Disasterology

Richard Seymour has a new book out, Disaster Nationalism, which I haven't read yet (I'm hoping Santa will oblige) but whose central thesis he explained in an interview with Jacobin: "Right-wingers are really enthralled and obsessed by hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster" while being in denial about real disasters, such as climate change. Seymour sees this as a pyschological coping strategy - the prepper who believes he is in control - while the denial is often channelled into conspiracy theories that provide an identifiable target - Covid-19 as a government plot, for example. He rightly notes that this is not Fascism, because it hasn't yet evolved into a critique of democracy, but he does suggest that it might be a harbinger: "We’re in a stage of accumulation of fascist force. When you go back to the interwar period, that accumulation process had already taken place, there had already been massive pogroms, there had been big far-right movements before fascism." What I'm interested in here is not the psychology of the right but the attitude of the political centre. It was, of course, the liberal and conservative blocs in Italy and Germany that facilitated the rise of Fascism. It was the accumulation of establishment support, or at least tolerance, that mattered, not the pogroms.

Seymour is alive to the ambiguous nature of the political centre. As he puts it, "Increasingly I think that when push comes to shove, liberals do not want liberalism. Obviously, certain distinctions have to be made because there are liberals who are genuinely philosophically and politically committed to liberal values and will fight for them and will go Left if they have to. But there’s also the kind of hard centrists whose politics is organized principally around a phobia of the Left." This is a conventional view on the left, albeit one that conveniently excuses an enervating pessimism about the possibility of progress through the institutions of representative democracy. But it's also a critique that characterises the centre as cynically knowing. They may be deluded in their assessment of how successfully they can control the Fascist right - how far they can turn up the dial on racism and bigotry, for example - but their worldview is not shot through with the same obsession with "hallucinatory scenarios of extreme disaster". Instead we are assured that optimism remains the defining characteristc of liberalism. 

There's a revealing moment at the start of a separate interview between Seymour and Tad DeLay in which he begins by talking about actual examples of liberal hysteria, notably the hyperbole around the "disaster" of Brexit, and then segues into discussing the manias of the far-right, such as the great replacement theory, as if they were one and the same people. This prompts a question, can we really separate liberals and conservatives categorically in this way, between the hallucinating right and the pragmatic centre? And if we can't separate them, is it helpful to yoke the obsession with disasters to nationalism and thereby quarantine it on the right? My own view is that we cannot, not least because nationalism itself is a product of liberalism rather than an instinctive feature of conservatism. I think there's a lot to be said for Seymour's thesis about the right - the relish for disaster, the stylised death-wish - but I don't accept the idea that liberal politics are fundamentally optimistic and rational in contrast. If anything, they are pessimistic about society, hence the historic disdain for democracy.

Attempts by the political centre to outflank the right, for example Keir Starmer's claim that the last Tory government was running an open borders policy, are often met with derision by the left because they assume the manoeuvre is insincere. But this is to underestimate the attraction that conservative disasters - a nation "swamped" etc -  hold for liberals. The liberal promise that a better future is possible is always tempered by the apparent necessity to defer that future. We cannot have good things today, either because of the errors of the past or because "economic realities" intrude, and improvement is only possible through technocratic managerialism. Hope (socialism or even just participatory democracy) is ridiculed as naive. Conservative thinkers have long sought to link liberalism's progressive teleology back to the Terror of the French Revolution, and then forward to the Stalinist Terror, but the historical reality of liberalism has been anti-utopian since the Thermidorian Reaction and explicitly anti-radical since 1848. We rightly criticise liberals today for adopting conservative rhetoric, but they have been doing this for a very long time.

A persistent criticism of the Labour government by media liberals is that it hasn't offered any hope, the promise of better times. The explanations for this omission have ranged from the wrong backroom staff (it was all Sue Gray's fault but Morgan McSweeney is a man with a plan) to the Prime Minister's lack of political mileage (he's actually been an MP for almost 10 years). A more honest assessment would be that the political centre no longer deals in hope in office, whatever it may campaign on, and hasn't done since 2008. Austerity has enjoyed consensus support across the centre-right and centre-left for the last decade and a half, despite its abject failure in its own ostensible terms, and following the budget reaction it now appears that the government has abandoned hope of stimulating growth to generate the revenues necessary to refurbish the public realm. Instead there will be more crackdowns on benefit claimants, more targeting of migrants, and any minister who tries to push politics further left will have their CV and social media pored over for incriminating evidence to justify their removal. In what sense could any of this be described as liberal optimism?

The Wilson governments of 1964-1970 also struggled with economic policy, and also cleaved to the status quo on foreign policy, but they made significant progress in terms of social policy, both through the legal reforms championed by Roy Jenkins as Home Secretary and in the major investments in education, housing and welfare. The Starmer government has less scope in those tangible areas due to decades of privatisation and marketisation, and it has yet to show much enthusiasm for reform in such traditional areas as the constitution and criminal justice. It is no surprise that elderly liberals like Polly Toynbee, who look back fondly on the liberal reforms of the 1960s (and on Roy Jenkins' subsequent political journey), should have celebrated the initial passing of Kim Leadbeater's private members' bill on assisted dying, but it is not at all certain that the government will do everything in its power to ensure the bill becomes law. That a government whip objected to and therefore blocked progress of another private members' bill to increase palliative care in children's hospitals, immediately after the vote on assisted dying, was telling in its symbolism: the whip was the former Tory MP Christian Wakeford.

In his interview with Jacobin, Seymour notes that the characteristics he discerns among the right can also be found among liberals: the "hallucinatory anti-communism" and the eager embrace of conspiracy theories like Operation Trojan Horse. You could also add the hysterical campaign against Jeremy Corbyn as Leader  of the Labour Party to that list. Many leftists consider that to be an example of dishonesty - the party right pretending to be scared or shocked in order to pursue factional advantage - but the tendency to dismiss it all as a scam ignores that many of Corbyn's accusers were clearly thrilled by the opportunity it afforded not only to pose as the righteous but to warn of impending disaster: the destruction of British Jewry. It struck me at the time that the liberal criticism of Corbyn over the EU Referendum campaign was not simply a smear (the claim he didn't campaign for Yes when he clearly did). It seemed to reflect a genuine contempt for his more measured assessment (famously he gave the EU "7 out of 10") and his unwillingness to cast the referendum in their preferred apocalyptic terms. 

We may well be in a period when the right is characterised by disaster nationalism, but that may actually be no bad thing as it appears to be mostly inwardly-directed and its conspiratorial mindset is flighty and incoherent. I'd be far more worried if we were facing expansionary nationalism of the sort that scarred the 20th century, and which looks dreadfully archaic today in Ukraine and Palestine. Of course this doesn't rule out the risks within states, and I think Seymour is right to particularly highlight the anti-Muslim pogroms in India, but my suspicion is that the right's cultivation of fictional disasters as a distraction from the real ones, or its attempts to explain real disasters like climate change as hoaxes or the malevolence of others, will eventually collapse in the way that most cults do. The bigger worry for me is the liberal tendency to adopt the right's style of "hallucinatory scenarios" for its own betes noires, such as the influence of social media, and even to overlap in its obsessions with the right, such as in the recent centrist turn against "wokeness", as this just provides more excuses to ignore liberalism's failures to address the real disasters that confront us: climate breakdown and galloping inequality.

The Persistence of the Old Regime

One of the more dispiriting developments following Donald Trump's election as 47th President of the USA is the return to prominence of Carole Cadwalladr and her hyperbolic style of reportage. It's not that she ever went away, but her regular beat of Russian disinformation and the role of social media in fomenting small town riots has been, well, small potatoes in comparison to her preferred narrative of how the liberal international order is being subverted from within by the "techbros" of Silicon Valley. Though she sees this as a collective threat, she is also happy to personalise it, in time-honoured liberal fashion, by focusing on Elon Musk as a malevolent actor threatening democracy. With his elevation to Trump confidante, she is now firing on all cylinders, happily introducing herself as a main character: the canary in the digital coalmine who correctly espied democracy's enemies at work in the 2016 EU referendum and Trump's election campaign later in the same year.

In her first major article in The Observer following the election result she erected a notable dichotomy between traditional news outlets and newer media: between "clean, hygienic, fact-checked news" and "the information sewers", as she puts it. She characterises the old order as "[T]ruth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times." Unfortunately for Carole, this came around the same time that the NYT, along with most of the Western media, eagerly published ridiculous claims of a pogrom in Amsterdam, and after months of passive-voiced reports on deaths in Gaza following unattributed air-strikes. Despite admitting that 2016 didn't in fact spell doom for truth, Carole is convinced that this time it is for real: "The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied."

In evidence she cites a hardening of attitudes among the figureheads of Silicon Valley: "These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed." The idea that "the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite" is some sort of novelty in Western democracies will surprise many, from historians to former Observer journalists like Anthony Sampson, but the more useful idea here is the parallel with Russia in the 1990s. It would be easy to point out that the chaos was as much the work of Western advisers from the Chicago School of Economics as of Russian nomenklatura, or that the rise of Putin and the Siloviki was a reaction to that chaos, but the more telling point is the importance of certain industrial sectors, notably oil and mining, in the power struggles of the era.

Carole's belief is that technology companies are now the dominant power in the US, defining the culture and thus the politics, and that the leaders of these companies constitute an elite that will shape policy in Washington for years to come. The older politico-economic establishment, based on oil companies, manufacturing, retail and the like, will presumably be marginalised under the new order. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the scale and importance of technology companies to the US economy, let alone their cultural reach, and that's without considering that she is only really concerned with a narrow slice of the technology sector itself: she isn't bothered about IBM or Dell, let alone General Electric, and Apple as usual gets a pass. This is perhaps to be expected of a journalist who sees everything through the self-important prism of traditional media, but it also highlights a longstanding failure of the journalistic profession to understand the variety to be found among those she lumps together as "techbros", or even to take seriously the sociology of the wider capitalist class.

For all the emphasis on bleeding-edge technology, Elon Musk is tied to traditional industry sectors, notably car manufacture (Tesla), transportation (SpaceX) and telecommunications (StarLink). His shift to the conservative right, and his purchase of a media company, is what you would expect from such a background: simultaneously berating the state for its interference in the free market while being reliant on it for contracts and sympathetic regulation. Mark Zuckerberg, who has felt aggrieved by both Democrat and Republican administrations in the past, remains on the fence politically simply because Meta hasn't expanded beyond a business dependent on the goodwill of a broad cross-section of the population, leaving Carole to critique him for his choice of haircut. In preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris, which it probably would have done as the voice of the Washington establishment, Jeff Bezos wasn't hedging his bets with Trump so much as indicating that he wants Amazon to be considered politically neutral, as befits the "everything store". 

The broader shift in political allegiance among Silicon Valley luminaries, from the fuzzy libertarianism of the 90s to the increasingly authoritarian conservatism of today, reflects material changes in the industry, notably the rise of abusive mediation and monopoly - what Cory Doctorow has polemicised, from the perspective of the consumer, as enshittification. This has led to greater antagonism between the state and technology companies, e.g. the recent ruling against Google's near-monopoly on search, but that in turn has simply made it more necessary for those companies to exert political leverage. Initially that was achieved through the Democratic Party, in combination with the banking interests that have long dominated it and with which the industry had an obvious synergy during the IPO mania, but more recently it has led to alliances with the Republican Party as the focus has shifted away from the proactive design of regulation to resistance against attempts to impose the costs of externalities on it, whether hate-speech or climate change. But far from supplanting traditional industrialists as political power-brokers, the technology company leaders have simply joined the club.

This is not to suggest that capitalist business-as-usual means there is no threat to democracy. Capitalism and democracy are inherently antagonistic, and managing capitalism for its own good (social democracy) or managing democracy to defend capitalism (neoliberalism) are both fraught with contradictions, which leads to a ceaseless quest to find new justifications for the maintenance of the hierarchies that democracy threatens. What remains distinctive about the Californian Ideology is its reactionary modernism, which combines social accelerationism with a supersession of democratic accountability. As William Davies described one of its current luminaries, "Figures such as Peter Thiel explicitly straddle the worlds of wealth management and ethnonationalist politics, proposing at the overlap of these two spheres a form of revolutionary reaction, in which capital breaks free of liberal democracy so as to restore some primordial past in the future." It's easy to be distracted by the wacky natalism, the revival of "race science", or the aristocracy of taste that is effective altruism and forget that this is ultimately about preserving wealth.

Donald Trump's picks for office have prompted much horrified pearl-clutching, but what has been less remarked upon is how many, beyond the usual rich industrialists and think-tankers, have been TV personalities or gossip column regulars, not the very online guys of Carole Cadwalldr's nightmares, which emphasises that Trump himself is an analogue president, a product of the TV and tabloid age. Similarly, the liberal press remain stuck in an imagined past of civility and decorum circa Lou Grant (forgetting the more pointred lessons of Network). As in 2016, they thought that Trump would self-implode by saying something offensive, then to women, this time to Puerto Ricans. Like Talleyrand's Bourbons in exile, they have learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. In the aftermath of this month's defeat, the Democrats have oscillated between blaming the brutish mass for their stupidity and blaming the left for alienating the solid citizenry. Leading neoliberals are already happily parroting conservative lines about pronouns and politicised academia. What we're witnessing is not a new era but an old one. This is the Restoration not the Revolution.

The Loyal Opposition

The recent US Presidential election was presented as a moment of crisis: democracy in danger, Fascism imminent. In the event, following Donald Trump's much-feared victory, Joe Biden immediately committed to an orderly handover. The fevered post-count analysis - Trump didn't win, Harris lost; it's the economy, stupid; the Manosphere swung it etc - obscures that the US establishment has once more emerged victorious. Obviously it is one particular wing of the establishment, and that bias will have real consequences for many Americans, but don't imagine that a second Trump presidency will significantly diverge from established policy, either domestically or internationally, any more than his first term did, and you can be assured that any substantive changes he does make will more than likely be maintained if not explicitly endorsed by a future Democrat president, just as the US embassy remains in Jerusalem and just as illegal immigrants were deported under Obama.

Trump is unlikely to be the harbinger of Fascism, even if some of his backers and hangers-on might desire that. It was the failure to deliver anything beyond a standard conservative administration during his first term that assured voters he could be trusted again, with the events of January the 6th four years ago now downgraded from a hyperbolic insurrection to a farcical riot. Among his backers, the Project 2025 crowd are likely to be more disappointed than the various billionaires. Trump isn't a programmatic guy. He may pick and mix some of their ideas, but his own egoism is likely to be a bigger factor in determining policy than a 900-page tome he clearly hasn't read. Apart from his personal indolence, he will be restrained by the guardrails of American politics. Ultimately, he wants to be loved more than he wants to be feared, and that means cleaving to the longstanding orthodoxy.

Fascism is reaction in the guise of revolution but Trump offers nothing revolutionary. His politics today are well within the historical norm, from tariffs as the solution to American industrial competitveness to moral panics over immigration as the unifying substrate of American nationalism. And this is why the Democrats will willingly go into internal exile and brood upon the electorate's lack of gratitude rather than the nature of the Republic. The "resistance" will once more be a rhetorical style that will quickly pall, while the DNC will start the beauty parade to find another pliable centrist who will appeal to rich donors. Just as nationalism cannot arise without the foundation of liberalism, so Fascism cannot arise except in the context of a democracy brought to crisis by that same liberalism. But the Democrats are not going to question the nature of their creed any more than they will question their commitment to the national secuiry state.

In foreign policy, there will be no divergence on Ukraine, let alone Israel. The US long ago made clear that it saw Ukraine as a disputed borderland between Russia and Europe and had no intention of accelerating NATO membership. Whether Trump leans on Zelensky to agree a Carthaginian peace, or whether he simply lets the war drag on and insists it's up to the Europeans to pay for it, the outcome won't be much different to what a Harris presidency would have delivered. Putin knows this, but it will suit his domestic political agenda to allow Trump to claim partial credit for a deal, and for him to appear magnanimous in victory. Netanyahu can expect a more overtly supportive White House, however the dynamic between the US and Israel is not one of empathy but of utility, and the strategy since Bill Clinton has been a deliberate absence of restraint on Israel's treatment of the Palestinians coupled with an explicit restraint on Israel's antagonism of Iran. That won't change. 

Allowing for population growth, Trump has received pretty much the same popular vote for three elections in a row. If his victory in 2016 was down to the structural bias of the Electoral College, this year's victory owes everything to the Democratic vote tanking. The party failed to turn abortion rights into a vote winner despite a number of states that voted for Trump as President simultaneously passing pro-abortion legislation. This suggests that voters have given up on the Democrats passing pro-choice legislation at a federal level, something they have repeatedly failed to do even when in full control of Congress. Pro-abortion activists are instead focusing on defending and extending rights at the state level. Likewise, many voters have decided that the Democrats cannot be trusted to re-engineer the Supreme Court, in a manner similar to the Republicans' ruthless pursuit of power, despite ample opportunities.

There has been no shortage of claims over the years that the GOP was heading for history's trashcan, whether due to demography (the dominance of cities and the growing multi-ethnic young) or its takeover by the crazies (from the Tea Party onwards), but there is no doubt that the Republican Party will persist as the preferred vehicle of both broader capital (domestic industry, land etc) and American nationalism (even if paradoxically both imperial and isolationist). What is less certain is that the Democratic Party will persist as its higher echelons reflect an ever narrower strata of high finance, the culture industry and the state apparatus, and as it consciously alienates its supposed natural supporters among the working class and progressive opinion. Its problem is that it has become a loyal opposition, hence the civility of its response to defeat and hence it cowardice over issues such as abortion. It assumes that the American people are innately conservative and this latest failure will simply reinforce that self-limiting belief.

This isn't a failing  peculiar to American centrists. In the UK, and contrary to much hyperventilating opinion in the British press, it is the Labour Party, rather than the Conservatives, that is most at risk of a steady and then sudden abandonment by its traditional supporters. The right may be currently split between the Tories and Reform, but it can easily unite, something that appears more likely as Nigel Farage now has reason to spend even more time in the US than he does in London, let alone Clacton. The broad left, from progressive liberals to socialists, looks far less cohesive, despite the dynamics of an electoral system that promotes coalition around two poles. In extirpating the left from the party, and in alienating ethnic minorities as it searched for the socially conservative vote, Labour's right have perhaps permanently damaged the progressive coalition. 

Arguably the most advanced Western democracy in terms of this trajectory is France. Not only has the traditional centre-left of the Parti Socialiste fragmented, but the technocratic centre has willingly marched to join forces with the right. Emmanuel Macron has legitimised the Rassemblement National as the loyal opposition and dismissed everyone to his left, the actual progressive coalition of the Nouveau Front Populaire, as the disloyal opposition. One day, French centrists will wake up to find that the far-right has become the government. Their response will be to become the loyal opposition in turn. Across the West, neoliberalism remains politically hegemonic despite its repeated rejection by electorates. Because neoliberalism can accommodate nationalism, opposition to it is forced into the channels of the right. The left remains anathema because its critique cannot be accommodated. The morbid symptom this gives rise to is a liberal establishment that decries the conservative right in increasingly hysterical terms while happily adopting its policies.

Deserting the Centre

A common theme in the commentary on the Tories' current troubles has been the search for parallels with previous occasions on which power changed hands between the two main parties. Inevitably, the end of a long period of Conservative government and the Blairite nostalgia of the commentariat has made 1997 the choice comparison, with the dominant narrative being that the Tories are headed for the electoral wilderness because of a lurch to the right, a prediction reinforced by the shortlist of potential party leaders being winnowed down to Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. There are two problems with this comparative analysis. The first is a tendency to misinterpret the history of past electoral shifts, the second is a tendency to ignore the contradictions of conservatism as this historic conjucture. Even what passes for the left-inclined newspaper commentariat has tended to treat the latter as a matter of personalities - e.g. "Bad Enoch v Sad Enoch", in Aditya Chakrabortty's phrase - which is no better than the sneery virtue-obsession of centrists such as John Crace or Marina Hyde.

To be fair to Chakrabortty, he does recognise the contradictions that arise in attempting to reconcile libertarian economics and social conservatism, but reducing this to "moron or bastard" personalises a more profound tension that is currently restructuring politics not only in the UK but across much of the world. Martin Kettle, perhaps suprisingly, does at least recognise the global context: "Across the developed world, the party politics of the 20th century have fractured. The once dominant centre-right parties of countries such as France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are either struggling to survive or have disappeared. In the US, the Republicans have turned into a populist cult. After the general election, the Conservative party hesitated to lurch down the same path. Now, though, it has done so anyway. It is a fateful moment and the consequences will not be pretty for any aspect of British politics." Of course, this is simply Kettle mourning the end of the political landscape he grew up in, but he does at least recognise that there is more at work here than the triumph of stupidity.

Simon Wren-Lewis has also taken to looking for parallels in watershed elections of the past. He too imagines that 1997 offers the best comparison, but along the way he makes some interesting comments about 1979: "Just as Labour then was deeply split between left and centre, you could say the Conservatives are split between the right and a One Nation centre. But whereas the split within Labour in 1979 onwards was both very evident and extended to the membership, if the Conservatives are split the centre is both remarkably quiet and appears largely absent from the membership." He is using "centre" here is the sense of a positioning on the wider political spectrum, and thus a synonym for liberal in the context of Labour. In fact, the split in the Labour Party was the longstanding one between the socialist left and the Old Labour right. The liberal strand, represented by Roy Jenkins and his allies, was a minority within the party, literally a gang of four at the outset, with only 28 MPs eventually defecting to the breakaway SDP, often for reasons of careerism. The dynamic that led to the formation of the new party was a squeeze between the left and right in Labour that marginalised liberalism, and it was this as much as the electoral arithmetic that led to its subsequent merger with the Liberal Party.

Wren-Lewis is concerned that by lurching to the right the Conservatives have rejected any attempt to appeal to the median voter, which he presumably imagines a One Nation centrist would be more sympathatic to. But this ignores two things. First, that the "nice Tories" of the centrist imaginary were always happy to support the economic libertarianism of Margaret Thatcher and the austerity of David Cameron and George Osborne (Ken Clarke, Dominic Grieve and David Gauke, for example). Second, insofar as these things can be judged from opinion polls, the median voter is already significantly to the left on economic policy of not only the Tory right and the One Nation centre but also Labour. It's also worth noting that voter's material preferences, on issues such as taxation and nationalisation, look a lot more stable than the polling and focus group claims that the median voter is positioned to the right on social and cultural issues, such as immigration and trans rights, not least because the latter tend to be topics with which most voters have little personal issue but which they assume are of concern nationally due to the salience and bias of media coverage.

What we see in these various analyses is the classic narrative of centrism in which the losing party in a pivotal general election lurches off into the political wilderness by deserting the centre ground. In fact, what characterised both 1979 and 1997 was that the winning party had very deliberately stated in advance of its victory that it saw itself as being to the right of the centre and engaged in a radical transformation: the Tories to defeat the unions and Labour to embrace globalisation. In both cases, there was a public belief that this was over-stated, that while meaningful change was needed, the party would prove less radical in office (there were obvious echoes of this in 2024 with the claim that Starmer and Reeves would redress the wrongs of austerity). Both elections shifted the "Overton Window" to the right, making the left appear ever more distant from the centre (which opened it up to the cynical anathematisation of recent years) and positioning the middle of the spectrum significantly to the right of the median voter.

The tension at the heart of conservatism between libertarian economics and social reaction has not resided exclusively within the Tory Party for decades. It has become hegemonic. It was central to the makeup of New Labour and continued in subterranean form throughout the post-Blair years. Ed Miliband's desire to make the economy more socially responsible and to dial down the reactionary impulses around welfare and immigration simply produced an alliance between the neoliberals and the old right to hamstring him. Jeremy Corbyn's outright rejection of both neoliberalism and reaction simply turned the dial of opposition within the party up to 11. Keir Starmer's attempt to reconcile the two has led to the fiscal orthodoxy of Rachel Reeves, the neoliberal revivalism of Wes Streeting and his own bleak authoritarianism, now lapsing into the parody of a patriotic reactionary. The apparent triviality of the Conservative Party leadership contest simply reflects the fact that the struggle for the soul of conservatism is currently underway in the Labour Party. 

Those Labour Party supporters who think a Conservative Party led by either Badenoch or Jenrick would be a godsend, guaranteeing a further 5 years in power, acknowledge their fear that James Cleverly would have pitched for the same centre-right ground that they now occupy (indeed, it requires no struggle to imagine Cleverly as a minister in the current government). What they perhaps don't want to acknowledge is that a further shift to the right by the Conservatives will encourage Labour to move further right as well, to ensure they are fully Tory-adjacent and so close up the space for any further incursions by the Liberal Democrats. The truth of the matter is that the conservative party is in rude health, it just doesn't go by that name any more. The more troubling truth is that conservatism is no closer to resolving the contradictions between its economics and its social instincts. The rise of the far-right is an opportunistic attempt to exploit the latter to obscure the former, but it offers no coherent solution. Nationalism retains a strong appeal, but the commitment to a comprehensive reordering of society that was foundational to Fascism is simply inconceivable in our individualistic world.

We are living in the early days of a one-party state, or a single state party, if you prefer. The curious reluctance of Labour to fight the Tories over the need for austerity in 2010 and then again in 2015 were the warning signs. The brief resurgence of a mildly left of centre opposition in 2017 was perhaps the last chance to preserve a genuine electoral choice, hence the notable increase in turnout and the high percentage share of the two main parties. People knew the election mattered, in a way that 2024 didn't. 2019 was the great consequential election, not so much in confirming the UK's exit from the European Union (that was always likely to happen in some form, the promise of a second referendum notwithstanding) but in finally entombing the left. The so-called "Soft Left" of Labour have taken junior ministerial jobs or voiced timid dissent from the backbenches, but their opposition to hegemonic conservatism is no more substantial or likely to make a difference than that of the Tory "Wets" in the early-1980s. The dominant political question of the moment is this: Who is best suited to manage the contradictions of conservatism - the Labour right or the Tory right?

What Is Left of Neoliberalism and Conservatism?

If there is a fundamental difference between liberalism and conservatism, both in theory and practice, it is that the former is universal while the latter is particular. From the Kantian imperative to modern human rights law, liberalism sees its scope as all of humanity. In contrast, conservatism believes in minding one's own business. Of course, as historians like Domenico Losurdo have long pointed out, liberalism in practice operates a very clear hierarchy of regard, from its involvement in slavery and colonialism to today's discrimination in its sympathies towards Israelis and Palestinians. This is because at root it is about the defence of private property, from which arises an entire global order. In reality, liberalism and conservatism are simply two strategies with the same goal - their historic friction and entanglement reflecting evolving class power and the underlying changes in the material base. But the distinction between the universal and the particular remains a useful guide to understanding liberal and conservative thought and the way it is expressed politically.

Though both the recent Labour and Conservative party conferences were crashingly dull, with little of substance to report and much trivia served up to an ungrateful press, both followed the script to the letter. Labour avoided the particular by eschewing policy announcements beyond "more of the same", while the Tories indulged the particular by ill-considered asides on maternity pay and extra-judicial killing. The liberal media pleaded with Labour to offer the nation some "hope", albeit in the form of rhetorical bromides rather than anything that might inflame the passions, while the conservative media, faced with four underwhelming candidates for leader, has started to read the last rites for the party. The Labour conference prompts the question: What is left of neoliberalism? Though many commentators have seen the new government in terms of continuity with the Blair era, there is clearly a lot less on offer this time round. Likewise, the Conservative conference prompts the question: What is left of conservatism? While a leadership contest inevitably means speakers pitching to an audience far to the right of public opinion, the fact that so much on offer was little more than hobby horses points to an obvious void.

The turn to a more activist state in pursuit of a more national economy, which began after 2008, has not seen a return to the social democratic state of old. Rather it has accentuated the disciplinary features of the neoliberal state. Thus Bidenomics has been more about maintaining US energy security, with all its geopolitical ramifications in Ukraine and the Middle East, than near-shoring manufacturing jobs, while the EU's shift towards the reimposition of internal as well as external borders is clearly not intended to reduce the mobility of capital. In the UK, the prime current example, heavily-freighted with symbolism after the recent riots, is the Labour government's commitment to build new prisons. While this has been offered up as justification for wider-ranging planning reform in the face of "NIMBYism", it is clear that the Prime Minister in particular finds his comfort zone within the carceral state rather than amidst the blueprints of new public infrastructure. Perhaps the most telling example has been France, where the permanent state of exception in support of "stability" has now dropped the pretence of democracy.

The original claim of the Third Way was not simply that it was pragmatic ("what works"), or inclusive after the divisiveness of the 1980s (the communitarian and dialogic vogues), but that it was post-ideological. In other words, it was postmodern in rejecting the grand narratives of the past, specifically the nationalism and socialism that dominated from 1848 to 1989. If there is an intellectual substrate to Starmerism it is a belief in the state, arguably the grandest and oldest narrative of them all, which goes back to the 17th century and Hobbes' Leviathan. This means that not only is it not postmodern, but that it largely rejects modernism and structuralism too, hence the strong whiff of cultural conservatism and unapologetic anti-intellectualism that Starmer and his chief lieutenants give off. Liberal newspaper columnists bemoaning the lack of substance would strike traditional conservative thinkers like Michael Oakeshott as ironic. Starmer is saying that he is an echt conservative and his lack of fancy foreign ideas, as much as the looming Union Jack flags that provide the background to his speeches, is the proof of that. 

The Conservative Party leadership candidates have predictably all commited to lower taxes, a smaller state and a larger military, which might suggest a consensus as to what is left of conservatism. But this is mostly shibboleths and ancestor-worship. The inescapable trend is towards higher taxes because of demographics, i.e. more dependents and a shrinking working-age population, something that should be obvious when you survey the attendees at the party conference. The state has never meaningfully shrunk, even on the Tories' watch, both because of those demographic trends and because of rising expectations of the state to provide greater security (pretty much every public inquiry results in a demand for it to do more). It's also worth noting the self-interest of the politico-media class in expanding the state's activities, which in turn expands the scope for private interests to seek influence through lobbying and donations. Military spending will continue to decline, if only because the alternative is even higher taxes, and because the salience of conflict in Ukraine and Lebanon cannot detract from the secular trend towards less war. 

It's a professional failing for politicians to ignore material and social forces and imagine that they can affect the course of history, but it's also an expression of contemporary conservativism: that things will only get worse unless we intervene against the "woke mind virus", or whatever bizarre form the justification for reaction has now taken. Paradoxically, this is the exact opposite of traditional conservatism's belief in making no unnecessary change. From Edmund Burke through Michael Oakeshott to Roger Scruton the fundamental principle has been the precautionary: "first, do no harm". English conservatism since the millennium has lost its bearings, largely due to American influence (Scruton's claim that the left lost its bearings due to French influence now appears quaint in comparison). The transatlantic variety has always been more concerned with the preservation of what it see as innate hierarchies of power, from the family (anti-abortion) to society more generally (a militarised polity enforcing racial discrimination). This gives rise to such morbid symptoms as the trad wife and the prepper. In contrast, English conservatism (for it is particularly English, not British) has been relaxed about changes in personnel so long as the structure of hierarchy remains in place (the House of Lords). It has, in a word, been pragmatic. That is not an adjective that could be used to describe the Conservative Party in recent years.

Amusingly, it is liberals who have fretted most over the decline of English conservatism while the Tories have sought refuge in the consolations of pessimism or simply thrown themselves into unhinged mania. A recent example was Kenan Malik in The Observer telling us (in the words of Roger Scruton, no less) that conservatives believe in the free market and choice, when they very obviously don't. Within recent memory we had a Tory government looting the public treasury to shovel money towards "VIP" mates. Malik suggests that Tories were actually ambivalent towards Margaret Thatcher because she combined a Hayekian liberalism destructive of the tried and tested with an ostensible conservatism, but this ignores that her advocacy of the free market was in support of a reactionary social order, not unlike that other Hayek fan, Augusto Pinochet, which tells you what classical liberalism is really about. She didn't create a nation of entrepreneurs but one of rentiers, spivs & petty authoritarians (a legacy that lives on in the Labour Party as much as elsewhere). To be fair, Malik also admits (again quoting Scruton) that what really motivates conservatives is obedience, i.e. the obedience of others towards themselves, which is closer to the truth. 

The meta-narrative of modern political science is the idea that we are witnessing a realignment of voter loyalties. This tends to follow two well-worn tracks: the rise of populism in response to the discontents of globalisation; and the claim that party affiliations are now more determined by values than material interests. The common factor is the rejection of class as both an analytical category and as an organising principle for political action. In conjunction, they also serve to justify the demand that centrist politicians ease up on the neoliberal teleology and show sympathy for conservative values: the petit bourgeois and the working class must be kept onside by pandering to social reaction. With liberalism less universal in its aspirations and conservatism even more obsessively particular, the result has been a gradual merging of the two in a common "party of order" (most obviously in France) whose chief purpose is to protect society from the "chaos" of the left and various alien malcontents. Putting up Stars of David at every entry-point into the UK, as suggested by Robert Jenrick, might appear both mad and deeply trivial, but you wouldn't be surprised if the current Labour government adopted the policy.

Money Talks

In his book, The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, the American political scientist Corey Robin provides a useful summary of conservative thinking on the intersection of money and political speech: "When it comes to political speech, Thomas proposes, men and women speak most forcefully not through the idle chatter of social media or cocktail conservation but through giving up their money as campaign donations. Donors 'speak through the candidate', Thomas writes". This is conventional enough, but Robin excavates the roots of this thinking in Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. Specifically, the idea that the market reveals our true preferences through the price mechanism, whereby we "decide what to us is more, and what less, important". This suggests that the more we value something, the more we will pay for it. At the margin - e.g. if you're down to your last dollar - what you spend it on will surely be your priority, a true moral choice. But what if you're rich? To cap campaign donations would be to deny the rich person the ability to make a choice at the margin - i.e. at the limit of their possible expenditure. 

As Robin sardonically notes, "the Hayekian argument would seem to favour limitations on accumulations of wealth. How are the wealthy ever to make a moral choice if they never approach the end of their riches?" But this is obviously not the conclusion for soi-disant classical liberals like Hayek or contemporary conservatives like Thomas. The argument rather is that there should be no limit on the exercise of political speech through the medium of money, as that would be an abridgement of rights under the First Amendment. Along with the acceptance of corporate personhood - that rights nominally intended to be exercised by the individual are also available to corporations - this has led to a contemporary American polity in which the interests of large corporations and billionaires dominate the political discourse. Political speech is only meaningful in public forums, and increasingly they can only be accessed through money. Speech may be free, but in practice political speech is beyond the buying-power of the vast majority of citizens. It is no coincidence that social media has arisen in parallel with this development, offering the appearance of free speech but ensuring that the clamour of the crowd (or the occult working of the algorithm) muffles most of it. 

Before turning attention to the UK, one final observation by Robin: "Liberal critics will claim that Thomas's model is pure influence peddling, money buying access and legislation, the essence of corruption. Thomas counters that corruption happens only if there is a simple quid pro quo, a bribe, which is illegal. Influence and access, by contrast, are what all citizens seek. Influence peddling, in other words, is the essence of citizenship." It's obviously easy to disguise a bribe, so the fine distinction being made here between vice and virtue is not one that can readily survive in the real world. The equation of money and speech muddies the field by suggesting that cash can change hands in a virtuous manner, so the presence of cash or benefits in kind is not in itself evidence of corruption. What matters is the intent: influence versus bribery. Ironically, this means that larger donations are less likely to be considered questionable. Per Hayek, the more you give the more it is an expression of your true beliefs and thus a moral choice. It is easier to give a Senator, who has legislative authority over a Bill that will affect your financial interests, $1 million than it is to give a Sheriff who recently stopped you for speeding $100.

Unlike the US, the UK has recognised the right of corporations to make political donations since the Trade Union Act of 1913 superseded the Osborne Judgement of 1909. The latter had temporarily banned trade unions from funding the Labour Representation Committee (the forerunner of the Labour Party) after a Liberal-supporting member of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants had objected to the use of his contributions in this way. The 1913 Act made political funds lawful but also enshrined the right of union members to opt-out. Succeeding legislation has further tightened this and today members must opt-in to the political fund, if there is one. Historically, the trade unions were the largest contributor to Labour but that has steadily declined since the 1990s. Last year, in the run-up to the general election, they accounted for 27% of the cash donations to the party. In contrast, businesses and individuals accounted for 67%, with two individuals (Gary Lubner and David Sainsbury) jointly contributing more than the unions. 

Over the years, political donations by companies to all of the leading UK political parties have declined. This is partly due to the desire of publicly-listed companies to appear non-political in order to keep all of their shareholders happy (and avoid charges of wasting money that could go to dividends), but it also reflects the growth of private donations by rich individuals, many of whom will effectively be recycling company profits by virtue of their own large shareholdings. More broadly it indicates how much wealth has shifted from public corporations to private accumulations: patrimonial capital, in Thomas Piketty's phrase. Companies are these days more likely to make donations in kind, for example by seconding staff to work in politicians' offices, or by offering entertainment and other freebies that can be explained to shareholders as lobbying or public relations. It is the latter that is currently in the news for the simple reason that it has become pervasive. 

The first defence wheeled out by many Labour ministers when questioned on the subject was a variation of "Everybody does it; it's no big deal". This was a useful insight into their own worldview, particularly at a time when they were calling for sacrifices by welfare recipients, but it wasn't exactly smart. Equally unhelpful have been the party supporters who have attempted to dismiss football boxes or concert tickets as trivial during a cost-of-living crisis, or who pointed out that Conservative politicians have a worse record in accepting free hospitality, not to mention corrupt practice, though this is surely more down to the opportunity of 14 years in government rather than any moral peculiarity. The problem is that these manoeuvres imply that ethics might actually be relevant at a certain price-point, which simply leads to a discussion of what that price might be. £100,000 in declared freebies over a year plus a new wardrobe for the wife appears to be way in excess of that notional number to judge from public opinion. By now you might have expected the spin-doctors to have come up with a better line. That they haven't tells us something significant, and it isn't that Keir Starmer is politically tone-deaf or that the Number 10 operation is distracted by infighting.

What the government appears to be telling us is that buying influence is fine and that the only ethical requirement is that it should be publicly declared. The insistence on that public declaration is not a weak excuse but a proud boast. That act transmutes what could look like a bribe into a legitimate expression of political preference by the donor, a point Rachel Reeves made, though she was unintentionally revealing in describing a "scale" ranging from members and supporters (small donations) to "people who have been successful in life" (large donations). She isn't going to state that the degree of influence is proportionate to the amount of money, because that would be crass, but she is prepared to suggest that the largest donors don't have to be supporters, let alone party members. The fact that so many Labour politicians have appeared nonplussed at the idea that they would be swayed by some Taylor Swift tickets, which they only took for the benefit of their kids, is not them playing dumb. They understand that what will sway them are much larger donations, not to mention non-executive directorships and plum consultancy gigs.

The Labour Party's infatuation with American politics used to be largely restricted to the Blairites, but since Obama's first presidency, and the post-2008 counter-revolution it enabled, that infatuation has spread to pretty much all parts of the party other than the left and a few Blue Labour eccentrics. Indeed, the charge of anti-Americanism was a significant sub-text to much of the purge of the left after 2016. This goes beyond the traditional Atlanticism of the Labour right, or the West Wing cosplay of Labour's media outriders at the New Statesman and elsewhere, to a full-on absorption of American political norms, from the jejeune technophilia of the Tony Blair Foundation to a more transactional relationship with the donor class. But while the latter is rooted in its US context in a belief that money is political speech, in the UK it is rooted in a very different history, one in which money is authority. This explains the contrast between the cacophonous US party conventions with their loud protests and Labour's tightly-managed conference where protest is anathematised and dissenters are bundled away. 

The Vibes-based Order

According to Polly Toynbee, the Labour government is already being treated harshly by the press: "The honeymoon for Labour is over, say the massed ranks of the rightwing media. What honeymoon was that? It seems to have been over since 5 July." The party's honeymoon started immediately after the 2019 general election. In retrospect, Keir Starmer has enjoyed the longest personal honeymoon, in the sense of a period of indulgence by the media, of any party leader in history. Indeed, he has faced a quite remarkable lack of scrutiny ever since he entered Parliament in 2015. You could attribute this to his good fortune in facing a succession of incompetent Conservative Prime Ministers after 2019, but then the comparison with Tony Blair suggests otherwise. Labour's fresh-faced new leader in 1994 was ridiculed by much of the press as "Bambi" for his inexperience. The backdrop of sleaze and the loss of the Conservative government's reputation for economic competence after Black Wednesday in 1992 meant that a change of government was expected. The only question was whether Blair was an adequate replacement for John Smith, not whether he was an adequate replacement for John Major.

The truth is that the media knew that Boris Johnson would be a disaster at some point and accepted that Labour had to be positioned as a credible replacement government once it had been secured against the left, and once Brexit had been "delivered". While the press was divided on the merits of the latter, there was unanimity on the former. It remains notable that the pro-EU commentators of the Guardian feel that Starmer deserves a long honeymoon despite his central role in sabotaging both the chance of a soft Brexit and a Labour government following his intervention at the 2018 party conference. It's likely that over time some will come to regret their order of priorities, accepting that their instinctive and irrational determination to stymie Corbyn and the left should not have trumped their pragmatic and rational desire to remain in the EU Single Market or Customs Union, but that day is not yet come, hence the petulant whining now about the triviality of £100,000 in goody-bags and the unacceptability of leaks about Number 10's office politics.

Before the sleaze and bitching took centre stage, the attitude of the liberal media towards the government could best be described as one of studied bemusement, both at its apparent priorities (cutting pensioner benefits) and its poor public relations (cutting pensioner benefits). John Harris insisted that "This country needs a lot more than the myopic parsimony of pen-pushers and bean-counters", while Jenni Russell pleaded "Keir, we can’t thrive if all you offer is misery". It's as if neither had spotted at any point over the last 5 years that Starmer had relentlessly moved Labour to the right and appointed a Shadow Chancellor committed to the Treasury View, or that his rhetorical style from day one has centred on the negativity of threats to the party (antisemitism) and threats to the country, both of which would require authoritarian crackdowns. Jonathan Freedland was a little more realistic in his take, claiming that "It’s hard to say that the honeymoon is over, because it never really began. You can’t blame Labour for that: it warned voters before the election not to get their hopes up, and it has stood firm against the menace of optimism ever since." Of course, he has always been an authoritarian masquerading as an even-handed liberal, so his sympathy for the Prime Minister comes as no surprise.

Freedland believes that Rachel Reeves is on the right track because lower interest rates mean "Investment becomes attractive, so the economy begins to grow", and from this all sorts of wonders will arise. He'll not thank you for pointing out that we had near-zero rates for a decade after 2008 during which investment was weak and growth anemic. His attempts to convert from his usual Eeyorish hand-wringing (see any article he's ever written on Palestine) to a Polyannish optimism doesn't convince, but he gives it a good go: "There is an extra prize in sight too. Britain with low interest rates, governed by a new, ostentatiously sensible government with an enormous parliamentary majority, will look like an island of political stability, especially as France and Germany contend with a surging far right. That will attract overseas investment, previously frightened off by the Tory follies of the Brexit years, which means yet more money in Treasury coffers available for public spending." Finally, those sunny uplands are in sight and the damage of Brexit is consigned to history. The purpose of all this nonsense is not to suggest that Reeves should alter course but that Starmer (subtext: still needs to develop political antennae) should make some popular gestures to signal "that better times are on the way". It's all about the vibe, man.

Right on cue we are now told that Starmer is under pressure to ensure his upcoming conference speech offers "hope", though hope of what exactly is unclear. When Peter Mandelson is reduced to lauding Ed Miliband as "a man with a plan", you know they are scratching around. That this demand for optimism comes not only from "party insiders" but "business leaders" is significant. It's clear that the government's focus on doom and gloom is beginning to undermine consumer confidence, and while some of this may be a deliberate ploy to cast whatever crumbs of comfort Starmer comes up with in a better light, it's also clear that this government will be no different to previous Labour administrations in having to toil under the yoke of "business confidence". As Michal Kalecki long ago pointed out, that is merely a way of disciplining governments, who in turn are expected to discipline labour. The idea that business leaders want a better vibe is absurd. What they want is for the government to ease off on any plans to increase tax on capital or to extend workers' rights. And it sounds as if Reeves considers delivering that, aka "stability", to be her chief goal.

In this light, the decision to abolish the Winter Fuel Allowance, the lack of embarrassment over donations and freebies, and the insistence that the autumn budget will be painful are all of a piece, intended to reassure business that this government will prioritise the interests of capital. As Phil Burton-Cartledge notes, "Starmer's lorry load of shopping bags and weeks spent in corporate hospitality boxes says loud and clear whose side he's on." But there's another signal being transmitted here, from the media to Starmer himself. The focus on petty corruption among politicians is always a matter of tone. For example, the real critique of Johnson's refurbishment plans for the flat at Number 10 was the assumed vulgarity of the wallpaper. This was held to reflect a lack of taste and (the misogyny being all too apparent) a wife out of control with ideas above her station. The more serious threat to take Johnson down came much later amidst Partygate. The refurb kerfuffle was simply a plea that he be more serious and statesman-like.

The liberal press want Starmer to be more Jupiterian, to borrow a French phrase, and thereby cement centrist, technocratic government as the natural order of things, even as France reveals the squalid reality of ostensibly progressive centrists allying with the reactionary far-right to block the left, all in the interests of "stability". You can also see this demand for tone at work in the British liberal press's coverage of the US Presidential Election, where the Democrats' turn to a strategy of ridicule directed at Trump and Vance has generated enthusiasm among centrists while successfully obscuring Harris and Walz's essentially conservative policy platform, thereby risking a repeat of the errors of condescension that did for Hillary Clinton. The Trump-Harris debate focused heavily on the character of the participants, with the only issue of policy substance being abortion, a topic that neither party is comfortable with and that has only appeared on the agenda as a result of the highly-political actions of the Supreme Court. 

Starmer will no doubt ride out the current wave of criticism over his designer glasses, his expensive if ill-fitting suits and his preference for a box at the Emirates, if only because there is no advantage to be gained in deposing a man who is clearly congenial to capital, to the British establishment and to Washington (regardless of who wins in November). The self-denying ordinance announced today - no more clobber, thanks - does not signal a retreat from his determination to cosy-up to donors, nor does it suggest that he particularly cares about the poor optics of having his expenses subsidised by the rich while some pensioners worry about whether they can afford to put the heating on this winter. What it does suggest is that he is sensitive to the framing of the press: the hint of haut couture is to be avoided as rigorously as sympathy for human rights while the freebies associated with the more demotic environment of football are dismissed as "fair dos", even though an executive box is the concrete form of de haut en bas. 

It amuses me to note that when he interviewed for his first chambers as a barrister after university he was almost turned down because of his poor dress sense, having turned up wearing a post-Punk cardigan. His interviewers could not see that this was a misjudgement of disguise by an ambitious young man determined to enter the liberal establishment and imagining that its dress code is the same in the Middle Temple as it is in a university. The question remains whether Starmer is more in the mould of Balzac's Eugène de Rastignac or Anthony Powell's Kenneth Widmerpool. Liberals secretly hope that he is Rastignac, a man who started penniless and ended up a peer of France by charm and administrative talent. Their fear is that he is Widmerpool, a vulgar petit bourgeois who lacks charm and whose process mania cannot compensate for his lack of elan or rhetorical skill. They wish he was a British Emmanuel Macron but he comes across like a more stuffy version of John Major, an adenoidal, narrow-minded suburbanite. No wonder they were secretly thrilled by the revelation that he wears (or at least inhabits) expensive tailoring.

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-preservation 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 the 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.