Public Goods, the Social Wage and Universalism

My X thread about Deborah Meaden's comments on the winter fuel allowance has done numbers, as the kids say, but I suspect that those who criticised it, and perhaps some who appreciated it, didn't get the joke at the beginning or ultimately the point at the end, though the latter may be down to not reading the entire thread. Excuse me if I ignore the cardinal rule of both comedy and the British royal family and try to explain. 

Meaden trots out the classic argument of the rich against universal benefits: I don't need it so the taxpayer's money is being wasted. This is often accompanied by an assurance that the unnecessary government largesse is routinely donated to charity, so virtue triumphs in the end. You'll note that this argument and its corollary are less often heard when tax cuts for the wealthy are being justified, though the rationale is the same. If you're already incurring the top rate of tax on a large part of your income, why do you need more money? In that instance the argument in favour of tax cuts focuses on incentives: that the prospect of keeping more of your earnings will make you more productive, which can only help the wider economy. This is a consequentialist argument: what matters is the outcome, which is presumed to be good. There are similar consequentialist arguments against universalism, which can be summarised using Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: giving money to people who don't need it discredits the benefits regime and so lowers public support for the needy (perversity); in benefiting everyone, no one gains in relative terms (futility); and an income guarantee weakens the effect of any incentive to expand income and so undermines the wider economy (jeopardy).

Meaden's argument is different in that it isn't simply consequentialist but utilitarian (a narrower form of consequentialism), which means it concerns itself with calculable efficiency, the greatest possible good,  rather than just an assessment of good versus bad. Specifically, it seeks to maximise aggregate utility through discrimination: "Lots of people should not get winter fuel allowance…lots should", as she put it in her tweet. The former group have a negligible marginal utility because they are rich, the latter have a high marginal utility because they are poor, and there is an implied gradient between the two where everyone can be positioned. One paradox of utilitarianism (among many) is that achieving this macro optimality requires a granular focus on the micro foundations - the utility calculus of the individual - hence Meaden's focus on her own circumstances. Solipsism is a hallmark of vulgar utilitarian reasoning: "I don't need X" or "I never had Y growing up". Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" may have inspired the concept of utility in the emergent field of economics, but its ambitions to be a coordinating mechanism for society soon gave way among theorists (from Jevons to Hayek) to price as the only reliable signal of utility in aggregate. But while absent in the market, utilitarian calculus lived on in the realm of discretionary welfare, notably in the form of personal need assessments and means-testing.

Public goods, in the sense employed in economics, bypass the problem of individual assessment by operating wholly at the macro level. We assume, quite reasonably, that there is an aggregate benefit for society delivered by the provision of certain goods and services, such as roads. Economic theory holds that these goods are characterised by two features: they are non-excludable (i.e. freely available to all), and they are non-rivalrous (i.e. my use does not compromise your use). In reality, most public goods are imperfect in terms of this abstract defintion (or "impure", in the jargon). Nationalised utilities in the postwar era charged for use of gas and electricity, which meant you could be excluded (i.e. cut off). Today we still have toll roads, albeit with electronic turnpikes, such as part of the M6, the Dartford Crossing and the Humber Bridge. These are still classed as public goods, because the charges are treated as an impost (a supplementary tax based on use), but you will be excluded if you can't pay the toll. Likewise, roads are rivalrous because, as Adam Driver said in the 2023 film Enzo Ferrari, "two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time." In other words, congestion makes vehicles rivalrous (think of parking spaces).

In the UK, the logic of public provision was extended in the postwar era to many areas of the economy and public life previously subject to the market, giving rise to the concept of the social wage: the benefit that we individually gain from collective effort, whether in the form of public goods (roads, libraries), welfare services (the NHS, state schools) or direct financial payments (state pensions, unemployment benefit). In reaction, conservatives challenged both the extent of the social wage and the categorisation of its components, particularly in areas where the public sector was seen to be pushing back the private sector, such as health and education. Central to this reaction was the insistence that genuine public goods are few and far between and that what is left over within the scope of the social wage should be treated as a discretionary benefit and therefore means-tested (returning to the approach of the inter-war years). At the margin, among market fundamentalists, this reaction has led to continuing attempts to narrow the scope of public goods even further by either converting them to state-supplied commodities (e.g. road-pricing) or by privatising them altogether (e.g. railways and water companies). 

It came as no surprise that some of those disputing the intentionally ridiculous comparison of public goods (roads) with a benefit (the Winter Fuel Allowance) should also be advocates of road-pricing. For them, "confusing" the two was a purity violation (to borrow a term from moral foundations theory), but not because they are champions of public goods but because they want to advance the narrowest possible interpretation of them. Their apparent inability to see a joke (clearly the WFA is not actually a public good) is similar to the media suspicion that advocates for public goods want to impose broadband communism or nationalise sausages - i.e. not entirely sincere. This po-faced response also points to a narrow conception of public policy discourse in which the mathematical calculus of liberal economics is all that matters: utility is not a laughing matter. This narrow perspective also means that such critics cannot see that Meaden's comments are not the self-evident common sense that they imagine but actually a highly political statement and one founded (consciously or not) in the ideological presumption that social policy should be determined by aggregate utility, i.e. utilitarianism.

The intersection of reactionary conservativism (minimse public goods) and liberal utilitarianism (maximise efficiency) has resulted in the steady erosion of the principle of universalism. A feature of this has been the tendency of liberals to adopt the conservatives' framing, talking about universal benefits as if they are public goods that had been erroneously categorised. This explains why the discussion of the viability of such benefits tends to centre on excludability (as a positive) and rivalry (as a negative). For example, "It is absurd to give the wealthy cash that they do not need" leads to the insistence that they be excluded so that the needy can have more (or, more likely, that the benefits "bill" can be reduced). The idea that the cash can simply be clawed-back through taxation is rarely entertained and then only to complain about its "redundancy", despite the obvious operational superiority of using an existing mechanism over creating a new means-testing regime. In contrast, rivalry tends to occur within the arena of universal benefits through engineered scarcity: the competition to get through on the phone to book a doctor's appointment, or going private to beat the waiting list. This framing of benefits as if they were public goods is adopted partly to avoid a frontal attack on universalism, which obviously remains popular (e.g. the NHS), but it also reflects the extent to which half a century of neoliberalism has shifted the discourse of social policy away from the collective to the individual through the vocabulary of representative agents, marginal utility and incentives.

The joke that opened the thread was an ironic response to Meaden describing the Winter Fuel Allowance as a "universal scheme". The WFA isn't universal - I don't get it and you probably don't either. You might counter that this is because it is for pensioners only, but then why describe it as universal? Well, you might retort, child benefit is universal but the childless don't get it, do they? Indeed, but they have no need of it. I, on the other hand, have fuel bills to pay but do not qualify for the WFA. The truth is that it was introduced by Gordon Brown (no fan of universalism) in 1997 as a targeted electoral bribe, to be paid to a Tory-inclined cohort and therefore a priority to be won over by a Labour government. But while she described the WFA as universal, Meaden's argument against it employed the language of the miscategorised public good: to paraphrase, "rich people like me should be excluded from it". I parodied this by pointing out the insanity of extending this logic to an actual public good, roads. In doing so I was also highlighting the absurdity of centring the public policy debate on the personal circumstances of individuals who are definitionally atypical of society: the rich.

The wider point is that not only are there very few "pure" public goods, which are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but there are nowadays very few genuine universal benefits either. Most of what we imagine to be universal, like the state pension, depends on National Insurance contributions. The truly universal - available to everyone regardless - are the minimal benefits when all other contributory benefits have run out, and the state has long aimed to restrict these to a minority who, by virtue of their dependence on them, are seen as recalcitrant and therefore worthy targets for public contempt. It's also worth noting the long-running campaign of the media to make even these minimal benefits discretionary: not to be paid to the feckless, to single mothers popping out babies and certainly not to asylum-seekers. The two-child cap, which was heavily promoted by rightwing newspapers, is literally a pointed refusal to accept that benefits should be universal. That it is targeted at the demonstrably innocent isn't simply an example of cruelty, it is a clear statement that need is irrelevant. Deborah Meaden's insistence that she doesn't "need" the WFA and her advocacy for means-testing are actually old hat. The bleeding-edge of social policy thought is the denial that society has any obligation to the needy.

The Lessons of Grenfell Tower

The media discussion of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report has increasingly focused on the operational failures of the building firms involved, with calls for criminal prosecutions, and on the deficiencies of the regulatory regime, with dismay at the risks entailed in cutting red tape and a consequent demand for tougher government intervention. What has been increasingly lost in this orchestrated campaign is the role of the local authority, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), and in particular its policy towards social housing. A good example of this was the Guardian's immediate analysis by Peter Apps, a housing expert critical of the industry, which doesn't mention RBKC once. This could be justified given the tenor of the report itself. The execuitve summary, which is probably all that many journalists will have read, largely limits itself to criticising RBKC's poor oversight of the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO) that had in turn failed to "observe its basic responsibilities" towards the tower's occupants. What the report doesn't do is question the very existence of the TMO. Why was this arms-length function deemed necessary by a council that had the primary responsibility for its tenants?

It is clear from the report that the TMO existed to outsource responsibility and thereby remove day-to-day management of the tower as a concern for councillors and council officers. One telling example of what this meant in practice is the report's observation that "RBKC took little or no account of an independent and highly critical review of fire safety carried out for the TMO in 2009. It did not even know about a further independent and highly critical report produced in 2013 because the TMO had failed to disclose it to RBKC." This, like a number of other observations in the report, essentially charges RBKC with ignorance when the actual charge should be wilful neglect. The strongest criticism of RBKC's performance in the lead-up to the fire was reserved for council officers: "RBKC’s building control department failed to perform its statutory function of ensuring that the design of the refurbishment complied with the Building Regulations." In other words, there has been a scrupulous determination to avoid questioning the political logic of social housing management in the borough in favour of a focus on the regulatory regime.

Where the report cannot avoid addressing the failures of the council is in the response to the tragedy, but again the tenor is very much that this was an organisation simply overwhelmed by the challenge or unsuited to the immediate demands placed upon it: "RBKC’s systems and leadership were wholly inadequate to the task of handling an incident of such magnitude and gravity, involving, as it did, mass homelessness and mass fatalities." A telling comment is that the victims and survivors of the fire received far more effective support through community groups than they did from the council, but that this was ultimately down to the council's dismissive attitude towards the community rather than any difference in resources or competence: "one of RBKC’s failings was to make too little use of the local voluntary organisations and to fail to have adequate standing arrangements to enable them to be called on in the event of a major emergency." In other words, there was a lack of trust not only between tenants of the tower and the council, which the report could pin on the TMO, but a more wide-ranging lack of trust between the community of North Kensington and RBKC.

There are two unusual characteristics of RBKC that need to inform an understanding of the tragedy and its aftermath, both of which I highlighted in the post I wrote a year after the fire: Candide in Kensington (a critique of Andrew O'Hagan's whitewash of the council in the London Review of Books). The first is that the council is very small both in terms of population and territory. It is, in fact, the smallest borough in London by population if you exclude the oddity of the City of London. If it were to be merged with the neighbouring (also small) borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the combined authority would still only be the sixth largest in London, about the same size as Wandsworth. A larger authority would not only have greater capacity in terms of emergency housing, but it would likely also have more officers devoted to building control and health and safety. The limitation of size has been recognised for years, however this hasn't advanced beyond the pre-fire "Tri-borough" arrangement for shared services (also involving the City of Westminster) where the focus was very much on cost-cutting during the post-2010 austerity years. There is no real justification for the separate but adjoining boroughs, but it has historically suited both main parties, with the Conservatives having exclusive control of Kensington and Chelsea (except for the northern wards) and Labour dominating Hammersmith and Fulham for all but a brief period between 2006-14.

The second characteristic is the longstanding antipathy towards the direct provision of council housing, one reason why the borough was notorious for slum landlordism up until the 1960s. Historically, it always preferred to operate at arms-length through charities and housing associations rather than directly providing and maintaining council homes. This is the root explanation of the TMO, a desire to outsource its residual responsibilities as a landlord and an implicit acknowledgement that it "doesn't do" council housing. That the phase 2 report essentially buys into this narrative of council incompetence (the recommendations are largely about training council staff up to be able to better manage its services and contingency planning) means that the political worldview behind its poor performance is not brought into the light. The borough is a stark example of social segregation, with the richer southern wards politically dominating the rump northern wards and treating the social housing residents of the latter as at best an afterthought and at worst as importunate and ungrateful (as many were characterised by O'Hagan). That the report locates this lack of trust between authority and people in the TMO is an evasion and an example of the unwillingness of public inquiries to address the political context of failures, something seen in the torturous Hillsborough saga and more recently in the Contaminated Blood scandal.

More broadly, the attitude of the RBKC points to the political elephant in the room, which is the UK's troubled relationship with housing. The fundamental problems of the UK housing market are not inadequate supply and high prices - these are merely epiphenomena - but a lack of capacity in the system, which is the consequence of the end of central planning (i.e. the expansion of council housing) and the concomitant financialisation of housing as an asset class with the take-off of Right to Buy and mortgage deregulation in the 1980s. It cannot be stressed enough, that the UK has only properly housed the population, whether owner-occupiers or tenants, during the postwar era of central planning, and then only towards the end of the era when supply caught up with demand. Basically, the late-1970s. All states make provision for spare capacity, but not always in the same areas. For example, the UK has always sought to maintain a domestic defence industry, notionally to ensure national security but also to reinforce its geopolitical delusions. Doing so entails a need to keep that industry busy, hence the easy encouragement of military adventures and the selling of arms to dodgy regimes. Continuing to build social housing capacity would have left us with a public good and fewer property millionaires; continuing to produce arms for sale has left us open to the charge of aiding and abetting genocide.

Other states are more concerned with capacity issues such as food security or medical supplies. The former can give farming interests an outsize influence on land planning and retail prices; the latter can mitigate the dangers of a public health crisis. The criticism this weekend over the poor preparedness of the NHS for the Covid-19 pandemic should be read less as an attack on the serial incompetence and cheese-paring of Conservative ministers since 2010 and more as a long-overdue recognition that the state has been reducing its capacity, and therefore its contingent capabilities, across the board since the 1980s. This, as much as formal deregulation, has been a consistent theme of all governments since Margaret Thatcher. And it is not simply a naive belief that the free market will provide, but a conscious desire to reduce the public responsibilities of the state. Of course, the state never shrinks, not just because its prime directive is self-presevation but because the reduction in provision simply promotes costly demands elsewhere. Thus the lack of council housing investment has been more than offset by the increase in the cost of housing benefit, which simply means that state resources have been diverted from the needy to rentiers.

Might there be a sea-change in government policy? Labour have certainly talked up the issue of planned capacity in some of their proposals, such as Great British Energy, but the substance to date has looked a lot like marginal or cosmetic gestures while the insistent drumbeat from both the Prime Minister and Chancellor has been that austerity remains the only game in town. The idea that fiscal responsibility will stimulate private sector growth ("expansionary fiscal contraction") was comprehensively disproved under the Cameron and Osborne regime, but even if it proved true this time, an expanding private sector will simply compete with the state for real resources, which means the likelihood of major investment in capacity isn't on the cards. The idea that you "fix the roof while the sun is shining" is about as intelligent as equating the economy with a household. The greatest historic investments in British public capacity, in areas such as housing and transport, occurred during periods of relative economic turbulence, such as the 1930s and 1970s, as much as during periods of growth. You have to build capacity regardless, rather than waiting for a fiscal surplus that will only lead to the competing demand for tax cuts, and that means accepting that real resources must be diverted from private consumption.

It took over six years after the Grenfell Tower fire for all of the former residents who survived to be permanently rehoused, though often in inadequate accommodation, with the council reluctant to prioritise their needs and its new housing provision continuing at a snail's pace. It is hard to see any evidence that the RBKC and the TMO have changed their attitude over this time. Talking of her recent discussions with the residents, Gillian Slovo noted that "They told me about a council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its managing agent, the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), that treated them as if they should have no voice in the way that they lived. They drew a picture of one of the richest boroughs in England ignoring them because they lived in social housing." The current leader of the council, Elizabeth Campbell (who lives in the ultra-rich Royal Hospital ward), has predictably apologised in light of the report's findings - how could she do otherwise? - but the commitment to learning and improving will be meaningless until such time as she and other politicians are prepared to address the two key characteristics of RBKC: that it is too small to be effective and that its reluctance to invest in council housing will always leave it in conflict with the community of its northern wards. Both are issues of capacity.

In Place of Strife

I know that deconstructing Martin Kettle's Guardian columns is just shooting fish in a barrel, but I'm easily-pleased, so here we go again. In his latest, Kettle imagines that Keir Starmer is embarked on a course of action that could fundamentally change Britain and its economy. This obviously begs the question about Starmer's commitment to fundamental change of any kind. The reason for this progressive optimism is that "The watchword of the industrial relations section of Labour’s election manifesto this year was not conflict but its very opposite: partnership." There isn't, in fact, an industrial relations section in the infamously lightweight manifesto, but one on industrial strategy, a much more vague concept. The partnership described in this section is clearly between government and business, with the role of the former to provide the necessary conditions for the latter to deliver growth. If that proves elusive, the onus will be on government to redouble its efforts. In contrast, trade unions will have a merely advisory role through a probably toothless Strategy Council. The phrase "industrial relations" appears only once in the document and then in the context of the Tories' poor record. 

What the manifesto did emphasise was Labour's "new deal for working people", but this has always been framed as government granting protective rights to typically unorganised labour (e.g. gig workers) rather than removing the restraints of employment law from organised labour. This is something Kettle implicitly recognises - "Employment law reform is not the same thing as trade union power" - but he is reluctant to draw the conclusion that this means there is an industrial relations void at the heart of Labour's policy that the emphasis on partnership cannot fill. This void reflects two realities. First, that the rightwing of the Labour party long ago switched its allegiance from organised labour to business. As Andy Beckett noted, in what is in some ways a rejoinder to Kettle, this has been a criticism of Labour since the 1960s, with its roots in the 1930s (if you accept Ralph Miliband's analysis in full). The second reality is that the trade unions have, since the defeats of the 1980s, pursued an ameliorative strategy that has seen them simultaneously lose members and influence within the party. As the Guardian's political desk are only to happy to point out, the unions are in hock to the party, not the party to the unions.

This context helps explain Kettle's anecdotes about Hugh Scanlon, the leader of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers from 1968 to 1978. Though he was black-balled by the security services for his youthful communist affiliations, and routinely painted as an anti-democratic "baron" by the press, Scanlon was by the 1970s a mildly progressive moderate in the context of union and Labour politics (he was elevated to the House of Lords in 1979). Along with Jack Jones of the TGWU, Scanlon was central to the Social Contract of the mid-1970s, a voluntary agreement between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan and the TUC to restrain wage demands and limit strike action. This proved unable to hold, largely due to the inflationary consequences of the successive oil crises between 1973 and 1979, leading to the rise of unofficial stoppages and eventually the "winter of discontent" in 1978 that famously contributed to the Conservative victory in the general election of the following year. 

The historical point, all too clear in retrospect, is that the partnership of the Social Contract was doomed to failure due to structural forces beyond the contracting parties' control: the geopolitical disruption arising from the Yom Kippur War, the decline in capitalist profitability starting in the late-60s and consequent squeeze on wages, and the beginning of the process of globalisation that would radically reconfigure the UK economy in the succeeding decades. Again, this is a point that Beckett makes in asking whether a centre-left government can ever succeed on its own terms: "Such governments typically try to find a balance between boosting capitalism and regulating it, between redistributing wealth and keeping economic elites content, between making foreign policy more ethical and accepting existing power arrangements." Such a careful balancing act is easily unbalanced by contingent events, which invariably reveal the underlying biases in play. As Beckett notes of Tony Blair, "as soon as he tried to combine this mildly progressive project with more rightwing policies such as the privatisation of public services and participation in American wars, the credibility and coherence of his government were fatally damaged."

One reason for referencing Scanlon is to revisit what Kettle and other centrists, like Will Hutton, imagine to have been the lost opportunities of the 1970s: "One of the prime reasons for Britain’s low productivity is that we have failed to revisit the role of codetermination between employers and employees over issues of workplace and corporate governance." This ignores that codetermination wasn't killed off by the 1977 Bullock Report, which revealed intractable differences between capital and labour, but by the steady erosion of workers' rights in the name of deregulation pursued by central government since then. Even in Germany, its traditional champion, codetermination is on the defensive after the "liberalisation" of employment law through the various Harz reforms. You also have to question Kettle's assumption that codetermination would magically raise productivity, as if the current low levels of the UK owe more to prickly shopfloor relations rather than under-investment and the heavy bias of the economy towards services rather than manufacturing.

The idea of industrial "partnership" has a long history, originating in the reaction against organised labour. Unions were originally presented as a Jacobin threat to the established order in the days of the Combination Acts, but in the later nineteenth century the rhetoric changed towards the idea that organised labour was selfish and lacking in national spirit at a time of imperial expansion. This was exacerbated by the Russian Revolution, which revived the older trope of a malign foreign threat, and culminated in the corporatism of Fascism and Nazism. Milder forms of corporatism were also advocated in the liberal democracies during the 1930s. Unsuprisingly, partnership became the watchword in the UK and US during wartime, when labour was expected to make sacrifices not only for reasons of patriotism but to defend ideals such as democracy itself, despite this being notably absent in industrial relations. That strikes peaked after both World Wars was not coincidental: wartime merely obscured that the opportunity to address the underlying friction between management and workers had not been taken. One predictable result of this was that nationalisation in the UK largely retained the existing management, which brought with it the existing frictions.

In this historical context, a "new deal for working people" is the worst kind of rhetorical nothing, suggesting progress and fairness while excluding those who don't work, as if the population is neatly divided into two groups when the reality is that many are obliged to flit from employment to unemployment and back again while even more are under-employed and reliant on in-work benefits. Kettle's lack of understanding of the contemporary economy leads him to nostalgically imagine a society divided into two blocs: "For too many years, both sides of the divide have preferred a more zero-sum approach. Too many employers have simply been anti-union as well as indifferent to their workforces. Too many unions have seen industrial action as the only way to get what they want. It is why some on the employer side hark back so often to the Thatcher years, and some on the union side to the days when the law was largely kept out of industrial relations. And it is why some on both sides are so slow to change." 

This is the classic centrist "each as bad as the other" lament, but it is also a refusal to acknowledge class interests. Employers aren't anti-union because of a personal lack of virtue, any more than trade unionists are monomaniacs who cannot appreciate the value of negotiation (most "disputes" are settled without recourse to industrial action). It is notable in his sketch that Kettle personalises capital ("employers") but present labour as a collective ("unions"). In other words, labour is a class for itself, and therefore selfish in the eyes of centrists, while capital has no class consciousness and should be understood as simply a set of individual entrepreneurs. Not only does Kettle fail to understand the composition of today's working class, three quarters of whom are not in trade unions, he is unwilling to acknowledge the organised power of capital, despite the ample public evidence of business lobbying of the government to water down the proposed "new deal". It is ironic that Kettle accuses "both sides" of being slow to change, when it is clear that his understanding of industrial relations hasn't altered since he enjoyed an expensive lunch with Hugh Scanlon in the 1980s.

The Crisis of Representation

Populism, as a style of political rhetoric, reflects the crisis of democratic representation. Centrists would have you believe that it is atavistic bigotry, the product of poor education or the machinations of foreign powers, anything in fact other than what it actually is. This is because centrists imagine populism to be outside the bounds of healthy politics, rather than a style that is opportunistically adopted by all politicians. The standard definition of the word is a politics that presumes an antagonistic divide between a "people" and an "elite". This is trivially true in the sense that all democratic politics involves privileged actors attempting to marshall the popular will. The critique at the heart of the populist style is that this dynamic has gone awry, either because some or all of those privileged actors are deliberately working against the popular interest ("traitors") or because they are sincere but have lost touch with public opinion ("fools"). Contrary to the belief that the populist style is to be found only at the extremes, it has always been central to our politics, particularly around pivotal moments of change. 

For example, the Conservative Party under Harold Macmillan was derided in the early-1960s for being out-of-touch and foolish (the Profumo Affair), an impression reinforced by his replacement as Prime Minister by the aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home. Harold Wilson, as Leader of the Opposition, was not just consciously technocratic in style ("The white heat of technology" etc), but populist: a man of humble origins who understood the people. He had the fabled "common touch", despite being a middle class grammar schoolboy who had become an Oxford don at the age of 21. This populist impression probably made all the difference to what proved a narrow victory in the general election of 1964. A later example was Margaret Thatcher's campaign against "union barons" in the late-1970s, which contributed to the Conservative Party's election victory in 1979. Despite her own obvious wealth and privileged social position, she was able to present herself as the tribune of the ("decent, hardworking") people against an unrepresentative elite who were strangling enterprise and inconveniencing the public.

In contemporary politics, attention focused on those accused of "populism" distracts attention from the rest of the political field. The question to be asked is why they, the anti-populists, aren't adopting the populist style, given that historically it was quite normal to do so. To a certain extent they are, but often in a banal way through clichéd tropes, for example wrapping themselves in Union Jacks, praising "ordinary, hardworking families" or burbling about "legitimate concerns". This often appears to be rote because it stems from a desire to close off avenues of attack by the press (e.g. insufficently patriotic or not mindful of the aspirational working class) rather than arising from any personal sympathy. There has been a sea-change in politics since the 1980s, largely as a result of neoliberalism's importation of business practice to the realm of governance. What this means is a rejection of the very premise of democracy, a form of engagement alien to the vast majority of commercial organisations which are run as dictatorships. This has led to a liberal form of managed democracy, which is not that different to the illiberal forms found in Eastern Europe. The manifestation of this is the crisis of representation.

One example of this is the prominence of what we might call para-politicians in the media, particularly on TV. Though he has finally managed to get elected as an MP, Nigel Farage has been the leading para-politician of his generation, and one who shows no sign of changing his modus operandi now that he has a Westminster pass. Even when the Commons is sitting, it is more likely that he will be "asking questions" on GB News than in the chamber. In contrast, a number of Labour politicians who have been rejected by the electorate have been more prominent on TV recently than the newly-elected MPs who defeated them, for example Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. Who are they representing? Their claims that their election defeats were somehow unfair is not an attempt to represent the interests of their former constituents but to defend their own sense of entitlement. The fact is that both consider themselves to be members of the political body regardless of the judgement of the electors: the people have squandered their confidence, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht.

These para-politicians are held up as representative of the public interest, but that is an interest heavily mediated by the press and also by opinion pollsters and focus group facilitators, all of whom are disproportionately represented in TV current affairs, and all of whom have a vested interest in presenting politics in reductive terms. Academics rarely feature unless they are willing to behave like crude polemicists, typically of the right, such as Matthew Goodwin or David Starkey. The traditional symbiosis of politicians and journalists is now moving towards partial endosymbiosis, whereby a large subset of politicians are fully absorbed into the media. A good example of this is Ed Balls, a senior politician rejected by the electorate who has made the transition to TV presenter despite having no obvious talent for the job and possessing a rebarbative, hectoring style that has brought regular complaints from viewers. The politico-media caste have no qualms about presenting themselves publicly in this unflattering way. The Spectator garden party isn't a covert conspiracy, after all.

Part of the appearance of managed democracy is the creation of points of conflict that are wholly artificial but which serve as a distraction. The multifarious "culture wars" are one obvious example of this, but the more fundamental dichotomy is between populism, which doesn't actually exist as an "ism", in the sense of a coherent body of political theory, and anti-populism. Because populism is simply a matter of style, all of our politics can be crammed into these two capacious terms and all para-politicians can line up with one or the other. But this doesn't mean that their allegiances are fixed. Populism can be put on and taken off like a coat. While Keir Starmer performs anti-populism as the head of a government committed to restoring the authority of the state, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, spent her first few weeks in office loudly declaiming "Look what they've been hiding from us", as if the Treasury was the equivalent of Imelda Marcos's suddenly revealed shoe collection. Some media commentators sardonically rehearsed the Captain Renault gag - "Shocked, shocked" - but none pointed out that this was a populist manoeuvre.

Perhaps the most interesting act of representation occured on Wednesday when huge numbers of people took to the streets in multiple counter-protests against the rioters. These marches and vigils were clearly organised, and the people attending had coherent political views, even if not everybody subscribed to every opinion on every placard, yet at no point did the media seek to define who the attendees were politically or what they wanted beyond the diametric opposite of the rioters supposed demands (so "Refugees welcome here" rather than "Free Palestine"). Ahead of Wednesday, the government asked that people did not turn out, in order to avoid "inflaming" the situation. In the event, it was the large show of support, a visible representation of actual public opinion, that marginalised the far-right. Shorn of opportunistic looters, the knuckleheads were revealed as tiny in number and organisationally clueless. But who is representing that larger, better organised and coherent public opinion in Parliament? When the Prime Minister is reluctant to even use the word Islamophobia, can it be said that they are represented by anyone beyond the handful of independent MPs currently cold-shouldered by the media or sneered at by the likes of Ed Balls?

Though Wednesday's counter-protests showed up the government's lack of political management, it won't lead to any change of tack. If anything, it will simply reinforce Starmer in his belief that the riots must be dealt with as a law and order issue. This is tactically smart in that the political right cannot criticise such a focus even as they attempt to "understand" the rioters' motivations and squeeze immigration into a debate that was triggered, lest we forget, by the murder of three children by a  clearly-deranged young man who is not an immigrant. But it is strategically dumb because it passes up an opportunity for Labour to reconnect with the communities alienated in the run-up to the general election, including those that unseated Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. The inescapable conclusion is that in a liberal managed democracy what matters is not listening to the actual people at the ballot box, nor their organic representatives in the form of large-scale protests, but rather in divining their true feelings through the media and its auxiliary battalions of pollsters and focus groups. Brecht would have understood.

Algorithmic Outrage

Predictably, the weekend riots across England have prompted press fulminations about the malign role of social media. This has evolved to the point where the far-right is now described as "post-organisational", which I think we can translate as "does not actually exist". If you're looking for some morbid humour in all this, you might recall Margaret Thatcher's famous dictum "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families." Obviously there has been some loose organisation at work ("kick-off at 3pm"), as is usually the case in a riot, but just as that organic, confused reality was long subsumed under the myth of "outside agitators" and "foreign influence", so the contemporary response is increasingly to portray hooliganism as a property of the technology. The suggestion that the riots may owe more to the machinations of the Kremlin than the relentless propaganda of the rightwing British press is obviously absurd, but it is also internally consistent in that it inflates a foreign bogeyman into an existential threat. The idea that British society is at risk of being undermined by Vladimir Putin is just the liberal equivalent of the conservative idea that it is at risk from asylum-seekers.

The Observer has been at the forefront of this liberal interpretation: "Prof Stephan Lewandowsky of Bristol University, who is an expert in disinformation, said that social media platforms amplified far-right voices. “Facebook is an outrage machine,” he said." The obvious point to make here is that the press has been an outrage machine for a very long time, and insofar as there has been a significant change in the landscape it is in the extension of tabloid outrage first to radio and then more recently to TV. The crowd that gathered in Southport was not made up of dedicated Telegram users. Their worldview will be primarily influenced by "mainstream" media. This is a point the paper is reluctant to concede. Instead, Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate is quoted as saying: "Language used by higher-profile figures such as Robinson, the actor Laurence Fox and ex-MP Andrew Bridgen, who spoke at the 27 July rally, as well as the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, is often repeated in other social networks such as Telegram and WhatsApp". This avoids naming the platforms that promoted the words of those indivduals, i.e. newspapers and TV, in order to focus attention on social media.

It won't come as a surprise that Carole Cadwalladr has waded in, talking about "our new age of algorithmic outrage". She quotes Maria Ress, the Filipino journalist who won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (so is unimpeachably virtuous): "There’s always been propaganda and there’s always been violence. What’s brought violence mainstream is social media. [The US Capitol attack on] January 6 is the perfect example: people wouldn’t have been able to find each other if social media didn’t cluster them together and isolate them to incite them further." I can still can't work out what she means by bringing violence mainstream, when she first concedes that there has always been violence. It's simply a meaningless statement. The claim that the Capitol riot could not have occured without social media is absurd, as is the implication that prior to the arrival of the technology there was no way of coordinating the far-right. Cadwalladr's wider purpose is to convince us that social media is a "polarisation engine" and that this arises from the use of algorithms that reinforce outrage. In describing the dynamic, she emphasises that the movement misinformation takes is from fringe platforms prefered by the far-right - such as Telegram, Bitchute and Parler - towards X and other "mainstream social media platforms". In other words, this is a plea not for the outlawing of those fringe platforms but for the creation of a firewall to protect the mainstream. 

Helpfully, Stephan Lewandowsky makes a similar point: "It’s a serious problem and is easily solved by modifying the algorithms so that they highlight information based on quality rather than outrage." In other words, we need better gate-keepers, the traditional role of the press. Again, there is a reluctance to admit that the majority of the misinformation that we have to deal with comes not from the periphery but from the centre. Amusingly, Cadwalladr notes that "the Daily Mail ran a shocked banner headline this week about a single suspicious account on X, with signs it may be based in Russia, spreading false information, although it is likely that this was only one very small part of the picture." Presented with evidence of mainstream misinformation she takes it simply as proof that the same paper was wrong to criticise her past work about Brexit misinformation ("investigations that were ignored or ridiculed by large sections of the British rightwing media").

One interesting quote in Cadwalladr's article, from Julia Ebner ("the leader of the Violent Extremism Lab at the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion at Oxford University"), notes an affinity between the far-right and the medium: "It’s very, very similar across the world and in different countries with a rise in far-right politics. No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way. The far right is just really tapping into those really powerful emotions, in terms of algorithmically powerful emotions: anger, outrage, fear, even surprise." The first question to ask here is whether there really has been a rise in the far-right in recent years. The evidence does not suggest it. Much of what gets labelled far-right, e.g. Viktor Orban's "illiberal democracy", is simply conservative nationalism. In India, Modi and the BJP have suffered a setback. In France, Marine Le Pen is no closer to power and anyway her political trajectory has been towards the centre-right, competing with Emmanuel Macron to absorb Les Républicains. In the UK, the right is fragmented and the riots have managed to mobilise only small numbers of people (compare and contrast with the recent pro-Palestine marches).

It may be true to say that the far-right has found social media congenial, but this appears to be true of all political persuasions. To say "No other movement has been able to have their ideologies amplified in the same way" suggests that this ideology is near-hegemonic, but what exactly is it? A belief that asylum-seekers are thieves and rapists, that Islam is a death-cult, or that our statues are a risk from the intolerant left? Ideology seems a generous word to describe a set of prejudices whose prevalence extends well beyond the "far-right". In focusing on anger, outrage and fear, Ebner is echoing the moral foundations theory of Jonathan Haidt, a dubious attempt to justify conservative impulses (you're not racist you're just loyal) and suggest that liberals have blindspots (you don't acknowledge legitimate concerns). The idea that these are "algorithmically powerful emotions" is obviously a nonsense: algorithms don't recognise emotions, they're just shuffling data based on a dynamic taxonomy (you liked that so you might like this). 

The reaction of the British press, both liberal and conservative, to the Internet has always been driven primarily by its material interests. As search engines gobbled up advertising spends, the press went into a tailspin. It only levelled out to the extent that it was able to migrate online. In doing so, it realised that its own interests were better-served by viral contagion than paywalls. This has resulted in a deliberate expansion of the sort of content likely to earn clicks, and that has meant appealing to the emotions, not just anger and fear but envy, amusement and desire. The inevitable coarsening this has given rise to has been blamed on the medium. Where the press have led, other media have followed, hence the explosion of talk radio and now the arrival of partisan TV with GB News. Social media have provided not only the means to disseminate this calculatedly offensive opinion but also a source of original material: the opinions of ordinary people as much as celebrities that can be held up for public censure or ridicule.

In today's Observer, amidst Sonia Sodha insulting the BMA over puberty-blockers and Jane Martinson espying the patriarchy at work in the BBC's handling of Huw Edwards (neither story needed to be written but both will get the clicks), you will find Andrew Rawnsley opining on the riots. "Part of the answer to the violent far right will come from smart and proactive policing. Making the tech giants live up to their moral and legal responsibilities to the rest of society is another must. These are necessary steps, but they are not by themselves all that will be needed. The longer-term challenge for ministers is to find ways to drain the swamps of racism and conspiracism from which the far right recruit." I'm not aware that anyone is actually claiming that the tech giants have not lived up to their legal responsibilities, in contrast to parts of the press who we recently learnt may have destroyed compromising evidence. Likewise, it's hard to take calls for moral responsibility seriously while Leveson 2 remains sidelined. And as for draining the swamps of racism and conspiracism, surely the place to start would be with those wellsprings in the traditional media who keep the swamps watered.

The Moral Economy of the Labour Right

Martha Gill in the Observer asks: if politicians are corrupt and self-serving, why shouldn't the rest of us shoplift, cheat on benefits and evade tax? The context for this is the observation by the Department of Work and Pensions that benefit fraud, like wider fraud in society, is on the increase. Of course, it should be borne in mind that the DWP has a vested interest in pinning the blame for an increase in benefit overpayments on what they describe as "a growing propensity to commit fraud", rather than the incompetence of an increasingly complex claims system that is still characterised by larger sums unclaimed than lost. According to the government's own figures, £8.3 billion was overpaid in 2023 due to fraud and error, while £3.3 billion was underpaid. Independent assessments of benefits unclaimed are north of £20 billion. For Gill's purpose, the DWP's selective interpretation and somewhat opaque figures are irrelevant. What matters is the introduction of a moral dimension. In a manner similar to Janan Ganesh's recent ruminations on the link between public morality and politics, she asks "Could the long trend of rising corruption in politics, too, be linked to this growing feeling that it is “only a bit wrong” to break some rules yourself? Could it be that the conduct of ordinary Brits has something to do with the behaviour and decisions of their leaders?"

But whereas Ganesh flipped the polarities to blame the swinish multitude for the poor quality of our politicians, Gill's purpose is to squarely blame those politicians. To this end she references E.P. Thompson's essay, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century". In her words, "The crowd was expressing moral outrage. Industrialisation had changed the rules on them – protective laws had vanished, and previously illegal activities were everywhere. The upper classes were defying commonly held values and the rioters wanted to reassert them." This is a subtle misreading, though one that many of Thompson's contemporary critics also succumbed to, largely because of confusion over the use of the word "moral". For Thompson, this was about mores, not ethics, and specific to time and place: "beliefs, usages, and forms associated with the marketing of food". And crucially, this moral economy did not lead to a generalised hostility to the "upper classes". The food riots of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century were typically a protest against profiteering, directed at specific merchants. Likewise, the Luddite riots were directed at specific mill owners, not the Prince Regent.

Gill's misreading allows her to draw a line to the present: "This explanation also turns up in accounts of the 2011 London riots. The looting was decried as “senseless” by much of the rightwing press, but those who interviewed looters were instead treated to angry rants about the MPs’ expenses scandal, the bank bailouts, police corruption and the abuse of stop-and-search powers. The riots were, in part, a response to double standards." Clearly there is a world of difference between opportunistically looting Foot Locker and rioting against a grain merchant who is hoarding his stock in a time of dearth with a view to raising the price. But by suggesting the 2011 riots were motivated, at least in part, by a wider sense of fairness, Gill can create a causal relationship between virtue in government and social morality: "All this tends to suggest that the DWP is wrong when it says there is nothing to be done about this loss of integrity: the solution lies in leading by example. Corruption and unfairness at a high level leaks into the population at large. In battling this, the government seems to have made a start: Rachel Reeves has appointed a corruption tsar to claw back money lost to fraudsters during the pandemic."

Gill's final comment is to wonder whether retaining the two-child benefit cap might encourage more benefit fraud because it is perceived as "unfair". This reads like a plea for the cap to be abolished on moral rather than utilitarian grounds, but it is also a view that imagines the people as a single body with a common mind: inclined to see certain things as unfair (despite polling evidence that many people agree with the cap), and inclined to give way to their base nature if thwarted (despite the fact that the increase in benefit fraud is marginal).  Like Janan Ganesh's suggestion that the cynicism of the people corrodes politics, it is firmly rooted in the elitist world of Plato's Republic. The idea that there is a causal relationship between ministerial virtue and public morality is pure Plato, but it is also an idea that flies in the face of history and political economy. Some of the greatest crimes against humanity, notably man-made famines, were carried out by politicians who considered themselves to be virtuous, while nobody since the caesura between Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations would claim that material interests are irrelevant to public morality.

Having helpfully introduced the most acute issue in politics over the last week or so, we can leave Gill behind and turn to the latest dispatch from the bowels of the Labour right: Andrew Rawnsley's Sunday column. Most of it is a defence of Rachel Reeves's claim to be shocked, shocked by the state of the public treasury, which Rawnsley sees as clever politics ahead of an inevitable increase in taxes on the well-off. But he also takes time to explain the rationale for the suspension of the whip from the seven Labour rebels who voted to lift the cap: "Defenders of the punishment meted out to the rebels say it was “a matter of principle” to sanction Labour MPs who voted with the opposition against a Labour King’s Speech which was based on a Labour manifesto put to the electorate less than a month ago. There’s also a nip—in-the-bud argument. This goes: if you let seven rebels go unpunished this time, you’ll have 30 Labour MPs voting with the opposition when the next difficult issue comes up, 60 the time after that and your majority will have unravelled before you know it."

This is typical of the commentary on the Prime Minister's "ruthless" move in that it can't seem to settle on a single explanation. We are variously told that this is about setting a precedent in a parliament where the size of the government's majority will make future rebellions cost-free; that it is yet another performative act intended to show that Labour has changed since the days of Corbyn (approaching 5 years ago); and even that it is bad form to vote against the King's Speech (ye olde tradition of making up the consitituion as you go). What's received less attention is the duration of the suspension. Why 6 months? There have been few suspensions in recent years and then typically around 3 months. Leaving aside Keir Starmer's history of sentencing inflation in the aftermath of the 2011 riots, the length of the suspension isn't meant to be a condign punishment or a deterrent pour encourager les autres. My own suspicion is that he is trying to give the seven enough rope with which to hang themselves. As currently independent MPs they will have opportunity to vote against the government, but that will probably just result in further extensions or even permanent withdrawal of the whip. 

As we saw with the long delays in handling the disciplinary "cases" of Corbyn, Abbott and Shaheen, and in the successful burying of the Forde Report, the preferred tactic of the Labour right is to manoeuvre the left into limbo and then wait for time to take effect. Appeals to fairness fall on deaf ears because for the Labour right unfairness is the whole point: the left are illegitimate and undeserving of due process or justice. This is exacerbated when the left tries to appeal either to the better natures of the right or to the sympathy of the media, e.g. John McDonnell claiming that the seven voted to "put country before party", or when they deride the act as a "macho virility test" (music to the right's ears). In its contempt for any popular sentiment that doesn't match its own prejudices, in its self-pity when confounded (e.g. denied the parliamentary seats it thinks it owns), and in its exultation at the exercise of power, this is a moral economy that would be only too familiar to Edward Thompson, but it is that of the merchants and the mill owners, not of the crowd.

The Lineaments of Desire

The honeymoon period of the Labour government has been less revealing of Starmer's true nature or his administration's priorities, all of which were made abundantly clear before the general election, than it has of the hopes and fears of the commentariat. Inevitably, none has been busier in articulating their desires than Polly Toynbee at the Guardian. On The Monday after the vote, when it was clear how shallow support for the incoming government was but before the King's Speech confirmed its intentions, she was demanding that Starmer addressed the cynicism of the electorate through the trifecta of Lords Reform, a cap on political donations and the introduction of proportional representation. Obviously, none of this made the cut and you can safely assume we'll be in much the same situation in 2029 as we are today, even if they do get around to retiring a few hereditary peers. After the King's Speech she was reduced to insisting that the government would surely abolish the 2-child benefit cap, despite other commentator's noting that there was no way the government would take any action that could be seen as ceding to pressure from the left.

In between times, our fearless politics-understander went on safari to observe the Tories in defeat and was delighted to discover that Nigel Farage is alive and well. With the newly-installed government giving every sign that it will disappoint her liberal hopes, she was happy to displace her energies onto the defeated enemy. It was long thought that Farage got disproportionate coverage on the BBC and elsewhere because of the influence of the Tory press, but we're about to witness the determination of the liberal press to keep him front and centre, both to encourage the continuing division of the political right and to fill the void where progressive reform should be. Picking up the weekend baton, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer has decided that we can finally discern the lineaments of Starmerism: "This is turning out to be a very political government led by a very political prime minister accompanied by a very political cabinet." That might sound banal, but what Rawnsley actually means is that this is a government with a clear agenda. He puts it bluntly: "This isn’t socialism. It is using the power of the state to try to galvanise a more productive capitalism." And then even more bluntly: "One thing is already clear. The Starmer government is not at all libertarian."

Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times took, as is his wont, a more Olympian view on what he described as the doom loop of modern politics: "Hatred of politicians deters good people from the job, which makes government worse, which makes voters hate politicians still more". This thought was stimulated by the failed attempted assassination of Donald Trump, which Ganesh immediately linked to people in the UK telling parliamentary candidates to fuck off: "The harassment of candidates in Britain’s election has been met with a sinister breeziness. To be clear, then: the anti-politician culture is wrong in and of itself. But more than that, it is self-reinforcing." Far from a sinister breeziness (what even is that?), the travails of various Labour candidates beaten by pro-Gaza independents or Greens has resulted in the new Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, promising taskforces and crackdowns, not to mention TV allowing the likes of Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire to air their grievances and suggest that voting them out of office was somehow unfair. What is sinister here is the conflation of legitimate anger with illegitimate violence, something we've also seen in the judicial treatment of Just Stop Oil protestors this last week.

Ganesh makes the connection explicit as part of his claim that we're not recruiting the best people to Parliament: "Actual violence is worse than intimidation, which is worse than verbal abuse, which is worse than invasive attention, which is worse than the reflexive, almost rote-learned cynicism that is now the routine lot of the politician in front of a public audience (“Why should I believe a word you say?” etc). But all have the same effect. All deter able individuals." This is mere sophistry. They clearly aren't comparable, unless you think that a life sentence in prison and missing the bus are equivalent as reasons for why I missed a football match. The purpose is to equate a lack of respect for the political class with violence - i.e. incivility as the gateway drug to assassination. The key thing we know about the two political murders in Britain in recent years, the killing of MPs Jo Cox and David Amess, is that they were committed by respectively a neo-Nazi and a Jihadi, both clearly unbalanced. To read from this that the problem is a wider societal disrespect for politicians is absurd.

Ganesh goes further to suggest that there is something tragic in the very nature of political life. The example he offers is frankly comical: "Robert McNamara was a jewel of his American generation — Harvard Business School star, Ford Motor Company whizz — and a tragically fumbling Pentagon chief during the Vietnam war." The assumption that academic or commercial credentials make you a natural for politics is naive technocracy, while the implicit appeal to meritocracy is pernicious (note how much that misunderstood concept has featured in the propaganda around the new UK government's social plans, such as Bridget Phillipson's belief that her life story can inspire a nation). Not only do people succeed at one firm and fail at another, highlighting the importance of institutions and tacit knowledge, but politics is inevitably constrained by circumstance and ideology. The Ford Edsel was an unforced error; the Vietnam quagmire was the consequence of the analytical errors of anticommunism that had become settled, bipartisan policy.

Writing in what is by defnition the inner sanctum of the liberal elite, Ganesh has no reservations about pointing the finger at the real villain: "It is natural to attribute the anti-politician mood to governmental failures: the botched wars, the misregulation of banks, the British state’s formidable achievement of rising taxes and deteriorating outcomes. There isn’t anything like the same curiosity about the source of those failures. What if the causal link runs the other way? What if an inept state is the ultimate fruit of anti-politics?" In other words, what if it is the fault of the people? Ganesh wants this to be true, as I'm sure many of his readers do, and to that end he will happily deny the evidence of his own eyes and insist that the failure of Northern Rock was the fault of its depositors, not its reckless management, and that the increasingly poor performance of the NHS is down to the sick rather than the failure of politicians to adequately fund it. This is frankly no different to a tabloid berating benefit claimants or insisting that the NHS is struggling due to uncontrolled immigration.

Though they operate in very different registers, what is common to Toynbee, Rawnsley and Ganesh is the hope that under a Starmer government we will see a change in the political culture. For Toynbee,  this is a matter of virtue: "cleaning up our fetid politics". For Rawnsley, the emphasis is on the efficient, even brutal exercise of power: using "legislative hammers" and being "tough and dirigiste in the pursuit of its most critical goals". For Ganesh, the desire is for an end to populism, which is to say for democracy to take a back seat and for the electorate to be less demanding of the political class. Government should get on and govern, and the electorate should know its place. How much Starmer will satisfy their desires is moot, depending as it does on contingency and the level of public resistance, but you can already expect Toynbee to be the most disappointed. This will not be a notably liberal government, except in the narrow economic sense, and in the sphere of planning its "dirigiste" intentions will inevitably give way to the interests of capital, so Rawnsley will be making excuses at some point in the future. The one who appears most likely to get his wish is Ganesh, simply because all he wants is the restraint of democracy, which remains the abiding desire of the Parliamentary Labour Party as well.

The AI Hype Cycle

Gartner, the American technology research consultancy, launched its Hype Cycle in 1995 at a time when there was a lot of new hardware and software being punted towards its corporate clients. The original value of the cycle was that it allowed Gartner to visually represent the relative maturity of various technologies within the wider cycle of business adoption, not unlike a wine vintage chart (too early, drinkable now, past its best). As the somewhat cartoonish graphic indicates, this was pitched at non-technically-literate executives. The origin story told by Jackie Finn makes clear that the purpose was to advise on the timing of adoption, hence the research note in which the image was first published was entitled "When to Leap on the Hype Cycle". The absence of "whether" simply reflected that Gartner's business model was to sell consultancy to firms that were in adoption mode. This in turn reflected the times: not simply a point at which the World Wide Web was taking off but the latter stages of the great IT fit-out of the corporate world that commenced with the arrival of PCs and mini-computers (what would become known as "servers") in the 1980s.

The Hype Cycle quickly became a fixture not only for Gartner but in the culture of business and even wider society. But as it spread, an idea developed that this was actually the common life-cycle of emergent technologies: there would always be a period of hype followed by disillusion followed by the payoff of improved productivity. You can see the problem with this by considering some of the examples on that first graphic. Wireless communications never really had a peak of inflated expectations because the underlying technology (radio) was mature and the benefits already proven. Bluetooth was frankly a bit Ronseal. Handwriting recognition turned out to be a solution in search of a problem, hence it never made it to the plateau of productivity. Object-oriented programming (OOP) turned out just to be a style of programming. Insofar as there was hype, it resided in the promise of code re-use, modularity, inheritance etc, which were all crudely understood by executives to mean a shift from the artisan approach to the production line and thus fewer, lower-paid programmers. The explosion of the Internet and the consequent demand for programming killed that idea off.

It's difficult to say on which side of the peak of inflated expectations we are today in respect of AI - i.e. artifical intelligence but more specifically large language models (LLMs). If I can be forgiven for introducing another term, we may well have reached the capability plateau of AI some months ago, possibly even a couple of years ago. This is because we are running out of data with which to populate the models. All the good stuff has been captured already (Google and others have been on the case for decades now) and the quality of newer data, essentially our collective digital exhaust, is so poor that it is making generative AI applications dumber. The current vogue for throwing even more computing resources at the technology, which has boosted chip suppliers like Nvidia and led to worries that the draw on power will destroy all hope of meeting climate targets, reflects the belief that we can achieve some sort of exponential breakthrough - who knows, perhaps even the singularity - if we just work the data harder. 

The appearance of financial analyst reports suggesting that AI isn't worth the investment strongly suggests that the trough of disllusionment may be upon us, but for the optimistic this simply means we are closer to the slope of enlightenment. The classic real-world template for this was the dotcom stock boom in the late 90s, which was followed first by the bust in 2000 and then the steady, incremental improvement that culminated in the mid-00s with the iPhone and Android, Facebook and Twitter, and the first examples of cloud computing with Google Docs and Amazon Web Services. For those with a Schumpeterian worldview, the bust was simply the necessary stage to weed out the pointless and over-valued. The Internet eventually became pervasive, generating highly valuable businesses in the realms of hardware, software and services, because it met the consumer demand for killer apps: first email, word-processing and spreadsheets, and then social media, video and streaming. But what is the killer app for LLMs? An augmented search function, like ChatGPT or Microsoft's Copilot, is small potatoes, while the ability to create wacky images with DALL-E 3 is on a par with meme-generators in terms of value.

The wider promise of AI has been that it will replace the need for certain workers, notably "backoffice" staff whose knowledge is highly formalised and whose data manipulation can be handled by "intelligent agents" (to use the terminology, if not the meaning, of that original Gartner graphic). You may remember this idea from the history of OOP. Indeed, you may remember it from pretty much every technology ever applied to industry, starting with the power looms used to depress wages that the Luddites railed against. The standard story is that new technologies do destroy jobs but they create other, even better jobs in turn by freeing up labour for more cognitively demanding (and rewarding) tasks. Of course, from the perspective of an individual business this isn't the case. The promise of greater productivity is predicated on either reducing labour or increasing output. The new jobs will be created elsewhere and are thus someone else's problem. This is a good example of the difference between microeconomics (the rational choice of a single firm to replace staff with technology) and macroeconomics (the impact on aggregate levels of employment and effective demand in the economy as a whole). The story of job substitution is true, as far as it goes, but it is also obviously a consolation: there is no guarantee that the new jobs will actually be better.

The dirty secret of AI is that it requires an ever-growing army of human "editors" (to dignify them with a title that does not reflect their paltry pay and poor working conditions) to maintain the data used in the LLMs. These are mostly "labellers" or "taggers", and mostly employed in the global south. The fact that the jobs are done at all tells you that they must be sufficiently attractive in local terms. In other words, spending all day tagging pictures of cars is probably better paid than tending goats. This means that the anticipated benefits of AI may simply be a futher round of the offshoring familiar from manufacturing in the 1980s and 90s, but this time with AI acting as a veil that makes the human reality even more obscure than sweatshops in Dhaka or Shenzen. Indeed, the veil may be the point for many AI boosters in the technology industry: a way of preserving their idealised vision of a tech-augmented humanity that isn't shared by many beyond their own limited social milieu and geography. Inevitably the boosters also include many who have zero understanding of any technology, like Tony Blair, but who are very keen on the idea of a dehumanised workforce and a disciplined polity.

AI serves as a massive distraction for technocratic neoliberalism. It offers a form of salvation for all the disappointments of the last few decades: secular stagnation is averted, productivity growth picks up, truculent labour is made docile. After all the waffle over the last three decades about the knowledge economy - the need to raise our skills to take advantage of globalisation - it is notable that the promise of better jobs has been downgraded. In a recent "report" by the IPPR think-tank, we are told that "Deployment of AI could also free up labour to fill gaps related to unaddressed social needs. For instance, workers could be re-allocated to social care and mental health services which are currently under-resourced." From spreadsheets to bed-pans. The lack of resource for health and social care is simply a matter of money, i.e political choice. There is no suggestion that AI-powered businesses will be paying a higher rate of tax, rather the implication is that AI will fuel growth that will increase revenue in aggregate (again, macroeconomics provides the consolation for microeconomics). 

One of the key dynamics of postwar social democracy was the idea that public services depended on a well-paid workforce paying tax. The value created in the economy was funneled via pay packets and PAYE into the NHS and elsewhere. Neoliberalism broke this model by offshoring and casualising labour. Workers (i.e. average earners) funnel less value to the state, which leads both to greater government efforts to raise revenues elsewhere and to pressure to cut public spending ("cut your coat according to your cloth"). An AI revolution that reduces the number of average paying jobs (those "backoffice" roles) and substitutes more lower paid "caring" roles will simply further increase the pressure on the public sector. I suspect that the deployment of AI will not be marked by a slope of enlightenment, let alone a plateau of productivity, but by the determination of the private sector to reduce labour costs and by the determination of the state to trim the public sector as tax revenues decline. It is often comically bad, but in combination with offshored digital peons, AI technology is probably already "good enough" to meet those ends. In terms of the hype cycle, we are probably a lot further along than we imagine.

The General Elation

The centrist celebrations of Labour's landslide general election victory have quickly given way to crabby complaints that the strategic genius of Morgan McSweeney and Keir Starmer isn't being appreciated. This is because of "resentful Corbynistas" and battered Tories pointing out that Labour got half a million fewer votes than in 2019 and barely improved its vote share. One word that has been used a lot is "efficient" as Labour managed to convert its 34% share into 64% of MPs. There are obviously other terms you could use to decribe that outcome, such as disproportionate, but the choice of word tells us a lot about what commentators anticipate from the new government. There has been much talk of Labour being "under new management" and Keir Starmer personally promising competence and probity in public office; the one an obvious ideological rebuke to the left, the other a condemnation of the Tories' chaotic misrule. But no one seriously expects that a working majority of 181 will encourage Keir Starmer to release his inner socialist and drive radical reform. Thus we have the sight of a party celebrating that it no longer piles up "wasted votes" in urban seats giving every sign that it will waste the opportunity of a big Commons majority, just as Blair did in 1997 when the door to lasting constitutional reform was wide open. 

The Labour right's "power for a purpose" mantra exists solely to chastise the left. In office the party is invariably timid, particularly in respect of the constitution and foreign policy. 1945 wasn't even an exception to this rule: Attlee had no more interest in reforming the House of Lords than he did in pushing decolonisation. The urging of "boldness" ahead of the manifesto publication was largely a plea that Labour adopt something vaguely progressive that could be sold on the doorstep. It was about the vibe rather than the substance. Likewise, the early talk of priorities and the first hundred days has focused on fire-fighting rather than reform: stop Thames Water going bust, end the NHS strikes, stop more local councils going bust. The impression given is of a new management team parachuted in to save a failing business. There will be progressive gestures. The Rwanda scheme abandoned, the de facto ban on onshore wind farms rescinded, and various taskforces assembled to address planning regulations and the parlous state of the universities, but there's will be no questioning of the role of capital while the meta-narrative will be about the restoration of the state's authority.

For Starmer's enthusiastic backers in the media, such as Andrew Rawnsley, the election victory is a continuation of the Labour leader's efforts to "rebuild" the party after Corbyn and "its most abject defeat since 1935". The idea that Britain is a broken ruin is hyperbole but it does chime with voters' experience of crumbling public services and infrastructural neglect. The idea that the Labour Party was a ruin, given the huge increase in membership under Corbyn and the positivity of the 2017 election, is ridiculous, but the needs of the narrative demand that Starmer be framed as a fixer and restorer. The problem is that his "remarkable feat" in making Labour electable is mostly smoke and mirrors. Not only did it depend on the Conservative vote being torn in multiple directions by an electorate united in nothing beyond the conviction that the Tories should be booted out, it also required the connivance of the press as Starmer systematically misled the Labour membership, purged the left and lined the party up with the most conservative elements in society. The late endorsement by The Sun was confirmation of a deal sealed years ago.

The myth of 2019 will never die because it serves the narrative of how Starmer "rescued" Labour, but it will also enjoy a new lease of life as the challenges mount up for the government. As more and more people are disappointed, the Prime Minister will be able to say that it took 5 years to fix the party and it will take at least that to make inroads into the UK's myriad problems. That Labour secured over half a million more votes in 2019, and a percentage share only slightly worse than last week's, are not details that will change this narrative, and no centrist will thank you for noting how poorly 2024's performance compares to 2017's in terms of attracting voters. What matters is the win, even if we all know that the result was simply an extreme example of the old adage that it is governments that lose elections not oppositions that win them. The claim of efficiency does come with some caveats: that Labour has alienated the young and ethnic minorities, which it may come to regret, and that its vote in many of the consitituencies won from the Conservatives is fragile. With so many seats now classed as marginals, a Tory revival is not out of the question.

How the Tories might accomplish that is moot. The tale of the last 50 years is not just the general shift to the right on the political spectrum but the compression of the options. Reform are plain old reactionary conservatives, most of whom consider themselves to be Thatcherites. The Liberal Democrats are dominated by the neoliberal economic orthodoxies of the Orange Bookers, while their social liberalism is insipid. They will no doubt seek to challenge Labour's authoritarianism in office, but cooperation on areas such as health, education and welfare is likely. With Labour adopting the mantle of fiscal responsibility, there's no obvious space for the Tories to occupy. Once Brexit "got done", for good or ill, and once the pandemic brought home the folly of austerity, the party found itself without a clear proposition, hence it has spent the last few years thrashing about over emotive but marginal issues such as the Rwanda scheme, London's ULEZ and the fatuous "war on woke". In a political landscape dominated by conservative orthodoxy, Starmer correctly recognised that competence could be his USP, not least because the Tories had displayed serial incompetence in office since 2015. 

There was clearly little movement by voters between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, the latter's vote share barely changing, any more than there was movement from the latter to Labour. Ed Davey and his merry band were simply more efficient (that word again) in their targeting. In contrast, Reform came third in the popular vote, ahead of the Liberal Democrats, but their diffuse support meant that they won only 5 seats compared to the traditional third party's 72. The recovery of the Conservative Party electorally will require it to eat deeply into one or the other's voter base, so it faces a crucial choice. At this point we should remember that the party's secret weapon is not the loyalty often claimed for it but collective opportunism. In 2009 they managed to transform a banking crisis into a charge of fiscal irresponsibility against the last Labour government, paving the way for austerity and indirectly Brexit. Ten years later they exploited the Labour right's sabotage of its own party and the lingering leave-remain split to secure a further five years in power. Opportunism suggests either the absorption of Reform by adopting a fully reactionary programme, or coalition with the Liberal Democrats on a platform of rejoining the EU.

If the UK had a proportional electoral system then a split in the Conservative Party would be likely. But under first-past-the-post (FPTP) it must stick together and so it must choose one political direction or the other. Unlikely though it may seem, the greater opportunity lies towards the Liberal Democrats. Keir Starmer is sincere (for once) in saying that he cannot see the UK rejoining the EU in his lifetime. Though popular sentiment has steadily shifted to rejoining the Single Market it remains negative on the idea of adopting the euro (which would be a condition) and that's unlikely to change any time soon. Were Labour to back reaccession, it would probably lose a lot of seats in those areas that originally voted heavily for leave. As part of the project to establish Labour as the national party, Starmer appreciates that it must also remain the Brexit party, at least until death and demography change the electorate. Though the Liberal Democrats have managed to produce an efficient result at this election - 11% of seats on 12% of the vote - they also know that this will prove a historical curio unless they can significantly boost their vote share (half of what they got in 2010) next time. A merger with pro-EU Tories would consign Reform to the traditional disproportionate lot of the third party.

2024 may well go down in British political history as the oddest election of them all, and we can expect to hear a lot about the need for electoral reform over the coming weeks as a result. But its very oddity means that Labour will be unwilling to consider reform. This is not solely self-interest but an appreciation that the more fragmented landscape of a proportional system would not be in the interests of a faction, the party right, that has deliberately alienated swathes of the membership and made enemies of much of its own voter base. Starmer's "Stability is change" mantra should be clue enough that the project of restoring the state's authority after the disruptions of Brexit and Corbyn will not be sidetracked by constitutional reform, any more than UK foreign policy will suddenly discover an independence from Washington or a moral dimension. The size and fragility of Labour's Commons majority means that the next five years will see growing backbench anxiety as the government's popularity inevitably falls in the face of weak growth and painfully slow improvements in public services. With so many lobbyists elected, there are likely to be lobbying scandals. 

A couple of days before the vote, Polly Toynbee insisted that "If the result is grossly disproportionate, Labour would have a moral obligation to voters to bring in a fairer system: it couldn’t be called gerrymandering when Labour had benefited so much from first past the post." In other words, she thinks Starmer should be magnanimous in victory. Toynbee has always been stunningly naive about British politics since her days helping to found the SDP in the 1980s, but even she must appreciate that magnanimity isn't a word that appears in the lexicon of the Labour right. She continues, "Weak but long held-up reasons for opposing reform were burnt away in the turmoil of recent years. Who can defend first past the post as providing “stability” after the tragicomedy of five PMs in eight years, and scores of ministers whizzing through revolving doors?" Again, she misunderstands what Starmer means by stability: it isn't the "grown-ups" back in charge, it is rather an authoritarian government that will brook no dissent. And if Starmer ever countenanced a change to the electoral system, you can be pretty sure that the party right would dispose of him pronto. The rumour that they intend to change the party rulebook so that only MPs can elect the leader when in government isn't simply about denying the membership a say. Turkeys don't vote for Christmas and the PLP isn't about to vote for PR.