Live at the Witch Trials

The Institute for Fiscal Studies' judgement on the Conservative and Labour manifestos could be summed up as "a plague on both your houses", which rather neatly echoed the coincidental news that a GCSE exam paper managed to confuse Montagues and Capulets. There is no mistaking the parties however, with the Tories accused of underfunding public services and Labour accused of over-estimating future tax revenues. This has been the think-tank's stock take over the course of its history, so few will have been surprised by the outcome. The idea of policy-costing, like the IFS itself, is a product of neoliberal hegemony, now institutionalised in the poacher-turned-gamekeeper that is the Office for Budget Responsibility. The ideological thrust is an aversion to higher taxes combined with a demand that social provision should be increasingly met by private insurance markets. Had the IFS been founded a quarter of a century earlier than it was, you can imagine the withering assessment it would have delivered on Labour's 1945 manifesto. Today, the "honesty" they demand of the Tories is an admission that a smaller state means reduced public provision, while the honesty they demand of Labour is an admission that increased public services funded by taxation can only be achieved through a greater burden on median and lower earners.

Unsurprisingly for a body created by City interests, the IFS considers that the Tories' planned reduction in immigration will be economically damaging, while Labour's plans for higher taxes on "faceless corporations and the rich" will curtail private sector investment. Both parties are accused of ignoring the long-term challenges of an ageing population. Given its fiscal focus, the IFS has been at the forefront of the campaign of doom, insisting that we must either cut services or increase taxes to cope with a surfeit of the elderly, with the result that they have underplayed the more fundamental problems of the UK economy: poor productivity, under-investment (even when taxes were cut) and a worsening balance of payments. While demographic change clearly has an impact, this is by its nature transitory and its effect on the economy tends to be primarily a stagnation in expectations and confidence, as seen in Japan since the 1990s, rather than a fiscal crisis. This suggests that Keynesian demand-management might actually be helpful. Shifting to a greater reliance on private pensions and insurance might well help the public exchequer, but it is unlikely to aid British industry if the financial flows are managed by a City of London that has historically been reluctant to invest domestically.

The modern role of the IFS as the UK's fiscal "umpire" highlights the shift from the primacy of macroeconomic to microeconomic concerns that first took hold in public consciousness in the 1980s. House prices replaced the balance of trade as a barometer of broader economic health while the impact on representative households ("winners and losers") crowded out debate about the balance of taxation (and the gains from growth) between capital and labour. Though the IFS has been among those arguing for increased taxes on property and inherited wealth, essentially treating both as VAT-able, it has also argued consistently for lower taxes on corporate capital, a regressive shift of public taxation from income to consumption, and a "simplification" of welfare to encourage low-paid work and restrain any future growth in benefits. While the emergence of a low-wage, high-employment economy since 2008 has seen the future "threat" move from skivers to pensioners, the fundamental premise remains the same: labour (current and historic) is the problem, big capital is the solution.

Given its relative novelty, the tradition of an IFS election judgement highlights the historical amnesia of political coverage. This extends well beyond the fiscal sphere. For example, the Tory condemnation of Corbyn's statement this week that "the war on terror isn't working" is concerned with form (appearing to say the right thing in the right way) rather than content, with the predictable result that Michael Fallon was made to look a chump when Channel 4's Krishnan Guru-Murthy anonymously quoted Boris Johnson's mild 2005 comments acknowledging the reality of blowback from intervention in the Middle East. While this could be dismissed as the result of Fallon's habitual parroting of stock phrases, or as another tiresome gotcha by a journalist trying to be edgy, what it really shows is the vacuous nature of most political debate. Corbyn's real solecism in the eyes of the political class was to venture an opinion (shared by much of the electorate) that diverged from received wisdom. Predictably, this led to pompous criticism not only from unthinking Tories but from fatuous liberals like Jonathan Freedland.

The Tory claim, that terrorist acts committed on British soil are the sole fault of evil individuals who hate us and are in no way connected to our military interventions, is not just implausible but easily disproved by history. After all, the IRA were quite clear that their mainland bombing campaign was undertaken to "bring home" the cost of the UK's presence in Northern Ireland to the British electorate. In this light, the government's current stance is merely a continuation of the strategy of criminalisation fruitlessly pursued during the 70s and 80s, hence the continuing emblematic importance of Corbyn's dealings with Sinn Fein. One obvious byproduct of this approach in the 70s was the misrepresentation of the Irish community in the UK as untrustworthy and inherently malign, leading to the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six miscarriages of justice and a host of petty acts of anti-Irish abuse. The same stance now leads to the charge that there must be something wrong with Islam as a religion, or that Mulsim communities are somehow less law-abiding or humane than the rest of us, which legitimises the programmatic bigotry of UKIP and others.

Clearly foreign policy is consequential. If it wasn't, there'd be no point in having a Foreign Office. But though terrorist activities broadly correlate with the perceived involvement of states, they are also opportunistic, hence the Islamist attacks in recent years in Germany and Sweden, countries with little direct responsibility for state-trashing in the Middle East. Though this truth is used in turn by xenophobes to reject our moral obligations to refugees, what it really highlights is the increasing normality of migration and the way this acts as a vector in spreading conflict, both in actuality and rhetoric. This isn't new, and nor should it be taken as an argument against immigration: consider the IRA's support by sections of expatriate Irish communities in the USA. The globalisation of Middle Eastern conflicts certainly owes much to the push of clumsy foreign intervention, but it also owes much to the pull of economic demand and the way this has created new spaces for those antagonisms to be played out. The 1970s were marked not just by Palestinians applying the old technique of piracy to the new technology of mass air travel, but by simmering tensions between Turkish and Kurdish gastarbeiter that would culminate in violence on German streets during the early-90s.

The superficial sociology of Islamic terrorism notes how volunteers are often religious illiterates, or have a history of indulging in a "Western lifestyle" that has been reduced to little more than drinking and partying, but few suggest that their turn to an implacable and intolerant interpretation of their parents' faith reflects a desire to stop being an "anywhere" and become a "somewhere", to borrow the terminology of David Goodhart. In other words, these are often uprooted or confused individuals seeking the homogeneous and cohesive community that all societies claim to value as they pursue an economic orthodoxy that inevitably undermines it. They are, to employ the language of an earlier conservative ideologue, people who having "got on their bike" have decided to reject modernity for the nostalgia of an Umma no less fantastic than the Middle England conjured up by Paul Dacre. During the era of globalisation, economic imperatives have been far more significant in stimulating movement - and the deracination this gives rise to - than war, famine or failed states, and have thus contributed more to the spread of terrorism than any other single factor.

The historic amnesia of politicians extends well beyond foreign or fiscal policy, but there is little downside to their ignorance. The Fallon gotcha was possible because journalists rarely work forward from a historic base, preferring to work backwards from a contemporary prejudice. After the Paris shootings in November 2015, the Beeb's Laura Kuenssberg wanted Jeremy Corbyn to commit to a shoot-to-kill policy, which was not merely a silly incitement but an example of crass insensitivity for a national broadcaster supposedly serving the whole of Northern Ireland. Likewise, the BBC's coverage of fiscal policy remains hamstrung by a foolish deference to bodies like the IFS that promote a particular agenda. Across the broader media landscape these habits are partly the product of structural change - the need for gotchas to boost ratings and the shallow expertise produced by frenetic competition - but they also reflect the way that neoliberal ideology erases history. Just as mobile labour is meant to slough off its past and absorb a bland reduction of the dominant culture (aka "integration"), so media are encouraged to live in an eternal present in which historic causality is demoted in favour of personal malignancy, which is essentially the dynamic of the witch trial. No wonder the trope of household finances took hold. I'm just surprised that Jeremy Corbyn hasn't been accused of spoiling milk.