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.

The Lessons of Grenfell Tower

The media discussion of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report has increasingly focused on the operational failures of the building firms involved, with calls for criminal prosecutions, and on the deficiencies of the regulatory regime, with dismay at the risks entailed in cutting red tape and a consequent demand for tougher government intervention. What has been increasingly lost in this orchestrated campaign is the role of the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and in particular its policy towards social housing. A good example of this was the Guardian's immediate analysis by Peter Apps, a housing expert critical of the industry, which doesn't mention RBKC once. This could be justified given the tenor of the report itself. The execuitve summary, which is probably all that many journalists will have read, largely limits itself to criticising RBKC's poor oversight of the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) that had in turn failed to "observe its basic responsibilities" towards the tower's occupants. What the report doesn't do is question the very existence of the TMO. Why was this arms-length function deemed necessary by a council that had the primary responsibility for its tenants?

It is clear from the report that the TMO existed to outsource responsibility and thereby remove day-to-day management of the tower as a concern for councillors and council officers. One telling example of what this meant in practice is the report's observation that "RBKC took little or no account of an independent and highly critical review of fire safety carried out for the TMO in 2009. It did not even know about a further independent and highly critical report produced in 2013 because the TMO had failed to disclose it to RBKC." This, like a number of other observations in the report, essentially charges RBKC with ignorance when the actual charge should be wilful neglect. The strongest criticism of RBKC's performance in the lead-up to the fire was reserved for council officers: "RBKC’s building control department failed to perform its statutory function of ensuring that the design of the refurbishment complied with the Building Regulations." In other words, there has been a scrupulous determination to avoid questioning the political logic of social housing management in the borough in favour of a focus on the regulatory regime.

Where the report cannot avoid addressing the failures of the council is in the response to the tragedy, but again the tenor is very much that this was an organisation simply overwhelmed by the challenge or unsuited to the immediate demands placed upon it: "RBKC’s systems and leadership were wholly inadequate to the task of handling an incident of such magnitude and gravity, involving, as it did, mass homelessness and mass fatalities." A telling comment is that the victims and survivors of the fire received far more effective support through community groups than they did from the council, but that this was ultimately down to the council's dismissive attitude towards the community rather than any difference in resources or competence: "one of RBKC’s failings was to make too little use of the local voluntary organisations and to fail to have adequate standing arrangements to enable them to be called on in the event of a major emergency." In other words, there was a lack of trust not only between tenants of the tower and the council, which the report could pin on the TMO, but a more wide-ranging lack of trust between the community of North Kensington and RBKC.

There are two unusual characteristics of RBKC that need to inform an understanding of the tragedy and its aftermath, both of which I highlighted in the post I wrote a year after the fire: Candide in Kensington (a critique of Andrew O'Hagan's whitewash of the council in the London Review of Books). The first is that the council is very small both in terms of population and territory. It is, in fact, the smallest borough in London by population if you exclude the oddity of the City of London. If it were to be merged with the neighbouring (also small) borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the combined authority would still only be the sixth largest in London, about the same size as Wandsworth. A larger authority would not only have greater capacity in terms of emergency housing, but it would likely also have more officers devoted to building control and health and safety. The limitation of size has been recognised for years, however this hasn't advanced beyond the pre-fire "Tri-borough" arrangement for shared services (also involving the City of Westminster) where the focus was very much on cost-cutting during the post-2010 austerity years. There is no real justification for the separate but adjoining boroughs, but it has historically suited both main parties, with the Conservatives having exclusive control of Kensington and Chelsea (except for the northern wards) and Labour dominating Hammersmith and Fulham for all but a brief period between 2006-14.

The second characteristic is the longstanding antipathy towards the direct provision of council housing, one reason why the borough was notorious for slum landlordism up until the 1960s. Historically, it always preferred to operate at arms-length through charities and housing associations rather than directly providing and maintaining council homes. This is the root explanation of the TMO, a desire to outsource its residual responsibilities as a landlord and an implicit acknowledgement that it "doesn't do" council housing. That the phase 2 report essentially buys into this narrative of council incompetence (the recommendations are largely about training council staff up to be able to better manage its services and contingency planning) means that the political worldview behind its poor performance is not brought into the light. The borough is a stark example of social segregation, with the richer southern wards politically dominating the rump northern wards and treating the social housing residents of the latter as at best an afterthought and at worst as importunate and ungrateful (as many were characterised by O'Hagan). That the report locates this lack of trust between authority and people in the TMO is an evasion and an example of the unwillingness of public inquiries to address the political context of failures, something seen in the torturous Hillsborough saga and more recently in the Contaminated Blood scandal.

More broadly, the attitude of the RBKC points to the political elephant in the room, which is the UK's troubled relationship with housing. The fundamental problems of the UK housing market are not inadequate supply and high prices - these are merely epiphenomena - but a lack of capacity in the system, which is the consequence of the end of central planning (i.e. the expansion of council housing) and the concomitant financialisation of housing as an asset class with the take-off of Right to Buy and mortgage deregulation in the 1980s. It cannot be stressed enough, that the UK has only properly housed the population, whether owner-occupiers or tenants, during the postwar era of central planning, and then only towards the end of the era when supply caught up with demand. Basically, the late-1970s. All states make provision for spare capacity, but not always in the same areas. For example, the UK has always sought to maintain a domestic defence industry, notionally to ensure national security but also to reinforce its geopolitical delusions. Doing so entails a need to keep that industry busy, hence the easy encouragement of military adventures and the selling of arms to dodgy regimes. Continuing to build social housing capacity would have left us with a public good and fewer property millionaires; continuing to produce arms for sale has left us open to the charge of aiding and abetting genocide.

Other states are more concerned with capacity issues such as food security or medical supplies. The former can give farming interests an outsize influence on land planning and retail prices; the latter can mitigate the dangers of a public health crisis. The criticism this weekend over the poor preparedness of the NHS for the Covid-19 pandemic should be read less as an attack on the serial incompetence and cheese-paring of Conservative ministers since 2010 and more as a long-overdue recognition that the state has been reducing its capacity, and therefore its contingent capabilities, across the board since the 1980s. This, as much as formal deregulation, has been a consistent theme of all governments since Margaret Thatcher. And it is not simply a naive belief that the free market will provide, but a conscious desire to reduce the public responsibilities of the state. Of course, the state never shrinks, not just because its prime directive is self-presevation but because the reduction in provision simply promotes costly demands elsewhere. Thus the lack of council housing investment has been more than offset by the increase in the cost of housing benefit, which simply means that state resources have been diverted from the needy to rentiers.

Might there be a sea-change in government policy? Labour have certainly talked up the issue of planned capacity in some of their proposals, such as Great British Energy, but the substance to date has looked a lot like marginal or cosmetic gestures while the insistent drumbeat from both the Prime Minister and Chancellor has been that austerity remains the only game in town. The idea that fiscal responsibility will stimulate private sector growth ("expansionary fiscal contraction") was comprehensively disproved under the Cameron and Osborne regime, but even if it proved true this time, an expanding private sector will simply compete with the state for real resources, which means the likelihood of major investment in capacity isn't on the cards. The idea that you "fix the roof while the sun is shining" is about as intelligent as equating the economy with a household. The greatest historic investments in British public capacity, in areas such as housing and transport, occurred during periods of relative economic turbulence, such as the 1930s and 1970s, as much as during periods of growth. You have to build capacity regardless, rather than waiting for a fiscal surplus that will only lead to the competing demand for tax cuts, and that means accepting that real resources must be diverted from private consumption.

It took over six years after the Grenfell Tower fire for all of the former residents who survived to be permanently rehoused, though often in inadequate accommodation, with the council reluctant to prioritise their needs and its new housing provision continuing at a snail's pace. It is hard to see any evidence that the RBKC and the TMO have changed their attitude over this time. Talking of her recent discussions with the residents, Gillian Slovo noted that "They told me about a council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its managing agent, the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), that treated them as if they should have no voice in the way that they lived. They drew a picture of one of the richest boroughs in England ignoring them because they lived in social housing." The current leader of the council, Elizabeth Campbell (who lives in the ultra-rich Royal Hospital ward), has predictably apologised in light of the report's findings - how could she do otherwise? - but the commitment to learning and improving will be meaningless until such time as she and other politicians are prepared to address the two key characteristics of RBKC: that it is too small to be effective and that its reluctance to invest in council housing will always leave it in conflict with the community of its northern wards. Both are issues of capacity.

In Place of Strife

I know that deconstructing Martin Kettle's Guardian columns is just shooting fish in a barrel, but I'm easily-pleased, so here we go again. In his latest, Kettle imagines that Keir Starmer is embarked on a course of action that could fundamentally change Britain and its economy. This obviously begs the question about Starmer's commitment to fundamental change of any kind. The reason for this progressive optimism is that "The watchword of the industrial relations section of Labour’s election manifesto this year was not conflict but its very opposite: partnership." There isn't, in fact, an industrial relations section in the infamously lightweight manifesto, but one on industrial strategy, a much more vague concept. The partnership described in this section is clearly between government and business, with the role of the former to provide the necessary conditions for the latter to deliver growth. If that proves elusive, the onus will be on government to redouble its efforts. In contrast, trade unions will have a merely advisory role through a probably toothless Strategy Council. The phrase "industrial relations" appears only once in the document and then in the context of the Tories' poor record. 

What the manifesto did emphasise was Labour's "new deal for working people", but this has always been framed as government granting protective rights to typically unorganised labour (e.g. gig workers) rather than removing the restraints of employment law from organised labour. This is something Kettle implicitly recognises - "Employment law reform is not the same thing as trade union power" - but he is reluctant to draw the conclusion that this means there is an industrial relations void at the heart of Labour's policy that the emphasis on partnership cannot fill. This void reflects two realities. First, that the rightwing of the Labour party long ago switched its allegiance from organised labour to business. As Andy Beckett noted, in what is in some ways a rejoinder to Kettle, this has been a criticism of Labour since the 1960s, with its roots in the 1930s (if you accept Ralph Miliband's analysis in full). The second reality is that the trade unions have, since the defeats of the 1980s, pursued an ameliorative strategy that has seen them simultaneously lose members and influence within the party. As the Guardian's political desk are only to happy to point out, the unions are in hock to the party, not the party to the unions.

This context helps explain Kettle's anecdotes about Hugh Scanlon, the leader of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers from 1968 to 1978. Though he was black-balled by the security services for his youthful communist affiliations, and routinely painted as an anti-democratic "baron" by the press, Scanlon was by the 1970s a mildly progressive moderate in the context of union and Labour politics (he was elevated to the House of Lords in 1979). Along with Jack Jones of the TGWU, Scanlon was central to the Social Contract of the mid-1970s, a voluntary agreement between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan and the TUC to restrain wage demands and limit strike action. This proved unable to hold, largely due to the inflationary consequences of the successive oil crises between 1973 and 1979, leading to the rise of unofficial stoppages and eventually the "winter of discontent" in 1978 that famously contributed to the Conservative victory in the general election of the following year. 

The historical point, all too clear in retrospect, is that the partnership of the Social Contract was doomed to failure due to structural forces beyond the contracting parties' control: the geopolitical disruption arising from the Yom Kippur War, the decline in capitalist profitability starting in the late-60s and consequent squeeze on wages, and the beginning of the process of globalisation that would radically reconfigure the UK economy in the succeeding decades. Again, this is a point that Beckett makes in asking whether a centre-left government can ever succeed on its own terms: "Such governments typically try to find a balance between boosting capitalism and regulating it, between redistributing wealth and keeping economic elites content, between making foreign policy more ethical and accepting existing power arrangements." Such a careful balancing act is easily unbalanced by contingent events, which invariably reveal the underlying biases in play. As Beckett notes of Tony Blair, "as soon as he tried to combine this mildly progressive project with more rightwing policies such as the privatisation of public services and participation in American wars, the credibility and coherence of his government were fatally damaged."

One reason for referencing Scanlon is to revisit what Kettle and other centrists, like Will Hutton, imagine to have been the lost opportunities of the 1970s: "One of the prime reasons for Britain’s low productivity is that we have failed to revisit the role of codetermination between employers and employees over issues of workplace and corporate governance." This ignores that codetermination wasn't killed off by the 1977 Bullock Report, which revealed intractable differences between capital and labour, but by the steady erosion of workers' rights in the name of deregulation pursued by central government since then. Even in Germany, its traditional champion, codetermination is on the defensive after the "liberalisation" of employment law through the various Harz reforms. You also have to question Kettle's assumption that codetermination would magically raise productivity, as if the current low levels of the UK owe more to prickly shopfloor relations rather than under-investment and the heavy bias of the economy towards services rather than manufacturing.

The idea of industrial "partnership" has a long history, originating in the reaction against organised labour. Unions were originally presented as a Jacobin threat to the established order in the days of the Combination Acts, but in the later nineteenth century the rhetoric changed towards the idea that organised labour was selfish and lacking in national spirit at a time of imperial expansion. This was exacerbated by the Russian Revolution, which revived the older trope of a malign foreign threat, and culminated in the corporatism of Fascism and Nazism. Milder forms of corporatism were also advocated in the liberal democracies during the 1930s. Unsuprisingly, partnership became the watchword in the UK and US during wartime, when labour was expected to make sacrifices not only for reasons of patriotism but to defend ideals such as democracy itself, despite this being notably absent in industrial relations. That strikes peaked after both World Wars was not coincidental: wartime merely obscured that the opportunity to address the underlying friction between management and workers had not been taken. One predictable result of this was that nationalisation in the UK largely retained the existing management, which brought with it the existing frictions.

In this historical context, a "new deal for working people" is the worst kind of rhetorical nothing, suggesting progress and fairness while excluding those who don't work, as if the population is neatly divided into two groups when the reality is that many are obliged to flit from employment to unemployment and back again while even more are under-employed and reliant on in-work benefits. Kettle's lack of understanding of the contemporary economy leads him to nostalgically imagine a society divided into two blocs: "For too many years, both sides of the divide have preferred a more zero-sum approach. Too many employers have simply been anti-union as well as indifferent to their workforces. Too many unions have seen industrial action as the only way to get what they want. It is why some on the employer side hark back so often to the Thatcher years, and some on the union side to the days when the law was largely kept out of industrial relations. And it is why some on both sides are so slow to change." 

This is the classic centrist "each as bad as the other" lament, but it is also a refusal to acknowledge class interests. Employers aren't anti-union because of a personal lack of virtue, any more than trade unionists are monomaniacs who cannot appreciate the value of negotiation (most "disputes" are settled without recourse to industrial action). It is notable in his sketch that Kettle personalises capital ("employers") but present labour as a collective ("unions"). In other words, labour is a class for itself, and therefore selfish in the eyes of centrists, while capital has no class consciousness and should be understood as simply a set of individual entrepreneurs. Not only does Kettle fail to understand the composition of today's working class, three quarters of whom are not in trade unions, he is unwilling to acknowledge the organised power of capital, despite the ample public evidence of business lobbying of the government to water down the proposed "new deal". It is ironic that Kettle accuses "both sides" of being slow to change, when it is clear that his understanding of industrial relations hasn't altered since he enjoyed an expensive lunch with Hugh Scanlon in the 1980s.

The Crisis of Representation

Populism, as a style of political rhetoric, reflects the crisis of democratic representation. Centrists would have you believe that it is atavistic bigotry, the product of poor education or the machinations of foreign powers, anything in fact other than what it actually is. This is because centrists imagine populism to be outside the bounds of healthy politics, rather than a style that is opportunistically adopted by all politicians. The standard definition of the word is a politics that presumes an antagonistic divide between a "people" and an "elite". This is trivially true in the sense that all democratic politics involves privileged actors attempting to marshall the popular will. The critique at the heart of the populist style is that this dynamic has gone awry, either because some or all of those privileged actors are deliberately working against the popular interest ("traitors") or because they are sincere but have lost touch with public opinion ("fools"). Contrary to the belief that the populist style is to be found only at the extremes, it has always been central to our politics, particularly around pivotal moments of change. 

For example, the Conservative Party under Harold Macmillan was derided in the early-1960s for being out-of-touch and foolish (the Profumo Affair), an impression reinforced by his replacement as Prime Minister by the aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home. Harold Wilson, as Leader of the Opposition, was not just consciously technocratic in style ("The white heat of technology" etc), but populist: a man of humble origins who understood the people. He had the fabled "common touch", despite being a middle class grammar schoolboy who had become an Oxford don at the age of 21. This populist impression probably made all the difference to what proved a narrow victory in the general election of 1964. A later example was Margaret Thatcher's campaign against "union barons" in the late-1970s, which contributed to the Conservative Party's election victory in 1979. Despite her own obvious wealth and privileged social position, she was able to present herself as the tribune of the ("decent, hardworking") people against an unrepresentative elite who were strangling enterprise and inconveniencing the public.

In contemporary politics, attention focused on those accused of "populism" distracts attention from the rest of the political field. The question to be asked is why they, the anti-populists, aren't adopting the populist style, given that historically it was quite normal to do so. To a certain extent they are, but often in a banal way through clichéd tropes, for example wrapping themselves in Union Jacks, praising "ordinary, hardworking families" or burbling about "legitimate concerns". This often appears to be rote because it stems from a desire to close off avenues of attack by the press (e.g. insufficently patriotic or not mindful of the aspirational working class) rather than arising from any personal sympathy. There has been a sea-change in politics since the 1980s, largely as a result of neoliberalism's importation of business practice to the realm of governance. What this means is a rejection of the very premise of democracy, a form of engagement alien to the vast majority of commercial organisations which are run as dictatorships. This has led to a liberal form of managed democracy, which is not that different to the illiberal forms found in Eastern Europe. The manifestation of this is the crisis of representation.

One example of this is the prominence of what we might call para-politicians in the media, particularly on TV. Though he has finally managed to get elected as an MP, Nigel Farage has been the leading para-politician of his generation, and one who shows no sign of changing his modus operandi now that he has a Westminster pass. Even when the Commons is sitting, it is more likely that he will be "asking questions" on GB News than in the chamber. In contrast, a number of Labour politicians who have been rejected by the electorate have been more prominent on TV recently than the newly-elected MPs who defeated them, for example Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. Who are they representing? Their claims that their election defeats were somehow unfair is not an attempt to represent the interests of their former constituents but to defend their own sense of entitlement. The fact is that both consider themselves to be members of the political body regardless of the judgement of the electors: the people have squandered their confidence, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht.

These para-politicians are held up as representative of the public interest, but that is an interest heavily mediated by the press and also by opinion pollsters and focus group facilitators, all of whom are disproportionately represented in TV current affairs, and all of whom have a vested interest in presenting politics in reductive terms. Academics rarely feature unless they are willing to behave like crude polemicists, typically of the right, such as Matthew Goodwin or David Starkey. The traditional symbiosis of politicians and journalists is now moving towards partial endosymbiosis, whereby a large subset of politicians are fully absorbed into the media. A good example of this is Ed Balls, a senior politician rejected by the electorate who has made the transition to TV presenter despite having no obvious talent for the job and possessing a rebarbative, hectoring style that has brought regular complaints from viewers. The politico-media caste have no qualms about presenting themselves publicly in this unflattering way. The Spectator garden party isn't a covert conspiracy, after all.

Part of the appearance of managed democracy is the creation of points of conflict that are wholly artificial but which serve as a distraction. The multifarious "culture wars" are one obvious example of this, but the more fundamental dichotomy is between populism, which doesn't actually exist as an "ism", in the sense of a coherent body of political theory, and anti-populism. Because populism is simply a matter of style, all of our politics can be crammed into these two capacious terms and all para-politicians can line up with one or the other. But this doesn't mean that their allegiances are fixed. Populism can be put on and taken off like a coat. While Keir Starmer performs anti-populism as the head of a government committed to restoring the authority of the state, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, spent her first few weeks in office loudly declaiming "Look what they've been hiding from us", as if the Treasury was the equivalent of Imelda Marcos's suddenly revealed shoe collection. Some media commentators sardonically rehearsed the Captain Renault gag - "Shocked, shocked" - but none pointed out that this was a populist manoeuvre.

Perhaps the most interesting act of representation occured on Wednesday when huge numbers of people took to the streets in multiple counter-protests against the rioters. These marches and vigils were clearly organised, and the people attending had coherent political views, even if not everybody subscribed to every opinion on every placard, yet at no point did the media seek to define who the attendees were politically or what they wanted beyond the diametric opposite of the rioters supposed demands (so "Refugees welcome here" rather than "Free Palestine"). Ahead of Wednesday, the government asked that people did not turn out, in order to avoid "inflaming" the situation. In the event, it was the large show of support, a visible representation of actual public opinion, that marginalised the far-right. Shorn of opportunistic looters, the knuckleheads were revealed as tiny in number and organisationally clueless. But who is representing that larger, better organised and coherent public opinion in Parliament? When the Prime Minister is reluctant to even use the word Islamophobia, can it be said that they are represented by anyone beyond the handful of independent MPs currently cold-shouldered by the media or sneered at by the likes of Ed Balls?

Though Wednesday's counter-protests showed up the government's lack of political management, it won't lead to any change of tack. If anything, it will simply reinforce Starmer in his belief that the riots must be dealt with as a law and order issue. This is tactically smart in that the political right cannot criticise such a focus even as they attempt to "understand" the rioters' motivations and squeeze immigration into a debate that was triggered, lest we forget, by the murder of three children by a  clearly-deranged young man who is not an immigrant. But it is strategically dumb because it passes up an opportunity for Labour to reconnect with the communities alienated in the run-up to the general election, including those that unseated Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. The inescapable conclusion is that in a liberal managed democracy what matters is not listening to the actual people at the ballot box, nor their organic representatives in the form of large-scale protests, but rather in divining their true feelings through the media and its auxiliary battalions of pollsters and focus groups. Brecht would have understood.

Algorithmic Outrage

Predictably, the weekend riots across England have prompted press fulminations about the malign role of social media. This has evolved to the point where the far-right is now described as "post-organisational", which I think we can translate as "does not actually exist". If you're looking for some morbid humour in all this, you might recall Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Obviously there has been some loose organisation at work ("kick-off at 3pm"), as is usually the case in a riot, but just as that organic, confused reality was long subsumed under the myth of "outside agitators" and "foreign influence", so the contemporary response is increasingly to portray hooliganism as a property of the technology. The suggestion that the riots may owe more to the machinations of the Kremlin than the relentless propaganda of the rightwing British press is obviously absurd, but it is also internally consistent in that it inflates a foreign bogeyman into an existential threat. The idea that British society is at risk of being undermined by Vladimir Putin is just the liberal equivalent of the conservative idea that it is at risk from asylum-seekers.

The Observer has been at the forefront of this liberal interpretation: "Prof Stephan Lewandowsky of Bristol University, who is an expert in disinformation, said that social media platforms amplified far-right voices. “Facebook is an outrage machine,” he said." The obvious point to make here is that the press has been an outrage machine for a very long time, and insofar as there has been a significant change in the landscape it is in the extension of tabloid outrage first to radio and then more recently to TV. The crowd that gathered in Southport was not made up of dedicated Telegram users. Their worldview will be primarily influenced by "mainstream" media. This is a point the paper is reluctant to concede. Instead, Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate is quoted as saying: "Language used by higher-profile figures such as Robinson, the actor Laurence Fox and ex-MP Andrew Bridgen, who spoke at the 27 July rally, as well as the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, is often repeated in other social networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp". This avoids naming the platforms that promoted the words of those indivduals, i.e. newspapers and TV, in order to focus attention on social media.

It won't come as a surprise that Carole Cadwalladr has waded in, talking about "our new age of algorithmic outrage". She quotes Maria Ress, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (so is unimpeachably virtuous): "There’s always been propaganda and there’s always been violence. What’s brought violence mainstream is social media. [The US Capitol attack on] January 6 is the perfect example: people wouldn’t have been able to find each other if social media didn’t cluster them together and isolate them to incite them further." I can still can't work out what she means by bringing violence mainstream, when she first concedes that there has always been violence. It's simply a meaningless statement. The claim that the Capitol riot could not have occured without social media is absurd, as is the implication that prior to the arrival of the technology there was no way of coordinating the far-right. Cadwalladr's wider purpose is to convince us that social media is a "polarisation engine" and that this arises from the use of algorithms that reinforce outrage. In describing the dynamic, she emphasises that the movement misinformation takes is from fringe platforms prefered by the far-right - such as Telegram, Bitchute and Parler - towards X and other "mainstream social media platforms". In other words, this is a plea not for the outlawing of those fringe platforms but for the creation of a firewall to protect the mainstream. 

Helpfully, Stephan Lewandowsky makes a similar point: "It’s a serious problem and is easily solved by modifying the algorithms so that they highlight information based on quality rather than outrage." In other words, we need better gate-keepers, the traditional role of the press. Again, there is a reluctance to admit that the majority of the misinformation that we have to deal with comes not from the periphery but from the centre. Amusingly, Cadwalladr notes that "the Daily Mail ran a shocked banner headline this week about a single suspicious account on X, with signs it may be based in Russia, spreading false information, although it is likely that this was only one very small part of the picture." Presented with evidence of mainstream misinformation she takes it simply as proof that the same paper was wrong to criticise her past work about Brexit misinformation ("investigations that were ignored or ridiculed by large sections of the British rightwing media").

One interesting quote in Cadwalladr's article, from Julia Ebner ("the leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University"), notes an affinity between the far-right and the medium: "It’s very, very similar across the world and in different countries with a rise in far-right politics. No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way. The far right is just really tapping into those really powerful emotions, in terms of algorithmically powerful emotions: anger, outrage, fear, even surprise." The first question to ask here is whether there really has been a rise in the far-right in recent years. The evidence does not suggest it. Much of what gets labelled far-right, e.g. Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy", is simply conservative nationalism. In India, Modi and the BJP have suffered a setback. In France, Marine Le Pen is no closer to power and anyway her political trajectory has been towards the centre-right, competing with Emmanuel Macron to absorb Les Républicains. In the UK, the right is fragmented and the riots have managed to mobilise only small numbers of people (compare and contrast with the recent pro-Palestine marches).

It may be true to say that the far-right has found social media congenial, but this appears to be true of all political persuasions. To say "No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way" suggests that this ideology is near-hegemonic, but what exactly is it? A belief that asylum-seekers are thieves and rapists, that Islam is a death-cult, or that our statues are a risk from the intolerant left? Ideology seems a generous word to describe a set of prejudices whose prevalence extends well beyond the "far-right". In focusing on anger, outrage and fear, Ebner is echoing the moral foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt, a dubious attempt to justify conservative impulses (you're not racist you're just loyal) and suggest that liberals have blindspots (you don't acknowledge legitimate concerns). The idea that these are "algorithmically powerful emotions" is obviously a nonsense: algorithms don't recognise emotions, they're just shuffling data based on a dynamic taxonomy (you liked that so you might like this). 

The reaction of the British press, both liberal and conservative, to the Internet has always been driven primarily by its material interests. As search engines gobbled up advertising spends, the press went into a tailspin. It only levelled out to the extent that it was able to migrate online. In doing so, it realised that its own interests were better-served by viral contagion than paywalls. This has resulted in a deliberate expansion of the sort of content likely to earn clicks, and that has meant appealing to the emotions, not just anger and fear but envy, amusement and desire. The inevitable coarsening this has given rise to has been blamed on the medium. Where the press have led, other media have followed, hence the explosion of talk radio and now the arrival of partisan TV with GB News. Social media have provided not only the means to disseminate this calculatedly offensive opinion but also a source of original material: the opinions of ordinary people as much as celebrities that can be held up for public censure or ridicule.

In today's Observer, amidst Sonia Sodha insulting the BMA over puberty-blockers and Jane Martinson espying the patriarchy at work in the BBC's handling of Huw Edwards (neither story needed to be written but both will get the clicks), you will find Andrew Rawnsley opining on the riots. "Part of the answer to the violent far right will come from smart and proactive policing. Making the tech giants live up to their moral and legal responsibilities to the rest of society is another must. These are necessary steps, but they are not by themselves all that will be needed. The longer-term challenge for ministers is to find ways to drain the swamps of racism and conspiracism from which the far right recruit." I'm not aware that anyone is actually claiming that the tech giants have not lived up to their legal responsibilities, in contrast to parts of the press who we recently learnt may have destroyed compromising evidence. Likewise, it's hard to take calls for moral responsibility seriously while Leveson 2 remains sidelined. And as for draining the swamps of racism and conspiracism, surely the place to start would be with those wellsprings in the traditional media who keep the swamps watered.