Heroes and Villains

In his recent short essay, What was Corbynism?, Will Davies noted that the moral cause that swept the backbench MP to the leadership of the Labour party was a reaction to the instrumental moralising of David Cameron and George Osborne: "The aftermath of the financial crisis witnessed a resurgent politics of guilt, in which authority derived from its capacity to mete out punishment to those who had allegedly had it too good. ... Devastating cuts to the welfare budget and to local government (which is responsible for so much of what holds society together, via social care and children’s services) were notionally justified on a nonsensical macroeconomic pretext that they would generate growth and balanced budgets, but morally and psychologically justified on the basis that someone needed to suffer." The war on welfare was not just an article of faith for the Tories, it was a cynical diversion at a time when QE was cushioning the wealth of asset-holders. As Davies continues, "The point is that, several years before an unlikely figure from the Stop The War coalition became Leader of the Opposition, austerity had already been waged as a moralistic program based around a logic of innocence, guilt and punishment, overlayed on to a financialised economy divided ... according to a logic of assets and debt."

Had Labour's interim leader, Harriet Harman, taken a moral stand over benefit cuts in 2015, then it is likely that the leadership election would have seen a "soft left" candidate, such as the second-placed Andy Burnham, win handsomely. Though the membership clearly wanted the party to be more leftwing in general, and Corbyn enjoyed a sympathetic regard because of his historic radicalism, it was ethics rather than politics that fuelled his victory in the contest. Labour lost sight of its historic purpose as the voice of the dispossesed and the disadvantaged - and this was as much due to the Parliamentary Party's longstanding pusillanimity as the ideological dérapage of the New Labour years - with the result that one of the few sincere international socialists in its ranks became its conscience. One way of understanding how a largely unchanged membership could vote first for Corbyn and then for Starmer is to recognise that in 2015 they had little choice if they didn't want to compromise their core beliefs about what Labour stood for. Unlike the PLP, the opportunistic perpetuation of the party was not enough.

This moral dimension is salient at the moment because of Rishi Sunak's recent Spending Review. In the midst of the pandemic, the Conservative government finds itself unable to target its usual cast of the disreputable. The unemployed, who are forecast to number 2.6 million by the middle of next year, cannot be beasted as workshy or inadequate when jobs are disappearing through no fault of their own. Similarly, "skivers" will remain a redundant insult as long as the furlough scheme continues. That the £20 a week uplift to Universal Credit is due to end at the same time, next April, is obviously not a coincidence, while the ending of the grace period on benefit capping is already underway. This explains why the groups singled out by the Chancellor in his statement for punitive treatment are those who are deemed to at least have jobs and therefore less cause for complaint, hence public sector workers (with doctors, nurses and those on the lowest pay exempted) are expected to bear a real-terms pay reduction despite their efforts on the "frontline". Likewise, foreign aid can be slashed because the recipients have made no sacrifices for the nation and are popularly seen as queue-jumpers for limited charity. 

This last move is particularly vicious and has presumably been chosen (thereby breaking a manifesto pledge) in order to provide rightwing newspapers and the reactionary base with some red meat at a time when domestic villains are in short supply. As foreign aid is set as a share of GDP, maintaining it at 0.7% would represent a real-terms cut anyway because the economy has contracted by an estimated 11.3%. The additional "saving", estimated at £5 billion over the coming year, is negligible in terms of both the current deficit and accumulated debt. Public sector net borrowing for 2020-21 is forecast to be £394 billion while total debt will be north of £2 trillion. The popularity of this move is not a reflection of a lack of charity among Britons, who have mostly elevated Marcus Rashford to hero status for his campaigning for extended school meals, though the excuse that "We should spend it on our own people" often comes from those most insistent that domestic welfare should be trimmed as well. Rather it reflects a desire to export the punishment Davies talks of and not have to witness the consequences. It is an act of moral cowardice in which a majority of the population are implicated.

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed severe shortcomings in the state's resilience and capacity, and has particularly highlighted the damaging effect of austerity on local authorities over the last decade. Though more money has been provided for the extraordinary measures demanded by the pandemic, there is little sign that the government either intends to redress the last ten years of counterproductive underfunding or to alter its preference for outsourcing and private sector profit-making over public sector provision, despite the clearly greater competence of the latter in areas such as track and trace and the almost comical levels of incompetence and corruption revealed in the awarding of contracts for PPE and other pandemic-related products and services. The idea that there won't be a return to austerity, or indeed that austerity ever actually ended, is not supported by current policy. We are currently in a phoney war where the government cannot launch its austerity campaign for want of suitably contemptible opponents. Efforts were made to fill the temporary absence with the press focus on "Covidiots" earlier in the year, and more recently in ministerial statements that sought to pin the blame for the second wave on the public, but these have been undermined by confused regulations and perceived unfairness over local lockdowns.

The political right has always needed enemies within, but the intensity of the hatred of selected scapegoats is a relatively new development, and one that increasingly extends to the liberal centre. In a 2016 New Left Review essay, Davies describes the history of applied Neoliberalism in three phases. The initial period of 1979-89 was defined by its "combative opposition to socialism, whose destruction, both internationally and domestically, provided its animating telos". Despite failing in its public objectives to reduce unemployment ("Labour isn't working") and increase productivity ("Let managers manage"), it clearly succeeded in its core objective of marginalising socialism. The normative neoliberalism of the second phase, which spanned 1989-2008, was engaged in the "remaking of subjectivity around the ideal of enterprise", with competition (both real and artificial) employed as a means to discover best practice and ensure fairness. To this end, centre-left parties found themselves more in tune with the times because of both their greater willingness to pursue managerial and technocratic approaches to governance and their tolerance for increased public expenditure. Inequality was legitimised on the grounds of both efficiency and fairness. When neoliberal governance was shown to be hollow by the banking crisis, inequality once more became salient in political discourse.

The third phase, which Davies styles punitive neoliberalism, is still ongoing and is characterised by the focus on debt, which is held up both as a failure of government in the preceding phases and as a personal shortcoming, hence the utility of daft analogies between government spending and households or credit cards. "Under punitive neoliberalism, economic dependency and moral failure become entangled in the form of debt, producing a melancholic condition in which governments and societies unleash hatred and violence upon members of their own populations". Again, this is not simply an irrational spasm but an emergent process whose purpose is to divert society from the need to acknowledge the failure of neoliberalism to save capitalism by making it either fairer or more efficient. As Davies puts it, "One way of interpreting the apparently senseless violence of punitive neoliberalism is as a strategy for the circumvention of crisis and, at the same time, an avoidance of critique". 

In this context, the recent examples of cronyism and waste, and the disregard for public opinion over the subsequent revelations, are as telling as the Prime Minister's decision that far from being sacked for bullying, the Home Secretary should be held up as an example to us all, a heroine battling the Civil Service's ingrained misogyny and racism. In the eyes of liberal opinion, this is more evidence of Johnson's lack of virtue and the Conservatives' unwillingness to be bound by the norms that they insist should be observed by others. But this critique ignores that the Tories' defence of their actions actually rests on the arguments of combative and normative neoliberalism: that the free market must be prioritised over the state, even if that means tolerating abuse at the margin; and that coercive management is acceptable if it produces positive outcomes. As we (hopefully) come out of the pandemic next year, we can expect Tory rhetoric to return to the identification of society's villains in advance of a new round of rebranded austerity. Until then, if you want your punitive neoliberalism fix, you'll have to make do with the Labour party's war on its own membership.