New New Grub Street

It is possible that Brian Leveson will pull a rabbit out of the hat on Thursday, when he publishes the report of his inquiry into "the culture, practices and ethics of the press", but the widespread lobbying in advance suggests there will be few surprises, particularly as regards ownership and plurality. The battle lines have been drawn around the issue of statutory regulation. Those opposing this have adopted "no return to 1695" as their battle-cry, a reference to the date when the state licensing of newspapers ended, since when we have supposedly enjoyed a free press. It's worth delving back into the mists of time to understand what 1695 was all about, as it is relevant to the current debate, though not in the way claimed by the press freedom claque.

State licensing of the press was not abolished in 1695, it simply lapsed, which is not a pedantic point. Freedom of speech did not win a great victory, rather the state gave up a regime that had dated from the late Medieval period (largely concerned with the control of Bible printing) and adopted a new legal framework based on property rights, thereby recognising the revolutions in political theory and printing (which had become a lot cheaper) that occurred over the course of the century. It is also worth emphasising that "press" in this context meant the printing press. While the focus of the state's interest was on books and pamphlets, and what they contained, the means of production and thus control concerned the physical machinery of printing, a form of constant capital. Newspapers, in the sense of a regular publication on "matters of topical interest", did not evolve until after the end of licensing, which occurred with the expiration of the time-delimited Licensing Act of 1662, a Restoration law that replaced the earlier Licensing Order of 1643, which in turn had replaced censorship by the Crown (via the Star Chamber) with censorship by Parliament.

The lapsing of state censorship was due to a number of factors. Pre-publication control had long been an irritant in the struggle between King and Commons, particularly in relation to political and religious pamphlets, but it had also proven to be impractical and counter-productive, notably stimulating Milton's polemic in favour of free speech, Areopagitica. However, Milton's much-referenced (and little-read) work was as much a criticism of the monopoly of printing enjoyed by the Stationers' Company, who acted as sole licensors under both Crown and Parliament, as it was a plea for a fundamental right. During the late 17th century, attempts at imposing censorship, and the continuing unpopularity of the Stationers' Company among authors, led to more ill-feeling, which was exacerbated by the Bill of Rights of 1689. Though this did not establish a general right of free speech, it did insist that the debates of Parliament be free and unhindered, which set a crucial precedent.

With the end of licensing in 1695, the print market boomed. Though this was a golden period for literature, many of the leading lights of the Augustan age were motivated by an intense distaste for the hack-work it unleashed, hence Pope's Dunciad and its contempt for Grub Street, the centre of the low-end printing industry in London. Even "hacks" like Daniel Defoe were incensed by the unauthorised (and unpaid) republication of their works by unscrupulous printers. Responding to their loss of monopoly, the Stationers' Company changed tack and advocated copyright as a means of both checking unrestrained publication (and defending their members' own economic interests) and securing authors' rights in their property. This was in tune with the times, echoing the importance of property in John Locke's Second Treastise of Government. Their lobbying led to the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne of 1710. In parallel, the ability of the state to control "dangerous" material was satisfied by recourse to the law on seditious libel and by the imposition of stamp duty which further restricted the publication of newspapers to those with deep pockets. The reliance on libel also set a more general civil precedent, with the courts increasingly being used to defend the "property" of a person's reputation from damage.

Despite two centuries of change, including the huge growth of the newspaper and publishing industries following widespread literacy (described in George Gissing's New Grub Street of 1891), this framework has remained largely unchanged. While the official line has been that the British press is free, the government has always been able to prevent publication of specific items, so long as it was careful not to abuse its "advisory" privileges. Charges of seditious libel evolved into D-Notices and appeals to "national security". The rich and the famous have continued to have recourse to the libel courts, often using the mere threat of this as an effective means of pre-publication control. Meanwhile, you need even deeper pockets to publish a newspaper.

What has changed over the last decade is that the cost of a virtual printing press, in the form of electronic media, has fallen to zero. The Internet has become the New New Grub Street, where the practical absence of censorship and low barrier to entry have allowed anyone to become a hack. It has even led to the amusing sight of professional journalists indulging their bog-door-scrawling instincts as they retweet libellous rumours. While 99.999% (at least) of the material published this way will never be read by more than a handful of people, the "long tail" effect means that newspapers are losing their near-monopoly on both readers and the ears of politicians.

It's a commonplace to suggest that Hackgate is the result of the disruptive impact of technology on the print medium, but equally significant is the related calculation by Cameron and Milliband that they can now bite the hand that fed them because of this steady erosion. But that in turn may mean they believe the dilutive effects of the Internet are sufficient to avoid the need to directly confront the issue of ownership. What references to 1695 should do is remind politicians, and Brian Leveson, that the control of the press has always been a matter of property rights. A billion tiny printing presses does not fundamentally challenge the concentration of capital, any more than New Grub Street challenged Fleet Street.

Economics and Vagina Dentata

Discussing the "crisis" of soul-searching in the economics profession following the 2008 financial crash, Chris Dillow asks why economists lost sight of Keynes's advice to aspire to be as humble and as competent as dentists. Chris attributes the failure to the delusion of professional significance - the belief that economists could and should drive policy, rather than just deal with practicalities, which inevitably led to hubris: "What sort of reputation would dentists have if they stopped dealing with people's teeth and preferred to give the government advice on dental policy, tried to forecast the prevalence of tooth decay or called for new ways of conceptualizing mouths?"

All professions are vulnerable to the same delusion, privileging theory over practice and seeking to bask in the reflected glory of public policy, but I think economists were encouraged in the cultivation of their pretensions and we should be cautious about beating them up. Not only did some correctly predict the coming crash (though normal distribution means that a number were always going to be either spot-on or forgotten), but even cheer-leaders of the neoliberal economic order sounded a note of caution on occasions, notably Alan Greenspan's comment on "irrational exuberance".

The social and political standing of economists has little to do with their functional usefulness and everything to do with their ideological value. If the latter was close to nil, they'd have much the same standing as dentists. Talk about a "crisis in the profession" currently serves to deflect criticism of the financial order, just as the current "bishops with vaginas" kerfuffle distracts from the real crisis of the Church of England (an absurd anachronism in practice and based on a theory in inexorable decline). With little widespread support for an alternative to neoliberalism, economists must take on the role of scapegoat, despite the fact that many correctly identified the growing (and continuing) problems. The regular appearance of the Governor of the Bank of England and other economist worthies before the Treasury Select Committee thus oscillates between Moses delivering the tablets and a penitential auto da fe.

In 2008, the Queen famously asked "Why did you [economists] fail to predict this?" Many took this as an example of her sage wisdom, the equivalent of the small boy pointing out the emperor's butt-nakedness, but she was actually asking completely the wrong question. A profession so dependent on theory would always be disputatious, if only to satisfy personal ambition, so the idea that economists as a collective entity had a settled view was both naive and typical of the belief that there must be a "right" answer. A better question (and one that a small boy might well ask) would be "Why does a house in London cost a million quid?", though there are obvious reasons why such a thought would never have occurred to her, any more than she is probably troubled by being the head of a church that denies the authority of women.

Trying to get a decent drink

According to CAMRA, one pub a week is being converted into a supermarket, largely because the current planning regulations don't consider this to be a change in use (pubs being classed as retail outlets), so formal planning permission is not required. The friends of beer think this is a bad thing as it encourages viable pubs to be sold off. According to Tescos, "We are taking on derelict or vandalised pubs, not those which are still actively trading, and for all sorts of reasons those pubs were not successful. We go into communities and ask people what they want and how we can deliver that." So who is right?

I live on the fringes of Southfields in London, which lies within a triangle formed by Wandsworth, Putney and Wimbledon. It's popular recognition rests on the Tube station, which is the alighting point for the All England Club, about three-quarters of a mile down Wimbledon Park Road. For two weeks each year the station is swamped with corporate advertising and a surging tide of tennis grockles being touted by cabbies on their way in and colliding with commuters on their way out. It had a bit part in the recent BBC drama, as local resident George Enthwhistle was doorstepped pre and post-resignation. Further back, when it really was all fields round here, George Eliot lived at the Wandsworth end. Like many areas opened up by the extension of the metropolitan railways, Southfields is now part of that middle ring between inner London and the 20th century suburban expansion, which largely follows the boundary of the old London County. It's a mix of increasingly expensive family houses and yuppie flats, the latter particularly popular with Antipodeans and South Africans who've been forced south by high prices in Earls Court and Shepherd's Bush. Though there are council estates, these are physically marginal and gradually being sold off.

When the house-building began in earnest in Edwardian times, much of the land around the station was purchased from the Bishopric of London. This entailed a covenant that prevented the building of pubs for a century, despite (or perhaps because of) Young's brewery being just to the north. Until the 1990s, this meant walking down to the Merton Road, which formed the Wandsworth to Wimbledon side of the triangle, or up to The Green Man on Putney Heath, though a wine bar, Mandy's, did manage to get in under the wire in the 1980s by posing as an eatery (it's now a Starbucks). When the covenant expired, two pubs quickly opened, The Grid Inn and The Old Garage. Neither were much cop, the former being a gloomy Wetherspoons and the latter a bland Greene King. Last year Wetherspoons sold up, which means we now have a gloomy Tesco Metro instead. A Sainsbury's Local has also opened this year, replacing a Nicolas vintners, and a Waitrose has been given planning permission.

While I was no fan of The Grid Inn, it was neither derelict nor vandalised, and the suggestion that Tesco listened to the local community is tripe. Most of the shops in the immediate vicinity carried anti-Tesco posters when the change in use was announced, and some still do. While the shop owners obviously have a vested interest, this antipathy pretty accurately reflected local sentiment. The area already had two convenience stores as well as a butcher, fishmonger and greengrocer. I have no doubt that all three supermarkets will be successful, and that the other traders will gradually accomodate themselves to the new reality, simply because Southfields is a large dormitory suburb with a growing population of younger working adults who favour convenience stores. The people who use the greengrocer (more variety and cheaper) are not the target market. Restaurants and pubs have struggled simply because the customers for these have ample and better options on the boundaries of the area, particularly at Putney and Wimbledon on the District Line. For this same reason, the plan to convert the old snooker hall back to its original use as a cinema is doomed, as there are multiplexes at each corner of the triangle, not to mention a bijou Curzon in Wimbledon. I suspect we'll end up with a fitness club, a coffee shop and more flats.

That said, there is an argument for a decent pub in the centre of Southfields. Given the proximity of the Earl Spencer gastro-pub on the Merton Road, it should forget about competing on food and focus instead on quality real ale and wine. The real shame is not that pubs are being replaced by chain stores, but that so many pubs are themselves bland chains.

Zero sum nonsense

There has been another splurge of economic doom-mongering this week, following Mervyn King's prediction of weak growth. Some, such as Martin Kettle in the Guardian, believe we're facing 50 years of austerity, while others, notably the Social Market Foundation and Royal Society of Arts, see it as a shorter-term problem that will necessitate another £48bn in public spending cuts over the next 5 years. Kettle (not for the first time) is talking nonsense, and not just because predictions over such a distant horizon are worthless. The SMF/RSA crew have identified a real problem (George Osborne's predictions on growth were pants), however they have used it to justify another round of neoliberal welfare reform and (more pertinently) a bid for a government contract.

Kettle's case is based on two sources. The first is an OECD report that predicts global growth will be healthiest among developing nations (they're sticking their necks out there). The OECD's reliability in these matters has already been questioned, but in fact their prediction that UK GDP will grow at an average of 2.1% per annum over the next 50 years (1.6% per capita, due to an ageing population), is little different to the long-term historical growth rate. What's caught Kettle's attention is the continuing shift of economic power to the developing world, which is where the zero-sum fallacy comes in: "Economic power is shifting to China ... while the world will have more, we will have less of it – and maybe less in real terms, too. We are confronting scarcity of a sort we have forgotten." Given that the UK has been in relative decline since the 1880s, i.e. losing share of world output, this isn't as worrying as you might at first think. The reason why we can bear it is because we're still experiencing positive growth, even if others are growing faster (the OECD predicts global growth will average 3% over the next 50 years). It should hardly need stating that growth from a low base is always faster than growth from a high base. The wider point about growth is that it is not zero-sum, despite the tendency of politicians to cast competition between nation states in this light. Thus David Cameron recently insisted that we were in a race, which implies winners and empty-handed losers (a cynic might argue that the whole "batting for Britain" bollocks is just cover for politicians acting as salesmen for privileged industries, such as defence and The City).

The gloom does not let up: "Growth in Britain will often decline over the coming half-century. It will not resume. We can talk all we like about stimulus and investment, ... but, during the next 50 years, growth is going to be halting and uneven and will sometimes be negative." Pretty much like the last 50 years, then. There are two broad drivers for growth: a push and a pull. The push is the product of technological advance, improved labour skills and organisational efficiency, all of which increase productivity: same inputs, more outputs. This underlying trend is estimated at 1.3% p.a. You've got to be dysfunctional as a country not to be able to take advantage of it. The pull is the result of demand, which can be both external (exogenous) or internal (endogenous): more outputs requiring more inputs. For example, industrial development in China and elsewhere has led to increased demand for German machine tools (exogenous), while recovery from the 2011 tsunami in Japan is generating domestic growth (endogenous).

Kettle's ideological colours are shown when his pessimism about growth segues into pessimism about democracy: "In China ... a new leadership is seamlessly introduced for another 10-year span. In Europe, by contrast, a series of weak leaders ... struggle to assert some degree of control over a floundering currency and unification project. Meanwhile in the US, a re-elected but domestically weak president faces a series of defining political battles over spending and taxes." In trying to convince us that "austerity in some form is the context for most of the foreseeable political options in countries like Britain", he also references Thomas Byrne Edsall on the coming scarcity of resources. The resources in question are not raw materials or human capital but public money: "Although the 20th-century social democratic project may have stalled amid economic decline, the financial crisis has undoubtedly opened up a fresh opportunity to redefine the terms on which the rich and poor can coexist without social unrest in times of greater scarcity." Note the assumption about the persistence of "the rich and poor". The underlying postulate is that a real-terms increase in public spending can only be funded through the fruits of growth. In other words, it is a bonus available only in the good times, not a persistent exercise in the redistribution of wealth. This is a central neoliberal tenet that encourages the industry in doom-mongering. "We can't afford it" is the cry of the hour, despite the continuing advance in living standards (due to that 1.3% thang).

The SMF/RSA report, Fiscal Fallout, focuses its doom-mongering on the likelihood that growth will be lower than anticipated by the Chancellor, and in particular that we may face both sluggish growth in productivity and a smaller output gap than previously thought. The latter is the headroom between current output and potential output come a recovery. If this is small, because we have lost capacity for good, then the recovery will produce a correspondingly smaller bounceback in tax revenues. To hit the government's deficit targets, we may therefore need to cut public expenditure further.

The first point to make is that there are varying opinions on what has caused the drop in productivity and what this implies for a recovery, which the SMF/RSA acknowledge. They are probably right in thinking that there is a combination of factors. Labour-hoarding would imply there is spare capacity, though if it has been biased towards overhead roles this could mean that any expansion might largely be met through automation, offshoring or by new jobs at lower wages. Another factor might be the erosion of skills and a consequent decline in innovation, though you would expect this to take a good few years to have an effect. The forebearance of banks in respect of loans may be preventing the weak going to the wall, creating "zombie businesses", which is relevant as much productivity is the result of market entry/exit. One factor we know is present is constrained capital investment due to insufficient bank lending, hence QE and the funding-for-lending scheme. Though some businesses have large cash piles, those wanting to expand or retool (both of which would boost productivity) are struggling to secure finance.

Up to this point, the report is the work of the Social Market Foundation. Though a centrist think-tank (the legacy of David Owen), the SMF's analysis of the productivity decline is reasonable, and even their speculation about the output gap and the resulting deficit impact is logical. The problem with the report is the second half, the work of the RSA. This suffers from three flaws:

First is the instrumental view of welfare. Their mantra is that you can "drive productivity through public spending". This is a classic liberal concept - the idea that the role of welfare is to make labour more efficient and pliable, whether through health (minimising sick days and the avoidable death of skilled workers who have been invested in), education (providing preliminary skills of value to industry), or unemployment benefit (maintaining a reserve army of labour). This leads to the deployment of that pernicious phrase "value for money", which is (predictably) colouring current debate on welfare in the Labour party. In this light, the angst over rising health and social care costs can be seen for what it is: a distate that a growing share has to be devoted to non-productive labour, i.e. coffin-dodgers (the old), the unemployable (i.e. those on disability benefits), and people who have made "bad lifestyle choices" (the fat, smokers, alkies etc).

The second flaw is the report's lazy employment of policy nostrums that were drained of all meaning over the last 20 years, such as: "rebalance public finance away from Whitehall", implement "more collaboration and integration", focus on "prevention rather than cure", encourage "local engagement" and "devolved design", seek "negotiated autonomy". The report does not explain why these never happen in practice, so I will. Intermediaries (from management consultants to social enterprises) have a vested interest in maintaining the concentration of power, as it makes their job (i.e. interposing in spending decisions) easier.

The third flaw is a weakness for fashionable nonsense: "Flexicurity is a welfare model based on a balance between flexible labour-markets, active labour-market policies and benefits that are designed to smooth transitions between unemployment and work." In other words, welfare-to-work rebranded. Another example: "Open-source policy making" is interpreted as "there should be an open invitation to research centres, academia, think tanks and pressure groups to contribute their own data and expertise." That's not open source, that's just lobbying. Significantly, this is not open to anyone but to specific "civil society institutions", such as the RSA.

The depressing conclusion is that the self-identifying "left of centre" in British politics remains utterly committed to the neoliberal programme. There will never be a time when welfare is not under the cosh, and what little remains must be concentrated on those of most value to capital. There will always be winners, and losers. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate.

The Natural History of Trust

There was a slightly Oriental tinge to George Entwhistle's resignation as Director General of the BBC, despite the absence of ostentatious bowing and crying. It was there in the prominent use of the word "honourable" by both the quondam DG and Chris Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust (and former Governor of Hong Kong), and in the ready use of the word "shame" by the press. Since the weekend, the word that has come to the fore is "trust", as in "the BBC must restore public trust", though presumably not through seppuku. Peter Kellner of YouGov has been liberally spraying the media with opinion poll data, though his key message is that "the past decade has seen a decline in trust across the board". In relative terms the BBC remains well ahead of the likes of politicians and tabloid journalists. As Peter says, "something deeper is going on".

"Honour" and "shame" are subjective in that they rely on self-policing by the individual. If you are shameless, it doesn't matter if somebody else accuses you of being shameful. It has no effect unless you share their view on what constitutes behaviour worthy of shame. The verb to shame (i.e. "he was shamed into ...") is a form of coercion, which means you can simply resist. Trust, on the other hand, is objective to the extent that it concerns the expectation of one person about the likely behaviour of another, where that second person has previously given sufficient assurances to justify the expectation. Trust is contractual, which is why we talk of it being "betrayed" or sorrowfully say: "I expected better of you".

But does the YouGov data actually measure trust, in this sense of a social contract? In sociology, trust is taken to be "a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party". This is distinct from "confidence", which is a measure of belief in the competence of another. The detailed YouGov data breaks down the question of trust by age and other dimensions. In respect of school teachers, it finds that 68% of the 18-24 year-old cohort are broadly trusting while this figure rises slightly to 70% among those 60 and over. All perfectly reasonable. But the figures for "don't knows" are respectively 17% and 3%, i.e. the mistrustful are 14% and a whopping 27%. Given that people over 60 generally have little contact with school teachers, while most of those in the 18-24 cohort will have had contact relatively recently, it seems odd that the older cohort are the more definite in their opinion. Perhaps they are more prone to bearing grudges over the years.

Something similar can be seen with trades union leaders. Unless you are a union member (only about 1 in 4 workers), you have no substantive trust relationship with them, i.e. no implicit contract, so what exactly are you assessing? The suspicion is that trust has become a synonym for "like" and is no more meaningful than a simple thumbs-up. The poll also shows that respondents generally trust leading politicians less than their local MP. Given that most people can't remember who their MP is (only a minority of the poll sample will even have voted for the election winner), and will have negligible dealings with them even if they can, the suspicion is that this difference in rating largely reflects exposure. Nadine Dorries can expect her popularity to plummet further.

In historical terms, trust gradually replaced the social and religious concepts of obligation that were broken down by the industrial revolution ("All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned"). This counter-movement took two main forms during the nineteenth century. The first was a reactionary revival of religion (and a related fashion for the medieval) in which a strong moral and ethical code encouraged both charitable obligation and (as a quid pro quo) an acceptance of the division of society: "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, He made them, high or lowly, and ordered their estate." The second was the development of mutuality in the form of friendly societies and trades unions, culminating in the twentieth century welfare state (the contributory principle, often merely symbolic in practice, is important in respect of the idea of mutuality). However, the cultural artefact of public trust spread well beyond the welfare state proper, encompassing the behaviour of private enterprise (through socially-responsible regulation), the state (through democratic oversight of the police etc) and autonomous public bodies such as the BBC. Come the post-modern/neoliberal era, the framework of conventions and assumptions that embedded trust, i.e. the social-democratic consensus, was attacked as "restrictive", "inefficient" and lacking in "freedom of choice". The proposed solution was (and is) the market, but this solution is noticeably quiet about the role, if any, of trust.

Trust presumes engagement, the ability to take the measure of something before investing. Trust is a "forward option" as it anticipates future, contingent behaviour. This in turn implies predictability, but more flexibly than simple "conformance to spec". It rests on the shared assumption of what will persist and what behaviours can be expected. In a true market there is no predictability because there is no constraint on the actions of the market participants beyond their willingness to agree a price. This obviates the need for any independent ethical code. Thus "my word is my bond" has been replaced by hedging. Market fundamentalists explain market-rigging as the result of a market inefficiency, e.g. a lack of transparency or liquidity (popular explanations for the LIBOR and gas market scandals). In other words, the market isn't free enough. What it needs is not more regulation but less. In such a climate, trust is reduced to a question of system integrity, which is how the word has tended to be used in the field of technology. A trusted system exhibits reliability of operation. It does not exhibit benevolence. This brings trust close to the meaning of confidence - a belief in competence and capability.

As the concept of trust is elided with the cash-nexus, it appears to become simultaneously more dilute, hence "the decline in trust", and yet more transcendent, hence the religiose investment of trust in brands such as Apple or Virgin (as an aside, in the days before health-and-safety-gone-mad, the use of the word "trust" in advertising usually referred to unadulterated goods - now it just implies reliability: from "this won't kill you" to "no surprises in the small print"). The gradual evaporation of trust is emblematic of the emptying of the public space, as nomadic power and wealth ascends to the supra-national (in another era, the behaviour of Starbucks' and Amazon's UK management over tax would have resulted in a charge of treason), and individuals retreat to the private consolation of commodities.

A peculiarity of this movement is the way in which public trust is increasingly seen through the lens of private folly. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity noted that: "What are commonly and ever more often perceived as 'public issues' are private problems of public figures." Personal failings are nothing new, nor is their impact on public policy, but what is notable is the degree to which private behaviour now degrades public trust. Lloyd George's sale of honours did not destroy trust in the honours system, nor did the Birminghman Six miscarriage destroy trust in the judicial system, because in each case public trust was invested in a wider framework than a dodgy politician or a biased judge. Compare with modern scandals. The MPs expenses cesspit has clearly damaged the entire political class, though many individual MPs were blameless, while the behaviour of Jimmy Savile is automatically assumed to reflect badly on the BBC in its entirety.

This twist on "the personal is political" is ironic in that it sees right-wing critics of public bodies happy to employ a systemic critique even when the issue is one of personal morality. Thus if Savile could get away with sexual abuse at White City, then the entire corporation was clearly complicit (by omission if not commission) and therefore culpable, even 30 years later. Contrast with the readiness with which wrongdoing in The City is isolated as the behaviour of "rogue traders", and systemic reform plays second fiddle to the maintenance of industry strength.

It has been the BBC's good fortune that this latest kerfuffle has coincided with another of the increasingly frequent bouts of David Attenborough love. This has served to remind us that the BBC is neither rotten to the core nor unsympathetic. It remains essentially benevolent. However, the reliance on a living icon is a double-edged sword. When Saint David eventually shuffles off this mortal coil, there will be few left with the moral authority (the public trust) to counter the suggestion that the BBC, after a quarter century of marketisation and management bollocks, is now just another business that should be exposed to the bracing discipline of the private sector.