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.