The Triple Lock and the Trilemma

The media's framing of the possible suspension of the pensions "triple lock" has been varied, ranging from the Guardian's claim that its a penny-pinching initiative of the Treasury to the Telegraph's claim that it would be a "stealth tax raid", which isn't a phrase you often hear them use in connection with a benefit cut. The uncertainty over motive and timing suggests kite-flying, not so much for the intention to suspend or alter the triple lock ahead of the general election, but to see if they can get away with a refusal during next year's campaign to commit to it, and it looks like there is a cross-party consensus on that which has led to an informal agreement. As Chris Mason of the BBC rather artlessly put it: "Neither the Conservatives nor Labour have committed to keeping the triple lock come the next general election. ... I suspect that if the Conservatives keep it, Labour will too. If the Tories tweak it, Labour may well follow suit." (Clearly the BBC has learnt little from Laura Kuenssberg's catastrophic stint as a stenographer).

In the postwar era, the UK relied on widespread and generous occupational pension schemes, typically with defined benefits, to top-up the relatively ungenerous state pension, though this inevitably meant that pensioner poverty, among those who lacked such secondary pensions, was often acute. The late-70s marked an inflexion point as the basic state pension started a steady decline relative to average wages.  The introduction of the triple lock has helped arrest that decline, but the basic state pension (BSP) remains historically low (scoring poorly in international comparisons) and is unlikely to significantly better the position as a percentage of national income it reached in 1980 (just under 5%) despite the future growth in the pensioner population. This is because the instinct of the state, which has been there since the original Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, is to minimise the cost, either through means-testing, increased employee contributions (the original 1908 pension was a non-contributory scheme), pushing back the state pension age (SPA), or by failing to upgrade payments in line with wages. The result is a state pension system that is complex and subject to significant variations in outcome, which leads to the demand for further complex adjustments that introduce new problems.

This desire to penny-pinch has been countered by a political impetus towards fairness. This was particularly notable in the way that the BSP was introduced as the successor to the 1908 provisions in 1948. The proposal outlined in the Beveridge Report had been for a flat-rate pension, sufficient to lift people above absolute poverty, funded by lifetime contributions. The problem was the expectation that people who had suffered during the depression of the 1930s and then contributed to the war effort would also enjoy the pension, despite not having made contributions during their working lives. The consequence was that the BSP was not a funded system (i.e. where you take out what you put in, allowing for investment growth and actuarial evening across the population) but was in effect a "pay-as-you-go" system in which current employee contributions funded current pensions. The problem this stored up was that as the pensioner population grew as a percentage of the total population, either pensions would have to decline relative to wages or contributions by current workers would have to rise, neither of which was politically palatable. In part, pushing back the state pension age has been a compromise to avoid this choice.

The solution arrived at by the late-70s was to let the value of pensions decline through inflation, by removing the earnings link, but to offset this by encouraging greater private provision among better-off workers (as part of the wider move to financial deregulation), offering higher pensions through increased supplemental contributions (e.g. SERPS and later the State Second Pension, aka S2P), and introducing additional means-tested benefits for poorer pensioners (e.g. Income Support, Pension Credit, the Winter Fuel Payment). The repeated tweaks to the system reflects the state's reluctance to properly grasp the nettle, a failing that has been there since 1948. In this context, the triple lock was another attempt to kick the can down the road while implicitly acknowledging that the demise of occupational pensions for all but a minority meant that the state would have to shoulder more of the burden in future. It's clear the majority of working people aren't going to make adequate provision through personal pensions (it turns out that time preference - that current goods have greater utility than future ones - really is a thing), those in precarious work cannot afford to make supplemental contributions, and the perma-austerity of our political consensus means that benefits will inevitably fail to plug the gaps.

While many attribute the triple lock to a purely political calculation - i.e. securing the votes of the over-60s - and others have seen the shift from defined benefits to defined contributions as pushing risk onto employees following the pension fund scandals of the 1980s, another way of thinking about it is as the transfer of an overhead on capital (employer contributions) to a combination of the taxpayer-funded state and the individual. The reason why capital was prepared to fund generous occupational schemes in the postwar era was not an altruistic desire to make up for the modest BSP but an imperative to attract and retain workers in a tight labour market. There is a parallel here with the US, where employers have long had to offer generous health insurance to secure workers of the right calibre. The introduction of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 is an example of transferring that burden from capital onto the individual and the state. In effect, the pensions triple lock, which was also introduced in 2010, was the British Obamacare - just less contentious.

But while the welfare balance between the state and capital has shifted over time, it's clear that there has also been a change in the balance betwen the state and individual. This is due to a combination of poor private pension performance and growing inequality, placing an ever greater burden on the state. In practice that means a greater burden on today's workers, not only because of the pay-as-you-go nature of National Insurance but because the tax regime continues to favour wealth over income. This gets to the nub of the matter. If we think about it, the UK actually does have a national pension fund - i.e. a quantum of wealth, invested in assets that have historically delivered above-average growth returns, that many people anticipate will fund their retirement. It's just not in the intangible form of an electronic ledger. It's in the concrete form of bricks and mortar - in other words, property. Equity release is simply the modern equivalent of buying an annuity. The political problem is that pooling this fund for the benefit of all pensioners, including those who never owned their own home, would be inflammatory.

As many people point out whenever the issue of "pension generosity" arises, particularly in its current guise of the triple lock, the main beneficiaries are always going to be today's young, not today's old. This is because they can look forward to a full post-working life on a level of pensions that has grown relative to average wages over time. Of course there are some assumptions in this, notably that the state pension age is not pushed out even further while average lifespans remain static or even decline, and that other top-up benefits aren't reduced or even abolished. But the biggest caveat is that the current and future cost of state pensions must be paid by current and future workers. In other words, the fact that today's young can currently look forward to better pensions in the future not only ignores time preference, it assumes that the future labour force will be sufficent in size, and sufficiently well-paid relative to national income, to service a potentially much larger pensioner population. That seems optimistic, to say the least.

The obvious solution is equity release, in the form of increased taxation on property (and wealth more generally) to transfer funds to pensioners and thereby redistribute from rich to poor. This would also allow the burden on current and future workers to be reduced. Many people have long argued for National Insurance to be combined with Income Tax, but this is simply another way of saying that we should drop the pretence of a contributory welfare system and fund all benefits, from unemployment and disability to pensions, from general taxation. Limiting our ambition to having income tax do more of the heavy lifting misses that it already does a lot because we have failed to properly tax wealth, and in particular property. The classic poverty relief trilemma is that removing poverty without disincentives at low cost is impossible: you can have two but not all three. In the context of pensions: a flat-rate, generous BSP would be costly, while means-testing would disincentive supplemental private provision. The result is the acceptance that poverty for some is necessary. This is obviously an ideologically-coloured view: the persistence into retirement of the utility of the reserve army of labour.

Shifting the cost of pensions from workers to property has the advantage that it isn't going to disincentivise property ownership, in the same way that taxing land is reliable because landowners aren't going to abandon it (and obviously can't offshore it). The original sin of pensions in the UK was the idea enshrined in the Beveridge Report of the contributory principle, a regressive turn when you consider that the original 1908 pension, however ungenerous, was a non-contributory right. This principle turned out to be a carefully-cultivated myth that obscured that pensions were still dependent on general taxation. The subsequent sin was the turn after 1979 towards a tax regime that privileged wealth over income and increased regressive consumption taxes (e.g. VAT). The triple lock is likely to be tweaked at the very least after the next general election, by whoever happens to be in government. The cross-party consensus is not simply that it is unaffordable in the long run but that any changes to the pension regime must maintain the principle of pay-as-you-go, because to ask who should pay other than current workers would be to open a whole new can of worms.

The Manufacture of Dissent

Martin Kettle in the Guardian thinks that "Ulez reveals a systemic problem with how UK government works – or rather, doesn’t". As the lede summarises his argument, "Most people want cleaner air and a better NHS, but partisan politics gets in the way. To bridge the gap, we need citizens’ assemblies." The reason why centrists advocate citizens' assemblies is the expectation that they will inevitably deliver centrist outcomes, but it should be obvious that they only do this where there is first of all a political commitment to reform and enough of a cross-party consensus to ensure legitimacy for the outcome (e.g. in the case of Ireland's abortion reforms). The idea that partisan politics stands in the way of a better NHS has surely been disproved by history. On the contrary, the problem has been a cross-party consensus (for all but a few years) that the service must be reformed through marketisation and the greater involvement of private healthcare companies. What stands in the way is not partisanship but the cartel, and for that reason there will never be a citizens' assembly on the NHS.

On the specific issue of cleaner air for Londoners, Kettle claims that "In principle, people support action, provided the measures seem sensible, appropriate and fair, and that adequate preparation is made for the transition. It is clear this did not happen over the extension of Ulez. The upshot is that measures that would and could have secured sustained public backing, as well as being of public benefit, have become needlessly contested and at risk of being derailed. That failure is the result of our political system." This is misleading both on the scheme's introduction and the claim that it has become "needlessly contested". The original ULEZ scheme was announced by the then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, in 2015 and was set to cover the same area as the congestion charge zone in 2020. In the event, it was introduced earlier by the new Mayor, Sadiq Khan, in 2019. In 2021, the ULEZ area was extended to the North and South Circular roads. It was estimated that this would impact 140,000 vehicles. The further expansion to all 32 boroughs this year is expected to impact a further 40,000 vehicles. The plans have been widely publicised and remain popular across London as a whole.

To suggest that anything is "needlessly contested" is patronising, implying that there is a predefined agenda for politics. This is the same sort of thinking that imagines a citizens' assembly would produce common-sense consensus and mutual respect, rather than antagonism. If you put an angry outer borough van driver in the same room as an inner borough parent with an asthmatic child, you're not necessarily going to get consensus. One feature of genuine political contest, as opposed to polite disagreement, is the willingness to defy the law and it was predictable that on the issue of ULEZ the Tories should have suddenly become defiant. The party of law and order has always been happy to indulge law-breaking and disorder, while the rightwing press has frequently campaigned explicitly for both. This should not surprise us in the least, any more than the Labour Party's consistent commitment to both upholding the law and rejecting activism as unhelpful. That the current party leader is a former chief prosecutor is incidental though emblematic. But why has ULEZ become such a contested issue?

Phil Burton-Cartledge sees the protests in the context of petit bourgeois politics, employing the frame outlined by Dan Evans's book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petite-Bourgeoisie. "Looking at mobilisations of the petit bourgeoisie in the 21st century, there is a certain commonality to them. Whether it was the petrol protests in 2000 or the Countryside Alliance demonstrations a year later, the Fathers 4 Justice stunts, and latterly the cocktail of Covid conspiracism, 15 minute cities, and now ULEZ what they all have in common is the perception the state, or rather a busybody and overly managerial section of the state is getting in the way, professing to know better than them, and is stopping them from doing as they please." His purpose in this is to highlight the dangers that such political ressentiment may present an authoritarian and managerial Labour government, despite Keir Starmer showing every sign that he instinctively sympathises with petit bourgeois politics as much as he respects the dignity of the state.

But there are a couple of problems in this analysis relating to scale and persistence. The Fathers for Justice stunts will never enjoy widespread support, but their specificity also means they will continue at the margins of society: there is an endless supply of divorced dads who imagine the state is a misandrist conspiracy. In contrast, the Countryside Alliance is a substantial organisation, though it's pretty obvious that the bulk of its support comes from field sport enthusiasts rather than smallholders and agricultural workers. It isn't a reactionary spasm by the petit bourgeosie that will burn itself out but an astroturf organisation for large landowners and second-homers that will likely persist long into the future. The same cannot be said for Covid conspiracism, which has already ceded priority among the far-right to anti-drag queen protests. Likewise, the 15-minute city demonstrations appear to have petered out already, while the anti-ULEZ protests haven't mustered more than a few score attendees so far (of course, this may change, particularly if the 15-minute crowd shifts attention). 

The question is, how do such isolated and marginal protests take on the appearance of mass movements, if only temporarily? The answer is media coverage. Consider this from the Telegraph: "Protesters descended on Whitehall on Tuesday to demand that the expansion of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) be scrapped. Dozens of campaigners waved placards with messages such as “stop the toxic air lie”, and mocked-up car registration plates reading: “get Khan out”." (my emphasis). One reason why the Countryside Alliance has prospered over the years is that it has enjoyed disproportionate and sympathetic support from newspapers such as the Times and Telegraph. One reason why ULEZ has become a political issue is that those same papers have shifted from supporting what was originally a Conservative Party policy, encouraged by Grant Shapps as Secretary of State for Transport as recently as 2020, to outright opposition. 

The reason for that shift was the presumed political utility of ULEZ as a wedge issue in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election in July. That Labour's vote increased and the Tories' fell, making a seat previously considered safe enough for a sitting Prime Minister into a tight marginal, was taken not as evidence that the electorate increasingly favours cleaner air but that Sadiq Khan had somehow managed to lose Labour a shoo-in. This was a framing shared both by the jubilant Tory press and by the Labour leadership, and it was notable that both promptly extended the critique beyond ULEZ to green policies more generally. While Labour remains officially committed to Net Zero and cleaning up the environment, it has made it clear that this will not trump its commitment to economic growth, and I suspect that it considers indulging sole traders with polluting vans to be a contribution to the latter.

The Tories can be accused of reckless opportunism in deciding that "green crap" is the dividing line on which to fight the next election, not least because they will inevitably be drawn towards starker opposition in order to accentuate the differences between themselves and Labour. They haven't got much else to offer. With Rishi Sunak's attempts to rebrand the party as competent managers of the economy going slowly nowhere, and with Labour having successfully closed off most avenues of attack by reneging on their promises and insisting that they would stick to Tory spending plans, it was always likely that the coming general election would focus on the cost-of-living when not distracted by penises and censorious students. The question of who should bear the cost of the Net Zero transition is actually quite a cunning one because Labour simply will not admit that the cost should be borne immediately by the state but funded over time by increased taxes on wealth.

Both Martin Kettle and Phil Burton-Cartledge see the anti-ULEZ protests as an organic product of popular dissent, the one the regrettable result of the failure of partisan politics to provide leadership, the other an expression of social anxiety by an innately hysterical class. But I think both are wrong. In the normal course of events, the expansion to the outer boroughs would have produced grumbling, limited compromise and a few upsets in local council ward elections. What has turned it into a cause célèbre is the salience decreed by the media, which predominantly means the Tory newspapers, and while that is partly about helpfully crafting a wedge for the Conservative Party, it is also about protecting what they consider to be their own interests, or more accurately the interests of their owners and their owners' class. It was always likely that capital would drag its heels even once the imperative of climate change became indisputable, and it was equally likely that this would eventually take the form of popular resistance to an overweening state. And if that resistance doesn't naturally arise, it will be cultivated.

Decoding Rafael Behr

Rafael Behr will shortly be away. I have no idea where spends his holidays, but there is a distinct whiff of a retreat to the country about the introductory paragraph to his latest column in the Guardian: "August is the month when those of us who spend most of the year fixated on Westminster let politics drift into our peripheral vision, which is how most people see it the rest of the time. It is the benefit I have come to appreciate most from a summer holiday – the shift in perspective that accompanies a more abstemious news diet.Constant grazing on the minutiae of ministerial statements is not normal." Assuming that politics, or at least politics of the sort analysed by Behr and his ilk, is about the minutiae of ministerial statements is obviously a deliberately limiting frame. It's also worth noting his choice of word there, "minutiae", when something like "chaff" would better suit the grazing analogy. The term is not merely archaic, it points to a particular political tradition that becomes more evident as he explains what he means by normal.

"Normal is politics as it appears to people who are busy doing something else." The implication is that there is a divide between authentic democratic politics, which is mild and unobtrusive, and the sort practised at the "ideological extremes", which is passionate and lacking reason. The idea that political participation varies in not a product of modern sociology but a longstanding premise rooted in the Classical Greek idea of an anti-democratic social hierarchy. The most famous example of this was Plato's myth of the metals, in brief: the citizens of a polis owe loyalty to their city because they were born of its earth, but each has an admixture of metal in their soul. Those with gold are born to rule, those with silver are born to support the rulers (soldiers, police), and those with bronze or iron are born to serve (peasants, artisans). Behr accepts this fundamental division: politics is a matter for an educated minority and the tedious necessity of democratic legitimacy requires minimal engagement. What it doesn't require is for the people to be stirred up by demagogues insisting they take a closer interest in it.

The scene has been set in this way not to argue for a restriction of the franchise, so that cultured types like Behr can devote their full attention to chastising errant politicians without hoi polloi troubling their vision, but to convince you that your interests are best served by a political class that eschews anything beyond the most bland politics: "The winner in British elections tends to be the side that most appeals to that vast, amorphous constituency whose preferences are, by definition, ill-defined. There is an art in coming across as less intrusively political than the other side. The unspoken pitch is not to use up all the mental bandwidth that voters would rather spare for things other than politics." This isn't moderation in all things but quietism: leave the politics to others and hope that they rarely bother you. Despite the evidence that voters' preferences are often well-defined, Behr insists that a lack of interest is the norm, even going so far as to claim that the 2019 general election result was in part attributable to "remainers who hadn’t felt all that strongly about Europe in 2016 and wished the whole damned business would just go away", which is some climbdown after his own vociferous campaigning on the subject.

The suggestion is that politics should be restrained in manner, but there is a clear subtext: that society should cordon it off lest it infects "normality". Politics is destabilising, even bad for your health. Inevitably with Behr, Corbyn must make an appearance: "He was seen as a fanatic, the ringleader of lapel-grabbing, finger-jabbing cranks who think politics should be more in-your-face." The purpose on this occasion is to draw a parallel across the gulf of normality with the political right: "That stance, culturally rebarbative to many British voters, has now been adopted by the Conservative party. It stands out more grotesquely when you let politics drift past in the background. It is the face that leers from the crowd, eyes bulging, veins throbbing, fizzing with idiosyncratic fury: the Lee Anderson look." Corbyn and Anderson are clearly not remotely alike in manner, but the link is rhetorically established (note the repetition of "face"), allowing the aims of mild social democracy to be dismissed as fanaticism and bracketed with a reactionary bigotry that is only too culturally congenial to many British voters. Anderson may be a clown, but he is not unrepresentative, any more than Corbyn is.

Being a Guardian writer with little in the way of original insight, Behr also shoehorns in the concerns of the moment. Thus: "The internet has obviously had a radicalising effect on politics around the world. The mechanism is well documented: people dwell in information silos, have their prejudices amplified and insulate themselves from discomfiting truths." There is nothing obvious about this and it isn't "well-documented". Indeed, pretty much all the serious academic studies on the subject (the ones that don't get any press coverage, naturally) suggest either that the effect is neutral or that it is mildly positive - i.e. people are exposed to more diverse views and the ones that opt to exist in "information silos" are the same ones who actively chose to do so with older media, such as newspapers and TV. It also takes only a little historical awareness to realise that we are living in an age of weak radicalism. Contrast the political polarisation of today with the 1920s and 30s, or even the 1970s and early-80s. The prominence of the "culture wars" isn't evidence of greater radicalisation but of a willing distraction from substantive politics such as economic justice and climate change.

Inevitably, the purpose of Behr's condescending and illiterate column is to write-off the current Conservative government (characterised by Sunak's "pleading sterility", whatever that means, as much as Lee Anderson's boorishness) while managing expectations for the inevitable disappointments of its successor: "the opposition frontbench, under Starmer’s guidance, has successfully cornered the market in unthreatening banality. That might not sound like much of an achievement, but it counts for a lot when the Tory tone is hysterical menace." Who does it count for a lot with? That such banality elicits Behr's faint praise does not mean that it is widely admired. And exactly who considers a future Labour goverment to be less threatening? Is it families on benefits with more than two children, or graduates facing crippling tuition fee loans? Or is it perhaps the shareholders of water companies and private healthcare firms? What's odd in this is that Behr appears not to realise that Labour's "banality" is aimed squarely at the sort of voters who think the "plain-spoken" Anderson has a point.

The conclusion is predictably daft. "People who don’t follow politics closely might not be able to put their finger on why Labour should be given a go at government, but the idea that Britain needs another term under the Tories feels palpably weirder." Does it feel any weirder than it did in 2019 when Behr and his colleagues at the Guardian did their best to undermine the opposition and so guarantee an election victory for the Conservatives? A clue to the true weirdness of the times was provided in an earlier swipe at the previous Labour leader: "Theresa May’s net approval rating was higher going into the 2017 election – in which she was humiliated – than Johnson’s was on the eve of his triumph. The differentiating factor was the increase in determination to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of Downing Street." And how exactly did that change of opinion between 2017 and 2019 come about among "people who don't follow politics closely"? What led an electorate that Behr assures us would rather not think about politics, and whose preferences are ill-defined, to such determination?

Behr's schtick is that politics is something that must be endured. His only book is Politics: A Survivor's Guide, which employs his heart-attack as the launchpad for an assault on "extremism", despite not offering any independent evidence that the "stress" of his job (lunch with politicians, 1,000 words a week) was a factor and while admitting a history of heart disease on both sides of his family. But the reason why politics must be endured is not in the nature of politics itself. Between the lines he is conventional enough in believing it to be a potentially noble profession. The problem is the frankly awful people it attracts at the edges and the deviation from centrist moderation that he and his peers casually label "populism". What Behr found offensive about Corbyn once he gave him his attention after 2015 was not his politics, which he would simply dismiss as naive, but that he should be popular. In other words, his is a judgement on the people not the politician. Likewise, what seems to offend him about Anderson is not the clownishness but the fear that his working class style (however artificial) might be popular. It is the threat of an intrusion by the dull bronze and iron souls into politics that worries him.

Sixty Glorious Years

A paradox of British politics is that the nominally conservative party pays little heed to its history while the progressive party seems incapable of not constantly looking over its shoulder at the past. The Tories lack of respect for their own political ancestors and long-cherished principles ("Fuck business" being a recent example) simply points to the callous nature of their opportunism. What remains constant is their defence of privilege and property, the rewards of that opportunism. In contrast, the Labour Party seems constitutionally incapable of not raking over past ideological struggles. This is partly because the media, taking their lead from the opportunist Tories, sees value is digging up the dead, but it also reflects the personalisation of the party's history, particularly in the office of the Leader. The tendency towards ancestor-worship is as strong as that towards damnatio memoriae. This can currently be seen in both the continuing anathema of Jeremy Corbyn (and his hagiography by supporters) and in the attempts to rehabilitate Tony Blair (and his critics' refusal to forget about the Iraq War dead). Contrast this with the way that ex-Tory leaders are promptly consigned to the oubliette of history (Churchill and Thatcher being the exceptions that prove the rule).

The consequence of these competing tendencies is that every era is defined through the party leader, and they in turn are judged in comparison to previous incumbents. This, as much as the sentimentality and anti-intellectual bias of Labourism, explains the conservatism of the party. As Keir Starmer steadily pushed Labour's policy to the right after 2019, to the point where it became barely distinguishable in many areas from that of the Tories, there was a flurry of commentary to the effect that he was the true heir to Blair. Roy Jenkins' phrase about carrying a Ming vase was widely recirculated to explain the party's caution, the implication being that once in power Labour would spread its wings and do some good. But it soon became clear that the benign economic circumstances that Labour inherited in 1997, which allowed it to first maintain Tory spending plans and then steadily increase investment in public services on the back of an expanding economy and City tax receipts, are not going to be repeated. For all the mantras about higher growth and productivity, Labour clearly has no idea how to deliver either beyond trusting business and tinkering with planning reform.

With Blair offering a poor parallel, despite his very public anointing of Starmer, there has been a recent increase in the stock of Harold Wilson, who won a general election in 1964 after thirteen years of Conservative government (snap!) and then won two more elections before losing in 1970 and staging a comeback in 1974. That the last of these periods in power would result in Margaret Thatcher's victory in 1979 and a further eighteen years of Conservative government isn't generally mentioned. The parallels have tended to focus exclusively on the 1964-1970 period instead. In an amusing coincidence, the New Left Review has just published a number of articles from 1963 by leading lights on the left - Raymond Williams, Peter Wollen, Ralph Miliband and Eric Hobsbawm - that were originally published in Italian in the journal Il Contemporaneo. Miliband's contribution, titled "If Labour Wins ...", is helpful in understanding the suggested parallel between 1964 and 2024. It opens: "There are countries where the looming defeat of the government gives rise to complex judgements concerning the identity of its successor. Britain is not one of them. The decline of the present Conservative government, which has recently assumed spectacular proportions, and its ever-more-likely defeat at the approaching general election, can have only one beneficiary: the Labour Party."

The contemporary parallels between next year's general election and the one sixty years ago stretch beyond the coincidence of what Wilson described as "thirteen wasted years" to the hope recently expressed by the New Statesman that  "Labour’s caution could turn to radicalism in office". No evidence if offered for this claim beyond fan-fiction: "You can already picture Reeves standing at the despatch box, brow furrowed, proclaiming that action is required because the situation is worse than she understood." For this to be plausible, you'd have to assume either that the Shadow Chancellor hasn't been reading her briefs or that she's slow on the uptake, neither of which inspires confidence. There is nothing in Labour's history to suggest that faced with a financial crisis it will favour "radicalism" or that it will reject Treasury orthodoxy (Reeves is a former Bank of England economist). 1931 is the paradigmatic case but much the same can be said for Wilson's handling of the sterling crisis in 1966 when he chose to cut public expenditure rather than devalue the pound. Likewise, Gordon Brown's "saving the world" in 2008 was a triumph of coordination within the limits of fiscal orthodoxy, not a radical departure.

As Phil Burton-Cartledge noted, "Radicalism has to do more than upset: it has to fundamentally threaten the power relationships that structure and are upheld by a political settlement, and does so in a way that opens up opportunities for more democracy". Viewed in this light, the Wilson administration of 1964-70 was certainly radical in intent in some areas, even if many of its departures from orthodoxy proved short-lived or would eventually be stymied, such as the Department of Economic Affairs and the Open University. There was also the government's support for social reform, notably the Race Relations Act 1965, the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of homosexuality and the liberalisation of abortion and divorce, none of which could be said to be congruent with Labourism, albeit not necesarily in conflict either. It's worth noting that Wilson allowed legislative time for many of these reforms (i.e. via backbench bills) but refused to publicly commit his support. He was himself a social conservative, not the liberal other centrists have subsequently claimed. What that record hightlighted was the extent to which Labour in the 1960s was a mass movement that combined both organised labour and the liberal middle classes (personified in Roy Jenkins), not simply an anti-Tory coalition of convenience.

Starmer's Labour has shown no comparable intent and has gone out of its way to reassure the media and reactionary voters that it is conservative in all but name: that it will preserve most of the Tory dispensation of the last 13 years but simply manage it better. If Wilson was a half-hearted reformer, Starmer shows no inclination to pursue any sort of reform outside of the further marketisation and privatisation of public services, an abuse of the word. Far from framing Labour as a mass political movement, Starmer has decided to reduce it to a supportive claque for a Westminster-centric cartel. The anti-democratic moves against the left are not just factionalism, they represent a wholesale rejection of political activism. This has arguably been the lasting legacy of the People's Vote campaign, with its romantic parliamentarianism and rejection of provocative demands (e.g. soft Brexit) in favour of condescending maximalism. Today's equivalent of Herbert Morrison's "Socialism is what a Labour government does" is "Politics is what the PLP does". The one elevated government over extra-parliamentary activism, but the other simply rejects the idea that there is any political legitimacy beyond Parliament.

As you would expect from the author of Parliamentary Socialism, Miliband emphasises the continutiy of Labourism, which underpins the pessimism of his thoughts in 1963, something that we lose sight of with the focus on leaders and their supposed ability to "change the party" by force of will (that Clause IV moment etc). As he says of the revisionist turn against nationalisation in the 1950s, "These views did not represent a major departure from Labour’s traditional economic philosophy. The ‘revisionists’ merely wanted to give programmatic status to what has been the objective of Labour’s leadership (as distinct from its activists) from the moment the Party was founded. Other ‘revisionist’ demands were scarcely newer: the insistence on Labour’s ‘classless’ character and aims, the active discouragement of trade-union militancy, flattery of middle-class voters, the general weakening of Labour’s political message—this had always been part of the party’s approach. But such demands acquired a new significance in the late 1950s, when the ‘affluence’ in which workers were supposedly wallowing was used to reinforce the need for a new image, appropriate to a ‘post-capitalist’ society of an increasingly petty-bourgeois character."

One point Miliband made about Wilson as a political personality was his ambiguity: "Wilson’s whole career since 1951 has been built on ambiguity and a careful avoidance of too specific a commitment in the various disputes that have agitated Labour since that time." The charge against Starmer isn't one of ambiguity but straightforward inconsistency (Brexit) and even bald deceit (pretty much everything else). Ultimately, these styles are an expression less of an individual psychology than of the material and institutional conditions of the time. Or, to put it another way, the environment selects for these personality types. Wilson's ambiguity was a necessary talent in the service of maintaining unity both within a large and fractious party and across a wider labour movement that represented half the workforce, not to mention ensuring that Labour remained in pole position to lead the progressive coalition that emerged in the 1960s. In contrast, Starmer is the product of a countermovement: the attempt to re-establish the auctoritas and dignitas of the state after the twin shocks of Brexit and Corbynism. This calls forth a pious conservatism (the religious dimension is substituted by its secular equivalent: patriotism) and a performative authoritarianism. The idea that we can expect "radicalism" from this quarter is laughable.

A Decade of Bullshit Jobs

In a recent Jacobin essay, the sociologist Matteo Tiratelli took issue with David Graeber's celebrated idea of bullshit jobs. His purpose was not to say that they didn't exist, though he convincingly shows that the definition of the term is misleading, but that the heart of the matter is not a subjective sense of meaninglessness but a disconnect between work and the common good: "David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs asked a vital question about contemporary capitalism. But its theoretical starting point led it down a blind alley. The central problem with work today is not that a growing proportion of people feel their own job to be pointless. It is that the economy as a whole is not oriented around satisfying true human needs. Instead, we find our working lives consumed by dysfunctional bureaucracies that constrain our capacity for play and creativity. We waste time trapped in processes that exist only to give our bosses more control over us. And we’re directed to jobs that wouldn’t exist if people had the power to choose where to invest our increasingly scarce resources. That is where the real bullshit lies."

Where Graeber and Tiratelli overlap is in the assumption that bullshit jobs play a disciplinary role, both by occupying us and so preventing dissent at the level of society and by keeping us under the thumb of  bureaucratic management within the confines of the firm. But for me this misses out a crucial question. If we accept that many jobs are pointless, in the sense that their disappearance would not be a negative and might even be a net positive for society, why do they exist? Put another way, why do capitalists spend money on tasks that don't need doing and which they appear not to value? In his How to be an Anti-capitalist in the Twentieth Century, Erik Olin Wright notes one of capitalism's self-destructive tendencies: "Each employer wants to pay employees as little as possible in order to maximize profits, but this then depresses the buying power of consumers in the market, which in turn makes it harder to sell the things capitalists produce". It doesn't make much sense to heighten the exploitation of labour and then fritter away the gains on unnecessary roles that produce no surplus value.

A key sociological point to make about bullshit jobs, at least in the examples favoured by Graeber, is that they are predominantly "white collar", as we used to say. We can all think of pointless jobs that are coded working class, such as security guards, but the dominant image that comes to mind is someone in an office laboriously updating a spreadsheet that no one else will look at. In other words, regardless of the physical and cognitive demands of the work, these jobs are typically occupied by people who would be considered middle class, whether under-employed professionals or harried clerks. Paying supernumerary workers to ensure a large enough middle class to both preserve political dominance and maintain a buying public for goods and services is rational in aggregate, but self-interest would rule it out at the level of the specific firm. Capitalists are themselves subject to capitalist ideology, hence they are capable of irrational actions, even actions contrary to their own immediate interests, if they serve to preserve the capitalist order. But even so, there is a clearly a gap in the theory when it comes to coordination. And as ever when we are faced with a collective action problem, it makes sense to look at the role of government.

Tiratelli sees an avenue of coordination in the welfare state. "The growth of education and health care as an employer of last resort is intimately bound up with the decline of manufacturing ... the social power that industrial workers once had allowed them to win substantial concessions from the state and from capital, concessions that often took the form of expanded welfare provision. While those manufacturing jobs have been automated and offshored, the welfare states they created have lingered on, often under attack but generally accounting for a growing share of GDP and of working-class employment." There is something to be said for this, not least that the conservative political desire to "shrink the state" never actually manages to reduce it in any meaningful way, even as it shifts resources from the needy to favoured groups (consider the cross-party consensus to preserve the two-child benefit cap versus the acceptance that public money should be spent on the private school fees of diplomats' children).

But Tiratelli's theory is also unsatisfactory because of his focus on the working class. What we actually see in the welfare state is increasing labour exploitation and proletarianisation. As he notes himself, "They are increasingly underfunded when compared with the demands placed on them. They are poorly paid, insecure, and casualized. Professional autonomy has been decimated. And the prestige attached to these vital roles has been systematically eroded". This description shares many of the characteristics of the "precariat", but that concept obviously extends beyond the working class to the middle class. Indeed, the emergence of the idea reflected the extension of traditional practices from working class jobs to middle class ones, such as casualisation and piece-work. What were once accepted as necessary features of the market became a social "problem" only after this shift. But precarity extends well beyond the public sector to encompass the private, and arguably is more rife in the latter because the former has retained greater labour rights. The problem of coordination in the private sector remains.

When I first addressed this issue a decade ago, in response to Graeber's original essay, I suggested that the solution to the conundrum lay in the work of Ronald Coase, specifically his theory of transaction costs for firms. In a nutshell, firms will keep certain skills inhouse to meet intermittent need because this is ultimately cheaper than outsourcing, however this leads to the creation of unnecessary administration tasks to fill the downtime. As the firm grows, this work is gradually consolidated into distinct roles: bullshit jobs. However, there remains the countervailing tendency for technology to reduce transaction costs, so making intermittent outsourcing more attractive (this is the essence of the "gig economy"). Combined with the suspicion that recovery from recession would see a higher turnover in firms and an end to what appeared to be job-hoarding, my conclusion was that "In the face of this pincer movement, the decline in bullshit jobs seems likely and thus Graeber's essay takes on the air of a lament for a soon-to-disappear world, not unlike the typing-pools and reprographic offices of yore."

That prediction (though only semi-serious) has proved wrong. Recovery has been weak and the long-tail of low productivity firms stubbornly persistent: the great shakeout hasn't happened. The statistical decline in bullshit jobs that Tiratelli finds depends on his assumption that such jobs are predominantly working class, but that in turn rests on a subjectivity about how society values work (e.g. cleaners, labourers, sales staff) and the consequent lack of self-worth this gives rise to. The subject is bedevilled by the methodological issue that worth is reported by the worker, not established by any external, objective means. Thus the bullshit jobs that infest the corporate world can be defended by their occupants simply adopting a belief that they "add value" to a business. The key insight implicit in Graeber's essay is that, however they are defined, there was a noticeable increase in bullshit jobs during the 1990s and 2000s, yet this occured at precisely the time that many firms were outsourcing peripheral functions and even offshoring core operations.

If this is not simple coincidence, it suggests that bullshit jobs are a characteristic of globalisation, but this would lead us to expect them to decline as globalisation has itself cooled after 2008 and even gone into reverse with onshoring and inhousing. This does not appear to have happened, at least not in the corporate sector. The pandemic and ensuing lockdown led many people to question the value of their work. This was both in the sense of putting their careers in perspective as people around them died and in discovering that they could accomplish a week's tasks in a couple of days if they worked from home and thus avoided the "frictions" inherent in an office job, though the greatest friction, poorly-managed meetings, got worse for many with the shift online. That some companies have now insisted that workers return to the office, ironically including Zoom, suggests that the disciplinary role posited by both Graeber and Tiratelli is real, though that clearly covers both useful and useless roles. What we still don't have is any greater clarity on why firms continue to indulge the latter. 

The simplest explanation is probably that firms do not know how to properly evaluate cognitive roles (consider the story of Elon Musk assessing programmers by the quantity of code they produced). They know there is waste and inefficiency, but it cannot be isolated as easily as on a production line. As no one firm has an advantage over any other in this respect, the overhead can be accepted simply as the cost of doing business, much as the inefficiency inherent in any bureacratic system has long been tolerated. The great promise of information technology was that it would improve bureaucracy by eliminating the human factor. The great promise of the Internet was that it would transfer the burden of administration onto customers. Both have only been partial successes. The next great hope is that AI will somehow do away with the need for many cognitive roles, though it should be obvious that, as with previous technologies, this is likely to simply generate novel bullshit jobs in its train. It appears that bullshit is simply a feature of any cognitive work, and as that type of work expands as a share of the labour force under the pressure of continuing automation, we can expect such jobs to proliferate.