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.