that the self-preserving centre will try to defang outsider challenges by making anyone who endorses them appear unreasonable, frightening and constitutionally unequipped for the sober task of governance.

This makes them suspicious of any suggestion that there is an identifiable ideology called populism that has fundamental similarities no matter where on the political spectrum it appears. For this crowd, talk of an essence of populism – however thin – shades too easily into a charge of guilt by association, which inevitably has the effect of saddling leftwing populist movements (or even populist-looking movements) with the baggage of their xenophobic and racist rightwing counterparts. More specifically, they are likely to worry that the emphasis on exaggerated moralism as a defining feature of populism makes it too easy to depict legitimate opposition to elite power as irrational mobs.

Most objections to the thin-ideology definition owe a substantial debt to a duo of leftist political theorists: Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian who teaches at the University of Westminster, and her late husband, the Argentine Ernesto Laclau. Both thinkers have directly informed the new European left populist movements, including Syriza, Podemos and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise.

Mouffe and Laclau’s writings on Marxism and populism – some of which they produced together, and some separately – are famously dense and sometimes resistant to summary. But at their core is the idea that conflict is an inescapable and defining feature of political life. In other words, the realm of politics is one where antagonism is natural and unavoidable, in which consensus cannot ever be permanent, and there is always a “we” and a “they”.

“Political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts,” Mouffe insists. “Properly political questions always involve decisions which require us to make a choice between conflicting alternatives.” This emphasis on conflict produces a vision of democratic life that looks more radical than typical mainstream accounts of liberal democracy – but, Laclau and Mouffe would argue, one that more accurately describes the actual logic of politics.

In this view, any existing socio-political order (or “hegemony” in Mouffe and Laclau’s preferred formation, borrowed from the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci) is subject to challenge. Every status quo – however sturdy – is only temporary, and can always be challenged by a movement that seeks to replace it with something new. Political change, in other words, is the result of demands against the existing order, which must be fused together in a movement to change it – a movement that may look a lot like populism.

When my demands and your demands and our neighbours’ demands are brought together in such a movement, they can become the basis for a new political “we”: a “people” insisting that the current arrangement of power be altered in their name. To the extent that such a movement succeeds, it creates a new hegemony – a new baseline – which itself becomes open to challenge over time.

From this perspective, populism is just another word for real politics: for people (“us”) creating together, live on the ground, a sense of how our dissatisfactions relate, who is to blame (“them”), and how to force a change.

But those who benefit from the status quo don’t want it to change; to this end, they might champion toothless approaches to collective decision-making: bipartisan consensus as an end in itself; the elevation of “rational” experts over hot-headed partisans; “Third Way” centrism that shuns ideological conflict in favour of “what works” or mediation by liberal institutions. These approaches (Mouffe calls them “non-politics”) may for a time become dominant, as they did in the Anglo-American 1990s and early 2000s. But nothing lasts for ever, especially when the number of people who feel politicians are making their lives more precarious is rising. And then politics – real politics, which is to say populist politics – make a return.

 

Pablo Iglesias, leader of Spain’s Podemos coalition, in June 2016. Photograph: Francisco Seco/AP

According to Mouffe and Laclau, the only inherent connection between rightwing and leftwing populist movements is that both embrace the same fundamental truth about democracy: that it is an ever-shifting contest over how the default “we” of politics is defined and redefined, in which no one definition can be guaranteed to last. The goal, they argue, should not be placid consensus but “agonistic pluralism”: a state in which opposition and disagreement are accepted as the norm, and in which people maintain the capacity to disagree intensely without demonising each other, or descending into war.

Mouffe, in particular, has in recent years argued that the political question of the immediate future is not how to fight populism, but rather which type of populist you want to be. It’s about who you’re with (who belongs in your “chain of equivalence”), who you’re against (who is causing the problem, and how), and where to take your stand. Populism isn’t the problem: instead, leftwing populism is the solution.

Not all the academics who take inspiration from Mouffe and Laclau go quite this far, especially in the sober pages of peer-reviewed political science journals. But their work is palpably motivated by a sense that the real threat of “populism” is that our panic over the word will foreclose the possibility of new kinds of politics and new challenges to the status quo – and that fear of populism on the left could enable the victory of populism of the right.

These scholars’ preference is for definitions in which it has no ideological essence – not even the “thin” one posited by Cas Mudde. For them, even though the thin definition readily recognises populism’s ideological portability, it is still irrevocably tainted by pejorative overtones that push participants in debates about populism to take a position “for” or “against” all populisms. With no internal essence, populism is harder to categorise as inherently good or bad. Paris Aslanidis, a Yale political scientist, calls populism a “discourse” – a mode of talking about politics, rather than a set of beliefs – one that frames politics in terms of the “supremacy of popular sovereignty”.

Benjamin Moffitt, a senior lecturer in politics at the Australian Catholic University, refers to populism as a “political style”, the presence of which “tells us very little about the substantive democratic content of any political project”. Under definitions of this type, the central question is not whether a given political actor or group is or isn’t populist. It is instead whether, from moment to moment, they are “doing populism”, and how, and with what impact.

Of course, these disputes aren’t really about the difference between a “thin ideology” and a “discourse.” They are about whether “populist” is always an insult, and if the project of defining populism can ever be disentangled from the concept’s pejorative baggage. Ultimately, they are disputes about which types of politics make us suspicious, and why.

The current discussion of populism in the west is strongly coloured by the populist far-right parties that emerged in Europe in the late 1980s and early 90s, such as the Austrian Freedom party, the Danish People’s party and the French National Front. What most people knew about these parties, at first, was that they were openly nativist and racist. They talked about “real” citizens of their countries, and fixated on the issue of national and ethnic “purity,” demonising immigrants and minorities. Many of their party leaders flirted winkingly with antisemitism, and their electoral victories coincided with a resurgence of extreme right-wing violence in Europe, such as the 1991 attack on immigrant workers and asylum seekers in the east German town of Hoyerswerda.

When journalists and politicians started calling these parties and their supporters populist, the term was an expression of alarm at a problem and, simultaneously, a euphemism that made it possible to gloss over that problem’s exact qualities. This was especially useful for journalists who feared being viewed as anything less than politically neutral. Populist was obviously not a compliment, but it sounded less alarming than “extreme right” or “radical right”. What the term seemed to communicate more than anything else was backwardness: a juvenile incapacity to bring your preferences to the political arena and engage in the complex give-and-take of rational compromise. The populist combination of immaturity, emotional resentment and intolerance was widely held to constitute a threat to postwar European democracy.

In one respect, the thin-ideology definition popularised by Cas Mudde dismantled this view of things, freeing populism from its exclusively far-right connotations, and cautioning against the conflation of populism with the other -isms it was often paired to.

Mudde and many other scholars who use the ideological definition have in fact repeatedly argued that neither Trump nor Brexit should be regarded primarily as populist phenomena. Of course both Trump and Brexiters used ample populist rhetoric; but in both cases, they argue, the majority of support was motivated not by passion for populism’s core ideas, but by other ideological factors. After the Cambridge Dictionary declared populism 2017’s “word of the year”, Mudde wrote a Guardian column criticising the decision. (“It has become the buzzword of the year,” he noted acidly, “mostly because it is very often poorly defined and wrongly used.”) For the radical-right parties whose electoral campaigns in the Netherlands, France, Germany and Austria raised alarms across Europe, “populism comes secondary to nativism, and within contemporary European and US politics, populism functions at best as a fuzzy blanket to camouflage the nastier nativism”, Mudde concluded.

 

A pro-Brexit campaign bus in London, January 2019. Photograph: Matthew Chattle/Rex/Shutterstock

And yet, despite these caveats, the thin definition nonetheless positions populism as always posing at least something of a majoritarian threat to liberal democracy. It is this judgment, more than any other, that keeps the fight going between scholars who adopt the ideological definition, on one hand, and their Mouffe- and Laclau-inspired critics, on the other.

Liberal democracy, in this context, has almost nothing to do with contemporary distinctions between left and right. It refers, instead, to the idea that government should facilitate pluralistic coexistence by balancing the never fully attainable ideal of popular sovereignty with institutions that enshrine the rule of law and civil rights, which cannot easily be overturned by a political majority. (In this regard, as Mudde writes in his original paper, liberal democracy is “therefore only partly democratic”.) Today, liberal democracy is what most people mean when they talk about democracy – and therefore, to be deemed a threat to liberal democracy is, in the context of most political discussions, a devastatingly negative judgment.

Because populism, as described by the ideological definition, involves a moralised conception of an absolutely sovereign “people” – whose verdicts are regarded as practically unanimous – it is inevitable that populist movements will come into conflict with the liberal aspects of liberal democracy.

If all “real” people think the same way about the things that matter most in politics, then the idea of institutional protections for a dissenting minority are are at best superfluous and at worst nefarious. For the populists, they are just another wall that the corrupt elite has built to keep real power away from the people. The same is true for the independence of judges or regulators, or checks and balances between branches of government – especially when they appear to stymie the plans of a populist leader. In this account, the most basic elements of liberal democracy become both kindling and fuel for the populist fire.

No one who studies populism seriously – and not even the most opportunistic participants in the cottage industry of anti-populist alarmism – denies that populist movements can raise valid critiques of the status quo, and of the very real anti-democratic power of elites. Many take a viewpoint similar to that of the Mexican political theorist Benjamin Arditi, who described populism as a drunken guest at democracy’s dinner party, one who disrespects the rules of sociability and, along the way, brings up the failure and hypocrisies that everyone else in the room has agreed to ignore. In Populism: A Very Short Introduction, Mudde and his frequent co-author, the Chilean political scientist Cristóbal Kaltwasser, describe contemporary populism as an “illiberal democratic response to an undemocratic liberalism” – one that “asks the right questions but provides the wrong answers”.

Reading critics from the left, however, one often gets the sense that for them this adds up to so much lipstick on a pig: a sprinkling of nuance and restraint that still leaves populism, no matter its ideological stripe, with an undeserved taint of inherent danger. The unhappiness of these critics is magnified by the fact that populism rarely appears in mainstream discussion as anything but an insult – often in the mouth of pundits and politicians who regard the left and the right as an equal threat.

The fear in these circles is that saying anything negative about “populism” – however qualified and analytical – simply hands more ammunition to the very people who helped make politics such a hollow, undemocratic mess in the first place. Positioning any populism as fundamentally antithetical to liberal democracy, in this view, simply reinforces the association between populism and mob psychology, and stokes fears that individual rights will always be trampled by group identities.

Some scholars in this camp now argue that we should be talking less about populism and more about the centrist “anti-populism” that fears and demonises it. “Just as the adulterous spouse is always the one most suspicious of their own partner,” wrote the Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo in New Left Review in 2013, “so those who eviscerate democracy are the most inclined to see threats to it everywhere. Hence all the to-do about populism betrays a sense of uneasiness, smacks of overkill.”

For each side in this debate, the obvious temptation is to simply dismiss the other – or to insist that what the other side calls “populism” isn’t really populism at all, but just something populist-ish. But to conclude that the two camps are simply talking past each other would be to miss the extent to which they are in agreement –and what, taken together, they tell us about the current political moment.

In 1967, when political theorists from around the world gathered at the London School of Economics for the first ever academic conference on populism, they had a hard time figuring out exactly what they were supposed to be talking about. The word came from the “prairie populists”, an 1890s movement of US farmers who supported more robust regulation of capitalism. But in the intervening decades it had been used for a wide and varied grab bag of phenomena from around the world, from McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts in the US to charismatic Latin American leaders.

In the end, the conference proceedings failed to clarify the matter at hand. “There can at present be no doubt about the importance of populism,” read a summary report. “But no one is clear what it is.”

Over half a century later, there has been some progress. Populism, specialists now agree, is an ideologically portable way of looking at politics as a forum for opposition between “people” and “elites”. This definition creates more questions: is the conceptual “people” of populism inherently defined in a way that spells danger to pluralistic coexistence? Or, less menacingly, is the idea of “the people” a necessary but always malleable concept – simply part of what it means to do politics?

But populism, whatever it is, is not a chemical: no scientist will ever come along and reveal its exact, objective composition. Populism is a lens for looking at our politics, including – down a long hall of mirrors – the politics of what gets called populist, and with what implications.

The questions of populism would have little urgency were it not for the widespread agreement about the shortcomings of the political status quo: about the abyss between the shining ideals of equality and responsive government implied by our talk about democracy and the tarnished reality of life on the ground. The notion that “the people” are being poorly served by politics has vast resonance across the political spectrum, and for good reason.

But what is the remedy? Among the proponents of the ideological definition, some decline to provide an answer, claiming that they are looking only to define and measure populism, not take a stance on it. Others admit that, in the case of populism, the options for producing a description without forming a judgment are basically nonexistent. The order of the day, in their view, is to convince citizens to recommit to liberal democracy and its institutions.

There is, however, widespread recognition in this camp – more than they are credited with by their critics on the left – that it will no longer suffice to insist that there is no acceptable alternative to existing liberal democracy. Writing in the Guardian in 2017, Mudde argued that responding to populism required more than “purely anti-populist campaigns”; it would take, he claimed, “a return to ideological politics”. Even liberals who want some issues to be “depoliticised” – to be removed from the realm of democracy and handed over to experts – will have to, at a minimum, remake the case for those decisions. Nothing can stay depoliticised for ever; that’s politics.

If you squint just a little, this looks more than a bit like what you would expect from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, with their insistence that there is no space “beyond left and right” and no way to put political decisions – decisions about our collective fate – outside the reach of politics. Arguably, you might say that the defenders of liberal democracy are being suddenly reacquainted with the need to construct a democratic “we” – a people – around their demand to protect liberal institutions and procedures, in opposition to radical rightwing parties who are happy to see them discarded.

The corresponding challenge for anyone further on the left is to figure out the relationship between their long-term goals and the ideals of liberal democracy. There have always been critics for whom liberal democracy is sham democracy: a nice-sounding set of universal principles that, in practice, end up functioning as smokescreens that normalise the exploitations and inequities of capitalism.

Other theorists, Mouffe included, view something like the European social democracy of the 60s and 70s as the precondition for whatever comes next – for “radical democracy” that forces liberal democracy to make good on its promises of equality. But even Mouffe is no longer optimistic about our ability to revive our democratic prospects. Two years ago she wrote: “In 1985 we said ‘we need to radicalise democracy’; now we first need to restore democracy, so we can then radicalise it; the task is far more difficult.” What that task will look like on the ground is an open question.

The media framing of populism almost always sounds like a discussion about the margins: about forces from outside “normal” or “rational” politics threatening to throw off the balance of the status quo. But the scholarly discourse makes clear that this is backward: that populism is inherent to democracy, and especially to democracy as we know it in the contemporary west. It finds life in the cracks – or more lately, the chasms – between democracy’s promises and the impossibility of their full, permanent realisation.

The question of populism, then, is always the question of what kind of democracy we want, and the fact that we will never stop arguing about this. Anxiety about populism can be a smokescreen for people who don’t want the world as they know it to be disturbed. But it also flows from the core insight that we can never know exactly where democracy is going to take us – not this time, nor the next, nor the time after that.

Brexit proved our economy is broken, but our leaders still have no clue how to fix it

Politicians obsess over GDP growth yet its benefits are unequally shared. And Labour leave areas suffer most writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian


 

Illustration: Sébastien Thibault


Just after midnight on 25 May 2016, a senior staffer in the remain campaign sent colleagues an urgent message. “Voters are very sceptical about our warnings on the economy,” began his email. “They don’t trust the numbers. They don’t trust the Treasury.” As head of strategy for Britain Stronger in Europe, Ryan Coetzee had bombarded Britons with evidence of the economic damage they would do to themselves if they didn’t stay in the EU. He and his team enlisted the Bank of England, the IMF, the OECD and pretty much every acronym that mattered. They’d wagged fingers, flung numbers around and pointed out the danger signs.

From David Cameron down, leading remainers considered the economy their trump card. In the biggest single choice Britain had had to make for four decades, they were sure economics would be the deciding factor. But with less than a month to go before the vote, seasoned operative Coetzee could see the strategy was failing. Why, just a few days earlier, George Osborne had produced Treasury analysis that Brexit would send house prices plunging by as much as 18% – and BBC journalists reported being deluged with calls from would-be buyers asking where they could sign up.

As remain started losing its central argument so, internal polling analysis showed, it began trailing leave. Hence the panic in that late-night memo, quoted by Tim Shipman in his history of the referendum, All Out War. One of Shipman’s Labour sources in the campaign cut close to the bone: “When we started just saying, ‘the economy will be fucked’, it showed what a profound misunderstanding they had of Labour motives. Across the north-east and the north-west people already felt like the economy was fucked and not working for them.”

Bingo. Project Fear stuck as a catchphrase precisely because Osborne’s rhapsodies over the health of the economy sounded to so many like Project Fantasy.

Osborne banged on about Britain’s miracle recovery even while pay remained below pre-crash levels. His replacement at No 11, Philip Hammond, made a big flourish in his last budget of doling out “little extras” to schools where teachers now face huge funding shortfalls. Over the past few years Westminster has embarked on a march of the makers that looked more like a punch-drunk stagger, erected a northern powerhouse almost invisible to the naked eye, and declared a war on skivers and freeloaders – led by Iain Duncan Smith, the cabinet minister who claimed £39 in expenses for one solitary breakfast. 

But this economic chasm runs deeper and longer than just the past decade. Around the same time that Coetzee was raising the alarm in Westminster, I was reporting in Pontypool, south Wales. It was market day, and locals reminisced about old times, when the town centre would be “rammed”. In that day’s drizzle it was half-deserted. In the 80s and 90s, voters in south Wales were assured that vibrant new industries would replace the coalmines and steelworks that had shut down. What actually filled the void was public spending, and casual work and self-employment that barely paid its way. 

“It’s dead now, because they took what they wanted,” Neil told me, his glasses specked with paint from his day job as a decorator. “They” meant Westminster, London, the rich. “Thatcher smashed the unions. Boosh! We’re out of here. Boosh! They’ve moved on.” Raised in a Labour family in a blood-red part of the country that had been deceived by the political classes for so long, he now considered all politicians “liars”. And in the EU referendum, he intended to let them know.
In the crudest of ways, Neil and others got some of what they wanted. Since the summer of 2016, politicians and pundits will freely declare that something in British politics and economics is broken. The trouble is, the governing classes are no closer to knowing what exactly is bust, let alone how to fix it.

It ultimately comes down to this: decades of privatisation, hammering unions and chucking billions at the housing market while stripping the welfare state has effectively ended any semblance of a national, redistributive economy in which a child born in Sunderland can expect to have similar life chances to one born in Surrey. Yet politicians remain fixated on mechanisms that no longer work adequately for those who actually depend on the economy. They obsess over GDP growth when the benefits of that are unequally shared between classes and regions. They boast about job creation when wages are still on the floor.

Most of all, they brag about London, the one undoubted gleaming success of the British economic model. “A pound spent in Croydon is of far more value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde,” to quote Boris Johnson, the Conservative party’s last surviving greyback. But that is to ignore how London itself is rapidly becoming unlivable for many Londoners. New research by academics the Foundational Economy Collective shows that Londoners are the least likely in the country to have a mortgage and the most likely to swim in the shark-infested waters of the private rental sector. This is great for landlords and for employers, who enjoy a conveyor belt of ready-made renters and workers supplied to them from the rest of Britain and Europe. It is not such a great bargain for the rest of us. The high income generated by London is matched by the massive income inequality suffered by Londoners.

The irony is that Neil and other Labour leave voters have handed the keys to the very people least interested in reversing any of this. The top economic brains among the Brexiteers, miserable throwbacks such as Patrick Minford and John Redwood, believe the problem with Thatcher’s revolution is that it didn’t go far enough.

We rarely ask people what they want from the economy; if we did it more often, the answers might surprise us. The free-marketeers at the Legatum Institute did pose the question in a survey conducted in 2017. Top priorities for respondents were: food and water; emergency services; universal healthcare; a good house; a decent well-paying job; and compulsory and free education. At the bottom were owning a car and cheap air travel. HS2, a new runway at Heathrow or a garden bridge on the Thames didn’t even rank.

After reporting the survey, the Legatum Institute concluded: “Significant portions of the country … are vehemently anti-capitalist.” The report was co-authored by Matthew Elliott, former head of the Vote Leave campaign. Which just about sums up the Brexiteers’ politics: savvy enough to listen to what people want, cynical enough never to enact it.