Deserting the Centre

A common theme in the commentary on the Tories' current troubles has been the search for parallels with previous occasions on which power changed hands between the two main parties. Inevitably, the end of a long period of Conservative government and the Blairite nostalgia of the commentariat has made 1997 the choice comparison, with the dominant narrative being that the Tories are headed for the electoral wilderness because of a lurch to the right, a prediction reinforced by the shortlist of potential party leaders being winnowed down to Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. There are two problems with this comparative analysis. The first is a tendency to misinterpret the history of past electoral shifts, the second is a tendency to ignore the contradictions of conservatism as this historic conjucture. Even what passes for the left-inclined newspaper commentariat has tended to treat the latter as a matter of personalities - e.g. "Bad Enoch v Sad Enoch", in Aditya Chakrabortty's phrase - which is no better than the sneery virtue-obsession of centrists such as John Crace or Marina Hyde.

To be fair to Chakrabortty, he does recognise the contradictions that arise in attempting to reconcile libertarian economics and social conservatism, but reducing this to "moron or bastard" personalises a more profound tension that is currently restructuring politics not only in the UK but across much of the world. Martin Kettle, perhaps suprisingly, does at least recognise the global context: "Across the developed world, the party politics of the 20th century have fractured. The once dominant centre-right parties of countries such as France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are either struggling to survive or have disappeared. In the US, the Republicans have turned into a populist cult. After the general election, the Conservative party hesitated to lurch down the same path. Now, though, it has done so anyway. It is a fateful moment and the consequences will not be pretty for any aspect of British politics." Of course, this is simply Kettle mourning the end of the political landscape he grew up in, but he does at least recognise that there is more at work here than the triumph of stupidity.

Simon Wren-Lewis has also taken to looking for parallels in watershed elections of the past. He too imagines that 1997 offers the best comparison, but along the way he makes some interesting comments about 1979: "Just as Labour then was deeply split between left and centre, you could say the Conservatives are split between the right and a One Nation centre. But whereas the split within Labour in 1979 onwards was both very evident and extended to the membership, if the Conservatives are split the centre is both remarkably quiet and appears largely absent from the membership." He is using "centre" here is the sense of a positioning on the wider political spectrum, and thus a synonym for liberal in the context of Labour. In fact, the split in the Labour Party was the longstanding one between the socialist left and the Old Labour right. The liberal strand, represented by Roy Jenkins and his allies, was a minority within the party, literally a gang of four at the outset, with only 28 MPs eventually defecting to the breakaway SDP, often for reasons of careerism. The dynamic that led to the formation of the new party was a squeeze between the left and right in Labour that marginalised liberalism, and it was this as much as the electoral arithmetic that led to its subsequent merger with the Liberal Party.

Wren-Lewis is concerned that by lurching to the right the Conservatives have rejected any attempt to appeal to the median voter, which he presumably imagines a One Nation centrist would be more sympathatic to. But this ignores two things. First, that the "nice Tories" of the centrist imaginary were always happy to support the economic libertarianism of Margaret Thatcher and the austerity of David Cameron and George Osborne (Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, for example). Second, insofar as these things can be judged from opinion polls, the median voter is already significantly to the left on economic policy of not only the Tory right and the One Nation centre but also Labour. It's also worth noting that voter's material preferences, on issues such as taxation and nationalisation, look a lot more stable than the polling and focus group claims that the median voter is positioned to the right on social and cultural issues, such as immigration and trans rights, not least because the latter tend to be topics with which most voters have little personal issue but which they assume are of concern nationally due to the salience and bias of media coverage.

What we see in these various analyses is the classic narrative of centrism in which the losing party in a pivotal general election lurches off into the political wilderness by deserting the centre ground. In fact, what characterised both 1979 and 1997 was that the winning party had very deliberately stated in advance of its victory that it saw itself as being to the right of the centre and engaged in a radical transformation: the Tories to defeat the unions and Labour to embrace globalisation. In both cases, there was a public belief that this was over-stated, that while meaningful change was needed, the party would prove less radical in office (there were obvious echoes of this in 2024 with the claim that Starmer and Reeves would redress the wrongs of austerity). Both elections shifted the "Overton Window" to the right, making the left appear ever more distant from the centre (which opened it up to the cynical anathematisation of recent years) and positioning the middle of the spectrum significantly to the right of the median voter.

The tension at the heart of conservatism between libertarian economics and social reaction has not resided exclusively within the Tory Party for decades. It has become hegemonic. It was central to the makeup of New Labour and continued in subterranean form throughout the post-Blair years. Ed Miliband's desire to make the economy more socially responsible and to dial down the reactionary impulses around welfare and immigration simply produced an alliance between the neoliberals and the old right to hamstring him. Jeremy Corbyn's outright rejection of both neoliberalism and reaction simply turned the dial of opposition within the party up to 11. Keir Starmer's attempt to reconcile the two has led to the fiscal orthodoxy of Rachel Reeves, the neoliberal revivalism of Wes Streeting and his own bleak authoritarianism, now lapsing into the parody of a patriotic reactionary. The apparent triviality of the Conservative Party leadership contest simply reflects the fact that the struggle for the soul of conservatism is currently underway in the Labour Party. 

Those Labour Party supporters who think a Conservative Party led by either Badenoch or Jenrick would be a godsend, guaranteeing a further 5 years in power, acknowledge their fear that James Cleverly would have pitched for the same centre-right ground that they now occupy (indeed, it requires no struggle to imagine Cleverly as a minister in the current government). What they perhaps don't want to acknowledge is that a further shift to the right by the Conservatives will encourage Labour to move further right as well, to ensure they are fully Tory-adjacent and so close up the space for any further incursions by the Liberal Democrats. The truth of the matter is that the conservative party is in rude health, it just doesn't go by that name any more. The more troubling truth is that conservatism is no closer to resolving the contradictions between its economics and its social instincts. The rise of the far-right is an opportunistic attempt to exploit the latter to obscure the former, but it offers no coherent solution. Nationalism retains a strong appeal, but the commitment to a comprehensive reordering of society that was foundational to Fascism is simply inconceivable in our individualistic world.

We are living in the early days of a one-party state, or a single state party, if you prefer. The curious reluctance of Labour to fight the Tories over the need for austerity in 2010 and then again in 2015 were the warning signs. The brief resurgence of a mildly left of centre opposition in 2017 was perhaps the last chance to preserve a genuine electoral choice, hence the notable increase in turnout and the high percentage share of the two main parties. People knew the election mattered, in a way that 2024 didn't. 2019 was the great consequential election, not so much in confirming the UK's exit from the European Union (that was always likely to happen in some form, the promise of a second referendum notwithstanding) but in finally entombing the left. The so-called "Soft Left" of Labour have taken junior ministerial jobs or voiced timid dissent from the backbenches, but their opposition to hegemonic conservatism is no more substantial or likely to make a difference than that of the Tory "Wets" in the early-1980s. The dominant political question of the moment is this: Who is best suited to manage the contradictions of conservatism - the Labour right or the Tory right?

What Is Left of Neoliberalism and Conservatism?

If there is a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism, both in theory and practice, it is that the former is universal while the latter is particular. From the Kantian imperative to modern human rights law, liberalism sees its scope as all of humanity. In contrast, conservatism believes in minding one's own business. Of course, as historians like Domenico Losurdo have long pointed out, liberalism in practice operates a very clear hierarchy of regard, from its involvement in slavery and colonialism to today's discrimination in its sympathies towards Israelis and Palestinians. This is because at root it is about the defence of private property, from which arises an entire global order. In reality, liberalism and conservatism are simply two strategies with the same goal - their historic friction and entanglement reflecting evolving class power and the underlying changes in the material base. But the distinction between the universal and the particular remains a useful guide to understanding liberal and conservative thought and the way it is expressed politically.

Though both the recent Labour and Conservative party conferences were crashingly dull, with little of substance to report and much trivia served up to an ungrateful press, both followed the script to the letter. Labour avoided the particular by eschewing policy announcements beyond "more of the same", while the Tories indulged the particular by ill-considered asides on maternity pay and extra-judicial killing. The liberal media pleaded with Labour to offer the nation some "hope", albeit in the form of rhetorical bromides rather than anything that might inflame the passions, while the conservative media, faced with four underwhelming candidates for leader, has started to read the last rites for the party. The Labour conference prompts the question: What is left of neoliberalism? Though many commentators have seen the new government in terms of continuity with the Blair era, there is clearly a lot less on offer this time round. Likewise, the Conservative conference prompts the question: What is left of conservatism? While a leadership contest inevitably means speakers pitching to an audience far to the right of public opinion, the fact that so much on offer was little more than hobby horses points to an obvious void.

The turn to a more activist state in pursuit of a more national economy, which began after 2008, has not seen a return to the social democratic state of old. Rather it has accentuated the disciplinary features of the neoliberal state. Thus Bidenomics has been more about maintaining US energy security, with all its geopolitical ramifications in Ukraine and the Middle East, than near-shoring manufacturing jobs, while the EU's shift towards the reimposition of internal as well as external borders is clearly not intended to reduce the mobility of capital. In the UK, the prime current example, heavily-freighted with symbolism after the recent riots, is the Labour government's commitment to build new prisons. While this has been offered up as justification for wider-ranging planning reform in the face of "NIMBYism", it is clear that the Prime Minister in particular finds his comfort zone within the carceral state rather than amidst the blueprints of new public infrastructure. Perhaps the most telling example has been France, where the permanent state of exception in support of "stability" has now dropped the pretence of democracy.

The original claim of the Third Way was not simply that it was pragmatic ("what works"), or inclusive after the divisiveness of the 1980s (the communitarian and dialogic vogues), but that it was post-ideological. In other words, it was postmodern in rejecting the grand narratives of the past, specifically the nationalism and socialism that dominated from 1848 to 1989. If there is an intellectual substrate to Starmerism it is a belief in the state, arguably the grandest and oldest narrative of them all, which goes back to the 17th century and Hobbes' Leviathan. This means that not only is it not postmodern, but that it largely rejects modernism and structuralism too, hence the strong whiff of cultural conservatism and unapologetic anti-intellectualism that Starmer and his chief lieutenants give off. Liberal newspaper columnists bemoaning the lack of substance would strike traditional conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott as ironic. Starmer is saying that he is an echt conservative and his lack of fancy foreign ideas, as much as the looming Union Jack flags that provide the background to his speeches, is the proof of that. 

The Conservative Party leadership candidates have predictably all commited to lower taxes, a smaller state and a larger military, which might suggest a consensus as to what is left of conservatism. But this is mostly shibboleths and ancestor-worship. The inescapable trend is towards higher taxes because of demographics, i.e. more dependents and a shrinking working-age population, something that should be obvious when you survey the attendees at the party conference. The state has never meaningfully shrunk, even on the Tories' watch, both because of those demographic trends and because of rising expectations of the state to provide greater security (pretty much every public inquiry results in a demand for it to do more). It's also worth noting the self-interest of the politico-media class in expanding the state's activities, which in turn expands the scope for private interests to seek influence through lobbying and donations. Military spending will continue to decline, if only because the alternative is even higher taxes, and because the salience of conflict in Ukraine and Lebanon cannot detract from the secular trend towards less war. 

It's a professional failing for politicians to ignore material and social forces and imagine that they can affect the course of history, but it's also an expression of contemporary conservativism: that things will only get worse unless we intervene against the "woke mind virus", or whatever bizarre form the justification for reaction has now taken. Paradoxically, this is the exact opposite of traditional conservatism's belief in making no unnecessary change. From Edmund Burke through Michael Oakeshott to Roger Scruton the fundamental principle has been the precautionary: "first, do no harm". English conservatism since the millennium has lost its bearings, largely due to American influence (Scruton's claim that the left lost its bearings due to French influence now appears quaint in comparison). The transatlantic variety has always been more concerned with the preservation of what it see as innate hierarchies of power, from the family (anti-abortion) to society more generally (a militarised polity enforcing racial discrimination). This gives rise to such morbid symptoms as the trad wife and the prepper. In contrast, English conservatism (for it is particularly English, not British) has been relaxed about changes in personnel so long as the structure of hierarchy remains in place (the House of Lords). It has, in a word, been pragmatic. That is not an adjective that could be used to describe the Conservative Party in recent years.

Amusingly, it is liberals who have fretted most over the decline of English conservatism while the Tories have sought refuge in the consolations of pessimism or simply thrown themselves into unhinged mania. A recent example was Kenan Malik in The Observer telling us (in the words of Roger Scruton, no less) that conservatives believe in the free market and choice, when they very obviously don't. Within recent memory we had a Tory government looting the public treasury to shovel money towards "VIP" mates. Malik suggests that Tories were actually ambivalent towards Margaret Thatcher because she combined a Hayekian liberalism destructive of the tried and tested with an ostensible conservatism, but this ignores that her advocacy of the free market was in support of a reactionary social order, not unlike that other Hayek fan, Augusto Pinochet, which tells you what classical liberalism is really about. She didn't create a nation of entrepreneurs but one of rentiers, spivs & petty authoritarians (a legacy that lives on in the Labour Party as much as elsewhere). To be fair, Malik also admits (again quoting Scruton) that what really motivates conservatives is obedience, i.e. the obedience of others towards themselves, which is closer to the truth. 

The meta-narrative of modern political science is the idea that we are witnessing a realignment of voter loyalties. This tends to follow two well-worn tracks: the rise of populism in response to the discontents of globalisation; and the claim that party affiliations are now more determined by values than material interests. The common factor is the rejection of class as both an analytical category and as an organising principle for political action. In conjunction, they also serve to justify the demand that centrist politicians ease up on the neoliberal teleology and show sympathy for conservative values: the petit bourgeois and the working class must be kept onside by pandering to social reaction. With liberalism less universal in its aspirations and conservatism even more obsessively particular, the result has been a gradual merging of the two in a common "party of order" (most obviously in France) whose chief purpose is to protect society from the "chaos" of the left and various alien malcontents. Putting up Stars of David at every entry-point into the UK, as suggested by Robert Jenrick, might appear both mad and deeply trivial, but you wouldn't be surprised if the current Labour government adopted the policy.

Money Talks

In his book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, the American political scientist Corey Robin provides a useful summary of conservative thinking on the intersection of money and political speech: "When it comes to political speech, Thomas proposes, men and women speak most forcefully not through the idle chatter of social media or cocktail conservation but through giving up their money as campaign donations. Donors 'speak through the candidate', Thomas writes". This is conventional enough, but Robin excavates the roots of this thinking in Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Specifically, the idea that the market reveals our true preferences through the price mechanism, whereby we "decide what to us is more, and what less, important". This suggests that the more we value something, the more we will pay for it. At the margin - e.g. if you're down to your last dollar - what you spend it on will surely be your priority, a true moral choice. But what if you're rich? To cap campaign donations would be to deny the rich person the ability to make a choice at the margin - i.e. at the limit of their possible expenditure. 

As Robin sardonically notes, "the Hayekian argument would seem to favour limitations on accumulations of wealth. How are the wealthy ever to make a moral choice if they never approach the end of their riches?" But this is obviously not the conclusion for soi-disant classical liberals like Hayek or contemporary conservatives like Thomas. The argument rather is that there should be no limit on the exercise of political speech through the medium of money, as that would be an abridgement of rights under the First Amendment. Along with the acceptance of corporate personhood - that rights nominally intended to be exercised by the individual are also available to corporations - this has led to a contemporary American polity in which the interests of large corporations and billionaires dominate the political discourse. Political speech is only meaningful in public forums, and increasingly they can only be accessed through money. Speech may be free, but in practice political speech is beyond the buying-power of the vast majority of citizens. It is no coincidence that social media has arisen in parallel with this development, offering the appearance of free speech but ensuring that the clamour of the crowd (or the occult working of the algorithm) muffles most of it. 

Before turning attention to the UK, one final observation by Robin: "Liberal critics will claim that Thomas's model is pure influence peddling, money buying access and legislation, the essence of corruption. Thomas counters that corruption happens only if there is a simple quid pro quo, a bribe, which is illegal. Influence and access, by contrast, are what all citizens seek. Influence peddling, in other words, is the essence of citizenship." It's obviously easy to disguise a bribe, so the fine distinction being made here between vice and virtue is not one that can readily survive in the real world. The equation of money and speech muddies the field by suggesting that cash can change hands in a virtuous manner, so the presence of cash or benefits in kind is not in itself evidence of corruption. What matters is the intent: influence versus bribery. Ironically, this means that larger donations are less likely to be considered questionable. Per Hayek, the more you give the more it is an expression of your true beliefs and thus a moral choice. It is easier to give a Senator, who has legislative authority over a Bill that will affect your financial interests, $1 million than it is to give a Sheriff who recently stopped you for speeding $100.

Unlike the US, the UK has recognised the right of corporations to make political donations since the Trade Union Act of 1913 superseded the Osborne Judgement of 1909. The latter had temporarily banned trade unions from funding the Labour Representation Committee (the forerunner of the Labour Party) after a Liberal-supporting member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants had objected to the use of his contributions in this way. The 1913 Act made political funds lawful but also enshrined the right of union members to opt-out. Succeeding legislation has further tightened this and today members must opt-in to the political fund, if there is one. Historically, the trade unions were the largest contributor to Labour but that has steadily declined since the 1990s. Last year, in the run-up to the general election, they accounted for 27% of the cash donations to the party. In contrast, businesses and individuals accounted for 67%, with two individuals (Gary Lubner and David Sainsbury) jointly contributing more than the unions. 

Over the years, political donations by companies to all of the leading UK political parties have declined. This is partly due to the desire of publicly-listed companies to appear non-political in order to keep all of their shareholders happy (and avoid charges of wasting money that could go to dividends), but it also reflects the growth of private donations by rich individuals, many of whom will effectively be recycling company profits by virtue of their own large shareholdings. More broadly it indicates how much wealth has shifted from public corporations to private accumulations: patrimonial capital, in Thomas Piketty's phrase. Companies are these days more likely to make donations in kind, for example by seconding staff to work in politicians' offices, or by offering entertainment and other freebies that can be explained to shareholders as lobbying or public relations. It is the latter that is currently in the news for the simple reason that it has become pervasive. 

The first defence wheeled out by many Labour ministers when questioned on the subject was a variation of "Everybody does it; it's no big deal". This was a useful insight into their own worldview, particularly at a time when they were calling for sacrifices by welfare recipients, but it wasn't exactly smart. Equally unhelpful have been the party supporters who have attempted to dismiss football boxes or concert tickets as trivial during a cost-of-living crisis, or who pointed out that Conservative politicians have a worse record in accepting free hospitality, not to mention corrupt practice, though this is surely more down to the opportunity of 14 years in government rather than any moral peculiarity. The problem is that these manoeuvres imply that ethics might actually be relevant at a certain price-point, which simply leads to a discussion of what that price might be. £100,000 in declared freebies over a year plus a new wardrobe for the wife appears to be way in excess of that notional number to judge from public opinion. By now you might have expected the spin-doctors to have come up with a better line. That they haven't tells us something significant, and it isn't that Keir Starmer is politically tone-deaf or that the Number 10 operation is distracted by infighting.

What the government appears to be telling us is that buying influence is fine and that the only ethical requirement is that it should be publicly declared. The insistence on that public declaration is not a weak excuse but a proud boast. That act transmutes what could look like a bribe into a legitimate expression of political preference by the donor, a point Rachel Reeves made, though she was unintentionally revealing in describing a "scale" ranging from members and supporters (small donations) to "people who have been successful in life" (large donations). She isn't going to state that the degree of influence is proportionate to the amount of money, because that would be crass, but she is prepared to suggest that the largest donors don't have to be supporters, let alone party members. The fact that so many Labour politicians have appeared nonplussed at the idea that they would be swayed by some Taylor Swift tickets, which they only took for the benefit of their kids, is not them playing dumb. They understand that what will sway them are much larger donations, not to mention non-executive directorships and plum consultancy gigs.

The Labour Party's infatuation with American politics used to be largely restricted to the Blairites, but since Obama's first presidency, and the post-2008 counter-revolution it enabled, that infatuation has spread to pretty much all parts of the party other than the left and a few Blue Labour eccentrics. Indeed, the charge of anti-Americanism was a significant sub-text to much of the purge of the left after 2016. This goes beyond the traditional Atlanticism of the Labour right, or the West Wing cosplay of Labour's media outriders at the New Statesman and elsewhere, to a full-on absorption of American political norms, from the jejeune technophilia of the Tony Blair Foundation to a more transactional relationship with the donor class. But while the latter is rooted in its US context in a belief that money is political speech, in the UK it is rooted in a very different history, one in which money is authority. This explains the contrast between the cacophonous US party conventions with their loud protests and Labour's tightly-managed conference where protest is anathematised and dissenters are bundled away. 

The Vibes-based Order

According to Polly Toynbee, the Labour government is already being treated harshly by the press: "The honeymoon for Labour is over, say the massed ranks of the rightwing media. What honeymoon was that? It seems to have been over since 5 July." The party's honeymoon started immediately after the 2019 general election. In retrospect, Keir Starmer has enjoyed the longest personal honeymoon, in the sense of a period of indulgence by the media, of any party leader in history. Indeed, he has faced a quite remarkable lack of scrutiny ever since he entered Parliament in 2015. You could attribute this to his good fortune in facing a succession of incompetent Conservative Prime Ministers after 2019, but then the comparison with Tony Blair suggests otherwise. Labour's fresh-faced new leader in 1994 was ridiculed by much of the press as "Bambi" for his inexperience. The backdrop of sleaze and the loss of the Conservative government's reputation for economic competence after Black Wednesday in 1992 meant that a change of government was expected. The only question was whether Blair was an adequate replacement for John Smith, not whether he was an adequate replacement for John Major.

The truth is that the media knew that Boris Johnson would be a disaster at some point and accepted that Labour had to be positioned as a credible replacement government once it had been secured against the left, and once Brexit had been "delivered". While the press was divided on the merits of the latter, there was unanimity on the former. It remains notable that the pro-EU commentators of the Guardian feel that Starmer deserves a long honeymoon despite his central role in sabotaging both the chance of a soft Brexit and a Labour government following his intervention at the 2018 party conference. It's likely that over time some will come to regret their order of priorities, accepting that their instinctive and irrational determination to stymie Corbyn and the left should not have trumped their pragmatic and rational desire to remain in the EU Single Market or Customs Union, but that day is not yet come, hence the petulant whining now about the triviality of £100,000 in goody-bags and the unacceptability of leaks about Number 10's office politics.

Before the sleaze and bitching took centre stage, the attitude of the liberal media towards the government could best be described as one of studied bemusement, both at its apparent priorities (cutting pensioner benefits) and its poor public relations (cutting pensioner benefits). John Harris insisted that "This country needs a lot more than the myopic parsimony of pen-pushers and bean-counters", while Jenni Russell pleaded "Keir, we can’t thrive if all you offer is misery". It's as if neither had spotted at any point over the last 5 years that Starmer had relentlessly moved Labour to the right and appointed a Shadow Chancellor committed to the Treasury View, or that his rhetorical style from day one has centred on the negativity of threats to the party (antisemitism) and threats to the country, both of which would require authoritarian crackdowns. Jonathan Freedland was a little more realistic in his take, claiming that "It’s hard to say that the honeymoon is over, because it never really began. You can’t blame Labour for that: it warned voters before the election not to get their hopes up, and it has stood firm against the menace of optimism ever since." Of course, he has always been an authoritarian masquerading as an even-handed liberal, so his sympathy for the Prime Minister comes as no surprise.

Freedland believes that Rachel Reeves is on the right track because lower interest rates mean "Investment becomes attractive, so the economy begins to grow", and from this all sorts of wonders will arise. He'll not thank you for pointing out that we had near-zero rates for a decade after 2008 during which investment was weak and growth anemic. His attempts to convert from his usual Eeyorish hand-wringing (see any article he's ever written on Palestine) to a Polyannish optimism doesn't convince, but he gives it a good go: "There is an extra prize in sight too. Britain with low interest rates, governed by a new, ostentatiously sensible government with an enormous parliamentary majority, will look like an island of political stability, especially as France and Germany contend with a surging far right. That will attract overseas investment, previously frightened off by the Tory follies of the Brexit years, which means yet more money in Treasury coffers available for public spending." Finally, those sunny uplands are in sight and the damage of Brexit is consigned to history. The purpose of all this nonsense is not to suggest that Reeves should alter course but that Starmer (subtext: still needs to develop political antennae) should make some popular gestures to signal "that better times are on the way". It's all about the vibe, man.

Right on cue we are now told that Starmer is under pressure to ensure his upcoming conference speech offers "hope", though hope of what exactly is unclear. When Peter Mandelson is reduced to lauding Ed Miliband as "a man with a plan", you know they are scratching around. That this demand for optimism comes not only from "party insiders" but "business leaders" is significant. It's clear that the government's focus on doom and gloom is beginning to undermine consumer confidence, and while some of this may be a deliberate ploy to cast whatever crumbs of comfort Starmer comes up with in a better light, it's also clear that this government will be no different to previous Labour administrations in having to toil under the yoke of "business confidence". As Michal Kalecki long ago pointed out, that is merely a way of disciplining governments, who in turn are expected to discipline labour. The idea that business leaders want a better vibe is absurd. What they want is for the government to ease off on any plans to increase tax on capital or to extend workers' rights. And it sounds as if Reeves considers delivering that, aka "stability", to be her chief goal.

In this light, the decision to abolish the Winter Fuel Allowance, the lack of embarrassment over donations and freebies, and the insistence that the autumn budget will be painful are all of a piece, intended to reassure business that this government will prioritise the interests of capital. As Phil Burton-Cartledge notes, "Starmer's lorry load of shopping bags and weeks spent in corporate hospitality boxes says loud and clear whose side he's on." But there's another signal being transmitted here, from the media to Starmer himself. The focus on petty corruption among politicians is always a matter of tone. For example, the real critique of Johnson's refurbishment plans for the flat at Number 10 was the assumed vulgarity of the wallpaper. This was held to reflect a lack of taste and (the misogyny being all too apparent) a wife out of control with ideas above her station. The more serious threat to take Johnson down came much later amidst Partygate. The refurb kerfuffle was simply a plea that he be more serious and statesman-like.

The liberal press want Starmer to be more Jupiterian, to borrow a French phrase, and thereby cement centrist, technocratic government as the natural order of things, even as France reveals the squalid reality of ostensibly progressive centrists allying with the reactionary far-right to block the left, all in the interests of "stability". You can also see this demand for tone at work in the British liberal press's coverage of the US Presidential Election, where the Democrats' turn to a strategy of ridicule directed at Trump and Vance has generated enthusiasm among centrists while successfully obscuring Harris and Walz's essentially conservative policy platform, thereby risking a repeat of the errors of condescension that did for Hillary Clinton. The Trump-Harris debate focused heavily on the character of the participants, with the only issue of policy substance being abortion, a topic that neither party is comfortable with and that has only appeared on the agenda as a result of the highly-political actions of the Supreme Court. 

Starmer will no doubt ride out the current wave of criticism over his designer glasses, his expensive if ill-fitting suits and his preference for a box at the Emirates, if only because there is no advantage to be gained in deposing a man who is clearly congenial to capital, to the British establishment and to Washington (regardless of who wins in November). The self-denying ordinance announced today - no more clobber, thanks - does not signal a retreat from his determination to cosy-up to donors, nor does it suggest that he particularly cares about the poor optics of having his expenses subsidised by the rich while some pensioners worry about whether they can afford to put the heating on this winter. What it does suggest is that he is sensitive to the framing of the press: the hint of haut couture is to be avoided as rigorously as sympathy for human rights while the freebies associated with the more demotic environment of football are dismissed as "fair dos", even though an executive box is the concrete form of de haut en bas. 

It amuses me to note that when he interviewed for his first chambers as a barrister after university he was almost turned down because of his poor dress sense, having turned up wearing a post-Punk cardigan. His interviewers could not see that this was a misjudgement of disguise by an ambitious young man determined to enter the liberal establishment and imagining that its dress code is the same in the Middle Temple as it is in a university. The question remains whether Starmer is more in the mould of Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac or Anthony Powell's Kenneth Widmerpool. Liberals secretly hope that he is Rastignac, a man who started penniless and ended up a peer of France by charm and administrative talent. Their fear is that he is Widmerpool, a vulgar petit bourgeois who lacks charm and whose process mania cannot compensate for his lack of elan or rhetorical skill. They wish he was a British Emmanuel Macron but he comes across like a more stuffy version of John Major, an adenoidal, narrow-minded suburbanite. No wonder they were secretly thrilled by the revelation that he wears (or at least inhabits) expensive tailoring.

Public Goods, the Social Wage and Universalism

My X thread about Deborah Meaden's comments on the winter fuel allowance has done numbers, as the kids say, but I suspect that those who criticised it, and perhaps some who appreciated it, didn't get the joke at the beginning or ultimately the point at the end, though the latter may be down to not reading the entire thread. Excuse me if I ignore the cardinal rule of both comedy and the British royal family and try to explain. 

Meaden trots out the classic argument of the rich against universal benefits: I don't need it so the taxpayer's money is being wasted. This is often accompanied by an assurance that the unnecessary government largesse is routinely donated to charity, so virtue triumphs in the end. You'll note that this argument and its corollary are less often heard when tax cuts for the wealthy are being justified, though the rationale is the same. If you're already incurring the top rate of tax on a large part of your income, why do you need more money? In that instance the argument in favour of tax cuts focuses on incentives: that the prospect of keeping more of your earnings will make you more productive, which can only help the wider economy. This is a consequentialist argument: what matters is the outcome, which is presumed to be good. There are similar consequentialist arguments against universalism, which can be summarised using Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: giving money to people who don't need it discredits the benefits regime and so lowers public support for the needy (perversity); in benefiting everyone, no one gains in relative terms (futility); and an income guarantee weakens the effect of any incentive to expand income and so undermines the wider economy (jeopardy).

Meaden's argument is different in that it isn't simply consequentialist but utilitarian (a narrower form of consequentialism), which means it concerns itself with calculable efficiency, the greatest possible good,  rather than just an assessment of good versus bad. Specifically, it seeks to maximise aggregate utility through discrimination: "Lots of people should not get winter fuel allowance…lots should", as she put it in her tweet. The former group have a negligible marginal utility because they are rich, the latter have a high marginal utility because they are poor, and there is an implied gradient between the two where everyone can be positioned. One paradox of utilitarianism (among many) is that achieving this macro optimality requires a granular focus on the micro foundations - the utility calculus of the individual - hence Meaden's focus on her own circumstances. Solipsism is a hallmark of vulgar utilitarian reasoning: "I don't need X" or "I never had Y growing up". Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" may have inspired the concept of utility in the emergent field of economics, but its ambitions to be a coordinating mechanism for society soon gave way among theorists (from Jevons to Hayek) to price as the only reliable signal of utility in aggregate. But while absent in the market, utilitarian calculus lived on in the realm of discretionary welfare, notably in the form of personal need assessments and means-testing.

Public goods, in the sense employed in economics, bypass the problem of individual assessment by operating wholly at the macro level. We assume, quite reasonably, that there is an aggregate benefit for society delivered by the provision of certain goods and services, such as roads. Economic theory holds that these goods are characterised by two features: they are non-excludable (i.e. freely available to all), and they are non-rivalrous (i.e. my use does not compromise your use). In reality, most public goods are imperfect in terms of this abstract defintion (or "impure", in the jargon). Nationalised utilities in the postwar era charged for use of gas and electricity, which meant you could be excluded (i.e. cut off). Today we still have toll roads, albeit with electronic turnpikes, such as part of the M6, the Dartford Crossing and the Humber Bridge. These are still classed as public goods, because the charges are treated as an impost (a supplementary tax based on use), but you will be excluded if you can't pay the toll. Likewise, roads are rivalrous because, as Adam Driver said in the 2023 film Enzo Ferrari, "two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time." In other words, congestion makes vehicles rivalrous (think of parking spaces).

In the UK, the logic of public provision was extended in the postwar era to many areas of the economy and public life previously subject to the market, giving rise to the concept of the social wage: the benefit that we individually gain from collective effort, whether in the form of public goods (roads, libraries), welfare services (the NHS, state schools) or direct financial payments (state pensions, unemployment benefit). In reaction, conservatives challenged both the extent of the social wage and the categorisation of its components, particularly in areas where the public sector was seen to be pushing back the private sector, such as health and education. Central to this reaction was the insistence that genuine public goods are few and far between and that what is left over within the scope of the social wage should be treated as a discretionary benefit and therefore means-tested (returning to the approach of the inter-war years). At the margin, among market fundamentalists, this reaction has led to continuing attempts to narrow the scope of public goods even further by either converting them to state-supplied commodities (e.g. road-pricing) or by privatising them altogether (e.g. railways and water companies). 

It came as no surprise that some of those disputing the intentionally ridiculous comparison of public goods (roads) with a benefit (the Winter Fuel Allowance) should also be advocates of road-pricing. For them, "confusing" the two was a purity violation (to borrow a term from moral foundations theory), but not because they are champions of public goods but because they want to advance the narrowest possible interpretation of them. Their apparent inability to see a joke (clearly the WFA is not actually a public good) is similar to the media suspicion that advocates for public goods want to impose broadband communism or nationalise sausages - i.e. not entirely sincere. This po-faced response also points to a narrow conception of public policy discourse in which the mathematical calculus of liberal economics is all that matters: utility is not a laughing matter. This narrow perspective also means that such critics cannot see that Meaden's comments are not the self-evident common sense that they imagine but actually a highly political statement and one founded (consciously or not) in the ideological presumption that social policy should be determined by aggregate utility, i.e. utilitarianism.

The intersection of reactionary conservativism (minimse public goods) and liberal utilitarianism (maximise efficiency) has resulted in the steady erosion of the principle of universalism. A feature of this has been the tendency of liberals to adopt the conservatives' framing, talking about universal benefits as if they are public goods that had been erroneously categorised. This explains why the discussion of the viability of such benefits tends to centre on excludability (as a positive) and rivalry (as a negative). For example, "It is absurd to give the wealthy cash that they do not need" leads to the insistence that they be excluded so that the needy can have more (or, more likely, that the benefits "bill" can be reduced). The idea that the cash can simply be clawed-back through taxation is rarely entertained and then only to complain about its "redundancy", despite the obvious operational superiority of using an existing mechanism over creating a new means-testing regime. In contrast, rivalry tends to occur within the arena of universal benefits through engineered scarcity: the competition to get through on the phone to book a doctor's appointment, or going private to beat the waiting list. This framing of benefits as if they were public goods is adopted partly to avoid a frontal attack on universalism, which obviously remains popular (e.g. the NHS), but it also reflects the extent to which half a century of neoliberalism has shifted the discourse of social policy away from the collective to the individual through the vocabulary of representative agents, marginal utility and incentives.

The joke that opened the thread was an ironic response to Meaden describing the Winter Fuel Allowance as a "universal scheme". The WFA isn't universal - I don't get it and you probably don't either. You might counter that this is because it is for pensioners only, but then why describe it as universal? Well, you might retort, child benefit is universal but the childless don't get it, do they? Indeed, but they have no need of it. I, on the other hand, have fuel bills to pay but do not qualify for the WFA. The truth is that it was introduced by Gordon Brown (no fan of universalism) in 1997 as a targeted electoral bribe, to be paid to a Tory-inclined cohort and therefore a priority to be won over by a Labour government. But while she described the WFA as universal, Meaden's argument against it employed the language of the miscategorised public good: to paraphrase, "rich people like me should be excluded from it". I parodied this by pointing out the insanity of extending this logic to an actual public good, roads. In doing so I was also highlighting the absurdity of centring the public policy debate on the personal circumstances of individuals who are definitionally atypical of society: the rich.

The wider point is that not only are there very few "pure" public goods, which are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but there are nowadays very few genuine universal benefits either. Most of what we imagine to be universal, like the state pension, depends on National Insurance contributions. The truly universal - available to everyone regardless - are the minimal benefits when all other contributory benefits have run out, and the state has long aimed to restrict these to a minority who, by virtue of their dependence on them, are seen as recalcitrant and therefore worthy targets for public contempt. It's also worth noting the long-running campaign of the media to make even these minimal benefits discretionary: not to be paid to the feckless, to single mothers popping out babies and certainly not to asylum-seekers. The two-child cap, which was heavily promoted by rightwing newspapers, is literally a pointed refusal to accept that benefits should be universal. That it is targeted at the demonstrably innocent isn't simply an example of cruelty, it is a clear statement that need is irrelevant. Deborah Meaden's insistence that she doesn't "need" the WFA and her advocacy for means-testing are actually old hat. The bleeding-edge of social policy thought is the denial that society has any obligation to the needy.