Get Used to Immigration

Barring an unforeseen turn of events, it looks like immigration is going to be the main issue during next spring's general election. We're just going to have to get used to it. Even if Labour focuses on health and the Tories on the economy, popular debate will inevitably bring the migrant worker lens to bear (pressure on public services, pressure on wages etc). This will be the case even for media-darlings UKIP, whose by-election experience since Eastleigh has taught them to emphasise the migrant angle at every opportunity, even when campaigning for a pro-migration candidate like Duncan Carswell. The call for a referendum on the EU has already been rebranded as "taking our country back". As Left Outside noted, this points to a paradox: "How do you make policy to confront a problem which doesn’t exist. The solutions are already rolled out. The poor can’t marry foreigners. You can’t bring your family over if you’re poor. There is no legal way for asylum seekers to enter the country. EU enlargement is over for a generation and EU immigration numbers are now dictated by the relative strengths of different parts of Western Europe. The better the UK does relative to Southern Europe the more migration we’ll see." (And, he might have added, the more the UK's contribution to the EU budget will increase).

In truth, the debate on immigration is more about stock than flow, i.e. those migrants who are already here, and in particular those suspected of being reluctant to integrate. The focus of concern is on signifiers of cultural incompatibility, such as young men running away to join ISIS, organised sexual abuse and even halal meat. Fifty years ago, the violence, sexual exploitation and funny smelling food of West Indians played a similar role in the popular imagination. As Notting Hill in 1958 showed, very few people are out-and-out racists, simply because seeing the world through such a narrow perspective requires a degree of intellectual commitment that borders on monomania, but a lot of us are unthinking xenophobes.

In Britain, this low-level hum of contempt for foreigners has a long and respectable pedigree, being intimately bound up with the creation of first English and then British identity (biffing the French, building an empire, biffing the Hun). Though the casual bigotry of 50 years ago ("no blacks, no dogs, no Irish") has disappeared, you don't have to dig deep to discover a sullen resentment ("I'm not racist but ..."). For all the bland internationalism of the liberal centre, British popular culture remains wedded to the celebration of native ignorance, from self-defeating football tactics to Jeremy Clarkson winding up Argies. The idea that Britain is under threat of being "swamped" by foreigners who covet our wealth and despise our liberties isn't going to die away any time soon, not least because this attitude is anything but socially marginal.

Of course the world it conjures up is wholly fictitious. According to Ipsos MORI, "the public think that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13%. Even estimates that attempt to account for illegal immigration suggest a figure closer to 15%.  There are similar misperceptions on ethnicity: the average estimate is that Black and Asian people make up 30% of the population, when it is actually 11% (or 14% if we include mixed and other non-white ethnic groups)". It's worth emphasising that these two subsets (immigrants and Blacks/Asians) are not coterminus - i.e. lots of immigrants are white and lots of Blacks and Asians are native-born - however I suspect the 31% and 30% figures largely overlap for most of those polled. After all, it's not easy to determine the migrant status of someone in the street, but it's easy to spot someone with a black or brown skin.

But this is not a real street. As the pollsters found, almost 80% of us think immigration is a problem nationally, but less than 30% think it is a problem in our local area (see page 90 of this longer report). This discrepancy surely reflects our view of the mythical Britain created in ideological discourse. That UKIP should be most popular in areas with the lowest immigration is hardly surprising as these are also the most traditional and "anti-modern" areas. The general concern over immigration appears to reflect a fear that this mythical Britain is disappearing, though we seem broadly comfortable with the outcome in our own locality and even nationally, when push comes to shove - e.g. the Olympics. The more specific concern of UKIP voters appears to reflect the growing gulf between their local experience and that of "modern" Britain, in which immigration stands proxy for broader social change (precarious employment, unaffordable housing, gay marriage etc).

The chief reason for over-estimating, according to the poll respondents themselves (page 24), is the belief that illegal immigrants aren't being counted, however the barking implication of this is that over half of all immigrants (and perhaps even half of all Blacks and Asians) are illegal. This belief presumably helps fuel the periodic panics over failures in migration control and border security, not to mention the enoblement of Andrew Green and Michael Fallon's hyperbolic language. In terms of immigrant composition, we underestimate students and over-estimate asylum-seekers (page 76), possibly because of our different expectations of their likely futures (students to go home, refugees to stay), and we appear to be "less open to immigrants of a different race/ethnic group from the British majority compared with immigrants of the same race/ethnic group" (page 80). Well, whadda ya know.

The persistence of this ignorance frustrates the left not just because it is resistant to mere facts (e.g. that immigration provides net benefits) but because it distracts from the more fundamental causes of low wages, welfare cuts and insufficient housing. This has led some (and not just Blue Labour types) to advocate a strategy of "understanding more and condemning less". The problem with this approach is that understanding quickly comes up short against the wall of ignorance, which can easily lead to the diversion of your frustration elsewhere. John Harris fell into this trap recently when addressing free movement of labour in the EU: "What passes for the modern left tends to be far too blase about all this. Perhaps those who reduce people’s worries and fears to mere bigotry should go back to first principles, and consider whether, in such laissez-faire conditions, free movement has been of most benefit to capital or labour." As Chris Dillow pointed out, immigration is largely a wash in the tussle between capital and labour. The bigger gains to capital have come through the export of jobs, not the import of workers.

Harris also wheeled out the well-worn canard that immigrants increase pressure on public services: "There have also been inevitable problems surrounding how far schools and doctors’ surgeries have been stretched". The stretching has more to do with cuts in public expenditure, secular trends (e.g. ageing) and short-run fluctuations (e.g. the Portakabin bulge in London primary schools) than the impact of immigrants over the last decade. In fact, immigrants tend to be a boon for public services as they reduce per capita demand because they are disproportionately healthier (being of working age) and initially have fewer children and other dependents than the native population. Though this works itself out in time - they settle, have kids (keeping the population up) and grow old - the idea that they have a major short-term impact reflects a confusion between independent economic migrants and needy refugees.

Harris exhibits the limitations of the understanding strategy when he starts to sound like a rightwing opinion-monger from central casting: "There again, do the shrill voices accusing them of pandering to prejudice have any convincing stance of their own? Or is the fashionable metropolitan option still to cast aspersions on millions of people, and then look the other way?" When you are reduced to caricaturing fashionable metropolitan opinion in the Guardian, you're clearly on a hiding to nothing. To be fair to Harris, I don't have a cunning plan either, beyond patient dialogue, but I do think it is important not to subscribe to a counsel of despair that perhaps springs from a contempt for the intellectual capability of the working class. I also think it is equally important to call out bigotry when you find it. Remember, this is about stock not flow. "No Romanians, no benefit tourism" can quickly morph into "no Muslims, no foreign jabber".

Breaking Down the Barriers to Work

Now that the fuss over David Freud's thoughtless language in respect of disabled workers has subsided, it's worth considering what this little vignette tells us about attitudes to labour generally. The substantive issue was not the instrumentality of the former merchant banker, or the chutzpah of a life peer entitled to a daily attendance allowance of £300 musing on the viability of £2 an hour, but his willingness to consider a subsidy to business at a time when subsidies to the disabled (such as spare bedrooms) are being reduced in the name of austerity.

Though subsidy is generally a dirty word in political circles, being redolent of filthy French practices and the 70s, the diversion of tax revenues to business is a key characteristic of the neoliberal state. During the Thatcher/Major years, these subsidies took a variety of forms but were typically direct subventions to capital, such as preferential tax cuts, export credit guarantees and the like. During the Blair/Brown years, the emphasis shifted towards wage subsidies in the form of working tax credits and other in-work benefits. Though this directs the subsidy to workers, it serves to allow business to reduce payroll costs, hence it had to be augmented by the introduction of a minimum wage to limit the extent to which business could offload costs onto the state.

The difference between the main parties is less about preferring labour over capital and more about Labour preferring the subsidy to be managed centrally by the state, while the Tories prefer the subsidy to be managed decentrally by business, with some businesses benefiting more than others (hence the ideological tension between reductions in corporation tax, which favour big capital, and reductions in employer NICs, which favour small capital). A selective wage subsidy (the approach that Freud was willing to consider) is unlikely to find support with either party, which highlights the degree to which managerialists like Freud remain politically tone-deaf. For Labour, it undermines the national minimum wage, while for the Tories it opens up the prospect of businesses (particularly SMEs that abhor "diversity" as political correctness gone mad) being criticised for not hiring disabled workers when they are so "cheap".

Wage subsidies do not appear to boost employment generally, though they can help increase employment among targeted groups, such as the young or disabled. Rather than lowering the cost of labour and thus boosting employer demand for workers, selective wage subsidies appear to encourage substitution and the reduction of labour costs, thus boosting profit margins. A positive impact on aggregate demand is possible with a universal wage subsidy, but that would in practice be no different to an across the board subsidy to consumption, which could probably be achieved more efficiently via a basic income. The evolution of working tax credits and other benefits into a universal credit is one route by which that may come about.

An implication of the Freud gaffe is that there may be work currently not being done because it has a value lower than the minimum wage, however there is no evidence that this is so. When workers are paid a pittance, this usually reflects the strength of the employer not the marginal value of the work. Just as the introduction of the national minimum wage in 1999 did not destroy jobs, so the subsidisation of wages (through in-work benefits) did not bring a slew of previously uneconomic jobs into the labour market. Instead, it simply allowed many existing jobs to be kept at the minimum wage, thus boosting corporate profits.

Since 1999, the number of NMW jobs has doubled from 2.5% to 5% of the labour force, which translates into 1.2 million workers. That increase is not down to the weak post-2008 recovery alone. Rather there has been a steady increase since 2003 when the figure had dropped to 1.8%. Similarly, there has been a steady increase in jobs paid at marginally over the NMW, with those at up to 110% of the minimum now accounting for almost 12% of the workforce. If this trajectory continues, it will make future governments even more reluctant to significantly increase the minimum wage because of the quantum effect, which explains Ed Miliband's underwhelming promise to increase the main rate to only £8 by 2020.

I don't think Freud's clumsy language indicates that he is any more callous or stupid than your average unelected neoliberal chancer, rather it suggests that the political caste are only too well aware that we are building a low-wage economy in which the institutionalised dole, once directed to the unemployed and the unwilling, must in future be directed as much towards the employed and the willing. Increasingly, just having a job is no longer an indication of worth. As self-employment and piecemeal jobs proliferate, the boundary between work and non-work becomes ever more porous and the media dichotomy between strivers and shirkers ever more ridiculous.

Technology, Stagnation and Drug Abuse

I've been tracking the "modern technology is rubbish" meme for some years now. It originated as an ironic response to the dotcom bust, as if everyone awoke with a hangover and memories of an embarrassing night out, but really came to the fore after the 2008 crash revealed that the "new economy" owed more to an out-of-control habit of rising household debt than accelerating productivity. The meme was given a further boost by the reintroduction of the idea of secular stagnation to economic debate, but in recent months it has been challenged in the zeitgeist stakes by the emergence of the "eve of war" meme. This might appear to be little more than the product of the Great War centenary, amplified by trouble in Ukraine and the Middle East, however there is also a fear that the continuing ill health of the global economy since 2009 points to another parallel: "The problems created by the first world war were never properly dealt with, and it was only after the Great Depression and a second conflict that policies changed and global institutions were made fit for purpose. There is a real danger of history repeating itself".

There have been two main flavours of the "modern technology is rubbish" meme. "Techno-dammerung" is a variant on the age-old belief that everything is going to the dogs and we reached our peak sometime in the last generation. This is nostalgic not only for old certainties but for old fantasies and ambitions, hence the laments for the non-appearance of jet-packs and flying-cars alongside the misty-eyed recollection of chopper-bikes and school milk. "Trivialisation" holds that we have turned technology to self-indulgent and ultimately foolish ends, such as social media, rather than investing in productivity enhancements. This is a moral critique of decadence that has its roots in earlier theories of the structural deformation of media ("amusing ourselves to death") and is related to the persistent memes of "information overload" and "dumbing down". It's not quite Sodom and Gomorrah, but it's in the same neighbourhood.

The techno-twilight version also finds common cause with the idea, popularised most recently by Thomas Piketty, that the 1945-75 period was an exceptional golden age and that the future promises increasing inequality. In other words, the babyboomer generation was peak social democracy: "My children have the expectation that they won't be as rich as me. They won't have the life chances, they won't have the disposable income. There is an underlying sense that what has gone on might be a secular, long-term change". The meme, in both its flavours, informs the current fear of secular stagnation (persistent low economic growth), though I think the worry over the trivial nature of modern technology may be partly a misunderstanding of the power of software by academics raised in a hardware age. A recent paper rounding up current thinking on "secstag" identified three characteristics, each of which has a technological dimension.

1. Diminished long-run growth potential. This is the structural perspective on stagnation, which points to multiple causes: a lower rate of technological progress; the end of the historic growth in tertiary education (i.e. "peak graduate"); an ageing population; growing inequality; and the unsustainability of public debt. The first two are assumed to depress productivity growth through insufficiently rapid capital-labour substitution and a falling off in the rate at which the workforce composition moves from unskilled to skilled. The last three tend to depress aggregate demand (i.e. current consumption) and boost savings, with the erosion of the welfare state specifically prompting greater precautionary saving.

The rate of technological progress is also influenced by the trend towards monopoly, which discourages innovation, protects incumbents against new market entrants and promotes rent-seeking over investment. This trend is partly an inescapable factor of technological progress (scale economies lead to physical monopolies such as roads, railways and water), the network effects of software (i.e. the value of a common search engine or microblogging platform has led to monopoly not greater competition), and neoliberal practice (in the form of privileged firms being granted government monopolies via privatisation).

2. Persistent GDP gaps. This is essentially the Keynesian analysis. High under- and unemployment at the zero lower bound (i.e. central bank interest rates are at or near zero and can't be pushed lower) makes conventional monetary policy (lowering interest rates to stimulate investment) redundant. Consequently, we may need bubbles to kick-start any sort of growth, and thereby boost employment and wages. But like any drug, the comedown is a kicker. Balance sheet repair (i.e. paying down high household debt after a bubble) discourages spending, so even negative interest rates (penalising saving) or financial repression (keeping interest rates below inflation, as we have done) won't necessarily boost demand. Government-led investment, at a time of very low interest rates, would make a lot of sense, but this is off the agenda while reducing public debt and the deficit are defined as political imperatives.

There have been two major bubbles since 1980: technology and housing. Though the former is seen largely in terms of the dotcom bubble of the late 90s, it was actually the culmination of a longer underlying swell that started in the mid-80s with the introduction of the PC. The problem has been that the growth in IT capital investment since 2000 has slowed, not because of lower activity or trivialisation but because of the compositional shift from hardware to software. Similarly, house prices have been rising since the mid-80s, despite corrections in the early 90s and after 2008, and while the market has been extensively rigged for political reasons (most notably in the UK), there are genuine secular forces at work too, notably growing longevity (leading to later retirement and longer working lives) and increasing female participation in the workforce (which may now be exhausted). Persistently low interest rates will also keep house prices high, relative to income, which brings us to ...

3. Low interest rates. This partly repeats the point about long-run growth potential, namely that demography, inequality and anxiety over public services increases the supply of loanable funds in developed economies. However, it also notes that growth in developing economies, where pensions and healthcare may not be funded via tax, creates a surplus of savings that are exported to developed economies, thus acting to keep interest rates low regardless of domestic policy. On top of this, there has been a decline in the number of safe assets, due to the crash of previously triple-A mortgage-backed securities, while demand for them has increased due to tighter post-crash regulation of banks (i.e. they need more safe assets for their capital buffers), which drives rates even lower.

The compositional change in technology (i.e. more software) may also be lowering demand for loanable funds at the same time that R&D is declining. The latter is due to privatisation (the entrepreneurial state not being fully replaced by the private sector) and financial engineering, which encourages mergers and acquisitions rather than research competition. With technology being insufficiently expensive (or wasteful) as an investment opportunity, and public infrastructure and housing under-resourced, more and more capital is diverted elsewhere. As Larry Elliott has noted of the IMF, "It knows that much of the cash created by central banks has found its way, via the shadow banking system, into emerging markets and developing countries. It knows that investors are complacent about the risks. It knows that in a rush for the exit, many of these investors would be badly burned".

What the "modern technology is rubbish" meme is really telling us is that technology is, in aggregate, cheaper than ever. R&D is very expensive, but the hyper-efficiency of modern hardware and software means that the exploitation of that initial investment requires proportionately less capital than it used to. Historically, capital investment has been risky because it has been vulnerable to catastrophic loss, such as merchant ships sunk at sea, mines and oilfields nationalised by former colonies, and factories bombed to smithereens. The gradual decline of such threats after WW2, combined with the falling price of capital opportunities due to technology, has produced both a surplus of capital and an insane lack of caution (probably exacerbated in some cases by cocaine) among those who manage its investment.

In a stagnant economy, wages aren't going to rise much, if at all, and non-wage income will suffer from low interest rates unless diverted to shares, property or overseas markets. Meanwhile, capital continues to accumulate, which inevitably forces politicians to consider moving towards increased taxes on assets over income and profit, no matter how much they may publicly denigrate "mansion taxes" and seek to preserve inheritance. In fact, what we need are the "unrealistic" confiscatory taxes advocated by Piketty, not simply to redistribute income and narrow inequality, but to take large amounts of capital out of private sector circulation where it gives rise to systemic risk. This expropriated capital should be used to repair the public fabric, but some of it could also be used to pay down public debt, though investing it in productive capital formation to increase tax revenues is ultimately a more efficient way of paying down the debt and evaporating the deficit.

What the "eve of war" meme is telling us is that policy-makers increasingly doubt that the current situation can persist for much longer, though they'll attempt to sit on their hands as long as they can. As they showed in the aftermath of 2008, the only priority is the preservation of accumulated wealth. We don't know how this will play out, though a capital crisis in an emerging economy that wreaks havoc in the shadow banking sector currently looks more likely than a sovereign default or a run on a regulated bank. It is also possible that policymakers might let the hedge funds and their ilk crash and burn, sacrificing some of the rich for the benefit of the rest, and that contagion of the regulated banking sector could be prevented, but that would be a peculiarly inefficient way of letting air out of the system. For all his alleged utopianism, Thomas Piketty's suggestion that we cut to the chase and confiscate the stash makes increasing sense macroeconomically as well as socially.

The Mancunian Friend

I was tempted to watch BBC1's The Driver by memories of the 1978 Walter Hill film of the same name. I've always been a sucker for films, like Scorcese's Taxi Driver and the recent Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive, that use driving as a metaphor for alienation and the role of the skilled worker, even though I'm no petrolhead and I find the reality of being behind the wheel closer to Alan Partridge. The obvious problem with a British setting for a classic US genre is the relative mundanity of driving here, particularly in a rain-drenched Manchester, which the series tackled head-on (so to speak) with a high-energy car chase in the opening minutes. By the end of the three-part series I was reminded more of Wim Wenders The American Friend, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley's Game, a far superior meditation on free will and obligation with a little driving along the way.

The car chase was utterly implausible. The police appeared to have been reduced by cuts to a squad of just two bobbies in one car, unable to call up reinforcements to block the narrow streets of central Manchester. Neither of them appeared able to note the registration number of Vince's BMW, which he later left in an open-air car-park with CCTV. The Beamer was a mid-life crisis on wheels, and Vince's dexterity in handling it after a career driving a crappy people-carrier went unexplained. With this red herring out of the way, the character of Vince, well played by David Morrissey, was drawn as more of a Travis Bickle than a cool specialist, though one reduced to washing the vomit off his minicab mats rather than the scum off the streets. Much of the first episode resembled the trials of Job, as everything that could go wrong did go wrong, culminating in Vince getting mugged by two pissed-up teenage girls. In truth, this just showed him to be an idiot, albeit a sympathetic one, and nothing subsequently suggested an alternative reading.

Browned off with his life, Vince meets up with his boyhood pal Colin, played by an excellent Ian Hart, who has just got out of prison. Improbably, no one has told Col that his ex (who does not appear to have moved house) had shacked up with his twin brother and was now pregnant. That might be plausible in a Thomas Hardy novel but jarred in a programme where mobile phones were ubiquitous and the impossibility of keeping secrets was central to the plot. Col introduces Vince to The Horse (I was half expecting him to introduce a partner, The Cart), the local criminal mastermind, who suggests a few driving jobs. Again, Vince displays his idiocy by taking him at his word - just driving. To cut a long story short, it all starts to go horribly wrong as Vince is dragged deeper into criminality while trying to save his marriage and family from disintegration. He finally agrees to be wired-up by the police to entrap the gang, though the "wire" turns out to be a small stud (technically nonsense - you can't transmit without a power source) that Vince accidentally loses behind a sink (the man's hopeless).

As well as implausibilities and improbable coincidences, such as phonecalls occurring at the worst possible moment, the plot was riddled with soft misogyny. The central idea seemed to be that men go off the rails when not properly looked after by women. Vince is neglected by his wife, Ros (Claudie Blakley), who is distracted by her job (woman, know your limits!) and her passion for marathons (she's running away!) He is treated with contempt by his selfish daughter who dates a knobhead and later insists she can't enter the witness protection programme because she has 500 friends on Facebook (all over the land, millions of disgruntled men are simultaneously exclaiming "she needs a good slap, that one!"). Colin's mum is summed up as "if it doesn't come with ice and lemon, she's not interested". Even Vince's cabbie mate, who has left his wife and now indulges in Internet hookups, is literally "sorely used" by women, though he brings the blessing of a proper shag into their dull married lives. Apparently.

Women routinely appear as figures of authority and constraint: a doctor, who judges Vince insufficiently depressed for pills, and a warder at the local nick. Ros's sister is unsympathetic towards her brother-in-law (itself a dramatic cliché) and encourages her to desert him. His son has run away to some sort of cult, apparently under the influence of a girlfriend ("she needs a good slap, that one!"). When Vince attempts to extricate him, he is baffled by the non-violent men and women of the commune who marginalise him as the boy's "birth father" (echoes of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys). In the final episode, the police warn him that if he doesn't cooperate he will do 10 years inside, during which his wife will "take up with another man" (because apparently they all do - just ask Col). Vince sees the witness protection programme as a way of re-establishing a happy family, a fresh start. Perhaps crime does pay.

The underworld milieu features standard tropes (card games, wads of cash, the flirting moll), but is humorously undermined in the first episode through a bathetic tea ceremony, The Horse's philosophical pretensions, and a moronic dialogue on the geography of Hartlepool (the influence of Tarantino is felt throughout). But the key feature is that this is a male world where masculinity can at least defend itself through violence. Though this is shown to be problematic, and Vince comes to appreciate the value of an "ordinary life", it is still representative of a life that is fully alive (that small existential flicker in Vince's psyche). By the third episode, the gang's characterisation has been reduced to the one-dimensional, the humour replaced by formulaic thuggery and stupidity. Though Colm Meaney's Horse increasingly views Vince through narrowed, suspicious eyes, he still goes ahead with the climactic robbery, even though Col disappears at the eleventh hour, tipped-off by Vince about the police surveillance.

With the gang arrested in the act, the series ends with Vince reunited with his son, driving off to find his wife and daughter, suggesting that the two men may be able to reconstruct the family, standing up to the demands of the womenfolk on the one side and a hostile world on the other. Perhaps they'll head for the Australian Outback or the Canadian Rockies, stocking up on guns and tins of corned beef along the way. In The American Friend, the central character, having driven off and left his troubles behind, drops dead at this point, which would have made a lot more sense for Vince too. The loose end is Col, the Mancunian friend (though like Morrissey, Hart occasionally lapses into Scouse). Does he use the cash that Vince gifts him to head off to an ordinary life, or does he become a working class Tom Ripley?

Know Your Product

The popularity of the Green Party, and environmentalism more generally, is always a bad sign for the left. This is not because support for the Greens is inversely correlated to the electoral popularity of centre-left parties like Labour, though there is an element of ebb and flow between them, but because it remains a fundamentally conservative project, despite the delusions of self-proclaimed progressives, and thus a pointer to the temper of the times. The addition of 2,000 new members to the Scottish Green Party post-referendum does not presage a radical tidal wave at the 2015 general election, any more than the yes campaign revealed a social democratic nation north of the border. Support for the Greens tends to rise during periods of anxiety, such as the 1980s (recession, nuclear war) and now (recession, climate change), but that support remains centred on small capitalists and the professional middle classes, hence their greater threat to the LibDems (who are now facing a perfect storm in 2015).

The reactionary roots of environmental philosophy are well-known: the valorisation of the indigenous, of stewardship and sustainability (all of which privilege incumbency); the preservation of pre-industrial custom (with its roots in the ethnographic divide and rule of imperialism); the belief in a natural order and harmony that we challenge at our peril (Gaia and similar mysticism); and the tendency to respect most animals more than some people. The tap root of this ideology is the idea of man - historically Western, Christian man - as the image of god and thus god-like in his power. While man is undoubtedly a menace to himself and all other species, and anthropogenic climate change is real, his impact on the planet is akin to fleas on a dog. Man is not "the destroyer of worlds" (Oppenheimer's quote in respect of nuclear destruction is seminal to ecological thinking). He remains a weak and feeble lifeform in an obscure corner of a lesser galaxy. "Befouler of nest" would be more accurate, but less poetic.

Starting in the 1970s, and heavily influenced by the success of anti-nuclear and anti-NATO protests in Germany and elsewhere, Green thinking sought to marry this conservative tradition with radical left concerns such as social justice and participatory democracy, leading to a red-green alliance in many continental countries that appeared to place the Greens firmly on the left of the political spectrum. In reality, this development (and "rainbow coalitions" generally) masked the fragmentation of both left and right radicals around consumption and lifestyle preferences (cycling, craft beer, gay marriage etc), which was actually a testament to the hegemony of market-inflected libertarian thinking. By the turn of the century, Silicon Valley capitalists and chancers like Richard Branson were promoting themselves as green champions.

In the UK, the lack of proportional representation stymied a red-green alliance, as radical left activists either knuckled-down in the Labour Party or joined the Judean People's Popular Front, which has left the Greens fluttering their eyelids at LibDems uncomfortable with the neoliberalism of their Orange Book establishment (in this respect, they are in direct competition with Labour). Since 2008, being anti-neoliberal has become a way for the Greens to present themselves as attractive to both frustrated socialists and anxious conservatives, even to the point of being positioned by some media commentators as the "UKIP of the left". This is not as paradoxical as it might appear at first sight, as the psychological dynamic of both parties depends on a belief in an imminent threat to a settled order, not to mention the psephological waywardness of seaside towns.

The Greens continue to burnish their egalitarian credentials with their support for ostensibly radical policies like a citizens' basic income, without explaining how this could be achieved through economic policies that eschew growth for sustainability. A basic income is simply a mechanism that can be implemented in either a progressive or a regressive way. Without a radical reordering of society (i.e. who owns what), or a progressive distribution of the fruits of future growth (i.e. where the poorest benefit disproportionately), it will inevitably entrench existing inequalities and poverty. A basic income plus sustainability sounds radical, but its practical results would be remarkably similar to Tory policy, namely wage stagnation for the many and an increase in the social power of patrimonial wealth.

The meta-narrative of current political journalism is that the major parties are in decline, eaten away on all sides by fringe parties grabbing market share from voters disenchanted with the Westminster elite (the analogy with the supermarket sector reinforces the trope of politics as a consumption preference). The secular trend has been a decline in each of the two main parties' electoral support from 45-50% in 1945 to 30-35% in 2010. However, another way of looking at this is that varieties of neoliberalism now enjoy over 90% of the vote, if you include the LibDems and SNP. As per its standard modus operandi, fictitious competition has been introduced to a rigged market, with each brand selling the same ingredients in slightly different combinations. If UKIP have (irony of ironies) been positioned as the Aldi and Lidl of political insurgency, the Green Party is trying to be a hybrid of Waitrose and the Co-op.

A Bill of Goods

David Cameron has promised that a Conservative majority government will abolish the 1998 Human Rights Act and introduce "a new British Bill of Rights, passed in our Parliament, rooted in our values". For good measure he added "This is the country that wrote Magna Carta" and "We do not require instruction on this from judges in Strasbourg". This "pledge" has predictably been interpreted by the rightwing press as a welcome rejection of Europe, continuing the deliberate confusion of the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights (actually a triumph of conservative British jurisprudence) with all things Brussels. Critics also forget that the 1998 Act was passed in order to "bring rights home" by incorporating the Convention into statute and making UK courts the chief adjudicator of breaches, thus minimising the need for recourse to the Strasbourg court.

The Tories' outline proposal focuses on three changes: repealing the 1998 Act, incorporating the original text of the 1953 Convention into primary legislation, and "clarifying" the Convention rights to "reflect a proper balance between rights and responsibilities". The first two are a wash. The significant change is the introduction of the dubious notion that rights entail responsibilities. Much the same rhetoric was employed by New Labour, indicating its centrality to neoliberal ideology: the contractual nature of citizenship. The justification of these changes combines an appeal to tradition and a rejection of continental rationalism in favour of British pragmatism, which is captured in the proposal's opening paragraph: "Britain has a long history of protecting human rights at home and standing up for those values abroad. From Magna Carta in 1215, to the Bill of Rights and the Claim of Right in 1689, and over the centuries through our Common Law tradition, the UK’s protection of human rights has always been grounded in real circumstance, rather than simply being a matter of abstract principle".

According to a leaked version of an imminent Tory press release, the new bill will provide "a proper balance between the rights of citizens and their responsibilities in our society, and in particular to limit the ability of those who threaten British citizens or society to use human rights laws to protect their interests at the expense of the victims or potential victims". This hints at the true British tradition, which is that some people's rights are superior to the rights of others. In other words, rights are privileges and thus a species of property. The press release includes various tabloid-friendly examples of what the changes will mean, focusing on foreign criminals and illegal immigrants, but the supportive quotes from Tory worthies are more substantial, highlighting "restoring parliamentary sovereignty" and restoring "common sense". The appeal to "restoration" is obviously a theme with an impeccable pedigree, going all the way back to the Norman barons' claims to be restoring the ancient rights of the Anglo-Saxons.

Magna Carta was a contract of privileges between the King and landed magnates. Far from being uniquely English, this was common practice across the continent. Its significant innovation was a clause that empowered a committee of barons to over-rule the King if he breached the terms of charter. It was this that would give the document its symbolic value in the 17th century struggle between Crown and Parliament. There are only 3 clauses that have not been subsequently repealed. These confirm the liberties (i.e. property rights) of the Church of England, the liberties and customs of the City of London, and the right of freemen (farmers with freehold rights) to legal due process. As Gerrard Winstanley would later put it: "Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people still are, and have been left servants to work for them".

Like Magna Carta, much of the 1689 Bill of Rights has either been repealed or fallen into disuse, such as the prohibition on a standing army or the right of Protestants to bear arms. The key provisions concern the independence of judges from royal interference and the veto of Parliament on all new taxes. The Bill also established freedom of speech, but in the limited sense of speech within Parliament (i.e. what we now know as Parliamentary privilege) and the publication of debates. This was a bill of rights for the few, not for the many. As with so much of the British constitution, it is held up as a symbol of principles (our ancient freedoms) but is devoid of principle in practice. This is the elevation of the terms and conditions of a commercial contract to the status of philosophy.

The appeals to "common sense" and the notion of "balance" are intended to suggest that absolute, unqualified rights are not for us. In fact, the rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights are already qualified, in part because they were heavily influenced by English jurisprudence. For example, free expression (article 10) "may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary". A British Home Secretary could hardly ask for more.

Compare and contrast to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances". The dominance of the US model in popular culture leads most people to think of human rights in absolute, non-negotiable terms, but this approach is the exception rather than the rule, not least because it is often found to be impractical - e.g. the passage of time can make certain rights problematic, such as the right to carry a rifle up to the gates of a school, or the White House.

The postwar European tradition, influenced by British legal practice (did I already mention that?) as much as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, tries to steer a middle course between absolute principle and pragmatism, treating rights as general principles that are qualified in practice, and can thus evolve over time, with an emphasis on the rule of law as the ultimate guarantor of "common sense" and "balance". The British tradition is a variant on this, with the general principles obscured by the mirage of "traditional rights" that evaporate under scrutiny, and qualifications developed through case law as much as statute. This both entrenches existing privilege, through the conservatism of the legal system, and allows for the flexibility to adapt under pressure without triggering a constitutional crisis.

If history is any guide, the new Bill of Rights will be remarkably similar to the European Convention on Human Rights, and thus the 1998 Act, but with some tacked-on nonsense about mad mullahs not being entitled to NHS treatment and the UK Supreme Court being, well, supreme. In reality, there is little chance of this becoming law, not just because an outright Tory majority in 2015 isn't looking likely, but because the more they big it up as a constitutional moment, the more they risk stimulating popular campaigns for more extensive and radical rights, such as the right to an affordable education or housing. The chief lesson of the Scottish referendum is that if you let the people think they might have a decisive say, you'll only encourage them to get involved. File under guff.