tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53128537151233709162024-03-18T19:43:20.808+00:00From Arse To ElbowOr there and back again. A drunken boat on a stream of consciousness.David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.comBlogger895125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-6520640908526345372024-03-16T13:03:00.001+00:002024-03-17T10:57:13.580+00:00Stalemate in Russia<p>The death of Alexei Navalny has been interpreted as evidence that Russia has once more entered a stalemate. This doesn't refer to the minimal movement of the frontline in Ukraine but to the belief that Russian society is once more stuck, much as it was in the Brezhnev years, and that all anyone, inside or outside the country, can hope for is Putin's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/raising-white-flag-in-kyiv-will-never-make-the-putin-problem-go-away" target="_blank">inevitable demise</a> by natural or unnatural causes. The current gloomy predictions, centred on this weekend's <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68505228" target="_blank">presidential election</a>, are that he isn't going anywhere soon. He has stablised the economy on a war-footing, international sanctions have proved ineffective in bringing social pressure to bear on the military campaign, and weariness in the West means that Ukraine will face a frozen conflict for years to come if not pressure to negotiate the partial surrender of invaded territory. I have no particular insight into the military situation, though I would note that my <a href="https://twitter.com/fromarsetoelbow/status/1568880163785510912" target="_blank">simplistic assessment</a> that Russia hasn't got the materiel to take Kiev and Ukraine hasn't got the mapower to liberate the Donbass and Crimea remains sound, if hardly original. What I'm more interested in is the changing perception in the West of Russia, that "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma", as Winston Churchill patronisingly put it. </p><p>The trigger for this line of thought was an article in <i>Eurozine</i> by Kirill Rogov - <i><a href="https://www.eurozine.com/russias-future-and-the-war/" target="_blank">Russia's Future and the War</a></i> - published in the immediate aftermath of Navalny's death. The heart of Rogov's argument is the oscillation between pro-European and anti-European sentiment, with Navalny presented as an ikon of the former: "This regular pendulum movement can be seen throughout Russian history – periods of pro-European modernization, followed by periods when the anti-European agenda is prevalent. The rapid adaptation of European models and practices is then replaced by hostility to the European ideal and efforts to replace it with Russia’s ‘national’ or even ‘civilizational’ identity." There are two problems here. One is the claim that "As the face of European idea in Russia, Navalny incorporated everything that the forces of revanchism in the country oppose." Even the most superficial review of Navalny's history reveals a man who was happy to play the Russian chauvinist when it suited him. Like many Eastern European politicians (and many Western European ones), he moved seamelessly between liberalism, nationalism and Islamophobia. As <a href="https://postsocialism.org/2024/02/16/russia-lost-its-greatest-and-most-naive-optimist-a-curmudgeons-obituary-of-alexei-navalny/" target="_blank">Jeremy Morris</a> noted, "the anti-Putin contains many ingredients of Putin himself".</p><p>The second, and bigger, problem is the idea that Russia is bipolar. Some of this is simply recycling of old tropes about Russia's propensity for suffering and its tendency towards manic depression, which owed as much to the long shadow of serfdom and the knout as to the tortured speculations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The modern equivalents are the trope of alcoholism as an expression of social ennui and, topically, the accusation of fatalism in the face of political corruption. But there is an obvious inconsistency in the idea that Russia is governed both by a persistent structure of feeling (the "Russian soul") and by a tendency towards a periodic <i>volte-face</i> centred on its attitude towards Europe and its associated "modernisation". Rogov's attempt to prove the reality of the latter leads to some questionable history: "The Bolshevik project in the twentieth century was probably the longest period of Russian anti-Europeanism. It was certainly the most extensive and bloody attempt to establish in Russia a system of institutions and values completely opposed to European ones. However, after the Soviet regime entered the phase of its demobilization in 1960s, it was only a matter of decades before a pro-European elite had formed in the Soviet Union, leading to an anti-communist and pro-western revolution."</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzmYSCVAMLS0MOPjweuBF6jRCK6RbyuEBD0UCnRpsKxg617z4wVuNX1Qh1MkJE5RwfHilXnCJEpKTfcb3l2HvOCzznVzeR576WDuxwnYW_5RlU5aGyeZ41zOMIJyeM1EGhx7nk_ZOVgWpe2b-b8dleLYuFOLY78pkDs-yNv3foj5Azjmwr46hsnXjQfWM/s976/_116804862_hi065491250.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="549" data-original-width="976" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzmYSCVAMLS0MOPjweuBF6jRCK6RbyuEBD0UCnRpsKxg617z4wVuNX1Qh1MkJE5RwfHilXnCJEpKTfcb3l2HvOCzznVzeR576WDuxwnYW_5RlU5aGyeZ41zOMIJyeM1EGhx7nk_ZOVgWpe2b-b8dleLYuFOLY78pkDs-yNv3foj5Azjmwr46hsnXjQfWM/s320/_116804862_hi065491250.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />As any fule kno', the Boshevik project was consciously pro-European and modernising, hence the belief that revolution in Russia might trigger a general proletarian uprising throughout the continent. The Comintern was focused on generalising a Marxist analysis of history, not on emphasising Russian exceptionalism. Marx and Engels themselves contributed to the debate in the late-nineteenth century on whether Russia could proceed directly from the "primitive communism" of its agrarian base to socialism. They said no (the proletarian phase was necessary), but the key points to draw out here are that the Russian left was looking to European models and Marx and Engels were insisting that revolution in Russia would require first revolution in the West. This was finessed by Lenin as an alliance of workers and peasants, and would eventually give way, after the failure of revolutions in Germany and Hungary, to Stalin's "socialism in one country", but at no point did this entail a rejection of Europe. Even at its most extreme interpretation in the 1930s, Soviet Communism remain infatuated with European ideas of industrial modernity, scientific rationality and the appreciation of high culture (if not its contemporary expressions).<p></p><p>It's perfectly reasonable to characterise Russian history as one of warmer and cooler relations with the West - nobody would claim that today's <i>froideur</i> over Ukraine is the same as the sympathy shown towards Putin during the Second Chechen War. But the stronger claim being made is that these changes in temperature can be sourced to a reaction by Russia - the West being blameless (the idea that Putin was incited to invade Ukraine by the expansion of NATO is a version of this, albeit one that points the finger at Western carelessness as much as Russian pique). As Rogov puts it, "Periods of pro-European orientation in Russia often coincide with – and are stimulated by – signs of the success of Europe and the European project. ... when Europe reached a trajectory of sustainable growth at the end of the twentieth century, democratizing citizens’ access to the benefits of this growth by creating a mass consumer society, while at the same time making a breakthrough in European integration, it provoked the crisis and collapse of the totalitarian anti-European empire in the East." </p><p>If this dynamic were really at work, you'd have to ask why the USSR didn't collapse in the 1960s when the signs of the success of the European project were visible to everyone (consider the UK's repeated requests for accession to the EEC) and at a time that Rogov claims the Soviet regime was "demobilizing". He explains the delay as the gradual formation of a pro-European elite, as if Khrushchev inherited a backwater that had to be slowly opened to the West in the manner of <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2014/03/memories-of-underdevelopment.html" target="_blank">Peter the Great</a>, rather than a major power with broad international influence and two decades of close political, economic and cultural involvement with half the European continent. And can we really say that the 1980s and 90s in Western Europe was a period that "democratized citizens' access to the benefits of growth"? That phrase echoes the rhetoric of Thatcherism, but it doesn't chime with popular experience during an era of privatisation and rising inequality. The benefits of growth since 1979 have not been equally shared and the neoliberal political economy that has dominated Western Europe these last 40 years cannot be plausibly described in terms of greater democratisation.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8I218-1cDfkKjmxQVi9mDxO9DEZimbq5HErd_1Sqn2vd8duEdn78aZNdzsN_vnC-ULcO-yDuOTkTuj8HslOUqOiRBTSIilaWsEKevpC_0A6IOgHeJx-jTN4JWZme2ckwLKy_Mk2yr5lhF465h3Qm5JMsdZdw45xqrnlUF_uDr0SL9Vqb3K-qEaTC_nw/s600/00putin-speeches-topart-articleLarge.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF8I218-1cDfkKjmxQVi9mDxO9DEZimbq5HErd_1Sqn2vd8duEdn78aZNdzsN_vnC-ULcO-yDuOTkTuj8HslOUqOiRBTSIilaWsEKevpC_0A6IOgHeJx-jTN4JWZme2ckwLKy_Mk2yr5lhF465h3Qm5JMsdZdw45xqrnlUF_uDr0SL9Vqb3K-qEaTC_nw/s320/00putin-speeches-topart-articleLarge.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />The simple truth is that the bipolar nature of Russia reflects a lasting ambivalence in the West about how the country should be treated, rather than something innate to Russian society. Insofar as Russians do resent the West, it relates to that ambivalence: the unwillingness to accord the country equal respect and the sense that it can never quite qualify for membership of the club. That ambivalence ultimately reflects Russia's Eurasian position, hence the disproportionate focus in the West on its relations with China: the worry that they might ally and so present a threat to the US hegemony in which Western Europe has invested so much. Such an alliance would probably have little impact on geopolitics, contrary to the "heartland" theory of Halford Mackinder that Rogov alludes to with talk of Russia as part of the "Greater European Periphery". That 77% of Russia's population is west of the Urals, and that much of the other 23% were moved east by diktat, doesn't lessen the suspicion in the West that the country is essentially an Asiatic horde waiting to descend on European civilisation, hence the quagmire in Ukraine is easily translated into a clear and present danger for the Baltics and even Poland.<p></p><p>Rogov's analysis is hopeful in the sense that he thinks the pendulum will inevitably swing back: "Breaking off economic ties with Europe so abruptly and maintaining hostility towards Europe at such a high degree would produce strains on society and very strict forms of authoritarian control. After some time, when this control proves too expensive, or for other economic or political factors, prevailing opinion will turn back in favour of Europe." This strikes me as naive on two counts. First, it imagines that Russian politics is always and only ever about Europe and attitudes towards it, which is obviously ridiculous. And second, it implicitly identifies public opinion with a narrow band of the middle-class: the liberal intelligentsia that admires an idealised Europe as a way of avoiding having to think about Russia in domestic terms - a stratum that Rogov himself represents. As Tony Wood pointed out in <i>Russia Without Putin</i>, what ultimately matters is the post-Soviet system of capitalism, of which Putin is as much a prisoner as anyone in a Siberian labour camp. </p><p>That system has functioned well enough in the interests of the elite, and even the liberal intelligentsia. It has been coming under pressure in recent years, and the Ukraine misadventure can certainly be tied back to that fact and the regime's need for positive achievements, but it has yet to produce a coherent domestic opposition to that system, let alone a credible challenger to Putin. Alexei Navalny's narrow focus on elite corruption meant that the wider economic system never really came into view politically, while his personalised approach to campaigning presented too many in Russian society with the excuse of preferring the devil (and relative stability) they knew. As Wood put it in 2020: "Russia's imitation democracy is capable of reproducing itself whether Putin is in charge or not. It if is to be replaced by something substantively different, an alternative to the system as a whole will have to coalesce - not just an anti-Putin who can take the current president's place." Insofar as Russia is once more in a stalemate, it is because of the failure to develop an anti-capitalist opposition.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-85618676435361881822024-03-08T12:38:00.001+00:002024-03-08T12:38:42.863+00:00The Coming Tide<p>Barring the unforseen, Wednesday's budget is probably the last major political initiative we'll see prior to the calling of the general election (an Autumn statement, if it happens first, is likely to be more of the same). As such, it told us little we didn't already know about the leading parties: that the Tories will emphasise their commitment to lower taxes, and that Labour will offer little in the way of differentiation. Further austerity is therefore baked-in. The decision to abolish (i.e. rebadge) non-dom tax status was as heavily trailed as the reduction in NICs. Yet Labour appear to have been wrong-footed, having no alternative up their collective sleeve for the former and quick to support the latter as part of their own commitment to lower taxes on "hardworking families". The increase in child benefit was the one (mild) surprise, but even that made perfect sense as a gesture towards a pivotal demographic inclined to turn out at the polls. Most of the benefit will accrue to higher income households and will do little to offset the cost inflation suffered by those on lower incomes.</p><p>The predictability of the budget announcement makes Rishi Sunak's hyperbolic Downing Street statement on the Friday after the Rochdale by-election seem even more of an oddity in retrospect than it appeared at the time. He clearly wasn't teeing-up some major economic or foreign policy initiative, but equally the claim of democracy in existential peril hasn't heralded any major new policies in respect of policing, just a demand that the Met in particular gets tougher. In reality, the erosion of the rights of protest has been an incremental process since the early-80s, something done as a matter of bureaucratic routine rather than a novel initiative that needs to be announced from a lectern outside Number 10. The revelation that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/07/socialism-anti-fascism-anti-abortion-prevent-list-terrorism-warning-signs" target="_blank">the Prevent scheme now considers socialism and anti-fascism to be warning signs of potential terrorism</a> is the latest fruit of that process, and also a clear sign that the Home Office is confident that an incoming government under Keir Starmer isn't going to raise an eyebrow at a definition that automatically places the left of the Labour Party under suspicion. </p><p>Sunak's speech has been interpreted as a <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2024/03/rishi-sunak-doesnt-want-to-talk-about.html" target="_blank">diversion from the Conservative Party's Islamophobia</a>, but that strikes me as an overly negative motivation. The Prime Minister has never given the impression of being a man of strong beliefs, or of being particularly concerned about the party's public image, so it may make more sense to view this simply as an attempt to shore up support by appealing to social reactionaries and the Jewish community. But there are two problems with that. First, those are demographics that the Tories already enjoy dominance among, so appealing to them in this way seems unnecessary, unless the party's internal polls are predicting something truly dire. The second problem is that Keir Starmer's alacrity in supporting the Prime Minister's authoritarian impulse means this isn't a dividing line between the parties. Some Labour supporters will see this as evidence of Starmer's astuteness in avoiding a trap, though I think he was merely being himself. But again, the idea that outbidding Labour on the restraint of protest will be the key issue at the polls seems unlikely.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDG_5e_RljAx_DoU4FFMY56lAcHnQW_STvMYINuCS7X3T8P6C8JxiihmG2iQEqQZg0lDjOw11vo_ImBJkB04c_e0W0vPswF7OLRjRbKTGR5YgU7PZet03CM92yM6RgO_GKV6DCOyHrYCOletE6AnYtIvMEoz5RPJMdZS7cfBj5go_iRDjqoHJAcnKfLUo/s1920/GettyImages-2043894260-e1709564129446.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDG_5e_RljAx_DoU4FFMY56lAcHnQW_STvMYINuCS7X3T8P6C8JxiihmG2iQEqQZg0lDjOw11vo_ImBJkB04c_e0W0vPswF7OLRjRbKTGR5YgU7PZet03CM92yM6RgO_GKV6DCOyHrYCOletE6AnYtIvMEoz5RPJMdZS7cfBj5go_iRDjqoHJAcnKfLUo/s320/GettyImages-2043894260-e1709564129446.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Perhaps the simplest explanation is that Sunak wants to remind us he is still Prime Minister, there being few other issues on which he is able to command supportive media attention. In other words, this is another symptom of a government that has run out of ideas and has yet to convince itself that it knows how to avoid the coming electoral tide. Attention switched this week to Jeremy Hunt, and we shouldn't under-estimate the possibility that Sunak's statement was simply intended to pre-emptively distract from the inevitable media attention given to the Chancellor. If there is one thing we have learnt over the last decade it is just how self-regarding and bitchy Tory politicians are. Hunt's budget sought to cement the idea that the Tories are the only party who can be relied on to deliver tax cuts, even though the popular mood is very much in favour of increasing public spending after almost a decade and a half of austerity. You could see this as a last desperate attempt to make the political weather, but I think it's more a case of the Tories going down swinging, an approach apparently alien to Labour politicians (if only Gordon Brown had had the balls to abolish the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68477602" target="_blank">House of Lords</a> in 2009).<p></p><p>This determination to unashamedly do what Tories do should be borne in mind when we consider the growing body of commentary on the future of the Conservative Party. This can be broadly divided between the psephological focus of the moment and the longer-term analysis of the Tories as a historical and sociological force. For the first, there has been much heated talk of "meltdown" and "wipeout". In a first-past-the-post system this is conceivable: there is an inflexion point at which falling levels of support lead to an exponential increase in seats lost (i.e. getting into what might be called Lib Dem territory in terms of national levels of votes-per-seat). However, opinion polls and by-elections are rarely wholly reliable guides to general elections, and we must never under-estimate the fact that conservative voters are by temperament conservative and so stick with the devil they know. The second approach has tended to focus on the long-term demographic and material challenges for the party: in short, that they've lost the young (actually all cohorts <a href="https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/TheTimes_VI_240229_W.pdf" target="_blank">up to about 60</a>) and that their dominance among the old means their base will gradually shrink. The traditional transmission of youthful liberals into middle-aged conservatives appears to have broken down under the weight of unaffordable housing and rising income inequality. </p><p>In this context, the "culture wars" and the associated authoritarian turn against youthful protest are seen as an attempt to motivate that elderly base and retain the social reactionary vote detached from Labour in the so-called "Red Wall" seats of the 2019 general election. There are a number of problems with this theory, not least whether the Red Wall even exists independent of Brexit and why the only people in small Midlands and Northern towns who vote are apparently either OAPs or crypto-Fascists. But if there is one thing we know about the political commentariat it is that it remains endlessly fascinated by the far-right, hence the outsize attention given in recent weeks to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/21/liz-truss-deep-state-cpac-far-right" target="_blank">Liz Truss</a>'s attempt to carve out a speaking career in America, the anti-Enlightenment <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2024/02/22/fighting-the-enlightenment-what-do-danny-krugers-new-conservatives-really-want/" target="_blank">New Conservatives</a>, and the ever-present <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-leader-uk-conservative-party-2026/" target="_blank">Nigel Farage</a>. While the media's intermittent focus on the left is always about preserving the Parliamentary Labour Party's ideological conservatism, its focus on the far-right is about normalising the idea that the Tories are a genuinely broad church and that radical shifts are natural and welcome (consider Chamberlain to Churchill, or Heath to Thatcher).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSyMcH-Cw14v0ALxP_VX4lADVyfZc5Y50GuGu9ewE3Lui0Eu37OCeD6-qW1yIzPl-QR7oi61-JrkRQWYETAJOWAwxe9dxfz06mByE2D_kLcxzNKj0fsU-nx5mbfpqWEZm2ou4ilcTuX3DL10CsEzhl31-Byc9phXN3ljRnvBbXxz2VRl7uxnw-RzFG64k/s768/1315650_3517029.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="768" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSyMcH-Cw14v0ALxP_VX4lADVyfZc5Y50GuGu9ewE3Lui0Eu37OCeD6-qW1yIzPl-QR7oi61-JrkRQWYETAJOWAwxe9dxfz06mByE2D_kLcxzNKj0fsU-nx5mbfpqWEZm2ou4ilcTuX3DL10CsEzhl31-Byc9phXN3ljRnvBbXxz2VRl7uxnw-RzFG64k/s320/1315650_3517029.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />One product of this broad church assessment is the idea that the Conservative Party is an unstable alliance between conservatism and liberalism, hence it is apparently at risk of being "torn apart" by someone as intellectually shallow as Suella Braverman. But the party's actual <i>raison d'etre</i> is simply a defence of hierarchy, which makes it inherently stable. The default governing mode, which we are experiencing at the moment, is do-nothing because doing nothing preserves existing hierarchies. When the party has shifted to an activist mode, as in its adoption of neoliberalism in the 1970s, that has invariably been an attempt to restore hierarchy and its associated privileges. Thatcher's "Let managers manage" sought to restore capitalist power in the workplace while policies such as privatisation and right-to-buy sought to restore the privileges of property ownership (that ex-council houses ended up in the hands of petty landlords was a feature, not a bug).<p></p><p>Likewise, the idea that Labour is united by a common cause but divided by strategy misunderstands that socialism seeks to supersede liberalism, which is why the latter seeks to restrain and impede the former. This idea also ignores the structural imperatives to preserve hierarchies (consider the motivations and behaviours of the PLP). The motor of UK politics since 1832 has always been liberal "reformism", and the practical application of that has always been the creation of novel forms of governance and representation that preserve existing hierarchies while accommodating limited "progress". For example, nationalisation took industries into public ownership but largely retained and reinforced the existing management, which meant moves towards workers' control were stymied and the prospect of future privatisation preserved. Likewise, the return of those nationalised industries to private ownership has seen not only non-exec sinecures for helpful ex-politicians but the growth of a parallel bureaucracy of market regulation that shows a marked continuity with the QUANGOs of old.</p><p>The Conservative Party does not face an existential crisis, any more than democracy itself does, however both the party and our political system are subject to secular trends and material factors that will inevitably alter them. The Tories are facing a period out of office because the model of transferring economic control of public services to privileged private interests has finally hit the buffers. The crass profiteering around Covid contracts was like stripping an already emptied shop of its shelving. To paraphrase the lady, "The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of state resources to loot". The state <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-state-were-in.html" target="_blank">has not shrunk</a>, because <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2024/03/how-14-years-have-shown-impossibility.html" target="_blank">it can't</a>, and the rents extracted from it are now too high to bear, a point the public have got if the Westminster parties haven't. The challenge to democracy is that both the Conservatives and Labour remain in denial about the death of Thatcherism, despite standing amidst the mounting wreckage of the financial crash, auserity, Brexit and the pandemic. The palpable lack of enthusiasm for Labour, and the likelihood that enough of us will wearily troop to the polls to consign the Tories to temporary electoral oblivion, is a reflection of that <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2022/10/of-time-and-tide.html" target="_blank">sea-change</a>.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-86935953331920063602024-02-23T16:21:00.006+00:002024-02-23T16:32:00.923+00:00Arsenal vs The Celebration Police<p>We're two-thirds of the way through the league season so now is a good time to look at how the fight for the title is shaping up. Arsenal sit third, one point behind Manchester City and five behind Liverpool, who have played a game more. Most pundits think it will be a straight fight between the teams currently in first and second place, with Arsenal failing to keep pace and City favourites because they have won the last three titles (and five of the last six, Liverpool winning the other). In other words, the assumption is that history will repeat itself: the early promise of Arsenal's challenge fading, City putting together a winning run over a dozen games and Liverpool making one of their periodic dashes for the finishing line. People rarely go broke betting that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's, but there are reasons to believe that a new script might emerge. After all, it has to happen at some point. A feature of modern football is that as teams have become more drilled on the pitch, and as players have become more diligent and unassuming off it, managers have increasingly taken on the burden of providing personality and colour in the game, so that is as good a place to start the analysis as any.</p><p>Both City and Liverpool have managers either leaving or likely to leave in the not-too-distant future. Jurgen Klopp has already announced that he will be taking a sabbatical at the end of the season and while there is nothing official, or even rumoured, I think most people expect Pep Guardiola to fancy a change now that City have won the Champions League. His increasingly spiky dealings with the press suggest a man eager to burn his boats, and it's hard to believe he sees turning Jack Grealish into a world-class player as a suitably engrossing project any more. The counterintuitive integration of players like Haaland and Doku into the City squad looks like a master craftsman tinkering with his mechanism out of idle curiosity. He has always cut a dissatisfied demeanour on the touchline, but it's noticeable how much more morose he looks these days. Just as Klopp's manic grin has come to seem like the mask of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so Guardiola's irritability suggests that he's near the end of his tether, or at least sufficiently bored to want to walk away.</p><p>In contrast, Mikel Arteta remains wound up to the point of mania, which means he's still on the upward curve of the managerial trajectory. It's nothing more that relative age, but it does suggest that the growth potential at the Emirates is greater than that at Anfield or the Etihad. This has been reinforced this season by the frequency with which other members of the coaching staff have been given prominence in the media, notably Nicolas Jover's contributions to set-plays and the rumours of suitors for Carlos Cuesta, and by the near-legendary status accorded the warm-weather training trip to Dubai. Even the goalkeeping coach, Inaki Cana Pavon, has been mentioned in dispatches in the context of the background to David Raya displacing Aaron Ramsdale. What this suggests is the emergence of a new narrative in English football, which is partly down to Arsenal's undoubted progress in recent seasons and partly the boredom of the media with the established narrative embodied by Guardiola and Klopp. Attempts to create a positive narrative out of Ange Postecoglou appear to have faltered, mate, while the negative narrative of Manchester United under Erik ten Hag also appears to be fading.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU8hpeBJ7MGVy22OUNezt4yemUxeRjGAMCBkdh-WNMj-W3Smcs_a8UEHQJxoFdsnL5BKJiZqlD4fD4R19CykcGCFii0SMVq3hLjaJjDPdOLZ6x52V2vQdrwMPPihyphenhyphenpm3JKNhuYSB6S4rEujaAM3fM66Q7DV1iEwCew6351B1YxzFhGFSFi_Kst2LbzoFI/s1200/SEI182944276.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU8hpeBJ7MGVy22OUNezt4yemUxeRjGAMCBkdh-WNMj-W3Smcs_a8UEHQJxoFdsnL5BKJiZqlD4fD4R19CykcGCFii0SMVq3hLjaJjDPdOLZ6x52V2vQdrwMPPihyphenhyphenpm3JKNhuYSB6S4rEujaAM3fM66Q7DV1iEwCew6351B1YxzFhGFSFi_Kst2LbzoFI/s320/SEI182944276.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />This has given rise to some odd behaviour in the media, most notably the arrival of the celebration police with their demands that Arteta and his coaches comport themselves with greater dignity, as if winning a game of football was akin to laying a wreath at the Cenotaph. Given that the same sources were always able to find fault with the touchline behaviour of Arsene Wenger, a man who was never less than dignified even when confronted by rank imbecility, these snipes are not worth responding to, but they are worth thinking about as evidence that certain pundits with North West affiliations are becoming uneasy. This doesn't mean that Arsenal are bound for glory, but it does suggest that the foundations are there for a sustained period of excellence that will unquestionably improve the chances of said glory. This is perhaps best understood if we look at the data. Over the first 12 games of the season, Arsenal garnered 27 points, scoring 26 and conceding 10. Over the next 13 games they took 28 points, scoring 32 and conceding 12. This looks like consistency, even if you'd ideally have liked 2 or 3 more points per third. The question is: can they maintain this pace and perhaps even improve on it?<p></p><p>Last season, the points haul per third was 31, 29 and 24: a fast start and then an accelerating decline at the business end. In Arteta's first two full seasons, Arsenal secured 13+21+27 and then 20+28+21. In other words, he has overseen periods of top-four performance (25+ points) but has been unable to sustain this over a season. 2022-23 saw title-challenging performance (28+) over two thirds, which was enough to achieve an 84-point second place finish. The hope is that this season will see a steadier return and thus a consistent table-topping points tally in the 85-90 range. 35 points from a possible 39 remaining is achievable, but 30 is more likely. However a final tally of 85 might be enough to win the title. It's worth noting that Man City had 55 points after 25 games last season and went on to take the crown with 89, but I suspect they'll drop a few more points along the way this season. Their games away to Liverpool and at home to Arsenal in March could well be decisive.</p><p>In terms of the squad and style of play, Arsenal look more balanced and varied. There have been hiccoughs and a periodic struggle with low-block defences (the defeat away to Porto this week being the latest), but there have also been examples of Arsenal confusing their opponents with their movement and the attention to detail on set-plays has been real and rewarding. As is usually the case at this stage of the season, Arsenal are going to need some luck on the injury front: specifically that they don't lose key players like Ødegaard, Saka and Rice. Given that they've lost Timber and Partey for almost all of the season, and Tomiyasu, Zinchenko and Jesus for part of it, you could say that they've already proved that the squad has greater resilience and depth. The question is whether they can now raise their game for the title run-in and take either or both of Liverpool and Man City to the wire. The one thing we can be certain of is that whoever manages to win the title this year will be fully justified in tearing off down the touchline to celebrate.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-6439148388645575722024-02-16T10:35:00.013+00:002024-02-16T10:55:29.920+00:00Antisemitism Again<p>There are a number of reasons for the Labour Party's continuing troubles over antisemitism. Having deployed it as a weapon for factional ends, there should be no surprise that it has proven to be a double-edged sword in the hands of the Tory press who, for commercial as much as ideological reasons, like nothing better than blood on the floor. Likewise, the patent insincerity of the more thuggish elements of the Labour right in claiming to be lifelong campaigners against racism and bigotry was always likely to blow up in their faces at some point. I'm genuinely surprised it has taken this long, but that in turn points to a third reason: that the media's indulgence of Keir Starmer's leadership was always likely to end ahead of the next general election. He lacks the charisma and novelty of a mid-90s Blair and the process of making Labour's manifesto "bullet-proof" against Tory attacks has left a vacuum that needs to be filled somewhow. When your leading defenders are either insisting that you are a serial dissembler who will suprise us all by being more radical in office, or that your lack of fixed principles is actually a sign of pragmatic maturity, then you know you're going to struggle when the electorate asks what it's getting in return for booting out the Conservatives.</p><p>Beyond the confines of the Labour Party, the contemporary salience of antisemitism obviously owes a lot to the conflict in Gaza, though it should be emphasised that the turn in sympathy against Israel and towards the Palestinians, which is what we're really talking about here, long-predated the 7th of October and can be traced back to the collapse of the Oslo accords. The defenders of Israeli policy, such as the UK's Community Security Trust, whose data on the level of "antisemitic incidents" is routinely relayed by the media <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/feb/15/huge-rise-in-antisemitic-abuse-in-uk-since-hamas-attack-says-charity" target="_blank">without interrogation</a>, have obviously sought to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, to the point of now claiming that the phrase "Free Palestine" is anti-Jewish if addressed towards Jews or Jewish institutions. In other words, we are seeing the boundary of what qualifies as antisemitism expanded, a danger that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/apr/24/un-ihra-antisemitism-definition-israel-criticism" target="_blank">many previously predicted</a> in respect of the demand to adopt the IHRA definition without qualification, including <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/antisemitism-executive-order-trump-chilling-effect" target="_blank">Kenneth Stern</a>. This rhetorical inflation has led to many tropes that were previously considered acceptable, if crude and insulting, to now be taken as <i>prima facie</i> evidence of antisemitic intent, which appears to be what has tripped up Azhar Ali and Graham Jones, the two prospective parliamentary candidates at the centre of the latest Labour "row".</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlQluMXFf-f8GZMaFJVScw3FHgQzSx3NIz2a31wwXYuSx75tKQqo2SKsneYZtiZtUfT5dI2BvhbyfnPIjMxh57HnLmjwzBgRb8Lvy3H-7mUeZXh-qccxFAjMLrWyXZomV6j_dLdu-ZDTO941z-b7Hv3Ry6kP1IER3FBO_LvG3C6LCnZuS-JgaWUrrTtTc/s640/graham%20jones%20ali.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlQluMXFf-f8GZMaFJVScw3FHgQzSx3NIz2a31wwXYuSx75tKQqo2SKsneYZtiZtUfT5dI2BvhbyfnPIjMxh57HnLmjwzBgRb8Lvy3H-7mUeZXh-qccxFAjMLrWyXZomV6j_dLdu-ZDTO941z-b7Hv3Ry6kP1IER3FBO_LvG3C6LCnZuS-JgaWUrrTtTc/s320/graham%20jones%20ali.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />There is a fine line between believing that Israel has opportunistically exploited the 7/10 attack to pursue long-standing aims in Gaza and believing that there was a conspiracy to amplify the attack in order to further those aims. In suggesting the latter, Azhar Ali was indulging his audience in a worldview assumed to be common among Muslims: not just that Israel is conniving but that it is cruel and callous. What this suggests is that the presumption of factions based on ethnic or religious heritage remains part of Labour's internal management culture. Party members, even relatively elevated ones such as councillors, are assumed to have bloc loyalties (specifically to Pakistani-heritage <i>biraderi</i>) and must therefore be appealed to by pandering to what are assumed to be that bloc's prejudices. The two leading theories as to who leaked the meeting are that it was either a member of another faction disappointed by Ali's selection or someone genuinely appalled by what he said. In either case, this was clearly a <i>political</i> decision, which indicates how misguided it was to try and address the participant's concerns through the medium of an imagined bloc identity.<p></p><p>In contrast to Ali's statements, Graham Jones's "Fucking Israel" is a nationalist rather than a communalist sentiment. Likewise the claim that anyone fighting for the IDF is a traitor. What this highights is the double nature of antisemitism, here in the form of two distinct traditions: the idea of Jews as insufficiently loyal to their "adopted" country (Jones) and the idea of Jews as having an intrinsic moral deficit wherever they are found (Ali). The former has tended to be characterised as a sophisticated, even aristocratic tradition (e.g. the Dreyfus Affair), while the latter has been seen as vulgar: the antisemitism of the marketplace (e.g. Kristallnacht). But in reality these two traditions have always overlapped to the point where there is no meaningful distinction in practice - i.e. in how they impact on Jews. It exists purely in the minds of antisemites. The distinction between an upper class patriotism and a lower class materialism was constructed to reflect better on that upper class and to quarantine the lower classes whose "excitable" responses to economic disruption had a tendency to expand beyond questions of Jewish culpability into broader debates about inequality and power.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM0ZhyphenhyphenkQja16TEtjLiZAIL8bnApt0jlLSE4rCysOljE8kq1VxU2lCJsPisVqJa2OgmoqxxFk4Pg3OJ_MzXXPNtyOYr4BASfY5pfhug21iGH38CpxF9PN4IBaV3gUgafqHRvJ55GHdor3qfsQyQxEZyuisr8r2D2Cqoi6euifdxAdhbKdD-1W2qjHLrfEg/s700/de935a79-33d7-496a-a405-f345a7e64b63.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="393" data-original-width="700" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiM0ZhyphenhyphenkQja16TEtjLiZAIL8bnApt0jlLSE4rCysOljE8kq1VxU2lCJsPisVqJa2OgmoqxxFk4Pg3OJ_MzXXPNtyOYr4BASfY5pfhug21iGH38CpxF9PN4IBaV3gUgafqHRvJ55GHdor3qfsQyQxEZyuisr8r2D2Cqoi6euifdxAdhbKdD-1W2qjHLrfEg/s320/de935a79-33d7-496a-a405-f345a7e64b63.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The paradox of Nazi antisemitism - that the Jews could be characterised as both rich and powerful and at the same time as poor and verminous - was not simply a geographical distinction between the assimilated Jews of the Rhineland and the alien Jews of the Polish shtetls. It was also a class distinction in motive: the bourgeois antisemite resented the unequal competition of the bourgeois Jewish cabal and despised the vulgarity of the poor Jew, while the working class antsemite resented the power of the Jewish capitalist and despised the unequal competition of the Jewish worker willing to accept lower wages. The double nature of antisemitism reflects those class differences. Likewise, just as anti-black racism reflects the beliefs of "white" racists rather than any intrinsic quality of "blacks" (hence racism birthed race, not the other way round), so classic antisemitism - that is the antisemitism of the modern historial era rather than the religious antisemitism of the pre-modern era - reflects the ideology of the ethnically homogeneous nation, which was meant to unify the classes. <p></p><p>That classic antisemitism, with its roots in the nineteenth century and its overlaps with "scientific racism", never went away because we never superseded the nation state. But it has altered over time, specifically the dual nature of antisemitism has seen a bifurcation. The vulgar Jew has retreated into history in most Western societies. This is not simply because of the demographic impact of the Holocaust in Europe or the successful upward social mobility of Jews in the US (incidentally a continuing theme in American culture, e.g. in recent films such as <i>Oppenheimer</i> and <i>Maestro</i>). There are still working class Jews, but you rarely see them in the media. Instead the community representatives are overwhelmingly middle or upper-middle-class, tend towards the centre-right politically, and identify with the establishment. Likewise, few of us are familiar with the reality of working class life in Israel because Western media prefer to present the country in middle-class terms as one of technology start-ups, liberal values (that admittedly need defending from the vulgar Netanyahu) and the IDF's gender-equality, with the <i>charedim</i> as little more than a background noise and the illiberal settler movement as semi-detached.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrUPtr5NIHNHxh20gUGDeKY9MV2I_IjD5ETZqk485ObDpB2zlFaNTj-F8sfAiTMsw2ycU1XIVc0d2K5Re9P0mGO4Lcg1i0VHzEZLiTtLcOaokVOvgGQnnwg6rswXQps3OrGn0zI23_9FIC-OeQVitQztXEsqwjkSAo_kOq2-nT0v1_0CtTm5Qu9sNtUxo/s768/whatsapp_image_2023-08-19_at_20.10.22.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrUPtr5NIHNHxh20gUGDeKY9MV2I_IjD5ETZqk485ObDpB2zlFaNTj-F8sfAiTMsw2ycU1XIVc0d2K5Re9P0mGO4Lcg1i0VHzEZLiTtLcOaokVOvgGQnnwg6rswXQps3OrGn0zI23_9FIC-OeQVitQztXEsqwjkSAo_kOq2-nT0v1_0CtTm5Qu9sNtUxo/s320/whatsapp_image_2023-08-19_at_20.10.22.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />This has left a vacancy that has been filled by Islamophobia. The traditional tropes of antisemitism from the "lower" tradition have been transferred wholesale: the shadowy conspiracies and unfair competition (the underlying rumble about the Rochdale selection), the morbid religiosity, the desire to defile white women ("grooming" will be on the Rochdale ballot courtesy of an independent candidate). We can also see elements of the upper tradition echoed in popular forms - e.g. the treatment of the traitorous Shamima Begum. But if the upper tradition lives on, it does so predominantly, if paradoxically, under cover of philosemitism. The Jews are to be applauded because they have shown us what a true nation state looks like. They are defeating the Muslim interlopers, purging their land and ensuring the survival of the Jewish race. A good example of how these two traditions now combine was offered this week by Trevor Kavanagh, the former Political Editor of <i>The Sun</i>, who opined that <a href="https://twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1758128026565673381" target="_blank">all Muslims are by definition anti-Jewish</a>. This manages to treat both Muslims and Jews as homogeneous groups with common characteristics, while also conflating all Jews with Israel.<p></p><p>What this suggests is that Labour isn't going to able to "rid itself" of antisemitism, or at least the appearance of it, any time soon. The Tories will insist on the association of Muslim support and antisemitism not simply as a way of attracting Jewish (and Indian) support to themselves but as a way of gradually detaching Muslim voters from Labour. The hierarchy of racism within the party reflects a factional approach, and that won't change so long as the party remains averse to actual politics and so preserves the utility of ethnic blocs. The groups that achieved national prominence campaigning against antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn, such as the JLM, are unlikely to cede that prominence now, which will encourage further rhetorical inflation. The identification of the left with antisemitism has been pursued to inoculate the party from any taint of socialism, but the consequence of this has not just been a shift to the right on the ideological spectrum but a movement in the boundary of antisemitism itself, as Azhar Ali and Graham Jones have just discovered. Too many people are now invested in the persistence of antisemitism within Labour for it to easily disappear.</p><p></p><p></p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-53677485950858589582024-02-10T17:26:00.004+00:002024-02-13T11:36:55.680+00:00Labour's Industrial Strategy<p>John McTernan was unfortunate in his timing. His <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/31/labour-tories-spending-green-prosperity-fund" target="_blank">plea</a> for Labour to drop the pretence that the green prosperity fund was anything other than an industrial strategy came only days before the long-heralded <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/08/labour-28bn-green-prosperity-plan-keir-starmer-rachel-reeves" target="_blank">confirmation</a> that the expected next government will not be spending £28 billion per year transitioning to a low-carbon future or anywhere near that figure. Lost in the debate over whether this latest u-turn shows Labour cleaving to the Tory agenda or simply incapable of sincerity is his use of a term suggesting a more <i>dirigiste</i> approach to the management of the economy than has been visible of late. As a confirmed Blairite, McTernan would no doubt insist that New Labour had an industrial strategy, but in substance this amounted to little more than acquiescence in the once-fashionable idea that letting the financial sector do as it pleased would ultimately benefit all. In fairness, that was a strategy with a long pedigree in British politics. The formal industrial strategy of the postwar years was, like the wider concept of planning, an atypical interlude in a history otherwise tending towards <i>laissez faire</i>.</p><p>The UK's fitful attempts to craft an industrial strategy between 1940 and 1980 reflected the nature of the economic model that developed over the much longer period between 1750 and 1890. The technological advances of the age, which every schoolkid learns to recite as a series of names (Arkwright, Bessemer, Stephenson etc), gave the UK a significant first-mover advantage as they did not spread sufficiently rapidly to allow other nations to quickly develop competitive domestic production. There were two consequences of this: the growth of export-oriented capital goods sectors in the UK (shipbuilding, railways etc) with the corollary of a firm commitment to free trade, and the defensive adoption of protectionist policies by many of those competitors in an effort to shield and develop domestic production (notably the USA). The common ground was a commitment to sound money - the gold standard - which in turn benefited the UK by making the City of London the central nexus of global trade and capital financing.</p><p>The extroverted nature of British industry led to sectors dominated by multiple, small-to-medium size manufacturers specialising in niche products and selling to a global market. In contrast, the protectionist policies of the UK's chief competitors encouraged vertical integration within captive domestic markets, the classic example being the development of Standard Oil in the US, a company that spanned extraction, refining, distribution and retail (a model that remains central to the oil business today). The institutional effect of this was the emergence of the large-scale corporation and a tendency towards merger as a means of achieving growth, particularly notable in Germany around steel production, which was only occasionally restrained by anti-trust laws (e.g. the break-up of Standard Oil). After World War II proved the inefficiency of further expansion through territorial aggression, this birthed the modern multinational. </p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFRzGZc7Tnv1C69pc06g3XZ4E3f_wwGSEVahF-RWBnclP1LHvGpDHrFHhHxaSoB3wBrbgznaKj41s313IPPf41qIp1zf5RZftpggVkN-oqJDObDF5n976Btc32ccHon-2ATzbhESjuo9ajCUBPnmwqLHByuxPLKQEA2tUjRqDohPjtGgxaLcSLbcZ3VTo/s1334/7ede6gxpos131.png"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFRzGZc7Tnv1C69pc06g3XZ4E3f_wwGSEVahF-RWBnclP1LHvGpDHrFHhHxaSoB3wBrbgznaKj41s313IPPf41qIp1zf5RZftpggVkN-oqJDObDF5n976Btc32ccHon-2ATzbhESjuo9ajCUBPnmwqLHByuxPLKQEA2tUjRqDohPjtGgxaLcSLbcZ3VTo/s320/7ede6gxpos131.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />While all this was going on, the UK found itself pulled between competing interests. The established capital goods and manufacturing sectors lobbied government to preserve their export markets, which gave rise to the conflict between free trade and imperial preference (the latter being an attempt to stunt the growth of capital production and manufacturing in the colonies, which inevitably failed because no one seemed to appreciate that this wasn't what the dominions themselves wanted). Meanwhile, there was a conscious effort to consolidate the fragmented primary goods and manufacturing sectors during the twentieth century, notably coal, steel and automobile production. Typically, this was done by a combination of nationalisation, the encouragement of private sector mergers, and various schemes in between where the state would act as a sleeping partner underwriting private capital with public money. <p></p><p>What remained a constant was the interests of high finance and the influence it exerted on the UK state - what Giovanni Arrighi, in <i>The Long Twentieth Century</i>, refered to as its "pecuniary rationality". Despite the retreat from the gold standard and the emergence of capital markets in New York and Tokyo, the City of London continued to exert sway over the state's fiscal policy and industrial strategy, constraining the former (the "Treasury view") and showing little enthusiasm for the latter. Indeed, if nationalisation in the UK was characterised by a willingness to preserve the existing management culture and resist workers' control, it was also marked by a desire to side-step the City's lack of interest in domestic opportunities and to short-cut the process of private sector consolidation. The problem was that the fiscal constraints inevitably led to under-investment in those nationalised industries by the state: neither brave enough to defy the money markets nor brave enough to reform British management.</p><p>The technological first-mover advantage that the UK benefited from in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (roughly 1760-1840) now looks like a historical one-off, both in terms of the transformative effects it had on society (e.g. urbanisation) and in its duration, though you could make an argument for China's economic catch-up since 1978 being an echo of it, albeit through the absorption of common technologies into an untapped domestic market and then through labour cost arbitrage with the West. Subsequent cycles of advance, notably the second industrial revolution (1870-1914) and more recently the digital revolution (1970-1990), saw new technologies dispersed globally in ever more rapid bursts. This in turn means that the boost to GDP growth arising from new technologies tends to be weaker and much shorter. While tech-boosterism is still a thing among politicians and pundits, the likes of Tony Blair look increasingly naive in their fetishistic belief that the embrace of technology alone can transform a nation's fortunes. </p><p></p><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSeWsf-n3vZ4fx3fmX-o3j9Kf2SH8NTb83LENhTfA_kFULvSKU7bD7ERYmHMXFrlVh6qQKz8mZsNUSNg3O_4cMD4XuTeblMo9FUWy5k1hrJ_y9Orf1qTO40cfpt7QRW54xHtOXXNCFIXNJvyDp9JmXlNuatBHdNb1v7HaC4NMxI76LAtsUMW8LEK56LA/s653/fafa.jpg"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSeWsf-n3vZ4fx3fmX-o3j9Kf2SH8NTb83LENhTfA_kFULvSKU7bD7ERYmHMXFrlVh6qQKz8mZsNUSNg3O_4cMD4XuTeblMo9FUWy5k1hrJ_y9Orf1qTO40cfpt7QRW54xHtOXXNCFIXNJvyDp9JmXlNuatBHdNb1v7HaC4NMxI76LAtsUMW8LEK56LA/s320/fafa.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Today, growth above the historic mean, or even above the level of national comparators, can only arise in two ways. One is a historic conjuncture in which secular trends and contingent opportunities coincide to produce a benign environment. For example, a demographic bulge that rapidly adds youth to the working population or the demands of reconstruction after a period of major destruction. The second is a major change in the composition of the economy that provides a higher-level comparative advantage. For example, the discovery of oil, or other valuable resources, within a territory or the rapid expansion of an export-oriented industry that cannot be quickly replicated by competitors (such as semiconductor fabrication). Of course, these developments themselves entail risks, notably the resource curse in the first instance and exposure to fluctuating foreign demand and currency speculation in the second. A safer approach may be a state-led change in the compostion of the economy but for a developed nation with already mature technology like the UK such a change is more difficult to achieve: you can't just take it off the shelf as the Chinese did.<p></p><p>Outside these exceptional circumstances, the ambition for most states will be growth close to the international average. For developed economies, that's been around 2% per annum over the last twenty years. The UK is currently at about 0.5%, so there's certainly headroom, but getting closer to 2% won't generate the sort of tax incomes, <i>ceteris paribus</i>, required to fund much long-term investment, particularly given the demands to boost day-to-day spending on the NHS, social care and crumbling local goverment services. The green prosperity fund - or green new deal if you prefer, emphasising the pro-labour and pro-social aspects - offered a potential way out of this bind: a major retooling that would boost growth in the short-term and make the economy more competitive in the longer-term so sustaining that growth (or at least enabling the UK to keep up with its peer group). In rejecting the idea of using the green transition to boost growth, Labour are not simply allowing the Tories to set the agenda, or <a href="https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/02/labour-has-given-up-on-the-climate-crisis" target="_blank">giving up on the climate crisis</a>, they are confirming that the stranglehold of the City, last seen during the Truss debacle, remains very much in place. </p><p>Labour hasn't been the party of the workers since the 1970s, and even then workerism was only one of a number of competing ideological strands, but it did retain a credible claim to be the party of growth long past that point and as recently as 2019. With this announcement, Starmer and Reeves have confirmed that it has given up that claim and is now simply the party of sound money: the "fiscal rules" have become a fetishistic end in themselves rather than the means to a particular fiscal end (higher spending, lower taxes etc). The move to the right on policy (i.e. all those promises reneged), like the authoritarianism and managerial brutality, are not simply the instinctive behaviours of the right wing of the party. They are an expression of an overarching commitment to sound money that inevitably produces a conservative, pessimistic mindset and a preference for austerity: the constraint of the growth they claim to be in favour of. Labour has no industrial strategy because it has no growth strategy beyond a pious hope.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-62625982498900775662024-02-02T21:11:00.004+00:002024-02-03T10:22:39.157+00:00All in the Family<p>Gothic is coded posh. Or, to put it another way, gothic is a romantic recuperation of the past in which ruined property represents the decline of a hierarchical order: the bare ruined choirs of an abandoned abbey; the forbidding castle of the absentee landlord. The persistence of social hierarchy, and the contemporary economic importance of property, mean that the gothic is never far from the surface of our culture. Unfortunately, this often gives rise to a fetishisation of the property and an unrealistic, even hysterical, treatment of social relations. A recent example is Emerald Fennell's film, <i>Saltburn</i>, in which a middle-class psychopath destroys an aristocratic family and inherits their country pile. You probably saw that coming a mile off, even without the signposting to <i>Brideshead Revisited</i> and <i>The Talented Mr. Ripley</i>. Two far superior films, with striking similarities in plot but which use the gothic in more varied and imaginative ways, are Joanna Hogg's <i>The Eternal Daughter</i> and Andrew Haigh's <i>All of Us Strangers</i>. Of the two, Hogg's film is the more obvious in the way that it plays with gothic tropes, but it does so precisely to wrong-foot expectations. Haigh's film is more subtle in its use of gothic themes, but that is because its class milieu is very different.</p><p><i>The Eternal Daughter</i> re-uses the upper-middle-class mother and daughter from Hogg's two <i>Souvenir</i> films, Rosalind and Julie, but here both are played by Tilda Swinton. The film opens in suitably gothic style with mist and enveloping darkness as the pair plus dog arrive at a Welsh mansion, now converted to a hotel. The cabbie provides a tale-cum-warning. Naturally, the hotel is all but deserted, the receptionist is sour and unhelpful (she's Welsh and thus coded as resentful and lower class), and there are lots of noises in the night. The purpose of the visit is for some mother and daughter quality time, but it's clear that the relationship though loving is cool, even formal, with polite ministrations substituting for meaningful engagement. It's all very upper middle class in its emotional restraint and acceptance that there is an unbridgeable divide between the generations. There is also a strain of cynicism: Julie is covertly recording her mother's comments as raw material for a screenplay she is writing, which presumably reflects Hogg's own ambivalence about her autofictional approach to filmmaking.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgA9vycScclz_BtZetJ0xWCsTR2YIbNfQjg1zhgors2GqbkJ7kNVl7VLia4ztOLajkubeDt_y730noq5srXcmUy22UPuCtYtCFYCzJf2JssrS1xn2xvdQTTxBmhCgJh8oi-xTpc9FLcmTiMuaGD5ccM8q9dfuiOy3VnBuDMYiSYVBv-jmAA76-uruJWQs/s900/the-eternal-daughter-tilda-swinton-900x0-c-default.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="900" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgA9vycScclz_BtZetJ0xWCsTR2YIbNfQjg1zhgors2GqbkJ7kNVl7VLia4ztOLajkubeDt_y730noq5srXcmUy22UPuCtYtCFYCzJf2JssrS1xn2xvdQTTxBmhCgJh8oi-xTpc9FLcmTiMuaGD5ccM8q9dfuiOy3VnBuDMYiSYVBv-jmAA76-uruJWQs/s320/the-eternal-daughter-tilda-swinton-900x0-c-default.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />It transpires that the building was one that Rosalind lived in as a young girl during World War II (it was owned by an aunt), and that she carries memories - some nice, some not so nice - of what occured there. Suitably cued, you're expecting something bad to happen and sure enough the dog goes missing. Julie enlists the help of Bill, an enigmatic member of staff, and they search the grounds. The dog then turns up in Julie's room. This is the signal for a tonal shift away from the gothic. Julie shares a drink with Bill, who offers advice on bereavement: Julie has lost her father and Bill his wife. She later hears Rosalind tell Bill that she, Julie, has no children and will thus lack a dutiful daughter to care for her in her old age. The film reaches its climax with a birthday meal for Rosalind at which point we suddenly realise that the reason we never saw both characters in the same shot was not because they're played by the same actress but because Rosalind was never there: she too is dead. Julie is at the hotel on her own, working on a screenplay (presumably this film) and thus conjuring up her mother's ghost. As the film concludes, we realise that the hotel isn't deserted, that the receptionist is solicitous and that the weather is fine. Further confusing expectations, the wise old head Bill turns out to be real, rather than another projection of Julie's psyche. <p></p><p>A common and recurrent motif in both Hogg's film and Andrew Haigh's <i>All of Us Strangers</i> is the protagonist looking out of a window but in a way that suggests they are looking into the past rather than observing the present. Haigh's protagonist is Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a gay screenwriter approaching middle age who not only doesn't have kids but appears to have no friends: they moved out to the suburbs and country to raise families. Like Julie, Adam is in search of his dead parents and struggling to write about them. On a research trip to his modest childhood home in Sanderstead, he encounters a trim man in his 30s with a 'tache. What looks for all the world like a pickup turns out to be a visitation by his 80s-era father who takes him home where he is welcomed by his mother who recognises her now grownup son by his eyes. Just as Julie sought to establish a greater rapport with her mother, so Adam seeks to explain himself to his mum and dad, played by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. This primarily means coming out to them but it also means expressing what their loss meant to him. They died when he was only 12, after which he was brought up by a granny in Dublin (which explains Scott's accent). </p><p>There's a degree of humour in the generational divide that veers perilously close to a 1970s sitcom, but the real subject is the unbearable weight of a love that cannot now be expressed even if the imaginative encounter with his parents provides the consolation that they would love him just as much now as they did when he was a shy and sensitive child. As with Julie and her mother, not only does Adam conjure his parents' ghosts but he is finally ghosted by them over a meal, in Croydon's Whitgift Centre of all places. The twist in this tale involves Harry, played by Paul Mescal, the only other occupant of Adam's London tower block, who offers human contact and warmth as much as sex, but who is eventually revealed to be another imaginative projection of Adam's mind but, tragically, extrapolated from an all too real person who is also now dead. Adam is lonely - pathologically lonely, adrift in a building that is improbably empty and constantly replaying the queer-coded music of his 80s youth: Erasure, the Pet Shop Boys, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.</p><p>The difference between the two films reflects the class of the parents and how this has affected the child's understanding of the world. Rosalind's emotional reticence and Julie's instrumentalism have left their relationship transactional. Gestures of care and tokens of memory - Julie's presents for her mother, her mothers stash of photographs - have become the medium of exchange. Honest expressions of feeling are avoided and when Julie's finally burst through they come across as self-pitying and selfish. In contrast, Adam's parents are more emotionally engaged - allowing Adam into their bed, relishing shared joys like dressing the Christmas tree - but their view of the world - dismissing "poofy shit" - was as typical of their day as the easy relationship with drink and cigarettes. Adam's loneliness is rooted in his belief that they could never have understood what he was experiencing as a bullied schoolkid: that he was effectively orphaned before their deaths in a car crash. Their return offers a chance for Adam to convince himself that it wouldn't have mattered: that they would have evolved with the times while continuing to love him for who he was and is.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGaY7cLwlPSZBu8V17sBey6QQVZcrfmDBbeT_Afjf-dqiwyTZF6zMUBkDf1uyBq3iU44T-D5_amoL2wx6qUkfOlHakW7a-gDIN-bDkRvUKsZKZsjVZwEHvBlSLl-btl_QstYIHTiWXl0GLt8fdpQyuNW5Xh2vpAi4xTLeObIh9gGvUZeZp8pakxBEJdzM/s1200/2000.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGaY7cLwlPSZBu8V17sBey6QQVZcrfmDBbeT_Afjf-dqiwyTZF6zMUBkDf1uyBq3iU44T-D5_amoL2wx6qUkfOlHakW7a-gDIN-bDkRvUKsZKZsjVZwEHvBlSLl-btl_QstYIHTiWXl0GLt8fdpQyuNW5Xh2vpAi4xTLeObIh9gGvUZeZp8pakxBEJdzM/s320/2000.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />The property in <i>The Eternal Daughter</i> has been lost to the family. It is now a commercial, and thus a slightly grubby middle-class, concern rather than a gentry family home with all its history of good and bad. Despite the early suggestions of ruin, the Welsh mansion is actually in good condition and a popular hotel. As such, it represents an optimistic view of changing social relations: evolving towards a more democratic if essentially capitalist future. The property in <i>All of Us Strangers</i> is cosy but also empty. Adam never interrupts the present owners of his childhood home. They aren't there just as there is no one, apart from Harry, in the block of well-appointed flats in London where Adam now lives, which feels more like an abandoned spaceship than a slab of prime real estate, an effect heightened by the vivid sunsets that Adam observes from his 22nd floor eyrie. This property is also capitalist but it looks more like an investment: the urban flat as safe deposit box for distant investors; the suburban home as a Thatcherite aspiration now found to be devoid of humanity. <p></p><p>Gothic fiction is characterised by fear, the supernatural and the demands the past makes on the present. Julie fears a childless old age, Adam a life of loneliness. For both of them the supernatural is less a threat than a device that allows them to commune with the dead: a form of spiritualism for people who don't believe in spirits. The dynamic of both stories sets a time-limit on the past's demands - there is no haunting as such and the ghosts are a friendly as Caspar - and both protagonists come to realise that they must let the past go so that they, rather than the dead, can rest in peace. Both films ultimately supersede the gothic: Hogg's by highlighting the self-indulgence of the aesthetic and letting the light of day in; Haigh's by revealing that terror and inconsolable loss are quotidian emotions that affect us all, not the preserve of a social elite with refined sensibilities. Both are wonderful films. In contrast, the ending of <i>Saltburn</i>, in which Barry Keoghan's character cavorts naked through his newly-acquired palatial home, suggests little more than the masturbatory fantasy of an estate agent as imagined by someone who knows the correct cutlery to use on all occasions.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-91359736163500389872024-01-26T12:09:00.006+00:002024-01-27T10:53:12.008+00:00Labour Teleology<p>The Labour Party has always historicised itself. If Conservatives incline towards biography (as do Liberals, which tells you a lot), Labourites have preferred to situate their story within the broad sweep of British narrative history, though in practice this has tended to be largely English history of the sort made famous by RH Tawney and EP Thompson: somewhat sanctimonious and proudly parochial. This is partly the product of insecurity - a recognition that the Conservatives and Liberals long defined official English history so an alternative story needed to be told - and partly a recognition that the individual should not be elevated above the collective - something that became an article of faith after Ramsay MacDonald let high office go to his head. Whereas the Conservative Party is rooted in a belief that the old regime will persist, Labour is committed to the idea that, to coin a phrase, "Things can only get better". While in reality often less optimistic (Fabian gradualism), even downright pessimistic ("the forward march of Labour halted"), there is still the sense that Labour is on the right side of history and should therefore embrace the future.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbx4ofuy-WmJ9EK7aGy_210OY_NNAEZD_OH1BiQNCyAuX4inGvr_gBA2JmClrnB1AAWCcBnzvDlWXAasASi3z-hloRXbXIYqIAoz3z4abt8I8pkxeWR0MubNZzjSDAAh2qhj2eJsdC6PLxcHKep027G5GefI_qG1sAw_o8IiOgCDhhUq7WHGsSn9qX5O0/s1276/978-1-349-25305-0.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1276" data-original-width="827" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbx4ofuy-WmJ9EK7aGy_210OY_NNAEZD_OH1BiQNCyAuX4inGvr_gBA2JmClrnB1AAWCcBnzvDlWXAasASi3z-hloRXbXIYqIAoz3z4abt8I8pkxeWR0MubNZzjSDAAh2qhj2eJsdC6PLxcHKep027G5GefI_qG1sAw_o8IiOgCDhhUq7WHGsSn9qX5O0/s320/978-1-349-25305-0.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><br />In its earliest days this commitment went beyond vague progressivism to a concrete teleology: the labour movement had a social and economic goal and the party had a legislative programme to achieve it that could feasibly be enacted one day. Of course, there were differences of opinion about what that goal was, hence the ambiguity of the terms socialism and social democracy in Labour Party discourse, though these tended to be presented as debates on means rather than ends: essentially bureaucratic gradualism versus state activism. In contrast, conservatism is by definition anti-teleological. Preservation of the past is necessarily the deferral of the future. Modern conservatism, since the late 1970s, has employed the trope of progress and even revolution but in the context of a regressive movement in time: back to basics, it's morning in America again. The current appetite among Tories for a Thatcherite revival is a decadent example of this: an insistence that supply-side stimulus can once more work its magic despite the blunt rejection by reality when Liz Truss attempted it. <p></p><p>Postwar Labour revisionism was essentially the claim that the party's goal had been achieved by the 1950s and that the future would simply be a matter of efficient management of the social gains. In other words, bureaucratic gradualism won the day. Progress was still possible, but this would be the organic product of growing enlightenment rather than the engineering of social relations. This was a rejection of socialism in favour of the early twentieth century welfare liberalism that Labour had superseded when it supplanted the old Liberal Party. The debate in Labour in the 1960s and 70s was characterised by the revisionists refusal to admit this truth until the breakaway SDP. Even then, the claim to be the inheritors of the tradition of "social democracy" was a denial. Reality eventually obliged the SDP to fold into the Liberal Party. This surprisingly tortuous process took some years due to the egos involved, notably those of Roy Jenkins and David Owen, which emphasised how much the politics were essentially biographical (Jenkins, who had already written a life of Asquith, became a serial biographer once his political career ended).</p><p>The important point to note here is that welfare liberalism was still recognisably progressive. While it might advocate a different economic path - less nationalisation, more free trade (in the EEC) - it was congruent with the social goals of the labour movement in terms of improved rights and more extensive social goods. In the event, the reinvented conservative movement took over that economic path and married it with a regressive social agenda in the 1980s, which marginalised not only the socialist strand of Labour but the liberal strand as well. The emergence of New Labour (the very name redolent of progress and novelty) marked not only the formal acceptance of the Conservative Party's economic dispensation but its social prejudices too, hence the focus on welfare reform, antisocial behaviour and school discipline. This produced a government that regularly regretted its own liberal impulses (e.g. over the Freedom of Information Act) but this was offset by an optimism that made it confident enough to renounce its own past in the service of the future (e.g. Clause IV). The current Labour leadership represents not so much a return to the New Labour mix of light and dark as a bias towards that underlying strain of pessimism. The demand by Blairites for another "Clause IV moment" is telling inasmuch as Keir Starmer shows no appetite for it. What he appears to prefer are purges and disciplinary sanctions. Lacking the optimism of 1997, all we are left with is the authoritarianism.</p><p>Shorn of hope, all Labour can now offer is a permanently deferred future: "if the fiscal rules allow". It has become the party of no future, even if that designation is being widely applied to the Conservatives as they continue to poll badly. Tony Blair was obsessed with the future, even if it was one constructed out of mangement consultancy hype and his own credulity. In contrast, Keir Starmer seems permanently discomfited by the idea that tomorrow may be different from today, while Rachel Reeves, desperately trying to cultivate an intellectual hinterland, appears to have never had an original thought in her life: everthing is second-hand or shop-worn. The prospect for the general election later this year is of two parties painting a bleak future. The Tories will inevitably resort to "Don't let Labour ruin it" and point to the weak shoots of growth, if only because they simply haven't got an alternative, but the future they envisage will therefore be one that is fragile and anxious. Labour will say all the right things about getting a grip, restoring trust and boosting the economy, but on every substantive issue they will equivocate or urge "realism" about how much (i.e how little) can be done. The future they envisage will be equally underwhelming.</p><p>The parallel for the 2024 general election may turn out to be 1983 rather than 1997. Not in its outcome, of course - a Conservative landslide that depended on the Falklands War and the SDP - but in the bleakness of the main parties' offerings as mediated by the press and TV. The Thatcher government might have been buoyed by victory in the South Atlantic, but its message wasn't an echo of 1945's New Jerusalem but a promise to continue the policies that had led to recession and deindustrialisation. While the economy had improved, there was no promise of sunny uplands. Instead there was an emphasis on the intractability of unemployment and the threats of lawlessness, the USSR and trade unions. For Labour, the most famous speech of the campaign was by the then Shadow Education Secretary, Neil Kinnock: "If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary. I warn you not to be young. I warn you not to fall ill. I warn you not to get old". For partisan reasons, there was an unwillingness at the time and later to acknowledge the progressive temper of the 1983 manifesto, which was notoriously described by Gerald Kaufman as "the longest suicide note in history", hence the prominence given to Kinnock which all but sealed his elevation as the next party leader.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY5hSvO52z9G8KaNdnLS5hwhqtDD5QIRZvgjoy4Yc90eEqAiJ-tAjt2J93a__K-065bIEcpEQRzCNfacA-UiaIT4bG4t6dFFrJFnWuA5nPaEw-7MGln1lUG9I_3biR4_erhwoVJP9UoufM05hoxFEbTe06SS7mkimHiJ4UYfkBHYiclFz7KF_fPB8Q6qg/s1000/71M+55nCwKL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="639" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY5hSvO52z9G8KaNdnLS5hwhqtDD5QIRZvgjoy4Yc90eEqAiJ-tAjt2J93a__K-065bIEcpEQRzCNfacA-UiaIT4bG4t6dFFrJFnWuA5nPaEw-7MGln1lUG9I_3biR4_erhwoVJP9UoufM05hoxFEbTe06SS7mkimHiJ4UYfkBHYiclFz7KF_fPB8Q6qg/s320/71M+55nCwKL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg" width="204" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>The chief dynamic of UK politics since 2019 has been the Labour Party's shift to the right. The Conservatives are out of ideas, but still able to set the agenda in the confident expectation that Labour will follow where they lead. Thus debate centres on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/23/eye-watering-taxes-tories-labour-public-services" target="_blank">whether tax cuts are feasible</a>, not on whether we should change the balance of taxation between wages and wealth, while the NHS is portrayed as in dire need of reform rather than just the resources necessary to do its job. Liberal opinion is fretful over the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes" target="_blank">adoption of centre-right policies</a> and the next government's <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/keir-starmer-accuses-tories-of-salting-the-ground-by-spending-billions-on-tax-cuts_uk_65b13271e4b09e7f5b9e0519" target="_blank">room for fiscal manoeuvre</a>, but it isn't about to urge that we revisit the arguments of the socialist left. That's because British liberals long ago made peace with their conservative instincts. As was made painfully clear during the EU referendum and the ensuing campaign against Corbyn, and most recently in the response to the war in Gaza, they are in the business of preserving the old regime. Progress is to be welcomed, but at a snail's pace. This liberal-conservatism has now <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/22/england-conservative-politics-tories-labour" target="_blank">hegemonised Labour</a>, with the result that the party of progress has lost confidence in the future. One symptom of this is a revival of biography, even if <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/03/a-century-of-labour-by-jon-cruddas-review-what-does-the-party-stand-for" target="_blank">masquerading as narrative history</a>, which is ironic given the dearth of personalities in the current leadership. Labour's teleology is at an end.<p></p><p></p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-43336053551998782392024-01-16T13:54:00.422+00:002024-02-03T21:36:19.517+00:00Beyond the Horizon<p>Most English Premier League football clubs have now introduced digital passes for ticket-holders. There have been teething problems, but the technology is clearly here to stay: a bit like VAR. There are a number of reasons for this, from clamping down on ticket-touting (though the touts are still to be seen - I have no idea how they do it now) to better crowd safety (the long legacy of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report), but another driver for clubs' investment in ticketing technology since the 1980s was fraud at the margin - i.e. gate operators letting people under or over the turnstile, so the counter ratchet didn't click, and pocketing the money. To an extent this had always been tolerated as the cost of prevention was high and the loss to the club marginal, but it became a much bigger issue as entrance prices went up and clubs became more dependent on their matchday income. While wealthy foreign owners have driven inflation in the game since the millennium, financial fair play rules have simply reinforced the need to squeeze every last penny from the gate.</p><p>The reason I raise this is that it provides a useful entry-point for discussing what has come to be known as the Post Office scandal. There are two parts to this: the bug-ridden Horizon IT system and the response of the Post Office management to the unfolding debacle. Both were informed by a suspicion that the organisation was being defrauded at the margin, though it's central to the sorry tale that this started out as a belief that benefit claimants were defrauding the state, not just sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses defrauding Post Office Limited. It's also worth emphasising at this point that, with the exception of a handful of Crown Post Offices, those sub-postmasters are independent franchisees - i.e. small business people. This is important because it highlights a discrepancy between the positive rhetoric around self-employment and sub-contractors and the harsh reality of asymmetric commercial relations (it's also worth noting in passing that there are a lot of pseudo-SME arrangements in the public sector, e.g. doctors, as well as in the grey areas of public corporations, e.g. the BBC, and state owned commercial entities such as the Post Office).</p><p></p><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic2XT1LZvO3WHcn0Xhww3GBw6CzK6LhiaGAvFhLDkBwn9jLqbDT7KKVmf_80kl2jWicDBcYfieMs-0TCq0gQrsKnwdT68cIWWIarQqZrICQQ1kg_cE_0SyrNi_YBTliHurIcLEAK-7enmgvEZGKuaSXmsU2rHS7DO5CMVhAqmt9Ec_nOkwzNzp_J3mGqU/s480/p0h4nz3b.jpg.jpg"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic2XT1LZvO3WHcn0Xhww3GBw6CzK6LhiaGAvFhLDkBwn9jLqbDT7KKVmf_80kl2jWicDBcYfieMs-0TCq0gQrsKnwdT68cIWWIarQqZrICQQ1kg_cE_0SyrNi_YBTliHurIcLEAK-7enmgvEZGKuaSXmsU2rHS7DO5CMVhAqmt9Ec_nOkwzNzp_J3mGqU/s320/p0h4nz3b.jpg.jpg" width="320"></a></div><br>While the now-famous (and likely to be awards-laden) ITV drama, <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/jan/01/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-review-toby-jones-is-perfect-in-a-devastating-tale-of-a-national-scandal" target="_blank">Mr Bates vs The Post Office</a></i>, focused on the human interest of the present, and while much of the subsequent outrage has focused on the <a href="https://davidallengreen.com/2024/01/how-the-legal-system-made-it-so-easy-for-the-post-office-to-destroy-the-lives-of-the-sub-postmasters-and-sub-postmistresses-and-how-the-legal-system-then-made-it-so-hard-for-them-to-obtain-justice/" target="_blank">perversity of the law</a> and the recent underfunding of the courts, necessitating an act of Parliament to unpick the mess, to do the story justice (sic) you really need to look at the longer history. It might appear unnecessary to start with the origins of the General Post Office in 1635, but we should certainly go back as far as 1838 and the introduction of money orders, which is when the opportunities for fraud at the margin start to proliferate. The need for strict financial controls was reinforced by the creation of the Post Office Savings Bank in 1861 and the gradual expansion of state financial services culminating in the payment of old age pensions in 1909. The GPO has been investigating fraud at the margin for over 300 years, but this has been reported in the context of the scandal as evidence that it had become a law unto itself: that it shouldn't have been pursuing private prosecutions outside the purview of the Crown Prosecution Service. <p></p><p>But this misses the crucial point that the Post Office has a long data series - a corporate memory, if you will - on fraud at the margin. Why did no one notice the statistical anomaly of a significant rise in fraud prosecutions, estimated to be from an average of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/nils-pratley-on-finance/2024/jan/16/fujitsu-should-be-on-the-hook-for-hundreds-of-millions-of-pounds-in-redress" target="_blank">5 a year to 55</a>, after the introduction of the Horizon system? The likely answer is that Post Office management suspected the higher level of fraud was always there but that only now, with the benefit of computer-based accounting, were they able to uncover it. It's also worth noting here the downward secular trend in Post Office revenues and the pressure this exerted on management to reduce losses and thus reliance on state subsidies. What's less understandable is why government ministers weren't (as far as I can tell) asking the obvious question, i.e. is this increase in cases statistically credible?, particularly when you consider how wedded both New Labour and the subsequent coalition were to targets and metrics as part of the culture of New Public Management (NPM). The suspicion must be that politicians who spout about "business rigour" and "evidence-based policy" are mostly clueless when it comes to basic data analysis.</p><p>The second historical strand worth looking at is the origin and development of ICL. The business was created under the second Wilson government in 1968 and overseen by Tony Benn, the then Minister for Technology. It was an example of an industry "champion" (what would later be derided as "picking winners") formed by the merger of three UK computer fims. The state would have a 10% stake and would provide funding for research and development. The aim was to build a domestic competitor to IBM that could service both the UK public and private sectors and also develop an export market. Unfortunately, it started out with a 6-bit architecture instead of the by then standard 8-bit byte, as used by IBM and others, making its products a technological dead-end. It ended up marketing Fujitsu mainframes and minis, which were IBM clones. That gave the Japanese a route into the UK public sector, which they consolidated by buying a majority stake in ICL in 1990. The point to note here is that unlike IBM, which reinvented itself around software and services, ICL and Fujitsu were always chiefly hardware businesses. </p><p></p><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEcN13CMlIScEhmNcEsuUU3eg9sT8sngb2-GBrNTuSXLCOYOLbcf7mUnO1jhrse8vYLbEL-NaiDGeRY5z4lNa8FIUBatY4hli1NgwkaULLP9u8v43lFSvibuxGdxGhtfHDdtPBJaawQxQD7YTKbepFSb-zjHCaVqJyLOfFFBB_qnCSmfK46Y1osWOVo7A/s1592/c1a3bcfc-9d76-49bc-83c2-e8553264a56d-e1507813422879.png"><img border="0" height="286" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEcN13CMlIScEhmNcEsuUU3eg9sT8sngb2-GBrNTuSXLCOYOLbcf7mUnO1jhrse8vYLbEL-NaiDGeRY5z4lNa8FIUBatY4hli1NgwkaULLP9u8v43lFSvibuxGdxGhtfHDdtPBJaawQxQD7YTKbepFSb-zjHCaVqJyLOfFFBB_qnCSmfK46Y1osWOVo7A/w400-h286/c1a3bcfc-9d76-49bc-83c2-e8553264a56d-e1507813422879.png" width="400"></a></div><br>The primary political driver for the creation of the Horizon system was the plan, developed under the Major administration, to introduce magnetic swipe-cards for the payment of benefits, which it was thought would reduce fraud. The conversion of other Post Office counter business from a largely paper-based system to an electronic point of sale (EPOS) system was a secondary political consideration, though clearly from the perspective of the Post Office itself this was the commercial priority. The project was an early example of a private finance initiative (PFI), with the developer to recoup their costs and profit via transaction fees. ICL Pathway Limited was set up with the explicit purpose of winning the bid for Fujitsu, which it did in 1996. By 1999, with Labour now in government, the project was already a mess, not least because of doubts about the long-term viability of swipe-cards (chip-and-pin, common in Europe in the 1990s, arrived in the UK in 2003). As a result, the benefits element was ditched and the project scope reduced to the counter business.<p></p><p></p><p>Instead of going back to the drawing board, ICL Pathway decided to simply build on top of the already flaky prototype. It is clear from evidence already presented in public inquiries (<a href="https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/3408.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2019/3408.image1.pdf" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-11/WITN00620100%20David%20McDonnell%20-%20Witness%20Statement_0.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>) that Horizon was a badly-run project, with a poor architectural design, that tried to integrate with new third-party technology as it went (e.g. Windows, Oracle, SAP and wide-area networking). There appears to have been no consistent development methodology, no automated test framework, and poor bug management and version control. The smell it gives off is of a second-rate mainframe-centric business circa the mid-80s, which isn't surprising. What this in turn highlights is that there was inadequate IT competence at a senior level within the Post Office, which could have independently assessed ICL Pathway, and equally little technical nous within govenment, despite the public technophilia of the likes of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67941495" target="_blank">Tony Blair</a>. What is also clear is that the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Peter Mandelson, was pushing ICL Pathway to meet deadlines when the correct course of action would have been to abort the project, re-specify the requirements, and start a fresh tender process on a fixed-cost plus margin basis.</p><p>There have been multiple TV dramas about Hillsborough and Grenfell, and yet justice has not been delivered in either case and the prospect of special acts of parliament to deliver it are negligible (though it should be said that the proposed Post Office act may never see light of day given the <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/64523/legislating-to-acquit-horizon-victims-may-be-unnecessary-and-wrong-in-principle" target="_blank">issues of principle</a> it raises). The difference between those tragedies and the Post Office scandal is that they highlighted the negligence of the state towards ordinary people: the contempt of South Yorkshire police towards football fans in the one, and the disdain of a Conservative borough council towards poorer residents in the other. At Hillsborough, there was no appetite in government to criticise a force that had been central to the defeat of the miners five years earlier. As Thatcher herself said in response to the Taylor report, "The broad thrust is devastating criticism of the police. Is that for us to welcome?" Likewise, in the shadow of Grenfell Tower there was little desire to criticise a borough for cheeseparing when that had been the order of the day in local government for decades and when building safety had been presented as a contraint on enterprise ripe for deregulation. </p><p></p><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOb8FyjnMhMQgvLtAMrSqtFa9izjPhofM7RyJQZIy5qfBcqHzs0BAvV8jvwoaIN-VQqKPN9uKTflFMOG3uhuvVYuJdL_3A35GN0lZdZFmQ6m2UdpP2ROKv7iTp9MOeMpp5CrgwIgM4b0KCjjBeNDrPjDR0gk7YHUD49BCG6QIvpZEYWgIAAYmIECa4_iw/s900/1215583.jpg"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOb8FyjnMhMQgvLtAMrSqtFa9izjPhofM7RyJQZIy5qfBcqHzs0BAvV8jvwoaIN-VQqKPN9uKTflFMOG3uhuvVYuJdL_3A35GN0lZdZFmQ6m2UdpP2ROKv7iTp9MOeMpp5CrgwIgM4b0KCjjBeNDrPjDR0gk7YHUD49BCG6QIvpZEYWgIAAYmIECa4_iw/s320/1215583.jpg" width="320"></a></div><br>Ironically, had the Post Office remained fully in the public sector - i.e. as a public corporation rather than as a state-owned private company - the scandal could have dragged on even longer as there might have been greater political ramifications, but equally it might not have happened in the first place as the imperatives - that combination of a bad technology choice and government pressure to be a PFI success - could have been lacking. I don't imagine post offices would still be run on paper records, but a more thoughtful project might have decided to simply adopt a proven, off-the-shelf EPOS system with standard back-end ERP integration (post offices are just retail outlets, after all). The root problem was that initial demand to handle benefit payments, which in turn arose from the delusion that fraud at the margin could be reduced by a large enough figure to satisfy the critics of welfare. The compounding factor was the insistence of ministers that Post Office Limited should operate at arms-length from the state while being put under pressure by its owner (those same ministers) to be a commercial success.<p></p><p>The foot-dragging by the Post Office after the initial evidence that sub-postmasters were being wrongly convicted was not just the usual arse-covering or desire to minimise costs, it also reflected the history of petty fraud within the business and the fear that a general amnesty and blanket compensation might benefit the guilty as well as the innocent. Over-and-above bad management and poor IT practice, the scandal highlights the gulf that exists between the theory of the small business (incentivised, hard-working, responsible) and the reality (muddling through, sometimes incompetent, dodgy at the margins). What's depressing about the otherwise laudable TV drama and the public response to it is the idea that these people must have been innocent precisely because they were small business operators: that cuddly Toby Jones. In other words, they have been given the benefit of the doubt (albeit there are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/15/post-office-owner-convicted-of-wifes-denies-jumping-on-horizon-bandwagon" target="_blank">limits</a>) in a way that the victims of Hillsborough and Grenfell never were.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-7737713961252848642024-01-12T11:01:00.002+00:002024-01-12T11:58:21.360+00:00The Rise of the Far-right<p>The current era of "populism" dates to the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent turn to austerity. Though some historian have tried to trace it back to 9/11, Islamophobia was already well-established in the late twentieth century and the pushback against "radical Islam" was pioneered by the centre-right (and not a few on the centre-left), even as it provided ammunition for the far-right. The root of the trouble in the socio-economic travails of neoliberalism led to a centrist vogue for claiming that populism was to be found equally on the left as on the right, which provided useful cover for the hysterical rejection of mild social democracy pursued by parliamentary means, just as the charge of antisemitism was wielded against those who questioned US hegemony and suggested that the Western powers were not being even-handed in their treatment of Israel and Palestine. In recent years the populist lens has switched exclusively to "<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-rise-could-make-europe-ungovernable-eu-liberals-2024-01-09/" target="_blank">the rise of the far-right</a>", with the advances of the <a href="https://ukandeu.ac.uk/lessons-from-the-netherlands-on-the-rise-of-the-populist-radical-right/" target="_blank">PVV</a> in The Netherlands and the election of Javier Milei to the presidency in Argentina being held up as recent evidence. But the PVV is intent on a conservative coalition and Milei is just a manic retread of Southern Cone neoliberalism, so in what sense is this categorically different? One way of answering this question is to look at the role of youth.</p><p>Corbynism, like other leftist eruptions, was distinguished by two challenges to centrist orthodoxy: that there is an alternative to neoliberalism; and that the young matter politically. It's worth noting that the latter is not something instinctively resisted by conservatives. They are more than happy to present themselves as the youthful, vigorous option if faced with a tired and ageing government, as happened in the UK both in 1979 and 2010. At Margaret Thatcher's first general election victory, the Tories even won a narrow majority among <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-october-1974" target="_blank">18-24 year-olds</a> and wouldn't lose that lead till 1987. While liberals pay lip-service to youth as the motor of progressive history, the reality is that they rarely want to hear from them unless they are prepared to fully endorse the ruling, middle-aged orthodoxy. Consider the reception accorded President Macron's appointment of the youthful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/09/gabriel-attal-appointed-youngest-french-pm-as-macron-tries-to-revive-popularity" target="_blank">Gabriel Attal</a> as France's Prime Minister: "Sylvain Maillard, head of Macron’s Renaissance party in parliament, said Attal could be relied on to “faithfully” carry Macron’s project for the country".</p><p>This marginalisation of youth on the left isn't surprising, and nor is the tendency of centre-left parties to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes" target="_blank">drift to the right</a> in search of more mature voters who are assumed to hold conservative views on both economics and welfare. What has attracted less attention among academics and the media is the way that youth has also been marginalised on the right, specifically the far-right or "national populists" beyond the traditional conservative parties. For all the panics over torch-lit marches and crowds giving Fascist salutes, the reality is that the political far-right is tame. There are no <i>squadristi</i> and few street fighting men. As the far-right has become <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/30/far-right-on-the-march-europe-growing-taste-for-control-and-order" target="_blank">electorally respectable</a> so the skinheads have retreated into the shadows. The contemporary far-right looks notably bourgeois, and thus indistinguishable from the conservatives. And in its current incarnation it is actually <i>haute</i> bourgeois, if not oligarchic. The lower middle class <i>ressentiment</i> seen in the 1930s, which was directed against the larger capitals as much as organised labour and found fertile soil among youth denied opportunities by the Great Depression, is barely audible behind the blustering of rich men like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage.</p><p>In Europe today, the political far-right not only accommodates itself to centre-right orthodoxy (truculently pro-EU, "fiscally responsible" etc) but positively pleads with the centre-right to adopt its policies, for example on immigration, rather than simply insisting that the established parties are incapable of delivering the goods and must be swept away. The strategy has been one of absorption rather than displacement, and that absorption has been bi-directional. For example, Fidesz in Hungary, which started out as a conventional liberal party (founded under the name Alliance of Young Democrats), steadily moved rightwards to consolidate its electoral position and now promotes what it describes as "Christian illiberal democracy". What's important here is not just the historic shift to the right but the evolution from an urban student party to one dependent on older voters and rural values. In contrast, both the Rassemblement National (RN) and the Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) have moved inwards from the right, pursuing strategies of "<a href="https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220804-how-le-pen-s-far-right-party-went-from-de-demonisation-to-normalisation" target="_blank">de-demonisation</a>" and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/08/meloni-urged-to-ban-neofascist-groups-after-crowds-filmed-saluting-in-rome" target="_blank">republican respectability</a> to attract centre-right voters. These moves have involved distancing from more radical, and more youthful, groups on the right, such as Generation Identitaire.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2S6i6a7eZmiX0lU_IkSSEyPD0cTO_gszsRPU1iKWqoL4lsl5BP3cUoYZR6yo5281pGNyJbOAtwWcHt3R8jVaF4JiVIbHSw1OTskYetsKQ0uAE-h1zW07OiXdD5ItTP9r-rfmrajuXCCacf8qRxMhK7db7k0DWxdzS5a67hvUhSDWaKLCDzeR338w2TSE/s1280/american_psycho_1280-1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2S6i6a7eZmiX0lU_IkSSEyPD0cTO_gszsRPU1iKWqoL4lsl5BP3cUoYZR6yo5281pGNyJbOAtwWcHt3R8jVaF4JiVIbHSw1OTskYetsKQ0uAE-h1zW07OiXdD5ItTP9r-rfmrajuXCCacf8qRxMhK7db7k0DWxdzS5a67hvUhSDWaKLCDzeR338w2TSE/s320/american_psycho_1280-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />One obvious difference between old-style Fascism and today's far-right is the role of the party. For all the centrality of <i>Das Führerprinzip</i>, the Nazi revolution was effected through the NSDAP which provided a parallel "state" infrastructure before it came to power. This was not only in the sense of its corporatist rhetoric and performative welfare (e.g. soup kitchens) but in its deliberate policy of entryism into employer, farm and whitecollar organisations after 1928. It was this that provided the foundation for its seizure of power in 1933 and the subsequent process of <i>Gleichshaltung</i> (the coordination of society). With the exception of the RN in France, which retains signficant organisational heft in local government and the police, the present parties of the far-right are relatively weak socially, dependent on passive "respectable" supporters rather than the activist young and required to make common cause with conservatives when they achieve office. In Eastern Europe, parties of the far-right are largely indistinguishable from traditional conservatives, their capture of the state and civil organisations being essentially clientelistic. To find a social infrastructure comparable to the 1930s today, in which the party hegemonises the state, you'd have to look to the BJP in India or the AKP in Turkey.<p></p><p>One reason for this difference in Europe and America is the greater dependence of politics on the media as traditional routes to social engagement, such trade unions and universities, have been politically disempowered or disciplined by the market. This has boosted the far-right electorally. Ironically, this is not just down to rightwing media owners preference for the authoritarian and intolerant, it also appears in part to have been helped by liberals sanitising the far-right by using the term "<a href="https://theconversation.com/look-to-the-mainstream-to-explain-the-rise-of-the-far-right-218536" target="_blank">populist</a>", which most voters don't blanch at. But this media-dependence has also led to its organisational weakness, not least because the discourse is dominated by independent media personalities (think Nigel Farage or Éric Zemmour) rather than party apparatchiks, few of whom are able to convert their positions, dependent on media owners, into political power (think Tucker Carlson). The translation from articulated resentment to coherent policy has proven difficult not only for conservative parties attempting to absorb the far-right's demands (e.g. the Tories troubles with immigration) but for far-right parties when they achieve office (e.g. the Brothers of Italy's wholesale adoption of conservative orthodoxy). But the impetus for absorption remains strong. For all the worries about the <a href="https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/rising-radicalism-germany-s-right-wing-afd-party-makes-strides-in-the-west-a-4d0bde4f-ff09-4093-a653-b396860a62e5" target="_blank">electoral rise of the AfD</a> in Germany and its "rightwing extremism" the reality is that its strategy is to eventually form a coalition with the CDU or FDP.</p><p>In short, the rise of the far-right will remain merely an artefact of centrist media coverage until such time as the insurgent parties prioritise youth over entry into the establishment. If they don't, and there are strong reasons why they won't, then youth will increasingly be sacrificed to secure middle-aged and elderly conservative voters. Those reasons include demography (an ageing population means the young will be electorally less decisive), the leftwards bent of younger cohorts on both social and economic issues (which makes them less likely to succumb to the far-right), and the tendency towards disengagement caused by the professional and managerial turn of political culture. As the far-right competes with the centre-right it will attract some younger voters, but these are the ones who would always have voted right: every polity has it <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/younger-voters-far-right-europe" target="_blank">young conservatives</a>. Though there are genuine Fascists and even Nazis out there, the truth is that most of what we call the far-right today are simply the proudly illiberal end of the conservative spectrum. That is not to downplay the dangers. It was, after all, such conservatives that brought Mussolini and Hitler to power. But the far-right today cannot boast such single-minded megalomaniacs, let alone a committed revolutionary vanguard. Far-right politicians are careerists. A bit more American Psycho than the political norm, but still cut from much the same cloth.</p><p></p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-11537523921331880712024-01-03T10:07:00.002+00:002024-01-05T17:27:04.304+00:00Starmer and the State<p>At its heart, the Starmer project aims to restore the authority and gravitas of the UK state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. You could add Scottish independence to that list, though more in the sense of keeping the lid on an issue that is unlikely to return to the political foreground any time soon. As a reactionary and conservative exercise, focused on curtailing popular democracy and restoring the party cartel to the centre of politics, the project contains within it a fundamental tension between the desire to strengthen the state while preserving an economic system that has consistently undermined the state in the eyes of the electorate. Thus we have popular support for nationalisation and a rejection of the further encroachment of the private sector on the NHS at the same time that Labour rejects the former and supports the latter. The party's emphasis on the national interest and public service is intended not to reconcile these irreconcilable positions but to divert attention: to insist that the capture of the state machinery is a precondition for improvement, but without explaining how that improvment will be brought about, or even what it might look like. </p><p>One result of this is the constant <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/29/backlog-in-nhs-and-courts-will-take-10-years-to-clear-says-thinktank" target="_blank">lowering of expectations</a> about the likelihood of change combined with the hint that the inevitable disappointment will be the fault of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/29/how-much-can-labour-keir-starmer-pledge-at-election-while-remaining-credible" target="_blank">recalcitrant public sector workers</a>, not the government. It has become fashionable to point out the parallels between the rhetoric of the shadow cabinet and 90s-era Blairites, but this actually sounds more like 80s-era Thatcherities shorn of their revolutionary optimism. Where the rhetoric of the 1990s lives on is among the policy entrepreneurs of the think-tanks. A notable example of this is the recent report from the IPPR, <i><a href="https://www.ippr.org/files/2023-12/great-government-dec-23.pdf" target="_blank">Great Government: Public Service Reform in the 2020s</a></i>, which provided ammunition for those newspaper articles on how little we could expect. The report starts with the bad news, "in many ways the inheritance facing the next government is even more challenging than that in 1997", but then offers hope in the form of the management consultancy pabulum that was sounding tired long before that <i>annus mirabilis</i>: "To fix public services we must move beyond arguments about a smaller or larger state and instead focus on creating a smarter state". </p><p>Central to the IPPR report's worldview is the myth of leadership: the dynamic CEO who found political expression in the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The idea that one person's intervention can make all the difference (even Blair wasn't solely responsible for the Iraq misadventure) is premised on the idea that organisations are static, rather than organic and constantly evolving. Exogenous rather than endogenous reform is therefore necessary. This supports bringing in "outside expertise", or applying "industry best practice", which has an obvious ideological connotation in the context of the public sector. It also plays to the liberal media's narrative of Starmer's "success" at the Crown Prosecution Service. Consider this example of the report's emphasis on contemporary leadership: "There are already a host of inspirational and talented public service leaders who are demonstrating that delivering great public services is possible." You'll note that the people who actually deliver the services don't even merit mention as spear-carriers.</p><p>So what does a "smarter state" look like? According to the report's authors, "The smarter state means delivering the three p’s of public service reform: prevention, personalisation and productivity. Prevention means intervening earlier – before people hit crisis point – and can result in better outcomes and reduced costs; personalisation seeks to put strong relationships between citizens and staff in public services at the heart of delivering better outcomes, and empowers citizens to take control of their own lives; and productivity means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible." There is no obvious departure here from the ideas of the 90s. The trouble with prevention is that it is conflated with early intervention, which means treating people as suspect (e.g. "problem families"). In practice, the most useful early intervention is to prevent services collapsing, which usually means more funding. But that will clearly be anathema to a government fully subscribed to the Treasury View on public spending.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGK7JcDL0Lx1l4UxOe46g6zjFNibXHPS5NjE7KBgzG7_U5aK0rriBw_k5OchIX4aNbmrxT1oAY4NHa7Jk72ndQaFnxksKIk7U4HPInARAcjsGQedjQ5czSCSU26Vwbf6C3uqQ2RtH3Ny5YQjdheo6KYgv8zD70uZDTVKmjbl9Z1e6mqSE50JPoMF-xhE/s1160/GettyImages-1841939171-scaled.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="773" data-original-width="1160" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGK7JcDL0Lx1l4UxOe46g6zjFNibXHPS5NjE7KBgzG7_U5aK0rriBw_k5OchIX4aNbmrxT1oAY4NHa7Jk72ndQaFnxksKIk7U4HPInARAcjsGQedjQ5czSCSU26Vwbf6C3uqQ2RtH3Ny5YQjdheo6KYgv8zD70uZDTVKmjbl9Z1e6mqSE50JPoMF-xhE/s320/GettyImages-1841939171-scaled.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />Personalisation may be a softer term for 90s-era consumer choice but it implies the same shift away from the collective negotiation of service through politics to a model of atomised consumption with the state acting as a referee, only nominally answerable to the people, to ensure service providers observe the rules of the game. Empowering citizens does not hint at a reduction in the state's ambit, despite the usual waffle about devolution (the relevant section, on page 7, has 10 actions, 9 of which start with "Goverment should ..."). The idea that productivity "means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible" is close to meaningless, though you can reasonably infer that it's our old friend "doing more with less". The key action appears to be: "Government should invest in ‘employment friendly’ technology – including infrastructure, training and data – to speed automation and free up the frontline, while introducing a ‘right to retrain’ for impacted staff." Underneath the verbiage is the idea that public services are burdened by too many backoffice functions, thereby denying resources to the "frontline", which can be alleviated by automation and outsourcing. History suggest this is wrong on both counts.<p></p><p>Where the IPPR does diverge from the orthodoxy is the observation that during the New Labour years "NPM overemphasised extrinsic motivators and undervalued the need to unlock intrinsic motivation in staff and citizens." Of course, that critique of New Public Management was already available back in the 1980s, and most academic observers would agree that NPM went into decline in the late-90s as digital became the panacea <i>du jour</i>. What is significant in the IPPR critique is the emphasis on trust and autonomy, and how this in turn correlates with skill: "We argue that to fix public services a future government should invest in building a new public service playbook. We argue that this will mean shifting from a low trust, low skill, low autonomy public service model to a high trust, high skill, high autonomy one." The use of terminology like "playbook" isn't encouraging (pure <i>West Wing</i>), and "high-skill" is too often cover for outsourcing "low-skill" jobs, but the appearance of "autonomy", even if lacking the revolutionary implications of the 1970s, is none the less interesting.</p><p>There are two points to flag here. First is the implication that public services can only (or mostly) be fixed by addressing the organisation and culture of the public sector. In other words, it's the people: the service delivery rather than the service. But that begs the question as to what is fundamentally wrong. Most experts in the field agree that the root issue really is just a lack of money, and that most of the observable cultural and organisational deficiencies arise from that. The second point is that the emphasis on "high autonomy" runs up against the problem that the autonomy of public sector managers and that of workers may conflict. The report is vague on this distinction, but it is clear from comments by the Labour leadership (e.g. Wes Streeting on the NHS) that the preference will be to empower management rather than labour. In addition, it's fair to say that even the autonomy of management will likely prove more limited in practice than the IPPR imagines, not least because of Starmer's instinctive authoritarianism.</p><p>What the IPPR report suggests is that the policy hinterland of Labour has reverted to the managerial nostrums of the 1990s after an all-too-brief dalliance with more unusual ideas such as the foundational economy and universal basic income. This is understandable not only because of the innate conservatism of the Starmer regime but because of the attraction of a system of governance in which the state plays the leading role in the public performance of the satisfaction of wants and needs: the emphasis on financial prudence, the mania for targets and metrics, and the treatment of education and crime as disciplinary challenges. That the IPPR report focused its analysis of the public service inheritance of the next government on healthcare, schools and justice was no accident. These are the areas where the state can most easily display its power, even as it prepares the ground for relative failure and public disappointment (compare and contrast with the Tory government's foolish focus on asylum-seekers: a challenge it can never win and where the performance of goverment is increasingly absurd). The purpose of the Starmer administration will not be to improve public services but to re-establish ownership of the state.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-62877187864180851382023-12-28T16:55:00.004+00:002023-12-29T10:39:01.528+00:00A Low, Dishonest Decade<p>I don't know who first came up with the phrase "The Great Noticing" in the context of UK politics, but the definition appears to be widely understood: ingenuous press commentators noticing things that had been in plain sight for years, even decades. We are now in a meta phase, where journalists themselves notice <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/17/rightwing-britain-broken-tories-national-decline" target="_blank">The Great Noticing</a>, though largely in order to pursue industry beef. Thus centrists appalled at Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour Party leadership in 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket now criticise the rightwing press for its failure to appreciate the damage done by austerity, notably in its contribution to Brexit and the undermining of the constitution at home and international standing abroad during the Johnson years (and Truss weeks). This tendency to reimagine what everyone who really matters knew has now rippled outwards to the point that commentators are genuinely suprised if you didn't realise all along that Tony Blair was faithfully carrying out Margaret Thatcher's great work of economic and social reform, or that the role of the UK in international affairs is simply to hold the US's coat. </p><p>As The Great Noticing has become ever more embedded in the discourse, there has been a rise in cynicism: not simply in the negative sense of people assuming that there will be no penalty for lying and cheating (the removal of Corbyn raised the bar and the installation of Starmer has raised it higher still) but in the positive sense that the lies and cheats are more promptly seen through and more vocally called out. In this context, the Michelle Mone case is interesting less for the evidence of cronyism or backhand donations (it's estimated that some <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2021/02/05/crony-ratio-conservative-donations-government-coronavirus-contracts/" target="_blank">8 million</a> of the public money spent on PPE contracts found its way back into Conservative Party coffers), important as those are, than for the assumption on her Ladyship's part that lying to the press is a legitimate tactic to protect one's family from intrusion. This claim is presumably on the advice of her media handlers who have spotted the coincidental utility of the recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/dec/15/prince-harry-wins-partial-victory-phone-hacking-case-daily-mirror" target="_blank">legal judgement</a> against the <i>Daily Mirror</i>. Mone's argument is not simply that lying is justified to avoid public scrutiny, but that this is what any reasonable person would do. She is asking us to notice that this is how the world works: that virtue is little more than fancy dress.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhknifT9_O0e4-tLzv5ZDga8vZnvjvmK6L1kXpX2ytamKIoekv0AwGeHqqqSxTA8lEgL5C_100cGvKEHZLzDXEFJbTGuw4bQ6lBLluLr2rddqQywrW7CoC1juRu_sOpoEmnW8H8EzvQIhFfsql5TfSOBXOOQ55zZeFeizWKYZ1VHMt5s1Wfgsn5h6F3tAg/s1920/PA-31770508-e1652095989202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1920" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhknifT9_O0e4-tLzv5ZDga8vZnvjvmK6L1kXpX2ytamKIoekv0AwGeHqqqSxTA8lEgL5C_100cGvKEHZLzDXEFJbTGuw4bQ6lBLluLr2rddqQywrW7CoC1juRu_sOpoEmnW8H8EzvQIhFfsql5TfSOBXOOQ55zZeFeizWKYZ1VHMt5s1Wfgsn5h6F3tAg/s320/PA-31770508-e1652095989202.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Phone-hacking is a journalistic cheat-code. Instead of doing the hard yards of investigative reporting, interviewing and cross-referencing statements, you can simply bypass the normal rules of the game. The idea of a cheat-code isn't new, even if the metaphor is. Paying for tips from hotel staff or corrupt police officers has been going on since the popular press emerged in the late nineteenth century, while chequebook journalism is by its very nature the equivalent of a loot-box. We should therefore be cautious in assuming that there is anything particularly novel in such behaviour, but we can more confidently suggest that the response to phone-hacking and other press abuses has been categorically different this century, hence the disappearance of the <i>News of the World</i>, the Leveson Inquiry (however prematurely terminated), and the promising signs that Piers Morgan might end up if not in jail at least in the media wilderness. <p></p><p>While the Oxford word of the year might be "rizz", I suggest the phrase The Great Noticing would be a better choice, precisely because it seems to have both accelerated and graduated to a higher plane over the last 12 months, indeed over the last 12 weeks. The biggest illustration of this has been the apparently startled realisation of experienced reporters and respected foreign affairs commentators that Israel is actually trying to wipe the Palestinian people off the map. It would be easy to sneer at the media's inability to spot the accumulating signs since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, but what we should really notice (sic) is that this moment of clarity has inevitably caused a number of other lightbulbs to flicker on: that the two-state solution is long dead, that the US is not an even-handed broker in the Middle East, and that the problem with Israel is not that nasty man Netanyahu with his boorish ways but a society overwhelmingly committed to a system of apartheid. Who knows, maybe some might start to notice that not all charges of antisemitism are made in good faith, though I very much doubt we'll get a <i>Panorama</i> special on the issue.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKJvf-F_27N7jd5pKrKlg4y8ySu-EWjg3TcPgmDKKgvw9iFtbSQ4FC2MTrVEZmfB_31lcPt-DEKLsqpZfzfBtO0CkyZnk_n-4bojEVoEg0pTYal0FGY8OvRA0sRenRlfPwoIOhmofSRURzhuO5kEHOVEttJul_HUjqbA0GU2ApaGT554a6kJ0T6iOhoU/s760/231201-zelenskyy-mb-1241-93ba01.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="507" data-original-width="760" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilKJvf-F_27N7jd5pKrKlg4y8ySu-EWjg3TcPgmDKKgvw9iFtbSQ4FC2MTrVEZmfB_31lcPt-DEKLsqpZfzfBtO0CkyZnk_n-4bojEVoEg0pTYal0FGY8OvRA0sRenRlfPwoIOhmofSRURzhuO5kEHOVEttJul_HUjqbA0GU2ApaGT554a6kJ0T6iOhoU/s320/231201-zelenskyy-mb-1241-93ba01.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />Another example of this has been the recent moves by the US and EU to encourage Ukraine to reassess its strategy in the war with Russia. Accoding to <i><a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/27/biden-endgame-ukraine-00133211" target="_blank">Politico</a></i>, "the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to improving its position in an eventual negotiation to end the war ... [which] would likely mean giving up parts of Ukraine to Russia." The commentators who loudly denounced realists like John Mearsheimer last year for arguing that negotiation and territorial concessions were inevitable are now sagely stroking their chins at the same thought. What most of them appear to have finally noticed is that for all its lack of advanced weaponry and its operational deficiencies, Russia has a lot of manpower that it can call on. Conversely, Ukraine may have the material support of the West, if increasingly grudging, but it simply doesn't have the manpower to force Russia out of its eastern oblasts. While Russia can fight an offensive war against Ukraine, Ukraine cannot fight an offensive war against Russia. The best Zelenskyy can now realistically hope for is joining NATO and the EU as recompense for the loss of Crimea and the East.<p></p><p>At home, the masters of noticing are invariably centrists, not conservatives trying to understand how Britain can have been broken under continuous Tory government. The latter are simply preparing the ground for a Labour administration, both by constructing a <i>Dolchstoßlegende</i>, in which they were thwarted in office by a liberal establishment, and by rehearsing a litany of failures that by their nature a Labour government will struggle to address within a single parliament. Centrists are the great noticers because their essential purpose is to resist the critiques of the left. Not every leftwing analysis will turn out to be correct, and not every prescription emerging from the left effective, but enough will be such that the passage of time will oblige centrists to accommodate and absorb many of those analyses and prescriptions. Noticing is therefore a delaying tactic, so it should come as no surprise that 2023, when Labour took an apparently unassailable lead in the polls over the Tories and Keir Starmer proceeded to junk almost every even vaguely progressive policy, should have seen a flurry of noticing about the last decade.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHt33J4Yc5XnikiAbmwAWEjvGEBhOAz4jYSAqLbbFXI7GDbSyg72Cye_c67CZ_O9qZWe9FwNi4qrrAJsM2vAQ8Wf1pKkS3FgKg_yvc_B5IqnydatRBCd1chZWx7lmsp5lDaFGHwrgmG4bm3DBzw13QzkFjLQiyJ-XFgtBKxu7BPcj04n57yg4bdDg9lzE/s2560/Shehadeh-Settlers.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1707" data-original-width="2560" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHt33J4Yc5XnikiAbmwAWEjvGEBhOAz4jYSAqLbbFXI7GDbSyg72Cye_c67CZ_O9qZWe9FwNi4qrrAJsM2vAQ8Wf1pKkS3FgKg_yvc_B5IqnydatRBCd1chZWx7lmsp5lDaFGHwrgmG4bm3DBzw13QzkFjLQiyJ-XFgtBKxu7BPcj04n57yg4bdDg9lzE/s320/Shehadeh-Settlers.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />Likewise the upsurge in noticing in the realm of international affairs isn't about the chickens of the 2000-16 period coming home to roost, or even those of the post-1989 era (the expansion of NATO, the enfeeblement of Russia etc). Rather it reflects the cynicism of the present moment. On Ukraine, there is now an acknowledgment that the country cannot win back its lost lands and that they in turn are a paltry gain for a Russia that has lost standing globally. In the Middle East, there is now a recognition that there isn't even significant minority support for a two-state solution in Israel: the idea remains a figment of global diplomacy. Given the impossibility of a single-state solution - a nuclear-armed theocracy isn't going to dissolve itself into a secular democracy where it will quickly become a confessional minority - this means that the Palestinians must disappear. The calculation of the US and European powers is that they can sit on their hands long enough for this to happen in Gaza, and in subsequent phases in the West Bank, with Israel bearing the lion's share of the blame.<p></p><p>What The Great Noticing presages for British politics in 2024 is not regret over the errors of the last decade, from the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories in 2010 to the media doing its level best to boost Boris Johnson into office in 2019, but a doubling-down on the commitment to restore the authority and gravitas of the state through performative centrism: tough choices, NHS reform, anodyne virtue. The relative decline of the UK over the period - in GDP growth, in productivity growth, in international standing - will be seen not as a wrong-turn to be corrected by significantly different policies but as the new reality to which we must accommodate ourselves by maintaining the same policies, only more competently. In foreign affairs, realism will make a strong comeback, but largely as justification for accepting facts on the ground, whether in Ukraine, the West Bank or Taiwan. While The Great Noticing will see many commentators wake up to the follies of the recent past, few will have the nerve to suggest that we are already 4 years into a low, dishonest decade to stand comparison with the 1930s.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-82770310940147909232023-12-15T13:22:00.003+00:002024-01-19T11:26:16.469+00:00Tory Sovereignty<p>You don't watch a Ridley Scott film in the hope of a history lesson. The emperor Commodus did not murder his father, Marcus Aurelius, nor did he die at the hands of a gladiator in the Colosseum (he was actually drowned by a wrestler in a bath). So it seems churlish that Scott's <i>Napoleon</i> has been criticised for <a href="https://theconversation.com/did-napoleon-really-fire-at-the-pyramids-a-historian-explains-the-truth-behind-the-legends-of-ridley-scotts-biopic-217951" target="_blank">playing fast and loose with the facts</a>, such as Bonaparte witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette or the Battle of the Pyramids starting with the French firing cannons at the Great Pyramid of Giza (the site of the battle was actually 9 miles away). What the film does present is a traditional view of Napoleon, but that view is decidely the one generated during his lifetime and after by British propaganda, hence the traditional tropes of his sexual dysfunction, his callous disregard for his soldiers' lives and his megalomania. Scott's film is first and foremost an English film, embodied in Rupert Everett's enjoyably supercilious turn as the Duke of Wellington. You can understand why it has enraged many <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/arts/french-critics-napoleon.html" target="_blank">French critics</a>. To be fair to them, it isn't as good a film as Scott's feature debut, <i>The Duellists</i>, which was also set in Napoleonic France, but the reaction is more to do with national sensitivities than cinematic craft.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ56Ylh54aYytEXxii_N8P0G5lix0qwg3rbYFL8rtJVx6snHp-aOQkPBRxTY3QqC2zL4X4dlnIYZqtsEqLKcWUE1N0P8UJvnGxPUcPIBTBaeAWm6EM-LQIzJdYnNKrTpdHwWExzBGSns8IzGehkKKgv3Kmvq4x4gJ85uQvO6WvUzQoPKpXoFbMeohYIxM/s465/2000.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="279" data-original-width="465" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ56Ylh54aYytEXxii_N8P0G5lix0qwg3rbYFL8rtJVx6snHp-aOQkPBRxTY3QqC2zL4X4dlnIYZqtsEqLKcWUE1N0P8UJvnGxPUcPIBTBaeAWm6EM-LQIzJdYnNKrTpdHwWExzBGSns8IzGehkKKgv3Kmvq4x4gJ85uQvO6WvUzQoPKpXoFbMeohYIxM/s320/2000.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />The film obeys the usual rules of a Hollywood epic in that many of the supporting characters are English (even if actually Scots, Welsh or Irish). Tahar Rahim, as Paul Barras, is the only prominent French actor (he has an impeccable English accent). The American Joaquin Phoenix naturally plays the man of action, distinct from the silver-tongued Brits such as Ben Miles as Coulaincourt and Matthew Rhys as Talleyrand. He is a fine actor but miscast here, not least because we must believe that a bear of a man who looks every one of his 49 years can convincingly portray the character from 24 to his death at 51. The key physical characteristic of Napoleon was not sticking his hand inside his coat but the possession of boyish looks. Vanessa Kirby is likewise miscast as Josephine because she is too young, though she makes a decent enough fist of the part. The empress was six years older than the emperor. Had the film been a French production, it would have made sense to cast Benoit Magimel (also 49 but credibly boyish) and Juliette Binoche (59 and still able to play 20 years younger), not least because they have history as a couple (incidentally, they are excellent in <i>The Taste of Things</i>).<p></p><p>The film compresses the history, sometimes to the point of absurdity. For example, Napoleon's abdication in 1814 follows hard on the heels of the retreat from Moscow in 1812, as if the War of the Sixth Coalition, culminating in the battle of Leipzig, never happened. But one thing that does get a mention is the apparently dry subject of the Continental System, the attempt to stop the import of British goods that commenced in 1806 as a response to the British blockade of French ports. The prominence of this in the story owes much to its historic significance for the UK, notably in encouraging greater trade outside of Europe and reinforcing the strategic policy, formalised by Lord Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, of Britain's role in supporting the balance of powers in Europe while avoiding any continental entanglements. The role of the Continental System in exacerbating domestic recession after 1810 (it was a contributory factor to the Luddite revolt) and friction with the US (it was also a contributory factor to the War of 1812) are less noted.</p><p>The French are quite right to criticise the film as anti-French and pro-English, but they've tended to emphasise the former over the latter, which I feel misses the point. Scott is a Hollywood fixture but he remains a recognisably English director and one who subscribes to the romantic and conservative tradition of David Lean and Michael Powell. That might not appear obvious in films such as <i>Blade Runner</i> and <i>Alien</i>, but the themes of free will and motherhood have been constants throughout his career. I mention all this not simply because I like many of his films but because his latest has coincided with the resurfacing in politics of the perennial theme of sovereignty, the <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2016/06/that-eu-vote-3-sovereignty.html" target="_blank">core issue of Brexit</a>, this time in respect of the ridiculous and performatively cruel Rwanda scheme. Sovereignty means not only autonomy but the poessession of the power necessary to impose your will on others. Thus the term cannot be understood in a British context without consideration of the history of British power, and a useful place to start is the first great crisis of empire in the late nineteenth century occasioned by the loss of the American colonies and the threat, specifically of domestic contagion, posed by the French Revolution.</p><p>Napoleon has always been a figure who prompted mixed feelings in Britain. He curtailed the revolution and yet he also embodied the revolutionary spirit of ambition that upset the settled order. The trope of the asylum inmate who imagined he was the real Napoleon captured this ambivalence: the daring and the delusion. What Scott and Phoenix's Napoleon embodies is the idea of will, from his determination at the siege of Toulon to his decision-making at Austerlitz and Waterloo. His divorce from Josephine and marriage to Marie-Therese of Austria in search of an heir is presented as a petulant bending of the affairs of state to his personal satisfaction (in a parallel universe, Scott would have cast the suitably French surnamed Mark Francois as Napoleon and Nigel Farage as Wellington). The iconography of Brexit - the Spitfires, the white cliffs of Dover - dwelt on the patriotic resistance against Nazism of World War Two, yet there was always an under-current that saw "taking back control" not simply as the inversion of the colonial relationship - Britain as the occupied rather than the occupier, a rather trite intepretation beloved of <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2019/01/heroic-failure.html" target="_blank">liberals</a> - but as a recovery of that imperial might: the power to do as we wished.</p><p>The latest troubles of the government over Rwanda have led liberals like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/12/britain-rescuing-tory-cult-immaculate-sovereignty" target="_blank">Rafel Behr</a> to decry the Tories' "neurotic obsession with immaculate national sovereignty". But this is to forget the lesson of Brexit, which is that national sovereignty, whether immaculate or otherwise, remains a powerful issue in the public mind. It wasn't immigration or asylum that tipped the vote in 2016 but sovereignty, however poorly understood or incoherent the concept. What remains unresolved in British politics, and what has been the underlying tension since the incomplete revolution of the 17th century, is whether it should be popular sovereignty or parliamentary sovereignty. Whether, in the contemporary context, our political system remains fit for purpose. When Behr scoffs at the idea that reality can be amended by a simple act of parliament, he isn't about to suggest that the will of the people should be untrammelled. He is advocating the conservation of a system in which parliament is constrained both by domestic and international law. That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but then so too is the belief that parliament should be unconstrained by either, even if it is advanced by the likes of Bill Cash. </p><p>The power of Margaret Thatcher in the Tory mentality has less to do with private property or the restoration of class power, let alone the creation of a shareholding nation, than with the expression of national will, first in the Falklands and then against the "enemy within" of the NUM. It is that tradition, with its ancient roots in the Reformation and Shakespeare, not the recent derangement of Brexit, that powers the Tory tradition of sovereignty. In contrast, Labour has never managed to follow the logic of its role as the people's party and fully embrace popular sovereignty. As the party of the state apparat and the professional classes it has preferred to defend both parliamentary sovereignty (some of its staunchest defenders have been leftwingers with romantic delusions, like Michael Foot and Tony Benn) and the constraints of domestic and international law, though not without inevitable tensions, such as over the invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair's hubris approached Napoleonic proportions. Keir Starmer's project is to restore the authority of the state, but that inevitably means putting the genie of popular sovereignty back in the bottle, which is why talk of a return to the EU is misguided. If Ridley Scott fancies directing another historical epic centred on a dour man of will, I'd suggest he try his hand at Cromwell.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-71194153452843675422023-12-09T16:25:00.002+00:002023-12-09T17:01:16.234+00:00Kissinger and Empire<p>The running joke about Henry Kissinger was not simply that so many better people died before him, but that he continued to be fêted by the political establishment despite his judgement having been proved repeatedly wrong by history. Détente is a dead letter, not only with regard to post-Soviet Russia but to China as well, where America's "pivot to the Pacific" is a strategy geared to raising rather easing tensions. The military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina are long gone and whilst the later Latin American "pink tide" was hamstrung by neoliberalism, South America is clearly not the wholly compliant partner that Kissinger envisaged in the hemisphere. His advocacy of tactical nuclear weapons has, thankfully, never been adopted by any power. The final irony is that he died at a time when the limits of the "shuttle diplomacy" that he pioneered in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War have been all too visible in the Middle East where the Biden administration has refused to restrain Israel and very publicly disavowed its role as an honest broker.</p><p>Kissinger's role as a diplomatic "superstar" was one of the odder cultural developments of the early-1970s. It owed a lot to his presentation as a cosmopolitan intellectual: his heavy German accent being a performative melding of Old World expertise in the service of the dynamism of the New World. In fact, he had lived in the US since he was 15 (his family fled Germany in 1938) but carefully cultivated his outsider status while being the consummate insider. Kissinger owed his advancement to the utility of his theorising about the balance of power, in particular his idea that it could be personalised (he was a fan of both Metternich and Bismarck), the most famous example of this in action being "Nixon to China". Thus foreign policy was bent by ego and domestic ambition. But for all the focus on "legitimacy" and "order" in international affairs, Kissinger's theorising was ultimately just a smokescreen for the right of the US to act as the global policeman and to exercise its power without restraint: might is right. As Thomas Meaney noted in the <i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-myth-of-henry-kissinger" target="_blank">New Yorker</a></i>, "If Kissinger was a realist, it was in this sense—of making the image-management aspect of foreign policy a priority". </p><p>Today, under Biden as much as under Trump, the US doesn't really care about image-management, at least beyond its own borders. And that bipartisan contempt for the wider world reflects the realities of American power, not the personal preferences of individual politicians, let alone State Department employees. Kissinger's elevation to international celebrity owed everything to the watershed marked by the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold. This promised a future of greater geopolitical instability, one that appeared promptly in the form of the 1973 oil crisis, and thus stimulated a public desire for the better management of the emerging world system (what would, in time, become the Washington Consensus). Amidst the war crimes in Cambodia and Bangladesh, it's easy to forget, as <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/what-about" target="_blank">Joann Wypijewski</a> noted in the <i>NLR Sidecar</i> blog, that "Kissinger was a symbol, a servant, a latter-day ‘racketeer for capitalism’, in the words of Marine general Smedley Butler. He was also a failure. The objective of his foreign policy approach, he boasted, was order not justice. The world he’s credited with shaping has neither."</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo-OpDVOl8MTWcyIzCen8uuA6m32gg9n4k8R7Pk-Johm4NJq-_L0hYn1a97gi-EAVIysYd_IaHTDQKHOl8JizzER5eAl3nIv_W4zu6xjJbWNyisnMKvuI-snAmfoGkL7bmnP4z6EYbPvg-gI0HC23hslazNjywbXeVLYp0kBOmUAYsUZTMeBQScaw_pBc/s650/gbh9j8e4_modiwithpms_120x90_22_October_19.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="650" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjo-OpDVOl8MTWcyIzCen8uuA6m32gg9n4k8R7Pk-Johm4NJq-_L0hYn1a97gi-EAVIysYd_IaHTDQKHOl8JizzER5eAl3nIv_W4zu6xjJbWNyisnMKvuI-snAmfoGkL7bmnP4z6EYbPvg-gI0HC23hslazNjywbXeVLYp0kBOmUAYsUZTMeBQScaw_pBc/s320/gbh9j8e4_modiwithpms_120x90_22_October_19.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />Meaney picked up the thread in a <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/persona-grata" target="_blank">more forthright article</a>, also for the <i>NLR Sidecar</i> blog, where he emphasised that the acts attributed to Kissinger were a continuation of American foreign policy rather than a divergence. "Was it so unexpected that the country that had fire-bombed Japanese civilians to get Tokyo to the table also fire-bombed Cambodians in an attempt to get Hanoi to one as well? Was backing the massacre of Timorese an unusual follow-up to backing the mass-killing of Indonesian ‘communists’? Was it so shocking that the political class that had installed the Shah would also ease the way for Pinochet? Was Dr. Kissinger’s record in the Middle East really worse than that of his old nemesis Dr. Brzezinski? For what set the man apart, one may have to look elsewhere." And that elsewhere was image-management, which centred on a personally frutiful contrast of European cynicism and American naivety: "The presiding conceit of Kissinger’s career was that he was bringing geopolitical necessities (he never really warmed to the term ‘realism’) to the attention of a country enamoured with its own innocence, and hampered by its own idealism."<p></p><p>As Meaney concluded, "His trademark method was to find ulterior reasons for what the state was doing already." Again, it's worth contrasting this with the present moment where the US has made little attempt to rationalise, let alone justify, its indulgence of Israel. Beyond the usual obeisance towards a two-state solution and mild censure of settler attacks in the West Bank, the Biden administration has offered no substantive criticism of Israel's behaviour, leading to the conclusion that it will be perfectly happy if the Palestinians are wiped off the map once and for all. Its regional goals are clearly Israeli-Arab normalisation and the restraint of Iran, goals that Biden has pursued just as reliably as Trump did, and the underlying purpose of that is to ensure that the US retains a stranglehold on Middle Eastern oil supplies, which has been the guiding principle of its policy in the region since the Second World War. But why the lack of pretence now? The reason is simple: while the bipolar Cold War required a war of position, the era since 1989 has required merely a war of manoeuvre, evident in the spread of NATO to Russia's borders and the dependence of China on US Treasuries.</p><p>In a timely coincidence, the <i>Guardian</i> published a long read by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/30/americas-undying-empire-why-the-decline-of-us-power-has-been-greatly-exaggerated" target="_blank">Tom Stevenson</a> on American empire the day after Kissinger's death. This was a salutary reminder that for all the talk of American decline, or the end of the unipolar world, the US remains the global hegemon with a preponderance of financial and military power "so great that its very extent [has] served to disincentivise other states from challenging it". But this is rarely acknowledged, any more than the foreign policy consistency between Bush, Obama and Trump is. Instead, we are regularly regaled with tales of how a change of administration in Washington might jeopardise America's <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b42c62f7-57e6-4899-affe-a376cc568d3d" target="_blank">defence of democracy overseas</a>. As Stevenson asks, "Why the reticence to explain the nature of American power? And why ignore that so much of contemporary US grand strategy is oriented precisely to prevent its dissolution?" One obvious explanation is that countries like the UK and Japan, which slavishly follow US policy in foreign affairs and act as continental-scale aircraft carriers for the US military, are unwilling to admit that they are satellites of empire rather than sovereign states. Kissinger dignified the dealings of heads of state through a diplomatic theatre inspired by the Congress of Vienna. For that he was always <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/02ce3837-41ea-4c05-bc7a-8329b285ed54" target="_blank">welcome in elite circles</a>.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-67443371586344866912023-12-01T10:01:00.000+00:002023-12-01T10:01:16.622+00:00Against Science<p>Simon Wren-Lewis thinks that the political right has a problem with <a href="https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2023/11/why-does-political-right-have-such.html" target="_blank">facts and science</a>. There's an immediate philosophical issue here in that Simon implies that the right's attitude to facts and science is uniform because he assumes that facts and science are synonymous. But this isn't the case. The right has a high respect for facts, albeit narrowly defined, but it has an innate suspicion of the ambition of science. Facts are objective certainties: their truth is indisputable. But while some on the right have a flexible view of what constitutes a fact - the contents of the Bible, or the "reality" of race - the core conservative tradition of pragmatism, exemplified by Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, sees facts as limited by experience. In other words, facts exist in the realm of reality rather than speculation. As Oakeshott famously put it, "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss". This doesn't mean that conservatives are positivists, or that they limit their sympathy only to certifiable truths. For example, that antinomy of "fact to mystery" clearly excludes the mystagogy of the Church of England and the monarchy. </p><p>In contrast, science operates on probability - the likelihood that something is true - because certainty is limited. The edge of science is a venture into the unknown and the scientific method is more than simple empiricism. Knowledge progresses through the refinement of working hypotheses, which means it is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. The discipline of economics, Simon's specialism, has often been criticised for its pretension to scientific rigour, particularly in its reliance on mathematical models, but this is to imagine that economics deals in facts of a mathematical nature. It doesn't. Economics is a social science, which means that its truth is often contingent, hence the prevalence of stylised facts: general principles that hold in aggregate but for which contrary evidence can always be found at the granular level. That facts and science are not synonymous is not just pedantry. It points towards an important distinction in conservative thought between the familiar and the unknown, which is another way of saying between practice and theory.</p><p>Simon describes the right's problem thus: "Why does the political right increasingly seem to be on the wrong side of facts and science, and what should scientists do about it? One answer to the first question comes from asking another. Do some on the left, by which I mean those whose views are to the left of the positions adopted by the current Labour leadership, occasionally have problems with facts and science? My own answer would be that some can, at least in the area I know best which is economics. The example that is freshest in my mind is UK inflation." That "occasionally" is doing a lot of work. His specific argument is that "the inflationary episode we have recently been through in the UK was in part generated by higher energy and food prices, but it was also a result of strong labour markets, where unemployment was low by recent historical standards and vacancies were very high. ... some on the left were much happier talking about imported inflation than labour markets being too strong. Many claimed inflation was profit led. Yet the evidence so far for the UK is pretty clear that profit shares, outside of the energy sector, have remained pretty stable." </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJB_99iQ5M3x7pwdnZkAUDyle3yb9QYv0LqjJ6z-w5Twg4sq4kbPZIqRljL7aPTOAIchSU9j17dsshVYhuAjYDCOP6n1yluvDkAsV4Ucx1XjAPNdiJP7oNQC1M4ULx7JGQePcPCkitpROumOEkb8rTDMMW47RBssV-5Wpw6Ri6UajUsP1A7K07xS3y47U/s282/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="179" data-original-width="282" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJB_99iQ5M3x7pwdnZkAUDyle3yb9QYv0LqjJ6z-w5Twg4sq4kbPZIqRljL7aPTOAIchSU9j17dsshVYhuAjYDCOP6n1yluvDkAsV4Ucx1XjAPNdiJP7oNQC1M4ULx7JGQePcPCkitpROumOEkb8rTDMMW47RBssV-5Wpw6Ri6UajUsP1A7K07xS3y47U/s1600/download.jpg" width="282" /></a></div><br />This ignores that the left is not necessarily viewing the "episode" as simply another random event that can be empirically assessed. Rather leftists tend to see it in historical terms as part of a longer trend (a stylised fact, if you prefer), commencing in the late-1970s, that has suppressed working class incomes and boosted returns to capital, leading to today's high levels of inequality. The short-term stability of profit shares in sectors other than energy is not incompatible with this. The tendency to accuse the left of a utopian obsession with the future means that its engagement with history tends to be occluded. For example, critical theory is deeply embedded in historical reasoning as much as social science but is commonly presented as unmoored from both. The qualifiers in Simon's statement - "some", "many" - and his use of "happier" indicates that he recognises that the left has exhibited a range of opinions, both in respect of the latest bout of inflation and the secular trends of the last half-century, but he is obliged to construct a left strawman in order to establish a commonality with the right, namely the power of ideology: "My point is not that left and right are much the same. They are obviously not, and the right has power while the left do not. Instead it is to suggest one source of reality denial is ideology." <p></p><p>This sails dangerously close to the centrist conceit that everyone bar the centre is driven by ideology, which requires Simon to indulge a form of horseshoe theory in which both left and right are vulnerable to self-delusion: "The ideological source of the left’s focus on profits rather than a strong labour market is obvious. On the right, neoliberalism typically argues against state ‘interference’ with firms and markets. Both climate change and lockdowns are about the state taking measures to avoid extreme externalities. Equally a libertarian ideology would see both policies as restricting personal liberty". Again, that "obvious" is doing a lot of work. In fact, there are plenty on the left who consider an obsession with profit to be merely vulgar, in the Marxian sense, and who would prefer to focus on the clear differentiator between left and right that Simon himself identifies, namely power. The claim that neoliberalism argues against state interefence with firms and markets suggests that Simon really doesn't understand neoliberalism either in theory or practice, though I suppose that "typically" might allow him a degree of leeway. </p><p>Neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of state power. While inspired by Austrian economics (or classical liberalism, if you prefer), it is a pragmatic of how to introduce the market into a social democratic framework. Despite all of the "reforms" since 1979, Western European economies remain fundamentally social democratic, hence we still have state interference, large public sectors and high rates of taxation. Even the US, with its private healthcare and weak labour laws, is recognisably the social democratic polity built between the 1930s and 60s, despite the Reagan revolution. The equivalence of neoliberalism and libertarianism is also naive. While the election of Javier Milei to the Argentinian Presidency may prove a damp squib because he is clearly just <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/11/javier-milei-argentina-president-monster-mainstream" target="_blank">a neoliberal with a daft haircut</a>, the vote itself was decided by the specific difference of what was sold as libertarianism. Getting rid of the central bank and dollarising the economy is not neoliberal practice precisely because it curtails state power.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv21dbYxByUXmKQMrQAhHfzwBNA2nrhXgdPSkQNHAS5vo5G1toBiQ5n_J8RWE2M_7z-UxXc5DI70N65IotXWOUaLjNBJ_DZWqJhvF5jFMtxWXFVM5PnJgBD2U3ewvpqiC8Xnm52cUvoi_3uFg-69SLJEbylb5PmO3v-ACwO-jfaRLVsZeRpt3la2y5WFI/s1024/51799838289_b926009c29_b.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="683" data-original-width="1024" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv21dbYxByUXmKQMrQAhHfzwBNA2nrhXgdPSkQNHAS5vo5G1toBiQ5n_J8RWE2M_7z-UxXc5DI70N65IotXWOUaLjNBJ_DZWqJhvF5jFMtxWXFVM5PnJgBD2U3ewvpqiC8Xnm52cUvoi_3uFg-69SLJEbylb5PmO3v-ACwO-jfaRLVsZeRpt3la2y5WFI/s320/51799838289_b926009c29_b.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />At this point in his argument, Simon executes a sharp turn to highlight the return of the "paranoid style" (<i>a la</i> Richard Hofstadter) to conservative politics, mainly in the US but also in the UK and particularly in the media: "To see how this paranoid style sits far too easily with today’s politics on the right we can look at right wing media, and in the UK with the strong crossover in recent years between those writing in that media and Conservative political leaders and their advisers". The problem with this turn is that ideology does not neatly segue into conspiracism. The one is a collection of beliefs, not necessarily consistent or coherent, while the other is a style of reasoning that posits a singular "key" that explains manifold phenomena. The purpose of Simon's swerve is to establish a line from the media's indulgence of untruth to the Conservative Party's rejection of scientific expertise ("One of our former Prime Ministers made his journalistic reputation doing just this by making things up about the EU"). <p></p><p>But this isn't convincing. Telling lies, or being "economical with the <i>verité</i>", is not the same as having contempt for science. All politicians lie and mislead - consider the current leader of the opposition - but few of them were trained in the art at newspapers. The Johnson adminstration's disregard for scientific advice, which has been on ample show during the pandemic inquiry, was clearly the product of a more fundamental disregard for the lives of others and a <i>blasé</i> attitude towards public health. That can certainly be attributed to ideology, but the ideology in question is the traditional Tory one, marked by a contempt for the common herd and an aversion to further empowering the state bureaucracy at a time of crisis. Boris Johnson did not mark a departure from Tory values, any more than the pursuit of varying degrees of austerity by successive administrations from 2010 onwards did. The last 15 years have obviously been frustrating for a Keynesian, but to imagine this came about because of a recent rejection of facts and science, rather than a recapitulation of the traditional Treasury view, is - well - paranoid.</p><p>Simon's blogpost dribbles away into inconsequentiality and an appeal to liberal virtue: "The most effective way of tilting the scales back towards reality and science is to endeavour to ensure these politicians and this political viewpoint are kept well away from power in the future". Good luck with that, mate. This obviously ignores the structural dimension, and it is here that he could benefit from addressing the analyses of the left, notably Marxists like David Harvey and Robert Brenner, on the long-term causes of the current moment, from the spatio-temporal fixes of capitalist accumulation to the crisis of profitability and secular stagnation. So long as the political system is designed to block any challenge to capitalism, and so long as neo-Keynesian economics seeks to preserve capitalism through a "synthesis", we will see politicians spouting nonsense and denying facts. As Antonio Gramsci put it, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-73152163398554778052023-11-20T18:05:00.285+00:002024-01-27T11:01:15.055+00:00Human Resources<p>The term "human shield" is <i>en vogue</i> at the moment because of the claim by supporters of Israel's military action in Gaza that Hamas are using the civilian population to hide behind. A number of people have pointed out that this <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/11/human-shields-bombing-gaza-palestine-israel-defense-forces-morally-bankrupt" target="_blank">makes no sense</a> given that meat-based shields aren't very good at stopping bullets or shells. A human shield, properly speaking, is a hostage whose life is threatened by the person being shielded. But given the way in which the IDF is pounding Gaza regardless of the safety of the civilian population, it clearly does not regard Palestinians as hostages whose lives are to be cherished and it clearly has not prioritised the safety of the Jewish and other hostages seized on the 7th of October either, to judge by its indiscriminate bombing and the slow progress towards a ceasefire and hostage-exchange. The IDF's ostensible target is Hamas who, we have been repeatedly assured, are hidden in underground bunkers. But Israeli forces aren't using "bunker-busting" ordinance but simply flattening the buildings above ground, and so far they have provided little verified evidence of Hamas's network of tunnels or substantiated their claims to have killed "thousands" of Hamas fighters. Israel's goal appears to be to destroy the shield, i.e. the urban fabric of Gaza and its civilian population. </p><p>This appears to be an example of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine">Dahiya doctrine</a>, developed by the IDF in Lebanon in 2006 and later employed in Gaza during the 2008-09 war, which treated civilians and their homes not simply as collateral damage but as an asset to be denied to their opponents: "We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. [...] Harming the population is the only means of restraining [Hezbollah]". This doctrine is a classic counter-insurgency approach whose roots lie in the repressive policing of the European empires from their heyday in the 1880s through to their dismantling in the 1950s. The genocidal free-for-alls of earlier centuries were replaced by a more systematic policy in which native peoples were seen as a valuable resource. Not necessarily one to be preserved, but as one to be denied to the insurgents, both as a source of supplies and funding and as a protective environment within which they could find shelter. One form in which civilians are treated as a resource is through internment. </p><p>In Northern Ireland, this was justified on the grounds of a plausible suspicion of the internees' involvement in terrorism, but the reality - notably in the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius" target="_blank">Operation Demetrius</a> in 1971 - was that many innocent people were caught up in the sweep, which inflamed tensions and led to a rise in violence, while the partiality of the Stormont authorities (no Loyalists were interned in the operation) contributed to the decision to suspend the Northern Ireland Parliament and introduce direct rule from London. Internment in Israel/Palestine takes two forms. There is the classic detention without trial, not only of those suspected of being active in the armed resistance but of ordinary civilians, notably women and children, guilty of no more than throwing stones or haranguing IDF soldiers. It's no secret that Israel seeks to always have a large stock of Palestinians in prison as a contingency for its own troops or Jewish civilians being taken hostage: so that it has sufficient resource to agree a hostage exchange without the need to release actual Hamas or Hizbollah fighters. The second form that internment takes is Gaza itself, and increasingly areas of the West Bank, where barriers and blockades create what are in effect open prisons.</p><p>A notable early example of mass-internment was the British action in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899-1902). The British commander, Lord Kitchener, employed a traditional scorched earth policy to stop the rebels living off the land, burning crops and slaughtering or confiscating cattle, but this was combined with an innovative approach to civilians. Where previously these would be left to fend for themselves, which essentially meant condemning them to a forced march to less hostile territory, or allowing them to die through famine, the British decided to incarcerate them in "concentration camps". In effect, to take the families hostage and deny the rebels their material and emotional support. Though not death camps in the sense we would come to know during the Second World War, these places were characterised by malnutrition and disease due to systematic neglect. Of an interned population of some 100,000 Boers, roughly a quarter died, mostly women and children. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijHmC024hAyfL9Fp4T9UnLjl7B57EN3dRHnFaWMHysMqJmaj3W9-jT_iO4dhWHcjFaQGWmiFhzCrjvcqjvVcHkIk1N92EHEYmXcPTJDSBoCM7gjTJuOzUuvoYIkNAoTCg64BzwlSiFdH57g-hkV2_BD1mM7Gnwm2A7aHApwSO6TSUCTiofsoNEupt0RCc/s680/F_YJ3z3WQAAaza8.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="680" data-original-width="662" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijHmC024hAyfL9Fp4T9UnLjl7B57EN3dRHnFaWMHysMqJmaj3W9-jT_iO4dhWHcjFaQGWmiFhzCrjvcqjvVcHkIk1N92EHEYmXcPTJDSBoCM7gjTJuOzUuvoYIkNAoTCg64BzwlSiFdH57g-hkV2_BD1mM7Gnwm2A7aHApwSO6TSUCTiofsoNEupt0RCc/s320/F_YJ3z3WQAAaza8.jpg" width="312" /></a></div><br />Since then, wars have typically been fought less between armies than between the military and civilians. Even the First World War, which is emblematically remembered in the trenches of the Western Front, saw more civilian than military deaths. The Second World War was a notable example of this with the destruction of urban populations through mass bombing (and finally nuclear weapons) being as distinctive as the industrial-scale extermination of the Jewish population of Germany and occupied Europe. One war where military deaths did exceed civilian, though not by much, was the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975. This was similar to the Boer War in the use of a scorched earth policy (specifically the use of defoliants like Agent Orange) and of civilian relocation (the Stragetic Hamlet Program). It ultimately failed because of the contradictions between a military counterinsurgency strategy centred on "search and destroy" and a pacification strategy that required territory to be held and services provided to the civilian population to win "hearts and minds". What Vietnam (and indeed Northern Ireland in the 1970s) proved was that counterinsurgency is usually more anti-civilian than anti-insurgent, something that is only too apparent in Gaza right now.<p></p><p>The popular historiography of Israel focuses on the relatively brief military campaigns against the Arab states: the 1948 War, the Six-Day War of 1967 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. This focus is as partial as calling the Israeli military, the most powerful in the region and one that has overseen significant territorial expansion beyond the post-1948 Green Line, a defence force. The other perspective, that of the Palestinians, has focused on the forced expropriation of land and the displacement of the population, starting in 1948, along with the routine harrassment and eviction of the civilian population by both the IDF and settler groups since then. What the current war in Gaza has made plain is that the conflict is at heart between the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. It isn't really a military contest at all, despite Hamas's attempts to cast it as such. This has been reinforced by the opportunistic attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, as much as by the Arab states sitting on their hands under the watchful eye of the United States. </p><p>The defence of Israel's actions has included the conflation of all Palestinians with Hamas and the suggestion that civilian Palestinians are no more innocent than "<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/11/20/an-open-letter-on-the-misuse-of-holocaust-memory/" target="_blank">Nazi civilians</a>". Inevitably, criticism of the state of Israel in its aggressive policy has been interpreted as antisemitic, not just by Israeli politicians or Jewish groups in the diaspora, but also by non-Jewish politicians in countries like the US, UK, France and Germany. In some cases, voicing the common line - that Israel has the right to defend itself as it sees fit, that Hamas have brought this on the Palestinians of Gaza, and that calls for a ceasefire are pointless until Hamas is destroyed - is simply a way of indicating fealty to Washington. This, rather than a desire to further stomp on the left, is undoubtedly the main consideration for Keir Starmer and the Labour Party hierarchy, though the opportunity to do a bit of stomping will naturally be taken anyway. Opportunism also underpins the willingness of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/europes-far-right-joins-rallying-cry-against-antisemitism-unsettling-some-jews-2023-11-15/" target="_blank">National Rally</a> in France and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/04/germany-israel-hamas-war-peace" target="_blank">AfD</a> in Germany to align themselves with the political establishment.</p><p>It's worth at this point returning to the history of the Second Boer War. The British government's claim of "military necessity" for its concentration camp policy and its domestic opponents' charge of a "policy of extermination" have obvious echoes today, though it's important to note that no modern politician is willing to use that latter phrase as Lloyd George once did. It isn't hyperbole to talk of Israel pursuing a "policy of extermination", particularly when senior Israeli politicians and military personnel are employing <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-genocide" target="_blank">exterminationist language</a> themselves. In fact, the evidence is more compelling this time round. The avoidable civilian deaths of the Second Boer War could be attributed largely to incompetence rather than design, and it was true that improvements made after the public outcry significantly reduced the mortality rate. While Israeli ministers are circumspect enough not to chant "Death to the Arabs" at every opportunity, they are openly advocating the <a href="https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-773713" target="_blank">expulsion</a> of Palestinians from Gaza. That such rhetoric is tolerated by Western states, however uneasily, shows that the problem is not the human shield of Palestinians but the political shield provided by Washington and its allies for <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/" target="_blank">genocide</a>.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-2017040462832999912023-11-12T20:25:00.003+00:002023-11-13T09:03:40.679+00:00A VARcical Start to the Season<p>There is an air of familiarity at the top of the English Premier League, with Manchester City leading Liverpool and Arsenal and the usual suspects close behind, though Tottenham Hotspur appear to have replaced Manchester United as the seasonal anomaly: a team that aren't as good as the pundits claim but who have certainly been lucky. The good fortune that saw Erik ten Hag's team of misfits finish third last season (their goal difference was a paltry 15, which should have consigned them to sixth or seventh) appears to have run out, and luck may be about to do a flit from Ange Postecoglou's refashioned Spurs as well. What Tottenham's recent stumble indicates is that they remain a shallow squad who will probably struggle against teams in the top third of the table on most matchdays, despite the relatively good results achieved against Liverpool at home (that notoriously disallowed Diaz goal) and Arsenal away (a game in which Jesus missed a sitter and Jorginho uncharacteristically gave the ball away). </p><p>The other familiar feature, beyond Chelsea stuck in mid-table, is the interminable chuntering over VAR. For all the obvious errors and angry managerial reactions, this has been a strange debate because it scrupulously avoids the central issue, namely that the obvious incompetence is because the system is controlled by PGMOL. As the Spurs-Liverpool fiasco made clear, the interaction of the match officials lacks process discipline and suffers from over-familiarity ("<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/oct/03/var-audio-full-transcript-luis-diaz-goal-liverpool-tottenham" target="_blank">That's wrong that, Daz</a>"). The obvious flaw is that the official's discussions aren't broadcast. Where that happens, such as in rugby, public exposure encourages both a clear protocol - explicitly state the on-field decision and what is being checked - and militates against ambiguous, blokeish idioms. The whole idea of referees checking their own homework and, as Mike Dean cheerfully admitted, consequently seeking to protect their "<a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/mike-dean-var-chelsea-vs-tottenham-b1102893.html" target="_blank">mates</a>", was obviously flawed from the start. That said, there was never much likelihood of the technology being introduced without PGMOL being in control of it. </p><p>A long-standing bleat by well-paid pundits is that former players should be encouraged to become referees, which has always struck me as evidence of those pundits' unworldliness. Getting ex-pros to work their way up the ranks as referees isn't going to happen. They don't need the money these days and certainly not the aggro. But there is a good case for them being fast-tracked in as specialist VAR assistants, not simply because of their experience playing the game but in order to maintain some emotional distance between the VAR booth and the officials on the pitch. Of course, this would be akin to putting potential pundits in charge of VAR, and you can imagine the reaction of PGMOL to that, but then if all pundits had to serve an apprenticeship as VAR assistants, would that actually be a bad thing? It might even improve the quality of punditry by encouraging match commentators to be less willing to rush to judgement (though probably not Garry Neville).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjev9zpT9NNwybuuDHL21nSa7KUXI5IB8WI3JDzY4b100TgmDa0fYDRIHClM8NZI8z0qexLo5I09VifgALB6uWs9qeGxU1fcxvr-AVZWNzG1NPojIj_qdADdR6L6wqdvnncrW4bW9odVVryoByxCDBJdtn_7VqxYd097YtPmtiSCSVUNE00sKicKqUeHMc/s1200/0_Tottenham-vs-liverpool-VAR.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjev9zpT9NNwybuuDHL21nSa7KUXI5IB8WI3JDzY4b100TgmDa0fYDRIHClM8NZI8z0qexLo5I09VifgALB6uWs9qeGxU1fcxvr-AVZWNzG1NPojIj_qdADdR6L6wqdvnncrW4bW9odVVryoByxCDBJdtn_7VqxYd097YtPmtiSCSVUNE00sKicKqUeHMc/s320/0_Tottenham-vs-liverpool-VAR.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />The international football break - aka the interlull - has come at the thirdway point of the season, with all teams now having played 12 games. At 27 points and third behind Manchester City on 28 and Liverpool also on 27, Arsenal are slightly worse off than at the same stage last season, when they has 31 points and were 2 ahead of Guardiola's team. The rationalisation among fans is that our dash to the front in 2022 was ultimately undone by conceding too many goals and thus points in the final third of the season, largely due to injuries to key players such as William Saliba and Takehiro Tomiyasu. City paced themselves better, as they usually do, finishing strongly after beating us home and away in February and April. It is widely assumed that Arteta has decided to sacrifice some of the goal-scoring verve that marked the opening third of last season in order to make us more secure at the back. Controlling games better, in the manner of City, and increasing the depth of the squad, should not only make the team more efficient but more durable. Beating City at the Emirates in October might be a taste of that.<p></p><p>However, though our goals scored has dropped from 30 to 26, our goals conceded has only improved from 11 to 10. But an average of a little under a goal a game is probably is as good as it will get: City have now conceded 12 (albeit 4 of those were in today's game at Stamford Bridge). What matters is whether that rate can be sustained through to the end of the season. The last time Arsenal conceded fewer in the opening third, 9 in the 2015-16 season, they finished second behind Leicester City after conceding 13 and 14 in the middle and last thirds (and also losing their shooting boots in that middle third, scoring only 17). With injuries beginning to mount up, Arsenal face a key set of games after the interlull, running through to New Year's Eve, that could go a long way to determining whether Aretea's strategy has a chance of working. The coincidence of games against Liverpool and West Ham United either side of Chrismas, back-to-back fixtures that essentially ended our title tilt last April, offers the chance of psychological redemption.</p><p>In terms of the balance of the team, the key issue remains our limited options up front. Though Leandro Trossard and Kai Havertz have clearly given Arteta more variety, we just as clearly need another specialist forward who can lead the line as effectively as Jesus but with more reliable end-product. Eddie Nketiah remains a useful backup, as he proved against Sheffield United, but he isn't the sort of dominant striker that Arsenal require. If the team can keep on City's coat-tails until the end of the year, then they may well make a move in the January transfer window. At the other end of the pitch, the demotion of Aaron Ramsdale in favour of David Raya has divided fans, not least because the Spaniard doesn't appear to be that much of an upgrade on the popular English stopper. Time will tell whether this proves an astute tactical move by Arteta, but it is the first test of the much-vaunted "<a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/06/onwards-and-upwards.html" target="_blank">connection</a>" that the club has established with the fanbase over the last couple of years.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgPrxYTAe944fHz4HKPaqQJMGbV1s-VwQ1J483ixVMxqA5RrKqwUdHWVUZOur9Ng895OAWMS-n4v8Erbcv5Q_TCkHClFmB89jtk8PncwoxORWk3cEZPBo1BPRUS_uYR4HNlqoF2TA_quwmI9O50Ex_E_CMAsdCuONvJS2oC0YuYwOYDQshT900f5vvlfE/s2048/skysports-aaron-ramsdale-david-raya_6288863.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgPrxYTAe944fHz4HKPaqQJMGbV1s-VwQ1J483ixVMxqA5RrKqwUdHWVUZOur9Ng895OAWMS-n4v8Erbcv5Q_TCkHClFmB89jtk8PncwoxORWk3cEZPBo1BPRUS_uYR4HNlqoF2TA_quwmI9O50Ex_E_CMAsdCuONvJS2oC0YuYwOYDQshT900f5vvlfE/s320/skysports-aaron-ramsdale-david-raya_6288863.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In midfield, Thomas Partey's time at the club increasingly looks like it will come to an end this season, his persistent injury problems meaning that he can't be considered a key cog in the team in the way that Declan Rice has quickly become, despite his occasional dominant performances. Rice hasn't been a revelation exactly - he was propping up West Ham for years and always looked comfortable for England - but it's noticeable how much better he looks in a more technical team. If Arteta's endurance strategy is to pay off, it will depend to a large degree on Rice providing drive and defensive security in the middle of the park consistently until May. Jorginho looks like what he is: an experienced pro who can fill-in, but that simply makes him an upgrade on Mohammed Elneny. For all his popularity, the Egyptian is likely to leave by the end of the season while the Italo-Brazilian is unlikely to play more than twenty games. In brief, Arsenal will probably need to bring in another defensive midfielder next summer. <p></p><p>In terms of the creative roles, niggles for Martin Odegaard, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Martinelli should prove transient, though there remains a concern about the load on the England player. There is also the now perennial hope that Emile Smith-Rowe will finally get a break on the injury front. But it doesn't look like Reiss Nelson or Fabio Vieira are going to make the grade, or secure Arteta's lasting confidence, which amounts to the same thing, so there's every chance the manager and Edu will be in the market for another wide player. Kai Havertz hasn't lived up to his billing, however I have a sneaking suspicion that he could yet be pivotal (I'm obviously just hoping he repeats the trick of scoring the winner in the Champions League final). He's overdue a spectacular goal; or even just an ugly one. His languid style of play has irritated some Arsenal fans, though the player he reminds me of (based on limited exposure through old videos, it should be said), with his astute positional sense and heading ability, is one George "Stroller" Graham. </p><p>Overall, it's been a fascinating start to the season, with no one team setting the pace in the way that Arsenal did this time last year, and with plenty of unpredictable results and some very good games featuring late drama, such as today's 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Manchester City. As ever, what will matter is consistency in the middle third of the season and then the ability to tighten the screw in the final third, which ultimately reflects the depth of squads as much as tactics. Arsenal look more capable of lasting the distance this time round, though it is going to take some luck - or at least the absence of bad luck - on the injury front, while City are unlikely to repeat their treble triumph of last season and might even prioritise defending the Champions League over another Premier League title. The biggest threat to last season's top two is likely to be Liverpool, who despite looking chaotic at times have crept into second and have the muscle memory of a consistent run to the title to call upon, not to mention the incentive of winning the title in front of their fans rather than a Covid-emptied stadium. It promises to be a vintage season. Let's hope it isn't decided by dodgy VAR.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-72364095532242181682023-11-03T12:20:00.520+00:002023-11-04T16:12:25.118+00:00Time to Move<p>A dominant theme in the news at the moment is of people on the move, from the anxious queues at the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt to the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan. From a UK perspective, the issue of migration has been a persistent theme since the media focus on "bogus" asylum-seekers in the 1990s, and obviously played a crucial role in the upswell of euroscepticism between the accession of Eastern European states in 2004 and the EU referendum in 2016. The most recent manifestation, the so-called small boats crisis - itself a relatively minor subset of the number of asylum claims, which is currently around 80,000 a year - obviously pales in comparison to the prospect of 1.7 million Afghanis moved against their will. Beyond the immediate horizon, the continuing flow of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean littoral, and the growing number of people displaced by environmental degradation arising from climate change, suggests that this century will be defined by the ebb and flow of populations.</p><p>Not everyone drawing our attention to the mass displacement of Afghan refugees by Pakistan is arguing for a more humane policy towards refugees generally. For some, it is simply an opportunity to insist that Israel should not be singled out for the crime of ethnic cleansing. But however callous the forced repatriation of refugees might be, it isn't the same as displacing people from their homeland. Of course, the issue becomes blurred over time. Some of those Afghanis were born and brought up in Pakistan, their parents having fled in the 1980s. As the Windrush scandal made clear, states are institutionally oblivious to how quickly people can put down roots, and how even within a single family the understanding of where "home" is can vary (a point well made in Horace Ové's recently reissued film <i>Pressure</i>). But it's also the case that public opinion tends to be sanguine about ethnic cleansing so long as there are no deaths involved, hence the minimal outcry over the Armenians who have fled <a href="https://www.cfr.org/article/ethnic-cleansing-happening-nagorno-karabakh-how-can-world-respond" target="_blank">Nagorno-Karabakh</a>. </p><p>Inasmuch as events in Pakistan have a parallel with those in Israel, it is in the leaked government discussion about the feasibility of <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-30/ty-article/.premium/israeli-govt-document-suggests-possible-relocation-of-gazans-to-northern-sinai/0000018b-7ff6-d1da-a1bb-7ffe83ed0000" target="_blank">expelling the Palestinians</a> of Gaza into Sinai. There's certainly no parallel with the possibility of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt being expelled back into the areas of Israel they left under duress in 1948. There are close to <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/uk/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance" target="_blank">110 million refugees in the world</a> today, a majority of whom are internally displaced - i.e. they haven't crossed an international border. This figure has risen rapidly over the last decade, largely due to the conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. If we include migrants - that is people who have moved for a better life but do not yet enjoy the rights of citizenship in their host country - the global population of those living outside their country of origin is 184 million. Add the 62 million internally displaced and you have a global population of almost a quarter of a billion people who have been uprooted: approximately 3% of humankind.</p><p>What these figures don't include is the routine deracination that doesn't qualify as forced displacement. This is a combination of economic mobility (moving for work or education), precarious tenancy (a growing problem as homeownership and social renting both decline) and the forced evictions of slum clearances. In his 2006 book, <i>Planet of Slums</i>, Mike Davis noted that "Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly ... to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners and middle-class commuters." The result is that "every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people - legal tenants as well as squatters - are forcibly evicted from Third World neighborhoods". The point is that the displacement of people is a constant of capitalism and has been since the initial movement between countryside and town driven by the agrarian and industrial revolutions (the global population became predominantly urban in 2007).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMWbCv0vyOWwNsOTHkBN26d7uh9SA3Gami_W2UJ9I_0NGJhU9QyD_W7MkllrjIKXtMKZJWZvkEtE7MTwrUdPDps1I2y2SulTb7IUAcrv04g-woOzqmCneNjOVGhIb7Us4pbOoe45pR1EJsIFcvbO0Z0HNi0zuMXQ5-jyVjuoqI8l13WZD1PnK5_m8A49A/s1378/palestinian-loss-of-land-1947-to-2023-1300x1900-v0-8o630k6t0vsb1.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="917" data-original-width="1378" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMWbCv0vyOWwNsOTHkBN26d7uh9SA3Gami_W2UJ9I_0NGJhU9QyD_W7MkllrjIKXtMKZJWZvkEtE7MTwrUdPDps1I2y2SulTb7IUAcrv04g-woOzqmCneNjOVGhIb7Us4pbOoe45pR1EJsIFcvbO0Z0HNi0zuMXQ5-jyVjuoqI8l13WZD1PnK5_m8A49A/s320/palestinian-loss-of-land-1947-to-2023-1300x1900-v0-8o630k6t0vsb1.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />Viewed in this larger context, the struggle for a Jewish homeland during the twentieth century appears like a quixotic act of defiance against capitalism. This was one reason for the emergence of the kibbutz movement's combination of Zionism and socialism, in contrast to the universalist Jewish Bund that prioritised class solidarity across ethnic boundaries. But leftist <i>kibbutzim</i>, despite their presence among the victims of the Hamas attack, are atypical in Israel today, at least in comparsion to the West Bank settlements. While the Palestinian villages they displace are usually agricultural, those villages exist within a geographical hierarchy of small towns and cities housing industry and commercial services (however weak the Palestinian economy may be). In contrast, the <a href="https://israelpolicyforum.org/west-bank-settlements-explained/" target="_blank">Jewish settlements of the West Bank</a> are typically isolated and reliant on communication with towns and cities within the pre-1967 borders. Approximately 60% of the employed population in the settlements works in Israel proper. In other words, the settlements are gated communities made up of commuters and privileged religious groups, the latter of whom are as detached from Israeli society as from Palestinian.<p></p><p>The only way that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank can be functionally incorporated into Israel is if the Palestinians are expelled from Nablus, Ramallah and Hebron so that these and other cities and towns become fully Jewish components of Israel's society and economy. This in turn means that a two-state solution is only viable on the basis of the 1967 borders, which would mean Jews being expelled from all of the settlements constructed in the West Bank since then, just as they were forcibly removed, by the Isreali government, from within the territory of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Liberals who advocate for a two-state solution are usually vague on these practical details, despite the very obvious "facts on the ground", preferring to deride "extremism" on both sides. For example, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/03/war-israel-hamas-conflict-peace-extremists" target="_blank">Jonathan Freedland</a> thinks "the contest that matters most is the battle of hardliners v moderates, or, to be more specific, maximalists v partitionists: those who insist on having the whole land for themselves v those who are ready to share it". </p><p>Freedland's predictably nebulous solution would see "an end to the settlement project in the West Bank and the concession of territory", but an end is not the same as a dismantling. It's clear than many hope the existing settlements can be preserved, even if there is a moratorium on further expansion, and that the major territorial concession will therefore be by the Palestinians, not Israel. But this will leave a dysfunctional West Bank, crippling both a Palestinian state (the current weakness of the Palestinian National Authority isn't solely down to corruption or incompetence) and acting as a fiscal drain on Israel. The territory needs to have integrity. If that cannot be achieved through a single-state solution, then the two states need to be cleanly disentangled. In other words, the best hope is for a bloodless ethnic cleansing. And the only practical way that could be implemented would be for Israel to withdraw all of its citizens from the West Bank (and the Golan Heights) to within its 1967 borders. </p><p>Clearly there isn't much prospect of that happening, and the likes of Freedland would no doubt consider it "extreme", even though it was the original logic of the two-state solution. Likewise, there is little chance of a single-state solution in the foreseeable future, particularly a unitary democracy in which the Palestinian disapora would have the right of return and possible repossession of property, so raising the prospect of Israel neither being a formally Jewish state nor having a Jewish majority population. The outcome that currently appears to have the greatest chance of being realised is the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the West Bank, whose incremental progress has stepped up in recent weeks. When Western politicians talk about it not being the right time to consider a ceasefire in Gaza, insisting that the IDF should have the chance to wipe out Hamas first, we should bear in mind that this is consistent with their refusal to consider BDS as an appropriate response to the encroachment of settlements and outposts in the West Bank. Our politicians and media have been endorsing a slow-motion ethnic cleansing for decades.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-2169329626210661272023-10-24T22:37:00.758+01:002023-10-29T17:43:34.753+00:00Against History<p>As the violence grinds on in Gaza, attention has inevitably turned to the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For Israel's defenders, the desire to place Hamas's attack in its historic setting is an insult to the memory of the victims. This refusal to historicize has ironically been prominent among some historians. You might expect this from those who make a good living writing for the Tory press, but it has been salutary to see such impeccable liberal grandees as Simon Schama, who was famously scathing about the "rhetorical adrenaline" of the French Revolution, riding the wave of hysteria. One reason for the hyperbole is that any broadening of the discourse immediately reveals the asymmetry of the historic relationship. It also reveals the bankruptcy of the official position of the US and other Western states, obliged to back to the hilt an Israeli government that they despise and a two-state "solution" that has been revealed as nothing more than a fig-leaf for the continuing ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and now Gaza. This has raised the rhetorical stakes, requiring the "war" to be presented in Manichean terms and the murder of Palestinian civilians to be marginalised by quibbling about whose ordinance did what damage and whether casualty numbers are trustworthy.</p><p>It has also resulted in liberals dismissing the history of the conflict with what amounts to "It's complicated", insisting that the struggle between indigenous and colonist cannot be resolved because no people has a better claim to a land than another so we might as well accept the status quo. But the very idea that indigenous and colonist are distinct, like the idea that these categories map neatly onto "<a href="https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1716878447879073959" target="_blank">racial groups</a>", is nonsense. The complexity of history is in the makeup of peoples. In contrast, states are cleanly delineated because they are legal fictions: a line drawn on a map. The problem arises when states claim to be congruent with an ethnicity, either because this demotes some citizens to a second class status or because it prompts attempts to expand the borders. Ukraine offers a good example of both. The fall of Yanukovych after the pro-Western Euromaidan protests led to an upsurge of Ukrainian nationalism and consequently the disaffection of the pro-Russian east of the country. That in turn provided the pretext for the Russian annexation of Crimea and later the full-scale invasion and annexation of the east.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9IpXilCXacKU8jsL-pJfcht2G9e5l7Y-RIT67Pga6lQ36OnoSPtS-atHJPgaGEQlOkKPhg6seLxXMmx2NQ-kULM-XtksHeiC4MfWF8M87YKcS6iD8fEJsU4yquRRRes1qI-QcDd63twImvJaqVy81_FQalVPrxTQfG4XHXCEP3j7yYRwQfMth6ycSKg/s1024/S1l4C0Gik6_0_313_3000_1688_0_x-large.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU9IpXilCXacKU8jsL-pJfcht2G9e5l7Y-RIT67Pga6lQ36OnoSPtS-atHJPgaGEQlOkKPhg6seLxXMmx2NQ-kULM-XtksHeiC4MfWF8M87YKcS6iD8fEJsU4yquRRRes1qI-QcDd63twImvJaqVy81_FQalVPrxTQfG4XHXCEP3j7yYRwQfMth6ycSKg/s320/S1l4C0Gik6_0_313_3000_1688_0_x-large.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />What genetics shows us is that ethnicity is a cultural identification, not an intrinsic biological reality, and one that reflects the tides of history. Consider, for example, <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2015-10-20/ty-article/palestinians-and-jews-share-genetic-roots/0000017f-dc0e-df9c-a17f-fe1e57730000" target="_blank">the genetic overlap between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews</a>. To talk of Palestinian Muslims as Arabs is actually a little misleading. While the Arab conquest of the 7th century did result in some migration out of the Arabian peninsula to Palestine, it also resulted in the conversion to Islam of many indigenous Jews and Samaritans (and indeed of Christians who had previously converted from Judaism). That is a common pattern. Most conquests in history have involved a political takeover by an elite stratum (e.g. the Norman conquest of England or the later Ottoman conquest of Palestine), with the people (particularly the lower orders) changing little at the time. The reason for this was the mobility of warrior castes relative to sedentary agriculturalists in the pre-capitalist era. Such conquests could lead to new trading relationships that stimulated immigration, while foreign military garrisons could also be absorbed into the population (as was the case in the Roman Empire), but changes in the ethnic makeup of conquered territories tended to be gradual and rarely planned, driven mostly by religious conversion, cultural assimilation and career self-interest. <p></p><p>In contrast, conquest by genocide and settlement by planned mass immigration, as occured in the United States, is the historical exception, despite its scale and impact being such that it affected two continents - America and Australasia - and made significant inroads into a third - Southern Africa. It's worth noting here that the Spanish and Portuguese of the early-16th century considered the indigneous population of Latin America as a resource to be exploited in the search for precious metals, hence the early concern with laws governing that exploitation and the conversion of the population to Catholicism. By the mid-17th century, English and French colonists in North America saw the land itself, and its flora and fauna, as the resource and the natives as an impediment to access and exploitation. This change reflected the emergence of agrarian capitalism, first in England, and the development of a race-based ideology of land improvement and natural ownership, as theorised by John Locke. There are echoes of Locke's idea that ownership arises from mixing labour with the soil in the conventional history of Israel's land improvement after centuries of supposed waste and mismanagement by the Arabs (see <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reclamation-of-man-made-desert/" target="_blank">this example</a> of that narrative from 1960).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsSp54qyItKFSu2P_NYj5J2Yvdpdb0zjRT36HpAazZVlpI-UAmGByLqtvTzpnEdf0JyfLKBIErASwQHi2bK_Xp0i1r1rr1e03fvvhUrNfvpRDXAiLqRjEWiKBWQ5pVEgqy9kwTdF8eOg_k4dX8yqfWAhTBiFlfEtkn7S7AiniufgTmIR5BLZNARu-ojrE/s1280/maxresdefault.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsSp54qyItKFSu2P_NYj5J2Yvdpdb0zjRT36HpAazZVlpI-UAmGByLqtvTzpnEdf0JyfLKBIErASwQHi2bK_Xp0i1r1rr1e03fvvhUrNfvpRDXAiLqRjEWiKBWQ5pVEgqy9kwTdF8eOg_k4dX8yqfWAhTBiFlfEtkn7S7AiniufgTmIR5BLZNARu-ojrE/s320/maxresdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Outside of the Americas and Australasia, colonial societies in which settlers outnumbered the indigenous were rare and of very limited scope (the plantations of Ulster were in some respects dry-runs for the colonies of North America). This was because of the practical difficulty of carrying out an effective genocide or mass expulsion of the indigenous on a wider scale when that population had not been severely reduced by disease, as occured in the Americas, and where it already practised sedentary agriculture. In this respect Israel is a historical oddity because it is clearly emulating an American model of colonial settlement and (if only at the rheorical extremes) advocating a genocide of the indigenous population in an area marked by centuries of ethnic diversity and cohabitation, not to mention densely-populated cities and neighbouring states that not only have no intention of accommodating.more refugees but earnestly hope for the day when the existing post-1948 diaspora of the Palestinians can return home.<p></p><p>Ireland is a useful lens through which to view Israel as it experienced both colonial models: the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in the South (an elite stratum whose imposed agrarian capitalism led to famine in the 1840s) and the Ulster Plantation in the North (an aggressive settler society). The former was dismantled by a national revolution, triggered by a bloody insurrection in 1916, which followed a century of intermittent murders and bombings. That in turn led to a furious war of independence between British and Irish forces that saw war crimes committed by both sides. The creation of the Northern Ireland state was not simply a defensive reflex to protect the Protestant settlers of the six counties, as the deliberate drawing of the border to maximise the territory while ensuring a permanent Unionist majority at Stormont showed. This was a continuation of the rationale of plantation. In the event, demography - the changing makeup of the population and its reflection in elections - has put that domination into question, with the result that the main unionist party is now refusing to allow the Stormont government to function.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCk3TzimEODnK-iDqL9isDILSgpcvEEr0wXhiVROIcojrkELjs6FCCtbuUoIT4uuPpdIzh986TOV48hrLdvCQapGmdEhfEB2F8sENInkkTVV1ey5EUbD7JImpIuLzhEDFUdxgWK9HknpwQkYS3z08fgtzlGnr6Yuha2cQ6hMFVdLfUlOMpUIxLWwslnrI/s1160/GettyImages-1436976966-scaled.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="754" data-original-width="1160" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCk3TzimEODnK-iDqL9isDILSgpcvEEr0wXhiVROIcojrkELjs6FCCtbuUoIT4uuPpdIzh986TOV48hrLdvCQapGmdEhfEB2F8sENInkkTVV1ey5EUbD7JImpIuLzhEDFUdxgWK9HknpwQkYS3z08fgtzlGnr6Yuha2cQ6hMFVdLfUlOMpUIxLWwslnrI/s320/GettyImages-1436976966-scaled.webp" width="320" /></a></div><br />The conflict in Northern Ireland after partition was clearly rooted in religion, culture and the deliberate political exclusion of one community by the other, and not in any nonsense such as "race". As such, it has obvious parallels with Israel (that the communities in the North so easily map their sympathies to pro-Israel and pro-Palestine should make this obvious, as should the behaviour of the Irish Catholic diaspora in <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/israel-hamas-war-celtic-face-uefa-disciplinary-action-after-palestinian-flags-flown-at-champions-league-match-12992961" target="_blank">Glasgow</a>). It is also commonly understood that the final resolution of the conflict must be political: that neither community is going to disappear, either by exile or absorption, so there can be no zero-sum outcome. Power-sharing may currently be in abeyance, but it is clearly the only avenue available after the failure of both the exclusionary Protestant state and the nationalist armed struggle. There is a widespread expectation that this resolution will ultimately entail a unitary state, hence the provision in the Good Friday Agreement for a plebiscite on a united Ireland (the "border poll"). <p></p><p>What the latest round of killing has made clear is that the Western defenders of Israel do not accept that the same is true for Palestine - i.e. that the only realistic way forward that isn't a zero-sum outcome is a single state solution and that formal power-sharing must be part of that state's constitution. This explains why some are sympathetic to the Israeli claim that the Palestinian people are a modern invention without any historic right to self-determination while paradoxically insisting that the two-state solution, which presumes an equivalent claim to self-determination and thus statehood, remains a viable goal. The wide reporting of Netanyahu's comment that <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/" target="_blank">Israel must promote Hamas</a> in order to keep the Palestinians politically divided, so enabling the progressive annexation of land in the West Bank by new settlements, has surely removed the scales from even these people's eyes, so the conclusion has to be that they share the Israeli government's desire for the Palestinian people to simply disappear. </p><p></p><p></p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-24098426767381062882023-10-20T19:13:00.000+01:002023-10-20T19:13:37.754+01:00All Change<p>The twin by-election defeats in Mid-Bedfordshire and Tamworth have led to much chin-stroking about the parlous state of the Conservative Party. Can it adapt to the evident shift in public opinion in time for the general election? Does it have a future in the face of a potentially hegemonic New Labour 2.0? How bloody will the internecine struggle unleashed by Rishi Sunak's inevitable resignation as party leader be? A lot of this is just the froth of by-election coverage but there is a more serious aspect to it, and that is the media representation of the Conservative Party and its dynamics. In a nutshell, this boils down to two ideas. The first is that the Tories have a chameleon-like ability to change themselves in order to retain, or regain, power. The second is that the electorate appreciates this responsiveness and will reward it at the polls so long as the change is deemed credible and sincere. Before analysing what these ideas really mean - i.e. what are their ideological underpinnings - it's worth taking a look at the results from last night.</p><p>The first observation to make is that it's not easy to find the actual vote numbers in the media. Instead the focus is on the swing between the parties and the size of the Tory majority that has been overturned. Both were very large, and in both <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Tamworth_by-election" target="_blank">Tamworth</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Mid_Bedfordshire_by-election" target="_blank">Mid-Bedfordshire</a>, but this doesn't tell us all that much. Swings in by-elections are rarely useful pointers unless the swing is small in a tight contest, indicating a decisive shift that may be repeated at a general election, or the turnout is high, in which case a large swing may presage a landslide (not so much because of the size of the swing but because of the way it will be amplified due to the first-past-the-post voting system). Predictably, the turnout in both of the contests was low, which means the large swings will almost certainly be the result of differential turnout between the parties. In other words, this is about who stayed away from the polls and that was predominantly Conservative Party supporters. You can understand the hyperbole about "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/20/labour-declares-historic-byelection-wins-a-political-earthquake" target="_blank">political earthquakes</a>" and "redrawing the map", but if there is one constant in British political history it is that the significance of by-elections is exaggerated.</p><p>Labour managed to secure much the same number of votes in both constituencies that it did in 2019, supposedly it's worst result since the 1930s (in fact, its vote was slightly down in Mid-Bedfordshire). This suggests that it may be at or near to its maximum vote in those constituencies, which doesn't suggest that it will manage to retain either seat come the general election, particularly as it can't rely on the tactical voting that is nowadays a feature of by-elections. The party can expect a further boost in the general election with the prospect of booting out the government, but it can also expect some normally Conservative-voting electors, who wished to "send the government a message" yesterday by voting for the red team, to desert it and return to their usual allegiance. Labour's chief hope for the general election is that the pattern of disheartened Tory voters that has characterised by-elections in this parliament will be replicated on the national stage, as was the case in 1997 when turnout was down by over 6% and the Tory vote declined by 11% of the total.</p><p>The Conservative Party's chief hope for the general election is that the government can convince voters that it has changed sufficiently to be worthy of fresh consideration. The problem is that it clearly hasn't changed since Rishi Sunak took over as Prime Minister and there is no sign that he personally has a strategy for change. He is tied to the legacy of austerity, under-investment and graft, while the attempt to divert politics towards the trivialities of a "culture war" has failed abjectly, despite the best efforts of the Tory press. His elevation was all about putting the "<a href="https://www.ft.com/content/cd91db6f-e9d6-45dc-b92f-404dc8f2724e" target="_blank">adults back in charge</a>", hence it was welcomed by centrists, but that in turn implied stabilisation and predictablity, not a radical new programme. Ironically, the Conservatives would probably have stood a better chance at the next election by sticking with Liz Truss, for all her faults, because she was credibly offering a departure from the preceding consensus. Her renewed vigour on display at the recent <a href="https://news.sky.com/story/liz-truss-to-restate-vision-for-conservatives-at-conference-fringe-event-12974544" target="_blank">party conference</a> was telling, not least because her argument for stimulatory tax cuts will be central to the inevitable post-mortem after a general election defeat.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDE5X4Qdri2Y6czlVUNscdtCtlczYxwVAKn4URgSviq5aldnkgD9gSk3I5EJo4dnSc5RrDj2Em_avbAk96qhC7EdH-y9UhXb0d3D38P8ot0f_7aj9ox_WXvBBmdaTXcyEwNV9SRH__eJt0dUosSu81FOg5bvr2ITlkZSbdq2xOqum1z5mascbSj3NzD9g/s1200/76580675-0-image-m-23_1697372229740.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDE5X4Qdri2Y6czlVUNscdtCtlczYxwVAKn4URgSviq5aldnkgD9gSk3I5EJo4dnSc5RrDj2Em_avbAk96qhC7EdH-y9UhXb0d3D38P8ot0f_7aj9ox_WXvBBmdaTXcyEwNV9SRH__eJt0dUosSu81FOg5bvr2ITlkZSbdq2xOqum1z5mascbSj3NzD9g/s320/76580675-0-image-m-23_1697372229740.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />The history of the Conservative Party's mutability is one of smoke and mirrors. The willingness to change, and the associated assumption of ruthless pragmatism, is more apparent than real. The Tories haven't significantly altered in their outlook since their embrace of empire under Disraeli, which reflected material changes in the value of land (the onset of the great depression in agriculture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century) and the consequent shift of aristocratic wealth to mature industries and the growing service economy. Even the oscillation between free trade and protectionism, of which Brexit is the latest turn, has been an expression of the persistent internal tensions arising from the material base rather than a "struggle over the party's soul". Margaret Thatcher is often presented as a radical departure, but she herself was always clear that she was simply reverting to traditional Tory values that had been marginalised by Butskellism. The marrying of classical liberal economics with traditional social conservatism had been pioneered a century before she entered Number 10.<p></p><p>The claims of Tory flexibility, which have been a feature of political discourse since the 1920s, invariably come from centrist commentators keen to discipline the Labour Party. The idea of Tory reinvention, along with the idea that their secret weapon is loyalty (obviously risible when you consider the last few years), is meant to paint Labour as politically regressive and fractious. Specifically, that it is wedded to a backward-looking class politics that has been superseded by liberal modernity (hence the influence of the trade unions must be reduced if not eliminated) and that it is impeded in becoming the natural party of government by an irresponsible and potentially traitorous left that elevates heart over head and cares more for foreigners than natives. One consequence of this is that the Tories' historic recklessness tends to be played down or transmuted into a debate about the state of the nation rather than the party's <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2015/05/executive-competence.html" target="_blank">competence</a>. Obvious examples are the return to the gold standard in 1925, the Suez debacle of 1956 and the monetarist experiment of the early-1980s. In contrast, Labour has an undeserved reputation for financial mismanagement that really reflects unlucky timing (1929, 1974, 2008) rather than profligacy.</p><p>The second idea, that the electorate appreciates change in response to its concerns is no less a myth. Indeed it only exists as a logical corollary of the first myth: if the Tories regularly change and regain power then this must be what the electorate wants. In fact, the dynamic is the other way round: public opinion changes over time and all the parties, not just the Conservatives, attempt to channel this in ways that support, or at least don't conflict with, their persistent interests. Thus the Tory volte-face on empire, reflected in Macmillan's famous "winds of change speech", came after public opinion had turned decisively against imperial delusions after Suez but also reflected British industry's desire to shift focus to the dynamic market of Europe. Similarly, the party's subsequent relationship with the European Union tracked public opinion, with the growth of euroscepticism from the late-80s onwards driven by newspaper owners rather than by politicians. Boris Johnson's ambivalence on the matter was emblematic of the party as whole, not just his own lack of principle. Likewise, the party's recent tacking on issues such as gender recognition and the green transition reflects the latest demands of the Tory press, not some cunning ploy to outflank Labour.</p><p>The prime objective of the party of the people is to restrain the people's enthusiasm, hence Labour's response to public opinion is a mixture of careful curation - for example, using focus groups to steer the media framing of that opinion - and straightforward gaslighting - for example, the insistence that public support for the nationalisation of utilities is naive, or that the NHS cannot be improved by more money alone. The media myth of the Tories is that they are constantly changing to meet the demands of the moment. Paradoxically, that this quintessentially regressive party, whose only persistent concern is the defence of private wealth, is mercurial and volatile. The contrasting paradox of Labour is that it is the party of change (even if only a change in management) but that its progressivism is limited to the retooling of the state and that it can thus be relied upon to minimise or divert the often radical changes demanded by the public. Is the Conservative Party about to change? No. It is simply going to hand the baton of fiscal responsibility and caution to an establishment-endorsed Labour Party. At some point, Labour's authoritarianism will alienate voters and the Tories will reappear offering the prospect of personal freedom. Nothing will change.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-88489832804967143592023-10-14T12:46:00.007+01:002023-10-27T23:08:56.245+01:00The Last Colony<p>The international reaction to the latest round of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has followed predictable lines, with the US giving Israel full backing and the EU calling for de-escalation on both sides. In the UK, the response has been coloured by the prominence given to antisemitism over the last five years, resulting in the sight of senior politicians suggesting that waving the Palestinian flag may be a criminal offence and that cutting off fuel and food supplies to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip is a legitimate tactic rather than a war crime. That these statements have been made by qualified lawyers, the Home Secretary and the Leader of the Opposition, is striking insofar as it highlights the extent to which attitudes to international law generally, and human rights specifically, have changed over the last decade. It would be easy to point the finger at Brexit and blame the Conservative Party, but it's clear that Labour's respect for international law is no better today, with a notional human rights lawyer in charge, than it was in 2003. Indeed, contempt for due process has become a leitmotif of the Starmer regime.</p><p>But there is something else in the British response, and to a lesser degree in the response of other Western powers, that goes beyond political opportunism and the habitual asymmetry in their treatment of Israel and the Palestinians, and that something is the recrudescence of the tropes of colonialism. This has been most noticeable in the British case because it remains firmly embedded in the political culture, even if the ideas that give rise to it are rarely articulated in public. Examples of this have been the belief that violence is the only language that Hamas, and by extension all Palestinians, understand, which is the unstated assumption behind the acceptance of collective and exemplary punishment. There has also been an attempt to devalue the Palestinians, from eugenicist claims about <a href="https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser/status/1711574037543940381" target="_blank">lower IQs due to inter-marriage</a> to the idea that there is a natural "exchange rate" both for hostages (e.g. that one captured <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit_prisoner_exchange" target="_blank">Israeli soldier</a> can be exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners) and for lives (that murdering multiples of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is an eye for an eye).</p><p>It has also been noticeable how much of this has stirred a muscle memory of the British state and media's handling of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Leaving aside the opportunistic Corporation-bashing, the claim that the BBC was wrong not to refer to Hamas as terrorists was founded on the myth, pushed by <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67083432" target="_blank">John Simpson</a>, that the national broadcaster has always avoided the term because it would be subjective and partisan. In fact, the BBC often referred to the IRA as "terrorists", notably after it revised its editorial guidelines in 1989 under pressure from the Thatcher government. This was the era of the ban on the broadcasting of Sinn Féin voices, which ran from 1988 to 1994, a surreal example of the "There is no suitable interlocutor" trope in which the state resolutely stuck its fingers in its ears. This was ironic because Britain was engaged in secret dialogue with the IRA at the time. That Israel routinely speaks to Hamas is not in doubt, any more than that Netanyahu's governments have deliberately <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/" target="_blank">cultivated the Islamist group</a> to split the Palestinians and undermine Fatah in the West Bank.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSpyiWQmHgEr8rIcjiZwHzESjELaxJESI9-si_HTkgewGWHHTyPtXA4LDTAbINMW-UR6pIn0bHcQCU7tuDODcs-Rpc4Rnb92omS3PGNNNa8ruuDFx0ZlgDNuPBfiXqJ-uTFWXojsLmPiw0F4sTBDZe-Jis1JmHZmfo3AwYF5U3dryPahf8u-Rl82PHvNY/s1024/white.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="1024" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSpyiWQmHgEr8rIcjiZwHzESjELaxJESI9-si_HTkgewGWHHTyPtXA4LDTAbINMW-UR6pIn0bHcQCU7tuDODcs-Rpc4Rnb92omS3PGNNNa8ruuDFx0ZlgDNuPBfiXqJ-uTFWXojsLmPiw0F4sTBDZe-Jis1JmHZmfo3AwYF5U3dryPahf8u-Rl82PHvNY/s320/white.jpg" width="320"></a></div><br>The most emotive tropes have concerned the vulnerability of Israelis in the areas bordering the Gaza Strip. The settlers whose suffering has been at the forefront of the media coverage are mostly secular kibbutzim, i.e. they look like "us" - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/families-festivalgoers-soldiers-and-foreigners-victims-of-the-hamas-assault-on-israel" target="_blank">white westerners</a> - posing in family snapshots and dancing at a music festival. They are not the religious Jews who have been rampaging in the West Bank of late. This should remind us that the physical expansion of Israel after 1948 was led by the chauvinist left, not by the religious right. It has been standard practice in Western media to focus the coverage of settlers in the West Bank since 1967 on the religious, despite the fact that many are actually secular (indeed, the usual pressures of housing costs since the neoliberal turn have increasingly attracted the <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2019-11-20/ty-article/.premium/more-and-more-secular-israelis-prefer-the-good-life-in-west-bank-settlements/0000017f-e843-dc7e-adff-f8efc6570000" target="_blank">non-religious young</a> to the settlements in search of affordable homes). Settlement is then seen as the regrettable over-enthusiasm of a segment of society rather than the systematic policy of the state. Likewise, the ills of Israeli society are increasingly blamed on a drift to the right, a drift seen as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/13/hamas-israelis-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-rightwing" target="_blank">inevitable reponse</a> to Palestinian resistance, despite the state having been birthed by the terrorism of rightwing groups such as Irgun (the political ancestor of Likud) and Lehi.<p></p><p>The most insidious form of this recrudescence of the colonial in the UK media is the use of Israeli liberals to advance arguments that combine humanitarian piety with language that dehumanises the Palestinians. Just as the arch-imperialists of Victorian and Edwardian Britain were liberals rather than conservatives, so it is the voice of centrist reason that today demands unswerving support for the Israeli state while insisting that the promise of a two-state solution can still be maintained against all the evidence of its failure. An example of this was the <i>Guardian</i> article by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/12/israelis-palestinians-greatest-danger-since-1948" target="_blank">Yuval Noah Harari</a> that sought to frame the history of the region since 1948 as a series of hopeful experiments by the well-meaning Israelis, all of which had come to grief due to the intractability of the Palestinians. Thus Israel's "generous offer" during the Oslo peace process was met with the Second Intifada. "Maybe Israel’s peace offer wasn’t generous enough. But was terrorism the only possible response?", Harari disingenuously asks. </p><p>At this point, it's worth recalling Northern Ireland in 1969. The re-emergence of the IRA was driven not simply by an angry response to the Stormont government's violence during the riots of that year, or by the decision of the London government to deploy British troops to keep the peace (but actually to reinforce the Northern Ireland state). Nor was it evidence of some inherent moral failing on the part of the Catholic community: a distaste for dialogue or a propensity for violence. The Northern Irish Civil Rights movement was consciously modelled on the US example of non-violence and ecumenical discussion. It's demise and the consequent turn to violence was the result of a political failure: the realisation that the Catholic community could not expect its concerns to be addressed or its interests defended by a gerrymandered state that systematically denied it effective political representation. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXHcd_d3Ag60umdZnmkbqFxHo-cwV6YONR0ewfkTo_Lf9Xl9EbyGQZyyKyvGx2q_0TsrIFjaM4M9TMFyIQlNzD1v1LbD-XWY3jfH50ynb7XEQKenQaagh0kL3ujLus-wu1C4_bCn076ZWvGaVpuuwg93uEZ7Xk5XgmfOZz3ExfBA1EYgnN4w0t5sPYGXc/s960/civilrights_960.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="960" height="127" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXHcd_d3Ag60umdZnmkbqFxHo-cwV6YONR0ewfkTo_Lf9Xl9EbyGQZyyKyvGx2q_0TsrIFjaM4M9TMFyIQlNzD1v1LbD-XWY3jfH50ynb7XEQKenQaagh0kL3ujLus-wu1C4_bCn076ZWvGaVpuuwg93uEZ7Xk5XgmfOZz3ExfBA1EYgnN4w0t5sPYGXc/s320/civilrights_960.jpg" width="320"></a></div><br>What eventually brought (relative) peace to Northern Ireland was the collective agreement of the "powers" (the UK, the Republic of Ireland and crucially the US) that a political solution, power-sharing, had to be pursued. For all the claims that today is the moment of greatest peril for Israel, there is absolutely no willingness on the part of the powers (the US again to the fore) to seek a political resolution to the conflict because that would reveal the bankruptcy of the two-state solution as currently envisaged. Instead there is a determination to preserve the status quo, which in turn has meant the acceptance of a system of apartheid. The institutionalisation of this system since 1967 has led not only to the claim that the Palestinians aren't a people as such, and therefore have no claim to a homeland, but to the suggestion that they are interlopers. This was a common refrain during the imperial era when the movement of peoples across imaginary borders, often the result of famines brought about by the conversion of the economy to cash-crops in a global export market (see Mike Davis's '<i>Late Victorian Holocausts</i>'), was presented as a threat to the recently-established settler economy. <p></p><p>I think what some people in the UK and elsewhere have found "horrifying" in this week's events is not simply the individual stories of death and destruction but that their acceptance of the asymmetry of the conflict has been disturbed. The Palestinians are expected to suffer, and we're meant to feel sorry for them, while Israel is expected to act with impunity, and we are meant to at best regret the evils this leads to. Hamas didn't keep to the script. The Yom Kippur war, 50 year ago, similarly upset expectations, leading to the slow but steady attempts at accommodation between the Arab states and Israel, but it also relegated the Palestinians to the collateral damage of geopolitics. Since the failure of Oslo, the West and the Arab states have had the opportunity to either impose a solution on Israel - specifically through boycott, disinvestment and sanctions (BDS), hence the focus on delegitimising it by Isarel and its supporters abroad - or to accept the gradual erasure of the Palestinian people. Everything we've seen this week suggests that the latter remains the preference.</p><p>Palestine is the archetypal frozen conflict, but we've seen many others since 1989, e.g. Kosovo and Ukraine, and the obvious problem is that they're not frozen enough: the situation changes. Perhaps the most consequential development was the recent Azeri takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, which proved that international opinion will accept ethnic cleansing if there isn't too much media coverage. This is clearly the hope of Israel too, a country whose history is founded on the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and its adoption of a colonial project of progressive land-theft and settlement. And the chief characteristic of that colonial society is not the rightwing nature of its government, nor the influence of the religious on its laws, but the obliviousness of secular, liberal opinion. As <a href="https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/uprising-in-palestine" target="_blank">Tariq Ali</a> rightly pointed out in the <i>New Left Review</i>, "Earlier this year, Palestinians watched the demonstrations in Tel Aviv and understood that those marching to ‘defend civil rights’ did not care about the rights of their occupied neighbours. They decided to take matters into their own hands." The impending destruction of Gaza is above all a political failure and the US and UK are complicit in this.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-43036104972508513852023-10-04T19:26:00.439+01:002023-10-06T20:59:32.950+01:00The Inactivist State<p>The big story of the week has been the long-expected cancellation of phase 2 of HS2, the high-speed railway lines between Birmingham and Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds (the latter had already been scaled back in 2021). Rishi Sunak's talk of taking "tough decisions" after years of govermental dither and delay has failed to change the perception that his administration is weak and knackered, while Keir Starmer's refusal to commit to restoring HS2 to its former glory has been judged sober and responsible in the circumstances, though I doubt anyone seriously believes he will change in his mind in office as many still believe he will do over Brexit. The merits of the original plan were always highly questionable, both because the positive return on investment depended on the northern legs being delivered and because high-speed rail should be about covering very long distances (London to Leeds really was the minimum) rather than creating what is now effectively a fancier version of the <a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-metropolitan-line.html" target="_blank">Metropolitan line</a>. </p><p>The chief argument for cancellation, however, wasn't a flawed concept but spiralling costs. This has been attributed variously to incompetence, greedy bosses and inflation, but arguably the biggest issue was the gold-plating of the London to Birmingham line to satisfy voters in Conservative constituencies. Had the project started with the northern branches, the economics would look very different today and a decision to proceed with the final southern leg would have likely been positive (and if undertaken by a Labour government with no seats to protect in the Chilterns, might not have resulted in such indulgence). But this is all history and counterfactuals. What I really want to focus on is not HS2 but what this week's decision says about the capabilities and will of the state. At the 2019 general election, both the Conservatives and Labour offered a vision of state activism: the one focused on "getting Brexit done" and launching the ship of state on the ocean of free trade; the other on public investment to repair the damage wrought by austerity and a green transition to combat climate change. At the general election next year neither party will be offering a comparable vision of state activism.</p><p>The idea that a Boris Johnson-led government would be activist, leveling up the North and securing trade deals all over the globe, was always dubious, and not just because of the man's own laziness. Beyond cosplaying Churchill demanding "action this day", his record before enetering Number 10 was one of opportunistic rebranding (the London bike-hire scheme) and accepting the kudos for projects long planned before his arrival on the scene (the London Olympics and, arguably, Brexit). Insofar as he made things happen during his time as Mayor of London, it was largely by giving the green light to property developers, though the notorious garden bridge over the Thames proved (ahem) a bridge too far. Johnson has always been a conservative, albeit of an optimistic rather than pessimistic cast: in love with tradition and antiquity, substituting conviviality for social justice, and convinced that problems can be overcome by a positive attitude. Faced with the opportunity of heading an energetic state during the Covid-19 pandemic, he dithered over lockdown and oversaw a culture of indulgence and greed at the heart of government.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEW2Rhhp33u_zUHcikhilAl_w7MZStLRhD_GyNxs3cOL4QtPld0-4IVoRHtBJGL2LXjkUvJMMKKslW7_nHy6R044KCjl-s3xERtYVnh2yDVfEQnsgE8mtf5Mc6lmoQ_HccjLf-jhyYWD7sV-XQcJcUVq9qcZ6QctdzNQ_YfKJnsGf0AMjVkXuzwzV8_M/s2048/skynews-rishi-sunak-conference_6308690.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEW2Rhhp33u_zUHcikhilAl_w7MZStLRhD_GyNxs3cOL4QtPld0-4IVoRHtBJGL2LXjkUvJMMKKslW7_nHy6R044KCjl-s3xERtYVnh2yDVfEQnsgE8mtf5Mc6lmoQ_HccjLf-jhyYWD7sV-XQcJcUVq9qcZ6QctdzNQ_YfKJnsGf0AMjVkXuzwzV8_M/s320/skynews-rishi-sunak-conference_6308690.jpg" width="320"></a></div><br>State activism is only an issue in a democracy when it might lead to an assault on property and power relations. For that reason, the restraint of democracy inevitably produces conservative governments whose chief feature is a reluctance to undertake anything novel coupled with energetic maintenance of the status quo. When they display activism, it tends to be in those areas that do not threaten to advance democracy, and often act as a bulwark against it, such as defence spending and the criminal justice system. New aircraft carriers and jails are no less activist than new railway lines and hospitals, but while the latter are seen as the response to a public demand, the former are not, even allowing for the media's determination to ventriloquise one. For all the differences in style and rhetoric, four of the last five Conservative Prime Ministers have shared a common characteristic in their aversion to state activism, while the one exception, Liz Truss, was unceremoniously booted out of office when she tried to actively manage the economy. <p></p><p>Cameron and Osborne's (and let's not forget Clegg's) austerity was inactivism as a government-wide standing order. The purpose was not to shrink the state but to weaken it and allow it to degrade. The vision was that this would encourage people to reduce their reliance on public services and thus walk away from the state's "teat", a vision that also inspires Rishi Sunak, a man who doesn't appear to have ever used a public service in his life. While you will still hear many claim that Jeremy Corbyn lost the EU referendum, it was Cameron's insouciance that did it, though in this he was simply continuing a tradition from the 1980s by which governments deliberately failed to make the case for the European Union, preferring to employ it as an all-purpose whipping-boy. Theresa May's activism never extended beyond the Home Office's "hostile environment", while her attempts to grasp various bulls by the horns as Prime Minister (social care, the Brexit deal) invariably led to panicked retreat at the first sign of opposition.</p><p>There are exceptions to this rule of conservative inactivism, such as when the state must be employed by capital to violently revise social and economic relations, as in the 1980s. Breaking the NUM was as much an example of state activism as the creation of the London Docklands and the market-making deregulation of the City. That phase of activism pretty much came to an end with Margaret Thatcher's fall. Indeed, her departure was arguably triggered by British capital deciding that the time for change was over (the last great achievement being the EU Single Market), hence the elevation of a Prime Minister, John Major, whose administration was characterised by careful reversals (the Poll Tax), willing subordination to markets (the ERM), and policy triviality (the infamous cones hotline). His ultimate failure sprang from his inability to restrain those parts of his party ("the bastards") who wanted the careful reversal extended to the Maastricht Treaty.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Kd5HtehXAhPmcH_zq0lWe93GTKbLUf2N7XJRV71qpzq8pGB6nIfYMC6U4jJJhZGVq2UPFegqaLW9PIkU5x1z7DyVcbtdqZ7QoK4AQtVJcZ7HZq29CwxyEelvJLhB-8qZ_afNDVS3OWDq_4iJPTiRokfv65refvDLBIW52kbPJ1PlWtlMtrYawIPyPyo/s292/download.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="173" data-original-width="292" height="173" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2Kd5HtehXAhPmcH_zq0lWe93GTKbLUf2N7XJRV71qpzq8pGB6nIfYMC6U4jJJhZGVq2UPFegqaLW9PIkU5x1z7DyVcbtdqZ7QoK4AQtVJcZ7HZq29CwxyEelvJLhB-8qZ_afNDVS3OWDq_4iJPTiRokfv65refvDLBIW52kbPJ1PlWtlMtrYawIPyPyo/s1600/download.jpg" width="292"></a></div><br>1997 presented an obvious contrast in the way that New Labour embraced activism as a style, but as history would show, the substance of its programme of "reform" was either the maintenance of order under cover of progressive rhetoric or the further pursuit of capital-friendly reorganisation. It's also easily forgotten how much Blair and Brown's message, particularly in the early years, concerned assurances of what they wouldn't do, which makes the sight of Blairites today warning Starmer over his "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/05/labour-figures-from-1997-victory-warn-starmer-against-cautious-approach" target="_blank">caution</a>" frankly hilarious. 2024 won't be a re-run of 1997, but the offer to the electorate will be essentially the same, both in its modesty and its assumption that a change of management is all that is required. At the fag-end of Tory administrations, Labour has a tendency to talk about "wasted years", as if they would have got more done, but in reality what they are criticising is neglect - a failure of stewardship - rather than missed opportunities.<p></p><p>Democratic state activism, in the sense of an increase in popular control and a consequent decline in inequality, ran out of puff in the early 1970s. The result of this has been a gradual degradation in the social fabric, inadequately offset by intermittent public investment that turns out to have been primarily opportunities for new private profits (PFI and its variants). The exception that proves the rule has been London, but the basis for that has not been a metropolitan bias by central government but the relative political power of the capital compared to other cities and regions and how that can impact on people's lives, for example Transport for London. But even in the capital there is a sense of drift after the heady years of activism under Ken Livingstone (and Boris Johnson floating on the vapours of his predecessor's work). Despite the hysterical Islamophobia of the right, Sadiq Khan's tenure has been one of cautious management and a reluctance to expand the scope of the mayoralty or the assembly.</p><p>The Tories have spent this conference week claiming that they will stop various bad things that were never going to happen anyway, such as a tax on meat and the need for 7 dustbins. Many of the government's critics have derided the triviality, but this misses that the focus on such mundane matters that would (if true) affect everyone is an attempt to celebrate inactivity and thus an appeal to genuine conservative values. It might seem bizarre that this has led to the Tories insisting that the country is near broken and that only they, the party of government for the last 13 years, can be trusted to remedy this, but again this is to underestimate how persuasive a promise to do nothing can be. It is also to ignore that Labour are pitching the same message, having matched the Tories on most commitments and equally on most refusals to commit. The implication is that if the country is broken it can be fixed by changing the management team but otherwise by hardly departing from Tory practice. There's a lot more inactivism to come.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-60256993541437984782023-09-29T12:23:00.001+01:002023-09-29T18:06:27.886+01:00Stuck in the Middle With You<p>The high-neoliberal period, from 1989 to 2008, was also the triumph of political centrism. This was theorised as the "third way", but as that name made clear, it was a theory that gained definition only in opposition to the other two: neither the sclerotic social democracy of the 1970s nor the antisocial free-market deregulation of the 1980s. As the alternatives on both the left and the right appeared to fall away under the weight of history (the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of monetarism), centrism became harder to define beyond banalities such as "what works" and an unthinking technophilia (which still motivates those who pine for that era, such as Tony Blair). Whereas "neither left nor right" appeared to have a clear if negative meaning in the 1970s, by the 1990s this provided less of a sharp contrast. There were no positive ideas to expound beyond the rhetoric of the "vital centre", which partly explained the turn to the headier air of international relations and the proselytisation of liberal democracy. In practice, centrism after 1979 did little beyond repackaging the foundations of the postwar consensus: the commitment to free markets, the (grudging) acceptance of the welfare state and a preference for technocratic governance.</p><p>Since the financial crash, there has been an intellectual revival on both the right and the left, though it can be argued that both actually started to recover some years earlier - the one in response to 9/11, the other in response to the Iraq War - but their theory (as opposed to their praxis) was largely ignored by a media still obsessed with the nominal centre and managerialist virtue. But a paradox is that this return to a greater definition on the flanks has not led to greater clarity in the centre in the manner of the 1970s and 80s. Nor has it produced a fresh flowering in centrist thought, let alone any vibrancy in its political practice. There are no thinkers of the calibre of Anthony Giddens to give a progressive gloss to the centre's renewed political hegemony (the "adults" are most definitely back in charge across the political landscape in the UK), while the likes of Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls would today be considered too far to the left in their concerns with democracy and equality. Once novel ideas such as the embrace of the service economy or the positive impact of workfare are now tired if not wholly discredited.</p><p>The marginalisation of thinkers such as Habermas and Rawls highlights the extent to which the spectrum of acceptable politics has shifted sharply to the right. That's not in the sense of the Overton Window - i.e. the policies that are now considered palatable for the electorate - but in the narrower sense of what the political cartel itself considers permissible. The UK offers a stark example of this, with the mild social democracy of Jeremy Corbyn anathematised and the xenophobic bigotry previously associated with UKIP now embedded in the Conservative Party and espoused even by <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-politics-66922119" target="_blank">ministers</a>. This has happened at the same time that leftwing policies have become increasingly popular, from nationalisation and wealth taxes to state-led green investment, while previously popular rightwing positions, notably the need for austerity and leaving the EU, have lost much of their attraction. There is a sense of the political caste and the electorate moving in opposite directions, yet there is also a clear (and cynical) expectation that this simply means we will be obliged to elect the slightly less rightwing party as our new government next year.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyeIGkDCStohUIaVTUwRsklDE41cK_I-648DT1COp3c4_39ta9B053WLDOOdCK4DZNRjdYp_EwBl3YFzam07tBc77qxPRaFXQ-gTSWoserJzd7z6IQS4yo9u95vdkf0oDF8zjSvsIQUccZsufhH_KUsCB-3gOHL3wI3NfRXce6VdSOgsZEWzZ1V1h9Pc/s7980/campbell.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4489" data-original-width="7980" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQyeIGkDCStohUIaVTUwRsklDE41cK_I-648DT1COp3c4_39ta9B053WLDOOdCK4DZNRjdYp_EwBl3YFzam07tBc77qxPRaFXQ-gTSWoserJzd7z6IQS4yo9u95vdkf0oDF8zjSvsIQUccZsufhH_KUsCB-3gOHL3wI3NfRXce6VdSOgsZEWzZ1V1h9Pc/s320/campbell.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />In the <i>Guardian</i> (where else?), <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/26/cuts-war-brexit-all-fuel-the-battle-for-the-centre-ground-but-no-one-really-knows-where-that-is?CMP=share_btn_tw" target="_blank">Steve Richards</a> bemoans this lack of clarity on where the centre ground actually lies. Ignoring the boundaries that historically provided its definition, he seeks consistency and internal coherence within the centrist space but finds only contradiction. Thus "On economic policy, the former Conservative MP Rory Stewart was and is a supporter of the austerity policies introduced by David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010, the real-terms spending cuts that went deeper than any of Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s. In contrast, the Labour MPs who formed the short-lived centrist Change UK party were passionate opponents of Osborne’s economic policies – a problem as the Conservative backbenchers who defected to the same party were proud advocates of the cuts. On the most fundamental issue, a radical economic policy, “centrists” take opposite positions." Leaving aside the dubious claim that the Labour right were "passionately opposed" to austerity, there's an obviously simpler explanation for this apparent paradox, namely the priority given to stopping Corbyn, but that would mean accepting that centrism is, and always will be, defined negatively, not positively.<p></p><div><p></p><p>There is no great mystery in the differences of opinion among centrists over tax and spend or public service reform. These are tactical arguments, comparable to the issues that divided the New Labour administrations or the 2010-15 coalition government. The strategic objectives - to avoid deficit spending, to privilege wealth over income and to reduce the cost and extent of the public sector - remain unifying goals. The centre ground is fundamentally conservative (the third way was never equidistant) and this means there will be disagreements over the pace of "reform" and the precise balance between rewarding the deserving and punishing the undeserving. It also means that its social policy will be essentially opportunistic, which doesn't mean responding to public opinion but to the positioning on its flanks. Thus every step that the right takes further rightwards opens up new space into which centrism can move while preserving its relative position. An obvious example of this is the way that the right's increasingly overt transphobia has allowed the Labour Party to water-down its commitment to trans rights.</p><p>In contrast, every shift towards the centre that the left takes will be fiercely resisted, if necessary by inventing a strawman left of extreme views and malign intent. That shift is partly the Overton effect - the way that previously marginal left positions on public ownership and taxation have become popular with voters due to material circumstance - but it also reflects the secular trend by which the left has come to absorb the traditions of social democracy and even liberalism since the 1980s as centrism has shifted away from both in the right's wake. The centrist resistance to the left is not simply factional antipathy: it reflects the need to establish a clear boundary against which it can define itself. If the right were to move towards the centre ground, so jeopardising the incumbents, there would be a similar resistance, though perhaps not so hysterical (recall Labour's resistance to the advance of the BNP and particularly the tactical divisions in 2010 between "No pasaran!" in Barking and Dagenham and "Maybe we should be more racist" in Oldham East & Saddleworth).</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie1mIKqxs8_ZsHZjX26kdtbKbfIsMVUT1zRaxnOqE4S5qLc0s-AqMf141w3UbLjehBF7XGVVfDENVWEhyD1YdjdtxTM3XSxxc-687l7yIQa0dc0J2lCq-Q7SiiR5w8f1QINnqKebPIm3hBw7XJBKV2BCp66dFggtAvFy4FkXw-xhWtZwkDRPT9pICw4Hk/s4550/balls.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3033" data-original-width="4550" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie1mIKqxs8_ZsHZjX26kdtbKbfIsMVUT1zRaxnOqE4S5qLc0s-AqMf141w3UbLjehBF7XGVVfDENVWEhyD1YdjdtxTM3XSxxc-687l7yIQa0dc0J2lCq-Q7SiiR5w8f1QINnqKebPIm3hBw7XJBKV2BCp66dFggtAvFy4FkXw-xhWtZwkDRPT9pICw4Hk/s320/balls.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />Ultimately, as an essentially conservative disposition, centrism will always define itself more sharply against the left than the right. It is wedded to the preservation of social and economic hierarchies, even if it does demand greater "opening up" to merit. It is inclined to view demands for greater social justice with scepticism ("the timing isn't right") if not outright hostility ("that goes too far"). Its focus on prudent financial management and minimising government deficits is identical to that of the conservative right, the only difference being a self-congratulatory claim to superior virtue. Above all, it stoutly defends the rights and privileges of property. Insofar as it sees itself as a torch-bearer for the progressive tendencies within society, it is in the form of technocratic managerialism and the celebration of a capital-inflected image of science (the obsession with translating primary research into "world-beating" business opportunities is emblematic). In its emphasis on maturity, it treats it opponents to left and right as children and hysterics respectively.<p></p><p>Centrism saw its historic mission as the defence of liberal democracy against communism (and socialism) primarily, and fascism secondarily (though much has been made of national conservative parties facilitating the parliamentary rise of the far-right in the 1920s and 30s, it shouldn't be forgotten that this accommodation also included parties that saw themselves as centrist or liberal). Since 1989 it has longed for enemies of equivalent stature, first seeking them among the recalcitrant abroad (the "Axis of Evil" etc) and then the rebarbative at home (the crude and unmannered "populism" that was conveniently found on both the left and right flanks). These enemies have proved a disappointment, even the source of embarrassment (Canada's impeccably centrist political establishment applauding a former Waffen SS soldier is just the most recent mis-step). Russia is a broken reed and China too intermeshed with global capitalism to isolate. Despite the persistence of Trump, right-populism is politically marginal and the left excluded almost everywhere.</p><p>We are living at a time when centrism is not only dominant but hegemonic. While neoliberalism might appear diminished after 2008, the underlying assumptions about the role of capital and the state - those foundations of the postwar consensus - remain fundamentally unchallenged despite more recent reservations about the limits of globalisation and the need for greater governmental activism to address climate change. This hegemony can be seen in the lack of concern shown when displaying centrism's contradictions. Steve Richards is being disingenuous in imagining that these will alienate the electorate to the extent of jeopardising the system. If anything, there is a relish in the way that the operation of the cartel, and its trivial tactical squabbles, is now openly celebrated, from chummy podcasts to the court gossip of the BBC. It is also evident in the authoritarian turn of Keir Starmer's brutally dishonest leadership of the Labour Party: a muscular centrism directed exclusively at the left, smugly welcomed by the politico-media establishment. The problem is not the centre ground's lack of definition but its imperial ambition.</p></div><p></p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-20104482909448577852023-09-22T12:25:00.002+01:002023-09-23T12:35:40.756+01:00Policy Stability<p>From Conservative Party backbenchers and former ministers, to the Labour Party frontbench and media commentators, all are agreed that what business needs is policy stability. Specifically, that the planned ban on the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030 should be adhered to rather than having the target date pushed back to 2035 and that the separate schedule for the phasing out of gas boilers should also remain in place (though Labour have, typically, subsequently reneged on the latter). The suggestion that both would be relaxed was enough to prompt carmakers and energy companies to issue strongly-worded statements, ahead of Rishi Sunak's announcement, deploring what has been framed by the media as a watering down of the net zero by 2050 commitment and an attempt to create a divide (or "<a href="https://fromarsetoelbow.blogspot.com/2023/09/the-manufacture-of-dissent.html" target="_blank">wedge issue</a>") between the Conservatives and Labour ahead of next year's general election. At this point it would be wise to separate the base and superstructure. The political angle does not need much explanation and was widely anticipated after the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July.</p><p>What needs more investigation is why the automotive and energy sectors should be up in arms at this development. Behind the greenwashing, neither has a principled commitment to the environment, any more than the oil and gas industry does. There is also the apparent paradox of champions of free market capitalism demanding state planning. The key thing to understand is that "policy stability", or synonyms like "predictability" and "<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2023/sep/20/rishi-sunaks-government-risks-looking-incapable-of-honouring-a-commitment" target="_blank">consistency</a>" in this context, are really just a subset of what <a href="https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/" target="_blank">Michal Kalecki</a> termed more generally "business confidence". While this may be localised in questions of state subsidy, infrastructure support or trade guarantees in specific sectors, across the economy as a whole it boils down to the promise that government will avoid deficit spending, which would lead to full employment and so push up labour costs (and potentially necessitate increased taxes on capital). As you may have noticed, both main parties are in agreement on the need to avoid deficit spending, and to make the labour market less tight, so you can take it that capital is fundamentally happy. </p><p>The idea that carmakers who commit to all-electric by 2030 will lose market share in the following five years, and so have particular cause for complaint now, assumes that electric vehicles (EVs) will continue to cost more than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEs) beyond the next seven years. This suggests a lack of confidence on the part of manufacturers that the price of EVs can be brought down to the same level as ICEs by 2030. Why the lack of confidence? Is it a fear of hitting techological limits in manufacturing? That hardly seems justified given the pace of recent advances, notably in battery technology, and the fact that unit costs will inevitably fall as production facilities are fully converted. Is it a fear that geopolitical uncertainty will raise EV costs disproportionately? That's credible short-term, given the way the price of key battery components like nickel has fluctuated due to the impact of the war in Ukraine on supply chains, but you'd expect prices to return to normal a decade out (they've pretty much already done so as supply has adjusted).</p><p>A simpler explanation is the expectation of larger profit margins for the automotive cartel as the real cost of cars rises. That's something that has to happen anyway. While some people envisage a one-for-one replacement of petrol and diesel cars with electric models, and car manufacturers (like tobacco companies before them) see growth in emerging markets, the reality is that the rate of car ownership has to go into historical decline in the West first and elsewhere thereafter, with more use of public transport, if we are to not only reduce CO2 emissions but particulate pollution as well. That rising cost of cars may be initially offset for consumers through higher state subsidies (as in Norway currently), or by higher Pigouvian taxes on petrol and diesel ahead of an outright ban on sales. Naturally, car manufacturers aren't going to come out and demand an increase in road tax or fuel duty now, though that is the logic of their commercial position. Apart from the political ructions it would cause, this would highlight the extent to which the market is dependent on the state's active management, rather than being the product of competition. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhUeGy8FhVJKWR4OwtjlmLrHO-D2S3JWhDOqm2zFhy3NkJjenzrK8KWeGHc_hgsp4PVv3zm9gxhNoEU4rLaOTLD8q6tb3es4kduMewqASuIOKYJtX6dwogpgrQM6L2NlPRBW73orVRbL1CSlFMlAhdVIMX9HfNpq26QT0_cZU2QVxDx9GhxqbKvNCfFhU/s2000/BMW-San-Luis-Potosi-Electric-Vehicle-Production-6.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="2000" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhUeGy8FhVJKWR4OwtjlmLrHO-D2S3JWhDOqm2zFhy3NkJjenzrK8KWeGHc_hgsp4PVv3zm9gxhNoEU4rLaOTLD8q6tb3es4kduMewqASuIOKYJtX6dwogpgrQM6L2NlPRBW73orVRbL1CSlFMlAhdVIMX9HfNpq26QT0_cZU2QVxDx9GhxqbKvNCfFhU/s320/BMW-San-Luis-Potosi-Electric-Vehicle-Production-6.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />As the postwar history of the UK shows, when the government offers economic policy stability, such as in the area of prices and incomes, business has a tendency to carp about the constraints on competition and "management's right to manage" that this entails. The Thatcher revolution was essentially the capitalist class accepting instability (aka "creative destruction") through the effects of monetarism on industrial policy. This caused many businesses to fold, but class solidarity held because it opened up new routes to profit elsewhere, notably through privatisation. The demands for policy stability today reflect the extent to which capital since the 1980s has become dependent on the neoliberal state not only to create the legal conditions for a market to function but to actively manage changes in the parameters of that market and to intervene in favour of certain businesses (to "pick winners" in the derided parlance of the 1970s). The secular trend over the last 150 years has been for the state to take an increasingly active role in the management of industry. "Revolutionary" eras like the 1980s should really be seen as the government forcing a reconfiguration of the economy rather than liberating industry from state control.<p></p><p>An example of picking winners was the subsidies provided to foreign car manufacturers like Nissan to base their European operations in the UK, a policy that continues down to today with government funding and guarantees for <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/business/bmw-gets-government-funding-to-support-ps600m-uk-investment-in-electric-cars-b2409164.html" target="_blank">BMW to continue manufacturing Minis at Oxford</a>. There is also the active role the government is playing in moves to delay the imposition of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/sep/22/we-cant-alter-brexit-deal-to-appease-car-industry-says-european-commissioner" target="_blank">import tariffs on EVs</a> between the UK and EU, where it is clearly pushing sectoral interests rather than national ones. This tight coupling of the state and industry obviously isn't novel, and the UK is in not an outlier in the way that it crafts policy to suit particular companies, but what is perhaps more unusual is the way in which the state has in recent years actively sought to shield car manufacturers from the consequences of government policy, for example over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/feb/05/uk-carmakers-allotted-150m-in-state-aid-in-attempt-to-save-jobs-nissan-brexit-vote" target="_blank">Brexit</a>. The point is not the implicit admission that Brexit is economically damaging, but the explicit acceptance that the car industry cannot be expected to deal with changes in the commercial environment. The current kick-back against the government is about the loss or devaluation of guarantees and the exposure this entails to the market.</p><p>This extension beyond market-making to market-maintenance was made brutally obvious in 2008 with the bailout of the banks. This was excused as an exceptional act for a systemically critical sector, but the hurry to return the banks to private ownership was not delayed by the thought that perhaps being systemically critical meant they should remain in the public sector under democratic control. It should be obvious now that both car-making and energy are systemically critical in the circumstances of the need to reach net zero, just as energy, water and other utilities are systemically critical full-stop. It was also the case that the banks were "too big to fail", which highlights that when specific firms make up a large share of a critical sector they will always be able to rely on the state as the investor of last resort, much as was the case in the 1970s, though then predominantly through public ownership. But again, this appreciation of scale does not prompt the thought that these firms should be nationalised, at least not in Westminster and the City.</p><p>This week's theatre can be viewed superficially as the opening skirmish in the general election campaign, but perhaps a better reading is that it was a reminder to the car industry that their future hopes depend on the state's willingness to continue to underwrite their operations and to adjust the market to guarantee profits. We habitually imagine that the state is weak and can easily be held to ransom by certain industries, like banking and car-making, but that is a fiction. It's popularity in political discourse is because it is agreeable to both the libertarian right, who see the state as inherently weak and ineffective, and those on the left who imagine that capital is wholly separate from the state, which holds out the prospect that a socialist government could use the levers of power to adopt a more antagonistic attitude towards capital. The reality is that the state is powerful but also deeply intermeshed with industry. It is less of a handmaiden to capital and more of a pilot of a ship that sails in the interest of its capitalist owners. The ultimate stability it offers is not a firm hand on the wheel but a refusal to allow the deckhands access to the wheelhouse.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-83957299983655852382023-09-15T19:49:00.000+01:002023-09-15T19:49:21.122+01:00The Triple Lock and the Trilemma<p>The media's framing of the possible suspension of the pensions "triple lock" has been varied, ranging from the <i>Guardian</i>'s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/sep/12/treasury-officials-mull-one-off-break-from-pensions-triple-lock" target="_blank">claim</a> that its a penny-pinching initiative of the Treasury to the <i>Telegraph</i>'s <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/pensions/news/triple-lock-state-pension-boost-stealth-tax-raid/" target="_blank">claim</a> that it would be a "stealth tax raid", which isn't a phrase you often hear them use in connection with a benefit cut. The uncertainty over motive and timing suggests kite-flying, not so much for the intention to suspend or alter the triple lock ahead of the general election, but to see if they can get away with a refusal during next year's campaign to commit to it, and it looks like there is a cross-party consensus on that which has led to an informal agreement. As Chris Mason of the BBC rather artlessly <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66788134" target="_blank">put it</a>: "Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have committed to keeping the triple lock come the next general election. ... I suspect that if the Conservatives keep it, Labour will too. If the Tories tweak it, Labour may well follow suit." (Clearly the BBC has learnt little from Laura Kuenssberg's <a href="https://bylinetimes.com/2022/03/30/laura-kuenssberg-bbc-political-editor-was-a-catastrophic-systemic-failure/" target="_blank">catastrophic</a> stint as a stenographer).</p><p>In the postwar era, the UK relied on widespread and generous occupational pension schemes, typically with defined benefits, to top-up the relatively ungenerous state pension, though this inevitably meant that <a href="https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/reports-and-publications/reports-and-briefings/money-matters/poverty-in-later-life-briefing-june-2023.pdf" target="_blank">pensioner poverty</a>, among those who lacked such secondary pensions, was often acute. The late-70s marked an inflexion point as the basic state pension started a steady decline relative to average wages. The introduction of the triple lock has helped arrest that decline, but the basic state pension (BSP) remains historically low (scoring poorly in <a href="https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN00290/SN00290.pdf" target="_blank">international comparisons</a>) and is unlikely to significantly better the position as a percentage of national income it reached in 1980 (just under 5%) despite the future growth in the pensioner population. This is because the instinct of the state, which has been there since the original Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, is to minimise the cost, either through means-testing, increased employee contributions (the original 1908 pension was a non-contributory scheme), pushing back the state pension age (SPA), or by failing to upgrade payments in line with wages. The result is a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228426465_The_History_of_State_Pensions_in_the_UK_1948_to_2010" target="_blank">state pension system</a> that is complex and subject to significant variations in outcome, which leads to the demand for further complex adjustments that introduce new problems.</p><p>This desire to penny-pinch has been countered by a political impetus towards fairness. This was particularly notable in the way that the BSP was introduced as the successor to the 1908 provisions in 1948. The proposal outlined in the Beveridge Report had been for a flat-rate pension, sufficient to lift people above absolute poverty, funded by lifetime contributions. The problem was the expectation that people who had suffered during the depression of the 1930s and then contributed to the war effort would also enjoy the pension, despite not having made contributions during their working lives. The consequence was that the BSP was not a funded system (i.e. where you take out what you put in, allowing for investment growth and actuarial evening across the population) but was in effect a "pay-as-you-go" system in which current employee contributions funded current pensions. The problem this stored up was that as the pensioner population grew as a percentage of the total population, either pensions would have to decline relative to wages or contributions by current workers would have to rise, neither of which was politically palatable. In part, pushing back the state pension age has been a compromise to avoid this choice.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxdk6IPwTRZtvLdiCxDJUJJ7W6GHfzMZFs6BJUtxlFeuX95M3hQRa-zRMajDUnVqAN0m6vMFeZqmJpg-N1TWRSfJ8rHCcotq7Zxs9S9voVHhh1Tj5L-fWWXOEa6371xD7U_6ANpjT_jq4BAmQ4iAftjq6YYistc0J3hsHIDf5b-FIddvIdUwygCdugWo/s615/1_Screen-Shot-2021-06-21-at-160324.webp" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="615" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHxdk6IPwTRZtvLdiCxDJUJJ7W6GHfzMZFs6BJUtxlFeuX95M3hQRa-zRMajDUnVqAN0m6vMFeZqmJpg-N1TWRSfJ8rHCcotq7Zxs9S9voVHhh1Tj5L-fWWXOEa6371xD7U_6ANpjT_jq4BAmQ4iAftjq6YYistc0J3hsHIDf5b-FIddvIdUwygCdugWo/w400-h220/1_Screen-Shot-2021-06-21-at-160324.webp" width="400" /></a></div><br />The solution arrived at by the late-70s was to let the value of pensions decline through inflation, by removing the earnings link, but to offset this by encouraging greater private provision among better-off workers (as part of the wider move to financial deregulation), offering higher pensions through increased supplemental contributions (e.g. SERPS and later the State Second Pension, aka S2P), and introducing additional means-tested benefits for poorer pensioners (e.g. Income Support, Pension Credit, the Winter Fuel Payment). The repeated tweaks to the system reflects the state's reluctance to properly grasp the nettle, a failing that has been there since 1948. In this context, the triple lock was another attempt to kick the can down the road while implicitly acknowledging that the demise of occupational pensions for all but a minority meant that the state would have to shoulder more of the burden in future. It's clear the majority of working people <a href="https://ifs.org.uk/publications/challenges-uk-pension-system-case-pensions-review" target="_blank">aren't going to make adequate provision</a> through personal pensions (it turns out that time preference - that current goods have greater utility than future ones - really is a thing), those in precarious work cannot afford to make supplemental contributions, and the perma-austerity of our political consensus means that benefits will inevitably fail to plug the gaps.<p></p><p>While many attribute the triple lock to a purely political calculation - i.e. securing the votes of the over-60s - and others have seen the shift from defined benefits to defined contributions as pushing risk onto employees following the pension fund scandals of the 1980s, another way of thinking about it is as the transfer of an overhead on capital (employer contributions) to a combination of the taxpayer-funded state and the individual. The reason why capital was prepared to fund generous occupational schemes in the postwar era was not an altruistic desire to make up for the modest BSP but an imperative to attract and retain workers in a tight labour market. There is a parallel here with the US, where employers have long had to offer generous health insurance to secure workers of the right calibre. The introduction of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 is an example of transferring that burden from capital onto the individual and the state. In effect, the pensions triple lock, which was also introduced in 2010, was the British Obamacare - just less contentious.</p><p>But while the welfare balance between the state and capital has shifted over time, it's clear that there has also been a change in the balance betwen the state and individual. This is due to a combination of poor private pension performance and growing inequality, placing an ever greater burden on the state. In practice that means a greater burden on today's workers, not only because of the pay-as-you-go nature of National Insurance but because the tax regime continues to favour wealth over income. This gets to the nub of the matter. If we think about it, the UK actually does have a national pension fund - i.e. a quantum of wealth, invested in assets that have historically delivered above-average growth returns, that many people anticipate will fund their retirement. It's just not in the intangible form of an electronic ledger. It's in the concrete form of bricks and mortar - in other words, property. Equity release is simply the modern equivalent of buying an annuity. The political problem is that pooling this fund for the benefit of all pensioners, including those who never owned their own home, would be inflammatory.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAisnYKxFc6HXKBfcUMq3OwucYN8wY1ELI5EpouoSwyNwHlMrpmjg3N4BY9hCt5W4ZtcHLbuPCCZrmwAULG6rtwSW45aUtA6sMrLd7rmW9Z0Zq5oEhreO4bkErb657EHdxCBcanvd3lZn-hDMO0vRppQS3-RB-6oCnYwzmpS5FQVgw8vmA2xWmojo3diQ/s300/Equity.png.rendition.320.320.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAisnYKxFc6HXKBfcUMq3OwucYN8wY1ELI5EpouoSwyNwHlMrpmjg3N4BY9hCt5W4ZtcHLbuPCCZrmwAULG6rtwSW45aUtA6sMrLd7rmW9Z0Zq5oEhreO4bkErb657EHdxCBcanvd3lZn-hDMO0vRppQS3-RB-6oCnYwzmpS5FQVgw8vmA2xWmojo3diQ/s1600/Equity.png.rendition.320.320.png" width="300" /></a></div><br />As many people point out whenever the issue of "pension generosity" arises, particularly in its current guise of the triple lock, the main beneficiaries are always going to be today's young, not today's old. This is because they can look forward to a full post-working life on a level of pensions that has grown relative to average wages over time. Of course there are some assumptions in this, notably that the state pension age is not pushed out even further while average lifespans remain static or even decline, and that other top-up benefits aren't reduced or even abolished. But the biggest caveat is that the current and future cost of state pensions must be paid by current and future workers. In other words, the fact that today's young can currently look forward to better pensions in the future not only ignores time preference, it assumes that the future labour force will be sufficent in size, and sufficiently well-paid relative to national income, to service a potentially much larger pensioner population. That seems optimistic, to say the least.<p></p><p>The obvious solution is equity release, in the form of increased taxation on property (and wealth more generally) to transfer funds to pensioners and thereby redistribute from rich to poor. This would also allow the burden on current and future workers to be reduced. Many people have long argued for National Insurance to be combined with Income Tax, but this is simply another way of saying that we should drop the pretence of a contributory welfare system and fund all benefits, from unemployment and disability to pensions, from general taxation. Limiting our ambition to having income tax do more of the heavy lifting misses that it already does a lot because we have failed to properly tax wealth, and in particular property. The classic poverty relief trilemma is that removing poverty without disincentives at low cost is impossible: you can have two but not all three. In the context of pensions: a flat-rate, generous BSP would be costly, while means-testing would disincentive supplemental private provision. The result is the acceptance that poverty for some is necessary. This is obviously an ideologically-coloured view: the persistence into retirement of the utility of the reserve army of labour.</p><p>Shifting the cost of pensions from workers to property has the advantage that it isn't going to disincentivise property ownership, in the same way that taxing land is reliable because landowners aren't going to abandon it (and obviously can't offshore it). The original sin of pensions in the UK was the idea enshrined in the Beveridge Report of the contributory principle, a regressive turn when you consider that the original 1908 pension, however ungenerous, was a non-contributory right. This principle turned out to be a carefully-cultivated myth that obscured that pensions were still dependent on general taxation. The subsequent sin was the turn after 1979 towards a tax regime that privileged wealth over income and increased regressive consumption taxes (e.g. VAT). The triple lock is likely to be tweaked at the very least after the next general election, by whoever happens to be in government. The cross-party consensus is not simply that it is unaffordable in the long run but that any changes to the pension regime must maintain the principle of pay-as-you-go, because to ask who should pay other than current workers would be to open a whole new can of worms.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com4London, UK51.5072178 -0.127586229.393862638031852 -35.283836199999989 73.620572961968151 35.028663799999983tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5312853715123370916.post-2614264235787374112023-09-01T12:45:00.000+01:002023-09-01T12:45:07.821+01:00The Manufacture of Dissent<p>Martin Kettle in the <i>Guardian</i> thinks that "Ulez reveals a systemic problem with how UK government works – or rather, doesn’t". As the lede summarises his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/31/ulez-uk-government-clean-air-nhs-citizens-assemblies" target="_blank">argument</a>, "Most people want cleaner air and a better NHS, but partisan politics gets in the way. To bridge the gap, we need citizens’ assemblies." The reason why centrists advocate citizens' assemblies is the expectation that they will inevitably deliver centrist outcomes, but it should be obvious that they only do this where there is first of all a <a href="https://www.politico.eu/article/the-myth-of-the-citizens-assembly-democracy/" target="_blank">political commitment</a> to reform and enough of a cross-party consensus to ensure legitimacy for the outcome (e.g. in the case of Ireland's abortion reforms). The idea that partisan politics stands in the way of a better NHS has surely been disproved by history. On the contrary, the problem has been a cross-party consensus (for all but a few years) that the service must be reformed through marketisation and the greater involvement of private healthcare companies. What stands in the way is not partisanship but the cartel, and for that reason there will never be a citizens' assembly on the NHS.</p><p>On the specific issue of cleaner air for Londoners, Kettle claims that "In principle, people support action, provided the measures seem sensible, appropriate and fair, and that adequate preparation is made for the transition. It is clear this did not happen over the extension of Ulez. The upshot is that measures that would and could have secured sustained public backing, as well as being of public benefit, have become needlessly contested and at risk of being derailed. That failure is the result of our political system." This is misleading both on the scheme's introduction and the claim that it has become "needlessly contested". The original <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone" target="_blank">ULEZ</a> scheme was announced by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in 2015 and was set to cover the same area as the congestion charge zone in 2020. In the event, it was introduced earlier by the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan, in 2019. In 2021, the ULEZ area was extended to the North and South Circular roads. It was estimated that this would impact 140,000 vehicles. The further expansion to all 32 boroughs this year is expected to impact a further 40,000 vehicles. The plans have been widely publicised and remain popular across London as a whole.</p><p>To suggest that anything is "needlessly contested" is patronising, implying that there is a predefined agenda for politics. This is the same sort of thinking that imagines a citizens' assembly would produce common-sense consensus and mutual respect, rather than antagonism. If you put an angry outer borough van driver in the same room as an inner borough parent with an asthmatic child, you're not necessarily going to get consensus. One feature of genuine political contest, as opposed to polite disagreement, is the willingness to defy the law and it was predictable that on the issue of ULEZ the Tories should have suddenly become <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12458065/Sir-Iain-Smith-ULEZ-vandals-Tory-MP.html" target="_blank">defiant</a>. The party of law and order has always been happy to indulge law-breaking and disorder, while the rightwing press has frequently campaigned explicitly for both. This should not surprise us in the least, any more than the Labour Party's consistent commitment to both upholding the law and rejecting activism as unhelpful. That the current party leader is a former chief prosecutor is incidental though emblematic. But why has ULEZ become such a contested issue?</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXXzZoB4sQ5KixQLp3Sw7oJ85aO4rkm2IFw9v5Ee8umMXAt5lSSkUpNhSlc03SnQA2BQzT4j2Z8d9vh8mCTwcq9g8yAzgQZ3FNmoSafDQd5MJY7f0Qrq9XRYB0NTHMD6CBwvbZFOJbCIa7WGKaZgbNpxTii-DY_NRjkDN9OjvGNWXMm2uXrF37kDNqc8/s300/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigXXzZoB4sQ5KixQLp3Sw7oJ85aO4rkm2IFw9v5Ee8umMXAt5lSSkUpNhSlc03SnQA2BQzT4j2Z8d9vh8mCTwcq9g8yAzgQZ3FNmoSafDQd5MJY7f0Qrq9XRYB0NTHMD6CBwvbZFOJbCIa7WGKaZgbNpxTii-DY_NRjkDN9OjvGNWXMm2uXrF37kDNqc8/s1600/images.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><p>Phil Burton-Cartledge sees the protests in the context of <a href="http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2023/08/ulez-and-its-discontents.html" target="_blank">petit bourgeois politics</a>, employing the frame outlined by Dan Evans's book, <i>A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite-Bourgeoisie</i>. "Looking at mobilisations of the petit bourgeoisie in the 21st century, there is a certain commonality to them. Whether it was the petrol protests in 2000 or the Countryside Alliance demonstrations a year later, the Fathers 4 Justice stunts, and latterly the cocktail of Covid conspiracism, 15 minute cities, and now ULEZ what they all have in common is the perception the state, or rather a busybody and overly managerial section of the state is getting in the way, professing to know better than them, and is stopping them from doing as they please." His purpose in this is to highlight the dangers that such political <i>ressentiment</i> may present an authoritarian and managerial Labour government, despite Keir Starmer showing every sign that he instinctively sympathises with petit bourgeois politics as much as he respects the dignity of the state.</p><p>But there are a couple of problems in this analysis relating to scale and persistence. The Fathers for Justice stunts will never enjoy widespread support, but their specificity also means they will continue at the margins of society: there is an endless supply of divorced dads who imagine the state is a misandrist conspiracy. In contrast, the Countryside Alliance is a substantial organisation, though it's pretty obvious that the bulk of its support comes from field sport enthusiasts rather than smallholders and agricultural workers. It isn't a reactionary spasm by the petit bourgeosie that will burn itself out but an astroturf organisation for large landowners and second-homers that will likely persist long into the future. The same cannot be said for Covid conspiracism, which has already ceded priority among the far-right to anti-drag queen protests. Likewise, the 15-minute city demonstrations appear to have petered out already, while the anti-ULEZ protests haven't mustered more than a few score attendees so far (of course, this may change, particularly if the 15-minute crowd shifts attention). </p><p>The question is, how do such isolated and marginal protests take on the appearance of mass movements, if only temporarily? The answer is media coverage. Consider this from the <i><a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/29/ulez-expansion-london-live-updates-sadiq-khan-tfl-vehicles/" target="_blank">Telegraph</a></i>: "Protesters descended on Whitehall on Tuesday to demand that the expansion of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) be scrapped. <i><b>Dozens</b></i> of campaigners waved placards with messages such as “stop the toxic air lie”, and mocked-up car registration plates reading: “get Khan out”." (my emphasis). One reason why the Countryside Alliance has prospered over the years is that it has enjoyed disproportionate and sympathetic support from newspapers such as the <i>Times</i> and <i>Telegraph</i>. One reason why ULEZ has become a political issue is that those same papers have shifted from supporting what was originally a Conservative Party policy, encouraged by Grant Shapps as Secretary of State for Transport as recently as 2020, to outright opposition. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC67qYUINzlvPPVtlrvPdN2nbHo_JZ39s959rBjCEbMfsok58APoroy6c-TIUwf4UTFTI4jUuUIkWVEVDrf1AqZiWIRPhlGk-5robtvvVRkRTvbaA8gob3csju-ZKvoQM-Q_22p1Tov2OuqbSEnqZYYkspDEndJri2AJxhJw_CvhAQoogul2Ws0OqXwB0/s300/images.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="300" height="168" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgC67qYUINzlvPPVtlrvPdN2nbHo_JZ39s959rBjCEbMfsok58APoroy6c-TIUwf4UTFTI4jUuUIkWVEVDrf1AqZiWIRPhlGk-5robtvvVRkRTvbaA8gob3csju-ZKvoQM-Q_22p1Tov2OuqbSEnqZYYkspDEndJri2AJxhJw_CvhAQoogul2Ws0OqXwB0/s1600/images.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>The reason for that shift was the presumed political utility of ULEZ as a wedge issue in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July. That Labour's vote increased and the Tories' fell, making a seat previously considered safe enough for a sitting Prime Minister into a tight marginal, was taken not as evidence that the electorate increasingly favours cleaner air but that Sadiq Khan had somehow managed to lose Labour a shoo-in. This was a framing shared both by the jubilant Tory press and by the Labour leadership, and it was notable that both promptly extended the critique beyond ULEZ to green policies more generally. While Labour remains officially committed to Net Zero and cleaning up the environment, it has made it clear that this will not trump its commitment to economic growth, and I suspect that it considers indulging sole traders with polluting vans to be a contribution to the latter.<p></p><p>The Tories can be accused of reckless opportunism in deciding that "green crap" is the dividing line on which to fight the next election, not least because they will inevitably be drawn towards starker opposition in order to accentuate the differences between themselves and Labour. They haven't got much else to offer. With Rishi Sunak's attempts to rebrand the party as competent managers of the economy going slowly nowhere, and with Labour having successfully closed off most avenues of attack by reneging on their promises and insisting that they would stick to Tory spending plans, it was always likely that the coming general election would focus on the cost-of-living when not distracted by penises and censorious students. The question of who should bear the cost of the Net Zero transition is actually quite a cunning one because Labour simply will not admit that the cost should be borne immediately by the state but funded over time by increased taxes on wealth.</p><p>Both Martin Kettle and Phil Burton-Cartledge see the anti-ULEZ protests as an organic product of popular dissent, the one the regrettable result of the failure of partisan politics to provide leadership, the other an expression of social anxiety by an innately hysterical class. But I think both are wrong. In the normal course of events, the expansion to the outer boroughs would have produced grumbling, limited compromise and a few upsets in local council ward elections. What has turned it into a <i>cause célèbre</i> is the salience decreed by the media, which predominantly means the Tory newspapers, and while that is partly about helpfully crafting a wedge for the Conservative Party, it is also about protecting what they consider to be their own interests, or more accurately the interests of their owners and their owners' class. It was always likely that capital would drag its heels even once the imperative of climate change became indisputable, and it was equally likely that this would eventually take the form of popular resistance to an overweening state. And if that resistance doesn't naturally arise, it will be cultivated.</p>David Timoneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03568348438980023320noreply@blogger.com5