The Crown in Parliament

The Thatcher revolution introduced the concept of popular democracy to a Conservative Party that long considered it the chief threat to the status quo. Though she couched it in terms of personal choice in the economic sphere, and otherwise cleaved to the usual social reaction of the Tories, Thatcher unwittingly encouraged the demand for a wider devolution of effective power beyond the confines of Westminster and the establishment. Her populist success has proved damaging, and may yet prove fatal, to the most successful political party in history. Its legacy is all too obvious in recent developments, from Brexit to the far-right riot in Knowsley. The problem is, how do you put the genie of democracy and popular sovereignty back in the bottle? The answer increasingly appears to be that you sub-contract the task to the political centre. The liberal turn to intolerance and the rejection of democracy is not simply a reaction to Brexit or the incursion of the hitherto marginalised left under Corbyn. It reflects a belief that the Tories have failed to defend the state and in particular it centrepiece of parliamentary democracy. That the latter is highly unusual, indeed unique, among developed democracies elicits little comment in the UK beyond the perennial demand for modernisation. It was notable that the mainstream epitaphs to Tom Nairn interpreted his The Enchanted Glass as a reflection on the House of Windsor rather than Parliament.

The latest liberal to take up the cudgels on behalf of parliamentary democracy is Sonia Sodha in the Observer. As has become the norm since 2016, her case is made in the form of a highly-personalised rant (with not a few factual errors) rather than a reasoned argument. Stripping away the invective, she advances the linked ideas that MPs have a unique mandate from their constituency electorate (and so deselection by their local party would be anti-democratic) and that they alone have the legitimacy and competence to decide on a party leader (so party members should have no say). This position has long been the preserve of conservative political historians enamoured of the genius of the British constitution, but it is increasingly promoted by liberals who were hitherto insistent that we needed to modernise the constitution through measures such as proportional representation. The apparent paradox - that the electoral system is insufficiently representative and must be reformed, but MPs are the epitome of effective representation and so should not be challenged - is easy enough to explain in cartel party theory: the political caste should divide up power among itself in a way that avoids legislative monopoly while resisting any incursion that would undermine the party oligopoly. 

There are rational and pragmatic arguments to be made in favour of cartel politics, such as that it promotes political expertise and the peaceful alternation of governments, but these aren't arguments typically made in Britain. Instead we focus on the mystagogy of the constitution, notably the spiritual union of MPs and the electorate. But contrary to the myth, MPs are actually less in tune with voters than party members on many political issues, notably around inequality and workplace power, which clearly reflects lived experience and highlights MPs' sympathy with the managerial class, a sympathy shared by the commentariat. According to Sodha, "It is fundamentally undemocratic to give the small, unrepresentative sliver of voters that constitutes the Labour party membership too much power to impose a leader that neither the party’s MPs, nor the country at large, think is decent and competent, or to impose an idiosyncratic choice of individual as a likely local MP on tens of thousands of voters. Liz Truss’s success in winning the votes of Conservative members in her party’s contest sharply illustrates how this extends beyond Labour: giving party memberships too much power gums up parliamentary democracy." 

You'll notice that sandwiched between the claims that neither Corbyn nor Truss should have been allowed to become party leader is the suggestion that constituencies should have no say in the selection of candidates. Again, you could make respectable arguments for this, notably that it is how it used to be done. But leaving aside the reasons why the process was changed, not least that anti-democratic stitch-ups produced candidates who were never remotely representative of the constituency, consider how different the parties are today. The mass membership Conservative constituency parties were a rough proxy for bourgeois society in the 1950s and Central Office generally trusted them to organically produce the right type of backbencher, but no more. Likewise, CLP selections used to reflect the strength of trade union branches and affiliated socialist societies. Again, no more. Ironically, the nearest we've got in recent years to the good old days of mass membership was the influx to Labour in 2015 and 2016 around the election (and re-election) of Jeremy Corbyn. The reaction against that, from the weaponisation of antisemitism to the flouncing-out of Change UK, indicated just how much the Labour Party apparat were determined not to turn the clock back and just how far we had already travelled towards the cartel model.

In suggesting that Conservative Party members "gummed up" parliamentary democracy Sodha ignores the role of the party's MPs. The only choice that the members were given was whether to elect Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak as leader. They opted for one and after a brief period ended up with the other, which hardly suggests democracy run riot, particularly when all the opinion polls indicated that they would have preferred to have retained Boris Johnson who, whatever his flaws, won a resounding majority in 2019 after being elected by much the same membership. Of course, if you point this out, the defenders of parliamentary democracy will insist that what 2019 really shows is the danger of having a leader, i.e. Jeremy Corbyn, elected by the membership who then proves unpopular with the national electorate: heads I win, tails you lose. As only one party leader can become Prime Minister, a system in which multiple parties allow the membership to elect them will reliably produce such "failures" at every general election. Does this invalidate internal democracy? The serial failure of the Liberal Democrats to get their leader into Number 10 is never taken as evidence that the party membership should be denied the right to vote in leadership contests.

Defenders of Corbyn might interject at this point that Labour's improvement in the 2017 general election was a validation of the members' choice, but this falls into the centrist trap of treating electability as the only relevant measure. The purpose of political parties is not to reflect the mean voter but to persuade that voter to shift position. Were it otherwise, all parties would inevitably gravitate towards the assumed centre (as narrowly defined by the press), with the result that we'd have at best personality-led factions and at worst a de facto one-party state (we may now be witnessing the journey from one to the other). In a two-party system, both parties must be "off-centre" to a degree. One may claim to be closer to the centre and its opponent further away, but it would be ridiculous to claim that a similarity in policies was a sign of democratic health. In this regard, it's worth recalling that Blair's rhetoric about the "vital centre" in the 1990s was very much a reaction to the populist genie unleashed by Thatcher in the 1980s. Her neoliberal economic dispensation would be accepted but the postwar social management role of central government would be re-established, albeit now on a more technocratic footing (the contemporary echoes are obvious).

Viewed historically, Sodha's abhorrence of party democracy is over the top. The "threat" doesn't justify the reaction. The strength of democracy within the Labour Party in recent years can best be judged not by the leadership contests of 2015 and 2016 (or even 2010) but by the minimal progress in the deselection of clearly useless and unrepresentative MPs, the auto-expulsion of the Change UK bloc notwithstanding, and the acceptance of turncoats such as Christian Wakeford. It has always been the selection of MPs that has been the chief battleground for democracy within the party, leadership elections being (usually) rare events. Between Tony Blair's election in 1994 and Ed Miliband's in 2010 there was only one leadership election and that was uncontested (Gordon Brown in 2007). The run of three elections in under 5 years since 2015 (one forced by a PLP coup) is anomalous. Since 2020, the membership has been purged, candidates imposed by party HQ, and nobody seriously expects Starmer to abide by conference decisions any more than he kept the pledges on which he was elected leader by the membership.

Among the centrist commentariat the idea that anybody but the PLP should elect the leader, and that the leader's office should dictate policy, is now regarded as laughable. What distinguishes this attitude is not the obvious partisanship (the belief that Starmer will pursue the "right" policies), but the unabashed deference it entails. This is also evident in the terminology, such as "the grown ups are back in charge". Far from a critique of the infantilism of the left, this is an admission that what centrists really want is to be subject to the firm discipline of the political parent (the "father of the nation"). The Labour right's performative disciplinarianism - the talk of Respect Orders and being the party of national security - is not simply about winning over reactionary voters in the mythical Red Wall, any more than the angry flag-waving and tearful monarchism is. It also expresses their sado-masochistic tendencies: the attraction of a style of governance in which punishment and obeisance go hand in hand. They really do get a hard-on about this sort of stuff.

Parliamentary democracy is obviously more about the first word than the second, and part of its justification is the "glamour" of the state and the "enchantment" this gives rise to, in the sense used by Tom Nairn in the Enchanted Glass. Nairn quotes R W Johnson on "the peculiar British political culture, characterised on the one hand by a uniquely powerful and successful state and, on the other, by it's non-inclusive conception of the popular interest ... It is unthinkable that a state like the British one can be 'possesed' by its people. The very institution of the monarchy makes this plain." In late-twentieth century British political history, not enough attention has been given to what the supposed froideur between Thatcher and the Queen actually meant, outside of class snobbery. Brexit may be a mis-step of epic proportions, but there is no doubt that the impulse towards popular sovereignty was real. The explanations for leavers' motivations on this dimension quickly settled on the supposed democratic deficit of England, notably it's disadvantage relative to the devolved assemblies of Scotland and Wales. This is objectively absurd, but the absurdity stems from the attempt to address the sense of a lack of popular sovereignty without mentioning the monarchical elephant in the room, which would in turn would mean addressing the nature of British democracy: the Crown in Parliament.

It's generally recognised that Starmer's historic brief is to restore the competence of the British state and the pre-eminence of the establishment after the populist shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn upsurge. This extends at a practical level to preserving the Union, re-establishing the UK as a key player in international governance (notably NATO), and restoring the country's credibility as a destination for global capital. But there is also a symbolic mission: restoring the divine right of parliament after Brexit raised the possibility of popular sovereignty. What the 2016-19 period exhibited was the unwillingness of MPs to be over-ruled by a popular vote, which was only brought to an end by another popular vote in a forced general election ("Tell them again"). Starmer's style, with its mixture of bureaucratic gravitas and belligerent intolerance, is a conscious expression of that mission to restore Parliament's dignity. His problem is that the steady decline of the monarchy, which probably won't be allayed by any temporary coronation celebrations, means that the glamour and enchantment of the state is weakening at just the point when it is most needed. 

Minor Party Concerns

A useful way of understanding the state of politics in the UK is to look at the minor parties. This is because British politics is defined by the primacy of the party system: the rigidity of the constitutional structure (first-past-the-post giving rise to alternating governments) and the dynamism of the parties as coordinated elements within it (the ebb and flow of voters from one to the other). Minor here means not just the Liberal Democrats, with their dreams of another hung parliament, or the SNP with their reality of devolved government, but the also-rans, such as Reform and the Greens. Each occupies a particular niche within the political ecosystem that is largely parasitical on the two main parties. For example, the Greens, despite not being eco-socialists in the main, are a respectable destination for leftwing protest votes in both safe Conservative and Labour seats. Likewise, Reform (like UKIP and the Brexit Party before it) offers a respectable option for reactionaries who feel the Conservatives have gone soft. The major anomaly here is the devolved assemblies, where the two main UK parties can find themselves in a minor position (e.g. Labour in Scotland or the Conservatives in Wales).

Political pundits generally ignore the minor parties at the UK level unless they can be used as a vector to attack either Labour or the Conservatives. In the case of the Liberal Democrats, the same party can be used to attack both. But this obscures the Liberal Democrats' symbiosis with the Conservative Party. The Liberal-SDP Alliance of the mid-80s confused matters by overlapping with the factional wars of Labour, but it's clear that the third party's electoral fortunes tend be an inverse of the Tories. The leap forward in 1974 from 8% to 19% under Jeremy Thorpe reflected the collapse of the Conservative government under Ted Heath. In 1979, David Steel oversaw a fall to 14% as conservative voters flocked to Thatcher's banner. The progress under Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg was due to the toxicity of the Tories as much as the mis-steps of Blair and Brown. In 2015, the Liberal Democrats fell back to 8%, the same level as in 1970, largely because their conservative voters decided to actually vote Conservative, back-filling the died-in-the-wool Tories who opted for UKIP and so keeping David Cameron in Number 10.

While copious amounts of digital ink are still expended on the Red Wall (tm), it seems to have escaped most commentators, both those sympathetic to Keir Starmer and those hostile to him, that the strategy with regard to what we might call low-information, older homeowners in the Midlands and North is one of neutralisation rather than conversion, both in the sense of not giving them reason to vote for the Tories (or Reform) and in the sense of not encouraging expectations that a Labour government will deliver all that much, hence the emphasis on fiscal constraints and the need for business growth to fund the repair of public services. In the realm of social policy, the watchword has been caution, not so much to convince reactionary voters that Labour is on their side in a "culture war" but to reassure the merely conservative that a Labour government does not intend to change anything if it can avoid it. Progressive reform will be constrained by regulatory governance (e.g. the EHRC) and there will be a return of the language of "rights and responsibilities". 

While winning back the Red Wall is a clear objective for the party, doing so will merely return it to the situation it found itself in 2017: short of a parliamentary majority. With little scope for additional gains in the big cities, Labour has to win a swathe of suburban and semi-rural seats if it is to form the next government, and that means winning over Liberal Democrat-inclined voters in seats currently held by the Conservatives where Labour is the realistic alternative. Much of Labour's current policy statements are tailored more to the electoral constituency that David Cameron and George Osborne succeeded in winning over in 2015, with a mixture of austerity and liberal virtue, than to the constituency attracted to Boris Johnson and his promises of an activist state in 2019. Starmer is essentially running from the centre-right against historic Labour, the usual ancestor-worship of Attlee and Wilson notwithstanding, hence the symbolic importance of continuing the purge of the left beyond total victory. Nobody wants Corbyn to stand as an independent MP in Islington North more than Starmer. Without the former Labour leader on the scene, hard questions might start to be asked about Labour's actual commitment to anti-racism.

The key message we should take from the polls is not that Labour has successfully detached 2019 pro-Brexit voters from the Conservative cause by disavowing a return to the European Union and committing to socially authoritarian policies, but that the party is now dependent on remain-voting liberals who don't think Starmer is sincere in his insistence that Brexit can be made to work. This is reflected in the continuing low ratings for Starmer as an individual. It is a strange reflection of British politics for the leader of a party so far ahead in the polls to be regarded as untrustworthy and uninspiring by so many. This isn't a case of being Marmite like Johnson. Almost nobody likes Starmer or strongly identifies with him, while his champions in the media spend an inordinate amount of time explaining why this general disdain doesn't matter. I'm not even sure there's much love for him on the Labour right where it's the likes of Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting and Yvette Cooper that get the valentines while David Miliband still appears to flutter hearts among the Blairite faithful.

In Scotland, Labour remains in denial about its position as a minor party, and how it ended up as one after its long dominance from the 1980s to the 2000s. This is partly because Scottish Labour really is just a branch office, hence the assumption that a commanding lead in the UK polls must result in the party's return to prominence as the chief challenger to the SNP and its eventual supplanter as the natural party of government. But it's also because of the way Scottish politics is presented as little more than a popularity contest among the party leaders, and internally as such when a leadership contest arises (who can define the political differences among the SNP contenders?) Thus Jim Murphy, who oversaw Labour's spectacular collapse in the 2015 general election (from 42% to 24% of the vote in Scotland), reckons "Anas Sarwar will be in the unusual position at the next election of being both the most well-known leader and being the insurgent", conveniently ignoring Sarwar's achievement of further shrinking Labour's vote in the 2021 Scottish Assembly elections from 19% (in 2016) to 18%.

Independence has always been highly personalised in the UK by both government and media. This includes not only those campaigning for independence from English rule, such as Sinn Féin or the SNP, but also those urging English independence from the EU (and, by implication, from the importunate Celtic periphery), such as UKIP under Nigel Farage. This personalisation could be excused as the consequence of either a messianic politics or the nature of small polities to cleave to "the big man" - consider variously Charles Stewart Parnell, Michael Collins or Éamon de Valera in the Irish case - but such personalisation was also evident in the imperial treatment of large nations with multifarious polities demanding self-rule, such as the UK's focus on the eccentric figure of Gandhi in India or the supposedly manipulative Nasser in Egypt. The advocates for autonomy were variously unwordly fools or malicious rogues, but most importantly they were held to be unrepresentative. 

You can still see this attitude in the coverage of Nicola Sturgeon's resignation speech, notably in the liberal press, with the emphasis on the wrongheadeness of her continuing commitment to independence and enthusiasm for trans rights. While Sturgeon is held to be an admirable female leader - bracketed with Angela Merkel and Jacinda Arden - her actual achievements in office have often been misrepresented. According to The Guardian, "Bolstered by Labour voters supporting yes in the 2014 independence referendum, Sturgeon had been highly skilled at attracting Labour voters to the SNP, by pulling her party firmly to the left and making the SNP the flag bearers for Scotland’s anti-Tory vote." Only someone unfamiliar with Scottish politics would consider the SNP to be anything other than a bog-standard neoliberal party. A simple comparison with Labour in Wales under the hardly radical Mark Drakeford should make the point. The actual history of the SNP, since the expulsion of the 79 Group in 1982, has been one of the marginalisation or absorption of the left as the party has shifted towards identification with the European mainstream.

Labour in Scotland has gradually increased its polling support over the last 12 months from 20% to touching 30%. This is held to be a great achievement that reflects poorly on the SNP, who are at around 45%, though it's clear much of the shift has actually come from Conservative supporters and probably reflects the changing expectations of the unionist hardcore as to who will form the next government at Westminster. Given that Labour only holds one parliamentary seat north of the border, it was always likely to do better at the next election, but the suggestion that it could win up to 25 of 59 constituencies on 30% of the vote seems a stretch. Labour collapsed to 1 seat in 2015 on 24% and then recovered to 7 seats in 2017 on 27% so 10 seems like a more realistic target. That in turn should be reason to suspect that the stonking majorities being predicted at the UK level for Labour may prove illusory. What should worry Starmer is that the Liberal Democrats aren't prospering at the Tories' expense, which means that Labour's poll lead is currently boosted by Labour-curious conservatives who may well get cold feet at the ballot box. What should worry the rest of us is that the next general election will be a contest between different varieties of conservatism.

Member State of Mind

Keir Starmer has been the leader of the Labour Party for a little under three years now, so you would expect the lineaments of Starmerism to be clear at this point. But it remains the case that Labour is better defined by what it's against rather than what it's for, notably against the waste and dereliction of duty of Tory government. Its poll leads are clearly an inverse reflection of the Conservative Party's unpopularity. Even where the Labour leadership's enthusiasms are evident, such as in its unwavering support for NATO or Israel, this is defined not in a progressive tone but in the negative register of a defence against the enemies of the West. There has been plenty of policy development under Starmer, at least over the last year, but to date this has produced little more than opaque vibes (Great British Energy) or simply reheated New Labour positions. Where Starmerism has become more concrete is in the institutional dimension: the iron grip on the party structure, the chilly relationship with the wider labour movement, and the forever war against the left.

In an amusing attempt to psychoanalyse Starmer (or at least the political persona), Oliver Eagleton highlights how the return of the "grown-up", much celebrated by centrists in 2020, has led not only to a crushing insistence that a significantly better future isn't possible (we must stop being infantile) but also to the loss of the élan that distinguished New Labour in the 1990s (the boring dad is now in charge): "Passivity is the surprising but necessary image of adulthood in this mode, where the ambition to grow up resolves itself negatively – in the absence of clear content – into a quest to punish everything identified as childish, and emulate others past and present who seemed like grown-ups. There is no programme beyond that, only masochism and mimicry." With the Tories now uncertain what they actually stand for (are tax cuts still good?), the consequence is the current sense of vacancy. As Eagleton puts it in respect of Labour, but in terms that apply more widely, "This is a mood, not a politics. It represents a failure to face the present, to grapple with its multiple crises by honing a political project to meet them."

A symptom of this vacancy is the growth of what we might call celebrity political populism, whereby trusted faces from light entertainment pick up the cudgels on behalf of an exasperated public. Carol Vorderman offers a recent example of this, not just in her "speaking truth to power" about corporate corruption but in the media's uneasy recognition that the "normality" they imagined both Starmer and Sunak would usher in hasn't returned. This "populist" approach has always disfigured the tabloids (particularly at election time - "I'll leave Britain if Labour gets in" etc), but it has infected the broadsheets and television now. This trend has run in parallel with another: the tendency of politicians to want to become light entertainment celebrities. There's always been a degree of crossover (Gyles Brandreth, Gloria Del Piero etc), and even a conscious toying with the boundary itself (recall Harold Wilson's post-PM stint as a chatshow host), but in recent years there has been a growing sense that politics is entertainment and that politicians are playing parts. That the new Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party wants to bring back capital punishment is just the latest example of a poorly-written character lacking in nuance.

This has made the establishment uneasy. Not only has it led to the elevation of clowns like Johnson and Truss, and the dumbing-down of political and economic reporting (cf the recent BBC review), but it has also undermined the UK's international standing as a sober and reliable player on the world stage, most obviously in the fallout from Brexit. Starmer and Sunak represent an attempt to restore dignity to the state as much as to their respective parties. An important aspect of this is the "masochism" that Eagleton identifies: the acceptance that the road ahead will be hard, that sacrifices will have to be made, and that we muist atone for past sins, whether the deluded optimism of 2016 or 2017. The jouissance of Boris Johnson - the idea that there are easy answers and that resolute will is all that we need (a belief shared by Liz Truss but without the same panache) - is to be rejected. But as Johnson's boosterism was little more than vibes, what this requires is a different mood rather than a political project, so the hazy "levelling up" is replaced by the equally hazy "devolution" and the same slogans ("Take back control") are recycled.

Though a Labour government is not a nailed-on certainty by 2025, the development of Starmerism as an institutional form gives us an insight into how the post-Brexit state will be refashioned. Perhaps paradoxically, Starmer's rejection of any immediate plans for rejoining the European Union give us a clear indication of just how much the UK will continue to be a "member state" in all but name. As Christopher Bickerton describes it, "It is certainly possible that whilst the UK has formally left the EU, it remains a member-state. This view would imply that the most distinguishing features of member-statehood are not to do with EU membership at all but point to something deeper, perhaps to the pathologies of the 21st-century post-democratic capitalist state. In this case, EU membership is of little real consequence. We are talking about a far broader category of statehood, one that encompasses much of the West and is tied to the globalization of the post-Cold War era".

To berate Starmer for accepting Brexit is to ignore that his government will be a continuation of an EU member state. It is this, rather than an early referendum, that will ultimately prepare the path to formal re-accession. And the reason for that continuation is not some elite conspiracy but the very nature of neoliberal governance and economy, in particular the commitment to the transnational institutions of the informal American empire, from NATO to the financial ties of the City of London with New York and the US Treasury. The Conservatives could agitate for a hard Brexit in the secure knowledge that they would never challenge the UK's position within that transnational regime, any more than they would seriously seek to revive the North of England. Labour under Corbyn offered the only, if tentative, path towards a different future, and that was promptly crushed. While Eagleton not unreasonably describes the remain cause in 2019 as "one of the most spectacular own-goals in British political history", it's arguable that it preserved more than it lost.

In other words, though the offical line of a Labour government will be that we have cleanly left the political union but will pursue economic convergence, the reality will be otherwise: we will maintain the culture of political union, increasing the commitment to other transnational institutions like NATO and the IMF in compensation, while allowing a mild degree of economic divergence (which will be driven by US as much as UK interests). That culture will be embodied in the state, which means a return to punitive social policy, the valorisation of business, and the need for sound money. All of this has been well-trailed by the Shadow Cabinet in recent months. Within Labour itself, there will be no let up on the delegitimisation of the left and the routine abuse of democracy. If the left no longer meaningfully exists within the party, it will be invented so that it can fulfill this necessary role as the permanent threat - the eternal impulse towards childishness in Eagleton's reading. Starmer, whether you like it or not, intends to become the father of the nation.

Hedging Your Bets

Back in the 1970s, the BBC tended to report on the economy from two contrasting perspectives: that of producers, which meant the profit/wages contest between employers and trade unions; and that of consumers, which meant a focus on household spending, particularly food and clothing (and with a seasonal sideline in package holidays, replaced in the 90s by home improvements). Economics, in the sense of an explanation of competing academic theories, was rarely broached. Even the specialist media coverage, from the Financial Times to the BBC's Money Programme, tended to focus mainly on the financial markets. That focus was a harbinger of a structural shift that would occur during the 1980s as industrial correspondents were replaced by business editors and the pulse of the economy was taken not through indicators such as unemployment or the trade deficit but in house prices and the balance of payments (handily boosted by financial services). 

But while this obviously reflected an ideological watershed - the move from Keynesianism to neoliberalism (and briefly monetarism) - it did not see a lessening in the expertise brought to bear in explaining the economy, merely a shift of the spotlight. City economists might have given the impression that the manufacturing sector was of lesser importance but they clearly understood the financial markets. But there was another shift that occured after 2008. In the face of the failure of academic and City economists to predict, or even initially explain, what was going on as the global banking system seized up, the reporting of economics in the media shifted back towards political journalists. This could be seen as a legitimate recognition of the return of political economy and questions of distributive justice, though the establishment reaction to Thomas Piketty and the pearl-clutching over the revived interest in Marx suggests otherwise. More telling was the implication that this was a judgement on society ("living beyond our means", "maxed out the credit card" etc) that demanded in response a strong political grip and hair-shirts all round. This perspective wouldn't have been out of place in the early 1930s.

Following growing complaints about the poor quality of its coverage of economics since 2010, the BBC has finally got round to addressing the issue in the form of a narrow "thematic" review by "seasoned economics experts and broadcasters" Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot. The chaps have been praised for being quite tough with the Corporation, though much of this is just theatre. The review scope is narrow in time (a matter of months), criticism from both left and right is taken as evidence of balance, and the "external interviewees" reflect a spectrum that streches all the way from centre-right to centre-left. Their key conclusion is that "while the risks to impartiality may look political, we think they need a better explanation, which is that they're really journalistic". This allows the BBC to ignore accusations of structural bias and instead agree that it needs to improve the calibre of its journalism, which in practice will mean a shift back to more specialised reporting by economics editors rather than political editors. There may even be less of a City focus.

One thing that the review doesn't explain is why the BBC allowed the coverage of economics to shift from the specialist realm of the City editor to the political editor after 2008. Consequently, there is no historical dimension to the review (what happened between 2007 and 2010?) and only minimal interest in the sociological (the shared milieu of journalists and politicians and their mutually-reinforcing prejudices). The critical responses to the review have also tended to be soft-ball, with eager hopes that the BBC might take economics more seriously (and so widen its pool of  invitees onto Newsnight or Today). For James Meadway, the key question is "How different might the last decade of British politics have been if the public had been better informed about economics?" To emphasise the point, he asks "Would a public not spoon-fed mush about the supposed perils of government borrowing have been so ready to accept David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity in the early 2010s? Would Labour’s then leadership have felt so compelled to support spending cuts – a position that helped lay the ground for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity leadership bid? Might the Brexit vote have gone differently?" 

This is a progression from the dubious to the implausible. It starts with the presumption that the austerity demanded by the Conservatives after 2008 was an argument about economics, when it's not at all clear that it was. The much derided "household budget" analogy made no sense as an economic argument, but it obviously made sense as a parable of morality: neither a lender nor a borrower be. Likewise, the claim that we could "end up like Greece" was an emotional appeal, not a forecast that the world's 6th largest economy could turn overnight into the 54th. It is even less credible that the Labour leadership between 2010-15 felt "compelled" to support spending cuts because of the quality of such arguments, though they no doubt appreciated their emotional resonance, not least when they were being amplified by the BBC. Labour's qualified support for austerity sprang from the PLP's sincere belief that public spending must play a large part in balancing the books. This was the legacy of the 1990s commitment to prudence, not a sudden conversion to Osbornomics, and you could argue that its roots went all the way back to Jim Callaghan's party conference speech in 1976.

This is an example of how the review's failure to engage with the history of the Corporation's coverage of economics has allowed its reception to be similarly ahistorical, or at least to have no working memory beyond the last decade. Likewise, the idea that economics was the decisive factor in Brexit comes close to suggesting that euroscepticism was a niche pursuit before 2008. That economics was a key driver of the 2016 referendum has been disproved by both quantitative and qualitative research. We know that votes to leave the EU were heavily correlated by age. What this means is that younger voters more entwined with the economy - in work, with young families and high housing costs etc - tended to vote remain, while older voters with more limited exposure to the economy - notably pensioners and those with their mortgages paid off - tended to vote leave. Brexit was obviously not just down to one thing, but economics came a long way behind immigration and sovereignty as motivating factors, and where it did arise it was usually in the context of decades of punitive industrial policy and growing inequality, not worries over public debt as a percentage of GDP.

The institutional shift from Keynesianism to neoliberalism at the BBC can, for emblematic convenience, be isolated to the period 1984-6, between the end of the miners' strike and the "big bang" of market deregulation in the City of London. Similarly, the turn to austerity and the defeat of the short-lived post-Keynesian revival can be isolated to the period 2008-10. Both were marked by a step-change in the BBC's coverage of economics. Given that the Corporation now accepts that a further change is called for, the question must be: what underlying shift does this spectacle of self-criticism and commitment to re-education represent? Is it simply a reflection of the "cost of living crisis", with a return to a 70s-style focus on wages and household bills, or does the reappearance of the "wage-price spiral" in the discourse indicate a renewed political belief that inflation, rather than growth or productivity, is the chief economic challenge? 

A major change in finance since the 1970s is the relative clout of banks versus asset managers in defining what is important to the economy and what constitutes economic health. Previously, the banks were dominant and their hatred of inflation (which reduced the cost of debt to borrowers in real terms and so whittled away the lenders' profits) determined policy, notably higher interest rates to offset the falling value of loans. But today it is asset managers who are dominant, or at least the most risky feature in the financial landscape and thus the most indulged (see the Bank of England's intervention to protect pension funds last year after the disastrous Truss/Kwarteng budget, which directly went against their official policy of monetary tightening). For them, it is higher interest rates that are the greater danger because that depresses asset values. Inflation is still a problem, as that can also erode the value of an asset, but after years of freshly-minted speculative capital piling into financial markets, the more immediate worry is that a tight-money regime in response to inflation will reduce liquidity and thus push asset prices down. 

There are two other suggestive developments. One is that the state is beginning to push real resources and financial capital towards productive uses and away from speculation. This is most obvious in the US with the COVID stimulus acts and now the Inflation Reduction Act. In the UK, the shift has been modest and much is currently no more than rhetoric, notably around green energy transition and the "foundational economy". The second development is the growing clamour for price controls, most obviously around fuel but increasingly in other area such as basic foodstuffs, as the twin effects of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine continue to work their way through the global system. What this suggests is the weakening grip of finance on the public definition of "economic health" and a popular recognition that price-gouging is driving inflation rather than wage demands (with a corresponding unwillingness to accept that inflation can only be tackled by pushing down on wage rises, suggesting that economics isn't as "over my head" for most people as the BBC report suggests).

What these developments point to is firstly a divergence of interests in haute finance between banks and asset-holders that goes beyond short-term policy: tight money and higher interest rates versus loose money and tax cuts. Though this has produced spectacular political epiphenomena (e.g Liz Truss's ill-fated premiership), the more fundamental issue is how the long-expected post-2008 adjustment (i.e. the downward revaluation of speculative financial assets versus the productive economy) will be handled. This will either be at the expense of fixed incomes, through persistent but controlled inflation, or at the expense of assets, through values depressed by high interest rates. This divergence of interests has relaxed the three-line whip in the media that applied during the era of austerity and the pandemic, when all fractions of capital supported the transfer of funds from the public to the private sector, whether through the Bank of England's quantitative easing or the government's handouts to business and no-strings contracts for cronies. 

This has created a space for a more popular interpretation of what matters in the economy. Thus we've seen a turn away from financialisation, notably the obsession with asset price growth (e.g. house prices). There has instead been a turn towards the "real economy" and in particular the profit-wage share (hence the sympathy for striking workers). Against this background, the BBC is hedging its bets by shifting from a political to a more technical stance in its coverage of the economy, even as it persists in a political approach to industrial relations - e.g. taking it as read that strikes are bad for the country. It's possible the BBC is going to improve it's coverage of economics, but it would be naive to believe that this has come about because of a decade of justified criticism by academics or the derision aimed by the great unwashed at Laura Kuenssberg on social media. Economics is in an apolitical state at the moment because the establishment has yet to reach consensus on how financial assets are to be devalued: abruptly through recession or steadily through inflation. The BBC's reset reflects this, and only this.