And so we finished fourth. As predicted. And we won one-nil away from home, no less. Talk about retro. I've held off writing about Arsenal since the aftermath of our home defeat by Bayern Munich. Not because of any rabbit's-foot paranoia, but simply because it looked to me like the second half of the season was going to follow a familiar trajectory, though I confess the victory away to the new "best team in Europe" in the return leg almost had me attacking the keyboard, if only to wonder why we make a habit of doing this Jekyll and Hyde thing (see AC Milan in 2012 and Barcelona in 2011).
I admit that the away defeat to Spurs, shortly after the loss to Bayern, was a downer, but not wholly unexpected. Tottenham have put together a decent squad, while ours has been poorer than usual, which is why they ran us close. What I did expect was that we would gradually erode their points advantage. Andre Villas Boas's mistake, which he probably won't make again, was to think that a 7-point gap in early March was conclusive. As many a Spurs fan pointed out, they enjoyed the same gap after their 5-2 defeat at the Emirates at roughly the same point last season. Arsenal fans could feel confident because we usually out-point Tottenham over the closing straight of the season. In the event, Spurs didn't implode in classic style. Over the last 12 games, they've been 3rd best in the form league. Unfortunately for them, Arsenal have been the top form team.
This last point highlights a frustration for many Gooners, namely that we could have made a decent tilt at the title had we been as effective earlier in the season. Of course, this ignores the salient fact that we had a lot of new players to integrate into the team, not to mention the need to re-engineer an attack previously reliant on Robin. As I suspected back in January, the increasing familiarity of the team produced a solid groove of decent results - i.e. getting points even when the performance was below par. It was also noticeable that we improved away from home, scoring more but crucially conceding very few - only 1 over the last 5 away games since White Hart Lane. Our home form was decent but not spectacular. Since defeat by Man City in mid-January, the only blemishes in the league were draws against Liverpool, Everton and Man Utd. Had we been in pole position, this would probably have been tolerable.
Attention now shifts to the summer. Given the amount of managerial change among the top four, I suspect we'll see a spike in "making a statement" signings (that rules out Loic Remy, unless the statement in question is being made to the police). In today's Football Focus fag-end, the main topic of debate was whether Gareth Bale will now sign for Manure (along with Baines, Fellaini and Jagielka, no doubt). I really wanted Martin Keown (who loyally insisted that Arsenal now have real money to spend, not just the legendary "war-chest") to innocently suggest that Wenger might make a bid, but his current schtick is the conventional "obdurate defenders make thoughtful pundits" one, so sarky humour must be suppressed until you've served your time and ascended to the 70s light entertainment nether-world of Hansen and Lawrenson. Keown is actually an intelligent observer (though alongside Garth Crooks and Robbie Savage the cast of Made in Chelsea would appear incisive), but much too diplomatic. His future at the BBC is assured (I suspect Lee Dixon parted ways because he could not always suppress his engagingly derisive laugh).
We obviously need another striker. Podolski has proven a useful specialist. If he can get over the injury he's been carrying, he could even hit 20 goals a season, but I doubt he'll ever be the main man. Giroud has been a lot better than his critics have generally allowed, but for all his good link-up play he remains too slow to be the the pivot-cum-poacher that the modern game demands. This is why players like David Villa keep popping into the frame. Of course, this implies a possible reconfiguration of Arsenal's game-plan, assuming Wenger keeps Giroud in the starting eleven. Perhaps the most interesting development will be Wenger's decision on Rosicky, who is the closest we have to a central number 10 (Wiltshere and Cazorla tend to drift out towards the sides of the penalty area) and often the catalyst for upping our tempo. I suspect Le Prof will try to resolve this by acquiring a a mobile striker who can play wide, central or deep. Luis Suarez would appear to be tailor-made, despite the houndstooth.
The midfield has improved with every game. Arteta got the recognition he deserved early on, and has
been consistently reliable since, while Ramsey has gone from the new Jon Sammels to the new Ray Parlour. Oxlade-Chamberlain looks ready to step up, while no one can deny that Walcott has matured, even if he remains a player of fits and starts. Cazorla has been the player of the season for me, if only because he has never been less than good in what is usually a variable first campaign (cf Giroud). I suspect he'll miss out on the usual "EPL team of the season" polls due to the eye-catching performances of Mata and Michu, but he's been a joy to watch and that promises much for next season.
The defence has been the key to recent results, hence the unwillingness of Wenger to let Vermaelen loose when Koscielny and Mertersacker have been so effective as a partnership. The Belgian has been unfortunate, perhaps suffering from being promoted captain, and I wouldn't be surprised if a move to Barca (who need recruits) isn't on his mind. With Squillaci and Djourou likely to move on, a new centre-back or two is presumably on the shopping list. The same may be true for goalkeepers. Fabianski must have figured by now that he's inherited Dan Lewis's 1927 jersey. As soon as he puts in a few decent performances, calamity (injury or a freak goal) strikes. While Szcsesny probably still has the manager's faith, an experienced backup looks like a prudent investment.
All in all, a bit of a "transition" season. We've got RvP out of our system, and even the (admittedly unlikely) Fabregas rebound is prompting more concern about Wilshere than anticipation about the return of the prodigal. The danger is that if Vermaelen, Rosicky and Sagna all move on, we could be faced with a further extension of that transition as we integrate more new players with insufficient seniors, even though the squad unquestionably needs to be augmented. Our success, as ever, may therefore be down to who doesn't leave as much as who comes in. In 1970-71, we used only 16 players over 64 games (42 in the league). That was unusually parsimonious even then. In the modern era of rotation and injury caution, a winning squad tends to have plenty of competition. Our squad is probably 3 or 4 quality players short of the ideal. More out of hope than expectation, I'm looking forward to a busy summer.
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Monday, 20 May 2013
Friday, 17 May 2013
Targets and Expectations
The Department of Work and Pensions has conducted an internal inquiry into the use of targets for job-seeker sanctions and concluded that there is "no evidence of a secret national regime of targets". The report is the sort of whitewash you would expect from self-inspection. It finds (correctly) that the DWP did not set a Vegas trip target for job centre advisers, with TV displays of a leaderboard against a backdrop of the Bellagio hotel. Though "targets" were not set, it was standard practice to instruct advisers on "what might be expected in their local labour market and for their size of caseload as an aid to judging whether the law is being properly applied". This fine distinction between a target and an expectation is sophistry. As a football fan, my target may be to win the league, but my expectation is to finish in the top four. They are not the same thing. As the DWP do not have formal targets for "exceeding expectations", i.e. the goal is not (yet) to sanction every claimant, then the target is necessarily synonymous with the expectation.
This shows how management can create an environment that promotes and reinforces a particular behaviour while officially denying either intent or responsibility (you can insert your own topical examples here, from banks to online retailers). Perhaps the best evidence of the reality of targets is the DWP's own "scorecard" of referrals and sanctions by office, which interprets a month-on-month increase (i.e. more job-seekers in trouble) as a positive, illustrating it with a green 'up' arrow. A fall in sanctions, which you might think would be welcome, indicating that job-seekers were toeing the line and busily looking for work, is marked with a red 'down' arrow. Anyone would get the message: job centres must find more shirkers.
The tougher regime for job-seekers is part of a wider programme of "structural reform" being advanced under cover of austerity that aims to re-engineer both state institutions and public expectations. It is becoming more widely appreciated that government policy since 2010 (and earlier in some countries - e.g. Ireland) has been focused on the preservation of privilege (both corporate and individual) and the reinforcement of hegemonic control (there is no alternative, public debt is bad etc). While structural reform encompasses real differences of opinion among capitalists, e.g. the division between Big Capital and Money Capital over banking and the frictions between Big Capital and Small Capital over the EU, the broad thrust is unmistakeably neoliberal: the dominance of supra-state agencies, the furtherance of free trade (the actual purpose of Cameron's US visit this week), and the increasing diversion of income from labour to capital.
The last of these is the most profound. The evolution of the neoliberal supra-state framework (IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU etc) continues, however the establishment phase, between 1945 and 1992, is now over. The blows to this framework in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis have not been fatal, but they do herald an era of more gradual and (for now) grudging development. The EU is more likely to go sideways than forwards over the next decade. While the great technological leaps of the last 50 years in logistics and communications have made free trade, in the form of globalisation, the dominant socio-economic story of the period, the current phase is likely to be shaped more by the rise of the robots. Though this has come to the fore in recent years, the harbingers were there in 1979.
Since that pivotal year, we have been in transition from full employment (which was a historic anomaly limited to les trente glorieuses) towards a capital-biased economy with persistent high un- and under-employment. Globalisation and anti-union laws were the initial mechanisms for disempowering labour, but robots (and I'm using that word as shorthand for automation more generally) will be the dominant lever in the coming phase. If the expectations about the speed at which technology will displace labour (without providing new jobs at a sufficient replacement rate) are correct - i.e. that this is accelerating - then the last 35 years can be seen as the ideological preparation of the political terrain for a future in which many people are simply surplus to requirements - i.e. worthless in themselves (as labour) and not owning sufficient assets to generate significant consumption. The coming conflict will not be between people and robots, it will be between those who own robots and those who don't.
The DWP's exculpatory report was telling in its revelation of the use of personal improvement plans (PIPs) as a way of managing the behaviour of job centre staff and setting expectations. They "should be very clear about the consequences of an individual not fulfilling the personal responsibilities as a civil servant to administer the system in full". The point here is not that PIPs are the mechanism by which informal targets are set and enforced, but that the job centre worker is considered to be as suspect as a JSA claimant and thus equally deserving of coercion. This is in line with the ideological drift of the last 35 years. Back in the 70s, in keeping with the importance of "differentials" in pay-bargaining, recipients of unemployment benefit (who had paid NICs to deserve a higher rate) would often look down (admittedly not from a great height) on those on supplementary benefit. Today, all of the unemployed, and increasingly the disabled, are assumed to be skivers by default, while we are encouraged to see workers on low wages as scroungers if they get housing benefits above a certain level or are guilty of "over-breeding". Everyone who does not own capital is suspect.
Job centre staff are experiencing a work management regime that has become common among middle-tier clerical roles. Their work is increasingly proceduralised and rule-bound, and the latitude for personal judgement and interpretation is minimised. The goal is to reduce the role to one that can be fully automated. When robots do the job, the targets will be internalised within the software. At this point there will be no discernible difference between targets and expectations, but also no need to claim otherwise.
This shows how management can create an environment that promotes and reinforces a particular behaviour while officially denying either intent or responsibility (you can insert your own topical examples here, from banks to online retailers). Perhaps the best evidence of the reality of targets is the DWP's own "scorecard" of referrals and sanctions by office, which interprets a month-on-month increase (i.e. more job-seekers in trouble) as a positive, illustrating it with a green 'up' arrow. A fall in sanctions, which you might think would be welcome, indicating that job-seekers were toeing the line and busily looking for work, is marked with a red 'down' arrow. Anyone would get the message: job centres must find more shirkers.
The tougher regime for job-seekers is part of a wider programme of "structural reform" being advanced under cover of austerity that aims to re-engineer both state institutions and public expectations. It is becoming more widely appreciated that government policy since 2010 (and earlier in some countries - e.g. Ireland) has been focused on the preservation of privilege (both corporate and individual) and the reinforcement of hegemonic control (there is no alternative, public debt is bad etc). While structural reform encompasses real differences of opinion among capitalists, e.g. the division between Big Capital and Money Capital over banking and the frictions between Big Capital and Small Capital over the EU, the broad thrust is unmistakeably neoliberal: the dominance of supra-state agencies, the furtherance of free trade (the actual purpose of Cameron's US visit this week), and the increasing diversion of income from labour to capital.
The last of these is the most profound. The evolution of the neoliberal supra-state framework (IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU etc) continues, however the establishment phase, between 1945 and 1992, is now over. The blows to this framework in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis have not been fatal, but they do herald an era of more gradual and (for now) grudging development. The EU is more likely to go sideways than forwards over the next decade. While the great technological leaps of the last 50 years in logistics and communications have made free trade, in the form of globalisation, the dominant socio-economic story of the period, the current phase is likely to be shaped more by the rise of the robots. Though this has come to the fore in recent years, the harbingers were there in 1979.
Since that pivotal year, we have been in transition from full employment (which was a historic anomaly limited to les trente glorieuses) towards a capital-biased economy with persistent high un- and under-employment. Globalisation and anti-union laws were the initial mechanisms for disempowering labour, but robots (and I'm using that word as shorthand for automation more generally) will be the dominant lever in the coming phase. If the expectations about the speed at which technology will displace labour (without providing new jobs at a sufficient replacement rate) are correct - i.e. that this is accelerating - then the last 35 years can be seen as the ideological preparation of the political terrain for a future in which many people are simply surplus to requirements - i.e. worthless in themselves (as labour) and not owning sufficient assets to generate significant consumption. The coming conflict will not be between people and robots, it will be between those who own robots and those who don't.
The DWP's exculpatory report was telling in its revelation of the use of personal improvement plans (PIPs) as a way of managing the behaviour of job centre staff and setting expectations. They "should be very clear about the consequences of an individual not fulfilling the personal responsibilities as a civil servant to administer the system in full". The point here is not that PIPs are the mechanism by which informal targets are set and enforced, but that the job centre worker is considered to be as suspect as a JSA claimant and thus equally deserving of coercion. This is in line with the ideological drift of the last 35 years. Back in the 70s, in keeping with the importance of "differentials" in pay-bargaining, recipients of unemployment benefit (who had paid NICs to deserve a higher rate) would often look down (admittedly not from a great height) on those on supplementary benefit. Today, all of the unemployed, and increasingly the disabled, are assumed to be skivers by default, while we are encouraged to see workers on low wages as scroungers if they get housing benefits above a certain level or are guilty of "over-breeding". Everyone who does not own capital is suspect.
Job centre staff are experiencing a work management regime that has become common among middle-tier clerical roles. Their work is increasingly proceduralised and rule-bound, and the latitude for personal judgement and interpretation is minimised. The goal is to reduce the role to one that can be fully automated. When robots do the job, the targets will be internalised within the software. At this point there will be no discernible difference between targets and expectations, but also no need to claim otherwise.
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Bad Faith Awards
Back in March, 100 academics wrote a letter to the Independent criticising Michael Gove's proposed national curriculum. Gove's cheerleader Toby Young then invented the Bad Grammar Awards with the apparent objective of ridiculing the letter-writers. A case of playing the man (or men and women, if we're going to be pedantic) rather than the ball. The fisking, by the 71 year old Neville Gwynne (who taught Young's offspring Latin and whose grammar book is published by the fogeyish Idler, the sponsor of the awards), was unintentionally funny because in criticising the use of the phrase "too much too young" the old geezer was obviously ignorant of the Specials' song. Most people reading the original letter would have got the reference. Even funnier was a supportive piece in the Evening Standard, headlined "Academics are the very worst for bad grammar". Any any fule kno', "worst" is a superlative so "very" is redundant. A grammar Nazi would have you shot for that.
The point that should shine through is the commonplace that language is constantly in flux, hence the appearance of new words like "fisking" (a point-by-point rebuttal, originally in an email or blog post), the employment of new idioms like "too much too young" (i.e. without a comma after "much"), and the fact that deliberately breaking grammatical rules for effect is fine (e.g. "very worst"). There are no rules of grammar as such, merely accepted conventions on usage. At any given time there will be rival conventions, some emerging and others falling into disuse, simply because their purpose is to discriminate between "in" and "out" groups that are themselves evolving. It is reasonable to criticise certain grammatical forms on the grounds of style (e.g. a double-negative like "I didn't do nothing" is clumsy), but if the meaning is clear (which it usually is) then you should engage with the meaning instead of indulging in ad hominem attacks like Toby Young.
An obsession with correct form over effective communication has an obvious authoritarian foundation, not to mention a clear ideological purpose in separating the civilised from the uncultured. Official grammar and vocabulary is often just the slang of the ruling classes. In the middle ages this meant using French instead of English, the language of landowners rather than peasants, hence the continuing high proportion of French idioms in administrative and legal terminology. From the Renaissance onwards it meant using Greek and Latin words and phrases (like ad hominen), and even conforming to Latin conventions in grammar, such as the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. Funnily enough, putting the verb at the end of the sentence never caught on in polite society, possibly because the hoi polloi often did it too: "off to market I be".
The 16th and 17th centuries are regarded as a highpoint in English literature in large part because the language was so fluid, importing foreign terminology and giving national prominence to dialect words (notably in Shakespeare), employing multiple spellings and variable syntax, and generally experimenting with whatever came to hand. The grammar police start to make their appearance as copyright replaces censorship in the early 18th century. The emerging bourgeois idea of manners, which converted traditional Christian ethics into a social commodity (e.g. charity moved from giving alms to inculcating right behaviour), was extended to the performative realms of dress and speech. As the 19th century brought social dislocation and mobility, grammar and vocabulary (more so than accent) became an identifier of class: talking "proper", as Eliza Doolittle would say. In the 20th century, mass media gradually produced a standardised vernacular and an increasingly neutral accent (I'm always amused to hear David Dimbleby's clipped tones from his youth), which has led to an even greater focus on grammar by social conservatives as the last bastion defending us against the estuarial and the immigrant.
Toby Young and his Tory mates probably think they've been clever in showing up the academics, but what they've actually done is highlight that their own worldview is based on separating the rest of us into right sheep and wrong goats, on an essentially trivial basis, which clearly reflects their assumptions about education in general. They want and expect "good" and "bad" to co-exist: Eton, free schools and selected academies as islands of quality amidst the sea of failing state education. Dissenting opinions are dismissed on a technicality. You can almost hear the Govian disdain: "If you disagree with me, you are by definition wrong". It should hardly come as a surprise that Gove's media outriders then employ personalised contempt (Niall Ferguson is another recent example), or that Gove himself appears to view politics wholly in terms of ego. The issue here is not bad grammar but bad faith.
The point that should shine through is the commonplace that language is constantly in flux, hence the appearance of new words like "fisking" (a point-by-point rebuttal, originally in an email or blog post), the employment of new idioms like "too much too young" (i.e. without a comma after "much"), and the fact that deliberately breaking grammatical rules for effect is fine (e.g. "very worst"). There are no rules of grammar as such, merely accepted conventions on usage. At any given time there will be rival conventions, some emerging and others falling into disuse, simply because their purpose is to discriminate between "in" and "out" groups that are themselves evolving. It is reasonable to criticise certain grammatical forms on the grounds of style (e.g. a double-negative like "I didn't do nothing" is clumsy), but if the meaning is clear (which it usually is) then you should engage with the meaning instead of indulging in ad hominem attacks like Toby Young.
An obsession with correct form over effective communication has an obvious authoritarian foundation, not to mention a clear ideological purpose in separating the civilised from the uncultured. Official grammar and vocabulary is often just the slang of the ruling classes. In the middle ages this meant using French instead of English, the language of landowners rather than peasants, hence the continuing high proportion of French idioms in administrative and legal terminology. From the Renaissance onwards it meant using Greek and Latin words and phrases (like ad hominen), and even conforming to Latin conventions in grammar, such as the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending sentences with prepositions. Funnily enough, putting the verb at the end of the sentence never caught on in polite society, possibly because the hoi polloi often did it too: "off to market I be".
The 16th and 17th centuries are regarded as a highpoint in English literature in large part because the language was so fluid, importing foreign terminology and giving national prominence to dialect words (notably in Shakespeare), employing multiple spellings and variable syntax, and generally experimenting with whatever came to hand. The grammar police start to make their appearance as copyright replaces censorship in the early 18th century. The emerging bourgeois idea of manners, which converted traditional Christian ethics into a social commodity (e.g. charity moved from giving alms to inculcating right behaviour), was extended to the performative realms of dress and speech. As the 19th century brought social dislocation and mobility, grammar and vocabulary (more so than accent) became an identifier of class: talking "proper", as Eliza Doolittle would say. In the 20th century, mass media gradually produced a standardised vernacular and an increasingly neutral accent (I'm always amused to hear David Dimbleby's clipped tones from his youth), which has led to an even greater focus on grammar by social conservatives as the last bastion defending us against the estuarial and the immigrant.
Toby Young and his Tory mates probably think they've been clever in showing up the academics, but what they've actually done is highlight that their own worldview is based on separating the rest of us into right sheep and wrong goats, on an essentially trivial basis, which clearly reflects their assumptions about education in general. They want and expect "good" and "bad" to co-exist: Eton, free schools and selected academies as islands of quality amidst the sea of failing state education. Dissenting opinions are dismissed on a technicality. You can almost hear the Govian disdain: "If you disagree with me, you are by definition wrong". It should hardly come as a surprise that Gove's media outriders then employ personalised contempt (Niall Ferguson is another recent example), or that Gove himself appears to view politics wholly in terms of ego. The issue here is not bad grammar but bad faith.
Friday, 10 May 2013
That's Enough Fergie Time
The decision to announce Alex Ferguson's retirement as manager of Manchester United was presumably timed to allow for a mass love-in at this Saturday's home game against Swansea, the following and final game being away at The Hawthorns. Surely it would have been more in keeping with the tenor of his career, and the Premier League's willingness to routinely oblige MUFC, to add an additional home game at the end of the season. The ultimate in Fergie Time. I'm sure Spurs would have volunteered to be the opposition.
I wouldn't normally quote Simon Jenkins as an expert on football (or much else, come to that), but he made a perceptive point today in noting the parallel of Fergie's career with the era of "vanity capitalism". That Harvard Business School should consider Ferguson an apt subject for a study in leadership is telling, though I suspect this was more an exercise in corporate PR than genuine academic enquiry. There is no doubt that he was a great manager, but we should not lose sight of the underpinning that United's wealth provided during the era of TV money (which started in 1988, two years after Ferguson joined United, ahead of the formation of the EPL in 1992). The challenge for Moyes is that finishing less than first in the league will now be seen as relative failure, but more because of the available resources than the unflattering comparison with Ferguson.
The quantitative comparison of Ferguson's record with previous "giants of the game" is pointless. You might as well claim that Walter Smith (10 league titles) was a better manager than Herbert Chapman (just the 4). Temporal differences are just as great as spatial ones. Even a qualitative comparison is slippery. Where is the common scale to judge Fergie's contribution to United's achievements with Clough's revolution at Nottingham Forest? Ferguson's good fortune was not only to be in charge of the richest club when money became the key factor in football success, but to be able to make his position unassailable in 1999 with the famous last minute victory over Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, which put him on the same pedestal as Matt Busby. This allowed him a full quarter of a century to build up a haul of silverware that is unlikely to be matched by anyone in the foreseeable future. With the possible exception of Arsene Wenger (and few believe he will stay at Arsenal for another decade), who else would be given so much time?
Like all dictators, Ferguson the public persona was a mixture of authoritarian theatre (the banning of journalists and exiling of players who challenged him) and gross sentimentality (the harping-on about humble origins and the "no one is bigger than the club" cliches). He is on record as characterising his management style as a balance between fear and love - the classic psychosis of the paterfamilias. Susceptibility to the cult of the leader is obviously found as much on the left as on the right, hence the willingness to take Ferguson's "socialist sympathies" at face value and even hold him up as an epitome of collectivist culture. Ferguson the political emblem has followed a New Labour trajectory: from leading a strike by shipyard apprentices in his youth to a knighthood, racehorses and counting Alastair Campbell as a mate.
Ferguson is less the product of a collectivist ethic and more the product of autocratic managerialism turbo-charged by a huge influx of money. As a Scot who took the road South and made his fortune, he had more in common with Fred Goodwin than Bill Shankly.
I wouldn't normally quote Simon Jenkins as an expert on football (or much else, come to that), but he made a perceptive point today in noting the parallel of Fergie's career with the era of "vanity capitalism". That Harvard Business School should consider Ferguson an apt subject for a study in leadership is telling, though I suspect this was more an exercise in corporate PR than genuine academic enquiry. There is no doubt that he was a great manager, but we should not lose sight of the underpinning that United's wealth provided during the era of TV money (which started in 1988, two years after Ferguson joined United, ahead of the formation of the EPL in 1992). The challenge for Moyes is that finishing less than first in the league will now be seen as relative failure, but more because of the available resources than the unflattering comparison with Ferguson.
The quantitative comparison of Ferguson's record with previous "giants of the game" is pointless. You might as well claim that Walter Smith (10 league titles) was a better manager than Herbert Chapman (just the 4). Temporal differences are just as great as spatial ones. Even a qualitative comparison is slippery. Where is the common scale to judge Fergie's contribution to United's achievements with Clough's revolution at Nottingham Forest? Ferguson's good fortune was not only to be in charge of the richest club when money became the key factor in football success, but to be able to make his position unassailable in 1999 with the famous last minute victory over Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, which put him on the same pedestal as Matt Busby. This allowed him a full quarter of a century to build up a haul of silverware that is unlikely to be matched by anyone in the foreseeable future. With the possible exception of Arsene Wenger (and few believe he will stay at Arsenal for another decade), who else would be given so much time?
Like all dictators, Ferguson the public persona was a mixture of authoritarian theatre (the banning of journalists and exiling of players who challenged him) and gross sentimentality (the harping-on about humble origins and the "no one is bigger than the club" cliches). He is on record as characterising his management style as a balance between fear and love - the classic psychosis of the paterfamilias. Susceptibility to the cult of the leader is obviously found as much on the left as on the right, hence the willingness to take Ferguson's "socialist sympathies" at face value and even hold him up as an epitome of collectivist culture. Ferguson the political emblem has followed a New Labour trajectory: from leading a strike by shipyard apprentices in his youth to a knighthood, racehorses and counting Alastair Campbell as a mate.
Ferguson is less the product of a collectivist ethic and more the product of autocratic managerialism turbo-charged by a huge influx of money. As a Scot who took the road South and made his fortune, he had more in common with Fred Goodwin than Bill Shankly.
Wednesday, 8 May 2013
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
According to Simon Jenkins, "The UK Independence party is mid-term political froth, here today and blown away tomorrow". This judgement came in a typically overheated piece on Nigel Lawson's Euro-exit bombshell (as the sub-editors might put it). Lawson is batting for The City, and specifically warning Cameron not to give way on tighter regulation of financial services. This, like Jenkins own interpretation, is an example of metropolitan bias. According to Jenkins, "Lawson may not have made Ukip respectable but he has put its central plank into serious play". As any number of analyses should have made clear by now, Europe is actually a relatively minor issue for UKIP supporters. It should also be emphasised that disaffection with the EU is essentially a matter of democracy, not the interests of Money Capital or simple xenophobia.
The reason why UKIP is more than just froth can be seen in the regional distribution of the seats the party won in the recent county council elections. Where UKIP did best was in the economically stressed areas of Lincolnshire and Kent, agriculture and port-dominated counties that have seen both job losses and high-profile Eastern European immigration in recent years. Some might focus on the latter as the defining characteristic, but it's the economic stress that looks more significant. Looked at on the map, UKIP's "heartland" looks like the Anglo-Saxon territories around the middle of the 6th century, before the expansion into Mercia and Northumbria. This might appear like an amusing coincidence, but I think it actually highlights some important points about the nature of UKIP's support and thus their prospects.
First, they are not obviously a Home Counties party, despite the assumption that they represent a "natural Conservative" insurgency, i.e. the Tebbit tendency. The Tories remain much the stronger party of the right in the immediate vicinity of London, notably Surrey, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire (the higher UKIP vote in Buckinghamshire looks to have been boosted by opposition to HS2). UKIP's support in the South East is quite peripheral, hugging the more economically marginal coastal counties. They look like a party that will do well in seaside towns rather than the commuter belt (and who could deny that Nigel Farage looks like the sort of chap you'd bump into at Brighton Racecourse). This reflects the dominant influence of the Great Wen, both in terms of a metropolitan condescension to UKIP's Little Englander vibe and (more significantly) a realisation that London as a whole could not thrive outside the EU, regardless of the piratical opportunities this might open up for The City. There are a lot more corporate accountants and lawyers in the Surrey stockbroker belt than actual stockbrokers.
Second, contrary to the media claims that the Kippers took votes off all parties, it is clear that Labour suffered the least, and not just because their strongholds in the metropolitan areas were not up for election this time round. If UKIP are going to attract disaffected working class voters inclined to blame immigrants for their economic woes, they'll just be hoovering up the relatively small number of votes that have hitherto gone to the BNP and EDL. That's not to say that they can't do well in the North on a broader agenda, but the evidence from Lancashire and Durham is that they are not doing so at present. I doubt they will thrive beyond the Severn-Humber line. Voters are parochial, and increasingly anti-metropolitan, which means that an obvious Southern toff like Farage (who to most people in the North does not appear readily distinguishable from George Osborne) isn't going to attract many votes in Burnley, though he might pick up a few in Harrogate. UKIP policies, insofar as they can be gleaned, do not address regional imbalances, nor do they have any coherent plan for job creation. Tax cuts and quitting Europe (a visible benefactor in many depressed regions) does not look like a winning manifesto in Newcastle.
Third, the coastal bias reflects a disproportionate level of support among older voters. This perhaps explains the one exception to the Anglo-Saxon focus in terms of seats won, namely Cornwall, which I suspect may reflect support among retirees from elsewhere rather than a sudden upsurge in English nationalism. However, UKIP aren't picking up pensioner votes in particular. Indeed, the sweet spot appears to be people in their 50s and, to judge from the analysis of the Eastleigh Parliamentary by-election (see page 5) and other polling, the less well-off. This indicates that the party's appeal is to the economically vulnerable. It would be easy to paint the stereotypical UKIP voter as a small capitalist raging about EU red tape and smoking in pubs (that may be representative of party members), but the reality looks more like someone facing an impoverished retirement due to an inadequate pension, possibly with kids struggling to find a job, worried about future health and care costs, and with only a modest house (if that) as an asset. The EU and immigration are obviously lightning rods (and the latter more than the former), in the sense that very few people actually have a well-informed opinion on either. Both serve as handy offstage targets for a more fundamental, economic anxiety.
What I think this portends is that UKIP might scrape a few seats in the 2015 general election, possibly in depressed seaside or rural towns in the South and East, but they aren't going to cut a swathe through Tory ranks. What they will do is erode the Tory vote. The legacy of Thatcher has been the Conservative Party's retreat to England. The legacy of 2008 and the Eurozone crisis may be the further retreat towards the affluent hinterland of London. UKIP may do enough to split the conservative vote and let the LibDems through in some constituencies, but overall the tendency of UKIP to attract former LibDem votes as much as Tory ones, together with the disappointments of coalition, will surely produce a net loss for Clegg & co. In some marginal constituencies, a defection of working class Tories to UKIP could even let Labour in, though again Labour are vulnerable to some vote erosion by UKIP as well. Ultimately, it will be the party that offers the most credible hope in terms of economic renewal that will suffer least from the UKIP factor, not the party that promises an EU referendum.
The reason why UKIP is more than just froth can be seen in the regional distribution of the seats the party won in the recent county council elections. Where UKIP did best was in the economically stressed areas of Lincolnshire and Kent, agriculture and port-dominated counties that have seen both job losses and high-profile Eastern European immigration in recent years. Some might focus on the latter as the defining characteristic, but it's the economic stress that looks more significant. Looked at on the map, UKIP's "heartland" looks like the Anglo-Saxon territories around the middle of the 6th century, before the expansion into Mercia and Northumbria. This might appear like an amusing coincidence, but I think it actually highlights some important points about the nature of UKIP's support and thus their prospects.
First, they are not obviously a Home Counties party, despite the assumption that they represent a "natural Conservative" insurgency, i.e. the Tebbit tendency. The Tories remain much the stronger party of the right in the immediate vicinity of London, notably Surrey, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire (the higher UKIP vote in Buckinghamshire looks to have been boosted by opposition to HS2). UKIP's support in the South East is quite peripheral, hugging the more economically marginal coastal counties. They look like a party that will do well in seaside towns rather than the commuter belt (and who could deny that Nigel Farage looks like the sort of chap you'd bump into at Brighton Racecourse). This reflects the dominant influence of the Great Wen, both in terms of a metropolitan condescension to UKIP's Little Englander vibe and (more significantly) a realisation that London as a whole could not thrive outside the EU, regardless of the piratical opportunities this might open up for The City. There are a lot more corporate accountants and lawyers in the Surrey stockbroker belt than actual stockbrokers.
Second, contrary to the media claims that the Kippers took votes off all parties, it is clear that Labour suffered the least, and not just because their strongholds in the metropolitan areas were not up for election this time round. If UKIP are going to attract disaffected working class voters inclined to blame immigrants for their economic woes, they'll just be hoovering up the relatively small number of votes that have hitherto gone to the BNP and EDL. That's not to say that they can't do well in the North on a broader agenda, but the evidence from Lancashire and Durham is that they are not doing so at present. I doubt they will thrive beyond the Severn-Humber line. Voters are parochial, and increasingly anti-metropolitan, which means that an obvious Southern toff like Farage (who to most people in the North does not appear readily distinguishable from George Osborne) isn't going to attract many votes in Burnley, though he might pick up a few in Harrogate. UKIP policies, insofar as they can be gleaned, do not address regional imbalances, nor do they have any coherent plan for job creation. Tax cuts and quitting Europe (a visible benefactor in many depressed regions) does not look like a winning manifesto in Newcastle.
Third, the coastal bias reflects a disproportionate level of support among older voters. This perhaps explains the one exception to the Anglo-Saxon focus in terms of seats won, namely Cornwall, which I suspect may reflect support among retirees from elsewhere rather than a sudden upsurge in English nationalism. However, UKIP aren't picking up pensioner votes in particular. Indeed, the sweet spot appears to be people in their 50s and, to judge from the analysis of the Eastleigh Parliamentary by-election (see page 5) and other polling, the less well-off. This indicates that the party's appeal is to the economically vulnerable. It would be easy to paint the stereotypical UKIP voter as a small capitalist raging about EU red tape and smoking in pubs (that may be representative of party members), but the reality looks more like someone facing an impoverished retirement due to an inadequate pension, possibly with kids struggling to find a job, worried about future health and care costs, and with only a modest house (if that) as an asset. The EU and immigration are obviously lightning rods (and the latter more than the former), in the sense that very few people actually have a well-informed opinion on either. Both serve as handy offstage targets for a more fundamental, economic anxiety.
What I think this portends is that UKIP might scrape a few seats in the 2015 general election, possibly in depressed seaside or rural towns in the South and East, but they aren't going to cut a swathe through Tory ranks. What they will do is erode the Tory vote. The legacy of Thatcher has been the Conservative Party's retreat to England. The legacy of 2008 and the Eurozone crisis may be the further retreat towards the affluent hinterland of London. UKIP may do enough to split the conservative vote and let the LibDems through in some constituencies, but overall the tendency of UKIP to attract former LibDem votes as much as Tory ones, together with the disappointments of coalition, will surely produce a net loss for Clegg & co. In some marginal constituencies, a defection of working class Tories to UKIP could even let Labour in, though again Labour are vulnerable to some vote erosion by UKIP as well. Ultimately, it will be the party that offers the most credible hope in terms of economic renewal that will suffer least from the UKIP factor, not the party that promises an EU referendum.
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