Gain Or Loss

According to Charlotte Higgins, the "chief culture writer" at the Guardian, "In popular discourse in Britain, returning artefacts to their communities of origin is almost invariably framed as a loss." This is surely wrong. To take the most famous example, and the chief subject of Higgins's article, 55% of people favoured the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece when polled by YouGov in 2017, and only 21% favoured retaining them in Bloomsbury. That majority probably aren't particularly worked up over the issue, so a charged term like "loss" is irrelevant to their feelings. Where emotion runs high is not among the populace at large but among those sections of the commentariat who see British museums as a national patrimony under threat externally from grasping foreigners and internally from woke curators and politically correct trustees. Rather than addressing those rightwing commentators' beliefs head-on, Higgins opts for a third way in which restitution is framed as an ethical gain: everyone's a winner; there is no loss.

But the idea that Britain restoring the marbles to the Parthenon would be a magnanimous gesture is no different to the self-congratulation of manumission. It seeks to avoid the shame of a past wrong by the spectacle of present virtue, and expects the bonus of admiration into the bargain. The parallel with slavery is not over-the-top. In both cases the root of the issue is the treatment of property. Today we are appalled by the idea that people could be considered as such, but our attitudes towards cultural artefacts, and in particular the idea that they should be freely tradeable across the globe, has not changed one iota in two hundred years. They may seem conceptually miles apart now, but slavery and collecting clearly overlapped, most obviously in the imperialist discipline of ethnography. For this reason it's worth considering the vexed issue of historic collections using the three Rs often rasied in the context of slavery: recognition, restitution and reparations.

Viewed thus, it is clear that the British Museum and the UK state remain stuck on the point of recognition, i.e. the admission that the marbles should never have been separated from the building (the claim that this was done to protect them from damage and was sanctioned by the Ottomans is special pleading, not to mention lacking in proof). For that reason, the hope of Higgins and other liberals that some via media can be found to address restitution is premature. Indeed, her suggestion that "perhaps to see the surviving portions of the Parthenon frieze and pediments reassembled, it will need Greece and Britain both to lend their sculptures to a third country" indicates the extent to which such schemes are mere day-dreaming, as if Greece could realistically be expected to compromise to avoid upsetting the feelings of the Daily Telegraph. Restitution cannot precede recognition, and once that recognition is conceded, there can be no negotiation - a point I'm sure both the British Museum and the government are only too well aware of.

In laying out the problem, Higgins instinctively reaches for the apocalyptic language of conservatism, even if she frames it in terms of a historical irony: "Minds leap to a vision of our museums violently pillaged: walls bare, sculpture courts deserted, store rooms despoiled – a fascinating reversal of how at least some (albeit, to be fair, a tiny minority) of museum objects in the UK were actually acquired." This elides the manner in which the vast majority of exhibits were acquired while simultaneously highlighting it. They were not the product of violent seizure but of purchase. However, this was in no sense the operation of a "free" market. Rather artefacts were acquired at knockdown prices through coercion, in the same way that labour power was acquired in the domestic sphere through enclosure and punitive poor laws, or agricultural commodities and raw material are acquired today through global cartels. There's also a tendency to forget how many were the result of trades between imperial powers, which distanced the original theft or seizure, or of the operation of a rapacious comprador class acting as agents for those imperial powers. Empire was a system of permanent exploitation, not occasional looting raids.

The argument against the restitution of the Parthenon marbles to Greece was long an example of the "gish gallop" - that is a set of uncoordinated claims, tendentious in isolation but intended to overwhelm the debate by sheer numbers. Thus you cannot undo history (an argument familiar in the recent debate over statues); you risk setting a precedent (an argument wheeled out by the current Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan); the artefacts can be cared for better here than there; and more people will see them in a major museum in a "world city". All of these have been repeatedly knocked down. No one would now seriously claim that the marbles, or the study of Classical Greek statuary more generally, would suffer by being returned to the purpose-built Parthenon museum in Athens, or that returning them would result in the British Museum being denuded in double-quick time (though if that resulted in more displays of actual British artefacts, would it be such a bad thing anyway?) One argument that remains implicit, because it would obviously prompt a riot if articulated today, is that we are better able to appreciate the marbles, but this was an argument that was once explicit and unashamed. Indeed, Elgin's original defence was precisely that he was rescuing these artefacts from local neglect.

Who is best qualified to advance the understanding of a people's culture and history? The idea that it is the current descendants of that people is relatively novel, and obviously tied-up with the twin ideas of  nationalism and decolonisation. The arrogance of imperial powers towards subject peoples sat alongside another form of cultural appropriation, that of the claim to be the favoured inheritors of the classicial tradition. To be, in other words, the modern Athens or Rome. Britain's retention of the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes are categorically different in this respect. The former were secured as a legitimation of empire and enlightenment, that is a reflection of Britain's historic role as the most developed nation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and thus the trustee of civilisation. With Greece still under Ottoman rule and Hellenism the height of fashion, the idea that Britain was the natural inheritor of the Athenian Golden Age was common. The transfer of Classical art from the Mediterranean to Britain through the vector of the Grand Tour was a tangible tribute to Britain's geopolitical status, much as it would become for rich Americans in later centuries.

In contrast, the Benin bronzes were seen at the time as a penalty paid by those who resisted Pax Britannica. Again, we easily forget that for most of their time in the British Museum these artefacts were not considered to be of civilisational significance, certainly not on a par with the statuary of Classical Greece and Rome. 60% of the bronzes (which were mostly brass and thus not instrinsically of great monetary value) looted during the 1897 expedition were distributed among the soldiery as spoils or war or sold at auction (many to foreign museums, such as in Germany). It was only with the interest shown by European artists in African sculpture in the early twentieth century that they acquired a greater cultural cachet. Even then, the British Museum continued to sell small numbers back to the Nigerian government up until the early 1970s, indicating their treatment as mere commodities. 

The Parthenon marbles should be returned to Greece, and the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. And if any other country wants any other artefacts currently housed in the British Museum returned, then that should happen without any quibble too. (It's worth noting that most countries won't go to the trouble, any more than the UK will be demanding that all Beatles memorabilia be repatriated). Far from dressing this up as an ethical gain, the UK should have the courage to accept it as a justified loss and therefore a proper restitution. The importance of this is not simply in the proper treatment of the artefacts themselves but in the signal it would send in respect of the three Rs, namely that the UK was now at a point where it could seriously address the issue of reparations. But that is obviously a step too far, not just for the conservatives who still cling to the belief that the British empire was a force for good in the world but for those liberals who believe that the empire was dismantled through the virtuous enlightenment of the British people.

A Failure of Nerve

The widely-reported death of "levelling up" may reflect the government's changed tenor, from the activism of Johnson to the pragmatism of Sunak, but as Johnson was never that active, and Sunak has proven to be anything but pragmatic (e.g. failing to buy off the nurses and split the strike movement), it might simply reflect the political eclipse of Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, to give him his full title. Gove's policy paper, published less than 12 months ago, talked of levelling up as "a moral, social and economic programme for the whole of government" that would "spread opportunity more equally across the UK". Such lofty ambition has always been Gove's rhetorical signature, whether in pushing a nostalgic schools curriculum or promising us the sunny uplands of Brexit. Whatever else can be deduced from the current administration's behaviour over the last three months, it's clear there will be no single unifying theme beyond hanging on for dear life, which isn't that much different to the opposition's approach as they sit atop a poll lead that clearly has little to do with their policy pledges.

In trying to distract from Sunak and Starmer's underwhelming presentations, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer defined the difference between the parties as less state versus more state. This isn't altogether wrong, though given Rawnsley's undiluted Blairism, it merely prompts the question as to what sort of state he has in mind. For example, when he writes "his one thought about addressing the crisis in the NHS is that more health care should be provided by the private sector", it isn't immediately clear which party leader he is talking about, though the clue is that Starmer's comments on the NHS came some days later so it's actually Sunak. Not only did the Labour leader back Wes Streeting's suggestions about private sector involvement, he also took the time to take a swipe at the vested interests of doctors and NHS "bureaucracy", while advocating a nebulous devolution of power that encompassed self-referrals to medical specialists and communities "taking back control", none of which would have been out of place in Gove's policy paper, or indeed a speech by Maragaret Thatcher.

This modesty of ambition is the opposite of what many hoped for (or feared) following Brexit. There has been a striking consensus between remainers and leavers in recent months, the former concluding that the facts of geography and the asymmetries of power in a world still highly-integrated by trade mean that our hands remain (fortunately) tied, the latter that the Brexit project has been fatally damaged by the Tories' incompetence and is now "unsalvageable". This shared pessimism about the capability of the UK state might seem odd given that it co-exists with a continuing belief in the power of the EU project on the one hand (the activist state in excelsis), and a belief that a dynamic (even "swashbuckling") Britain still exists somewhere just out of reach on the other. But viewed through the lens of history, it highlights that a failure of nerve at the crucial moment has been typical of the UK for more than a century, and we appear to be living though another one now.

Though the People's Budget of 1909 marked a significant step towards a Bismarckian welfare state, it also marked the limits of the UK's fundamentally Georgian constitution. The crisis of the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1918 was famously attributed to a combination of Lords reform, Irish home rule, female suffrage and trade union power, but what this omits is that the chief problem was not external pressure, either in the form of conservative resistance or progressive demands, but internal weakness, specifically that the Liberals were temperamently unsuited to overseeing the growth of the sort of state necessary to meet the challenges of the twentieth century, either in wartime or peace. They became irrelevant and that is why they were supplanted by the Labour Party, though ironically this marked the point at which liberalism became hegemonic. It is grimly amusing that Lords reform, Scottish independence, gender rights and mass strikes are all on today's agenda, but this is less a case of history rhyming than continuities from a century ago due to the weak development of the state. 

There were two pivotal moments over the last 100 years: the late-1940s and the mid-1960s. The first of these was in some respects the return of the Liberal Party to government. Not only was the welfare state cast in the image of William Beveridge, but consititutional reform was ducked and empire preserved where possible (partly to generate export dollars to pay for US war loans but also partly because of a genuine belief that Britain still "deserved" its imperial reach, just like its seat at the UN and nuclear bombs). Meanwhile, social policy was given a distinctly pre-war cast (e.g. the 1944 Education Act, the 1948 Nationality Act). At a time when the UK could have become the de facto leader of Europe, it mentally retreated behind the English Channel. What Labour was temperamentally more suited to was the nationalisation of strategic industries, albeit on a Fabian model that assumed a continuity of management (and thus poor labour relations) with "public ownership" a substitute for more radical industrial democracy. 

By the early-60s it was clear that the UK needed to change course. The empire was gone, British industry continued to suffer from under-investment, and people were still living in Victorian slums while watching American TV shows (or watching the same slums on Coronation Street). Again, there was a failure of nerve, with politicians dithering like Macmillan or retreating into nostalgia like Gaitskell. The Wilson governments of 1964-70 made important advances in education, housing and social security, as well as pushing through many liberal legal reforms, but this was arguably just the overdue work that should have commenced in 1945. Where the state failed was in taking the lead to retool industry or advance beyond the industrial relations of the 1950s. This would be played out through the 1970s in strikes, the persistence of a class antagonism and snobbery that reeked of the prewar era (see 'Til Death Us Do Part or The Good Life for examples), and strife over the European Common Market. In all, the slow death of Labourism.

In many ways the 1980s marked the apogee of state activism. This was seen in the induced recession that decimated manufacturing, the privatisation and asset-stripping of nationalised industries, and the centralisation of power. The systematic selling-off of council housing was arguably the most consequential social policy of the century. What this showed was that the state had enormous leverage, which in turn highlighted the timidity of those earlier periods. You could extend this argument to the creation of the EU Single Market and even the Poll Tax, which proved a major miscalculation but could not be faulted in terms of ambition. Though the shadow of Margaret Thatcher looms large over contemporary politics, one important difference is the reluctance to lever the state for such radical economic and social change. The Blair governments were busy and intrusive, but many of their achievements were shallow, with the result that few of their mighty works survived even five years of the coalition government. Conservative administrations from Cameron onwards have been marked by venality, indolence and incompetence.

Against this backdrop, I return to the question I rhetorically asked of Andrew Rawnsley above: what will the state look like under Starmer? His answer is: "At heart, Sir Keir believes in a large and activist government, with the levels of taxation implied by that, though he prefers to talk about an “agile state” to make it sound more attractive to the wary." This isn't much help. The first part sounds like Blair while the second, borrowing an anodyne term from neoliberal business-speak, could equally apply to Wilson. But there is clearly not going to be a return to 1960s levels of taxation, so the scale of social investments seen in that era are unlikely to be repeated, while the few commitments made to date have either been carefully hypothecated (e.g. using increased tax receipts from a "reformed" non-dom status to fund more doctors and nurses) or are so ambiguous as to be impossible to price (Great British Energy). There's also little likelihood of someone like Roy Jenkins pushing the envelope of legal reform (say around trans rights) beyond Sir Keir Starmer KC's comfort zone.

The UK state has tried to be genuinely activist on three occasions. It gave up after 1911 because the Liberal party (and Asquith in particular) didn't have the stomach for it. It was supremely activist in the early-40s under the exigencies of war, though it was no coincidence this was led by a former Liberal minister of an activist bent in Churchill. It was activist again in the 1980s, under the influence of monetarism and neoliberalism, leading to the paradox of an anti-state government that significantly expanded the state's power. The Attlee governments of 1945-51 were less radical than supposed, with much of their effort geared to the continuation of the warfare state as much as the extension of the welfare state, and their economic policy focused on repair and preservation rather than reinvention. The Wilson governments of 1964-70 were an attempt to address the social policy omissions of the Attlee years and the subsequent stagnation under the Conservatives, but without the nerve to address economic power beyond the rhetoric of modernity and In Place of Strife. The result was the 1970s combination of improved living standards and industrial conflict. 

In this context, there is little reason to believe a Labour government under Starmer will be particularly activist, and certainly no reason to believe it will seek a radical departure comparable to the early-1940s or 1980s. It clearly won't even live up to the qualified activism of the Attlee or Wilson governments. Though there is similarity in the rhetoric - the wasted years of Tory rule - there is also much talk of continuity: fiscal responsibility, leveraging the private sector, and not frightening voters (the social democractic manifesto of the Corbyn years now having been anathematised). Above all there is waffle, notably in the insistence that devolution can be a silver bullet: "We will succeed where successive governments have failed, in various ways, to varying degrees for a century, and we will do so for one simple reason – ending a century of centralisation and unleashing the power of all people in all parts of Britain". This is not only unconvincing from a party that is notably authoritarian and centralised, it suggests a refusal to acknowledge that the failure of successive governments has been down to a failure of nerve, not an excess of state power. Like the Liberal Party before it, Labour appears ready to give up before it has started.

The Youth of Today

Late December is usually marked in the media by year-end reviews, best-of lists and other filler prepared months ago, but occasionally it also provides space for more ruminative pieces that echo the zeitgeist. One that captured the attention this time round was John Burn-Murdoch's article in the Financial Times that used his trademark colourful charts to show that millenials in the UK and US were failing to become more conservative as they aged. While there is undeniably a trend here, I have a number of problems with the treatment, and the way that the idea has been taken up elsewhere in the media. Burn-Murdoch starts with a dodgy quotation, and even highlights its questionable origin: "“If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” So said Winston Churchill. Or US president John Adams. Or perhaps King Oscar II of Sweden. Variations of this aphorism have circulated since the 18th century, underscoring the well-established rule that as people grow older, they tend to become more conservative."

In fact, the frequently re-worded epigram originates with the French historian and statesman Francois Guizot, who was specifically addressing the relative attractions of republicanism and the constitutional monarchism he himself favoured. The original form is: "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head". Guizot was insisting that republicanism was a temporary aberration triggered by absolutism, whose historical role was to pave the way for a constitutional monarchy and the synthesis of conservative and liberal traditions. This was indeed the theme of one of his historical works, the Histoire de la révolution d'Angleterre depuis Charles I à Charles II. As that subject should make clear, Guizot did not anticipate a recurrence of the pattern in every generation but a final settlement (revolution here meaning a return to order). The maturation he was speaking of was not that of the individual but of society as a whole - and the implication that France was merely adolescent in the eighteenth century reflected the belief that it had only then reached eligntenment - but his choice of the personal metaphor would make the idea eternal. 

The phrases's subsequent career in the service of reaction, and the attempts to find antecedents in John Adams and Edmund Burke, reflected first the expansion of democracy and then the emergence of socialism. In other words, it gets wheeled out when there is a threat to the established order and its purpose is to dismiss that threat by implying immaturity and a lack of realism. In Burn-Murdoch's case, the purpose is to justify the "rule" of the drift from liberal to conservative sentiments over an individual lifetime. But the idea that the older you get the less radical you become is not one that is proven by events, even if there is a clear correlation with political affiliation. Obvious examples in recent years would be the preference of older voters for the radical departures and risks of Brexit in the UK and Donald Trump in the US. Going further back, the 18-24 year-old vote in UK general elections leapt from 24% for the Conservatives in 1974 to 42% in 1979 (higher than Labour), but this obviously cannot be explained by those slow-working material factors associated with a shift to the right such as home-ownership or parenthood.

The correlation of age and party affiliation is not fixed but reflects the way that parties mould themselves to societal groups that they think are more likely to be motivated to vote. Boris Johnson's "Fuck business" was a good example of his appreciation that the coalition he required to win in 2019 would necessarily include many social conservatives suspicious of big capital and resentful of the City of London. Likewise, Margaret Thatcher may have played many reactionary tunes in 1979, from union-bashing to fears of being "swamped" by immigrants, but she also appealed to the young and aspirational and associated their interests with her capital-friendly plans for deregulation and "freedom". It's easy to forget now, but one of the characteristics of the broader labour movement in the 70s was its age and over-familiarity, which contributed to the sense of exhaustion and the desire for change. Trade union leaders were mostly old and the Labour Party was still dominated by the wartime generation (Callaghan, Healey, Foot etc). Indeed, the left-right struggles of the time, from the GLC to Bennism, very clearly had a generational dimension to them. Labour looked, and presented itself as, the party of the old.

Burn-Murdoch doesn't believe the divergence from the "well-established rule" (which obviously can't be a rule after all) is due to either an age effect (the divergence is the disproof) or a period effect (the Tories current unpopularity). Rather he sees it as a cohort effect, i.e. "that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these". He highlights two factors: the turn to the left on economics and redistribution after the 2008 financial crisis, and the difficulty young people find in getting on the housing ladder. In subsequent discussions on Twitter, he noted that home-ownership is probably only having a marginal effect, which suggests the post-2008 shift in sentiment is more significant, but he also added another element to the mix: "to me this suggests the culture war politics of the last few years (predominantly an Anglophone phenomenon, actively disdained by many European countries) may be playing a bigger role than economics (similar experience in most countries)".

That incidental point about the difference between the anglosphere and continental Europe (where the cohort divergence doesn't appear to be happening) prompted others to suggest that the voting system might have a bearing. According to Rob Ford, "PR also enables voters to combine social liberalism with economic conservatism, but in Anglo-Saxon FPP or AV systems where the dominant right wing party is now socially and economically conservative they can't easily have this combo." This is an example of centrist groupthink. Having conceded that struggles over home ownership cannot account for the recent persistence of leftwing sentiment, and then using the difference of Europe to decouple the post-2008 reaction from that sentiment, we are left with the suggestion that our unreformed electoral system may in fact be misrepresenting the natural order of things: that "well-established rule". But if this were true, why did the young prefer the Conservatives in 1983 when the party was obviously both socially and economically conservative, having overseen the authoritarian turn that led to the 1981 urban riots and engineered a recession in the name of sound money? Was it just the Falklands effect?

One factor in the divergence of millenials that almost all commentators have agreed upon is the secular increase in graduates. Higher education is associated with a tendency towards liberal attitudes, even allowing for the class bias in university access and outcomes in terms of progress to professional careers. For example, the political economist Ben Ansell notes: "So the reason JBM is finding that millennials are not becoming more Conservative as they age (and I’m finding stability among Gen X) is that they are more likely to have degrees, which pushes them to the left and counters the aging effect." But within literally three sentences he admits that there has been a shift left among the young regardless of educational attainment. It could be, he surmises, that "the cultural attitudes of the university-educated class might have spilled over to the non-graduate young, in a way that bodes ill for culture warriors on the right". He offers no mechanism for how this "spilling-over" has taken place, nor does he explain why it didn't operate in previous decades. I can't help sensing the shadow of the rightwing narrative of universities as woke madrasas that are a danger to wider society.

James Marriott in The Times inevitably picked up on this vibe, explaining the difference between anglophone and continental European countries as the product of the Internet and the way that it has spread American progressivism, which reminded me of the fulminations against American cinema that were a staple of press commentary throughout the twentieth century. Marriott's attempts to defend European civilisation are quite comical, largely because of his ignorance of the subject. Thus he can claim that Michel Houellebecq is "mainstream" in France (yes, in the sense that Nigel Farage is mainstream in the UK), and that "To liberal English ears a centrist such as President Macron sounds as if he belongs much further on the right" (in fact, he's considered quite rightwing in France). Quoting Bruno Macaes, Marriott suggests that "Whereas liberalism, with its claim to universal moral principles, can be applied round the world, “woke” ideas, rooted in the specific racial atrocities of US history, are less easily exported." This is a peculiar perversion of the notion of American exceptionalism, and one that has been disproved by historians, such as Domenico Losurdo, who have thoroughly established the worldwide relationship of liberalism to slavery, racism and genocide.

The desire to blame the disaffection of the young on NIMBYism or the Internet or gerontocracy is just avoidance. Capitalism in the West has been failing since the 1970s. Globalisation and the shift to rentierism deferred the admission of this, but at the cost of increasing inequality as domestic wages were driven down in real terms and all generations, not just the young, were pushed into private rented housing. The vogue for a narrative that pits the generations against each other, or seeks to divide society by some cultural or values faultline, is an avoidance of class realities that spawns multiple myths that are easily disproved. Young people are still buying houses in their 20s, it's just that they are the well-off young who already have enough accumulated wealth to afford the deposit and well-paying jobs to service the mortgage. Governments haven't bent over backwards to serve the interests of pensioners ("The UK devotes a smaller percentage of its GDP to state pensions and pensioner benefits than most other advanced economies"). And there is no shortage of Red Wall towns where 1 in 10 identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or other.

Going back to Ben Ansell and his point that leftwing views seem to be prevalent among the young as a whole, one thing he highlights is that the major differences between the generations are about perception, notably in respect of fairness, equality and social mobility: "To the degree there is a ‘British dream’, the mostly retired think it exists and those entering the workforce think it’s a sham". This clearly reflects lifetime experience. The old are reluctant to believe that their cohort's arc (good job opportunities, affordable housing, asset appreciation, cheaper commodities etc) was exceptional: the product of a particularly benign convergence of socio-economic factors. Likewise, the young are reluctant to see the merits of capitalism after the veil was torn away in 2008 and as the payoff of climate change has become obvious. In other words, this is about the history of capitalism, not the atypical mindset of the young. The political implication is not that we need more competent facilitators of capitalism, but that we need politicians capable of looking beyond it. As the reaction to the Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies showed, that isn't about to happen. I'd finally note that Francois Guizot became Prime Minister of France in 1847, and went into exile in England in 1848 with the outbreak of revolution.