The Cartel

A while back I noted that Labour under Keir Starmer's leadership was exhibiting many of the characteristics of a cartel party. What I particularly focused on was his aversion to activism. This could be excused in the early stages of Starmer's tenure as evidence of insecurity and a determination to control messaging after the free-for-all that characterised the Corbyn years (and in which Starmer himself was notably conspicuous, even to the point of making up Brexit policy on the hoof during his conference speech in 2018). Given the quiescence of this week's party conference (not a single expression of republican sentiment in the hall during the bizarre tribute to the dead monarch on Monday), it is clear that the lanyard-wearing layer of the membership has now been completely purged of leftwingers. While this is not (yet) the case at the level of constituency parties, it is clear that the struggle between left and right, and its expression in NEC elections, is now a sideshow as policy formation has been decisively taken away from the membership (whatever it may transpire to be, Great British Energy is clearly not the Green New Deal). Labour is no longer a party of activists. The bragging over the return of corporate sponsors was indicative of that.

The cartel theory of party politics is usually reduced to two key features: the interpenetration of party and state, and collusion between the parties. The former is not simply about professionalisation, by which politicians are increasingly drawn from a narrow social strata that spans media, advocacy and public administration. It also refers to the way that state functionaries are increasingly co-opted as technocratic experts, much as financiers and business tycoons were previously co-opted during the heyday of New Public Management. Recent, high-profile examples would be Mario Draghi (the head of the Bank of Italy), Emmanuel Macron (who straddled the worlds of banking and public administration), and Keir Starmer (former Director of Public Prosecutions). The record of all three indicates that political ineptness is no bar to participation in politics, which in turn suggests that the parameters of the political have changed over recent decades. It's worth noting in passing that much of the tone-policing by centrists in recent years has involved comparing feral politicians unfavourably to virtuous state functionaries, such as judges and public health officials.

Collusion is also less about formal coalitions or informal deals, let alone criminal conspiracy, and more about the tendency to eschew ideological confrontation and to find common interests as a professional class (think of Jess Phillips and her Tory mates, or the belief that expressions of class antagonism within the politico-media caste are bad form - e.g. the regular dismissal of Owen Jones). This isn't simply the result of neoliberal hegemony or (elsewhere in Europe) the structural incentives of proportional representation (where "finding common ground" usually means admitting common interests). It also reflects a more fundamental desire to insulate the process of negotiation between the parties and the state from popular scrutiny and accountability. As such it is a parallel process to marketisation in that it seeks to depoliticise politics. Whether popular alienation from politics is the cause or consequence of cartelisation, in either eventuality it leads to shrinking party memberships and a distaste for activism.

Many on the left derided Starmer, and his General Secretary, David Evans, for losing so many members that the party looked like it was headed for bankruptcy. Of course, the current turn in the political cycle, with the Tories looking vulnerable and Labour enjoying huge poll leads, means that significant donations from corporate interests and the rich are likely to start flowing again, not least because the need for a general election by January 2025 means that the coffers were always going to start filling up over the next two years. I think this derision misunderstands the strategy, which is not to shift the party's funding from labour to capital but to call into question the entire system of party funding, hence one thing that has been consistent under the last two Labour leaderships has been the attack on Tory sleaze. If that word in the early-90s meant sexual misbehaviour as much as financial, and in 2009 was reduced to the relatively small beer of expense-fiddling, the focus now is much more on the corruption of parties by major donors, notably foreign oligarchs (who, let us not forget, New Labour as well as the Tories courted). 

It's possible Starmer just wants to limit party funding to the native rich, but I suspect his instinct as a former state functionary is to go further and insitutionalise it. What I think he wants is greater state funding and to this end his current aversion to proportional representation, which would diffuse funds and make changes in party income levels more volatile, makes perfect sense. His preference appears to be to retain first-past-the-post, not simply to cement Labour's electoral advantage but to translate that into a funding advantage as well. He won't push this before an election, for obvious reasons, but if he ever makes it to Downing Street then I'd expect a supportive campaign to quickly emerge in the media. This would be presented as a necessary, even grown-up, measure to insulate political parties from undue influence by the reckless rich or nefarious foreigners, but clearly what it would actually do is insulate them from membership accountability. In the case of Labour, it would also weaken the influence of the trade unions, an outcome long-desired by both the media and the neoliberal elements of the Labour Party most sympathetic to the cartel model. If Starmer is moving Labour towards cartelisation, and given that this requires a degree of collusion by the other main parties, the question we have to ask is, Why now?

One way of answering this is to look at the impediments to cartelisation in the past. The political scientist Klaus Detterbeck noted in 2005 the historical and structural constraints that had hitherto limited the emergence of the cartel party in the UK. First, the adversarial style of politics, encoded in the first past the post system, militates against collusion and instead encourages a zero-sum approach. This was certainly evident in the 1980s when the Conservative government worked to undermine the Labour Party as an institution through its attacks on trade unions and local government. Labour's response in the mid-90s was to agree with the Liberal Democrat proposal for state funding of parties, to break the Tories' advantage, though it dropped the issue after 1997 when zero-sum meant it suddenly had the advantage. Its eventual tentative steps (notably the 2006 Hayden Phillips report) were prompted by the "cash for honours" scandal. Since then, the ideological convergence seen in the 2010-15 period and the cross-party effort to expel Jeremy Corbyn from the political sphere have led to a greater belief that the politico-media caste has common interests, leading to less antagonism (consider Starmer's "constructive criticism" during the pandemic).

Second, until the 1980s there was a clear social difference between Labour and Conservative MPs, with the former still often from working class backgrounds and the latter frequently part-time, with parallel careers in the City or law. This has been eroded since to the point where "second jobs" are clearly on the way out (a topic on which Starmer has been unusually robust) and the social origins and career trajectories of MPs are increasingly similar, giving rise to a greater sense of shared identity as much as common interests. We are currently in an adversarial phase of politics, not least because the Truss government has sought to step outside of the mainstream political consensus (i.e. the macroeconomic policies endorsed by the media) that has held since 2009. However, despite the rhetoric about a government of the rich, it is clear that Labour have no intention of rocking the boat, hence the City is still eulogised an an engine of growth, nationalisation is off the table and the emphasis is once more on "fiscal responsibility" after the levelling-up promises of Boris Johnson and the tax cuts of Liz Truss. But if the impediments to cartelisation are weaker, does that necessarily mean that it will happen?

One argument against the cartel party theory is that history has shown interpenetration by the state and collusion to be ineffective in defending those parties that turned away from the mass member model in the 1980s and 1990s. The obvious examples are the Parti Socialiste in France and PASOK in Greece, with the latter lending its name to a process by which centre-left parties were squeezed precisely because they failed to represent their traditional mass support among the working class and because they were corrupted by office, opening themselves to populist attack, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. A counter-argument is that this actually proves the strength of democracy, and thus the relative weakness of cartel parties, rather than invalidating the theory. To complicate matters, the decline of the PS in France opened the door for Emmanuel Macron's En Marche, a party that appeared to be a cartel from its very inception: led by an énarque, with no real grassroots (hence the tone-deafness of the response to les gilets jaunes), and committed to a supra-political technocracy.

A second, related argument is that the very real, and historically extreme, turnover in parties over the last fifteen years suggests that the cartel party, if it ever existed, was a product of the "great moderation" in the period between 1980 and 2008. However, this fails to recognise that many of the populist or nationalist parties that have arisen in recent years, particularly in Europe, have been much less of a threat than hysterical liberal comment has suggested precisely because they have been quickly interpenetrated by the state and thus absorbed into the existing system. The rebranding of the Front National as Rassemblement National in France and the toning down of the separatist rhetoric of La Lega in Italy are recent examples. This isn't merely hypocritical positioning to meet the needs of electoral politics. As the acceptance of EU membership indicates, they are engaged in a negotiation with the state whose rewards will be access to funds that will indirectly benefit the parties themselves. Likewise, the electoral surge of Fratelli d'Italia has not seen the mass mobilisation of Fascist squadristi but simply the latest reconfiguration of Italian conservatism. With only 130,000 members, it is little bigger than the SNP.

In contrast, there has been a consistent refusal by the state to negotiate with new (or revived) parties on the left. The only real exception to this has been the by-force-of-circumstances inclusion of Podemos in the current Spanish coalition government, though it is clear the party is weakening electorally and is able to exert little influence over the PSOE. More notable was the blackballing of Jeremy Corbyn, not so much in the predictable undermining activities of the right-leaning PLP so much as in the briefings by former civil servants and military top brass that he was not to be trusted. This was a rare public appearance by the state that emboldened the political consensus (i.e. the collusion of the Labour right, the centre and the Tories) that in the event of a hung parliament there should be a party coup to prevent him entering Number 10. This repudiation of democracy was justifed on the grounds that the Prime Minister must enjoy the confidence of his party's MPs. But the supposedly hallowed principle of MP independence and personal conscience was clearly a flimsy fig-leaf for the reality of a PLP that considered it had a corporate right to reject the decision of both party members and voters.

The reason for the rejection of the left goes beyond ideological antipathy or the traditional bias of the state apparatus, and has clearly increased in intensity since the last great financial crash. We need a theory that can explain the virulent hatred that has been exhibited by the political establishment over the period despite the organised left being mostly harmless and certainly modest in its essentially social democratic, green-tinged politics. For all the talk about the revival of Marx and the renewed interest in Gramsci, the British left continues to be characterised by shallow theorising and organisational amateurism. Shit-posting and football-style chants do not pose a threat to the establishment. It isn't enough either to say that the centre has moved right when topics such as nationalisation and state-led investment have returned to the discourse. Talk of Putin-apologists or woke Nazis can be dismissed, and I think we can also set aside the notion of guilt arising from 2008. The angst over inequality has proved wholly ineffective at the political level and vowing to restore the 45% tax rate is hardly going to change that. 

It isn't the only reason, but I think one driver of liberal hysteria has been the fear that the left would not abide by the implicit rules of the game. As the established parties have drawn closer together both ideologically and socially, so they have come to view any challengers to the cartel with greater loathing. It might seem a stretch, but I think some of the current outrage directed towards the libertarians in Numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street is simply the right-facing equivalent of the outrage directed towards Corbyn. What appears to irk the establishment most about the left is its activism and commitment to participative democracy (often dismissed as "populism"), which it fears would be destabilising, not just in terms of wresting policy formation from the politco-media caste but more precisely in offending newspapers that consider themselves the true tribunes of the people. If my theory is correct, one of the first things you'd expect to see would be the neutralising of Labour activism and the re-emergence of a supportive media portraying the party as a safe pair of hands. If you want a vision of the cartelised future, imagine the Labour Party conference respectfuly signing God Save the King - forever.

That 1970s Show

Simon Wren-Lewis recently made the point - which bears repeating but has been repeatedly obscured by Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and now the war in Ukraine - that the post-2010 programme of austerity was a monumental policy error that looks to have permanently damaged the UK economy. Arguably, David Cameron and George Osborne's decision to blame Labour's fiscal profligacy as much as lax financial regulation for the banking crisis, and thereby justify shrinking the state, was worse that those other famous Tory examples of executive incompetence: the return to the gold standard in 1925 and crashing out of the ERM in 1992. The former exacerbated the depression of 1929, but coming off gold in 1931 had a positive impact on the economy, though many would not feel the benefits until the second half of the decade. In contrast, quitting the ERM had an almost immediately positive impact on GDP and household wealth. Labour in 1997 benefited not only from the political turn against the Conservatives after Black Wednesday but also from the robust growth of Ken Clarke's stint as Chancellor.

The failure of Osborne's embrace of "expansionary fiscal contraction" was evident not only in poor growth and degraded public services but in the continuation of the exceptional fiscal intervention that marked the response to the banking crisis, notably quantitative easing. It was certainly true that the Tories and their backers in the City and property development quickly became hooked on the QE drug, providing as it did an instant hit that inflated asset values, but it also highlighted the lack of any alternatives short of an admission that their strategy was fundamentally wrong and that the times called for an expansion of the state and a reduction in income inequality in order to prop up effective demand. As William Davies recently put it, "The austerity measures of George Osborne, which mendaciously blamed Britain’s economic woes on government debt, resulted in such dire economic stagnation that only unprecedented monetary policies could stave off a depression."

Austerity appears to have dramatically reduced long-run output, a fact that has been obscured by the wailing over Brexit. It's quite possible that the hit to growth of the latter self-harm will turn out to be smaller than the destructive acts of the coalition years (it's worth noting in passing that Brexit has also helped obscure the Liberal Democrats' hand in that destruction). Wren-Lewis also mentions another Tory balls-up that has recently been recalled from the memory banks, namely the Barber Boom of 1971-3. The contemporary relevance is the fear that government policy will stoke inflation. But the parallel isn't exact. Barber couldn't realistically foresee the exogenous event that would amplify inflation, namely the 1973 oil crisis following the Yom Kippur War, while the comparable event today, the wider energy crisis, was underway long before Liz Truss entered Number 10. Gas and oil prices have been rising steeply since early-2021 (a year before Russia's invasion of Ukraine). 

Truss and Kwarteng's decision to try and engineer a "boom" through tax cuts in this environment looks far more negligent, and that's before you consider the distributional inequity. The latter aspect is important over-and-above the morality of the decision because of the multiplier effect. The poor tend to spend every penny they get, the rich have a greater propensity to save. In theory, those savings could be used to fund productive investment in the UK economy. In practice, as we have seen for decades now, the money tends to be invested either abroad (reflect in passing that Jacob Rees-Mogg made his pile by investing in emerging markets, not in good old Blighty) or in unproductive property. Kwarteng's announcement today of a rise in the threshold for stamp duty is of more significance than abolishing the 45% top rate of income tax. It clearly indicates that there will be no fundamental change in the makeup of the British economy and therefore there is unlikely to be any deviation from the direction of travel since 2010.

History, as much as the opinion polls, might suggest that a Labour goverment is on the cards, as happened in 1929, 1974 and 1997, but we shouldn't ignore the recent success of the Tories in diverting attention from their negligence through the auto-da-fe of Brexit in the elections of 2017 and 2019. This was obviously aided by the hysterical anti-leftism of the political centre, but that was not enough on its own to secure two more Tory victories. A significant number of soi disant centrist remainers voted Conservative in 2019 because they didn't have a problem with austerity and were prepared to believe that the party would eventually recover its senses once Brexit was "done". When even the soft left elements of the Guardian's staff are today reduced to "‘Everything is broken because of 12 years of Tory government’ – why can’t Starmer just say it?", you realise that the bigger problem with this country is not the incompetence of the Conservative Party but the willingness of centrists to keep it in office.

Obviously Starmer is seeking to address this by reassuring centrists as much as the famous Red Wall voters. Hence his aversion to nationalisation and anything that might be considered economically radical as much as his performative monarchism and sympathy for social conservatism. The lack of substantive policy obviously depresses the left, but we shouldn't forget that this is precisely what many centrists want: cosmetic change, stability, boring technocracy. But Brexit remains a challenge and Truss & co exhibit every sign that they intend to continue exploiting it. In drawing historical parallels, we should also remember the fragility of those 1929 and 1974 Labour governments. 1997 was very much the exception and one, as noted above, that owed as much to the relative success of the economy after it was freed from the shackles of the ERM as it did to the electorate's exasperation with Tory sleaze. Those benign conditions obviously don't pertain now and there is no reason to believe that things will get noticeably better over the next two years, even if the war in Ukraine ends soon and energy prices fall. Labout must - as Zoe Williams and others now realise - attack the Tories for their malevolence and not just deride them for their incompetence.

If we're not facing a re-run of the 1990s, and the late-1920s are too distant to provide a realistic comparison, the question then is whether what we're facing is a repeat of the 1970s or a re-run of the 2010s. The popular journalism has inevitably plumped for the former, with all its redolent imagery of industrial unrest and queues at the petrol pumps, but I think the latter is more likely, which means another two years of growing inequality and welfare cuts rather than blackouts or rubbish piling up in the streets (though I wouldn't rule either out). Labour's challenge at the next election will be to pin the blame on 14 years of deliberate Tory policy, not just mismanagement, and trace the thread from the baseless claims of 2010 forwards without being distracted once more by Brexit. But the precedent of 2015, and particularly the craven behaviour of the PLP immediately after the election when it abstained on the welfare bill, suggests that they will struggle to do that if they continue to cleave to the neoliberal policy orthodoxy that, absent the Corbyn interlude, has marked the party since the 1990s.

The thing to understand about the 70s is that it was a period of growing prosperity for most people, in no small part because wages kept up with prices due to stronger unions and because employment remained high. There was also the continuing impact of the long tail of major investments in the social fabric and industry that had commenced in the 1950s. In contrast, what we face today is the legacy of a decade of deliberate under-investment in that social fabric and the continuation of a pattern of weak capital investment by the private sector. The results have been widening inequality, precarious employment and poverty wages. Despite the revival of union militancy in the face of rising inflation and further public sector cuts, this is not as propitious an era for organised labour as the 1970s was. The result is that while the Labour Party can expect to be ahead in the polls, a lack of popular confidence in its willingness to pursue radical structural change may lead to a hung parliament. The ironic echo of the 70s may turn out to be another Lib-Lab pact, which could pave the way for a Tory revival.

On the Nature of Debt

The government's plan to financially support households and businesses in the face of rocketing fuel bills, which remains vague on the details and may end up costing more than the suggested figure of £150 billion, has brought the question of government debt back to the fore. But instead of warnings about sustainability or the impending arrival of the bond vigilantes the discourse has been marked by an easy acceptance of the idea that the state should borrow not just to subsidise consumers but to fund tax cuts as well, and that both can have a positive impact on debt levels over the medium-term. The former is expected to reduce inflation and therefore the interest that the government must pay on existing debt - a dubious assumption that the Tories have lifted wholesale from Labour's equally vague proposals - while the latter is expected to boost GDP at a time of geopolitical uncertainty with the IMF and World Bank forecasting a global decline in growth from 6% to 3%. Clearly there is some blind faith at work here, but there is also a lot of political economy. What the media have so far failed to do is uncover that in any meaningful way, and it's not because they've been distracted by the funeral.

Recent examples of the media promoting crazy nonsense in the interests of supposed balance (Brexit, climate scepticism etc) should not blind us to the fact that it mostly operates by taking sides, rather than pretending there are two of equal weight. The debt-to-GDP ratio is a good example of this, which can be seen in the persistent treatment of debt-sceptical theories such as MMT as unorthodox or even downright nonsense, and in the gullibility displayed over Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart's infamous 2010 claim about sustainability levels, which turned out to be based on a mix of political economy prejudice and spreadsheet errors. Instead it was taken as read that rising debt is bad, despite domestic economic growth having been reliant on it for decades. The household metaphor was a particularly bizarre example of this, as if people didn't have mortgages or credit cards and still managed their finances by arranging piles of coins on their kitchen table. 

It was also strange that the variability of the cost of debt, both in terms of interest rates and collateral, was so little remarked upon despite this being obvious to the average householder and despite it being central to the sub-prime explosion. It is always easier and cheaper for the rich to incur debt, and socially more acceptable to do so. This isn't because they are less likely to default. As John Paul Getty famously observed, "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." The simple truth is that the ability to borrow money is a privilege. Originally, this was limited to royalty and the aristocracy (the Queen Mother owed £7 million when she died in 2002, despite having assets worth vastly more) but soon spread to the bourgeoisie with the development of  commercial banking and eventually to the rest of us with its "democratisation" in the twentieth century. If the top end of the debt market is still about privilege (platinum credit cards), the bottom end is very much about discipline (loan-sharking).

Increased government debt will now be presented as acceptable because the issue is not the debt itself but what the money is spent on - i.e. who benefits. When the focus is public services, then debt is bad. When the focus is tax cuts that disproportionately favour the better-off, then debt is efficacious. The theoretical underpinning of this has nothing to do with sustainbility levels or the powers of a monetary sovereign. It is rather the belief that the state spends wastefully while the private sector spends wisely. Keynes's major contribution to the debate was the observation that there really isn't any such thing as wasteful spending at a macroeconomic level, just wasted resources (the banknotes in bottles story), while Hayek's chief contribution was the idea that private actors price goods and services more accurately than planners, so pounds spent in the private sector have in aggregate a greater return than pounds spent in the public sector. These theories aren't in conflict, but they clearly reflect very different views on the role of the state: the buyer of last resort versus the enforcer of contracts.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, has reassured markets that despite the government's commitment to short-term fiscal loosening, it will "never let debt spiral unsustainably". The key word there is "spiral", which is usually associated with the unreasonable demands of labour. In other words, Kwarteng is promising that there will be a tight rein on public spending. This should be read in tandem with the government's refusal to impose a windfall tax on energy providers' super-profits. Together they point to who is going to pay for that extra debt and the mechanism by which it will be effected, namely the lower income brackets and further public service cuts. Liz Truss's determination to reverse the National Insurance rises introduced by Rishi Sunak, which will significantly benefit the well-off more than the poor, is not simply about sucking up to Conservative voters but about reducing benefits. Even though NI isn't hypothecated, it is associated with welfare in the public mind, so this decision carries a symbolic weight.

Critics, like James Meadway, who suggest we're witnessing the birth of "Tory MMT" are ignoring the distributional intent by focusing on what appears to be a volte-face over the acceptability of debt. But while the Conservative Party has a long history of flip-flopping on the mechanics of economic management, from the gold standard to the ERM, it has never wavered in its representation of class interests. The underlying issue is always about who benefits from debt and, in turn, who will pay for it. The significance of MMT to the present moment is that the theory is a rejection of the neoliberal idea of globalism in which the international financial markets discipline the nation state. The government's relaxed approach to increased debt, like the hints that the Bank of England's monetary independence may be constrained, are only possible because we are currently in an environment in which that global discipline is largely in abeyance due to the combined impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ramifications of the war in Ukraine. 

However, it's worth remembering that rising debt is also the inevitable consequence of the turn against austerity. According to the New York Times, surveying the European scene, "spending billions and ditching the old orthodoxy may be the only way to keep voters on board with Europe’s strong support of Ukraine against Russia." But government debt was rising for some years before the Russian invasion as it became clear that the fiscal orthodoxy was strangling growth and that millions faced declining living standards even before the price of fuel went up. A better observation in the same article, quoting a Dutch economist, is that "For the last ten years and more, we’ve been told that workers and pensioners and the young all have to make sacrifices and we need to live within our means. We’ve seen degrading infrastructure, our health system deteriorated. It was all for nought. The dogma has been clearly exposed as a narrow political ideology, devoid of macroeconomic thinking, weaponized for narrow political ends."

The current environment is likely to persist until 2024 at least, which means the next general election will probably be a watershed, in the way that 2010 was but 2017 and 2019 were not. According to Simon Wren-Lewis, "Truss believed that, with two and a half years before the next election, playing the deficit responsibility card would reap few political dividends and might prevent the government from doing more popular things, like cutting taxes. Deficit obsession was never a fundamental part of neoliberalism, but just a useful tactic at certain times to achieve a smaller state." I think this underplays the role of defict discipline in neoliberalism. As Ludwig von Mises put it in 1944, looking forward to a postwar order that would limit sovereign rights, "Measures which affect debts, the money systems, taxations, and other important matters have to be administered by international tribunals, and without an international police force such a plan could not be carried out. Force must be used to make debtors pay". That pretty much describes the Troika's approach to Greece in 2007.

It's worth noting, with the 2024 election in mind, that there isn't a significant political divide on this. New Labour's famous "prudence" was premised on the idea that rising tax receipts due to bouyant GDP growth would fund improved public services, but the argument that the latter could boost the former was rarely made: the causal relationship was always one way. While Labour may be advocating a windfall tax - as ever, a relatively timid one despite widespread public support - it isn't proposing to redefine the role of the state, hence the continuing aversion to nationalisation. It would no doubt seek to increase spending on the NHS and other "acceptable" elements of public expenditure, but it won't noticeably shift the ratio of private and public in the GDP mix, and that inevitably means that the less acceptable elements of welfare spending, such as benefits, will continue to be squeezed. The rehabilitation of debt as a tool of macroeconomic management may signal a renewed focus on the "dependency culture" that lost its spot in the political limelight of recent years to "wokeness".

The Monarchy and the Media

In searching for something interesting to say about the passing of QE2, I've been struck by a paradox. The media is obviously highly prominent, in the the wall-to-wall TV coverage and the banal press tributes (there have been only a few exceptions worth your time), and we've even been treated to the sight of erstwhile champions of free speech insisting that now is not the time to express a heterodox opinion (I marvel at the ability of some liberal commentators to eulogise Volodmyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron while insisting that the UK has been blessed to have an unelected head of state). But at the same time the media has been almost completely absent from the discussion of either the historical development of the monarchy over the last 70 years (wheeling out the old anecdotes about the King's speech on the wireless, or how everyone supposedly bought a TV for the coronation in 1953, do not count) or its future prospects, which by any reasonable assessment must be considered uncertain. 

This is odd given that our understanding of the institution is almost wholly dependent on the media. You certainly don't get taught about it in school, and even courses in Modern History tend to avoid it outside of constitutional crises, all of which appear to end with "progress" and the monarchy largely unruffled as if Whig history were still a thing. The official and semi-official histories are obviously anodyne and the more structural works in the Marxist tradition, such as Tom Nairn's The Enchanted Glass, largely marginal to public discourse (and arguably out of date). Even the more polemical books, such as Christopher Hitchens' The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish, are in the tradition of radical journalism, being denunciations of a lack of virtue rather than critical evaluations of the functional role of the crown. For such a central component of the UK state and establishment, the monarchy remains analytically opaque.

A good example of this occlusion could be found in today's Observer where Kenan Malik managed to make some sharp (if decidely undergraduate) points about the relationship of the monarchy to democracy while (almost) avoiding mention of the media altogether (the one mention points to its role as the self-appointed arbiter of decorum, which is a bit like saying the CBI has opinions about working from home - it hardly gets to the heart of the matter). According to Malik, "politics is the means by which ordinary people engage with the process of governance; to insist on the need for a hereditary monarch to stand above it, to embody continuity and the nation’s moral principles, is to restrain that process of democratic change. The monarchy may be deemed to be above politics, but its very presence is itself a profoundly political statement; a statement about the degree to which the people and the democratic process can be trusted."

What this omits is the role of the media in that elevation above the demos. Once the monarchy's practical political powers were curtailed in 1911, and it therefore no longer needed to be in the front-row of resistance to democracy, it adopted a largely ceremonial role, reflected in the steady invention of yet more dubious traditions, and a personal discretion (the shift from the aristocratic behaviour of Edward VII to the ostensible bourgeois mundanity of George V) that, absent the abdication crisis of 1936, continues to this day. All of this was public relations fodder that depended on a sympathetic media for broadcast to the nation. As we have seen on occasion, the press is more than capable of presenting a royal in an unflattering light, yet it rarely did so despite the family's notorious and persistent racism, classism and misogyny. The royals' embrace of the wireless and later television was not some grudging acceptance of modernity but an adroit recognition that they were now media properties.

The fawning towards the monarch is not independent of the press's more critical attitude towards our leading politicians but is in fact its corollary. If you are going to routinely denigrate politicians, not because of their individual failings but because you really don't like democracy and what that implies for the "free press", then you need some reference point "above the fray". This is most obvious when a politician comes along who is sympathetic to your hopes for an anti-democratic but populist coup. Consider the apochryphal froideur between Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher. What they actually thought of each other was irrelevant - what mattered was the media assumption that they were essentially in competition, which was a product of their slavish devotion to the Conservative Party leader in her pomp. Likewise the willingness of the press to turn on any member of the royal family short of the Queen was not simply a display of lèse-majesté but a reminder that the monarchy depends on its indulgence.

Ultimately, the view of the Tory press is not that "someone born into the right family is more fit to represent the nation than someone chosen by the demos", as Malik puts it, but that the most fitting is whoever has been anointed by the press. The crucial role that Tony Blair played in protecting the monarchy in 1997 from popular criticism was less a reflection of his own electoral authority on the back of a landslide general election win and more the confidence imbued by the backing of Rupert Murdoch. He knew that this was a rare moment when the press would back the politician over the prince, but he also knew that pursuing an aggresive line would make him ever more dependent on the press, and so jeopardise his plans to shut the Tories out of government for a decade. Given his own conservative instincts, it was no surprise that he indulged his favourite rhetorical trope of "modernisation" while carefully ensuring that the old order remained intact.

The Observer did publish a more insightful piece on the monarchy by David Edgerton, but I feel that in his desire to meet the brief (be disobliging about the Tories and you can promote your book), he also underplayed the role of the media. His central point is that the monarchy depends upon the Conservative Party and the changes in the latter since Margaret Thatcher have made the monarchy more vulnerable. He sets the scene by establishing the early twentieth century dynamic: "Monarchy was never above politics. It rested on it and on the Conservative party in particular. This was the party of the monarchy, the union, the constitution, the established churches and the empire. In 1936, it disposed of a king emperor who offended its bourgeois sensibilities, thus redirecting the royal line of succession down to King Charles III."

This is naming names in a way that Malik is reluctant to do, but noting that the modern Tory party "has taken up Powellite free marketism and nationalism rather than imperialism" is less about unpicking the contrary strains of globalising neoliberalism and its chauvinistic counter-movement than establishing the monarchy as an emblem of postwar modernity: "In 1953, the coronation was broadcast on television, to a nation of wireless listeners. The new Prince Consort started egging on the nation’s engineers in an era of heroic test pilots, sleek new jets and atomic power stations. That Dan Dare world is as long gone as the promise of the new Elizabethan age, but it had its moment." In truth, that moment was very short (though strangely formative), spanning little more than three years until Suez made the UK's reduced circumstances obvious to even the most obtuse journalist. I should also stress that any review of the monarchy that highlights the emblematic role of the wireless receiver and the TV set should be marked down for a lack of originality.

Just as Edgerton doesn't wholly buy Tom Nairn's thesis that the monarchy embodied an antique state (which is a bit of a simplification of the thesis), so I'm not convinced that it should instead be seen as imbued with modernity in the latter half of the twentieth century, from its exploitation of mass media to its encouragement of technology. This sounds too much like special pleading for his own history of the British nation. But what he does, via the historiography of invented tradition, is highlight the extent to which the monarchy in the age of Elizabeth II was a construct and above all one created by the media. Contrary to the claim that BBC newsreaders live in fear of negative newspaper coverage if they put a foot wrong, the truth is that the Corporation has always been heavily and willingly invested in the ritual of monarchy. Indeed, much of its own authority derives from those "I am speaking to the nation" radio speeches and that famously televised coronation.

Using the Guardian/Observer line - that democracy is imperilled by shadowy forces, from Russia to California, and only liberal journalism can protect us - as cover, Edgerton hints about the changing dynamic of media ownership: "The invented traditions that sustained the performance of monarchical presence have their outward pomp but have lost much inner meaning. The voice of the monarchical state is, post-Iraq and Brexit, assumed to be dissembling or mendacious. The once wholly cringeing media now often report to greater powers who are less inclined to respect the official royal version. They have bigger lies to tell." This reference to the media is welcome, after Malik's silence, but it's a misdirection to suggest that there has been a decline in its respect for the monarchy due to foreign ownership. If anything, the last few days of cringeing media coverage, despite a noticeable lack of the popular hysteria we saw in 1997, should have given the lie to that.

Political media remain firmly wedded to the nation state, even if entertainment has long since become a global industry. And in the UK that means that the monarchy retains its role as a rebuke to democracy. The press aren't going to undermine the monarchy, though they will take great pleasure in toying with it and will demand periodic sacrificial victims. At the end of the day, the monarchy remains the only component of an increasingly threadbare constitution capable of putting the brakes on democracy, if only by symbolic example rather than the exercise of real power. The only thing that might change the relationship of the press and the monarchy is if Liz Truss manages to truly revive the Thatcherite revolution and this time follow it to the logical end that Thatcher, as an unimaginative snob whose admiration for Hayek et al owed much to their anti-democratic credentials, resiled from, just as she eventually resiled from the logic of the single european market, namely the creation of a truly bourgeois political order. The Republic of Great Britain is coming and, like Nixon to China, it can only ever be birthed by a Tory government.