Jeremy Corbyn speech at Brighton conference

The Corbyn Effect

Part 1 Andrew Murray interviewed byTariq Ali

Part 2

Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism

Jeremy's Anthem for 2017

by Girish Menon

I’m not afraid of  Brexit

I’m not worried about Trump

I’m not scared of boundary changes

Don’t care about opinion polls

I don’t bother with Tony

Nor his many cronies

Half a million volunteers

Are my army

Largest party in the EU

I won’t let you down

I believe in socialism

Universal basic income

World class NHS

Pure air, water and food

A safe place to live

For all who live here

Half a million volunteers

Will each bring thirty new voters

Largest party in the UK

I won’t let you down

I said don’t go to Iraq

I did not fudge my bills

I do not hate the wealthy
The media hate me

But the youth relate to me

And I am full of energy

Half a million members

Will spread the good word

A fair government in the UK

I won’t let you down.

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Universal Basic Income explained

Farewell to Fidel Castro

Am I a socialist?

Zoe Williams in The Guardian


Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

 

‘There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike.’ Photograph: Steve Eason/Getty Images
 

This question has gained extra piquancy this week, with two investigations – one, Dispatches, undercover and rather underhand – into Momentum, the grassroots organisation that sprang up in support of Jeremy Corbyn. The question put, insistently, is: are Corbyn’s supporters real socialists or hard-left entryists? If we accept that some of them are real socialists, are they having their arms twisted by Trotskyists?

I know from the ferocity of the debate that it will be taken for insincerity when I say this, but nevertheless, I mean it: I find it difficult to identify the concrete principles that separate the acceptable socialist from the unacceptable outrider. Often the criteria are quite loose and temporally free range: you are no longer a socialist if you’ve shared a platform with a revolutionary, or been involved with Stop the War (the jury is still out as to whether going on a Stop the War march counts), or ever espoused anything other than parliamentary democracy, even if it was the 90s and you were drunk.

Proxy issues – usually Trident and Palestine – are used as tests of the boundary between socialism and radicalism, even though neither issue could be rationally situated on the left or right, one being fundamentally a techno-military question of what modern warfare will look like, the other a foreign policy matter in which the supposedly “lefter” side has plenty of support among conservatives. There is nothing unsocialist – indeed, nothing more socialist – than to have been involved in the miners’ strike, yet if it put you in contact with the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty, which it probably did, that made you a communist.

  ‘In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist.’ Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

There is a school of thought that says, just as George Osborne would never call himself a free-market fundamentalist, rather, a man of good sense, so a socialist shouldn’t wrestle too much with self-definition. Yet I have the feeling, in the absence of clarity, of a taboo closing in, so that one day soon we will wake up unable to remember whether socialism is an acceptable position at all, or whether it opens you up for some abstruse historical reason to the accusation of “palling around with terrorists”. 

It is helpful to return to the pre-Corbyn consensus, by which I mean, any time up to last September; how could you describe yourself, before you made Andrew Neil even redder, or Evan Davis’s eyebrows shoot up, or in some other way put yourself beyond the pale of common sense?

You were a socialist if you believed in nationalising industries and/or utilities, if you believed in raising wages through collective pay bargaining rather than post-hoc redistribution, if you cleaved to a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work – a living wage. Free healthcare at the point of use is properly understood as a socialist principle, and is described as such by American commentators, but has never counted because British opinion is united in support of it: a tacit understanding of our politics is that once something has majority support, it ceases to be socialistic – it’s an OK position so long as it remains niche, and it is easier to turn a blind eye to the socialism inherent in a popular position than it is to admit that socialism is often popular.

Likewise, a belief in equality has now reached the status of platitude, with politicians from every party espousing it, whereas in fact, it remains socialist rather than capitalist: only a creed that considers equality an actionable goal, rather than a utopian idea you scramble towards by giving extra nursery hours to insufficiently aspirational toddlers, can realistically claim to believe in it.

In the early part of this decade, Ed Miliband called himself a socialist, without much catcalling.

‘If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.’ Photograph: NBCUPhotobank/Rex Features

Those who wanted to signal their discontinuity with the Blair years, while not sounding too radical, would call themselves democratic socialists – that is, they believed in socialism but were happy to trust a sensible, non-socialist majority to democratically overrule them.

If you wanted to sound like a West Wing leftie – like a British leftie, only better looking, wearing cashmere, more likely to win, and even losing, less likely to be a crank – you would call yourself a liberal egalitarian.

There were questions to which Miliband-style socialism had no answers: it was not against private property, indeed, socialism has never been rigid on this point. So if you saw the growth of a landlord class and the return to a rentier society as the inevitable result of housing being priced as an asset (exchange value) rather than a necessity (use value), that would put you in Marxist territory, whereupon you would have to park a perfectly demonstrable economic theory while you quickly apologised for gulags.

It is fascinating, to me at least, to see a younger generation on the left reclaim “communism” – now in the shape of fully-automated luxury communism, which fuses the aims of egalitarianism with the inevitability of a robotised future. Lefties over 40 will never call themselves communists because the inevitable conversation about whether or not Stalin was evil is just too tedious. It is a glimpse of what it feels like to be seen, if a Muslim, as an apologist for Isis, but only a glimpse.

To get to the fundamental distinctions between socialism and communism, without going via Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong-un, it is useful to return to the source of both terms – Paris in the 1830s – when secret political societies sprang up to finish what the revolution had left undone. These groups were mainly discursive, though occasionally spilled out into street protest, dismissed at the time – this will be familiar – as mainly middle-class intellectuals. It’s a bizarre and, even more bizarrely, effective rightwing accusation: “Your movement is stupid because its proponents are too clever.”

It was often hard to disentangle one belief from the other since the words waxed and waned in popularity, were often used interchangeably, and both believed in revolution. However, very broadly, the socialists wanted central direction of industry but weren’t opposed to markets, while communists wanted to see an end of markets and money, with all endeavour freely chosen and paid for by coupon. Socialists weren’t against private property, though they were in favour of the common ownership of goods, and obviously there’s space in there to quibble about what can and can’t be legitimately held in common.

Communists believed in universal free education, and so did some socialists. There were societies fusing socialism and communism that preached class war, on the basis that the aristocracy was a cancer on the body politic and as dangerous to man as was the tiger to other animals; and thought, furthermore, the aristocracy of money was as bad as the aristocracy of blood.

However, by a process of self-sorting and vigorous infighting, the communists ended up the more trenchant on this killing-enemies point, while socialism by the mid-1800s was shot through with a much softer vision, in which science and the best of humanity would unite to create paradise on Earth through peaceful means. The Comtean Positivist Religion of Humanity, resting on the twin blessings of brotherly love and the natural goodness of mankind, was probably what finally did it for the socialists’ allegiance with the communists, who found them saccharine.

‘Karl Marx would roll in his grave.’ Photograph: Popperfoto

To put that in perspective, even by 1846, the first two items on the agenda of the Communist Correspondence Committee were: “1. An examination must be made of the Communist party. 2. This can be achieved by criticising the incompetent and separating them from the sources of money.” If you know you’re a socialist because it takes a lot of evenings, you know you’re communist when you hate the other people at your meeting worse than the devil (this is no longer the case with fully automated luxury communists, FYI).

Just as a new technological context has allowed a generation to re-imagine communism, so the tectonic movements in democracy, energy, climate, land, finance, money and work throw up questions to which the socialism of the 1830s, 1930s or 1980s could not possibly have the answers. How do you reconnect a socialist party to a grassroots movement in the absence of mass trade union membership? How do you bring energy back into common ownership? Is there any point in nationalising fossil fuels, or is the right to a common stake in a viable future more important? (In that case, only renewables are socialist). How do you arrest the concentration of land into the hands of the few, when it’s moving so fast? Is profit un-socialist by definition, or is it the legitimate result of a good decision, so long as the investment is accessible and pro-social? Indeed, is finance inherently capitalistic or can it be democratised and thereby socialised? (Mark Davis at the Bauman Institute releases a report on this on Thursday).

Come to that, now we understand money as a social resource – a marker of trust between people and institutions, with no innate value – should we socialise its creation? How do you build solidarity that doesn’t rely on work or a workplace? Probably the only solid socialist answer to any of these questions is that it’s within the wit of science and the innate goodness of the species to figure them all out. There are certainly no fixed lines, here, no spaces where a classic socialist could not possibly be flexible to the demands of the future, where a would-be socialist finds him or herself confronted with an idée fixe. Marx would roll in his grave.

You could question the value in using old principles to solve new problems: I would counter that those principles – common ownership, equality, fellowship, innovation, a belief that everyone’s welfare is everyone else’s business and that a better future for the next generation is the sine qua non – are universal and need no updating, for all that they don’t point in one obvious direction.

Finally, you could argue about the wisdom of returning to an old term when it risks derailing the quest for new answers. Yet the stigma around it is lifting. In the 90s and noughties, it was a shorthand for a person who didn’t understand modernity and couldn’t find political energy with a canary and a pit helmet. The fact that it’s being reclaimed, with pride, is probably the beginning of a very short answer: if you can ask, “Am I a socialist?” and not mind getting a “Yes”, then you probably are one, or at the very least, know some.

Does the left have a future?

All over the west, the left is in crisis. It cannot find answers to three urgent problems: the disruptive force of globalisation, the rise of populist nationalism, and the decline of traditional work.

by John Harris in The Guardian

There is more than one spectre haunting modern Europe: terrorism, the revival of the far right, the instability of Turkey, the fracturing of the EU project. And in mainstream politics, all across the continent, the traditional parties of the left are in crisis.

In Germany, the Social Democratic party, once a titanic party of government, has fallen below 20% in the national polls. In France, François Hollande’s ratings hover at around 15%, while the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party has seen its support almost halve in less than a decade.

The decline of Greece’s main social democratic party, which fell from winning elections to under 5% in less than a decade, was so rapid that it spawned a new word, “pasokification”, for the collapse of traditional centre-left parties. Even in Scandinavia, once-invincible parties of social democracy have been hit by increasingly disaffected voters, as rightwing populists stoke anxiety about immigration and its impact on the welfare state.

The reinvention of left politics in the countries most harshly affected by the Eurozone crisis might appear to offer grounds for new optimism. In Spain, Podemos rages against the political establishment it calls “la casta”, while Greece has seen the rise of Syriza, the upstart radical party that has been in government since 2015. The energy and iconoclasm of these two movements finds echoes elsewhere – witness the unexpected wave of support in the US for the Bernie Sanders campaign. But beyond the torrid Greek experience, these developments still feel more like an expression of protest and dissent than a sign of the imminent acquisition of power.

In Britain, the Labour party embodies almost all of the crises of the modern left. Labour still does well in big cities such as London, Bristol, Leeds and Manchester, but flounders in the south and east of England. The party may also be losing its hold on its old industrial heartlands, and in Scotland it looks headed for extinction. Labour’s poll ratings have been stuck in the same lowly place since before 2010.

This is not fundamentally about the party’s current internal strife. Labour is engulfed by the same crisis facing its sister parties in Europe. Political commentary tends to focus on politicians, and describe the world as if parties can be pulled here and there by the sheer will of powerful individuals. But Labour’s problems are systemic, rooted in the deepest structures of the economy and society. The left’s basic ideals of equality, solidarity and a protected public realm should be ageless. But everything on which it once built its strength has either disappeared, or is shrinking fast.

 The western left faces three grave challenges, which strike at the heart of its historic sense of what it is and who it speaks for. First, traditional work – and the left’s sacred notion of “the worker” – is fading, as people struggle through a new era of temporary jobs and rising self-employment, which may soon be succeeded by a drastic new age of automation. Second, there is a new wave of opposition to globalisation, led by forces on the right, which emphasise place and belonging, and a mistrust of outsiders. And all the time, politics rapidly fragments, which leaves the idea that one single party or ideology can represent a majority of people looking like a relic. The 20th century, in other words, really is over. Whether the left can return to meaningful power in the 21st is a question currently surrounded by a profound sense of doubt.

On the morning of May 8 2005, Tony Blair stood on the steps of Downing Street, after an unprecedented third consecutive Labour election victory. On the face of it, this provided proof of Labour’s newfound dominance, and another occasion for union jacks, talk of a new dawn, and the same blithe optimism that had carried Blair to power in 1997. But this time he took a much more hard-headed stance. Labour had just been been re-elected on 35.2% of the vote, with the support of only 22% of the electorate. The first-past-the-post system had worked its strange magic and taken the party back into government – but on the lowest figures for any government in the democratic age.

That day, Blair seemed contrite. “I’ve listened and I’ve learned, and I think I’ve a very clear idea what the people now expect from the government in a third term,” he said. “And I want to say to them very directly that I, we, the government, are going to focus relentlessly now on the priorities that people have set for us.” He spoke of the idea that “life is still a real struggle for many people”, and devoted one section of his speech to rising public angst about immigration.

Five months later, Blair made his 12th annual conference speech as party leader, and all traces of humility had vanished. His essential message reflected one of the key strands of his political theology: the mercurial magic of modern capitalism, and his mission to toughen up the country in response to the endless challenges of the free market. “Change is marching on again,” he announced, in that messianic tone that had begun to emerge in his speeches around the time of 9/11. “The pace of change can either overwhelm us, or make our lives better and our country stronger,” he went on. “What we can’t do is pretend it is not happening. I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

His next passage was positively evangelistic. “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”

I watched that speech on a huge screen in the conference exhibition area. And I recall thinking: “Most people are not like that.” The words rattled around my head: “Swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” And I wondered that if these were the qualities now demanded of millions of Britons, what would happen if they failed the test?

Listening to Blair describe his vision of the future – in which one’s duty was to get as educated as possible, before working like hell and frantically trying not to sink – I was struck by two things. First, the complete absence of any empathetic, human element (he mentioned the balance between life and work, but could only offer “affordable, wraparound childcare between the hours of 8am-6pm for all who need it”), and second, the sense that more than ever, I had no understanding of what values the modern Labour party stood for.

If modern capitalism was now a byword for insecurity and inequality, Labour’s response increasingly sounded like a Darwinian demand for people to accept that change, and do their best to ensure that they kept up. Worse still, those exacting demands were being made by a new clique of Labour politicians who were culturally distant from their supposed “core” voters, and fatally unaware of their rising disaffection.

In 2010, under Gordon Brown’s butter-fingered leadership, Labour fell to a miserable 29% of the vote – its lowest share since 1983, when it came within a whisker of finishing third. Five years later, despite opinion polls suggesting a possible Labour win, Ed Miliband could only raise Labour’s vote share by a single percentage point.

If the party hoped to reassemble the electoral coalition that had just about held together through the second half of the 20th century, the world that gave rise to it had clearly gone. Trade union membership was at an all-time low, heavy industry had disappeared, and traditional class consciousness had waned.

As those foundations crumbled, so did the party’s old nostrums of nationalisation and redistribution. In their place, and in unbelievably favourable circumstances that veiled Labour’s underlying weaknesses – a long economic boom, and a Conservative party incapable of coherence, let alone power – Blair and Brown had come up with a thin social democracy that stoked the risk-taking of the City and used the proceeds to spend huge amounts of money on public services. But the financial crisis had put an end to that model as well.

Meanwhile, as deindustrialisation ripped through 20th-century economies, the instability and fragmentation embodied by the financial and service sectors was taken to its logical conclusion by new digital businesses. In turn, the latter have spawned what some now call “platform capitalism”: a model whereby goods, services and labour can be rapidly exchanged between people, companies and multinational corporations – think of Uber, eBay, Airbnb or TaskRabbit, which link up freelance workers with people who need help with such tasks as cleaning, deliveries or moving home – with little need for any intermediate organisations. This has not only marginalised retailers and wholesalers. It calls into question the traditional role of trade unions, and further reduces the power of the state, which is now locked into a pattern where innovations take rapid flight and it cannot keep up.

In retrospect, the left’s halcyon era was based on a straightforward project. When the archetypal factory gates swung open, out came thousands of men – and by and large, they were men – united by an unchanging daily experience, and ready to support a political force that would use the unions, the state, and the fabled “mass party” to create a new, much fairer world in their monolithic image.

Now, an atomising, quicksilver economy bypasses those structures, and has fragmented people and places so thoroughly that assembling meaningful political coalitions has begun to appear almost impossible. These are the social and political conditions that define relatively prosperous places such as the commuter towns of Surrey, or Essex, the centres of the knowledge economy to be found around Cambridge, and the gleaming new town of Livingston in Scotland. And in a very different way, these new conditions can be experienced just as powerfully in the tracts of the UK that modernity seems to have left behind.

In the spring of 2013, a couple of days after the death of Margaret Thatcher, the Guardian dispatched me to the post-industrial south Wales town of Merthyr Tydfil, to talk to people about the legacy of her time in power. I had been there many times before, and always beheld a place in which Labour’s decline was not a matter of symbolism and metaphor, but something to be directly experienced.

Essentially, it is a place defined by absences: of the coal and steel industries, and the huge Hoover factory that closed in 2009 – but more generally, of the ideas and institutions that once defined the Labour party and the wider Labour movement. Between 1900 and 1915, Merthyr was represented in the House of Commons by Keir Hardie, Labour’s first leader and founding icon. In 1997, the party received an astonishing 77% of the vote in the town. But by 2010, that figure had crashed to 44%, as local politics belatedly reflected a lingering sense of dismay and loss that dated back to the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985.

As I drove into town, I clocked an EE call centre, which pays its customer services operatives around £16,000 a year. Outside the town’s vast Tesco, I spoke to two retired men, who understood what had happened to Merthyr as a kind of offence to their basic values. In the past, one of them told me, “a man wanted to be a working man: he didn’t want to be in here, stacking shelves”. When I asked him about the legacy of the miners’ strike, what he said was full of pathos and tragedy. “Thirty years ago, whatever … it’s still embedded in us down here, he said. “We still talk about it every day: what might have happened if it had gone the other way.”

In the town centre, I then met an 18-year-old who was finding it impossible to get a job. “I’ve applied and applied, and it’s all been declined,” she said. She wondered whether there was something wrong with her CV: the idea that there were perhaps larger forces to blame for her predicament did not enter the conversation. I wondered, did she know what a trade union was? “No,” she said. “I don’t. What’s that?”

One in seven Britons is now self-employed. In the US, Forbes magazine has predicted that by 2020, 50% of people will at least partly work on a freelance basis. In 2015, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that since 1995, “non-standard” jobs – which is to say, temporary, part-time or self-employed positions – accounted for the whole of net jobs growth in the UK since 1995.

Such is the rise of the so-called “gig economy”. Economists and sociologists talk about “the precariat”, a growing part of the population for whom work is not the basis of personal identity, but an on-off part of life from which they often need protection. Some of this, of course, is down to the venality and greed of businesses. But the central momentum behind it is rooted in technology, and what Marxists would call the “mode of production”. In a world in which businesses can survey their order books on an hourly basis and temporarily hire staff at the touch of a button, why would they base their arrangements on agreements that last for years?

Merthyr is still said to be a Labour heartland. But like so many other places, it is brimming with a sense of a politics now hopelessly out of time: older people whose sense of a meaningful Labour identity is tangled up in an increasingly distant past, and younger residents who know nothing of any of this, and have little sense of the relevance of politics to their lives. In Merthyr, 56% of voters supported Brexit; at the Welsh assembly elections of 2016, Ukip won 20% of the local vote. In such places, the sense of Labour’s fall is palpable.

Go to any traditional Labour area, and people will tell you that Labour was once “the party of the working man”. Even now, from its name onwards, this reductive understanding of Labour, its people and its essential mission still runs deep, not least within the party itself. In place of “the working man”, the New Labour years ushered in a politics pitched at “hard-working families”, a term partly intended to reflect people’s increasing antipathy towards people on benefits. Even when it was advocating enhancements to childcare and pre-school provision, Labour tended to do so in terms of getting new mothers back into paid employment as soon as possible.

Today’s Labour party has not shed these outmoded ideas about the nature of work. Both Owen Smith and Jeremy Corbyn have sketched utopian plans to somehow magic the world back to some unspecified time before 1980. Smith wants to revive the Ministry of Labour, done away with by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1968. Corbyn’s “10-point plan to rebuild and transform Britain” is all about “full employment and an economy that works for all”, and promises to restore “security to the workplace”. These visions are either naive or dishonest, but they reflect delusions that run throughout Labour and the left.

In a world in which work is changing radically, modern Conservatism applauds these shifts. For clued-up Tories, it is time to rebrand as “the workers’ party” – in which the worker is a totem of rugged individualism, not a symbol of solidarity. For proof, read Britannia Unchained, a breathless treatise about economics and the future of Britain co-authored by five Tory MPs who entered parliament in 2010: Kwasi Kwarteng, the new international development secretary Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss, who Theresa May appointed justice secretary in her first reshuffle. According to Britannia Unchained, the ideal modern worker is represented by the drivers who work for the London cab company Addison Lee. These people “work on a freelance basis. They can net £600 a week in take-home pay. But they have to work for it – up to 60 hours a week.” In this vision – taken to its logical conclusion by Uber – the acceptance of insecurity becomes a matter of heroism, and a new political division arises between the grafters and those – as Britannia Unchained witheringly puts it – “who enjoy public subsidies”. In other words, the “skivers” versus the “strivers”.

Blair tried to lead New Labour in this direction, but his attempts always jarred against his party’s ingrained support for the traditional welfare state and its attachment to increasingly old-fashioned ideas of secure employment. But in the context of the modern labour market, lionising work for its own sake will never bolster support for a politics built on those values. Instead, it may push people to the right.

People who work, after all, are no longer part of a monolithic mass: many increasingly think of themselves as lone agents, competing with others in much the same way that companies and corporations do. In the build-up to the 2015 election, I saw vivid proof of how fundamentally this erodes the left’s old understanding of its bond with its supporters.

In Plymouth, I watched a woman answer the door to a Labour canvasser with the words: “I’m a grafter – you ain’t doing nothing for me.” I spoke to a man in the north-eastern steeltown of Redcar who told me he would never vote Labour “because I work”. In the bellwether seat of Nuneaton, two women told me that Ed Miliband would probably win the election because “all the people on benefits” were going to vote for him. As these people saw it, Labour was no longer the “party of work”.

This is a hell of a knot to untangle. But for the left, a solution might begin with the understanding of an epochal shift that pushed politics beyond the workplace and the economy into the sphere of private life – a transition first articulated by feminism, with the assertion that “the personal is political”.

Belatedly building this insight into left politics does not entail a move away from the kind of regulation and intervention that might make modern working lives much more bearable, nor from the idea that government might foster more rewarding and useful work, chiefly via investment and education.

But beyond the old gospel of hard graft and the dignity of labour, any modern centre-left politics has to surely speak powerfully to elements of people’s lives – as citizens, carers, friends and parents – which it has long underplayed, and for which the incessant demands of modern capitalism leave little room. People on the left should be thinking about extending maternity and paternity leave and allowing its reprise when children are older; reviving adult education (often for its own sake, not just in terms of “reskilling”); assisting people in the creation of neighbourhood support networks that might belatedly answer the decline of the extended family; and, most obviously, enabling people to shorten their working week – think about a three-day weekend, and you begin to get a flavour of the left politics of the future.

The deep changes wrought by our ageing society will anyway begin to increase the numbers of people beyond working age, and accelerate the shift away from paid work towards caring. But the most radical shift will be caused by automation and its effects on employment. If the Bank of England now reckons that as many as 15m British jobs are under threat from technology, and if a third of jobs in the retail sector are predicted to disappear by 2025, does the myopic, often macho rhetoric of work and the worker really articulate any meaningful vision?

The left naturally embraced the mantra of the Occupy movement – the glaring division between the super rich and the rest of us embodied by the slogan “We are the 99%”. Objectively, the idea of a division between a tiny, light-footed international elite and everybody else holds true. But in everyday life, this division finds little expression.

Instead, the rising inequality fostered by globalisation and free-market economics manifests itself in a cultural gap that is tearing the left’s traditional constituency in two. Once, social democracy – or, if you prefer, democratic socialism – was built on the support of both the progressive middle class and the parts of the working class who were represented by the unions. Now, a comfortable, culturally confident constituency seems to stare in bafflement at an increasingly resentful part of the traditionally Labour-supporting working class.

The first group has an internationalised culture, a belief in what the modern vernacular calls diversity, and the confidence that comes with education and relative affluence. It can apparently cope with its version of job insecurity (think the freelance software developer, rather than the warehouse worker on a zero-hours contract). But on the other side are people who have a much more negative view of globalisation and modernity – and in particular, the large-scale movement of people. In the UK, they tend to live in the places that have largely voted Labour but supported leaving the EU, and whose loudest response to globalisation is to re-embrace precisely the “custom and practice”, as Blair put it, that modern economies tend to squash: to emphasise place and belonging, and assert an essentially defensive national identity.

Does anyone on the left want to write off the working-class voters who chose Brexit as a mass of bigots and racists?

From a sympathetic perspective, to put out a flag can be a gesture way beyond mere jingoism. It often stands as an assertion of esteem – and collective esteem, at that – in an insecure, unstable world that frequently seems to deny people any at all. Those who were once coalminers or steelworkers may now be temporarily-employed “operatives” waiting for word of that week’s working hours. In a cultural sense, by contrast, national identity offers people at least some prospect of regaining a sense of who they are, and why that represents something important. Even when it comes to resentments around immigration, a nuanced, empathetic understanding should not be beyond anyone’s grasp: people can be disorientated by rapid population change and anxious to assert a sense of place without such feelings turning hateful.

There is also a much nastier side to all this – a surge in racism, which has happened all over Europe, and appears to have been given grim licence by the Brexit vote. Even so, does anyone on the left want to write off the 3.8m people who voted for Ukip in 2012 – or the even larger number of working-class voters who chose Brexit – as a mass of bigots and racists? Even in its most unpleasant manifestations, most prejudice has a wider context, and it is clear that these modern antipathies are most keenly felt in places that have either been left behind by modernity, or represent its most difficult elements: insecure job markets, scarce housing, overstretched public services.

And this new mood is growing partly because of factors tangled up with the decline of the left: the demise of trade unions and the traditional workplace, which have left political vacuums now filled by another form of collective identity. A glaring example is the new politics of England and Englishness, which is as much bound up with class as it is with place, and has so far simmered away without finding a coherent expression.

I have met enough people who have identified themselves as “English” to know that it is usually not just a matter of national pride. It also tends to translate as a set of defiant cultural rejections, on the part of people who are not middle-class, not from London, and angry about the way that people who fit both those descriptions view the rest of the country. The UK census of 2011 was the first ever to include a question about national identity – and in England, 60% of people described themselves as English only. But the left, in Britain as much as in Europe, remains in denial about why people have taken refuge in such expressions of nationhood. This is something that applies to both so-called “Blairites”, and Corbyn and his supporters: one is so enraptured by globalisation that it thinks of vocal expressions of patriotism as a retrogressive block on progress; the other cleaves to a rose-tinted internationalism that regards such things as a facade for bigotry.

In 2014, I spent three days in and around the Kent coast, following Ukip activists, and talking to people watching their manoeuvres. In the town of Broadstairs, a group of energetic leftwing activists – who would go on to found a thriving local branch of the pro-Corbyn group Momentum – had organised a day of campaigning against Ukip, focused on Nigel Farage’s candidacy in the seat of South Thanet. I watched them debate with a man sitting on the town’s seafront, who was determined to vote for Farage, and scornful of their attempts to dissuade him.

“He’s going to be voted in, and there’s nothing you people can do about it,” he said, gesturing to them with a kind of camp contempt.

He then explained his main source of anger. His son, he said, had a speech disability, and could not find work in his chosen field of catering. “Nobody will give him a job. But a foreigner could come over here and speak not one word of English and they get a job.”

The truth of this was batted around for two or three minutes, before he came to his conclusion. “I’m brassed off,” he said, and he then spoke pointedly about his own sense of insecurity. “I’m a working man. I’ve paid all my taxes and everything. And if anything goes wrong with me or my family and I get thrown out of my house because I can’t pay my mortgage, I’ll get put in a bedsit.”

What, then, did he want? “A better England,” he said, and I could instantly sense that he had a basic set of grievances – about insecurity and unfairness – to which the political left would once have been able to confidently speak. Unfortunately, in the absence of any meaningful cultural bonds, the avowedly leftwing people to whom he was talking were residents of a completely different reality.

Can things be any different? If left politics is not to shrink into a metropolitan shadow of itself and abandon hope of gaining national power, they have to. Indeed, if British politics is not to speed towards the kind of nasty populism taking root all over Europe and calling the shots in such countries as Poland and Hungary, this is a matter of urgency – not least because as automation takes hold, the disorientation on which the new rightwing politics feeds will only increase.

Scotland is perhaps instructive. The Scottish National party’s essential triumph has been to bond with millions of people via a modern, “civic” kind of nationhood, and thereby recast a social democratic model of government in terms of identity and belonging – rather than standing on the other side of a cultural divide, as Labour now does in England. To some extent, this is a matter of clever branding, and the successive political feats pulled off by Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon: the lion’s share of SNP MPs and MSPs are almost as metropolitan and media-savvy as the scions of New Labour were. But for the time being, it undoubtedly works.

South of the border, by contrast, a key part of Labour’s crisis is that it so clearly fails to speak to swaths of England – and Wales – and leaves these places open to political forces that want to sever their residual links to left politics for good. Circa 2006, it was the BNP. From around 2012 onwards, Ukip began to slowly push into Labour’s old heartlands. Now, the millionaire Ukip donor Arron Banks is said to be mulling over a new party that might capitalise on the support for Brexit in working-class Labour areas and deliver them a new political identity. The stakes, then, are unbelievably high: if the left cannot speak for the people it once represented as a matter of instinct, much more malign forces will.

If the left’s predicament comes down to a single fault, it is this. It is very good at demanding change, but pretty hopeless at understanding it. Supposedly radical elements too often regard deep technological shifts as the work of greedy capitalists and rightwing politicians, and demand that they are rolled back. Meanwhile, the self-styled moderates tend to advocate large-scale surrender, instead of recognising that technological and economic changes can create new openings for left ideas. A growing estrangement from the left’s traditional supporters makes these problems worse, and one side tends to cancel out the other. The result: as people experience dramatic change in their everyday lives, they form the impression that half of politics has precious little to say to them.

In a political reality as complex as ours, there are inevitable problems for the political right as well. It is a long time since the Conservative party has spoken the visceral, populist language that was the hallmark of Margaret Thatcher. As with Blair in 2005, the Tories were recently elected to power with the support of less than a quarter of the electorate. Similarly, in Germany, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats once vied with the Social Democrats for the support of a majority of the population, but they are now down to around 30%. But modern challenges for the centre-right will always be less difficult than they are for the left. The former, after all, seeks to safeguard and advance modern capitalism rather than substantially change it. Even in the absence of a broad social base, the right is sustained by big business and the conservative press, which give it huge political advantages.

The left has responded to its crisis by looking endlessly inward – but occasionally, there are flashes of hope. There is a rising recognition, among both former followers of Blair and alumni of the traditional left, that Labour’s old majoritarian dreams are probably finished – and that it should finally embrace proportional representation and build new alliances and coalitions. This change would probably trigger a split between the party’s estranged left and right, and thereby bring Britain into line with the rest of Europe, where the left’s crisis is highlighted by a tussle between traditional social democrats and new radicals.

In Britain and plenty of other places, there is growing interest in the idea of a universal basic income, built on an understanding of accelerating economic changes, and their far-reaching consequences for the left’s almost religious attachment to the glories of paid employment. It is early days for such a leap. But proposing that the state should meet some or all of people’s basic living costs would be an implicit acknowledgement that work alone cannot possibly deliver the collective security that the left has always seen as its basic mission, and that space has to be created for the other elements of people’s lives.

Whether the left can come to terms with the new politics of national identity and belonging and thereby rein in its nastier aspects is a much more difficult question – but if it doesn’t, its activists may very well gaze at their parties’ old “core” supporters across an impossible divide.

Perhaps the most generous verdict is that here and across the world, the left – radicals and liberals alike – is stuck in an interregnum. You could compare it to the predicament of the 1980s, but it is even more reminiscent of the 1930s, when the aftershocks of an economic crash saw the left pushed aside by the politics of hatred and division.

In 1931, the great Labour thinker RH Tawney wrote a short text titled The Choice Before the Labour Party, casting a cold eye over its predicament in terms that ring as true now as they must have done then. Labour, he wrote, “does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants. It frets out of office and fumbles in it, because it lacks the assurance either to wait or to strike. Being without clear convictions as to its own meaning and purpose, it is deprived of the dynamic which only convictions supply. If it neither acts with decision nor inspires others so to act, the principal reason is that it is itself undecided.”

No party can exist forever. Political traditions can decline, and then take on new forms; some simply become extinct. All that can be said with certainty is that if the left is to finally leave the 20th century, the process will have to start with the ideas and convictions that answer the challenges of a modernity it is only just starting to wake up to, let alone understand.

Why are corrupt politicians popular in India

This is an excerpt from a speech by India’s Reserve Bank of India chairman Raghuram Rajan. The full text is available here.


Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant, an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians.

By killing transparency and competition, crony capitalism is harmful to free enterprise, opportunity, and economic growth. And by substituting special interests for the public interest, it is harmful to democratic expression. If there is some truth to these perceptions of crony capitalism, a natural question is why people tolerate it. Why do they vote for the venal politician who perpetuates it?

A hypothesis on the persistence of crony capitalism

One widely held hypothesis is that our country suffers from want of a “few good men” in politics. This view is unfair to the many upstanding people in politics. But even assuming it is true, every so often we see the emergence of a group, usually upper middle class professionals, who want to clean up politics. But when these “good” people stand for election, they tend to lose their deposits. Does the electorate really not want squeaky clean government?

Apart from the conceit that high morals lie only with the upper middle class, the error in this hypothesis may be in believing that problems stem from individual ethics rather than the system we have. In a speech I made before the Bombay Chamber of Commerce in 2008, I argued that the tolerance for the venal politician is because he is the crutch that helps the poor and underprivileged navigate a system that gives them so little access. This may be why he survives.

Let me explain. Our provision of public goods is unfortunately biased against access by the poor. In a number of states, ration shops do not supply what is due, even if one has a ration card – and too many amongst the poor do not have a ration card or a BPL card; Teachers do not show up at schools to teach; The police do not register crimes, or encroachments, especially if committed by the rich and powerful; Public hospitals are not adequately staffed and ostensibly free medicines are not available at the dispensary; …I can go on, but you know the all-too-familiar picture.

This is where the crooked but savvy politician fits in. While the poor do not have the money to “purchase” public services that are their right, they have a vote that the politician wants. The politician does a little bit to make life a little more tolerable for his poor constituents – a government job here, an FIR registered there, a land right honoured somewhere else. For this, he gets the gratitude of his voters, and more important, their vote. Of course, there are many politicians who are honest and genuinely want to improve the lot of their voters. But perhaps the system tolerates corruption because the street smart politician is better at making the wheels of the bureaucracy creak, however slowly, in favour of his constituents. And such a system is self-sustaining. An idealist who is unwilling to “work” the system can promise to reform it, but the voters know there is little one person can do. Moreover, who will provide the patronage while the idealist is fighting the system? So why not stay with the fixer you know even if it means the reformist loses his deposit?

So the circle is complete. The poor and the under-privileged need the politician to help them get jobs and public services. The crooked politician needs the businessman to provide the funds that allow him to supply patronage to the poor and fight elections. The corrupt businessman needs the crooked politician to get public resources and contracts cheaply. And the politician needs the votes of the poor and the underprivileged. Every constituency is tied to the other in a cycle of dependence, which ensures that the status quo prevails. Well-meaning political leaders and governments have tried, and are trying, to break this vicious cycle. How do we get more politicians to move from “fixing” the system to reforming the system? The obvious answer is to either improve the quality of public services or reduce the public’s dependence on them. Both approaches are necessary. But then how does one improve the quality of public services? The typical answer has been to increase the resources devoted to the service, and to change how it is managed. A number of worthwhile efforts are underway to improve the quality of public education and healthcare. But if resources leak or public servants are not motivated, which is likely in the worst governed states, these interventions are not very effective.

Some have argued that making a public service a right can change delivery. It is hard to imagine that simply legislating rights and creating a public expectation of delivery will, in fact, ensure delivery. After all, is there not an expectation that a ration card holder will get decent grain from the fair price shop, yet all too frequently grain is not available or is of poor quality. Information decentralization can help. Knowing how many medicines the local public dispensary received, or how much money the local school is getting for mid-day meals, can help the public monitor delivery and alert higher-ups when the benefits are not delivered. But the public delivery system is usually most apathetic where the public is poorly educated, of low social status, and disorganized, so monitoring by the poor is also unlikely to be effective.

Some argue that this is why the middle class should enjoy public benefits along with the poor, so that the former can protest against poor delivery, which will ensure high quality for all. But making benefits universal is costly, and may still lead to indifferent delivery for the poor. The middle class may live in different areas from the poor. Indeed, even when located in the same area, the poor may not even patronize facilities frequented by the middle class because they feel out of place. And even when all patronize the same facility, providers may be able to discriminate between the voluble middle class and the uncomplaining poor. So if more resources or better management are inadequate answers, what might work?

The answer may partly lie in reducing the public’s dependence on government-provided jobs or public services. A good private sector job, for example, may give a household the money to get private healthcare, education, and supplies, and reduce their need for public services. Income could increase an individual’s status and increase the respect they are accorded by the teacher, the policeman or the bureaucrat. But how does a poor man get a good job if he has not benefited from good healthcare and education in the first place? In this modern world where good skills are critical to a good job, the unskilled have little recourse but to take a poorly-paying job or to look for the patronage that will get them a good job. So do we not arrive at a contradiction: the good delivery of public services is essential to escape the dependence on bad public services?

Money liberates and Empowers…
We need to go back to the drawing board. There is a way out of this contradiction, developing the idea that money liberates. Could we not give poor households cash instead of promising them public services? A poor household with cash can patronize whomsoever it wants, and not just the monopolistic government provider. Because the poor can pay for their medicines or their food, they will command respect from the private provider. Not only will a corrupt fair price shop owner not be able to divert the grain he gets since he has to sell at market price, but because he has to compete with the shop across the street, he cannot afford to be surly or lazy.

The government can add to the effects of empowering the poor by instilling a genuine cost to being uncompetitive – by shutting down parts of the public delivery systems that do not generate enough custom. Much of what we need to do is already possible. The government intends to announce a scheme for full financial inclusion on Independence Day. It includes identifying the poor, creating unique biometric identifiers for them, opening linked bank accounts, and making government transfers into those accounts. When fully rolled out, I believe it will give the poor the choice and respect as well as the services they had to beg for in the past. It can break a link between poor public service, patronage, and corruption that is growing more worrisome over time.

Why the Tory project is bust

David Hare in The Guardian


Just over 40 years ago, I wrote a play called Knuckle which tried out for two weeks at the Oxford Playhouse, before going on to open in the West End. It was my fourth full-length play, and one that suffered an extremely difficult birth. I was 26. If only I had known it, its reception was to have a decisive and lasting effect on my life. Knuckle was produced at a time of bitter and fundamental industrial disputes, so the hotel I stayed in along from the theatre was subject to blackouts. It was February and it was freezing cold, and there were evenings when the hotel was lit only by candles placed on the stairs and in my room. 

Edward Heath, a Conservative prime minister, was about to announce a markedly unwise election based around the question of “Who runs Britain?” He was tired, he said, of the trade unions having too much power and he wanted to settle the arguments between government and workers once and for all. At the end of February 1974, the electorate gave him a dusty answer – it is always said to be a mistake to go to the people with a question they expect you to answer for yourself – but Heath hung on for a few undignified days in Downing Street, trying to cobble together a coalition, before gracelessly accepting the inevitable. Harold Wilson, the victor, quickly settled with the miners, and the lights came back on again.

The past is comparatively safe, next to the present, because we know how at least one of them turns out. Or do we? One of my purposes last year in publishing a memoir, The Blue Touch Paper, was to reclaim the 1970s from the image that politicians of one fierce bent have successfully imposed with the help of largely compliant historians. The now-familiar version of our island story is that we all spent the 1970s in industrial chaos, with successive governments failing to confront the overbearing unions, until Margaret Thatcher arrived and set about deregulating markets, privatising public assets and generally encouraging citizens to work only for ourselves and our own self-interest. This, we have been continually told over three decades of sustained propaganda, was wholly to the good. The country we now live in with all its crazy excesses of inequality and flagrant immorality in the workplace – bosses in large firms averaging 160 times the salaries of their worst-off employees – is said to be far superior to how it was in the days when labour still held management in some kind of check.

History belongs to the victors. Conservatives in Britain now command not just the economy but the narrative as well, and three recent Labour governments have done little to challenge it. But it is not the case that everything was in chaos until 1979, since when everything has been bliss. The 1970s were disputatious times, times of profound and often bitter argument. Living through them was not easy, and a lot of us suffered wounds that took years to heal. But the political discussions we were having – in particular about how the wishes of working-class employees could be more creatively taken into account – were about important things, things that, disastrously, present-day politicians disdain to address. The shocking rancour of the 1970s now looks like a symptom of their vitality. Today’s quiescence seems more like a phenomenon of resignation than of contentment.

 

David Hare’s play Knuckle in 1974 featured a father and son who represented two contrasting strands in conservatism. Photograph: Comedy Theatre

Knuckle was a youthful pastiche of an American thriller, relocating the myth of the hard-boiled private eye incongruously into the home counties. Curly Delafield, a young arms dealer, returns to Guildford in order to try and find his sister Sarah who has disappeared. But in the process he finds himself freshly infuriated by the civilised hypocrisy of his father Patrick Delafield, a stockbroker of the old school. In the play father and son represent two contrasting strands in conservatism. Patrick, the father, is cultured, quiet and responsible. Curly, the son, is aggressive, buccaneering and loud. One of them sees the creation of wealth as a mature duty to be discharged for the benefit of the whole community, with the aim of perpetuating a way of life that has its own distinctive character and tradition. But the other character, based on various criminal or near-criminal racketeers who were beginning to play a more prominent role in British finance in the 1970s, sees such thinking as outdated. Curly’s own preference is to make as much money as he can in as many fields as he can and then to get out fast.

The first thing to notice about my play is that it was written in 1973. Margaret Thatcher was not elected until six years later. So whatever the impact of her arrival at the end of decade, it would be wrong to say that she brought anything very new to a Tory schism that had been latent for years. Surely, she showed power and conviction in advancing the cause of the Curly Delafield version of capitalism – no good Samaritan could operate, she once argued, unless the Samaritan were filthy rich in the first place. How else to explain the fact that the very split that she formally confronted in the different mindsets within her government – she named the two opposing sides “wets” and “drys” – was explored in my work at the Oxford Playhouse more than five years before? In 1951, resolving never to vote for them again, the novelist Evelyn Waugh had complained that the Conservative party in his lifetime “had never put the clock back a single second”. But the administrations that Thatcher first led and then inspired have never shown interest in conserving anything at all. The giveaway, for once, has not been in the name.

You may say that the party aims, like all such parties, to keep the well off well off. That, never forget, is any rightwing grouping’s conservative mission, which will offer a blindingly simple explanation for the larger part of its behaviour. And for obvious reasons, the money party in this particular culture has also aimed to perpetuate the narcotic influence of the monarchy. But with these two exceptions, it is hard to think of any area of public activity – education, justice, defence, health, culture – which any of the last seven Conservative governments have been interested in protecting, let alone conserving. On the contrary, they have preferred a state of near‑Maoist revolution, complaining that, in an extraordinary coincidence, almost every aspect of British life except retail and finance is incompetently organised. Who could have imagined it? And after all those dominant Conservative governments! In this belief, they have launched waves of attacks against teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen and women, soldiers, social workers, civil servants, local councillors, firefighters, broadcasters and transport workers – all of whom they openly scorn for the mortal sin of not being financiers or entrepreneurs.

For a party that is meant to like people, and to believe in enabling them, the modern Conservative party, once inclusive, has had, to say the least, a funny way of showing it. From every government department we regularly expect sallies against the very people who toil in the sector that the minister is supposed to lead. If there were at this moment a Ministry of Fruit Picking, you can be damn sure that the only way an ambitious Tory minister could advance his career would be by launching a blistering attack on the feckless indolence and inefficiency of fruit pickers.

It would be dishonest, however, to pretend any kind of nostalgia for the earlier, smugger form of conservatism. It is commonly said that leaders such as Harold Macmillan had either fought in the trenches or known men at first hand in their industrial constituencies and so gained a respect for working-class life, which the 21st-century leadership, with its upmarket aura of fine wine and evenings spent manspreading with sofa-sprawled box sets, conspicuously lacks. But this is to ignore the repellent layer of snobbery on which such sympathy relied. Even if, like me, you find the modern snobbery of a Notting Hill Cameron, who would rather be seen to be cool than to be caught out being compassionate, even more disgusting than the old-fashioned kind – because it is so much more cynical and calculated – nevertheless there was in the blimpish tone of the old conservatism an air of right-to-rule that saw the country as its plaything and government as its entitlement. Winston Churchill’s outrage at being booted out at the end of the second world war and the ruling class’s linking of the words “inexplicable” and “ingratitude” in the face of the hugely beneficial result speaks of an entire class culture that had at its heart a group resolution neither to understand nor to explain.

As the years have passed, the contradictions within conservatism have seemed to reach some kind of breaking point at which it is very hard to see how its central tenets can continue to make sense. Admittedly, since the severe recession brought about by the banks, Conservative administrations have found favour with the electorate while Labour has languished. At the election a year ago, Conservatives did somehow scrape together votes from almost 24% of the electorate. But such an outcome has done nothing to shake my basic conviction. In its essential thinking, the Tory project is bust.

The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher. Whatever your view of her influence, she was different from her predecessors in her degree of intellectuality. She was unusually interested in ideas. Groomed by Chicago economists, she believed that Britain, robbed of the easy commercial advantages of its imperial reach, could thenceforth only prosper if it became competitive with China, with Japan, with America and with Germany. For this reason, in 1979, a crackpot theory called monetarism was briefly put into practice and allowed to wreak the havoc that destroyed one fifth of British industry. As soon as this futile theory had been painfully discredited, Conservative minds switched to obsessing on what they really wanted: the promotion and propagation of the so-called free market. If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism.

It is painful to point out how completely this grafting of foreign ideas onto the British economy has failed. The financial crash of 2008 dispelled once and for all the ingenious theory of the free market. The only thing, ideologues had argued, that could distort a market was the imposition of unnecessary rules and regulations by a third party, which had no vested interest in the outcome of the transaction and that was therefore a meddling force that robbed markets of their magnificent, near-mystical wisdom. These meddling forces were called governments. The flaw in the theory became apparent as soon as it was proved, once and for all, that irresponsible behaviour in a market did not simply affect the parties involved but could also, thanks to the knock-on effects of modern derivatives, bring whole national economies to their knees. The crappy practices of the banks did not punish only the guilty. Over and over, they punished the innocent far more cruelly. The myth of the free market had turned out to be exactly that: a myth, a Trotsykite fantasy, not real life.

Even disciples of Milton Friedman in Chicago were willing to admit the scale of the rout. They openly used the words “Back to the drawing board”. But in an astonishing act of corporate blackmail, the banks themselves then insisted that they be subsidised by the state. The very same taxpayers whom they had just defrauded had to dig in their pockets to pay for the bankers’ offences. Although state aid could no longer be tolerated as a good thing for regular citizens, who, it was said, were prone to becoming depraved, spoilt and junk-food-dependent when offered free money, subsidy could still be offered, when needed, on a dazzling scale, to benefit those who were already among our country’s most privileged and who were, by coincidence, the sole progenitors of its economic collapse. What a stroke of luck! Socialism, too good for the poor, turned out to be just the ticket for the rich.

It was the Labour government of Gordon Brown that consented to this first act of blackmail. It had little choice. There were dark threats from the banks of taking the whole country down with them. But it was the City-friendly Conservatives, learning nothing from history, who caved in without protest to a second, more outrageous wave of blackmail. The banks that had led us into the recession then argued that they were the only people who could lead us out. And the only way they could restore prosperity, they insisted, was by returning unpunished to exactly the same practices that had precipitated the crisis in the first place.

It has become impossible for any Conservative to argue for a free market when they do everything in their power to forbid free movement of labour. One is impossible without the other. A market, by definition, cannot be free if it operates behind artificial walls, or if it deliberately excludes traders who can offer their goods and services at a more competitive price. At the moment many such traders are volunteering to arrive and lend our market exactly the vigour that Conservatives always say it needs. But all too many of them, whether from Aleppo or from Tripoli, are dying with their children in open boats in the Mediterranean because the home secretary, Theresa May, is telling them that when she talks of the “free market”, she doesn’t actually mean it. She means “protected market”. She means “our market”. She means “market for people like us”. How can anyone with a trace of consistency or personal honour stand up and declare that international competitiveness is the sole criterion of national success, while at the same time excluding from that competition anyone who can compete better than you? Economic migrants, showing exactly the qualities of risk-taking, courage, independence, and family responsibility that Conservatives affect to admire are invited by May to plunge to their deaths in the sea rather than to trade.

The outcome of the Conservatives’ 30-year love affair with the idea that Britain is at heart no different from China, †he US or Germany, has inevitably been a sense of threat to the idea of national identity. Once Thatcher surrendered a native British conservatism to an American one, she knew full well that the side-effect would be to destroy ties and communities that held society together. By her own policies, she was reduced to petulant gestures. At Downing Street receptions she replaced the despised Perrier with good British Malvern water, but nobody was fooled. If international capital did indeed rule the world, then nothing made Britain special. On the contrary, it was on its way to being little more than a brand, defined, presumably, by the union jack, Cilla Black, Shakespeare, Jimmy Savile, Merrydown cider, and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. “We are a grandmother,” offered to cameras in the street on the birth of her first grandchild, represented a grammatical formulation halfway between patriotism and lunacy, intended to suggest the unique syntactical glamour of the English language. With the flick of a single pronoun, anyone could make themselves royalty. But on Thatcher’s watch, Britishness was now just bunting, a Falklands mug, a pretence.

 

A protest outside the Home Office against the Conservative government’s immigration policies, in 2015. Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Alamy

Since then, successive Conservative governments have agonised long-windedly about the problem of how to make citizens loyal to a nation at the very moment when they are declaring the primacy of the economic system over the local culture. Their words die as soon as spoken, because everyone can see that if a government is unwilling to lift a finger to save those few organisations – like, for example, the steel industry – that do indeed forge communities, then all their rhetoric is so much guff. The home secretary, hitting syllables with a hammer as to a backward class of four year-olds, gloweringly asks everyone to share what she calls “British values”. Yet her own values, which she shares with the gilded David Cameron and George Osborne, include support for drone strikes and targeted assassination, the right to intercept private communications, the intention to curtail freedom of speech, the imposition of impossible limits on industrial action, a fierce contempt for any of the sick or unfortunate who have relied on the support of the state in order to stay alive, and a policy of selling lethal weapons to totalitarian allies who use them to bomb schools. The home secretary contemplates with equanimity the figure of the 2,380 disabled people who died in the little more than two years following Ian Duncan Smith’s legislation that recategorised them as “fit to work”. I don’t. By these standards, am I even British? Do I “share values” with Theresa May? Do I hell.

There will certainly be those who think me wistful in imagining that just because a headbangers’ conservatism no longer makes any intellectual sense that it is therefore finished. You will point, correctly, to the resilience of the Tory party and its ability to adapt at all times to changing circumstance. In the autumn of 2015, Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, ready to warn us of what he insisted with relish were the harsh realities of global capitalism – Oh God, how Tories love saying “harsh realities” – insisted that Britain could only compete with China if it lowered state benefits and slashed tax credits for working people. It was, he said, essential for our whole future as a nation. But when George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, then reversed his announced plan to slash those tax credits because such slashing would have represented a threat to his own advancement to Downing Street, that same Jeremy Hunt fell, on the instant, conspicuously silent.

It is, you may think, exactly such calculating practicality that is keeping the Tory ship floating long after its engine has died. You will add that the problems of how individual cultures are to endure the assaults of global corporations are, after all, not confined to Britain. Even if the government were of a radically different colour, you may say, it too would be facing the almost impossible challenge of asking how any country is to maintain meaningful democracy in the face of a predatory capitalism run by a kleptocratic class, which feels entitled to skim money at will. Would any faction honestly do better than the Tories at dealing with businesses run for no other purpose than the personal enrichment of their executives?

David Cameron arrived in office aware that a conservatism that was purely economic could not possibly meet the needs of the country, and therefore chose to advance an unlikely system of volunteerism, which he called the “big society”. It was, self-evidently, a palliative, nothing more, the lazy shrug of a faltering conscience, and one that predictably lasted no longer than the life cycle of a mosquito. Alert to a problem, Cameron lacked the fortitude to pursue its solution. Instead, Conservative ministers have fallen back on the more familiar, far more routine strategy of sour rhetoric, petulantly blaming the people for their failure to live up to the promise of their leaders’ policies. Do you have to be my age to remember a time when politicians aimed to lead, rather than to lecture? Is anyone old enough to recall a government whose ostensible mission was to serve us, not to improve us? When did magnanimity cease to be one of those famous British virtues we are ordered to share?

 

Prime Minister David Cameron makes a speech on the ‘big society’ in 2011. Photograph: WPA Pool/Getty Images

Commentators excoriate the politics of envy, but the politics of spite gets a free pass. Jeremy Hunt hates doctors. Theresa May despises the police. John Whittingdale resents public broadcasters. Chris Grayling loathed prison officers and Michael Gove famously had it in for teachers. Nowadays that’s what is called politics and that’s all politicians, Conservative-style, do. They voice grievances against a stubborn electorate that is never as far-seeing or radical as they are. Like Blair before him, Cameron has reduced the act of government to a sort of murmuring grudge, a resentment, in which politicians continually tell the surly people that we lack the necessary virtues for survival in the modern world. They know perfectly well that we hate them, and so their only response is to hate us back. Politics has been reduced to a sort of institutionalised nagging, in which a rack of pampered professionals, cut from the eye of the ruling class, tells everyone else that they don’t “get it”, and that they must “measure up” and “change their ways”. Having discharged their analysis, the preachers then invariably scoot off through wide-open doors to 40th-floor boardrooms to make themselves frictionless fortunes as greasers and lobbyists – or, as they prefer to say, “consultants”.

Of all the privatisations of the last 30 years, none has been more catastrophic than the privatisation of virtue. A doctor recently remarked that she was happy to put up with long hours and underpayment because she knew she was working in the service of an ideal. But, she said, if the NHS were so reorganised that she were then asked to suffer the same degree of overwork to provide profits for some rip-off private health company, she would walk away and refuse. In describing her motivation in this simple way, she put her finger on everything that has gone wrong in Britain under the tyranny of abstract ideas. Why do we work? Who are we working for? As Groucho Marx once asked: “If work’s so great, why don’t the rich do it?” People are ready, happy and willing to do things for our common benefit that they are reluctant to do if it is all in the interests of companies such as British Telecom, Virgin Railways, EDF Energy, Talk Talk, HSBC, Kraft Foods and Barclays Bank, outfits that still have little or no interest in balancing out their prosperity in a fair manner between their employees and their shareholders.

The reason we have been governed so badly is because government has been in the hands of those who least believe in it. Politicians have become little more than go-betweens, their principal function to hand over taxpayers’ assets, always in car boot sales and always at way less than market value. No longer having faith in their own competence, politicians have blithely surrendered the state’s most basic duties. Even the care and detention of prisoners, and thereby the protection of citizens from danger, has been given to contractors, as though the state no longer trusted itself to open a gate, build a wall, or serve a three-course meal. With foreign policy delegated to Washington, and consciences delegated by private contract to callous logistics companies, no wonder the profession of politics in Britain is having a nervous breakdown of its own making.

In the years after the second world war, under successive administrations of either party, we profited from purposeful initiatives, building the welfare state, the housing stock and the NHS. We voted for leaders who shared a common-sense belief that government was necessary to do good. They entered politics partly because they believed in its essential usefulness. How strange it is, then, this new breed of self-hating politicians who want to make a healthy living in politics, while at the same time insisting that the only function of politics is to get out of the way of private enterprise. Ever since Ronald Reagan announced that he would campaign on a platform of smaller government, it has been an article of faith on the right to insist that the state must play an ever smaller part in the country’s affairs. But the paradox of a Thatcher or a Reagan is that they fulminate all the time against the state while living lavishly off it. Our current administration advises everyone else to strip back and face the new demands of austerity. Meanwhile, it employs 68 unelected special advisers to fix Tory policy at taxpayers’ expense, while busily ordering a private jet for the prime minister’s travel.

How did we get here? And how do we move on? Prince Charles, questioning a monk in Kyoto about the road to enlightenment, was asked in reply if he could ever forget that he was a prince. “Of course not,” Charles replied, “One’s always aware of it. One’s always aware one’s a prince.” In that case, said the monk, he would never know the road to enlightenment. A similar need to forget our pretensions must newly govern our politics. We do not live in a free market. No such thing as a free market exists. Nor can it. The world is far too complex, far too interconnected. All markets are rigged. The only question that need concern us is: in whose interest? In the light of this question, obsessive Tory spasms about Europe are revealed as a doomed attempt to re-rig the market even further in their own favour, so that the same exclusion orders that prevent Syrians and Libyans from threatening our carefully protected wealth should in future keep out over-eager Hungarians, Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians. Far from wishing to free the country to compete in the world, anti-European Union sentiment in Britain is, in Tory hearts, about protecting Britain yet more effectively.

The first task British politics has to address is correcting the terrible harm we have done ourselves by assuming that nothing can be achieved through collective enterprise. It is as much a failure of national imagination as it is of national will. When I woke up on the morning after Knuckle opened in London, on 5 March 1974, then the stinging impact of the play’s rejection by audiences and critics alike forced me finally to admit to myself that I was not just a theatre director who happened to write, but that I was, indeed, going to spend the rest of my life as a professional playwright.

In the 1980s and 1990s, my attention turned to the people on the front line who helped bind the wounds of communities shattered by Thatcherism. In plays such as Skylight and Racing Demon and Murmuring Judges, I was able to portray teachers and vicars and police and prison officers who, newly politicised, saw their jobs as trying to tackle the everyday problems caused by a reckless ideology. I loved writing about such hands-on practical people because I admired them. They became my heroes and heroines. But even as I tried to discredit the publicity that saw Thatcherism as liberating, I was still reluctant to propose a counter-myth, which pictured the government of 1945 as a permanent model of perfection. Requested over and again to write films and plays about the National Health Service, I always refused because I was reluctant to make too facile a comparison. How could I write on the subject without seeming to imply that once we had ideals, and that now we didn’t?

 

Michael Gambon and Lia Williams in David Hare’s play Skylight, in 1996. Photograph: Joan Marcus/AP/AP

Our current politics are governed by two competing nostalgias, both of them pieties. Conservatives seek to locate all good in Thatcherism and the 1980s, and in the unworkable nonsense of the free market, while Labour seeks to locate it in 1945 and an industrial society, which, for better or worse, no longer exists. And yet issues of justice remain, and always will. Conservativism, as presently formulated, is unworkable in the UK because it continues to demand that citizens from so many different backgrounds and cultures identify with a society organised in ways that are outrageously unfair. The bullying rhetorical project of seeking to blame diversity for the crimes of inequity is doomed to fail. You cannot pamper the rich, punish the poor, cut benefits and then say: “Now feel British!”

There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it? I had asked this question at the Oxford Playhouse in 1974 as I walked back down a darkened Beaumont Street to a hotel of draped velvet curtains, power outages and guttering candles. I ask it again today.

Financial markets are not free – they're one of the last bastions of socialism

Larry Elliot in The Guardian

 

You can’t buck the market, Margaret Thatcher once said, but the world’s policymakers have been giving it their best shot. Photograph: PA/PA


You can’t buck the market, so said Margaret Thatcher back in the late 1980s. Maybe you can’t, but the world’s policymakers are giving it their best shot.

Let’s just consider the context. During August there was a big sell-off in shares amid concerns that the Chinese economy was in trouble. The declines, however, followed a long bull market in which prices were supported by the quantitative easing programmes pursued by central banks rather than by underlying economic strength. A true believer in free markets would have seen the recent sell-off as both inevitable and healthy.

But financial markets are by no means free. They are, on the contrary, one of the last bastions of socialism left on earth. Everything possible is done to boost asset prices and when overstimulation leads to bubbles bursting it is all hands to the pump to prevent them from falling too far.

So, in the last couple of days we have seen the chief economist of the European Central Bank musing openly about the possibility of additional QE. We have had the president of the New York Federal Reserve dropping the biggest possible hint that an interest rate rise will be delayed. And we have had the authorities in Beijing buying up shares on the Shanghai stock market.

And guess what? It has worked. Shares have been going up around the world because investors have been given guarantees that they will be protected from the consequences of their own folly. Despite the upward revision to US growth figures, all that Wall Street needs to do to prevent a Fed rate rise is to have another flash crash between now and mid-September. The Fed will then back off. If things get really bad, it will need to consider a fourth dose of QE. Yes, really.

George Saravelos, of Deutsche Bank, says there is a reason western central banks, starting with the ECB and the Bank of Japan, might need to again resort to the electronic printing presses: China’s use of its foreign exchange reserves to defend the external value of the yuan.

Effectively, China has been selling a chunk of its holdings of foreign bonds, such as US Treasuries. QE involves buying bonds, so what the People’s Bank of China has been doing is QE in reverse or, as Saravelos puts it, quantitative tightening or QT.

Ostensibly, QT has always been part of the plan. When central banks embarked on their asset-buying programmes, the intention was that they would be sold back to the markets when things had returned to normal. The problem is that things have never returned to normal and, judging by recent events, never will.

Zero interest rates were supposed to be temporary. They are now the norm. QE was an unconventional measure for use in an emergency only. It is here to stay, albeit subject to the law of diminishing returns.

Clearly then, you can buck the market. Corrections can be delayed and halted, even reversed, by determined policy action. But, as the history of bubbles from Dutch tulips to subprime mortgages has shown, only for a while. In the long run, Mrs T was right.