Lift That Weight

In the latest round of the gender critical discourse, Tanya Aldred of the Guardian has argued that trans women should not be able to participate in womens' events at the upcoming Tokyo Olympics. The core of her case is that "fairness is at the heart of sport". This claim is difficult to treat seriously, despite the recent collapse of the European Super League in the face of opposition to its attempts to make football less fair. As a sub-division of the entertainment industry, most popular (i.e. televised) competitions are run on the basis that the appearance of fairness is more than enough to satisfy the punters, hence the "financial doping" that Arsene Wenger once decried was not a talking point when Chelsea beat Manchester City in the Champions League final. The Olympics, with its history of legal state-sponsored advantage and illegal chemical doping, is no exception. In team games such as football, where allegiance to all but a handful of clubs entails a conscious defiance of structural disadvantage, what attracts us is not fairness but the prospect that the meritocratic order might be undone by exceptional performance or random chance: raising your game, causing an upset. It is the unpredictability that nourishes hope. 

Aldred's suggestion that a transgender woman competing in the weightlifting event is as unfair as sandpapering a cricket ball or using loaded boxing gloves is a confusion of terms. The latter are examples of cheating, not unfairness. Unless she has evidence that Laurel Hubbard transitioned purely in order to attend the Tokyo games, i.e. that she is masquerading (which would be a transphobic slur), they are in no way equivalent and should not be conflated. This is ironic given that her argument is that the decision to allow Hubbard to compete is conflating gender and sex. As is par for the gender critical course, Aldred insists that the two are distinct: that for all the superficial changes there is a boundary that cannot be crossed. As has become wearily predictable, this involves advancing an essentialist argument that wouldn't have been out of place in an anti-feminist diatribe 50 years ago: "By conflating gender and sex, I would argue we fudge the very reason we have sex categories in sport: the male performance advantage. Without a separate category for females, there would be no women in Olympic finals".

The reason we have sex categories in the modern Olympics is because they started out as male-only in 1896, in conscious emulation of the original Greek festival. The "advantage" was not men's differential performance but their social standing, and that was about class as much as gender. The ancient games were limited to freeborn males while their modern revival was for a long time limited to amateurs, which in practice advantaged the independently wealthy. Females could only participate in the ancient Olympics by a rich woman's ownership of a chariot team. In an ironic echo of this, the first woman to win a medal in the modern games was a Swiss countess in the 1 to 2 ton sailing class in 1900 (though she was an active crew member, not simply the owner of the boat). That year also saw women competing for the first time with men in the upper-class game of croquet and separately in tennis and golf. After 1900, women were gradually admitted to more sports, but under a policy of segregation in almost all cases. The only truly mixed sports today are sailing (one class) and the equestrian disciplines (dressage, eventing and jumping), where the performance of your property is a leveller.

The opening up of the games to women in the twentieth century reflected progressive trends, but - like the suffrage movement and later feminist waves - it also reflected the class-bias of the times and the hierarchy of social value. Segregation might have been fairer in terms of performance and representation in many disciplines, but its practical effect was marginalisation as the women's competitions received less support and regard. Between 1912 and 1948 the Olympics included activities in which women could have competed on equal terms, specfically the art competitions, such as architecture, sculpture and music. These were a nod to the role of the ancient Olympics in a wider celebration of excellence (arete) within Hellenistic culture. Their discontinuance after the postwar London Olympics was not because women were winning (they were under-represented among the medals due to the prevailing gender discrimination in the arts) but because the men who were winning were increasingly found to be professionals (there weren't many amateur architects by the late-40s). In other words, class and social standing, rather than meritocratic achievement, remained the deciding factor.

Aldred's argument of unfairness boils down to the idea that trans women have a "retained advantage" from having experienced male puberty. You might expect her to put in a good word for puberty blockers at this point, on the grounds that they would prevent the development of such an advantage for at least some trans women, but the subject never arises. Nor does the subject of intersex athletes, like Caster Semenya, who haven't chosen their circumstances and whose "advantage" is entirely natural (indeed, the requirement that she chemically adjust her testosterone level is an example of how unnatural sport has become in its quest for the appearance of fairness). What does arise in Aldred's article are two subsidiary arguments: the physical danger posed by trans women - "the safety issues in combat, collision and some team sports" - and the claim that in practice they exclude natal women, either by putting them off sport altogether or by taking limited competition places. 

The first argument hints at a predisposition to violence against women. Just as trans women in changing rooms are caricatured as potential rapists, so trans women athletes are considered dangerously abnormal, which echoes misogynistic claims about natal women athletes in the past. There is no evidence to suggest that trans women are a disproportionate danger in contact sports, not least because there are so very few of them. In contrast, there is plenty of evidence that size is a risk factor, but far from being a disqualification this is actually valued, for example in rugby. The second argument suggests that trans women are men taking what rightfully belongs to women. This not only ignores the corollary of trans men (are they denying natal men their birth rights?), but it also occludes those natal women who remain disadvantaged for other, intersectional reasons, such as racism and poverty. What's striking about these subsidiary arguments is the subtext of female fragility and property rights, which wouldn't have been out of place in 1896. There is a whole weight of misogynistic history here that gender critical feminism appears only too happy to collude with in the cause of policing the boundaries of womanhood.

Morbid Symptoms

The launch of GB News is a good moment to consider what's really behind what has come to be known as the "culture wars". Though there are superficial similarities to the pushback against "political correctness" in the 1980s and 90s, not least the conjuring of the figure of the woke as a cross between Angela Davis and Rick from The Young Ones, that was pretty clearly a reaction to a social evolution centred on the growth of tolerance arounds areas such as sexuality, feminism and racial diversity. Importantly, the chief site for the disputes over "PC" was academia, which reflected both the expansion of tertiary education in those years to previously neglected sections of society (the emergence of the knowledge economy and its need to incorporate women and minorities into the labour force) and the new perspectives on the curriculum brought by younger, more diverse academics as a result of that expansion. But despite the evergreen tales of campus cancelling and snowflake over-sensitivity, it's clear that the contemporary culture wars have a much broader social scope than higher education. GB News isn't being set up to counter feminist reading groups or to turn back the tide on the teaching of critical race theory.

Andrew Neil's claim that the new channel will cater for the underserved part of the country raises the question as to who he thinks this audience is. The early viewing figures suggest it is attracting mostly older, well-off males (not unlike its roster of presenters, and not unlike established TV news). That is hardly an ignored demographic in the wider British media landscape. The idea that it will appeal to the non-metropolitan parts of the country makes more sense, not least because the press and national TV are particularly London-centric, but it clearly isn't a pitch for a more devolved offering in a country already well-served by regional TV news and local radio. There will no doubt be coverage of "loony left" councils and the "incitement" of the SNP, but that is hardly a departure from the standard operating procedure of the national press. The well-founded suspicion is that the bulk of its political content will continue to revolve around Westminster and its daily agenda of opinion will be led by London-based newspapers (unlike the BBC and ITV, it can legitimately plead a lack of reporting resources for this parasitic relationship).

The suggestion that its output will be "more upbeat about both the UK’s future and the positive impact of capitalism" has an amusingly 1970s vibe to it, as if the problem were a media landscape sunk in pessimism and cowed by the imminent threat of a socialist revolution. This obviously chimes with Boris Johnson's combination of declinism and boosterism, and we know that there is a solid market for that product, but again it hardly puts clear blue water between GB News and the established players of the BBC, ITV and Sky. The channel's representatives have been keen to stress that it won't be a British Fox News, not least because it will likely feature liberal counterpoints in order to stay the right side of broadcast impartiality rules, much as LBC uses James O'Brien to offset Nick Ferrari. As ever, this will be a confection that locates the centre ground of British politics on the right and delegitimises the left as abhorrent in the eyes of all good people, liberal and conservative. But perhaps the chief difference is that GB News isn't intended to dominate the airwaves, or even simply set the agenda of a particular political party. It's chief aim appears to be to act as a critic and goad of the BBC and as such its values are those of newspapers rather than television. 

Structurally, GB News is a late development in a much longer trend that has shifted media resources from reporting to opinion. This was initially driven by newspaper bloat in the 1990s (lifestyle sections, cultural reviews and greater financial coverage), but also by a sense that politics was now sufficiently technocratic that only strong opinions on social issues, from immigration to gay marriage, could tickle our jaded palates. This was exacerbated by the impact of the Internet, which first made investigative journalism increasingly costly as advertising revenues fell and then raised the bar for performative outrage through social media. Television, and in particular the BBC, has always been constrained by its commitment to balance and a piousness arising from its national responsibilities. The result was a tendency to outsource primary opinion to the press, with coverage then focusing on its secondary effects: the denial, the row, the tweetstorm. Piers Morgan's role at ITV was to introduce tabloid values to the staid world of daytime television long after the tabloids had lost their bite. GB News looks like a similarly morbid symptom of the industry's decline, with its values somewhere between the Daily Mail and Telegraph and its presentational style (including cock-ups and Neil's abrasiveness) recalling an earlier age.

In the US, the motor for much of the culture wars is still religion, but this is less a reflection of social norms (observance and affiliation are both in decline) than religion's utility in providing a commitment to discrimination in a country that nominally insists that religion and politics are separate spheres. It is for this reason that the Protestant right have been happy to see conservative Catholics promoted to the Supreme Court. For the secular right, the attraction of  "religious liberty" is that its target isn't secular society in general but the state in particular, and precisely because the constitutional separation of the state and religion allows the latter to be painted as under threat from the encroachment of the former. Any limitations on the exercise of choice by the non-religious right that religious liberty gives rise to can usually be bypassed by money - e.g. flying elsewhere for an abortion. It is the non-wealthy who are constrained, which reinforces the hierarchies of privilege that the right, religious and secular, ultimately seek to defend. 

Consequently, while the American culture wars do extend to the private sector, notably in areas such as entertainment and sport, the central points of friction tend to be within the ambit of the state. This can be in the form of conflicts between individual states and the Federal government, or between those individual states and community groups that can cite specific constitutional protections, such as churches. This explains why American culture war topics are often linked back to the 1960s and 70s and the demand for equal rights and recognition against an oppressive state. Both sides insist on liberty, and not just because the right habitually adopts the left's rhetoric. In contrast, the UK right's attempts to paint the state as oppressive have always been half-hearted and unconvincing. Compare the US salience of a term such as "carceral state" to the British deployment of "nanny state". The result is that the UK's culture war is more reflective of the bigotries of newspapers, such as Islamophobia and transphobia, and the sort of shallow history that Sellars and Yeatman were satirising 90 years ago. Attempts to import the American style of "liberty", notably in the form of anti-lockdown protests, have produced little media interest beyond the entertainment value of Laurence Fox's midlife crisis, while the early Covid scepticism of the likes of Toby Young and Allison Pearson has fizzled out in the face of the vaccine "triumph".

In fact, the culture wars have come to prominence in the UK at a time when the libertarian right has been marginalised by the Conservative government's switch to a strong state narrative. Anti-state rhetoric of the sort pioneered by the likes of the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs will no doubt feature at GB News, but what we probably won't see is direct criticism of the government's further centralisation of executive authority. The downgrading of Parliament since the 2019 election and the increasing reliance on prerogative powers to bypass scrutiny is currently receiving little media attention, which is notable after the hyperventilation over meaningful votes and prorogation in the last Parliament. One morbid symptom of this ennui is the low public opinion of the official opposition, which doesn't just reflect Labour's poor performance in opposing the government, or Starmer's failure to articulate a distinctive programme, but also arises from the sense of powerlessness as the government ignores the Commons and pays only lip service to the remonstrations of a weak Speaker.

In the topsy-turvy world of the culture wars, it is the upper levels of hierarchies who claim to be the most oppressed, from multi-millionaire pastors thundering about gay marriage to middle-aged, white, male academics who want to rehabilitate colonialism. It is a sense of grievance that is the common characteristic of the political right across the globe these days. One explanation for this is that victimhood allows for a more aggressive language of resistance. This morbid symptom is not just another example of the right's détournement of leftist practice, it also pays tribute to the evolution of social norms. You can no longer simply display contempt for those you despise, as in the manner of the old right (for an example of this generational shift, compare the syles of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen). Instead you must present yourself as under attack and therefore justified in hitting back. If you don't play the victim, you risk being labelled a bully. To make this work, your attacker must obviously be inflated to the level of an existential threat, hence the exaggerations and outright lies. 

One irony of the comparison of the US and the UK is that the inflation is far more pronounced here, despite the American rightwing media's susceptibility at the margin to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, essentially because the US struggle centres on the actual disposition of power while the UK's largely doesn't. Local government long ago had its wings clipped and the story of Parliament since we "took back control" from the EU is of its further emasculation by the executive. It also doesn't help that we have an official opposition torn between ignoring culture war issues (so conceding media bandwidth) and trying to outflank the Tories on the right. Rather than Supreme Court battles over substantive issues of legislation, we are reduced to urban myths about no-go areas or claims that removing the Queen's portrait is tantamount to regicide. Perhaps the most ridiculous expression has been the defence of racists booing black footballers on the grounds that they are protesting against Marxism. 

In this context, the role of GB News is twofold. The power struggle it has been recruited to is that over the BBC, not the state. It isn't a realistic competitor to the national broadcaster, but it can be used to further push the discourse to the right in the short-term and to make the case in the longer-term for the Corporation to be broken up to allow a variety of roughly-equal voices covering the full spectrum of opinion from centre to far-right (Paul Dacre remains the preferred candidate for the Chair of Ofcom). Its secondary role is to salvage the newspaper industry by providing a constant feed of free advertising. While the press already gets a good deal of complimentary coverage from the BBC and ITV, this is restricted to exclude the more extreme views (though quite a lot of that still seems to find its way onto Question Time). GB News will broaden that broadcast spectrum, further corroding the discourse ("Will you nationalise sausages?" will appear quaintly tame in years to come), which in turn will encourage newspapers to push even further right in the search for controversial and edgy opinion. The newspaper industry is dying and, as the Daniel Morgan case once more reminds us, the smell is going to hang around for a while yet.

Story Time

Tom McTague's recent article in The Atlantic, "The Minister of Chaos: Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing", has been widely derided as what happens when one journalist is played by another, even to the point where his peers have resorted to good-natured parody. In part this is the result of a British writer attempting to explain to an American audience why "British Trump" might be simplistic, but it also reflects the continuing determination of the press to indulge the Prime Minister by bracketing his obvious defects (the lies, the callous indifference, the incompetence) to present a portrait of a flawed but complicated individual, possessed of an unusual political cunning and personal charm. An early remark that pretty well sums up the whole article establishes a common interest in misrepresentation: "When I began meeting with Johnson early this year, I didn’t know precisely how he would take to interrogation. His exuberance worked in my favor; the fact that he is a former journalist, familiar with our wicked ways, did not." By the end, the article is frankly admiring: "As ever with Johnson, it’s hard to discern true belief from narrative skill".

An example of the Prime Minister's familiarity with the weaknesses of journalists was the casting of his role in the European Super League fiasco as "the people's tribune, defender of the national game from the threat of alien imposition ... channeling a cry of anger and turning it against globalization". This decidely misleading tale included Johnson lobbing in the term "deracinated", which seems to have dazzled McTague, while occluding his role in having apparently given Ed Woodward of Manchester United reason to believe that the government wouldn't object days before the announcement broke. What we see here is both flattery on the part of Johnson and a refusal to actually interrogate the subject on the part of McTague. The journalist love-in becomes positively cloying at times: "Johnson often carries a notepad around, a habit from his days as a journalist. A former aide told me that you know he has taken your point seriously if he writes it down. He runs meetings like an editor, surveying his staff for ideas, always looking for 'the line' - cutting through dry and occasionally contradictory facts to identify what he sees as the heart of the matter, the story." Given the many credible tales of his laziness and insouciance, this is a very generous reading.

One thing that McTague reveals is that Johnson's "charm" is in large part sheer excess: "In his office, Johnson steered the conversation to a subject he raised nearly every time I saw him. He’d read an article I’d written, a kind of eulogy for the late British novelist John le Carré". Beyond the trowelled flattery (at a later point he insists that the lesson of Horace is that history remembers the writer, not the patron), this anecdote does reveal the Conservative leader's theory of British history, but it turns out to be little more than a bipolar belief that the structural headwinds that face the UK can be overcome by a triumph of the will: "To Johnson, le Carré had exposed not the fakery of the British ruling class, but its endemic passivity, and acceptance of decline. ... He said he was trying 'to recapture some of the energy and optimism that this country used to have.'" This sounds very much like making a silk purse out of the sow's ear of Brexit. To emphasise the point, "In an early phone call with Joe Biden, an aide told me, Johnson said he disliked the phrase special relationship after the president used it. To Johnson it seemed needy and weak" (you'll notice this is another revelation by a helpful "aide").

That introduction of a US angle is typical of McTague's approach, and Johnson's complicity, but it can sometimes be tin-eared, as here [my italics]: "His mission, he says, is to restore Britain’s faith in itself, to battle the 'effete and desiccated and hopeless' defeatism that defined the Britain of his childhood. He believes that if you repeat that it is morning in Britain over and over again, the country will believe it, and then it will come to pass. His critics, however, say he is just leading the country 'sinking giggling into the sea.'" That last is a reference to Jonathan Coe's insightful 2013 LRB piece in which he laid the blame for Johnson's prominence in public life on the media's weakness for Oxbridge satire: "he seems to know that the laughter that surrounds him is a substitute for thought rather than its conduit, and that puts him at a wonderful advantage". It's also worth noting at this point that Johnson spent the late 1970s at prep school and Eton, before proceeding to Oxford, so the view of the country he imbibed at the time might have been slightly jaundiced, not to say overly-influenced by that satirical tradition.

The narrative of traditional Tory declinism offset by boosterism is dignified by McTague as near-genius: "Yet Johnson understands the art of politics better than his critics and rivals do. He is right that his is a battle to write the national story, and that this requires offering people hope and agency, a sense of optimism and pride in place. He has shown that he is a master at finding the story voters want to hear." Really? Thatcherism constructed a narrative in which decline was blamed on pusillanimity towards both the enemy without - the Argentine Junta, the Soviet Union - and the enemy within - trade unions, leftwing councils, progressive culture. What is notable is that these were all genuine opponents. In contrast, Johnsonism has reduced the agents of British decline to cartoon characters - letterboxes, bumboys, doomsters and gloomsters. It is satirical caricature, not hope and agency. This is indirectly acknowledged in McTague's equivalence of Johnson's opportunism with adaptability, as if looking after number one could translate into a national story. But Johnson is no Bonaparte. He's a man who hid in a fridge during the last general election to escape scrutiny.

That weakness for caricature can also be seen in another long-form article in The Atlantic, George Packer's "How America Fractured Into Four Parts: People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?" Packer imagines the country divided by four "rival narratives" that combine into a contemporary political binary: two leaning right and two leaning left. Free America is the alliance of traditionalists and libertarians, which first coalesced under Reagan and then ossified to the point that it allowed Trump to take over the Republican Party. Smart America is the college-educated, liberal, coastal elite, who need to develop their social empathy. Real America is the devastated heartlands that continue to "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations", as Barack Obama put it. Finally, Just America is a "rebellion from below" that "assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America", but which suffers from a "dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme".

Given that these looks suspiciously like distinct and succeding eras in American history, rather than competing narratives - the post Civil Rights backlash of Free America, the 90s emergence of the knowledge economy, the 00s nostalgia for an already-dismantled proletarianism, the post-2008 revival of the left - why is reconciliation necessary? Won't time inexorably diminish the right and strengthen the left? My guess is that Packer is unwilling to repudiate the search for a unifying centrism. The result is an indulgence of the old right, whom he hopes can be rescued from Trumpism, and a disdain for the new left, combined with a wish for Smart America to develop some humility. For example, he exhibits a nostagia for Ronald Reagan, even crediting him with a pragmatic governmentality, which he then contrasts with Newt Gingrich's commitment to government shutdown. This ignores the continuity. If Reagan sold a popular narrative of "Morning in America", he also articulated a story for the donor class about how his White House would keep government out of their affairs. In contrast, the caricature of Sarah Palin - "a western populist who embodied white identity politics—John the Baptist to the coming of Trump" - oversells the continuity. All the two have in common is that they're grifters.

Likewise, Packer's belief that the young seeking justice is not simply a result of material factors but the product of two generations of critical theory in colleges is as fatuous as any rightwing dismissal of "the woke" as closet Marxists. Consider this snippet: "Things changed astonishingly quickly after 2014, when Just America escaped campuses and pervaded the wider culture. First, the 'softer' professions gave way. Book publishers released a torrent of titles on race and identity, which year after year won the most prestigious prizes." The language used here - "escaped", "pervaded", "softer", "torrent" - is the reactionary vocabulary of conspiracy, a mood reinforced by the petty resentment over prizes. One word that doesn't appear in this is "hegemony", because even a liberal (if not a conservative) would balk at claiming that the ideas of Just America had become the ruling ideas of society. Essentially Packer is advocating reconciliation because he doesn't like the direction that America is taking - i.e. the leftward drift of the young. As such, he is in the camp that hopes Good Old Joe Biden will win back Real America ("I'm a union guy") and restrain Just America. A suitably chastened Smart America will then inherit.

The trope of the storyteller is central to American politics, essentially because of the belief that the nation must constantly reaffirm a collective narrative or risk disintegration. This is because its history has actually been one of uncertainty of purpose, rather than manifest destiny, which was reflected in competing narratives, sometimes pursued to a bloody conclusion. This was not just limited to the Revolution and the Civil War. Consider the fundamental differences between the Federalists and anti-Federalists in the early years of the Republic, or the anti-communist witch-hunts of the late-40s and early-50s. The desire for a collective narrative has fuelled various attempts at reconciliation, from the "Era of Good Feelings" in the early 19th century through the 20th century's Civil Rights movements to the contemporary valorisation of bipartisanship. In this context, an individual politician who can craft an inspiring narrative that stresses both American exceptionalism and common interest, as Franklin D Roosevelt and John F Kennedy did, will be at an advantage. For all the talk of polarisation, the appetite for collective uplift remains, as is evident from the sentimentality of Reagan and now Biden.

In contrast, the storyteller in British politics has tended to have a much narrower focus. This is partly because the multi-national nature of the UK has made it more difficult to impose a dominant narrative, and partly because the issue of collective identity has, as a result, been promoted to a supranational and formally apolitical level through the symbolism of the monarchy or the invocation of abstract "British values" such as tolerance and fair play that serve to finesse social friction. But it also reflects that the late arrival of universal suffrage meant that democracy in the 20th century centred on the social question - i.e. class interests - and the consequent need to stymie revolution (the course of British politics in the democratic era was set in 1926). The result of that was a bias in mainstream political narratives towards comfort and stability, hence the Conservative Party's preference for caution, leavened by occasional bonhomie, from Baldwin and Chamberlain to Macmillan (interrupted only by Churchill's Edwardian nostalgia in the early-50s), and the Labour Party's replacement of socialist fervour by Fabian gradualism and the deification of the NHS as the centrepiece of a conservative welfarism. 

Despite her radical impact, Margaret Thatcher's narrative was a quintessentially Tory one: backward-looking and oblivious to the selfish individualism that her policies enabled (ironically, Ted Heath was the exception to this tradition, which in part explains his unpopularity within his own party). Her rhetorical appeals to the virtuous British housewife already had an antiquated air at a time when attention was shifting to the fortunes to be made in the property market, while her nationalism could never fully reconcile either the evolution of the European Community or the end of the Cold War (particularly German reunification). Tony Blair would offer a more energising narrative of a "young country", but it was no less a fantasy than Thatcher's, and one that quickly demoralised large swathes of the electorate as the promise of progressive reform was undone by creeping authoritarianism while the creative destruction of globalisation and neoliberal financialisation was welcomed with something approaching glee. Subsequent attempts by both parties to fill the narrative void by adopting the American style simply produced such narrative clunkers as "the British dream".

The contemporary political scene in the UK is distinguished by triviality (confected "culture war" issues that are as evanescent as mayflies), an ostentatious emotionalism (from the wailing remnants of #FBPE to Tory MPs refusing to watch the England football team if they take a knee), and a widespread cynicism about politics. The last of these has enabled a rapid decline in "standards in public life", such as the barefaced corruption of government ministers, but it has also emboldened the Parliamentary Labour Party to believe that it can kill off party democracy once and for all. This cynicism has inevitably accentuated the devolution of narratives, not just in Scotland and Wales but now in Northern Ireland too, and even embryonically in the North of England. In this context, Johnson's reheated national story is what you would expect: a vapid, feelgood yarn in which tomorrow can be a better yesterday and sacrifices are for others to make. It's success, if you can call it that, is down to the absence of any serious alternative from the Labour Party. A forensic storyteller is a category error and maudlin snippets from a dull biography can't make up for that.

Productivity and the Pandemic

Paul Krugman has once more returned to the mystery of missing productivity growth, pointing specifically at the underperformance of new technology: "Still, the data bear out the general sense that the real-world utility of new technology has fallen far short of the hype. Labor productivity — real output per person hour — has risen only about half as fast since 2007 as it did in the generation after World War II. Why measure from 2007? Well, it was the eve of the financial crisis; but it also happens to be the year Apple introduced the original iPhone. So much technoglitz; so little G.D.P. Why?". There's a cruical elision in this analysis in that the "postwar generation" clearly doesn't mean 1945 to 2007. The period of rapid productivity growth was up to 1975: les trente glorieuses. That postwar growth owed relatively little to the application of new technologies, at least in developed countries. Heralded breakthroughs like nuclear power proved damp squibs, while the bulk of productivity gains in manufacturing could be traced to well-established technologies such as electric motors. What mattered was that the rebuilding and retooling of factories offered an opportunity to redesign their exploitation more efficiently.

While much of postwar productivity growth can be attributed to the push factor of reconstruction, notably in Japan and continental Europe, a lot of it was down to changes in working practices, and not just on the production line. Consider the evolution of the office and the spread of scientific management techniques more generally. The relative decline in productivity growth after 1975 was also down to the pull factor of financialisation, which diverted capital away from productive investment to speculation. 2007, which saw the Northern Rock bank run in the UK as well as the launch of the iPhone, marked the unravelling of this. There were material factors at work in the spread of financialisation - the rise of global competitors in manufacturing, the growing volatility in energy and raw material prices, the Asian savings glut - but the chief reason was the political impetus, particularly in the US and UK, to deregulate financial markets and to make it easier to secure mortgages on homes. Globalisation diffused capital to developing economies that were experiencing rapid growth, but it also biased domestic capital in developed countries away from production and towards property. 

Krugman's emphasis on the iPhone over the financial crisis ignores that Apple's flagship product was nowhere near as technologically revolutionary as some claimed at the time. It was, after all, no more than an underpowered handheld computer with a built-in phone. From a practical perspective, the real breakthrough had first been the development of the modem-enabled laptop and later the development of the feature phone and SMS. The smartphone simply combined the two, allowing you to read emails on your phone, decades after email had become a staple of the business world. The period of relatively poor growth that commenced in the mid-70s coincided with the arrival of a genuinely transformative general purpose technology in the form of computers and digital telephony. While bespoke computers had been around since the 1940s, it was the 1970s that saw the spread of the first standardised mainframes, then mini-computers and finally the appearance of personal computers. But this didn't translate into a rapid increase in productivity growth in the 1980s. Why was that?

In answering the question, Krugman points to a new paper: How to solve the puzzle of missing productivity growth. As he pithily summarises it, the answer is "Just you wait". In other words, this is an issue of diffusion and complementary adjustment, which mirrors the pattern of exploitation of previous general purpose technologies like steam-power and electric motors. The paper's authors suggest that to improve the exploitation of technology and thereby boost productivity the state needs to encourage further research and development through grants and tax credits, expand human capital through education and selective immigration, and remove the regulatory and legal bottlenecks to entrepreneurship and innovation. In other words, the usual neoliberal nostrums. But as Krugman righly notes, if the IT revolution dates to the 1970s, we should have seen evidence of a positive impact on productivity long before now. In fact, we did, in the 1990s, with the move from centralised to distributed computing. In simple terms, every desk got a PC and everyone got email. This was down to a fall in unit costs (Moore's Law and offshoring to Asia) and the rapid growth in datacoms capacity (much of which was state-subsidised). But the upswing petered out in the 2000s.

However, that flattening of productivity growth over the last twenty years has been deceptive. We know this because of the productivity gains seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, from the rapid development of vaccines through the widespread reconfiguration of working practices to the expansion of online buying and home deliveries. These sudden accelerations have been widely-noted (they could hardly be ignored), but there has been a reluctance to acknowledge the twin implications. First, that productivity growth has probably been unnecessarily weak for the last two decades - i.e. the economy has been running short of its potential. And second, that these latent productivity gains can be unlocked by state intervention - i.e. Covid-19 has reminded us of the power of central planning. This raises the question: what has kept productivity growth depressed? It isn't the absence of central planning. The serial incompetence and corruption of the UK government is proof that central planning is no panacea, but just as in the 1940s, it can be effective in the face of market failure. That failure looks very much like the inefficient allocation of resources: the pharma sector's bias towards high-profit drugs; the diversion of capital into commercial office space; and the increasingly futile determination to preserve the high street.

The pandemic has provided real-world examples of the ability of the state to manipulate markets, albeit as much in the negative form of cronyism as in the more positive results of the vaccine challenge. It has also highlighted the extent to which behavioural pyschology proceeds from a pessimism about human nature that clearly encodes neoliberal ideology: the assumption that people are selfish, distracted and easily fatigued by the demands of solidarity. The attentuation of local government has also placed a greater burden on central government to mould public attitudes directly, what Steve Randy Waldman refers to as "market dirigisme". An example of this is the enforcement of the rules on gatherings and hospitality. Despite the press focus on exceptional breaches and the occasional daft intervention by the constabulary, this has largely been self-policed and enforced by social norms responding to central government direction (even when that direction has been vague and contradictory). What we have rediscovered is that there is such a thing as society and government can influence its behaviour. And changes in that behaviour can in turn force business to adapt.

According to The Economist, firms are planning a significant increase in capital expenditure coming out of the pandemic. This is not simply because "Fiscal stimulus has put money in people's pockets", so increasing aggregate demand. It also reflects the need to re-equip business for the different environment that is emerging after Covid-19: more online and more hybridised in its working patterns. The jury is out on whether this really "promises a world in which people get more done in less time", but it is a credible scenario. In the paper's predictable opinion, the shift in mood here is more one of business confidence than consumer sentiment: "The rapid deployment of entirely new business models when covid-19 struck, not to mention vaccine discovery, may have reminded bosses of the payoff to investing". Were it merely a matter of pent-up demand, businesses could reasonably expect a surge followed by a reversion to normal levels, which wouldn't encourage longer-term investment. Pessimists might even doubt the surge, reasoning that many people will prioritise paying down debts over buying new stuff, or might simply choose to divert more of their money into property.

Despite The Economist's sniffy preference for alert bosses over fiscal stimulus, it is clear that one thing business is anticipating is that government will meaningfully narrow income inequality and so boost aggregate demand. The most obvious signal here is the ambition of the Biden administration in the US to engineer a "high-pressure economy", largely through expanded public spending, in which private sector employers have to compete for workers. This would not only bid up wages but it should also stimulate investment in productivity gains to offset those higher labour costs. Of course there are good reasons to be sceptical about this, from the tenacity of the neoliberal association of business health with low taxes and low wages, to the class interests of capitalists causing them to favour the disciplining of labour over larger profits. If we recall the lessons of history, the Roosevelt administration's induced recession of 1937 and the abandonment of the UK's postwar commitment to full employment in the late-70s were both the result of a political attempt to secure "business confidence". The positive parallel is that Biden's programme echoes Roosevelt's embrace of deficit spending in 1938, once he realised his mistake. 

There are other grounds for optimism. The campaign for a global minimum corporation tax, regardless of how successful it proves in raising revenue, points towards a world in which more demands will be made of business. As was seen in the postwar era, there is no incompatibility between high rates of business taxation and capital investment. But perhaps the simplest explanation for the upbeat mood is fear: the fear of not adapting quickly enough to the new world emerging from the pandemic. In other words, investment may be defensive as well as offensive: about holding onto rather than growing market share. If that's the case, it points us back to the willingness of society to change its behaviours in a way that traditional economic models of utility-maximising monads simply can't compute, and to the ability of the state to coordinate such changes. But there remains a problem: the diversion of investment capital into unproductive property. With changing working patterns leading to people wanting more space, this could be about to get much worse, and there seems little likelihood that government will seriously address that particular market failure. Until such time as they do, I fear that productivity growth may flatter to deceive.