Reckless Opportunists

Almost two years ago I wrote a post on the modern establishment, which was triggered by Toby Young's comical failure to wangle himself a bully pulpit at the newly-established Office for Students. Coincidentally, I had read a Guardian article by Aeron Davis of Goldsmith's College on the same subject which I felt didn't diverge sufficiently from the methodology and sociological assumptions established by Anthony Sampson's seminal 1962 work, Anatomy of Britain. The article was a puff-piece for Davis's own slim volume, Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment, which I've finally got round to reading. This is my belated review. The first point to note is that the Guardian piece was a pretty decent summary of the work, so I don't think I was wrong in my superficial reading. In fact, it's pretty much a straight edit for length of chapter 1, whose conclusion was: "The logics of neoliberalism and unbounded self-interest are as potentially destructive to the Establishment as they are to the rest of society. ... Self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications".

Davis touches on a number of familiar themes that reflect the declining calibre of those managing the state: the increased homogeneity of the establishment, from PPE degrees to promiscuous job-hopping (hence why a journalist could think it realistic to be appointed to the OfS, or even become Prime Minister); the groupthink and reliance on business bullshit that reinforces this homegeneity and excludes the heterodox; the shift from qualitative to quantitative assessment in both the private and public sectors (the primacy of shareholder value, the tyranny of targets); and the way that the UK establishment has become increasingly international due to globalisation, encouraging hyper-mobility and a consequent lack of loyalty to, and even interest in, British society. In a brief review in April 2018, Simon Wren-Lewis summarised Davis: "He suggests the elite have lost coherence: that rather than look after the interests of the network as a whole (and for a conservative therefore the country), they look after the interests of themselves. They have become the reckless opportunists of the book’s title, getting what they can from the chaos they helped create."

What I find interesting is Wren-Lewis's description of a dynamic system, hence the importance of the lack of coherence and the failure to look after the network. Though this critique comes out in the book, Davis has addressed the subject more in terms of the sociology of elites, where the emphasis is on group identification and norms, how people feel and act, rather than historical development - i.e. how and why the system has changed. This is not to say that the latter is neglected, but that the analysis is relatively shallow. For example, neoliberalism is charged with being a corrosive, but without any real explanation as to how it became hegemonic; while the primacy of self-interest is offered as a moral decline and fall (there are the usual nostalgic asides by old City types about the pre-Big Bang days), which ignores the long history of corruption and greed to which the House of Lords stands as a monument. In my view, the establishment has always been essentially political, rather than a field in which different elites, from high finance to the military, coordinate or compete for influence across society as a whole. 

Davis is good on the political milieu, particularly the way that it has become increasingly enmeshed with the media. One of the features of this development, on both sides, is habitual ignorance and a preference for presentation over real expertise. The decline of investigative reporting, along with the increasing social homogeneity of senior media types, appears to have led not only to churnalism but a proprietorial defence of political orthodoxy. The scepticism of power has been replaced by a mixture of sanctimony and sarcasm. Few modern politicians have much of a hinterland beyond machine politics, having often climbed the greasy pole straight from a PPE degree (or a job in PR, like David Cameron) and then struggled with ministerial tenures too short to develop real knowledge, a trend that accelerated during the New Labour years (as Davis notes, domain experts like Frank Field, Chris Smith and Estelle Morris stalled in their careers partly because their expertise was often unhelpful while the glib and media-savvy who lacked independence of thought prospered). 

Another dimension the book brings out well is the way that elites, particularly in politics and business, have come to rely on ever more sophisticated lies to both avoid public scrutiny and salve their own consciences, from an emphasis on "values" and "purpose" to CSR and greenwashing. This has produced a regime of justification in which metrics are routinely gamed, plus a burgeoning industry of thinktanks and academics incentivised to produce helpful research. This in turn has fed the churnalism machine and provided grounds for motivated reasoning, such as the tendentious claims made about "efficient markets" or "threats to security". The consequence is an increasing incidence of catastrophic failures, due to dodgy balance sheets and dodgy dossiers, and a sharp drop in public confidence in both government information and journalism. To bring it up to date, the mix of self-delusion and ignorance has been particularly evident over the last 12 months in the Conservative's serial broken promises and Labour's fear of intellectual engagement.

Where I differ from Davis is that I don't believe that all of these developments have been as stark or as recent as he imagines (the Tories have regularly broken their promises and Labour has always been anti-intellectual). The traditional view of the establishment promoted by Sampson in the 1960s was already out-of-date, being more a picture of the pre-War and immediate post-war world remembered by his interviewees. Likewise, Davis's picture, which he built up over twenty years of interviews, tells us more about Tony Blair's "sofa government" than it does about the cronyism in the award of government contracts seen over the last year. Self-interest has always been at the heart of the establishment, and that heart is the interface of state and commerce. Public service and the interests of "the country" were themselves the self-deluding lies told by earlier generations. Recall that if there was anything that qualified as conventional wisdom among the establishment of the 1930s it was appeasement, which was founded on a desire to preserve the British Empire and avoid the social disruption that total war was expected to bring (the Great War brought democracy and the next was expected to bring socialism, as indeed it partially did).

Likewise, while the structural changes to the City and corporate governance since the 1980s have been profound they haven't produced a notably different commercial culture as far as morality or innovation are concerned. UK business has always tended towards short-termism, financial leverage and asset-stripping, and displayed a perennial suspicion of unorthodox thinking. Indeed, this critique of the commercial establishment is over a century old. If there has been a cultural change in recent decades it originates in New Labour's embrace of wealth-creation as embodied in the City and "superstar" CEOs. It was in the 1990s that the chinese wall between these two rooms of the establishment came down, with the result that they have now effectively merged into one. This is evident not only in the high proportion of bankers and corporate types who become MPs but in the equally high proportion of MPs who then seek second careers in company boardrooms (and not just British ones). The commercial establishment hasn't changed that much but the political has become highly commercialised.

The other significant change in the British establishment over the last twenty years can largely be traced to the disruption of the media. Again the issue is not so much an internal cultural shift among journalists or the structural shift away from reporting to comment and opinion (there's always been plenty of the latter), but rather the merging of the media and political milieus. As Davis notes, quoting Nick Robinson, in an age of 24-hour news Westminster correspondents spend more time with politicians and their competitors in the lobby than they do with other journalists from their own newspaper or TV channel. Now that's probably always been true, but what has changed is that there is no longer as clear a dividing line between the two in terms of background and career. Not only are journalists becoming politicians, but it is student politicians at Oxbridge who increasingly become (privileged) commentators. In other words, the root problem is the wider issue of falling social mobility and the lack of cognitive and cultural diversity this gives rise to.

For all the emphasis on old school ties, the establishment in the social democratic era was still relatively porous and mutable, partly because the expansion of the public sector did open up new paths of meritocratic advance. The marketisation and privatisation of much of the state since 1979 has not only led to greater self-interest and nepotism, it has moved significant operations beyond the conceptual boundary of the British establishment. Fewer people today think of themselves as members of it as opposed to members of a global elite. Increasingly, the establishment has narrowed to politics and those parts of industry and finance, together with privileged elements of the media, with whom they interface for commercial and presentational reasons. I don't think that the establishment is at its "end", as Davis suggests, even if it is more obviously decadent. You can point to the accession of a dishonest journalist to the premiership as evidence of opportunism, but the restoration of Labour's ancien regime under a bureaucratic lawyer suggests that recklessness has its limits. 

The Paradox of Coordination

Though we have far better tools today to allow us to coordinate, notably improved communication (social media) and predictability (data analytics), we struggle to do so outside of the trivial satisfaction of needs (Twitter, Amazon etc). Recent events, from the UK's response to the pandemic to the USA's inability to prevent an invasion of its legislature, suggest that the modern state does not find it as easy to handle either the exceptional or the foreseeable as yesterday's sci-fi envisaged. Not only is the Deep State apparently out to lunch but the formal state appears unable to marshall let alone pre-empt events. And this is not just a feature of liberal democracies. The ineptness and clumsiness of the Russian and Chinese regimes, from hit-and-miss assassinations to preventative mass detention, points to a lack of sophistication and an excess of administrative paranoia, but it also indicates that technological advances haven't delivered either the Orwellian dystopia of thoughtcrime or the Dickian dystopia of precrime. There is little qualitative difference between this and a traditional absolutism, merely an upgrade in technology. Spyware on smartphones has replaced the interception of sealed letters and blanket security laws the carte blanche. 

We may be surveilled more thoroughly but there is no sense that society is better managed, regardless of how authoritarian the state is. The proferred explanation for this difficulty in coordinating national populations is a mix of individualism and polarisation, which are superficially contradictory. As homo economicus, the neoliberal monad, we pursue our selfish interests, but this should, through the invisible hand, produce an aggregate good. In other words, it is folly to attempt to coordinate society, just as it is to intervene in the market. Obviously events like a global pandemic rather give the lie to that, though there are plenty who will insist that their personal rights should not be infringed for the benefit of public health. At the same time we are told that society is split into two irreducible halves - essentially the liberal and the conservative - whose unchanging values are rivalrous and irreconcilable (you can only be converted or deprogrammed). These homogenous blocs are engaged in a culture war and everyone must pick a side. What individualism and polarisation share is an epistemological perspective. The one believes that solipsistic obliviousness is the key to social wellbeing - i.e. we should focus on knowledge of self -  while the other holds that half the population (the other half, of course) is profoundly ignorant and must be schooled. But for either view to be true, we have to believe that ignorance has grown over time: that we have fallen from an Edenic state of common purpose and empathy.

Despite the tenacious myth of the filter bubble, we are actually far more cognisant and aware of each other than we were in the past, and not just locally or nationally but internationally too. The inhabitants of Stornoway and Penzance share far more of a culture and worldview than their forbears did, but they also share more with the inhabitants of Santiago and Poona. This should make coordination easier at the level of social norms and behaviours, yet we seem to be faced with a determination to fragment into camps built around antagonistic values, even within the highly-localised confines of the nuclear family. This isn't just the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt, not least because those "values" typically stress homogeneity and group identities. Of course much of this is the deliberate construction of a politics that obscures class interests and flattens heterogeneity (the gay OAP, the anti-racist ex-miner etc) in the service of journalistic stereotypes. But it also reflects a narcissism of small differences. The 2020 fuss over whether Last Night of the Proms should include the 18th century classic Rule, Britannia! evoked memories of the contemporaneous Jonathan Swift's reports on the conflict of Lilliput's Big-endians and Little-endians.

This determined obliviousness and wilful ignorance is occasionally remarked upon, but largely in a partisan context. So the supporters of Donald Trump and Brexit have been accused by liberals of closed-mindedness and a belief in fantastic conspiracies, while the political left has been reduced to an inward-looking "cult". Yet the accusers themselves have been guilty of the same, from the idea that free broadband is commie madness to the belief that Russia decisively interfered in a UK referendum and a US Presidential election. And when it comes to cult-like behaviour, the belief that a 78 year-old machine politician with a history of supporting domestic repression and imperial adventure is going to usher in a new age of justice is textbook delusion. For all the valorisation of science and Enlightenment values, there seems to have been a widespread embrace of the irrational and emotional among both liberals and conservatives since the 1990s. In contrast, what has characterised the left since 1989, whether in the form of wry cynicism or optimistic humanism, has been a commitment to the rational and empirical, along with a modesty of ambition. It's almost as if the true inheritors of Spinoza and Voltaire are left shitposters.

I think the emblematic discourse of today is not a dispute over Trumpian "facts", or the schadenfreude as another Brexiteer says "This isn't what I expected", but rather a liberal loudly denouncing a leftist in patronising and deliberately offensive terms. I'm sure you're familiar with the charges and the tone: you lack realism because you are politically immature, you embrace conspiracy because you can't get your own way, your support for socialism proves you are an antisemite etc. Some of this is simple bad faith, and some may even be projection, but what it also points to is how liberalism has increasingly taken on the aura of a religion, demanding auto da fés ("Apologise! Apologise again!") and adherence to a catechism that inevitably breeds schism (the horror of the UK's gender-critical feminists at Biden's executive order on trans rights highlights not only the weirdness of Britain's TERFs but the instability of liberalism more generally). This is annoying enough at the level of the individual, but it becomes acute in a political system built on intra-party coalitions as the demand for ideological purity is self-defeating. This patronising intolerance appears to be particularly afflicting Labour at the moment, neutralising its criticism of the government's competence and alienating significant numbers of the membership ahead of the local elections still scheduled for May.

Political parties have long relied on the domain expertise of marketing and PR folk to improve their communications and media engagement. But they have always insisted that this is auxiliary to their core competence of winning elections, which is firstly a political leadership matter, centred on the offer to the electorate and the critique of the opposing parties, and secondly a party organisation matter, centred on canvassing. Labour's recent decision to employ a management consultancy to advise it on how to win the next election is notable because the remit (insofar as it is known) appears to encroach on this core competence. Some of this will no doubt turn out to be the usual case of consultancy self-promotion, which dovetails with the old trick employed by management whereby measures that are potentially unpopular within the organisation are driven through under cover of the claim that they are only "following third-party advice", but there is also a sense that this goes beyond a return to the technocratic managerialism of the Blair years. Starmer's Labour appears to be unabashed by its own ignorance. In this it appears to be adhering even more tightly to the neoliberal conception of politics as marketing and parties as firms, sensitive only to price signals (focus groups, opinion polls) and resolutely opposed to theory (even of the third way variety - there is no Anthony Giddens in Starmer's coterie).

It was only a year ago that "winning the argument" was roundly dimissed as irrelevant if you can't win the election, and yet here we are being told that the new leadership is so unconfident of its native ability to do the latter that it feels obliged to outsource much of its planning and design. This could be excused as the habitual approach of a leadership whose background owes more to bureaucracy than campaigning, or even as a performative gesture to reassure business that Labour's new management is on the same wave-length, but it doesn't wholly obscure the paradox that the party does not appear to trust itself. That the PLP does not trust the membership beyond its utility as canvassing fodder is hardly news, but this development also suggests that the leadership isn't entirely convinced by the PLP, or even the current front bench. Ironically, this is not that much of a departure from the last year of Corbyn's leadership when the PLP was marginalised in the development of the 2019 manifesto (though understandably so given the efforts of many of its members to undermine the 2017 version). 

Labour failed in 2019 because it was unable to coordinate an effective electoral coalition. The forces arrayed against it were obviously considerable - not only the Conservatives but all of the minor parties, who targeted Labour more than the Tories, plus the media and the then-loudest voices in civil society (the People's Vote campaign, the anti-antisemitism lobby) - but it still failed to do as much as it might have done. This was partly down to personalities and talent, though they weren't much different to 2017, but it also reflected the simple truth that Labour found itself disadvantaged because its position on Brexit didn't coincide with the dominant narrative of a polarised public. It didn't come clearly down on one side or the other. That it has subsequently made the choice, and done so almost casually, simply indicates that it believes that particular axis of polarisation is now redundant. So what has taken its place? It is becoming clear that Keir Starmer doesn't (at least for the moment) see Boris Johnson and the Tories as his chief opponent, let alone the wider forces of capitalism or reaction. That role is held by the left, which means that the polarisation at the heart of the leader's politics is a peculiarly narrow one with little resonance among the wider electorate. 

Combined with his belief in Labour's organisational ignorance, this gives the impression of a party that is both parochial and vacuous, which really doesn't look like a winning formula. The Conservative government has provided ample evidence at the national scale of the shortcomings of the market, from the inept test and trace programme to the way that the selfish interests of many businesses, encouraged by the Chancellor, are undermining public health. It has tried to defray criticism by a new polarisation, between the irresponsible people and the virtuous state (a stretch given the personalities involved in the latter), while the press has discovered a new polarisation between Covid survivors and sceptics. Meanwhile, Starmer's Labour finds itself marginalised: prevented by its commitment to constructive criticism (and its own authoritarian instincts) from properly defending the people from the charge of irresponsibility, and an also-ran in the dismissal of Covid sceptics due to its own mis-steps over school opening and its premature call for an "exit strategy". We have a government that has proven incompetent at coordinating the nation in the face of a major threat to life and health (a crisis of governmentality, no less), and an official opposition that appears to have eschewed the coordination of civil society against that government (a crisis of the counter-movement) in favour of performative outsourcing and factional beef.

The Cancellation of Trump

The suspension of Donald Trump from Twitter has been welcomed by many who believe that social media promotes echo chambers and disinformation. This strikes me as odd because Trump was clearly followed by people of all political persuasions, including opponents who derisively retweeted him. Short of blocking his account and muting the very mention of his name, it wasn't possible to preserve your "filter bubble" from his yawping. He sought to expand his reach rather than limit it to the select few, and I can't help wondering if he sometimes exaggerated the madness to this end. Contrary to his characterisation as a political exception, his strategy was a conventional one of both reinforcing his base and trying to attract additional supporters. He may be a racist but he was happy to welcome black and latinx voters to his camp. Similarly, his attempts at disinformation prompted broad and detailed pushback, not to mention ridicule. The actual echo chambers within which conspiracy theories are shared and plots hatched are to be found on private platforms, like WhatsApp and Telegram, not essentially public platforms like Twitter and Facebook. So why is there now a political focus on the latter?

The chief reason is that these platforms are seen as central to the public sphere, hence the conflicting demands being made of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg: you should have acted earlier to restrain Trump; you shouldn't have the power to censor public debate. It's worth noting that this has come about due to the selective recycling of content by TV and newspapers rather than because the new platforms have supplanted traditional media. This selectivity takes two main forms: the amplification of statements and actions by people who are already considered newsworthy by the traditional gatekeepers, and the holding up of the vicious and aggressive opinions of the mob for ridicule. The common thread is the maintenance of order. The concern of the traditional media is not that Twitter or Facebook failed to restrain Trump. After all, he received far greater uncritical exposure through the press and TV, while the "other ranks" of social media often highlighted his lies and evasions better than many paid commentators. The real worry is that social media has proven too democratic. It is therefore unsurprising that the the discourse has swiftly moved from the restraint of Donald Trump to the restraint of Twitter and Facebook. The critique of social media has followed three lines of attack for over a decade now.

The first is anti-trust. The obvious problem is that the value of platforms like Twitter and Facebook lies in the network effect, so a pro-competition policy cannot be pursued without destroying a leading American industry (and handing an opportunity to China). You cannot break the major social media platforms up like Standard Oil or AT&T, even if you can force Facebook to divest WhatsApp and Instagram. In reality, the now-dominant view on anti-trust, promulgated by Robert Bork in the 1970s (now more famous for being rejected by the Senate as a Supreme Court nominee in the 80s), is that monopoly is fine so long as customers benefit. As they would demonstrably lose value, a break-up simply isn't on the cards. The second critique of social media has been the perceived costs to the consumer through the loss of privacy and the associated exploitation of personal data. But as a decade of officious interventions in the form of opt-ins has shown, most users rationally consider the value of their data to be trivial and therefore an acceptable cost in exchange for the utility of social media. The third line of critique has been about the ability of social media companies to deny responsibility for hosted content on the grounds that they are platforms and not publishers. In practice, their adoption of (largely) retrospective purging of the most objectionable content is probably as far as they can realistically go. You cannot edit the Internet.

The impossibility of platform break-up and the gradual development of a safety regime focused on the disciplining of users means that the problematic of social media is less one of commercial competition than managed democracy. To date, both Twitter and Facebook have followed conventional liberal opinion by intervening to suppress or flag certain content and to suspend or bar certain individuals. Neither is particularly effective, precisely because the network effect means there's too much content to censor and the user population is too dynamic to herd, plus the risk of false positives (from malicious reporting to simple misunderstandings) is high. Ultimately, the problem of social media is democracy. While the neoreactionaries of the Dark Enlightenment are happy to acknowledge this truth, the modern inheritors of the original Enlightenment can't do so without admitting that their liberalism is founded on a bedrock of authoritarianism. The result is a continued demand for regulation in terms of publisher accountability, privacy and competition, without acknowledging that the last decade, now culminating in the bizarre spectacle of the President of the United States being suspended from the leading platforms, has shown the impracticality and irrelevance of this approach. But even if there is little practical value in it, the insistence is still politically important.

The Harvard economist Matt Stoller thinks the solution is tighter rules of the game (specifically how the platforms make their money) and robust enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission led by a new class of administrative hero. The governing ideal is that the state must not only protect the interests of the individual consumer but more broadly ensure that competition itself supports the democratic polity. This isn't a qualification of Bork but a rearticulation of the coordinating role of the state that goes back to the Freiburg School of the 1930s. If we think of neoliberalism as a broad field that lies between the poles of "the free market" and "the social market", this marks a swing towards the latter and thus the European model rather than the Anglo-Saxon. This has been echoed on cue by Thierry Breton, the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market: "These last few days have made it more obvious than ever that we cannot just stand by idly and rely on these platforms’ good will or artful interpretation of the law. We need to set the rules of the game and organize the digital space with clear rights, obligations and safeguards. We need to restore trust in the digital space. It is a matter of survival for our democracies in the 21st century." A phrase like "restore trust" should set the alarm bells ringing. I don't go on Twitter because I "trust it", whatever that means.

Michel Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), noted that 20th century "state phobia" took two forms: market liberalism and totalitarianism. Far from being in opposition to each other, they are both attempts to resist the growth of the administrative state, that melding of absolutism and incipient socialism that characterised Bismarck's Germany. Neoliberalism is the "idea of a legitimising foundation of the state on the guaranteed exercise of an economic freedom" (page 83). In contrast, "the characteristic feature of the state we call totalitarian [is] ... a limitation, a reduction, and a subordination of the autonomy of the state [to the] party" (page 190). The one limits the state horizontally (the public sphere must not transgress on the private), the other vertically (the state must serve the party). These two approaches each have many varieties, reflecting different historical contexts and cultures. For example, neoliberalism was crucial to the legitimation of the Federal Republic of Germany, producing a conservative and cautious variant (ordoliberalism) that has in turn heavily influenced the EU. In contrast, neoliberalism in the UK has been presented as progressive and dynamic, by both Conservative and Labour governments, and even provided a constructive impetus to the EU in the form of the Single European Act.

The US is different again. The structure of party politics, specifically the persistence of self-perpetuating elites (the RNC and DNC) and affiliation through voter registration, means that there is both a tight inner party and a loose, verging on chaotic, outer party. The former tends to be bureaucratic and centripetal (giving rise to the fetish of bipartisanhip), while the latter tends to attract an activist fringe that in other countries would simply be barred or purged. This encourages mavericks who can build support among the outer party, but it also leads to a persistent (and not unjustifed) populism as a response to the ingrained antagonism between the inner and outer. Historically, as the party facing the inroads of first the Populists and then the socialist left, the Democrats have tended to be the most wary of the outer party and the most committed to organising it into loyal blocs (in the tradition of Tammany Hall). The party electoral coup of Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 proved beyond Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, not just because of the power of money and the DNC's machinations, but because of the crucial influence on registered supporters of key organisers such as Jim Clyburn of South Carolina.

A difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the latter have, at least since Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, been more comfortable manipulating the outer party by feeding it raw meat rather than seeking to suppress its appetite. A consequence of this is that the party has increasingly melded the two forms noted by Foucault, with the intersection being state-phobia. The inner party of the rich, the superego today represented by Mitch McConnell, is neoliberal in its programme (the privileging of capital under the guise of economic freedom) but the outer party, the id represented by Donald Trump, is totalitarian in its inclination (the claimed monopoly on truth, the ostracism of "traitors", the conspiracism). The combination of the two has marginalised the pragmatic ego (which McConnell is now belatedly trying to revive). This totalitarian subordination to the party extends to petty behaviours, such as Republican members of Congress still groundlessly disputing the election results after the Capitol riot and then refusing to go through metal detectors despite heightened security. But while there are plenty happy to bandy about the term "Fascist" in respect of Trump, a narcissistic opportunist and career criminal, what this theatre of objection and refusal illustrates is that the outer party is fundamentally reactionary rather than programmatically Fascist.

While there are actual neo-Nazis among registered Republicans, and plenty among the militias who would indulge violence, the essentially negative nature of the outer party means it is closer, in the classic typology of the right, to the supporters of a Latin American military junta than the NSDAP, a point reinforced by the social background of the Capitol Hill rioters. This is the American bourgeoisie, business owners and professionals, rather than degraded peasants or disillusioned proletarians. While there are some whose backstories are the familiar tale of hard times and ressentiment, notably Ashli Babbitt, and there was no shortage of ex-service and police personnel involved on the 6th of January, this isn't the Freikorps or the Blackshirts. But does this distinction matter? I think it does because while a society can suppress outright Fascism, or at least make adherence to it so socially costly that it is driven to the fringe, as Germany and Italy did in the postwar years, you cannot remove reaction from the polity or marginalise it, simply because it is foundational to conservative thought. However repulsive its manifestations, it is a legitimate political stance and crucially one that sees itself as particularly legitimate (hence it imagines itself as the victim of a conspiracy, not a conspiracy itself). The American reactionary will not disappear, any more than Donald Trump will remain cancelled. 

The worry is that the precedent set by Twitter will (unless overturned by the courts) result in a censorship regime in which a tiny minority of users are disadvantaged, essentially to show that the market can successfully discipline democracy. The makeup of this group will be distinctive: mostly low-follower accounts falling foul of various propriety rules, sprinkled with a few high-follower, semi-crazed celebrities lacking self-control. The "politicals" will be an even smaller number, possibly no more than a handful at any one time. What will be missing is the middle-class of journalists and professional provocateurs who actually contribute the majority of the disinformation and conspiracy-mongering to public discourse. This doesn't mean that the disadvantaged public figures, whether celebrities or politicians, will disappear altogether - I'm sure the New York Times will happily publish a column by Trump, so long as it has final edit, just as Laurence Fox will never want for an outlet in the UK - but that just means that the appearance of free speech will be preserved at the cost of once more ceding control to the gatekeepers. Twitter has made a material contribution to democracy by pursuing its market interests, but it is now accepting that it must subordinate its ambitions to the interests of the true inner party - the one that encompasses both the Democrats and the Republicans: the party of order.

Breaking Point

All of the developments that have apparently taken the government by surprise during the Covid-19 pandemic were predictable and probable, and I don't just mean exams and public holidays. As early as late January, when the first cases were recorded in the UK, we knew that the virus could spread rapidly: that was the lesson of China where Wuhan was locked down on the 20th and 6,000 cases were recorded nationally by the 29th (the UK Foreign Office advised against all but essential travel there on the 23rd). By the end of the month, 27 countries had confirmed cases. Though it was slow to react, the World Health Organisation declared the Covid-19 outbreak a global public health emergency on the 30th. Given that recorded cases lag actual infections, and considering the rapid spread already seen and the time of year (the flu season), it was likely that this would be a much more serious outbreak than the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic (which hit in the summer, with a second wave in autumn) and that the conditions were already in place for the outbreak in the UK to spread rapidly. It was clearly time for prompt action.

But something changed in offical thinking. The initial moves to quarantine cruise ship passengers and travellers from Wuhan gave way during February to a more laissez-faire approach in which people returning from skiing holidays in Northern Italy were waved through passport control and merely advised to self-isolate if they developed symptoms. By mid-March we started to hear about "herd immunity" and "cocooning". In practical terms, the strategy was supposedly to allow 60% of the population to become infected while protecting the 40% deemed vulnerable due to age or underlying health conditions. At the same time, the government announced that testing outside of hospitals would come to an end. Though the "herd immunity" phrase was soon banned from official communications, it is clear that the government's strategy was based on the assumption that a gradual spread through the population could be tolerated until such time as a vaccine was developed and that its immediate focus should be on slowing the spread, i.e. "flattening the curve". When the measures taken proved insufficient, we entered the first lockdown. This marked an escalation in management but not a change in strategy.

At no point does the government appear to have seriously consided eradication, which would have entailed strict quarantines for travellers, extensive testing and tracing, and repeated lockdowns (though we've ended up pursuing some of these measures anyway). The assumed trade-off for eradication is damage to the economy, though the quid-pro-quo is the potential of a more rapid recovery due to popular confidence. But it's also likely that worries about the state's ability to successfully implement such a strategy also informed the decision. This was excused at the time in terms of the population's anticipated "fatigue", but the claim that such measures would have been alien to a British society raised on tales of wartime fortitude are as risible as the idea that they would have been in conflict with the Prime Minister's "libertarian instincts". The thinking appears to have been: let nature take its course. But there must be more to it than an ideological aversion to state intervention or a belief that plague is a judgement on the undeserving. The government's progress has been characterised by the media as a series of u-turns, but that's just a lazy frame. It would be more accurate to say that the government's handling has been reactive rather than proactive. But why, given that so much was predictable?

Is this simple dither and delay? While Boris Johnson is clearly lazy and reluctant to take difficult decisions, I don't think we can attribute the government's slowness to act solely to the shortcomings of one individual. If that were the only issue, and if other Tory politicians had been urging "action this day", then we would have seen a party coup by now, or at least the first stirrings of one. The previous Conservative Prime Minister faced an internal vote of no confidence and was obliged to promise not to lead the party into the next general election before she was finally pressured to resign. To date, Johnson has faced no serious internal opposition and not even a sustained whispering campaign in the media. If anything, backbenchers and "sources" have been keen to find excuses for his dilatoriness. This indulgence may have been attributable last year to the imperative of "Get Brexit done", and could therefore change in the next few weeks, but while I expect the criticism to mount, I doubt it will coalesce into a clear policy alternative, despite Labour's noticeable absence from the field making it possible for the Covid Recovery Group or others to punt one without fear of benefiting the official opposition. 

Is the government's poor performance due to short-termism? This is more plausible in that there is clearly a lack of vision in Number 10, but I think there is a risk here of interpreting reaction to events as the absence of a strategy. If the purpose all along has been to implement the minimum measures consistent with keeping the NHS just this side of collapse, then trimming policy in response to the pandemic's course is what you would expect to see. Of course, what this highlights is that Conservative administrations since 2010 have deliberately degraded the health service's headroom and therefore its capacity to respond to a pandemic. When Jeremy Hunt cites his management of multiple "winter crises" as justification for his belief that things have now gone too far, he is condemning his own record as Minister for Health in preparing for just this contingency. The inadequacy of the NHS in the face of the current Covid-19 wave is the consequence of deliberate policy, and therefore something that was not merely predictable but anticipated. The problem is the corrosive, long-term bias against public services, rather than the ineptitude of short-term improvisation.

Is this just the Tories privileging capital? If so, you have to explain why, despite advocacy by the rightwing press, they didn't adopt the maximally business-friendly Swedish approach. Instead, the Chancellor implemented a package of measures, from cheap business loans through furlough to the moratorium on evictions, that have been distinguished by caution and conventionality, with the self-employed, SMEs and landlords often unimpressed. This isn't "disaster capitalism" cranking up a gear, nor is it indicative of a belief that capital faces an existential crisis. One suggestive piece of evidence was the early mishandling of care homes. First, the alacrity with which elderly patients in hospital were decanted in order to clear beds, and then the way that the sector's reliance on agency staff created an ideal vector for transmission, which put the interests of the elderly in conflict with those of private equity. This suggests that the chief concern has been to protect the NHS, rather than the care home industry, while the current priortisation of residents for vaccination is an attempt to neutralise the possible electoral consequences of that decision. The mantra "Stay at home, Protect the NHS, Save lives" was quite up-front about this.

The horse has now bolted on an eradication strategy (along with Dido Harding's test, trace and isolate programme) and we're going all-in on accelerating vaccination. There is scope for policy difference on this - the makeup of the priority groups, the length of the interval between jabs, the logistics of delivery - but nobody appears confident enough to promote a distinct plan B at the moment that amounts to anything more than faster, higher, stronger. Tony Blair's "blueprint" is just a confection of business consultancy blather ("harness the private sector"), managerialist fetishes ("a real-time dashboard") and the sort of daft tactical fixes that free market think-tanks trade in ("use empty offices as vaccine stations" will only appeal to commercial landlords). With its aspirational tone and urgent technocracy it's classic Blair, but utterly irrelevant. The reason for its prominence now is simply that the current Labour leader isn't cutting through. Why has Labour been so weak? Starmer's supporters in the media have taken every opportunity to highlight occasions when he has advocated a policy tweak that the government has subsequently adopted, but this has largely been a matter of rhetorical flourishes (e.g. a "circuit-breaker") or opportunistically calling for something once it looks inevitable. 

There has been little divergence on the overall strategy, while on specific areas such as education the Labour leader has gone out of his way to keep closer to the government line than that of domain experts like the teaching unions. Some of this is a fear of being labelled "anti-business" or "unpatriotic", but some of it appears to stem from a belief that the British state is institutionally robust and the economy essentially sound, it just needs better management (Labour won't call for Gavin Williamson's resignation, but it hopes the electorate might take the hint). In other words, a profound critique of the degrading of the public sector's capacities and capabilities isn't on the cards, any more than an acknowledgement that a low-wage and precarious labour market lacks resilience or that force-fed education doesn't lead inexorably to higher productivity. This reinforces the impression that Labour is returning to Blairite orthodoxy: some more money for the NHS, but no less marketisation; a bit more on Universal Credit, but no real change to the sanctions regime; a renewed emphasis on education, but no move away from the productivist obsession with testing and league tables.

For all the amplifying factors - Tory callousness, Johnson's laziness, institutional short-termism - the way that the pandemic has been managed in the UK has clearly been driven by the constraints of the NHS. The failures to date spring from two causes: one the result of design, the other the result of capacity planning. The first, longer-term issue has been the fragmentation of the wider public health capability, including not only the NHS, local authority functions and epidemiological services such as lab testing, but also policy on sick pay and the time taken to process benefit applications. The Tory emphasis on "ring-fencing" should be highlighted here. What it did was "protect" funding for the NHS while underfunding those parts of the wider public health infrastructure necessary to effectively manage a pandemic. Meanwhile the coercive approach to sickness has bred a culture of presenteeism and fear that in turn feeds infection. The failure of test, trace and isolate was therefore predictable, with the government determined to use the private sector instead of proven local authority resources, testing hindered by bottlenecks in outsourced providers, and effective isolation discouraged by inadequate wage support.

The Nightingale hospitals were also illustrative. We could quickly create bed capacity but couldn't provide nursing staff. That these facilities are now being redeployed as overflow for non-critical cases and vaccination looks like the fruits of integrated planning that should have happened well in advance. This lack of planning and coordination - a result of decades of markestisation, outsourcing and privatisation - precluded an integrated public health response, which is the sine qua non of an eradication strategy. The second, more immediate problem was that the service had been run near to the bone for a decade, as capacity failed to keep up with growing demand. This is most obvious now with the news that necessary surgery is being deferred due to a lack of beds and staff, which in turn reinforces the point that excess deaths from all causes will be the ultimate judgement on the country's preparedness and response to the pandemic. That the UK's preparedness to handle a pandemic was scored as second best in the world as recently as 2019 by the Global Health Security Index suggests that both integration and the capacity to flex in the face of an upsurge in demand for hospital care are blindspots in such technocratic assessments. 

The fundamental failure has clearly been the lack of a sufficiently integrated public health strategy. But what's odd is that the political response to this has seen an inversion of traditional roles. For all the u-turns and policy mistakes, it is the Conservative government that has taken the lead on planning and coordination, rather than leaving it to NHS and PHE management or assuming that the private sector will step in to meet demand. The employment of the likes of Deloitte and Serco is the creation of state monopolies, not competitive markets. The TV announcements, the emphasis on collective action, the wartime rhetoric are all the theatre of the interventionist state, hence the identical and competitive efforts in Edinburgh and Cardiff. In contrast, Labour, which has historically advocated integration, notably in areas such as public transport and social care, has been essentially mute on the subject during the pandemic, while its reluctance to champion planning has led to Tony Blair trying to fill the void. What the Conservatives' cack-handed efforts and Labour's timidity alike show is just how weak the British state has become over the last forty years. Hollowed-out from within and now desperately trying to maintain the illusion of control and constructive criticism respectively.

What Next?

The Irish writer and political commentator Fintan O'Toole has built a nice sideline writing for the British liberal press. The key to his method is twofold: to situate his analysis in a broad Whig history where progress is undermined by reactionary conservativism, and to flatter his audience by reinforcing their prejudices and complimenting them on their own clear-sightedness. In his latest piece for the Observer, he lays the flattery on with a trowel. "Two huge things in the history of the EU would not have been completed in the way they were without the Brits: the single market and enlargement. The problem with both, indeed, is that Britain pushed them forward without quite understanding their political implications." Naturally, he implicitly excludes the readers of the Observer from the charge. As remainers, they always understood the political dimension. Indeed, that was what made you a remainer. In fact, O'Toole's understanding of the UK's relationship with Europe is wrong-headed and the implication of that, which I am happy to make explicit, is that too many remainers have never properly understood the economic dimension.

The first of these achievements is Margaret Thatcher's finest hour in liberal mythology (that is, the one that can be spoken of - we draw a veil of discretion over her defeat of the unions): "The single market is the EU’s great achievement – protecting it was, ironically, the overwhelming aim in the negotiations on future trade with the UK. It simply would not have happened, when it happened, if Margaret Thatcher had not pressed so hard. ... The problem was that Thatcher could never accept that the workings of a single market would have to be counterbalanced by common social, environmental and safety standards, with the political, legal and administrative capacity to enforce them". In a spooky parallel, Thatcher's most avid pupil suffers the same flaw in respect of EU expansion: "It was Tony Blair who later pushed for Romania and Bulgaria to be allowed to join. Here, too, the implications of a British policy were not really understood in Britain. It was not explained that free movement would mean more immigration from these countries. Or that the governance of a much bigger EU would inevitably have to be more closely co-ordinated".

Here we have an image of Thatcher as vigorous but blinkered and Blair as progressive but naive. The one oblivious to the consequences of her (necessary) actions; the other oblivious to the risks of his (excusable) idealism. The truth is that the former was far more sensitive to European geopolitics than this caricature allows - she was notoriously against German reunification, for example - while the latter was far more cynical about EU enlargement and expected it to put the brakes on ever closer union, a continuation of the strategy established under John Major. The key to Thatcher was her belief that the Single Market would lead to greater market coordination of the European Union - i.e. the dominance of the private sector - and thus a move away from the functional coordination of the Common Market, which reflected the postwar tradition of cooperation between systemically-critical industries across national borders and thus institutionalised the role of the state in economic planning. In this she showed the influence of Hayek and his classical liberalism on her brand of neoliberalism, which was always at a slight angle to the Ordoliberal tradition of Germany in which the state was a legitimate coordinator of the economy.

Likewise, Blair was merely continuing the long British tradition of seeking a balance of powers within Europe - now the vertical balance between integration and expansion, rather than the traditional horizontal balance between states - and doing so in a manner that simultaneously maintained the UK's role as a broker between the US and the EU (hence NATO expansion proceeded in parallel with enthusiastic British support). If Major and Blair were heavily influenced by Foreign Office thinking, Thatcher was less enamoured by that department's traditional postwar realism, and had been since the Falklands War. For her, the Single Market represented a significant step not only in transforming the European Union from a political to an economic project but also in establishing the dominance of the commercial dimension in foreign affairs. The relative decline of the FCO, which was made clear by the creation of the Department for International Trade in 2016, is a continuation of this mercantilist turn. That the DIT is headed by Liz Truss, an unreconstructed Thacherite, is quite appropriate.

The attitudes of Thatcher and Blair towards Europe were never opposed. For all the mood music - her xenophobia, his globalism - they were really two sides of the same traditional coin: a belief that the UK's interests were best served by promoting commercial cooperation and free trade in Europe while remaining as detached as possible from any political entanglements on the continent. This has been the strategy of the UK state since the late 18th century. The British empire was never profitable in isolation: for all the resources it generated, it wasn't sufficiently populated to provide a large enough market for British goods, particularly after the loss of the American colonies. The one populous part, India, could only be turned into a market by destroying much of its native industry, notably textiles, but didn't have the per capita wealth to support a significant market beyond cheap, low-margin manufactures. The UK has always relied on Europe (and, to a lesser extent, the informal empire of South America) to provide the purchasing power to sustain British industry. 

After the Second World War, the UK initially kept aloof from Europe not because it hoped to preserve the empire (in practice, decolonisation rarely interrupted access to resources) but because Europe had little purchasing power. The initial moves towards continental integration, notably in coal and steel, were aimed at rebuilding industrial capacity after the depredations of the war years. For Britain, whose industrial capacity was largely intact at the end of hostilities, this offered little immediate gain. The eventual decision to join the Common Market was prompted by Europe's recovery in the 1950s: the Wirtschaftswunder of Germany and parallel rapid growth in France, Italy and the Benelux countries, which continued into the 1960s. Charles De Gaulle's political spite delayed the UK's accession by a decade, but this didn't alter the trajectory of the British economy. By the mid-70s, manufacturing was already in decline and the service economy was growing. 

In this light, the UK's decision to join the EEC was not merely pragmatic but forward-looking, and the focus on both deepening the economic relationship and expanding its geographical scale was strategically sensible, even if it was combined with a continuing wariness over closer political and currency union. When commentators like O'Toole point to the UK's championing of the Single Market as some sort of paradox, particularly in the person of Margaret Thatcher, they simply reveal their own shallow understanding (or, more cynically, their pandering to the illusions of remainers). If we follow the logic of this, Brexit needs to be decoded as a conscious economic choice on the part of the British people, not dismissed as an atavistic spasm or the consequence of decades of political naivety. The most credible explanation has nothing to do with free trade or global markets, let alone the emergence of novel technologies and industries. It is simply a rejection of the neoliberal dispensation of the last 40 years: the relative decline of the North and Midlands; the low-wage, precarious labour market; the worsening wealth and housing inequality. This may be motivated in part by nostalgia, but it is none the less a vision of a better future. The question is: how do we get there?

The left has historically been more realistic about the economic dimension of the UK's relationship with Europe, however its willingness to articulate an alternative hasn't advanced much beyond the AES of the 1970s or more recent riffs on that such as the "foundational economy" and universal basic services. Today, whether the perspective is backward-looking, such as David Edgerton's plea for a "bonfire of national illusions", or forward-looking, such as Larry Elliott chiding Labour for its "inability to envisage what a progressive government could do with Brexit", there is a common tendency to be sketchy about the UK's future economic strategy. The dominance of the City of London is accepted, or even lauded as a "specialism", rather than acknowledged as the product of state design. Low productivity and poverty wages are attributed to cheap labour, rather than an investment strike that has persisted for two decades. Brexit restores the potential for a planned national economy, but planned for what purpose beyond bromides such as "a better country"? Labour's 2019 manifesto pointed towards a more coherent vision, but we can be pretty sure its next one will be much less ambitious.

If today marks a pivotal moment in British history, what's remarkable about it is how vague the visions of the future are. Obviously the Prime Minister wasn't going to provide anything beyond bumptious waffle, but you'd have expected something more concrete from the Tories than glib phrases like "global Britain" and "levelling-up". This vagueness, like the associated retreat to the comfort of the Thatcherite past, suggests a lack of vision. The government really does look like it's going to be making it up as it goes along, much as it has done with the management of the pandemic. Those who think that the agreement signed with the EU suggests the UK has little intention of diverging on standards or state aid are probably correct. There doesn't appear to be a plan to do anything other than maintain the status quo, with perhaps a little more cronyism and public investment theatre at the margins. For its part, Labour under Keir Starmer seems happy to have its agenda shaped by the Tories (which, as Edgerton notes, is its historic default). For all the noise of the last five years, the political implications of Brexit appear nugatory, and that's because there is no economic strategy.