Local Government for Local People

Like the person with a hammer who thinks every problem is a nail, John Harris can be relied upon to insist that the chief cure for Britain's democratic shortcomings is localism. This has meant both advocating a radical devolution of powers to the neighbourhood level ("flatpack democracy") and championing metropolitan mayors against Whitehall. As he tends to take a blinkered approach to each (in the manner of his Anywhere but Westminster safaris), he never has to address the contradictions between the two, nor has he produced a theory of subsidiarity that would distinguish between good (regional) and bad (national) centralisation. While he is fulsome in his praise of technocratic Blairites, like Nick Forbes in Newcastle, he also exhibits a suspicion of politicians who are too political, hence his admiration for middle-class independents and his distrust of "top-down" Corbynism. His is a pessimistic anti-politics, hence the apocalyptic tone of his latest bulletin where he insists "that power and responsibility have to be radically relocated, before our age of failure and rupture finally breaks the system for good".

Harris provides a dubious history for this narrative of impending doom: "The very British malaise this story highlights (which is most clearly manifested in England, although all four countries of the UK now have over-powerful administrative centres, and weak local government) goes back more than a century, to a diminishing of civic leadership by national government that began in the early 1900s, and reached a peak in the Thatcher era, with a sustained assault on city and local government, and the idiotic abolition of England’s metropolitan county councils." He provides no explanation for why this process should have started in the Edwardian era, though the online version of his article links to a History Today essay bemoaning the 1902 Education Act for removing "direct democratic control" over schools. There is an argument to be made that the slightly wider franchise for local as opposed to parliamentary elections (e.g. some women had the vote) made councils more democratic at the time, but after 1900 the trend was towards universal adult suffrage at both local and national levels. The era of civic leadership whose passing Harris regrets was marked by the limited democracy of property ownership.

The Balfour Act, as the 1902 legislation was known, wasn't a power-grab by Whitehall. Its main provision was to guarantee funds from local rates for denominational schools that could operate independently of council control. This was undoubtedly regressive, as it entrenched religious schools and selective grammars, but if anything it meant devolving power, not centralising it. The act also replaced the directly-elected school boards with council-appointed local education authorities (LEAs). This "deradicalised" education, as many of the school boards had attracted trade unionist and suffragette candidates, but again the move hardly amounted to centralisation, while the later 1944 Education Act (the Butler Act) would extend local authority control over denominational schools. The major move towards centralisation in education came with the 1988 Education Reform Act (the Baker Act), which introduced the national curriculum, standarised testing and grant-maintained schools.

Harris's wider claim of "a diminishing of civic leadership by national government" over the course of the last century isn't supported by the actual history. The power of local authorities steadily expanded after 1900, not only in traditional areas such as public health and housing but increasingly in newer areas such as transport, further education and arts and culture. This culminated in the 1972 Local Government Act, which established the metropolitan county councils in recognition of the need for unitary control in the major conurbations. The tide turned with the Thatcher government, which not only abolished the metropolitan counties and reduced local authority influence over education but also commenced the privatisation of many local services. But this was very much a handbrake-turn, not the peak of an 80-year long centralisation drive. It must also be remembered that Thatcher's justification for many of these policies was to return power to local communities, not only in abolishing the metropolitan counties to the advantage of the boroughs but in curtailing "irresponsible" spending on black lesbians and other lefty causes for the benefit of respectable ratepayers. In this she was evoking the same Edwardian nostalgia that enamours the Guardian's small town expert.

In further support of his argument, Harris attributes the lower Covid-19 death rate in Germany to its tradition of devolution. This isn't without substance - it's clear that the UK government's decision to largely bypass local health experts has been a disaster - but a blithe comparison with German federalism ignores the long history of fragmentation under the Holy Roman Empire and the compromises required to effect unification in the nineteenth century, not to mention the reaction against centralisation after 1945. In contrast, England has been a unitary and highly-centralised state since 1066. Its devolution of power (or outright ceding of sovereignty) over the last century was limited to those parts of the British Isles that had been unwillingly absorbed in the past. England itself remains a relatively homogenous country with little appetite for the sort of regionalism found in Germany, Italy and Spain, and one where a strong civic identity in the major cities (as distinct from small towns) has traditionally been contentious and viewed with suspicion across much of the political spectrum (hence the Labour establishment's ambivalence over the GLC and its current uncertainty over devolution).

The weak power of the contemporary metro mayors, such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham, is consistent with British history, and the 1972-86 period of powerful metropolitan councils is very much the exception. It is county councils and city boroughs that have traditionally been the centres of local power, and they have been reluctant to devolve authority further as much as they have been reluctant to support regional tiers, not least because they have seen their remits eroded by Whitehall since the 1980s. It is possible that the metro mayors could evolve into a more substantial layer of government, but that could only come about if central government chooses to both loosen its own grip and dragoon the counties and boroughs into line. This seems unlikely in the current climate. The liberal ideal of a plurality of powers keeping each other in check, like the idea that local independents are inherently virtuous, is essentially anti-political. The reality at the micro-level is a monopolisation of scarce resources by the sharp-elbowed middle classes, NIMBYism and a conceptual segregation of local from national (and international) politics.

The metropolitan counties were created in response to the new demands of the 1960s and 70s, particularly the need for better coordination of housing and transport, as well as the first stages of deindustrialisation. Their abolition necessitated the creation of various coordinating bodies that have gradually led to the revival of unitary authorites since the millennium. This has been amplified by the increasing importance in the neoliberal era of agglomeration, requiring strategic coordination of transport, the environment and planning. The radicalisation that the older authorities were prone to has been neutered by directly-elected mayors beholden to media approval and with tight constraints on their remit (Ken Livingstone being the only notable maverick). The current friction between the Labour metro mayors and Tory government is likely to make the latter more reluctant to cede further authority, while the former are unlikely to agitate in any serious way as that would run counter to the strategy of the national party at Westminster and risk creating alternative centres of authority to Keir Starmer.

We are likely to remain stuck with a highly-centralised national government, a patchwork of county and borough councils that are either blinkered or beleaguered, and an inadequate intermediate layer at the metropolitan and regional level whose powers are inferior to popular expectations (not a day goes by without the Mayor of London being condemned for not acting over some issue that the office has absolutely no power over). It is important to recognise the competing dynamics: that national parties will always want a strong state in order to enact national policies and won't welcome dissenting intra-party power bases; that metropolitan authorities span varied constituencies with different interests, which means a politics of struggle rather than cooperation is inevitable; and that effective regional authorities capable of "levelling-up" must necessarily trample over the interests of some small towns and districts for the wider good. Until he acknowledges these dynamics, Harris's insistence that localism is a pancea for effective local government will remain just the idle daydream of the Shire-folk.

Eat the Rich

One reason why Conservative MPs feel emboldened to blame bad parents for hungry children is that their philosophy is based on the premise that the private and public domains are not merely separate but that there is minimal intercourse between them, and that what traffic occurs should be limited even further. In this view, Marcus Rashford is to be applauded for organising charity to ensure kids on free school meals are fed during half-term, but this should not be turned into a "political issue" as that would breach the boundary. The Manchester United forward has wisely sought to present his case as non-partisan and above politics, but his virtuous approach is ultimately only reassuring liberals that he isn't a closet socialist, which at least garners his campaign positive press. It is tactically adroit in that it prevents the Tories dismissing him out of hand as a trouble-maker, but it will have no effect in persuading the government to change policy unless they anticipate a major impact on public opinion, and what the last 15 months have shown is that they can rely on poll ratings not dropping below 40%, come what may.

This belief in separate domains throws up a number of paradoxes. The privatisation of public services has not simply moved certain activities from one domain to the other, which could be excused if it were a one-time adjustment, but has created a now-permanent grey-zone between them where public-private partnerships and social entrepreneurships, not to mention parasitism and corruption, thrive. No one in receipt of a public service nowadays is able to easily distinguish between the two domains. You could argue that the boundary has always been blurred - the status of NHS doctors as private contractors being an example that was foundational to the welfare state - but that merely calls into question the premise of conservative philosophy: is a neat separation even possible? What you might have expected when the privatisation programme started in the 1980s is that, after the inevitable confusion of transition, we would have ended up with a cleaner boundary, but the opposite is true.

Another paradox is the way that successive Conservative governments have increasingly sought to dictate operating practices and even values in organisations that are dependent on government funding, even as they have sought to reduce that funding and to move the organisations onto a more commercial and independent footing. The chief example here is education. The more that schools and universities are expected to stand on their own two feet, the more Conservative governments have pursued both prescriptions on how students will be taught and proscriptions on what they should not be exposed to, the latest bogey being critical race theory (New Labour was also guilty of this sort of authoritarianism, but that merely highlighted its conservative instincts). This kulturkampf is part of the wider so-called culture wars, wherein the paradox is reflected at scale. We are told that people are subject to the tyranny of the woke and politically correct, yet it is the government - the only institution that has the capability to actually be tyrannical - that is among the loudest in levelling the charge.

Corey Robin has an interesting piece in the New York Review of Books, entitled Gonzo Constitutionalism, where he notes that the Republican Party has gradually changed from one whose programme centred on restricting the state to one whose raison d'etre is now the preservation of the least democratic institutions of the state, namely the Electoral College, the Senate and the Supreme Court. This is not to say that the GOP isn't pursuing its economic agenda - it still manages to hustle pro-rich tax cuts through Congress, if little else - but that it has become less a party advocating for the private domain against the public and more a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. This echoes the point I was making in the last post, Ukania Delenda, inspired by Ellen Meiksins Wood, that absolutism lives on in bourgeois democracy. While the UK is struggling to accommodate revived absolutist impulses within its hybrid aristocratic-bourgeois constitution, the US is finding that the anti-democratic and absolutist features of its impeccably bourgeois constitution are becoming more salient, and that in turn makes it more obvious that the purpose of the US constitution is the defence of wealth and privilege.

Cronyism and nepotism have always been with us, but it is clear that they have increased in recent years. The plum jobs for favoured friends and relatives, the contracts awarded without tender to unqualified companies, and the repeated use of preferred suppliers despite their repeated failures and poor value for money all point to market failure. More worryingly, they also suggest weaker norms and institutional controls and an increasingly brazen belief that such gifts are within the power of whoever captures the state. It may be that this visibility is partly the result of greater scrutiny arising from new technology and media, however the decline in investigative reporting and the extent to which popular discourse is waylaid by provocateurs and conspiracy-mongers suggests that this may have been offset. What isn't in doubt is that leading politicians see personal enrichment as central to the pursuit of politics. Again, this isn't new (consider Lloyd George), but the Prime Minister griping to favoured journalists about his inadequate salary, in the full expectation of publication and a whip-round by donors, certainly is.

What this points to is not just banal corruption but the collapse of the walls between the private and public domains in the business of government. The visible angst of a Conservative Chancellor obliged by circumstance to "interfere" in the market to support businesses and wages is sincere, but that sincerity reflects a fear that a precedent will have been set, not that intervention in the market is unconscionable. After all, the massive interference in financial markets of the bank bailouts and the Treasury's ongoing QE programme have not proved ideologically shattering, even if they did cause some temporary embarrassment. The conceptual dividing line is no longer public and private but rich and poor, and this week's attempts to revive last decade's strivers versus shirkers rhetoric in the guise of good and bad parents will have little success in obscuring it. Footballers with a social conscience have long been dismissed on the grounds that they earn a lot of money. The implicit charge is not hypocrisy but class betrayal: you've escaped the working class and joined the rich, so don't bite the hand the feeds you. In badgering the government, Marcus Rashford isn't acting as the real leader of the opposition, he is simply shaming the rich.

Ukania Delenda

Perry Anderson's latest mega-essay for the New Left Review on "the conjuncture" (Ukania Perpetua) has the air of an elegy. He's 82 and many of his collaborators and critics have now left the stage, notably Edward Thompson, Tom Nairn and Ellen Meiksins Wood. He probably won't be around for much longer and while he remains as acute and acerbic as ever, there is a sense of a life in review, if not an apologia pro vita sua. The essay revisits the Nairn-Anderson thesis, as it came to be known, which attributed the UK's industrial decline in the 1960s to the persistence of an ancien regime following the incomplete bourgeois revolution of the 17th century (which was waylaid by religion) and the absorption of a precocious capitalism by the aristocracy between 1688 and 1832 (I'm massively simplifying, of course). This in turn produced political complacency and mystagogy, a subaltern and conservative labour movement, and an intellectural Philistinism in both academia and public life. The thesis was further elaborated in the late-70s and early-80s (notably in Nairn's The Break-Up of Britain), when the failings of the UK state appeared to herald its dissolution and British capital was deserting what was left of domestic industry.

This narrative of the UK's history is contrasted to the more "normal" development (from a Marxist perspective) seen in continental Europe, archetypically in France after 1789. The classic hallmarks were the sweeping away of feudal remnants, the development of modern bureaucracy, the state direction of industrial strategy, the valorisation of technical education, and the emergence of both a labour movement committed to revolution and a socially-integrated intelligentsia. This contrast was memorably ridiculed by Thompson as "inverted Podsnappery", though the heart of his critique concerns Nairn and Anderson's tendentious domestic history rather than the international comparison. In Thompson's view the UK's peculiar history reflected the success of the aristocracy and gentry in becoming capitalist in practice and stymying monarchical absolutism early. The political struggles of the 18th and early-19th centuries are then primarily factional disputes - largely between those members of the gentry who benefited from Old Corruption and those who didn't - rather than class friction between a landed aristocracy and an urban bourgeoisie. For all the prominence of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the significant moment was the 1832 Reform Act, which more evenly distributed power within a capitalist class that now spanned the agrarian, industrial and financial sectors.

Thompson's critique was expanded upon by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her 1992 book, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (excerpted here). In particular, she paid attention to the other side of the comparison, noting the continuity of the ancien regime in bourgeois modernity: "the emergence of these hallmarks in Continental Europe did not signal the maturity of 'bourgeois' or capitalist forces but on the contrary reflected the continuing strength of pre-capitalist social property relations. In fact, the appearance of ideas commonly associated with the advent of the modern state - certain conceptions of indivisible sovereignty and nationhood, for instance - testify as much to the absence of 'modernity', and indeed the absence of a unified sovereignty and nationhood, as to their presence in reality". This, I think, is a potentially fruitful point of departure in analysing the current political situation in the UK, in particular the way that characteristics more familiar from absolutism (a subject addressed in Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State, though he doesn't refer to that 1974 book in his new essay) have started to appear, particularly in respect to sovereignty and nationhood. Examples of this are citizenship (which is really a totalising institution birthed under absolutism rather than its democratic antithesis), the symbolic embodiment of the nation, and the role of law as the servant of the state rather than the individual.

Up to the 1980s, the use of "citizens" instead of "subjects" was mostly a leftwing manoeuvre in British political discourse - albeit with wider nationalist connotations in the UK periphery - intended to emphasise both the institutions of the social democratic state and its liberal commitment to civil society. Citizenship had formally replaced the British subject in the 1948 Nationality Act, but it was only after the 1981 Nationality Act that the two were finally divorced. From that point onwards, the term citizen eclipsed that of subject both in official usage and the popular vocabulary. Yet rather than suggesting a growing republicanism, it signalled a shift towards a normative nationalism that would eventually be enshrined in the citizenship test for those seeking naturalisation. For all the ridicule the test continues to prompt, citizenship in political discourse has clearly become a synonym for integration and a cultural catechism in its own right - a view that owes as much to Scottish as English nationalism in recent years. The increased use by the political right of terms like "the people" is not simply an indicator of populism - the opposition of the popular will to a notional elite - but the demand for political homogeneity. Likewise, the Windrush scandal is not simply racial and class prejudice but the inevitable fallout of an attempt to rigidly define the boundaries of that people in the face of messy reality.

A characteristic of the post-Falklands era in Britain has been a growing identification with the military as the embodiment of the nation, and a complementary decline in respect for the no longer irreproachable royal family, the Queen excepted. The contemporary totems of nationalism are the St George's flag and the remembrance poppy; the one a coded rebuke to the supra-national House of Windsor, the other a celebration of popular sacrifice. The emergent national idea is a mix of mangled history (the benefits of empire, licking Hitler), paranoia (the EU, migrants) and a performative loyalty in which the tropes of sporting fandom (theatrical contempt, badge-kissing) have replaced the complacent deference of old. This obviously owes something to the disenchantment of the royal family in an era of mass media, though scandalous behaviour was hardly a novelty in the past. But it also owes something to the erosion of the concept of duty in parallel with the expansion of the market. The armed forces remain one of the few unimpeachable exemplars of "public service" and injured former soldiers are emotive emblems of communal sacrifice in an era of hyper-individualism.

In his NLR essay, Anderson describes the economic prioritisation of the City's globalisation and the willingness to ride shotgun for the US in the postwar period as the "two prongs of Ukanian eversion" - i.e. the maintenance of the state elite by a conscious turning outwards and neglect of the domestic. Just as Brexit represents a rejection of the economic prong, Help for Heroes represents a rejection of the interventionist prong. This isn't a new development, and nor should it be casually bracketed with the chauvinism of the far-right - its antecedents are the original Little Englanders who eschewed imperial adventures in favour of bourgeois industry. Again, it's helpful to compare England with Scotland here, noting the SNP's longstanding objections to Trident and its equivocation over NATO. Unless you imagine the Scots are peculiarly pacific, this suggests that the UK population as a whole is less than keen on foreign wars, which was certainly obvious even in the early days of the Afghanistan and Iraq misadventures. As jingoism has declined, we have perhaps paradoxically become more sentimental about the armed forces.

On the political right, the challenge to the supremacy of the law goes beyond a distaste for the Supreme Court, set up under New Labour, and its supposed championing of the European Courts' "meddling" in UK affairs, to a more general distrust of the judiciary as representative of a liberal, as opposed to conservative, elite. This transformation, which is clearly one of perception rather than reality, is startling when you consider the attitudes towards (and the attitudes of) the higher judiciary in the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of Lords Denning and Donaldson. The parallel denigration of lawyers as self-interested shysters, or metropolitan elitists determined to frustrate the popular will over Brexit and asylum, owes less to any popular shift in sentiment (despite the best efforts of the press) and more to a deliberate policy pursued by the Conservative party to make the courts subservient to executive fiat. Similarly, the government's various attempts to insist it is above the law, whether in its arbitrary prorogation of Parliament or the provisions of the Internal Markets Bill to allow it to renege on international treaties, are the hallmarks of absolutism. Examples of personal impunity are then emblematic of a theory of state rather than a simple lack of virtue.

These changes are significant because all three institutions - the subject, the monarchy, the courts - were central to the success of aristocratic capital in establishing its political hegemony between the 16th and 18th centuries, thereby nullifying the threat of monarchical absolutism in Britain. The notion of the subject - someone with inalienable and ancient rights rather than feudal obligations - supported the claim that the entire nation was present in Parliament, even if most of it had no say in its representation, in contrast to the fragmented polity in pre-revolutionary France. Constitutional royalty was the basis of sovereignty - the Crown in Parliament - but this was designed to exclude the possibility of any sort of democratic sovereignty, once the radicals had been defeated by the grandees during the Civil War (and their inheritors first brutally suppressed at Peterloo and then dismissed with the failure of Chartism). The crown courts were the means by which class power was established at a national level rather than being parcellised through manorial courts and local jurisidictions (in the French manner), protecting the property rights and executing the contract law that were foundational to the emergent agrarian capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. So what is driving change in these three areas? The supersession of the subject by the citizen could be attributed to the delayed effects of democratisation, as could the gradual disenchantment of the monarchy, but democracy cannot be fingered for the recent assault on the law, despite invocations of the will of the people.

As Ellen Meiksens-Wood described, the triumph of the bourgeois state in 19th century France was less a violent disjuncture from a feudal past, as the traditional story of 1789 has it, than the fulfilment of the absolutist designs of the 17th and 18th centuries: a centralised state apparatus, the primacy of offices and government perquisites over commerce as the route to advancement, and a nationalism based on cultural homogeneity rather than dynastic fealty (features which persist and are arguably being reinforced under Macron, despite his valorisation of commerce). A paradox of the last 40 years is that while governments of both conservative and liberal temperament have advocated the rolling back of the state, what they have enacted has been a steady centralisation of power. Local government has been neutered as a political rival and its powers of patronage curtailed. Privatisation has been widespread, both in the selling-off of nationalised industries and in the transfer of housing assets from public to private ownership, but the more significant development in respect of the state's character has been the growth of outsourced public services, which has created a state/capital nexus that exhibits many of the characteristics of absolutism, such as privileged access to tax revenues (consider the role of firms like Serco or BCG recently) and richly-rewarded offices within the grant of government (think Dido Harding or the jockeying for the plum role of Chair of the BBC).

Though corporatism was rejected after 1789 in favour of individual rights, it continued to live on during the bourgeois era, being revisited by thinkers such as Mill and Durkheim, before being revived by the Facists in unambiguously absolutist terms: "everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". While politicians in the social democratic era certainly targeted particular interest groups - mothers, pensioners, young adults etc - this was always within the frame of a class position based on an overall balance between tax and spend. We are now in an era in which high taxation is taken to be inimical to economic growth and the market has been largely moved beyond the purview of government. As a result, control of expenditure now does most of the heavy lifting in the management of the state's finances. The consequence of this is that parties now compete for votes through promises of preferential treatment, such as the pensions triple-lock or the abolition of tuition fees, rather than through broader promises of tax reductions or spending increases in which specific cases are held to be emblematic of a wider programme (even Labour's 2017 and 2019 manifestoes were cautious in this regard). 

The result is that politics is increasingly framed in corporate terms, in the sense that it deals with distinct and presumably self-interested groups within society, which is reflected in the turn of political science to the (often spurious) sociology of an electorate divided by geography, age and ethnicity more than traditional class consciousness. In this environment, national identity is increasingly associated with intrinsic preferences and dispositions (aka the culture wars), including some that are essentially projections of elite prejudice (e.g. somewheres versus anywheres), rather than the supra-political totems of old. If the social democratic era was marked by the celebration of warm beer and eccentricity, our current era seems to be defined by gentlemen of a certain age "protecting" statues or newspaper columnists demanding a daily hecatomb to assuage the gods of the economy. It would be easy to laugh and miss what's going on here - not a descent into frivolity and spite but the insistence that everything is zero-sum: if you are up then I am down. This is a hallmark of absolutism: a closed system of power in which relative advantage is all.

At a time when the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill now before the Commons seeks a carte blanche for the agencies of the state (in a specific and limited way, of course), and the military are to be given protection against civilian charges of historic abuse, it should be obvious that there is something very wrong in a country that has historically prided itself on the restraint of arbitrary state power and has been wary of showing the military too much respect. Though Perry Anderson has been happy to amend his thinking in light of the criticism of Thompson and others, his failure to mention Meiksins Wood (who was on the NLR's editorial committee for almost a decade) in his new essay strikes me as significant. It is precisely her insights into the absolutist lineaments of the bourgeois state that I think are relevant to the UK's present conjuncture. If I'm right, what we're witnessing is not the delayed completion of the English revolution by a modernising gentry (of which both Johnson and Cummings are representative) but the collapse of British exceptionalism that Anderson long-heralded. The problem is that lacking many of the institutions typical of the "mature" bourgeois state to cushion the blow, the lineaments of absolutism are becoming ever more pronounced. Far from Ukania Perpetua, we may be witnessing Ukania Delenda.

A Menace to Society

What exactly do we mean by "social" in the context of social media? At the simplest level, it suggests communication between people that is not necessarily goal-oriented. In other words, it's not about communicating a specific message, in the manner of a phone-call or text, so much as being sociable: chatting, musing, ranting. But it also implies a broader field of participation: a public rather than private conversation. This in turn means that we see it as a reflection of society, albeit a fragmented and incoherent one. But despite this, we're reluctant to acknowledge that it reflects actual social relations, despite power being front and centre (likes, blocking, pile-ons etc). We might ruefully acknowledge our role as digital peons, providing the content that will be exploited by others, but this is a misleading analogy because none of us are forced to work the digital fields and what we receive in terms of utility is vastly greater than our individual contribution of toil. What we shy away from are the structural assumptions inherent to social media about authority and the degree to which we are complicit in establishing and defending its hierarchy of regard. 

Vulgar technological determinism would have you believe that social media has changed society, and may even have gone so far as to "rewire our brains" (a direct descendant of the belief that travelling in steam trains at 30 mph would physically alter the human body), but in reality it has simply made more obvious what was already there. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest". Consequently, any new technology will reflect existing social relations, even as it reforms historical dispositions of power. Old media firms are replaced by new media firms, but capitalism remains. This is so obvious that it is rarely stated, but it's actually an example of hegemony. If you imagine that capitalism is simply human nature ("hardwired" in our brains), you won't question whether it is historically-contingent and therefore may have temporal limits. A technology that undermined or bypassed capitalism then becomes inconceivable. 

This allows supporters of capitalism to criticise the technology, even to the extent of characterising it as a menace to society (making us stupid, eroding democracy etc), without questioning the fundamental social relations that have given rise to it and which it embeds. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, talking about the culture industry of the 1940s, "It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself". Lacking any social explanation, this coercion can then be attributed to personal motives, such as greed or partisanship. We're all familiar with the liberal charge-sheet: Facebook manipulates the credulous for financial gain; political bad-guys use social media to foment hate and convince people to vote against their best interests; Twitter empowers mobs and encourages bullying. What tends to be missing from this analysis is any recognition that social media reflects pre-existing conditions: that Facebook is fundamentally no different to General Motors or that Twitter has no more obligation to society than any capitalist business. 

Old media companies are keen that new media companies should be considered publishers not simply because this will require them to accept responsibilities that will help "level the playing field" commercially, but because the distinction reinforces the claim of old media that it faithfully fulfils those responsibilities itself. The counter-claim of social media firms that they are merely platforms is actually a claim that they are genuinely neutral, because disinterested, which casts the old media's commitment to even-handedness and "speaking truth to power" in a less than flattering light. The social media firms' gradual adoption of their duties as gatekeepers is presented by liberal opinion as not simply the rectification of a market imperfection but as a progressive contribution to society. This contribution takes the form of mitigating social ills that have been "thrown up" or "unleashed" by the technology, as if those behaviours and attitudes characterised as ills either didn't exist hitherto or were simply latent.

This tendency to blame the tool inevitably leads to both an over-inflation of the technology's capability and an exaggeration of its harms. We saw a classic case of this during the week when the Information Commissioner's Office published the results of its long-awaited investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Despite the extensive and often breathless reporting on the company and its dealings over the last four years, this passed almost without notice because the ICO unsurprisingly concluded that there really wasn't anything to see here. Cambridge Analytica's actual "crime" was to have over-sold the common technology that enabled its services. The suggestion that the Russians swung the EU referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election was always absurd, yet it was pursued seriously by mainstream journalists (to the point where it became indistinguishable from conspiracy theory in some cases) essentially because they were unwilling to admit that the business model of commercial data analytics is 90% bullshit.

This makes for an interesting contrast with the coincidental tale of Public Health England's Excel spreadsheet, which revealed the messy reality of much technology in practice. After various banking fiascos in recent years, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that mission-critical systems sometimes rely on outdated software, often lashed-up and poorly understood by its minders. This is partly a result of the "If it ain't broke" mentality, but it also suggests a reluctance to risk updating something that works because quite how and why it works isn't fully understood due to poor documentation, inadequate testing and plate-spinning in an organisation where executive priorities are volatile. After decades of outsourcing and austerity, it also shouldn't come as a surprise to learn that the state lacked a modern, thoroughly-tested system for managing a pandemic, despite this being near the top of the list of civil threats. For all its fetishisation of technology (that world-beating app), or perhaps because of it, it is clear that the government is poor at systems-thinking.

The PHE incident also highlighted the extent to which process integrity can be compromised by the needs of executive oversight. From an architectural perspective, not only should centralised test data have been stored in a database, but the dispatching of cases to tracers and the generation of statistics for reporting (for which Excel is a perfectly appropriate tool) should have been handled by discrete systems. The political dimension to this single point of failure is the way the system embedded a Whitehall-centric reporting hierarchy. Though Serco and other third party service providers were blameless in this case, outsourcing is predicated on the ability of the executive to read the "dashboard", not only to ensure service delivery but to assess contract performance. In other words, the system's vulnerabilities arose from the power relations of the participants. 

Social media isn't an epochal change in human culture - it pales in comparison to the invention of moveable type or telephony - and big data isn't the new oil. Though our digital exhaust is evidence of our psychological need for esteem and our innate sociability, it isn't a vector for mind control. Our engagement remains shallow and self-aware rather than addictive. Likewise, we are not reducing our cognitive diversity through filter bubbles and, far from being at the mercy of arch-manipulators like Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, we continue to find ways to repurpose the technology to meet our actual needs. Social media has brought our commitment to the competition for social esteem into the realm of the market, but that commitment obviously long predates the technology and its commoditisation in popular culture has been a commonplace since the invention of the teenager. The near-ubiquity of social media simply reflects the way that competition has thoroughly colonised society since the 1950s. 

Speech Act

Yesterday saw a mini-celebration of the 35th anniversary of Neil Kinnock's 1985 Labour party conference speech, with various people too young to have heard it first hand claiming to have been inspired. Its current utility is, of course, as an encouragement for Keir Starmer to start purging the contemporary left, though the current leader seems more interested in establishing his credentials as a social conservative and may well feel that the left is unlikely to present a challenge now that the right has successfully recaptured the party apparatus. What everyone remembers about Kinnock's big day in Bournemouth, or thinks they do, was the condemnation of Militant, but the organisation had been proscribed three years earlier so Kinnock didn't even deign to name it. The insults were indirect and coded. The wider context for the speech was Labour's unwillingness to practically support the NUM during the recently-concluded miners' strike and its attempts to distance itself from the "loony left" in local government. The criticism of Liverpool City Council was as much a coded attack on the GLC, while the dismissal of "posturing" was directed at Arthur Scargill as much as Derek Hatton.

The 1985 speech was first a diagnosis of the traumatic 1983 general election defeat and second a prognosis for how Labour could not just beat the Tories but hold off the advance of the SDP Liberal Alliance. That election would prove more pivotal than 1979, extending Thatcher's initially unpopular administration on the back of the Falklands victory and a split anti-Tory vote (the Alliance got 25% compared to Labour's 27%), and establishing the narrative of centrist modernisation that would eventually birth New Labour in the 1990s. For all of Kinnock's passion, the diagnosis turned out to be a tame acceptance of the Thatcherite dispensation with gestures towards greater managerial competence, while the prognosis - essentially that moderation and an appeal to the virtue of the public would restore Labour to power - proved naive during a half-decade that would be marked by contempt for social solidarity, a commitment to personal enrichment and Westminster sleaze. You can draw your own parallels to the present moment.

Kinnock started his speech by criticising the Tories for not living up to their own promises in areas such as law and order, the family, enterprise and freedom. This was an example of his undoubted rhetorical skill, but in highlighting the gap between appearance and reality - the Conservative fixation on "presentation", as he put it - he implicitly accepted many of the Tories' premises. Consider the following: "How is it that the party that promised to roll back the state has arrived at the situation where 1,700,000 more people are entirely dependent on the state because of their poverty during the time the Tories have been in government? ... How does the party of enterprise preside over record bankruptcies? How does the party of tax cuts arrange that the British people now carry the biggest ever burden of taxation in British history?" Kinnock wasn't employing irony but actually agreeing that families shouldn't be dependent on the state, that we should cherish business and that high taxation was a burden.

Central to both Kinnock's diagnosis and prognosis is the idea of change as both a threat and an opportunity, which is worth quoting at length: "We live in a time of rapidly and radically changing technology. We live at a time of shifts in the whole structure of the world economy; we live at a time of new needs among the peoples of the world and new aspirations among young people and among women – late but welcome new aspirations among half of humankind ... Change cannot be left to chance. If it is left to chance, it becomes malicious, it creates terrible victims. It has done so generation in, generation out. Change has to be organised. It has to be shaped to the benefit of a society, deliberately, by those who have democratic power in that society; and the democratic instrument of the people who exist for that purpose is the state – yes, the state. To us that means a particular kind of state – an opportunity state, which exists to assist in nourishing talent and rewarding merit; a productive state, which exists to encourage investment and to help expand output; an enabling state, which is at the disposal of the people instead of being dominant over the people."

For all the prefiguring of Marxism Today's "new times", the idea of the state as an enabler of opportunity, focused on production rather than distribution, wasn't a novel departure in Labour thinking. All of this had been outlined in Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism in 1956. Despite habitually citing Aneurin Bevan, Kinnock was signalling his adoption of Gaitskellite "revisionism". Though backward-looking, this had a topicality and urgency in the mid-80s after the decimation of British industry during Thatcher's first administration. But despite the crowd-pleasing gesture towards capital controls in the speech (a remnant of the influence of the Alternative Economic Strategy advanced by the Bennite left), and a dismissal of the Tories' "non-unionised, low wage, tax-dodging, low-tech privatised" vision, this was essentially a plea for the labour movement to facilitate capital's recomposition of the UK economy and hope for the best. It is for that reason that Kinnock nowhere mentions the miners' strike, which had so recently revealed the strategic focus and tactical brutality of British capital in its contemporary guise of Thatcherism.

Though internationalism has become a dividing line between the right and left of Labour since the 1980s, Kinnock was still speaking at a time when support for the global left and Atlanticism were not considered incompatible, hence his speech included rhetorical back-slaps for the anti-apartheid movement, Solidarnosc, Russian dissidents and democracy in Chile and Nicaragua, as well as a crowd-pleasing commitment to both nuclear disarmament and NATO. This was entirely gestural, which is ironic given his condemnation of the "gesture-generals" of the domestic left. The first three recipients of his solidarity turned out to be triumphs for capital, while the debate on what truly constitutes democracy in South America has now moved on to Venezuela and Bolivia. By contrast, Keir Starmer's first conference speech as leader mentioned "abroad" only tangentially, in a criticism of the government's intention to break international law and a promise that "We’re not going to be a party that keeps banging on about Europe", while the word "comrades", which Kinnock used 14 times, was nowhere to be seen (nor was "socialism").

The contentious commitment to nuclear disarmament was, faute de mieux, presented by Kinnock as an example of integrity: "We want to honour our undertakings in full in every area of policy. We want to say what we mean and mean what we say. We want to keep our promises, and because we want to do that it is essential that we don’t make false promises". This provided the segue into the final section of the speech, which begins with explicit electoralism and an implicit criticism of conference for adopting a load of policies that might jib with the "decent values and aims" of the ordinary voter. At this point Kinnock proceeds to damn the left for "slogans" and "implausible promises". The famous attack on Liverpool City Council is not quite the peroration, but it comes around 90% of the way into the speech. It suggests that Kinnock knew full well that only the last section would be of interest to the media, for whom a Labour leader's speech is only a success if it involves berating the party membership for their presumption and foolishness, and he was determined not to disappoint them, hence he even cues the TV cameras at this point ("People say that leaders speak to the television cameras"). 

The smattering of boos amid the applause was clearly anticipated: "Comrades, the voice of the people – not the people here; the voice of the real people with real needs – is louder than all the boos that can be assembled. Understand that, please, comrades. In your socialism, in your commitment to those people, understand it. The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect the gesture-generals or the tendency-tacticians." This distinction between Labour activists and the people was a theme throughout, and culminated in an example of the "elitist left" trope that is such a feature of Tory and Labour right propaganda: "Comrades, it seems to me lately that some of our number become like latter-day public school-boys. It seems it matters not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game." The actual peroration, when it finally arrives, is boilerplate pragmatism: "Principle and power, conviction and accomplishment, going together. We know that power without principle is ruthless and vicious, and hollow and sour. We know that principle without power is naïve, idle sterility". 

The media reaction ranged from the rightwing focus on Labour's continuing problems with Militant and the "loony left", with some asides about Kinnock's windbaggery, to liberal glee at the Labour leader's conversion not only to moderation but to modernisation and professionalism, which was emblematically marked that year by the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Labour's Director of Communications. James Naughtie in the Guardian caught the vibe: "Mr Kinnock prompted an ecstatic ovation by telling his party that electoral victory could not be achieved by 'pious faith or by dreams' but by 'working for it, planning for it, organising for it'". The irony here is that Militant had been proscribed in 1982 not for dreaming but for organising. It's also worth noting that Naughtie was not quoting from Kinnock's actual speech but presumably from a separate briefing, indicating the importance that "spin" would come to have in the reporting of Labour politics over the next two decades.

Kinnock's speech is remembered today as the start of the process by which the Labour left were ushered off the stage and the scene set for the arrival of Tony Blair, but this ignores that the left had already been largely sidelined by 1983, not simply through the proscription of the always-marginal Militant but with the more significant defeat of Tony Benn in the Deputy Leadership election of 1981 and his absence from Parliament immediately after the general election, which prevented him running for Leader after Michael Foot's resignation and opened the door for Kinnock to emerge as the "left" candidate. While some Militant stragglers would be expelled by Labour after 1985, the purging of the broad left from positions of power was carried out mainly by the Thatcher government through the abolition of the GLC and the other metropolitan county councils. Kinnock would lead Labour to two general election defeats, though he can claim to have reduced the Liberal Democrats (as they became) from 25% to 17% over 9 years. Blair's victory in 1997 was down to the collapse of the Conservatives after Black Wednesday, when they lost 4.5 million votes of which 2 million shifted to Labour. What mattered in the end was not Labour's moderation or virtue but the Tories' proven incompetence.