The Italian election results have been described as a "shambolic outcome" that makes Italy look "ungovernable". In other words, the sort of nonsense that could have been (and was) written about any number of Italian elections over the last 60 years. Parliamentary factionalism, coalition and short-run governments have been common features throughout. Despite this, Italy enjoyed better economic growth than the UK from the 1950s up until the 1990s. By then there was even a cynical belief that institutional gridlock might be a positive contributor to growth, by preventing either left or right from deviating from a demand management consensus, though the spectacular growth rates of the 50s and 60s clearly owed more to the stimulus of postwar rebuilding and the arrival of mass-consumption.
In recent decades the two economies have been nip-and-tuck in terms of size, with Italy jumping ahead during "il sorpasso" in the mid-80s, the UK coming back strongly in the mid-90s, Italy briefly nosing in front as it suffered less contraction in 2008/9, and then ceding to the UK as it suffered greater contraction thereafter. Both economies have structural weaknesses. The UK's over-reliance on financial services, a weak manufacturing sector, and regional redistribution (to the North) via public expenditure are well-known. Italy suffers from an over-reliance on small and medium businesses (lower capital stock means lower productivity), a weak services sector (big domestically but a poor contributor to exports outside of tourism), and regional redistribution (to the South) via public expenditure. If we could combine the better features of the two economies, we might be onto a winner, though we'd also need to extirpate two flaws: the corruption of a rigged property market in the UK and the corruption of clientelism (i.e. mafia) in Italy.
Italy has a large public debt, but its annual deficits are relatively small (a mass sell-off of sovereign bonds would be a crisis, but the ECB could step in and buy them up). The problem is that interest payments are large and growing, so limiting funds for stimulus. In contrast, the UK has a modest debt by international standards (despite the government's claims to the contrary), but is struggling to get its deficit under control. Austerity has killed growth in both countries, though Italian growth rates had been anaemic since the 90s. The UK is seeing the gain of public expenditure cuts eroded by falling tax receipts, hence the date at which we "pay off the credit card" is receding into the distance. Italy under the Monti administration has broadly balanced the books, but the absence of growth means it isn't generating the surpluses necessary to eat away at the debt pile. Both economies are essentially stagnating. Though they take different forms, the underlying problem is a weak productive base. The Euro has exacerbated Italy's declining productivity, though removing the option of devaluation and making Eurozone capital cheaper are part of the structural reform package. The independence of Sterling (devalued by roughly a third against the Euro since 2007) has partially offset the UK's declining productivity, but at the expense of growing inflation.
The success of Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement (M5S) is being held up as evidence that Italian's have had enough (basta!) of the Italian political system, as well as evidence of the emergence of a new politics based on social media. Both these views strike me as dubious. Italy has a long tradition of extra-parliamentary activism and iconoclastic mavericks, from Mussolini to the Red Brigades and Antonio Di Pietro (in the UK we had the more ridiculous Oswald Mosley, the Angry Brigade and Martin Bell). In this context, M5S look positively fluffy. They are, after all, contesting parliamentary elections. The fears of demagoguery and hidden agenda seem to owe as much to the medium as the message, though it is clear that the "new" doesn't extend much beyond tight Twitter management and competent online marketing. Grillo has hogged the limelight to date, but his ineligibility for parliament (he's debarred due to a conviction) means that others will soon come to the fore, toning down the invective.
Journalists in particular seem fixated by the potential of media technology to change the game. I suspect this reflects their anxiety about the very real threat posed to print. There was a bizarre example of this earlier in the week that attempted to explain the shift from earnestness to irony in the late 80s by reference to the Web: "The Google search gave us a way in which we could skate over the surface of cultural and political life, slickly knowing a little about a lot of things." The very real change in moral sentiment occurred during the Lawson Boom of 1986-8, when the country (or the South East at least) decided to forget about the social costs of deindustrialisation and start worrying about personal enrichment. This was the era of privatisation, endowment-based mortgages, the City big-bang, and the triumph of Thatcherism in the 1987 general election. The Web did not graduate from an esoteric interest until the arrival of Netscape Navigator and IE3 in the mid-90s, while Google was only incorporated in 1998. You could perhaps argue that the subsequent takeup of the Web was in part because we had already become superficial and ironic, but the idea that the 80s sea-change was caused by developments over 15 years later is as bonkers as homeopathy. Social media may have revolutionised newspapers, but they haven't revolutionised politics and I seriously doubt they have had much influence on public ethics.
What Italians have voted for is a similar mix to that found on the British political spectrum, but in a different party formation. The social democratic left (Partido Democratico) are offering moderation in all things: less painful austerity but continued structural adjustments and more progressive taxation. The initial stock market reaction indicates that big capital was hoping for a centre-left coalition with Monti, much as they would prefer a Lib-Lab pact in the UK if the Tories decided to quit the EU. M5S's electoral support centres on a left-of-centre coalition of unemployed graduates and older independents (in UK terms, the sort of voters who drift between Labour and the LibDems, with some right-libertarians and xenophobes thrown in). They predominantly reflect a popular left reaction to the compromised position of the parliamentary left, but it would be naive to think that big capital and M5S are essentially at odds. The structural reform of the Italian state and economy is a common "progressive" agenda: root out public sector graft (so costs can be reduced and services privatised), encourage more female workforce participation and education (so family incomes can grow as individual wages flatten), stem youth emigration (to avoid exacerbating an ageing population and falling tax receipts), reform the legal system (with a focus on quick resolution of commercial disputes), and implement environmental protection (which benefits capital-intensive businesses) and social liberal policies.
Berlusconi represents the existing centre-right alliance of small capital, rentiers and public sector rent-seekers. His current appeal is based on anti-tax policies and the defence of existing privileges. Though many commentators criticised him for failing to reform Italy during the 00s, with sleaze ultimately acting as the lighting rod for wider frustration, preventing structural reform was his not-so-hidden agenda. Outside of Italy, he is routinely derided as a venal and lecherous buffoon, which leads to bafflement when Italians vote for him. This was exemplified in a documentary on BBC4 last night, Good Italy, Bad Italy: Girlfriend in a Coma, presented by Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist. As you would expect with such a pedigree, it was a straight big capital analysis. Mario Monti was sympathetically interviewed, while a shifty Berlusconi refused to appear. The CEOs of Fiat, Ferrero and Vodafone Italia featured prominently, as did anti-mafia campaigners like Roberto Saviano, female academics complaining about objectification (despite the film's own patronising subtitle), subsidised culture wallahs, and artisan foodies. What this failed to get across is that the archetypal Berlusconi supporter is neither a mafioso nor a fashion designer, but a small-town pharmacist whose brother works for the council.
In UK terms, Berlusconi represents an alliance between UKIP and the Eurosceptic, small capital Tory majority. Were it not for his vulgarity, he'd be a Daily Mail hero. Though he trades on a different image (more Bertie Wooster than Del-Boy Trotter), the closest UK equivalent would be Boris Johnson. Johnson is a finance capital man, which means he will talk tough about Europe but ultimately seek a compromise with pro-EU big capital. Berlusconi has flirted with an anti-Euro stance, largely to satisfy small capitalists struggling with high interest rates, but he would be unlikely to trigger an exit. Though devaluation would temporarily improve competitiveness, this wouldn't fix the structural weaknesses of the economy and would import high inflation to the detriment of rentiers. The Euro was enthusiastically adopted by Italy precisely because of the monetary stability it brought. Berlusconi is yesterday's man but there remains a large constituency of pensioners, unambitious small business owners and petty bureaucrats that will only gradually lose its influence.
Emmott's film employed as a framing device a series of quotations from Dante (sonorously intoned by Benedict Cumberbatch) illustrated by Commedia dell'Arte-style animations. Modern Italy was equated with the circles of hell, which is a trifle over the top even as satire. The film's last section was a sideswipe at the Catholic church, held responsible for the hypocrisy and cynicism of Italian public life. The claim is that the confessional allows corruption to be routinely and insincerely absolved, a criticism that dates back to the Reformation. This ignores the fact that very few Italians even go to mass any more, let alone confession. The film then moved on to praise the supposed Protestant virtues of Mazzini, Cavour and Garibaldi, which would have come as a surprise to the named gents. Be more North European in business and politics seemed to be the message. The real weakness of the film was the good/bad dichotomy, implying that the one could be advanced at the expense of the other. This is a classic neoliberal failing, which we are reminded of by the coincidence of the ten-year anniversary of the decision to invade Iraq. Just as you cannot bomb people into democracy, you cannot shame them into reform.
The most likely outcome now looks like a minority centre-left government supported on a case-by-case basis by M5S. Pier Luigi Bersani, the PD leader, could opt for another election to secure a decisive mandate, but the current electoral momentum does not appear to be in his favour. While this would lead to much noise about "market uncertainty", "systemic instability" and "political tension", such a co-habitation would be perfectly acceptable to big capital, social democrats and other shades of progressive. Though many commentators see the election as a victory for anti-austerity, which is really just a tactical matter, the historical judgement may well be that it was a strategic victory for progressive (i.e. non-small capital) forces. The value of M5S is that it has provided a home for centrists reluctant to vote for either the left or for Monti, who might otherwise have held their noses and voted for the centre-right. Despite the claims of a resurrection, this probably marks the beginning of the end for Berlusconi, which would cheer up The Economist at least.
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Sunday, 24 February 2013
Robot Wars
An editorial in today's Observer claims: "Conflicts are defined, in large part, by how they are fought and their technologies. The First World War we associate with gas and tanks and the earliest use of airpower; the Second World War with strategic bombing and the first use of nuclear weapons". The listed WW1 weapons were emergent technologies that had minimal impact on the war itself. Many soldiers will have survived the trenches without witnessing any of them. The key technology was the railway, which allowed the concentration of massive amounts of men and material (AJP Taylor famously argued that the outbreak of the war was the result of rigid mobilisation schemes dependent on railway timetables). The lack of a knockout blow on the Western Front was due to an even balance of this technology.
Strategic bombing in WW2 was an oxymoron. It was ground battles that defeated the Axis powers, not thousand bomber raids. The point about the Blitz was not that Britain was unique in its ability to "take it", but that it proved any society could weather mass bombing. Its value was tactical at best (the other new weapon lauded in the 30s, parachutists, turned out to be a damp squib). While the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki curtailed the war, the Japanese military had already been beaten and a surrender was simply a matter of time. Wars are usually won by mature technologies, which in the case of WW2 meant tanks and motorised artillery on land and heavy warships and aircraft carriers at sea. The former enabled the early German victories in Europe and then led to the Soviet defeat of Germany once the production lines beyond the Urals outbuilt the Nazi war machine. After Midway, the war in the Pacific was a slow grind in which the US Navy brought massive firepower to bear on one island after another.
It's worth remembering this when the topic of new technologies in warfare is raised. For example, drones (or UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles) are not new. The Nazi V-1 (the Doodlebug) was an early example and the US Air Force first used UAVs in combat during the Vietnam War. The more recent developments, in terms of the variety of vehicle and capability, reflect technological maturity in the areas of miniaturisation, telemetry and datacoms. Despite this mundane reality, popular discussion on weaponry tends towards the "killer robot" trope. This is unfortunate as it distracts from the real change in the prosecution of war, which is ironically better understood as a return to 19th century practices rather than the coming of cyborg armies.
One of the features of modern warfare is that it isn't always clear when you are at war as opposed to peace. How will we known when the "war on terror" has concluded? In the past, the transition from one state to another would be marked by high ceremony. WW1 is remembered in terms of a shot in Sarajevo, followed by various telegrams making formal demands, and by the abrupt end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918. WW2 started to blur the boundaries, with the start coming somewhere between 1936 and 1939, depending on which national history you read, and the end marked by two separate victory days in 1945. The post and neo-colonial conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century shifted uneasily between "policing" operations (Malaya, Cyprus) and outright war (Indo-China, Falklands). The breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw a series of rolling conflicts and the normalisation of the idea of great power intervention on a periodic and selective basis. The two Gulf Wars against Iraq were essentially a single, discontinuous operation to restrain and ultimately overthrow the Saddam regime, with the "war on terror" providing a bogus pretext for the second intervention. The long-running policing operation in Afghanistan is just a mess.
This pattern of asymmetric conflict, open-ended intervention and selectivity is a return to the small-scale wars of the 19th century. The UAV is the modern equivalent of the gun-boat - a relatively mature technology that supports remote coercion and discipline. The Royal Navy enabled Britain to project power globally, to protect trade and impose advantageous commercial terms, and to avoid the need for an expensive land army. All this fell apart in the 20th century as the technical edge of the Navy was eroded, costs spiralled due to the arms race (from Dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines), two world wars necessitated huge land army expenditure, and independence ended the commercial benefits of the Empire. The US now faces the same challenges: conventional weaponry is ineffective against asymmetric attacks such as 9/11, the costs of the military have ballooned the fiscal deficit, and globalisation has led to a trade deficit. UAVs offer the US (and the UK) both a potentially cheaper arsenal and a more flexible means of intervening abroad.
The danger of such a discriminating approach to war is that the threshold for intervention gradually drops. Air-strikes are envisaged where "boots on the ground" are not. This doesn't make ground intervention less likely, it simply makes air-strikes more likely. Military operations become wars of choice not necessity, and after a while they become routine. The chief argument against ground troops is not that they are expensive per se (a trained human will be cheaper than an effective cyborg for a long time to come), but that they are rarely used. The cost of a standing army is mostly wasted on standing, so there is always a desire to get "value for money", to "use it or lose it". Our chief protection against this mentality is prohibitive expense. Ironically, spending money on a Trident replacement is likely to limit the enthusiasm of future British government's for foreign adventures.
A couple of weeks ago, Gary Younge accused Barack Obama of lacking moral authority and ethical consistency for supporting tougher domestic gun laws while approving drone-strikes. There is no inconsistency here. Both proceed from a belief in the benefit of the state's monopoly of violence. History is on Obama's side. Where the state does not monopolise violence, the people tend to be more vulnerable to assault and death. This is not just the Hobbesian war of all against all in a society lacking an effective state (which lives on in popular culture through the zombie trope), but the acceptance of low-level and persistent conflict as a proper feature of society, from the defence of the nation's honour to the defence of family honour. Drones and gun control are quite consistent.
The popular fear associated with the state's monopoly of violence is that the state will use this to repress the people (the black helicopter trope). In fact, what matters is not the state's monopolisation of violence but the monopolisation of the state itself (compare Churchill and Hitler). The practice of democracy is a better guarantee of liberty than the individual's right to bear arms. This legitimate fear of a coup d'etat is present in the debates around robot weapons, where the suspicion is that the computers will eventually tire of us puny humans and take control, a la Skynet. This is a projection of our fears onto an external enemy (our robot overlords) and into the metaphysical (the singularity). In reality, the abuse of the state's monopoly of violence is far more likely to originate with commercial interests, as Eisenhower recognised in his warnings about the military-industrial complex. Despite red herrings about the Red Army, it's pretty obvious that the Chinese tolerance of hacking is more about industrial espionage than cyber-warfare.
Strategic bombing in WW2 was an oxymoron. It was ground battles that defeated the Axis powers, not thousand bomber raids. The point about the Blitz was not that Britain was unique in its ability to "take it", but that it proved any society could weather mass bombing. Its value was tactical at best (the other new weapon lauded in the 30s, parachutists, turned out to be a damp squib). While the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki curtailed the war, the Japanese military had already been beaten and a surrender was simply a matter of time. Wars are usually won by mature technologies, which in the case of WW2 meant tanks and motorised artillery on land and heavy warships and aircraft carriers at sea. The former enabled the early German victories in Europe and then led to the Soviet defeat of Germany once the production lines beyond the Urals outbuilt the Nazi war machine. After Midway, the war in the Pacific was a slow grind in which the US Navy brought massive firepower to bear on one island after another.
It's worth remembering this when the topic of new technologies in warfare is raised. For example, drones (or UAVs - unmanned aerial vehicles) are not new. The Nazi V-1 (the Doodlebug) was an early example and the US Air Force first used UAVs in combat during the Vietnam War. The more recent developments, in terms of the variety of vehicle and capability, reflect technological maturity in the areas of miniaturisation, telemetry and datacoms. Despite this mundane reality, popular discussion on weaponry tends towards the "killer robot" trope. This is unfortunate as it distracts from the real change in the prosecution of war, which is ironically better understood as a return to 19th century practices rather than the coming of cyborg armies.
One of the features of modern warfare is that it isn't always clear when you are at war as opposed to peace. How will we known when the "war on terror" has concluded? In the past, the transition from one state to another would be marked by high ceremony. WW1 is remembered in terms of a shot in Sarajevo, followed by various telegrams making formal demands, and by the abrupt end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918. WW2 started to blur the boundaries, with the start coming somewhere between 1936 and 1939, depending on which national history you read, and the end marked by two separate victory days in 1945. The post and neo-colonial conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century shifted uneasily between "policing" operations (Malaya, Cyprus) and outright war (Indo-China, Falklands). The breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s saw a series of rolling conflicts and the normalisation of the idea of great power intervention on a periodic and selective basis. The two Gulf Wars against Iraq were essentially a single, discontinuous operation to restrain and ultimately overthrow the Saddam regime, with the "war on terror" providing a bogus pretext for the second intervention. The long-running policing operation in Afghanistan is just a mess.
This pattern of asymmetric conflict, open-ended intervention and selectivity is a return to the small-scale wars of the 19th century. The UAV is the modern equivalent of the gun-boat - a relatively mature technology that supports remote coercion and discipline. The Royal Navy enabled Britain to project power globally, to protect trade and impose advantageous commercial terms, and to avoid the need for an expensive land army. All this fell apart in the 20th century as the technical edge of the Navy was eroded, costs spiralled due to the arms race (from Dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines), two world wars necessitated huge land army expenditure, and independence ended the commercial benefits of the Empire. The US now faces the same challenges: conventional weaponry is ineffective against asymmetric attacks such as 9/11, the costs of the military have ballooned the fiscal deficit, and globalisation has led to a trade deficit. UAVs offer the US (and the UK) both a potentially cheaper arsenal and a more flexible means of intervening abroad.
The danger of such a discriminating approach to war is that the threshold for intervention gradually drops. Air-strikes are envisaged where "boots on the ground" are not. This doesn't make ground intervention less likely, it simply makes air-strikes more likely. Military operations become wars of choice not necessity, and after a while they become routine. The chief argument against ground troops is not that they are expensive per se (a trained human will be cheaper than an effective cyborg for a long time to come), but that they are rarely used. The cost of a standing army is mostly wasted on standing, so there is always a desire to get "value for money", to "use it or lose it". Our chief protection against this mentality is prohibitive expense. Ironically, spending money on a Trident replacement is likely to limit the enthusiasm of future British government's for foreign adventures.
A couple of weeks ago, Gary Younge accused Barack Obama of lacking moral authority and ethical consistency for supporting tougher domestic gun laws while approving drone-strikes. There is no inconsistency here. Both proceed from a belief in the benefit of the state's monopoly of violence. History is on Obama's side. Where the state does not monopolise violence, the people tend to be more vulnerable to assault and death. This is not just the Hobbesian war of all against all in a society lacking an effective state (which lives on in popular culture through the zombie trope), but the acceptance of low-level and persistent conflict as a proper feature of society, from the defence of the nation's honour to the defence of family honour. Drones and gun control are quite consistent.
The popular fear associated with the state's monopoly of violence is that the state will use this to repress the people (the black helicopter trope). In fact, what matters is not the state's monopolisation of violence but the monopolisation of the state itself (compare Churchill and Hitler). The practice of democracy is a better guarantee of liberty than the individual's right to bear arms. This legitimate fear of a coup d'etat is present in the debates around robot weapons, where the suspicion is that the computers will eventually tire of us puny humans and take control, a la Skynet. This is a projection of our fears onto an external enemy (our robot overlords) and into the metaphysical (the singularity). In reality, the abuse of the state's monopoly of violence is far more likely to originate with commercial interests, as Eisenhower recognised in his warnings about the military-industrial complex. Despite red herrings about the Red Army, it's pretty obvious that the Chinese tolerance of hacking is more about industrial espionage than cyber-warfare.
Friday, 22 February 2013
Here come the Thickos
The dismissal of the jury in the Vicky Pryce trial means that R. vs. Pryce is likely to feature in the legal textbooks long after anyone can remember who Chris Huhne was (a satisfactory form of revenge, even if Ms. Pryce is eventually convicted). This is because of the unusual plea of "marital coercion", though you'd be forgiven for thinking the issue was the poor calibre of jurors to judge from the many calls to reform, or even abolish, trial by jury. On last night's Question Time, Peter Hitchens suggested that only the educated should be allowed to be jurors (this being a "better" solution that simply reverting to a property qualification), while today Simon Jenkins suggests that juries should go the way of ducking stools and vestry duty, and Melanie Phillips advocates IQ tests (which seem to be language tests, i.e. tests of how foreign you are).
The coverage of the decision to order a retrial, and in particular the list of questions the jury asked of the judge, has generally implied that the jury were thick (though the Daily Mail naturally got to the point by doing a black and Muslim headcount). This was influenced by the judge's direction that they suffered "absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding". Any speculation on why they asked these questions, and what that indicated about the internal dynamics of the jury or their level of understanding, can only reflect prejudices, hence the way the QT debate quickly morphed into one about English language competence (amusingly, even the DM ruefully reported that none of the jurors "appeared to struggle" with the English-language oath, though I'm sure the Phillips test would weed them out). Jenkins aired the popular suspicion when he offered an anecdote from his own jury service (hardly a statistically significant sample) in which he criticised a Nigerian immigrant for her poor English and limited grasp of the law, before admitting that she was one of the few whose view on the guilt of the defendant matched his own. Right for all the wrong reasons.
Melanie Phillips' logic is as nasty as ever, claiming that unless we restrict juries to the qualified we risk losing the jury system altogether: anti-democracy offered as the defence against authoritarianism. Simon Jenkins' rant is standard Tory misanthropy, accusing the justice system of being a racket, beholden to the vested interests of the legal profession, and jurors of being vulgar gawpers, googling the background of the defendant and witnesses. He quotes Professor Cheryl Thomas of UCL to this effect, giving the impression she may share his contempt for all and sundry, which is amusing as she pops up elsewhere in the same edition of the Guardian to say: "More than 99% of the time juries reach a verdict. A hung jury is extremely rare. There are very few lessons from this case ... All the evidence I have from a decade of research is that the overwhelming majority take their job very seriously".
The issue that this episode highlights is the over-dependence of the jury on the direction of the judge. The purpose of a jury is to provide a counter-weight to the procedural monopoly of the legal agents, i.e. the judge and barristers, and by extension the wider justice system, i.e. the police. If you disempower juries, you necessarily increase the power of the other actors. This is a real danger. In 1975, the direction of the judge in the original Birmingham Six trial, specifically in relation to the forensic evidence, was crucial in securing a guilty verdict. In 1980, Lord Denning famously refused the Birmingham Six leave to appeal, and thus secure a fresh jury trial, on the grounds that their success would show the police to be guilty of perjury and violence. A couple of years later, in respect of a trial relating to the St. Pauls riots in Bristol, he suggested that some members of the black community were unfit to serve on juries, which led to his eventual resignation. There are many forms of thickness.
While the debate over the R. vs. Pryce jury's questions has focused on general knowledge no-brainers, such as what does "beyond reasonable doubt" mean, less attention has been given to the primary question of what constitutes "marital coercion", a defence available only to a wife. This is because the term is arcane and anachronistic. It dates back to an era when the balance of power between a husband and wife was such that a woman could face real danger if she disobeyed, from being committed to an asylum, having all her property estranged, or being beaten and raped (rape within marriage was only made illegal in England in 1991). The question of law, which is likely to recur even with a jury made up exclusively of PhDs, is whether marital coercion still exists in any meaningful sense, or whether the gradual equalisation of rights means that a wife today is no more likely to be coerced than a husband is.
The point that Hitchens failed to make, in his thumbnail sketch of the history of English juries, is that a property qualification was rational (if not fair) when the law was largely concerned with crimes against property. A jury, now as then, has to empathise with the victim of the crime, as much as they need to imaginatively sympathise with the accused. The move to democratise juries (women were admitted after 1919) reflected the gradual shift in the concern of the law from crimes against property to crimes against the person. This exactly mirrored the gradual reform of the franchise.
The structure and practice of the justice system reflects social and economic power. In the medieval era, when the Church was effectively a para-state co-existing with the Crown, clerics could only be tried in separate church courts. The subordination of the Church in England was played out in the gradual disempowering of ecclesiastical courts as much as in the sudden dispossession of the monasteries. The move to drop trial by jury for complex fraud cases, which was defeated in the House of Lords in 2007, reflected an era in which the complexity of finance was a given, with the corollary that this justified superior rewards and sympathetic regulatory oversight. Since that unfortunate business in 2008, the idea has been quietly dropped, despite the ostensible grounds for reform, that such trials often run into the sand, being as relevant as ever.
Peter Hitchens' suggestion of an educational qualification (and a higher age limit) is a bad idea for three reasons. The first is the class bias of education, i.e. the middle classes and above will be disproportionately represented. Hitchens didn't specify the level of educational attainment he considered adequate, though the related suggestion of an age limit of 21 might imply degree-level. However, as a Daily Mail columnist, I suspect he'd plump for GCSEs in English and perhaps Govian History, though he might push for the "gold standard" of A-levels. The higher the level, the more class bias this would entail - something that is likely to get worse as tuition fees rise and the attraction of further education for poorer kids declines. Even with greater social mobility, we should recognise that education inevitably inculcates middle class values, which is probably the attraction of such a qualification for Hitchens. In other words, imaginative sympathy with working class defendants is likely to suffer.
The second reason is that class bias is inevitably a property bias too. It is natural to feel more sympathy with people you identify with, hence in a case involving a middle class victim and a working class defendant, tried before a middle class jury, a guilty verdict would be more likely than if the roles were reversed. But bias is also likely to show at an aggregate level in respect of the type of crime, i.e. the propensity to convict, over and above the social class of the participants. Just as the historical shift to democratic juries reflected a growing belief that people were more important than property, so the attempt to reverse this trend reflects a belief that property deserves more respect. The demonisation of those on benefits is a species of this, in which public property (taxpayers' money) trumps sympathy for the poor.
The third reason is that qualifications for jury service tend to change in step with qualifications for voting. Ceding our right to sit on a jury is the thin end of the wedge. If someone is deemed to be unqualified to determine guilt in a court of law, then it is only a matter of time before they are deemed unqualified to determine who their local councillor or MP should be. In this regard it's worth noting that the "no representation without taxation" meme is quite open in the equation of rights with property. While Hitchens currently rejects the old-style property qualification (not finally abolished till 1972) in favour of educational attainment, I suspect he'd accept "being an income taxpayer" as a compromise.
The threat to trial by jury does not come from the dim, or first-generation immigrants with an accent, nor from religious nutters or the uneducated. As the history of the assault on jury trials for fraud before 2008 indicates, it comes from those who believe there are spheres of public life and justice that cannot be trusted to the hoi polloi. In their different ways, this is an elitist view that Peter Hitchens, Simon Jenkins and Melanie Phillips all share. Talk about thick.
The coverage of the decision to order a retrial, and in particular the list of questions the jury asked of the judge, has generally implied that the jury were thick (though the Daily Mail naturally got to the point by doing a black and Muslim headcount). This was influenced by the judge's direction that they suffered "absolutely fundamental deficits in understanding". Any speculation on why they asked these questions, and what that indicated about the internal dynamics of the jury or their level of understanding, can only reflect prejudices, hence the way the QT debate quickly morphed into one about English language competence (amusingly, even the DM ruefully reported that none of the jurors "appeared to struggle" with the English-language oath, though I'm sure the Phillips test would weed them out). Jenkins aired the popular suspicion when he offered an anecdote from his own jury service (hardly a statistically significant sample) in which he criticised a Nigerian immigrant for her poor English and limited grasp of the law, before admitting that she was one of the few whose view on the guilt of the defendant matched his own. Right for all the wrong reasons.
Melanie Phillips' logic is as nasty as ever, claiming that unless we restrict juries to the qualified we risk losing the jury system altogether: anti-democracy offered as the defence against authoritarianism. Simon Jenkins' rant is standard Tory misanthropy, accusing the justice system of being a racket, beholden to the vested interests of the legal profession, and jurors of being vulgar gawpers, googling the background of the defendant and witnesses. He quotes Professor Cheryl Thomas of UCL to this effect, giving the impression she may share his contempt for all and sundry, which is amusing as she pops up elsewhere in the same edition of the Guardian to say: "More than 99% of the time juries reach a verdict. A hung jury is extremely rare. There are very few lessons from this case ... All the evidence I have from a decade of research is that the overwhelming majority take their job very seriously".
The issue that this episode highlights is the over-dependence of the jury on the direction of the judge. The purpose of a jury is to provide a counter-weight to the procedural monopoly of the legal agents, i.e. the judge and barristers, and by extension the wider justice system, i.e. the police. If you disempower juries, you necessarily increase the power of the other actors. This is a real danger. In 1975, the direction of the judge in the original Birmingham Six trial, specifically in relation to the forensic evidence, was crucial in securing a guilty verdict. In 1980, Lord Denning famously refused the Birmingham Six leave to appeal, and thus secure a fresh jury trial, on the grounds that their success would show the police to be guilty of perjury and violence. A couple of years later, in respect of a trial relating to the St. Pauls riots in Bristol, he suggested that some members of the black community were unfit to serve on juries, which led to his eventual resignation. There are many forms of thickness.
While the debate over the R. vs. Pryce jury's questions has focused on general knowledge no-brainers, such as what does "beyond reasonable doubt" mean, less attention has been given to the primary question of what constitutes "marital coercion", a defence available only to a wife. This is because the term is arcane and anachronistic. It dates back to an era when the balance of power between a husband and wife was such that a woman could face real danger if she disobeyed, from being committed to an asylum, having all her property estranged, or being beaten and raped (rape within marriage was only made illegal in England in 1991). The question of law, which is likely to recur even with a jury made up exclusively of PhDs, is whether marital coercion still exists in any meaningful sense, or whether the gradual equalisation of rights means that a wife today is no more likely to be coerced than a husband is.
The point that Hitchens failed to make, in his thumbnail sketch of the history of English juries, is that a property qualification was rational (if not fair) when the law was largely concerned with crimes against property. A jury, now as then, has to empathise with the victim of the crime, as much as they need to imaginatively sympathise with the accused. The move to democratise juries (women were admitted after 1919) reflected the gradual shift in the concern of the law from crimes against property to crimes against the person. This exactly mirrored the gradual reform of the franchise.
The structure and practice of the justice system reflects social and economic power. In the medieval era, when the Church was effectively a para-state co-existing with the Crown, clerics could only be tried in separate church courts. The subordination of the Church in England was played out in the gradual disempowering of ecclesiastical courts as much as in the sudden dispossession of the monasteries. The move to drop trial by jury for complex fraud cases, which was defeated in the House of Lords in 2007, reflected an era in which the complexity of finance was a given, with the corollary that this justified superior rewards and sympathetic regulatory oversight. Since that unfortunate business in 2008, the idea has been quietly dropped, despite the ostensible grounds for reform, that such trials often run into the sand, being as relevant as ever.
Peter Hitchens' suggestion of an educational qualification (and a higher age limit) is a bad idea for three reasons. The first is the class bias of education, i.e. the middle classes and above will be disproportionately represented. Hitchens didn't specify the level of educational attainment he considered adequate, though the related suggestion of an age limit of 21 might imply degree-level. However, as a Daily Mail columnist, I suspect he'd plump for GCSEs in English and perhaps Govian History, though he might push for the "gold standard" of A-levels. The higher the level, the more class bias this would entail - something that is likely to get worse as tuition fees rise and the attraction of further education for poorer kids declines. Even with greater social mobility, we should recognise that education inevitably inculcates middle class values, which is probably the attraction of such a qualification for Hitchens. In other words, imaginative sympathy with working class defendants is likely to suffer.
The second reason is that class bias is inevitably a property bias too. It is natural to feel more sympathy with people you identify with, hence in a case involving a middle class victim and a working class defendant, tried before a middle class jury, a guilty verdict would be more likely than if the roles were reversed. But bias is also likely to show at an aggregate level in respect of the type of crime, i.e. the propensity to convict, over and above the social class of the participants. Just as the historical shift to democratic juries reflected a growing belief that people were more important than property, so the attempt to reverse this trend reflects a belief that property deserves more respect. The demonisation of those on benefits is a species of this, in which public property (taxpayers' money) trumps sympathy for the poor.
The third reason is that qualifications for jury service tend to change in step with qualifications for voting. Ceding our right to sit on a jury is the thin end of the wedge. If someone is deemed to be unqualified to determine guilt in a court of law, then it is only a matter of time before they are deemed unqualified to determine who their local councillor or MP should be. In this regard it's worth noting that the "no representation without taxation" meme is quite open in the equation of rights with property. While Hitchens currently rejects the old-style property qualification (not finally abolished till 1972) in favour of educational attainment, I suspect he'd accept "being an income taxpayer" as a compromise.
The threat to trial by jury does not come from the dim, or first-generation immigrants with an accent, nor from religious nutters or the uneducated. As the history of the assault on jury trials for fraud before 2008 indicates, it comes from those who believe there are spheres of public life and justice that cannot be trusted to the hoi polloi. In their different ways, this is an elitist view that Peter Hitchens, Simon Jenkins and Melanie Phillips all share. Talk about thick.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
Dominant Narratives
Arsene Wenger's behaviour at the Monday press conference, following the home defeat to Blackburn in the FA Cup, was tetchy, but it was hardly the "meltdown" claimed in the papers. Wenger was entitled to question why The Sun chose to run a claim that he was negotiating a contract extension with the club. This was obviously a windup, intended to goad Arsenal fans to question the manager's tenure. As any fule kno', Wenger has always allowed his contracts to fully wind down before starting fresh negotiations - "I always honour my contract" is his mantra. This has allowed the press to periodically claim that his head is being turned by Real Madrid or PSG, despite the fact that he then signs a new Arsenal contract. Which he has done repeatedly. Over 16 years. You expect this kind of mindless shit-stirring from the tabloids, but even the soi-disant quality press are happy to go along with it.
What we're witnessing is the relentlessness of the "dominant narrative", the chief reason why so much mainstream media reporting on football is column-padding bereft of insight. In the case of Arsenal, the dominant narrative is "x years since their last trophy", which legitimises speculation about the manager's job, the need for our best players to leave if they want to win trophies (apparently Barcelona "fancy" Wilshere, wouldn't you know it), and the squad's lack of bottle (Wilshere excepted). Before anyone suggests that the mislaid trophy cabinet key is simply a reflection of Wenger's declining powers, remember that the same narrative was wheeled out in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the 80s (and even the mid-90s). Arsenal have not managed to dominate silverware, and specifically win back-to-back league titles, since the 30s.
Meanwhile, Manure are apparently "on for another treble". This is a variant of their dominant narrative, which is "they don't know when they're beaten". The United mythology is largely founded on the Busby Babes and Munich, the combination of irrepressible youth and resilience. In reality, their success over the years has been based on generating and spending a lot of money. Most press coverage of their doings, in particular the flattery of Ferguson (who routinely acts like a thug in press conferences without shocking journalists), is simply the worship of power. This is not to say that these narratives are without foundation, such as the triumph of the "you'll not win anything with kids" United team in 1996 and their comeback in the 1999 Champions League final against Bayern, but popular history inevitably promotes those events that support the narrative and relegates those, like the 1979 FA Cup final, that suggest an alternative. A morbid symptom of this is anxiety at the prospect of the post-Ferguson era, which is coloured by memories of the post-Busby decline and Liverpool's ascension to the perch.
The narrative also colours expectations, not just on the part of fans and media but also on the part of players. Despite being footloose mercenaries, footballers are team-players who consciously accommodate themselves to the club culture, hence the continuing competitiveness of derby matches when few of the players are local. Nothing will endear a new signing to Arsenal fans quicker than relishing the next match against Spurs (expect a Nacho Monreal exclusive shortly). Of course, this can backfire. Blackburn's single stroke of tactical genius last Saturday, other than 11 behind the ball, was to get David Bentley to warm-up in front of the Arsenal singing section. At a time when the crowd needed to lift the team out of its torpor, we ended up abusing the prodigal. "Even Tottenham think you're shit" may be funny, but it's best saved for when you're 3-0 up.
Other sightings of the dominant narrative in recent days can be seen in the "dressing room rift" trope at Chelsea and the "Mancini may be sacked" speculation at Man City. The latter is particularly odd if you consider that the Abu Dhabi Group have only sacked one manager, Mark Hughes (whom they inherited), in almost 5 years of control. These two clubs currently have the same underlying narrative, which is "more money than sense". It is assumed that money corrupts judgement, leading to impatient and callous firing (Mancini has spent longer at City than he did at either Fiorentina or Lazio, and is close to the 4 years he spent at Inter). In the case of Chelsea, strife in the dressing room is held up as both a chief cause of managerial turnover (in reality this churn is just an inability to secure and keep their preferred candidates post-Mourinho) and as evidence of the greed and egoism of the players.
Narratives can evolve if circumstances change. The Chelsea and City ones are newly-minted, for obvious reasons, which gives even their long-standing fans (as opposed to glory-hunters) a queasy sense of shifting sands. The climax to last season saw City's traditional narrative, the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, threaten to make an all-conquering return, but this will gradually fade as long as the money continues to flow. Chelsea's old narrative, a seedy club off the pitch and flaky entertainers on it, lies six feet under the Bates motel. John Terry is the last link with both the knuckle-dragging Shed mentality of the 80s and the raffish off-field habits of the 70s. With the anodyne "Lucky" Lamps on his way out, and Ashley Cole planning to join a Trappist order, the last vestiges of "colour" will disappear when Terry is finally rendered down for burger meat. Chelsea will then presumably relocate to Monaco.
A good example of the malleability of narrative was the treatment of Mario Balotelli. When he started his career in Italy, a country where the evolution of racial sensitivity is about 30 years behind Britain, the domestic press coverage tended to focus on race and the immaturity of his response to goading, which was reminiscent of sheepskin-coated British managers criticising black players for their "lack of discipline" back in the early 80s. The coverage of Balotelli at Man City by the British media has veered between the challenges of his upbringing (i.e. a more sensitive appreciation of race) and his tendency to spunk money: cars written off, cash handed out to strangers, fireworks in the bathroom etc. The subliminal message was that here was a troubled young man with too much cash, which was emblematic of what City had become. On cue, Balotelli's return to Italy was greeted by Berlusconi's brother using a racial epithet. It's not quite a Ron Atkinson moment, but give it time.
With Arsenal facing an uphill struggle to over-turn a deficit from last night's first leg against Bayern Munich, it would be easy to subscribe once more to the dominant narrative and start wailing "how much longer?" But that would be foolish, and a bit like Spurs fans perennial susceptibility to the belief that "this is going to be our year". Success and trophies will broadly reflect club economics. While Chelsea enjoyed luck in winning the Champions League last year, it was only a matter of time before Abramovich's billions paid off. Arsenal are the 4th richest club in England, so we typically finish 3rd or 4th in the league. Wenger is justified in feeling irked by the insistence of the press that silverware, which is always in part a lottery, is somehow a greater achievement. The point is not that we don't want to win a cup, of course we do, but that the press slant is clearly mischievous. The "potless" narrative has served, off and on, for half a century. Why change a winning formula?
According to the Deloitte list, Arsenal are the 6th richest club in Europe by revenue, but this ignores wealth in the form of dubious sponsorship deals, the writing off of debts, and general financial "doping" by rich owners. There is no agreed ranking for club wealth, as it obviously comes down to the willingness of owners to pump in cash on demand, but I suspect the current "sustainable" model would put Arsenal closer to 10th or 12th position (PSG don't even make Deloitte's top twenty). Wealth is a better guide to the ability of clubs to buy players, and if you look at squad value, Arsenal's league position has outperformed that value for some time now, which is a pretty clear indication of the value-added of Wenger and the club infrastructure. It is hardly a surprise then if we typically end up going out of the Champions League around the last 16 or last 8. Our relative under-performance in the FA and League Cups is real enough, but this is probably more down to bad luck than bad players (see Birmingham in 2011). Though it would be welcome, I suspect a cup win would do no more than change the narrative to "x years since winning the league", something that Liverpool fans have long since had to get used to.
What we're witnessing is the relentlessness of the "dominant narrative", the chief reason why so much mainstream media reporting on football is column-padding bereft of insight. In the case of Arsenal, the dominant narrative is "x years since their last trophy", which legitimises speculation about the manager's job, the need for our best players to leave if they want to win trophies (apparently Barcelona "fancy" Wilshere, wouldn't you know it), and the squad's lack of bottle (Wilshere excepted). Before anyone suggests that the mislaid trophy cabinet key is simply a reflection of Wenger's declining powers, remember that the same narrative was wheeled out in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the 80s (and even the mid-90s). Arsenal have not managed to dominate silverware, and specifically win back-to-back league titles, since the 30s.
Meanwhile, Manure are apparently "on for another treble". This is a variant of their dominant narrative, which is "they don't know when they're beaten". The United mythology is largely founded on the Busby Babes and Munich, the combination of irrepressible youth and resilience. In reality, their success over the years has been based on generating and spending a lot of money. Most press coverage of their doings, in particular the flattery of Ferguson (who routinely acts like a thug in press conferences without shocking journalists), is simply the worship of power. This is not to say that these narratives are without foundation, such as the triumph of the "you'll not win anything with kids" United team in 1996 and their comeback in the 1999 Champions League final against Bayern, but popular history inevitably promotes those events that support the narrative and relegates those, like the 1979 FA Cup final, that suggest an alternative. A morbid symptom of this is anxiety at the prospect of the post-Ferguson era, which is coloured by memories of the post-Busby decline and Liverpool's ascension to the perch.
The narrative also colours expectations, not just on the part of fans and media but also on the part of players. Despite being footloose mercenaries, footballers are team-players who consciously accommodate themselves to the club culture, hence the continuing competitiveness of derby matches when few of the players are local. Nothing will endear a new signing to Arsenal fans quicker than relishing the next match against Spurs (expect a Nacho Monreal exclusive shortly). Of course, this can backfire. Blackburn's single stroke of tactical genius last Saturday, other than 11 behind the ball, was to get David Bentley to warm-up in front of the Arsenal singing section. At a time when the crowd needed to lift the team out of its torpor, we ended up abusing the prodigal. "Even Tottenham think you're shit" may be funny, but it's best saved for when you're 3-0 up.
Other sightings of the dominant narrative in recent days can be seen in the "dressing room rift" trope at Chelsea and the "Mancini may be sacked" speculation at Man City. The latter is particularly odd if you consider that the Abu Dhabi Group have only sacked one manager, Mark Hughes (whom they inherited), in almost 5 years of control. These two clubs currently have the same underlying narrative, which is "more money than sense". It is assumed that money corrupts judgement, leading to impatient and callous firing (Mancini has spent longer at City than he did at either Fiorentina or Lazio, and is close to the 4 years he spent at Inter). In the case of Chelsea, strife in the dressing room is held up as both a chief cause of managerial turnover (in reality this churn is just an inability to secure and keep their preferred candidates post-Mourinho) and as evidence of the greed and egoism of the players.
Narratives can evolve if circumstances change. The Chelsea and City ones are newly-minted, for obvious reasons, which gives even their long-standing fans (as opposed to glory-hunters) a queasy sense of shifting sands. The climax to last season saw City's traditional narrative, the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, threaten to make an all-conquering return, but this will gradually fade as long as the money continues to flow. Chelsea's old narrative, a seedy club off the pitch and flaky entertainers on it, lies six feet under the Bates motel. John Terry is the last link with both the knuckle-dragging Shed mentality of the 80s and the raffish off-field habits of the 70s. With the anodyne "Lucky" Lamps on his way out, and Ashley Cole planning to join a Trappist order, the last vestiges of "colour" will disappear when Terry is finally rendered down for burger meat. Chelsea will then presumably relocate to Monaco.
A good example of the malleability of narrative was the treatment of Mario Balotelli. When he started his career in Italy, a country where the evolution of racial sensitivity is about 30 years behind Britain, the domestic press coverage tended to focus on race and the immaturity of his response to goading, which was reminiscent of sheepskin-coated British managers criticising black players for their "lack of discipline" back in the early 80s. The coverage of Balotelli at Man City by the British media has veered between the challenges of his upbringing (i.e. a more sensitive appreciation of race) and his tendency to spunk money: cars written off, cash handed out to strangers, fireworks in the bathroom etc. The subliminal message was that here was a troubled young man with too much cash, which was emblematic of what City had become. On cue, Balotelli's return to Italy was greeted by Berlusconi's brother using a racial epithet. It's not quite a Ron Atkinson moment, but give it time.
With Arsenal facing an uphill struggle to over-turn a deficit from last night's first leg against Bayern Munich, it would be easy to subscribe once more to the dominant narrative and start wailing "how much longer?" But that would be foolish, and a bit like Spurs fans perennial susceptibility to the belief that "this is going to be our year". Success and trophies will broadly reflect club economics. While Chelsea enjoyed luck in winning the Champions League last year, it was only a matter of time before Abramovich's billions paid off. Arsenal are the 4th richest club in England, so we typically finish 3rd or 4th in the league. Wenger is justified in feeling irked by the insistence of the press that silverware, which is always in part a lottery, is somehow a greater achievement. The point is not that we don't want to win a cup, of course we do, but that the press slant is clearly mischievous. The "potless" narrative has served, off and on, for half a century. Why change a winning formula?
According to the Deloitte list, Arsenal are the 6th richest club in Europe by revenue, but this ignores wealth in the form of dubious sponsorship deals, the writing off of debts, and general financial "doping" by rich owners. There is no agreed ranking for club wealth, as it obviously comes down to the willingness of owners to pump in cash on demand, but I suspect the current "sustainable" model would put Arsenal closer to 10th or 12th position (PSG don't even make Deloitte's top twenty). Wealth is a better guide to the ability of clubs to buy players, and if you look at squad value, Arsenal's league position has outperformed that value for some time now, which is a pretty clear indication of the value-added of Wenger and the club infrastructure. It is hardly a surprise then if we typically end up going out of the Champions League around the last 16 or last 8. Our relative under-performance in the FA and League Cups is real enough, but this is probably more down to bad luck than bad players (see Birmingham in 2011). Though it would be welcome, I suspect a cup win would do no more than change the narrative to "x years since winning the league", something that Liverpool fans have long since had to get used to.
Sunday, 17 February 2013
Fantasy Island
Neoliberalism is a reactionary project in radical guise. You'd think that this became glaringly obvious to most people over the last decade, as "liberal interventionism" in Iraq and "free markets" in finance were revealed as bullying vandalism and shameless looting, but you'll still catch sight of old-skool neoliberal insurgency, claiming to advance liberty against entrenched privilege. Thus Niall Ferguson presents himself as a champion of the fact-hungry "kids" against the "pompous" Oxbridge dons who have had the temerity to criticise Michael Gove's attempt to convert the teaching of history in schools to a nationalist catechism.
Ferguson is a better polemicist than a historian, and in recent years he has been repeatedly called-out on his dodgy method and right-wing bias. Where Eric Hobsbawm, who spent formative years in the hollow shell of Hapsburg Vienna, once called him a "nostalgist for empire", his critics are now more likely to describe him as an outright apologist. A better criticism is that he takes a utilitarian attitude to empire, i.e. the belief that it does more good than harm, which is underpinned by the geopolitical assumption that empires are inevitable and all we can do is support the "good" (anglophone) against the "bad" (everyone else). This accounting depends both on an uncritical assessment of the "killer apps" (a laughably misused metaphor, by the way) that the British Empire bequeathed the natives, such as property rights and the Protestant work ethic, and on unprovable assumptions about the ills that would have occurred otherwise. The ideological purpose is to justify the neocon fantasy of America as a "force-for-good" empire, with the UK playing Tonto to the USA's Lone Ranger.
His habitual use of counterfactuals tends to be less "what if" and more "if only", a fantasy founded on a prejudice. For example, his belief that Britain staying out of WW1 would have been to the benefit of Europe (a victorious Germany would have accelerated the EU and prevented the rise of Fascism and Communism) and to the benefit of Britain (which would have diverted its resources to reform of the Empire and reinforced its natural alliance with the USA) is nothing more than an attempt to construct an alternative universe more congenial to free-market Atlanticists (you can guess his stance on UK membership of the EU).
Ferguson and Gove are trying to colonise the space of historical debate, to plant provocative ideas like bowling greens in Boston or cricket pitches in Bengal. It is not that they are attempting to undo modern historiography and reinstate Our Island Story as a set textbook, but rather that they are unapologetic supporters of the ideological purpose of such books: history as national propaganda. What they really dislike is plurality, the idea that there may be many simultaneous histories, over-lapping but often in conflict, rather than an orthodoxy. There are, I think, three ways of thinking about this (I'm practising plurality here). The first is to view it as conservative nostalgia, an attempt to return classrooms to some halcyon fantasy of the 1950s. This has informed a lot of the criticism of the proposed curriculum, but I think it's a weak argument. Gove's purpose clearly goes beyond just pleasing the Daily Mail.
The second perspective is to see this as ideological support for modern capitalism. The idolisation of the architects of the Glorious Revolution (the climax of key stage 2) is certainly a form of ancestor worship, but the emphasis on narratives that equate liberty with property serves a contemporary purpose. The "Enlightenment in England" gives prominence to John Locke and Adam Smith (the Enlightenment in Scotland is absorbed), with only a passing reference to "other European thinkers" (presumably Voltaire, Rousseau etc). The chronology proceeds right up to the election of Thatcher, following the "economic change and crisis" of the 1970s ("what crisis?" as Jim Callaghan didn't say), with a detour forward to the fall of the Berlin Wall - aka "the end of history".
The third view is that Gove and Ferguson are engaged in a reactionary endeavour, in the sense of a counter-movement to earlier changes. It's rolling back the revolution and restoring privilege. In the case of history in schools, that revolution is the opening up of the curriculum to global and minority history since the 1960s, popularly symbolised as Hitler and Civil Rights. The restored privilege is less about the caricature of "posh white blokes" and more about the centrality and superiority of the United Kingdom. It's Little Englander history: fog in the Channel, Europe isolated.
The times certainly have a reactionary feel. Workfare and the growth of in-work benefits look like a return to the Speenhamland system, with the poor coerced into crap jobs and public funds used to subsidise low-wage employers. The housing benefit cap is likely to drive more poor families out of London to declining towns in the regions, a reversal of the historic flow of native labour. The rise in poorly-paid self-employment and part-time work looks like a return to odd-jobbing, casualisation and seasonal work (the "portfolio career" of old). The increasing cost of further education, and the growth of online alternatives, points to a return to a two-tier system of elite institutions for the rich and correspondence courses and night-school for the rest. Welfare is being recast as the right of the poor worker, not of the citizen, just as the old poor laws discriminated between the able-bodied and the idle. Much of politics is a conscious discourse with the past, witness Milliband's proposed 10p rate and mansion tax, and reform is as likely to be presented as restoration as progress. While a shift in tax from income to wealth is to be welcomed, I suspect the call to revisit the idea of a property qualification for local elections will not be far behind.
Another feature of the times is the growing dominance of private corporations in the provision of public services. The shrinking of the public sector is self-consciously defined by the right as a return to the nightwatchman state of laissez faire Victorian Britain, but the manner of it looks more like a return to the monopoly corporations and royal warrants of the 17th and 18th centuries, with all its attendant corruption and cronyism. Privatisation is essentially enclosure and rent-seeking. I suspect the inclusion of Clive of India in the curriculum will focus more on the happy expansion of empire rather than the rapacious operations of the East India Company or his drug habit.
As more of its functions are privatised, government loses its capacity to do things and becomes more dependent on commercial agents. This leads to an ever closer identification and overlap between politicians and business people. Party politicians in the "post-democratic" age are obliged to simultaneously admit their powerlessness, accepting that whole swathes of life must be "left to the market", while trumpeting their ability to correct market abuse and bring wrongdoers to justice. Fingers are wagged at amoral bankers and newspaper proprietors, but the end result is the same squalid compromise of self-policing and light-touch regulation. The chief integrity failure of recent years was not the expenses scandal but the revelation that so many MPs are available for corporate hire. That politicians increasingly see themselves as the representatives of commercial interests, rather than as public servants, has a distinctly Hogarthian whiff. A consequence of the narrowing of the field of political action is a temptation to focus more on those areas reserved to government, such as foreign affairs and war, or on exhortation and moralising directed at the public. The Tories twin obsessions with the EU and gay marriage are perhaps partly compensatory.
The proposed history curriculum normalises the belief that Britain has a right, even a duty, to intervene abroad, that it should pursue policy solely in terms of narrow self-interest, and that private property is the source of liberty and wealth. That said, it is unlikely to be anywhere near as radical in practice as the Education Secretary hopes, simply because teachers will have a lot of latitude over interpretation. Like Ferguson, Gove has a weakness for fantasy, a belief that he can conjure up a parallel world where dutiful schoolkids in neat blazers, all looking a little bit like a young Michael Gove, listen in rapt attention to tales of William of Orange landing at Torbay and Wolfe expiring on the Heights of Abraham.
Ferguson is a better polemicist than a historian, and in recent years he has been repeatedly called-out on his dodgy method and right-wing bias. Where Eric Hobsbawm, who spent formative years in the hollow shell of Hapsburg Vienna, once called him a "nostalgist for empire", his critics are now more likely to describe him as an outright apologist. A better criticism is that he takes a utilitarian attitude to empire, i.e. the belief that it does more good than harm, which is underpinned by the geopolitical assumption that empires are inevitable and all we can do is support the "good" (anglophone) against the "bad" (everyone else). This accounting depends both on an uncritical assessment of the "killer apps" (a laughably misused metaphor, by the way) that the British Empire bequeathed the natives, such as property rights and the Protestant work ethic, and on unprovable assumptions about the ills that would have occurred otherwise. The ideological purpose is to justify the neocon fantasy of America as a "force-for-good" empire, with the UK playing Tonto to the USA's Lone Ranger.
His habitual use of counterfactuals tends to be less "what if" and more "if only", a fantasy founded on a prejudice. For example, his belief that Britain staying out of WW1 would have been to the benefit of Europe (a victorious Germany would have accelerated the EU and prevented the rise of Fascism and Communism) and to the benefit of Britain (which would have diverted its resources to reform of the Empire and reinforced its natural alliance with the USA) is nothing more than an attempt to construct an alternative universe more congenial to free-market Atlanticists (you can guess his stance on UK membership of the EU).
Ferguson and Gove are trying to colonise the space of historical debate, to plant provocative ideas like bowling greens in Boston or cricket pitches in Bengal. It is not that they are attempting to undo modern historiography and reinstate Our Island Story as a set textbook, but rather that they are unapologetic supporters of the ideological purpose of such books: history as national propaganda. What they really dislike is plurality, the idea that there may be many simultaneous histories, over-lapping but often in conflict, rather than an orthodoxy. There are, I think, three ways of thinking about this (I'm practising plurality here). The first is to view it as conservative nostalgia, an attempt to return classrooms to some halcyon fantasy of the 1950s. This has informed a lot of the criticism of the proposed curriculum, but I think it's a weak argument. Gove's purpose clearly goes beyond just pleasing the Daily Mail.
The second perspective is to see this as ideological support for modern capitalism. The idolisation of the architects of the Glorious Revolution (the climax of key stage 2) is certainly a form of ancestor worship, but the emphasis on narratives that equate liberty with property serves a contemporary purpose. The "Enlightenment in England" gives prominence to John Locke and Adam Smith (the Enlightenment in Scotland is absorbed), with only a passing reference to "other European thinkers" (presumably Voltaire, Rousseau etc). The chronology proceeds right up to the election of Thatcher, following the "economic change and crisis" of the 1970s ("what crisis?" as Jim Callaghan didn't say), with a detour forward to the fall of the Berlin Wall - aka "the end of history".
The third view is that Gove and Ferguson are engaged in a reactionary endeavour, in the sense of a counter-movement to earlier changes. It's rolling back the revolution and restoring privilege. In the case of history in schools, that revolution is the opening up of the curriculum to global and minority history since the 1960s, popularly symbolised as Hitler and Civil Rights. The restored privilege is less about the caricature of "posh white blokes" and more about the centrality and superiority of the United Kingdom. It's Little Englander history: fog in the Channel, Europe isolated.
The times certainly have a reactionary feel. Workfare and the growth of in-work benefits look like a return to the Speenhamland system, with the poor coerced into crap jobs and public funds used to subsidise low-wage employers. The housing benefit cap is likely to drive more poor families out of London to declining towns in the regions, a reversal of the historic flow of native labour. The rise in poorly-paid self-employment and part-time work looks like a return to odd-jobbing, casualisation and seasonal work (the "portfolio career" of old). The increasing cost of further education, and the growth of online alternatives, points to a return to a two-tier system of elite institutions for the rich and correspondence courses and night-school for the rest. Welfare is being recast as the right of the poor worker, not of the citizen, just as the old poor laws discriminated between the able-bodied and the idle. Much of politics is a conscious discourse with the past, witness Milliband's proposed 10p rate and mansion tax, and reform is as likely to be presented as restoration as progress. While a shift in tax from income to wealth is to be welcomed, I suspect the call to revisit the idea of a property qualification for local elections will not be far behind.
Another feature of the times is the growing dominance of private corporations in the provision of public services. The shrinking of the public sector is self-consciously defined by the right as a return to the nightwatchman state of laissez faire Victorian Britain, but the manner of it looks more like a return to the monopoly corporations and royal warrants of the 17th and 18th centuries, with all its attendant corruption and cronyism. Privatisation is essentially enclosure and rent-seeking. I suspect the inclusion of Clive of India in the curriculum will focus more on the happy expansion of empire rather than the rapacious operations of the East India Company or his drug habit.
As more of its functions are privatised, government loses its capacity to do things and becomes more dependent on commercial agents. This leads to an ever closer identification and overlap between politicians and business people. Party politicians in the "post-democratic" age are obliged to simultaneously admit their powerlessness, accepting that whole swathes of life must be "left to the market", while trumpeting their ability to correct market abuse and bring wrongdoers to justice. Fingers are wagged at amoral bankers and newspaper proprietors, but the end result is the same squalid compromise of self-policing and light-touch regulation. The chief integrity failure of recent years was not the expenses scandal but the revelation that so many MPs are available for corporate hire. That politicians increasingly see themselves as the representatives of commercial interests, rather than as public servants, has a distinctly Hogarthian whiff. A consequence of the narrowing of the field of political action is a temptation to focus more on those areas reserved to government, such as foreign affairs and war, or on exhortation and moralising directed at the public. The Tories twin obsessions with the EU and gay marriage are perhaps partly compensatory.
The proposed history curriculum normalises the belief that Britain has a right, even a duty, to intervene abroad, that it should pursue policy solely in terms of narrow self-interest, and that private property is the source of liberty and wealth. That said, it is unlikely to be anywhere near as radical in practice as the Education Secretary hopes, simply because teachers will have a lot of latitude over interpretation. Like Ferguson, Gove has a weakness for fantasy, a belief that he can conjure up a parallel world where dutiful schoolkids in neat blazers, all looking a little bit like a young Michael Gove, listen in rapt attention to tales of William of Orange landing at Torbay and Wolfe expiring on the Heights of Abraham.
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