Riffing With Rishi

The pandemic has caused a re-evaluation of a number of assumptions about how society should be organised. I'm going to focus here on the voguish topic of working from home (WFH). Outside of the financial sector and public spending, the economic intervention of the state has largely been rhetorical since 2008 and you could be forgiven for thinking that the more recent enthusiasm for "levelling-up" is merely intended to compensate for the class bias of quantitative easing and austerity. But while it seems unlikely that the North of England will blossom as a result of some free-ports and the relocation of a few Whitehall functions, there is reason to believe that the government will play a crucial role in determining whether WFH becomes the new normal for many people. Rishi Sunak's suggestion this week that many workers want the interaction of the office environment suggests that they are not keen to facilitate too much change. But what interests me is not his implicit support for commercial landlords but the explicit idea that offices aid productivity through some combination of "riffing", "spontaneity" and "team-building". 

Low or stagnant productivity growth has been an issue in developed economies since the 1970s, which coincides with a period of rapid growth in whitecollar roles and new office buildings. In 2019 there were more people in the UK working in offices, both as a quantum and as a percentage of the workforce, than at any time in history. Some attribute this record of poor productivity growth over 50 years (albeit with a short interlude in the 1990s) to the failure of IT to replicate the productivity boosts of earlier general purpose technologies (GPTs), like steam power or electric motors. Thus the Solow paradox from 1987: "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". The question of whether IT wasn't as impactful as previous GPTs, or whether the benefits were simply lagging, appeared to have been answered when productivity growth increased during the last decade of the century, suggesting that businesses had finally worked out how to use those computers. 

Others see declining productivity growth as an artefact of the neoliberal reorganisation of production, and not necessarily something to worry about. The theory is that globalisation simply shifted productivity growth offshore. The developed economies then moved more activity from production to consumption. Support for this theory was provided by the relatively high rates of productivity growth in domestic manufacturing even as it shrank as a proportion of the economy. But it is easy to mismeasure productivity in services, particularly because improvements in quality (the utility to the consumer) cannot be captured as straightforwardly as improvements in quantity. Manufacturing can be more easily compared across firms because they use common technologies. This in turn means that there is less variation in productivity growth: when a new technology appears it is quickly disseminated. In contrast, services exhibit a much wider range of productivity, reflecting greater variations in skill, market structure and intellectual property.

The return to low productivity growth in the 2000s has been explained through the same two mechanisms. In terms of technology, the low-hanging fruit of the IT revolution, such as improvements in supply-chain and backoffice functions, were one-off gains that were quickly exhausted once fast Internet access was deployed in the 1990s, while the distractions of social media since have shown how counter-productive technology can be. IT investment since the millennium has tended to focus on retail rather than production (apps, online buying), which means that productivity gains are more marginal and those that are realised may disappear at the aggregate level because they are distributive (e.g. gaining market share at the expense of a competitor may not translate into increased sectoral output or lower firm production costs). In terms of the organisation of the economy and trade, the reshoring of high-productivity manufacturing has been too slight to redress the impact of globalisation, while growing wealth inequality has continued to feed low-productivity services (from home deliveries for the middle-classes to concierge services for the rich).

It's true that previous GPTs took many years to fully penetrate industry and deliver their benefits, though these lag-times do appear to have speeded-up. For example, the internal combustion engine became prevalent much more quickly than steam engines. It's also the case that legacy GPTs tend to stick around. Consider how steam, diesel and electric trains were all in simultaneous use in the first half of the twentieth century. The reason for the cycle of slow adoption and reluctant abandonment is that work and infrastructure needs to be fundamentally reorganised around the new technology (the 1990s was the era of process engineering, which is what drove many productivity gains). As the optimum arrangement is only discovered through trial and error, and as the changes require large investments, this is inevitably a slow process. In comparative terms, the two decade lag in the realisation of IT's benefits was quite short. This was probably due to its easier substitutability in certain sub-processes (e.g. email replacing paper post) and its rapidly falling unit costs combined with rapidly increasing performance (Moore's Law etc).

Part of the attraction of the shift to WFH in the wake of the pandemic for economists and social scientists is the expectation that it could be both significant in scale and relatively sudden. In other words, we might be able to see the impact on productivity within a few years. Another factor is the belief that a lot of the work on optimisation has already been done by those who pioneered remote working following the deployment of broadband in the 1990s. Video-conferencing is now a mature technology while many firms had already migrated their core systems to the cloud before Covid-19 appeared. The optimistic school of thought holds that all the conditions are in place for a paradigm-shift in working practices. Noah Smith is representative of this but also of the assumption that these changes can occur organically as a result of market forces. Amusingly, some of his vision revives past predictions that never materialised: that we can all become digital crofters; that firms can outsource individual tasks (neither Amazon's Mechanical Turk nor TaskRabbit have proved revolutionary); and that the boundaries between firms will become increasingly blurred (the Coasian ideal).

One area Smith is silent on is labour organisation. He correctly notes that the productivity gains of electricity in manufacturing came with factory reorganisation, from belt-driven machines powered by large steam engines to workstations driven by local electric motors powered through wiring. This "allowed workers to do things when they needed to be done instead of adjusting their workflow to the rhythm of a giant machine". But it also allowed workers to "go slow" or call "lightning" strikes. The twentieth century pattern of industrial relations was set by variable-speed motors and the ability to cut electricity at the flick of a switch. There is always a labour dimension. In an earlier GPT cycle, the move from putting-out in the textile industry to water-powered mills not only concentrated production it concentrated workers and transformed them into wage labour: the traumatic process of proletarianisation. WFH may have few labour organisation implications for managerial and professional staff, but what if it is extended to unionised sections of the labour force? 

WFH potentially allows firms to forgo or reduce some costs, such as office space, but it also allows them to extend exploitation of the worker, notably in the use of the home as a workplace. This is unlikely to be compensated for, not least on the grounds that the worker gains by not having to pay for commuting. In other words, capitalism's historic ability to transfer the burden of various costs onto labour hasn't isn't going to change. In simple financial terms it may be about to get gradually worse because housing costs have historically risen faster than transport costs. In a putting-out or piece-rate system the worker usually provides both workplace and tools. As WFH has become more common and more homes have personal computers and Internet connections (if not national broadband), the expectation has grown that the worker will provide and the employer will at best subsidise. This suggests a trajectory in which WFH and the gig-economy increasingly converge (a model being sold as "free-agent entrepreneurship" in some quarters).

One reason why employers are increasingly sanguine about remote working is that they can see the potential for greater work surveillance through technology. This isn't about preventing skiving, as workers with minimal control over their jobs will ultimately be paid on the basis of their measured productivity anyway - e.g. the number of transactions completed or cases processed. This is more about disaggregating the workforce so that productivity can be optimised at the level of the individual. As such, it continues the trend of personal performance management that emerged in the corporate world in the 1980s. In factories you had the traditional problem of soldiering - everyone working at the same pace, often little above the slowest - while in offices the water-cooler became a synecdoche for a culture of work avoidance through the rituals of sociability. WFH offers the potential of fewer distractions and easier monitoring, but also of more granular worker "tuning". The hunt for a better work-life balance is not an initiative of labour but rather capital's continuing determination to raise productivity through greater exploitation.

I suspect that the enthusiasm for working from home will deflate once the pandemic is over. This is not to suggest that the secular trend towards remote and flexible working, with its emphasis on moderation and balance, won't continue, but that we will increasingly see the emergence of different classes of WFH: the professional who manages their own time and goes into a pleasant city-based office for a couple of days of socialising versus the digital peon in a small town whose piece-rate work is closely monitored. Central London will not empty; Mansfield will not be regenerated. Perhaps the most worrying aspect is that those whitecollar roles where trade unions have managed to retain a presence, notably in the public sector, will be increasingly vulnerable to this steady change. Though the technology offers as much opportunity to labour organisation as threat, the reality may be that WFH is combined with a move to greater freelancing and all the disempowerment that entails. Rishi Sunak isn't pushing a conservative narrative in which offices are temples of capital but imagining a world in which atomised labour has to be congregated for indoctrination in a corporate culture.

Homage to a Government

In a long piece heralding the government's integrated review of security, defence, development and foreign policy (Global Britain in a Competitive Age), Patrick Wintour in the Guardian linked Brexit and China: "Self-excluded from the European single market, the post-Brexit UK needs new trading waters in which to fish, while at the same time the rise of China requires the UK to give a more coherent response than the one offered by ministers so far". This is, ironically, much the same position as Nigel Farage has taken. For the grand old man of the gadfly right, the achievement of Brexit promotes China to the UK's number one geopolitical priority: a useful bugbear that can be linked to all manner of ills, from industrial espionage to Marxist indoctrination in universities. For an establishment man like Wintour, the advantage of the China threat is that it provides a credible substitute for the increasingly risible Russia threat, and that means a justification for cleaving to the US and more broadly supporting a "rules-based order" that can offset the destabilising impact of our departure from the European Union.

Central to this linkage is the belief of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Tony Radakin, quoted by Wintour, that "Where navies go, trade goes, and where trade goes, navies go". But this is obviously a truism only if you can't see beyond the particular history of Britain. One obvious counter to this is the success of the German and Japanese economies in the latter half of the 20th century. You could argue that this depended on the explicit protection afforded by US fleets in various oceans, but by the same token there would be no need for the UK to send more warships to patrol the South China Sea if it simply wishes to expand domestic industry through international trade. Of course a performatively belligerent stance towards China can offset a discretion on human rights abuses, which have the greater potential to disrupt that trade. Similar to Germany and Japan, the growth of Chinese exports since the 1970s has not been matched by an equivalent projection of force, despite increased defence spending (though it has remained constant as a percentage of GDP) and the noise over the Spratly Islands. Had China pursued a military expansion equivalent to the "humiliations" forced on it in the 19th century, it would have obliged the UK to cede a 100 year lease on Felixstowe by now.

Another pertinent, if more antique, comparison would be the way that Ming-era China turned its back on the military-cum-trade expeditions of Zheng He in the early-15th century. Trade continued to flourish, but it was henceforth "privatised", i.e. organised by independent merchants, as centralised court control ebbed and the priorities of commerce were no longer subservient to the system of political tribute. The common point is that trade and military projection do not have to proceed hand-in-hand, and the histories of the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific in particular prove this. But it's also important to recognise that they aren't wholly independent: both in the influence one has over the other and their competing demands on the state. Spending limited financial resources on aircraft carriers patrolling the Far East means less to invest in infrastructure at home. While the potential tension between "levelling-up" and "global Britain" is obvious to some Tories (Wintour quotes Jo Johnson on this very point), others sympathetic to the government can only see optimistic overlap: "The core intersection of the Global Britain and Levelling Up agendas is their shared focus on enhancing the UK’s digital capabilities".

Clearly, Boris Johnson is not so delusional as to believe that the UK can genuinely restore its geopolitical prestige East of Suez through gunboat diplomacy. If we learnt anything from his stint as Foreign Secretary, it is that he has no grand vision and little interest in the detail. His 2016 critique of the "defeatists and retreatists" of the Wilson government was a mix of the partisan and cartoonish, and it reflects the original hyperbole in ignoring the continued British presence after 1968 in Oman, Hong Kong and Brunei (see also Philip Larkin's bitter poem, Homage to a Government, with its now ironic belief in the permanence of statues, if not empire). Commentators who interpret Johnson's rhetoric as largely pyschological compensation are simply repeating the error of many remainers over the last 5 years by reducing everything to imperial nostalgia. He really doesn't care that much. The "Indo-Pacific tilt" (which is actually minor in its military consequences) is clearly trade-led, hence the UK's application to join the CPTPP and achieve partner status with ASEAN. Sending a lone carrier group to the South China Sea is less a case of sabre-rattling than trying to crash a party with a single bottle of Buckfast. 

Science and technology is central to the review's vision, but this is little more than aspiration (and perhaps the legacy of Dominic Cummings): "By 2030, the UK will continue to lead the advanced economies of the world in green technology ... We will be recognised as a Science and Tech Superpower, remaining at least third in the world in relevant performance measures for scientific research and innovation, and having established a leading edge in critical areas such as artificial intelligence. ... The UK will be a magnet for international innovation and talent, attracting the best and brightest from overseas through our points-based immigration system. Every part of the UK will enjoy the benefits of long-term investment in research and development, education and our cultural institutions." There is no real explanation as to how this glorious future will be brought about, beyond references to historic Nobel prizes and the convenient success of the Oxford vaccine, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that the UK could leverage its science and technology base further. It's just that optimism of the will isn't likely to be enough. 

The UK's persistent problem since the 1970s has been relative underinvestment in R&D, at around 1.6% of GDP (the government's current 2027 target is 2.4%), which is part of a wider decline in capital investment. This is a significant shortfall not only relative to most of the EU and the US but to the larger Far Eastern economies as well. The Chancellor's recent announcement of super-deductions for capital allowances doesn't mark a change in strategy as this is merely a short-term fix to prevent capital investment drying-up over the next two years as firms anticipate the 2023 rise in Corporation Tax. That higher rates of investment correlate with higher rates of business taxes is not something that the Tories are keen to draw attention to, preferring to emphasise their continued commitment to "competitive" and "business-friendly" taxation. Likewise, that higher wages boost investment by incentivising automation and process efficiency is not an observation to be found in the review's panegyric to science and technology. The word "wage" appears only twice in the report's 100-plus pages, and then only as an anodyne outcome.

Where the government can more justifiably be accused of delusion rather than mere avoidance is in its expectations of that other emergent global power, India; specifically in the belief that the historic relationship (where we destroyed the subscontinent's economy to create a captive market for our manufactures) provides some sort of contemporary advantage. There was a strand of Raj nostalgia among upper-class Indians up to the 1980s, but this was largely a reflection of dissatisfaction with the semi-socialist policies of the Congress Party. With the advance of the BJP and the encouragement of a more exclusivist nationalism, that has largely disappeared from the political culture. Outside of cricket, there is little sentimentality about England. Instead, there is a consensus in Delhi that the country's geopolitical presence depends on a careful cultivation of the US and a wariness towards China. The UK might be able to find common cause in this, but its support won't be considered significant and nor is it likely to count for much in trade talks (it's worth noting that India has shied away from comprehensive free trade agreements - it still hasn't agreed one with the EU).

Labour has predictably attacked the review for not being tough enough. Beyond "moar trooops", its criticism centres on the government's lack of virtue: it has failed to implement the recommendations of the Russia report, it has damaged relations with our NATO partners, and it has threatened to break international law. Her Majesty's loyal opposition has criticised arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the cutting of aid to conflict zones, but it has largely left the criticism of the proposed expansion in the nuclear arsenal to the SNP and others, in order to avoid giving the Tories ammunition to claim that the party is divided on Trident (this has generated a modicum of "elephant trap successfully avoided" praise from the usual suspects, but you sense their hearts aren't really in it). In truth, the integrated review doesn't amount to much of a change in British foreign or defence policy and that lack of fundamental change is ultimately pleasing to the Labour leadership and liberal commentators. There is no threat to Atlanticist orthodoxy and no questioning of the UK's "unique soft power" (the claim that "Those who challenge the values of open and democratic societies increasingly do so through culture" indicates that the domestic culture war will also be justified by national security - a sick joke at a time when the right of protest is being curtailed).

If there is a significance to the review it is the tonal importance ascribed to trade and the way that other elements of policy, from defence to international development, have been explicitly, if at times clumsily, linked to commercial goals. As such, Global Britain in a Competitve Age reads partly like a justification for Brexit (the EU is largely ignored) but more generally like a bought-in commercial strategy: long on aspiration and jargon, short on practicalities and coherence. At its heart is a refusal to admit that one consequence of Brexit is that guns must be sacrificed for butter: that our military capability must increasingly be turned from home defence to a symbolic presence that justifies our claim to be a global player but which would largely be useless in practice (so, no real change since Afghanistan). The parallels with the neglect of the country's pandemic preparedness and its rhetorical compensation by our "wonderful vaccine task-force" and "world-beating track and trace system", all under the rubric of an increasingly commercialised NHS, should be obvious. If the postwar era was about presenting a warfare state as a welfare state (per Edgerton), the neoliberal era saw an attempt to convert swords into ploughshares while pretending otherwise, from the Falklands to Iraq. Post-Brexit, those are now ploughshares for export, rather than domestic consumption. In reserving the right to nuke Chinese or Russian hackers at will, Johnson is merely indulging in further cakeism: obscuring the mercantilist turn in UK policy through militaristic bluster. 

Ruling the Void

Walter Bagehot famously divided the British constitution into two parts: the "dignified", represented by the monarchy, and the "efficient", represented by the executive. This was always a dubious distinction, suggesting a symbiosis between conservative and progressive impulses that was rarely visible in practice. The reality, since 1688, is that the monarchy has served as cover for an oligarchic executive. Over time, the House of Commons has made some inroads against that oligarchy, but this has been repeatedly compensated for by the steady absorption of the remaining powers of the monarch into the office of Prime Minister. As the monarchy has become more circumscribed and purposeless, its political utility has seen a shift in focus from the functional (what it can actually do) to the emotional (how it feels). This has led to a growing confusion in the media between the Crown and the person (to the point where it has become a sub-genre of romantic fiction). The monarchy is an institution, the Royal Family is not. 

The claim by parts of the commentariat that the latter has "the power to unite people", or that a group of unworldly artistocrats embody the "un-divisive" in public affairs and so stand in virtuous contrast to grubby politicians, is obviously ridiculous. But this type of thinking also reveals an unwillingness to engage with the Crown as a residual institutional component of the British state. The monarchy serves to obscure a void within the constitution: a zone of power where the executive is able to operate largely untramelled through the exploitation of royal prerogative. For example, Boris Johnson's calculated insult to Parliament when he prorogued it in 2019, which should be seen in the context of the long-running struggle between the Commons and the executive, was quickly diverted by shocked liberals into a barren discussion about whether he or Jacob Rees-Mogg had personally misled the Queen, as if lese-majesté mattered more than the muzzling of democracy.

The monarchy has always been divisive, not just in the sense that republicanism retains a stubborn foothold, but in the symbolic sense that the royals perform hierarchy and the deference due to privilege. Above all, they validate the division of society by inheritance. This week's debate about the racist overtones in an anonymous comment on the skin-colour of a yet-to-be-born child should really be about why an accident of birth entitles anyone to be called a prince. In foregrounding the quotidian - that the British upper class is habitually racist and the press is systematically bigoted - we ignore the absurdity of aristocracy and its obsession over status and slights. We also allow a debate that ultimately boils down to who among a small number of already rich people should be allowed access to the taxpayer-funded trough of the Civil List to distract from the larger issue of which politician's unqualified and incompetent friends should receive the largesse of government contracts and sinecures.

Support for the monarchy increasingly aligns with age, with the young being far less sympathetic either to the institution or the personnel. Of course, age increasingly correlates with socio-economic status. The war on the woking class is all about the defence of the haves against the have-nots, and the royals increasingly play a divisive role in this because they symbolise both the inheritance of unearned wealth and flagrant nepotism. The monarchy will eventually be abolished (de facto if not de jure) because its commitment to unearned status is non-negotiable. The history of British royalty is essentially the history of status: an evolution from personal aggrandisement (the internecine conflicts of the Medieval landed elite) through emblematic national status (the Tudor representation of the early modern state and fledging empire) to the reconciliation of absolutism and capitalist constitutionalism in the defence of oligarchic privilege (the Stuarts). By the time of the Georgians, the monarchy was unabashedly a champion of reaction and political repression, which was barely toned-down during the compromises of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. 

The arrival of the democratic era after 1918 saw a desire to be more "relevant" and "modern", specifically in the vain and shallow person of the then Prince of Wales. This impetus, which has echoes today in the current heir to the throne's supposed plans to "streamline" the firm, was less about reform than shoring up popular support following the termination of the continental dynasties and the emergent threat of Bolshevism. Edward VIII is remembered for his foolish flirtation with Nazism, though his rightwing sympathies and racism were all-too typical of the Britsh aristocracy of the period. The contemporary establishment's worry was not antisemitism but the drift towards populism, which led his banal comment as king, that "something must be done" for the unemployed during the Depression, to cause dismay among politicians. This culminated in the abdication crisis of 1936, when support for the king dangerously split along class lines: the working class being more sympathetic to his desire to marry the woman he loved; the middle class more insistent on his duty to Crown and empire. 

The subsequent determination to restore the monarchy's conservative reputation, which dovetailed with the appetite for a consolatory nostalgia in the face of geopolitical retreat, would produce a terror of political entanglement and a paranoia about public exposure that continues to this day: "They live in high luxury and low autonomy, cosplaying as their ancestors, and are the subject of constant psychosocial projection from people mourning the loss of empire." That judgement is both accurate and entertaining, but perhaps it misses out another dimension that has become ever more salient, which is that the monarchy is increasingly estranged from power. Much as the Church of England's influence was eroded by the welfare state, globalisation and the emergence of a pan-national capitalism has diluted national loyalties (in this sense, the Sussexes are very much in tune with the zeitgeist). Likewise, the reduction of the British establishment to a politico-media core has toppled the monarchy off its ideological pedestal and made it a divisive artefact in the street-level kulturkampf.

The idea that the royals are representative of the nation is a modern conceit, not an archaic tradition. It can be dated pretty precisely to Tony Blair's comment about "the people's princess" in 1997, when monarchism once more fatally collided with populism. This was bound-up in New Labour's attempt to reinvent Britain as a geopolitical and cultural force "punching above its weight", which would run into the sands of Iraq but enjoy an afterglow in the 2012 Olympics with its nostalgic combination of postwar myths in the persons of the Queen and the fella who plays James Bond. Some try to date the idea of the royals as the "first family" to the Second World War, but this is largely a retrospective gloss. When the then Queen remarked "I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye", she was exhibiting the "all in it together" cynicism of her class, which found a notable echo in the aristocratic vocabulary of David Cameron and George Osborne in 2010, not proposing a direct engagement with working mothers in Stepney. This was a woman who retained a retinue of 40 servants until she died.

In the event, the royals remained hermetically sealed-off from society in the postwar years, as their occasional forays into PR, such as the infamous 1969 BBC documentary, inadvertantly showed. The Diana era provided the framework of a soap opera, but one that existed more in the media's imagination than reality. Aristocratic infidelity is no more interesting than the common sort. Some imagine that the "mystique" of royalty, which is carefully maintained by "royal experts" performing discretion and divination in  a manner that echoes both Kremlinology and the older tradition of the inspection of the king's chamber pot, is intended to obscure the Windsors' notorious lack of intellect. But this is to ignore that the royal omerta would be just as important if the heir to the throne spent his days reading Theodor Adorno rather than Laurens van der Post. The monarchy's role is to give the appearance of something where nothing exists: the void.

And this is why the monarchy has a simultaneously symbiotic and destructive relationship with the tabloids. Without the fawning support of the media, the Royal Family would quickly become no more important to the mass of the population than county cricket: something seen as quintesentially English but of marginal interest and whose passing would be the occasion for only mild regret. But the demands of the tabloids, not only for drama and backbiting but for the legitimation of their own bigotry and snobbery, means that the Royal Family will always be constrained in the range of permissible personae, which means that anyone who steps beyond these bounds will be forcibly exiled. The monarchy we have is the one that the press has sculpted: conservative, anti-intellectual and defined by its property. They are the embodiment not of the nation but of a spurious middle-class hegemony that both the politico-media caste and the wealthy elite, aristocratic and otherwise, snigger about in private.

Political Insurgency

An opposition party cannot garner a reputation for competence when it is not in power. That much is obvious. It can appeal to its historic track-record, if it has previously been in office, but that tends to be a double-edged sword. Beyond mere quibbling, it must either relentlessly criticise the government's handling of affairs as evidence of a comprehensive failing or try to decisively shift the debate to novel territory where the government cannot easily follow. In other words, it must rely on the relative incompetence of the government (e.g the Tories return to the gold standard in 1925 or Black Wednesday in 1992, both of which presaged Labour administrations), or it must advance a relatively unorthodox position that chimes with an approaching inflexion point in public sentiment. The Tories managed to do the second in 1979, by tapping into a widespread belief that the postwar settlement had run out of road, and repeated the trick to an extent in 2010 when they leveraged a global discourse on debt sustainability (which turned out to have been based on motivated reasoning and a spreadsheet error) to impose austerity. The common feature is that on both occasions the Conservative Party positioned itself at the head of a generational shift, leaving Jim Callaghan and Gordon Brown looking like yesterday's men.

You could argue that the Tories' gradual embrace of a hard Brexit after 2016 was of that ilk, but I think that was more a case of simple opportunism: riding the tiger rather than harnessing a fresh horse. They didn't lead the country, hence Theresa May's relative failure in 2017 and the eventual success of the most opportunistic senior Tory in 2019. This was quite different to Margaret Thatcher's period as opposition leader. What mattered between 1975 and 1979 was the Conservative Party's championing of an intellectual insurgency on economics whose foundations dated to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. In a more compressed timeframe, Cameron and Osborne led an insurgency between late-2008 and early-2010 (though one whose intellectual roots went back to the Treasury View of the 1920s). It may have been absurd ("expansionary fiscal contraction"), but it caught the mood. Both 1979 and 2010 were attacks on Keynesianism, but the first relied on a caricature (the inevitability of stagflation), ignoring the systemic issues evident in capitalism's latest reformation (falling profit rates, the reliance on fossil fuels, emergent globalisation), while the second invented a Keynesian orthodoxy (that borrowing in excesss of 90% of GDP would be destructive if monetary policy levers were unavailable due to near-zero interest rates) as a strawman. Despite those fictions, they were genuine insurgencies that caught the popular appetite for decisive change.

What both of these occasions highlighted was the importance of supportive media. Not just in the sense of providing a welcome for congenial ideas but in conveniently reimagining history to suit the new narrative. Consider the ubiquity of Milton Friedman and the usefulness of Kenneth Rogoff respectively (and incidentally the media occlusion of Anna J Schwartz and Carmen Reinhart's contributions to A Monetary History of the United States and Growth in a Time of Debt). Thus the focus in 1979 was on the apparently unconnected symptoms of union militancy and inflation, rather than the squeeze on profits or the implications of the oil crisis, while the discourse in 2009 quickly shifted away from the sins of the financial sector to the burden of bank bailouts on government debt. It's a commonplace to note that the BBC takes its agenda from the press, but this observation is often used to suggest that it does so out of fear: that a more independent line would bring down the wrath of Rupert Murdoch and jeopardise the licence fee. In fact, the BBC does this of its own volition because it shares the same centre-right worldview. This much is obvious from its coverage in the 1970s, at a time when Murdoch was still relatively weak and the Corporation dominated broadcast news.

The notable exception to this pattern was 1945, when Labour enjoyed a degree of support for its radical proposals among the more liberal elements of the press, which helped to neutralise many of the Conservative attacks. This was in no small measure because the Labour narrative of recent history - that there should be no going back to the failed policies of the 1930s and that a comprehensive welfare state was feasible - had been vindicated in wartime. The Conservatives' error was in failing to seize the enthusiasm of the moment and promise a more radical departure from its own orthodoxy, largely because Churchill, a reforming liberal in his youth, was now simply too set in his ways and distracted by nostalgic dreams of global leadership and the maintenance of the British empire. In the event, the Conservatives were able to recover and resume office six years later because they managed to mop-up a decisive number of centrist voters for whom the 1930s hadn't been that bad and who were prepared to give the Tories the benefit of the doubt in other respects (the Liberals lost almost 2 million votes between 1950 and 1951 as they failed to stand in most seats in the second election due to a lack of funds).

There's an obvious parallel here with the Covid-19 "war", as the Tories offer superficial radicalism in combination with the normalisation of future austerity, while Labour is constrained by its conservativism and adherence to a Keynesian orthodoxy once more being framed in much of the press as inappropriate to the moment. This isn't simply a lack of imagination or Fabian caution (though that is part of the mix). Without the sustained support of the media (or at least a larger portion than half of the Guardian's opinion pages and the occasional Kirsty Wark encomium on Newsnight) it cannot easily sell a break with the immediate past as the new common sense, as Thatcher and Cameron did. To make matters worse, the "ideas that are lying around" (as Milton Friedman put it in 1982), such as the Green New Deal and a national investment bank, are tainted by association with Corbynism. Consequently, it is disciplined into promoting fiscal orthodoxy (though it's worth reminding ourselves that the 2019 manifesto was also perfectly conventional). From the perspective of Annelise Dodds, simply getting the Keynesian idea that we should avoid tax rises during a recession onto the media agenda has been an achievement. 

The commentariat has a tendency to talk-up the potential of third parties to "break the mould" of politics, but in reality these occasional campaigns simply reflect the strength of the centre-right orthodoxy among British newspapers and TV channels. In practice, whatever the originators' intents, these folies des grandeur are invariably repurposed by the media into a means of disciplining the main parties. Consequently, novel policy offerings tend to be marginalised while criticisms of the established parties are foregrounded. Who today remembers that the SDP advocated an integrated benefits system (i.e. what would become known as Universal Credit), or that UKIP wanted constituencies to have the power to sack MPs? In the most recent example, the party finally known as The Independent Group for Change, there was never any serious attempt to suggest that it was motivated by a coherent (let alone novel) worldview beyond a hatred of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn. Genuine political insurgencies are rare. Not only must an established party have the conviction that a sea-change is underway, it must have the confidence that this can be tied to a narrative in which its own historical blemishes are pushed to the background while the government's incapacity to respond is brought centre-stage. Labour clearly lacks that confidence today.

That the party has been wrongfooted by the Tories' emblematic focus on Corporation Tax shows that the debate has already moved on from whether we should fund a stimulus to who should pay for it. This is partly due to a change in the global discourse. The IMF and others are now sanguine about debt in the short-term and the longer-term expectation is that it should be paid down by a mixture of growth and tax rises rather than further spending cuts (though this week has confirmed that the Tories will still cut). But it also reflects the success of Labour after 2015 in reframing the domestic debate towards the reduction of inequality and the progressive role of the state in the direction of the economy. Conservative proposals for levelling-up, recovery bonds and free-ports are all indicative of this. The idea that opposing a Corporation Tax increase now gains Labour credibility with business, or will insulate the party from the usual charge of fiscal debauchery in 2024, is naive. Once the pandemic is over, the priority for most firms will be to restore lost turnover rather than shield profits, while the Tories aren't about to lose their undeserved reputation for executive competence by the time of the next election. For all too many of their supporters, austerity was a success: it maintained asset prices and punished the poor.

The significance of Corporation Tax is that Labour is shying away from the opportunity to reframe the economic debate, specifically the need to move the tax burden from labour income to capital income and accumulated wealth. This need is widely recognised, even among many conservatives, and reflects a generational shift that was already underway before the 2008 crash and the salience given to inequality by Piketty et al. This was stillborn in 2010, largely because the political right were able to divert popular sentiment into an obsession with government debt, but partly because the political left had become so compromised under neoliberalism that they couldn't envisage themselves leading a popular insurgency as opposed to continuing with the top-down technocracy to which they had become accustomed. So what we got was Gordon Brown "saving the world" for asset-holders and PASOKification. Inevitably, as nature abhors a vacuum, we then saw the steady rise of political populism. But the moment hasn't passed because the underlying contradictions haven't been resolved. Inequality has worsened over the last decade and the public fabric is increasingly threadbare.

In other words, there is still the potential for a once in a generation political insurgency. So why is Labour - like most other centre-left parties worldwide, it should be said - reluctant to put itself at the head of one? Debilitating technocracy and the alienation of the left's organic roots in society provide a common explanation across the globe, but is this enough to explain Labour's particular predicament in the UK? The chief reason for the party's slowing deflating poll numbers is clearly the combination of its self-denying ordinance on criticising the government's handling of the pandemic (and the consequences of Brexit) and the caution of its vision. This in turn suggests that "not Corbyn" is also steadily losing its power, despite the continuing insistence of many in the media that this remains the only card Labour needs to play. It's not that it lacks detailed policy prescriptions, as is often claimed (it's actually published more than it's given credit for), or that it lacks an all-encompassing narrative (the claim that the Tories will return to austerity fits that bill and is demonstrably correct). The problem is that it isn't offering a clear departure from the past, hence the loud noise of Blairites jockeying for influence. 

I think this is partly a reflection of Keir Starmer's self-image as a pillar of the establishment and his preference for Labour to be a bureaucratic cartel party that eschews activism, but I also think it reveals a learned helplessness in respect of the media that increasingly expresses itself in a startling defeatism. Having spent so long undermining the party (not just under Corbyn but under Miliband too), the PLP and their media mates have apparently internalised the idea that not only is a Labour-led political insurgency impossible but that the party's prime directive is the maintenance of order in the face of a variety of populist "threats". This isn't entirely a departure from Labour's history as the parliamentary block on democratic socialism, but it does suggest that its anti-leftism has been expanded to the point where any disruptive political development is to be resisted. In that sense, the farce of Change UK's policy void becomes more explicable: you can perform insurgency so long as you do not offer anything beyond a return to yesterday's certainties. This leaves the field clear for the Conservatives, who clearly learnt the lesson of 1945, to once more become the insurgents of British politics, successfully running against themselves for years to come.