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.