Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.

It's All About You

Jonathan Liew's midweek column in the Guardian starts with sarcasm - "Well, obviously we need to talk about that Myles Lewis‑Skelly red card" - but doesn't manage to advance much beyond it, unless you consider the Punch-style whimsy - the idea that you can be a football writer and know almost nothing about the leading referees - as an improvement. What the column doesn't do (well, obviously) is talk about the Myles Lewis-Skelly red card, other than to imply that those who have questioned it were guilty of hyperbole: "That was almost certainly not the worst decision you’ve ever seen." Liew has some self-awareness in an otherwise self-regarding piece: "nobody needs another sensible middlebrow columnist explaining in deeply patronising serif font that, actually, it’s the fans who are the problem here." But this is merely the downpayment on his final conclusion that "much of the stigmatisation of referees is a sublimation of other grievances: fan disenfranchisement, rising prices, malign owners, useless administrators, a sport that at an elemental level no longer works for us." Everyone and everything else is to blame.

At heart, most Guardian sports journalists prefer other sports to football - cricket, rugby, tennis, you get the idea - so their attitude towards the game is one of barely-concealed class disdain mixed with professional ennui. Compare and contrast the coverage whenever cricket or rugby are in "crisis". The class angle is obvious when you see Liew equate anger over refereeing standards "with “two-tier policing” and “legitimate concerns about immigration” as something over which the little people can obsess." In suggesting we shouldn't dismiss such concerns he is not just being patronisingly ironic in Guardian house-style, he is reverting for comic effect to the newspaper's atavistic view of football fans as part of an uncultured mob. There are plenty of people angered by Michael Oliver's decision who voted remain in 2016 and would support greater generosity towards asylum-seekers today (some may even be fans of cricket). That these issues are not of equivalent political or social importance does not mean that one in particular should not be addressed.

By submerging refereeing into a general bleat about football as a rapacious industry and football fans as unreasonable consumers, Liew seeks to dilute the issue of the PGMOL's high-profile errors and questionable use of VAR. The latter has raised standards, but by winnowing the chaff it has also highlighted arbitrariness (the Lewis-Skelly red card could have been challenged by Darren England at the time). Liew's plea that referees "should be anonymous" is both irrelevant to the issue of poor judgement and the inadequate recourse when referees get it wrong. VAR has helped, but it has been implemented in a way that seeks to protect the referees rather than the integrity of the game, hence the long delays and poor communication. Despite his disdain, even Liew cannot help but admit that the quality of refereeing is a legitimate concern (sic) and one that has become more pronounced as the referees have lost the anonymity that he cherishes. In his words, the PGMOL has become "a sort of floating body in the ether, run neither by the Football Association nor the Premier League and thus answerable to nobody but its own insatiable main-character energy".

In the event, Arsenal appealed the red card and it was duly over-turned by the independent regulatory commission. This wasn't unexpected, given the near-unanimity among ex-players and coaches (who provide the bulk of the 5-man commission) in the aftermath that it was a yellow card, but you don't have to be paranoid have to wonder whether the game's "guardians", such as the FA, may have been irked by the outcome and whether that may have contributed to what in football parlance is referred to as "a bit of afters", with Arsenal charged for failing to control their players. The media management of the fallout included the report that Michael Oliver's family had faced social media abuse and threats, the aim apparently being to paint the referee as the real victim, which is never a smart strategy. The coincidental Sun interview with David Coote, which linked his well-known troubles with the pressure of being secretly gay, likewise came across as special pleading on behalf of the referees obliged to survive in "the macho world of football". The whiff of thuggery is never far from the surface in media descriptions.

The Guardian, in the person of Barney Ronay, cast a typically withering glance in the direction of Coote's revelations and his choice of newspaper in which to make them, including the now standard ironic self-deprecation ("why is this person in the Guardian newspaper now complaining"). Not only did he criticise the grubby motives of the Sun ("monetising Coote's distress"), but he also suggested that associating homosexuality with bad behaviour would not encourage other gay referees to come out, which is a fair point. But that negative association is also being made by Ronay, albeit in a deniable "look what this other paper printed" fashion. Just as Jonathan Liew's column didn't need writing, so neither did Barney Ronay's, and both can be accused of making themselves the main character in their relationship with football, as well as chasing clicks by contrarian sneering. Typically, Ronay's final conclusion is that the game itself is rotten, "the real takeaway is how brutally football has chewed this person up", which chimes with Liew's take that football is essentially vicious.

Let us return to the Lewis-Skelly red card decision. One of the regular reasons for dismissing criticism of referees is what Liew describes as "conspiracy hokum": the idea that refs have it in for your favoured club. It's important here to distinguish between bias and corruption (e.g. Coote has faced questions about whether he issued a yellow card as the result of a betting tip to a mate). There is no substantiated evidence of corruption in the English Premier League, but that referees are subject to unconcisous bias is academically well-established. They are influenced by the crowd, they tend to favour home teams and currently successful teams, and there is a degree of regional sympathy. This last point is particularly salient in English football because of its partisanship: every referee is also assumed to be a fan (many are happy to publicise their allegiances). Most PGMOL referees hail from the North West or elsewhere above the Severn-Wash line. London is barely represented (compare and contrast its contribution to players and coaches), which gives rise to a certain paranoia among some fans of teams in the capital.

The issue is not that the PGMOL is a closed shop, though its lack of diversity does make it look like one, but that it is an intrinsically conservative institution with its own cultural norms, which above all means defending your mates against players and coaches and treating fans as ignorant and ignorable. The focus on bias, which the media implicitly stokes as much as it formally derides, is a moralistic distraction from this sociological point, not least because unconcious bias tends to be very marginal and in some cases (e.g. home advantage) will even out. What matters to fans are game-changing incidents, which in football is a reflection of how many such incidents there can be and how their impact varies over the duration of a match. Issuing a red card in the opening minutes or a penalty in the closing minutes matters a lot more than vice versa. And what some fans have begun to suspect is that referees are sensitive to this, hence the chants of "Who's the wanker in the black" and "You don't know what you're doing" have increasingly given way to "It's all about you".

It is this suspicion that referees want to be the centre of attention that drives the current dissatisfaction, not the "sublimation of other grievances" as Liew put it. And, whether you consider it bias or not, a controversial decision involving a big club (or a national team) is more likely to raise the profile of a referee than a similar decision involving a small club. This is why Liew's appeal for referees to be "highly paid and totally anonymous" is naive, even allowing for the weary irony. English referees have been making themselves the centre of attention ever since matches were televised - e.g. Jack Taylor awarding two penalties in the 1974 World Cup Final and Clive Thomas denying Brazil a winning goal against Sweden in the 1978 World Cup. The very existence of the PGMOL is a by-product of television and the money it has injected into the game, while the characteristics the organisation displays - prickliness, pedantry, vanity - are those that could be recognised in Taylor and Thomas all those years ago. What football needs is not more VAR or less VAR but more humble referees, which would require a massive cultural change at the grassroots. But so long as top-division games are comprehensively televised, don't expect it to filter up to the PGMOL.

The Pivot of History

According to Branko Milanovic, "January 20, 2025 marks a symbolic end to global neoliberalism. Both of its components are gone. Globalism had now been converted into nationalism, neoliberalism has been made to apply to the economic sphere only. Its social parts—racial and gender equality, free movement of labor, multiculturalism—are dead. Only low tax rates, deregulation and worship of profit remain." There is no shortage of symbolism in Donald Trump's second inauguration, but I think the idea that his return to power marks the definitive end of global neoliberalism is too neat. The stark opposition that Milanovic proposes between globalism and nationalism makes little sense, neoliberalism continues to dictate social policy in such areas as welfare, and the claim that multiculturalism is dead is no different to rightwing commentators claiming that it has "failed". Pivotal moments are often little more than narrative conveniences. Just as neoliberalism started to influence government policy long before Margaret Thatcher entered 10 Downing Street in 1979, so its end will be a long, drawn-out affair. 

The roots of neoliberalism lie in the counter-movement against democracy that began after the First World War. The idea that politics should conform to market principles was a later ideological addition to the premise that democratic control over the economy would spell the end of private property. It was the exigencies of war that first opened the appalling vista of state control and led both to working class radicalism in the postwar years and the emergence of what Clara E Mattei in her book The Capital Order described as a "reconstructionist" agenda among progressives who saw state intervention as the means to advance social justice. The centre-piece of the counter-movement was the invention of austerity: an explicit programme to constrain the state by imposing costs on the democratic majority through reductions in welfare, wage repression and the fiscal discipline of government by debt-holders. These features have been as consistent throughout the history of neoliberalism as low tax rates, deregulation and the worship of profit. 

The simultaneous emergence of Fascism in Italy in the 1920s was not simply another expression of the anti-democratic movement. It showed that neoliberalism's political agenda was wholly compatible with an activist state. Fascist governments employed the same techniques of austerity but justified them through appeals to nationalism, racism and anti-Bolshevism. Private property was sacrosanct and state industries were privatised (the ideological equation of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism during the Cold War obscured this). Even in the depths of total war, the Nazi state declined to expropriate capitalists, with the exception of Jews. But notwithstanding this cleaving to economic orthodoxy, the Second World War vastly expanded the scope of the state and led to the election of "reconstructionist" governments, typically of a social-democrat stripe, in many countries after the war. But from the beginning, these governments were reluctant to confront capitalists and soon acquiesced in a return to austerity. Far from marking a retreat of neoliberalism, les trente glorieuses marked its steady march towards hegemony.

If there is a symbolic moment that marks the triumph of neoliberalism it wasn't the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but the Nixon shock in 1971. That brought to an end the Bretton Woods system and in particular led to the gradual removal of exchange controls and thus the free movement of capital. From that point onwards we see the steady spread of neoliberal practice throughout the developed world and the emergence of what would later be termed the Washington Consensus in respect of its relations with developing nations. The point to note here is that it took 50 years for neoliberalism to achieve that victory. Had the Second World War not happened, perhaps it might have been quicker, but the war happened because neoliberalism promoted Fascism. I suspect that the end of neoliberalism may take as long. Trump's first Presidential win marked the culmination of a phase of neoliberal decay that started around the millennium and became obvious in 2003, with the Iraq War marking the end of the delusions of liberal intervention. It became inarguable in 2008 when the banking crisis marked the end of financialisation as a substitute for material production. 

Subsequent attempts have been made to deal with the fallout, notably the imposition (again) of austerity as a way to protect asset values, the adoption of Green New Deal rhetoric as cover for the subsidisation of domestic producers, and the promotion of security interests as a justification for trade restraints on competitors, notably China. Trump's second inauguration indicates the extent to which these developments have now been normalised. Much of the claimed successes of the Biden Presidency were simply an extension of the mercantilist logic that Trump brought into the open during his first term, which is why his return to the White House shouldn't have been a surprise, even allowing for the Democrats' disastrous handling of the nomination process and the subsequent election. If Trump's initial electoral victory emphasised how neoliberalism had failed the democratic majority, his second indicates the failure of institutional politics to respond. But it doesn't mark the definitive end of neoliberalism. For all the distracting nonsense of his initial executive orders, the meat of his programme remains cuts to welfare, deregulation and lower taxes.

In a follow-up blog post, Milanovic notes how the principles of neoliberal globalisation have been in abeyance for over a decade and paints a consequently bleak picture of the immediate future: "It implies the return to mercantilistic policies where the interests of individual countries are paramount. It also means the abandonment of any cosmopolitan and internationalist perspective where the rules are at least in principle universal. We no longer have universal rules and the main culprit for not having universal rules is not Trump, but the view of the world where domestic political interest and the so-called security concerns are above everything else. This is not a world of globalization, but of parceled regionalisms and even nationalism." As a former employee of the World Bank, Milanovic is an evangelist for global development so he sees this as a betrayal. But I think emotion may be clouding his judgement. The interests of individual countries have always been paramount (this is the essence of realism) and the universal rules have always been selectively applied, as Israel frequently reminds us.

Simon Wren-Lewis has also been ruminating about the end of neoliberalism and the dynamics of what comes after: "the main political battles in many countries [will] be between on the one hand socially conservative right wing plutocratic populists and on the other centre or centre/left parties tentatively moving away from neoliberalism." That "tentatively" is doing a lot of work, as is the implication that the movement would be leftwards. Just consider two of Keir Starmer's recent pronouncements. First, the commitment to "ruthtless" public spending cuts in support of Rachel Reeves's fiscal rules. Second, his paean to the idea that the fairy dust of AI can transform public services and that selling off public data is a price worth paying for what amounts to little more than hype. These are the classic tropes of neoliberal utopianism: the liberation afforded by technology and the discipline of markets. With its rejection of nationalisation, its antipathy towards welfare and its belief that deregulation will spur growth, this is a government that remains in thrall to neoliberal practice. Insofar as the Labour right intend to move anywhere, it is, as Phil Edwards notes, to a "position where it embraces policies which would have been more characteristic of a far-Right party forty or fifty years ago".

Wren-Lewis makes an interesting point about international dynamics: "Increasingly the populist plutocratic right is an international project, and Trump’s victory gives its national representatives much more power. The UK is far from alone in having to contend with this kind of political interference. There is a danger that individual national governments that are not right wing populists may be too weak to combat this attack, particularly when resistance can result in economic retaliation from Trump in the form of tariffs." This may raise a rueful smile among anyone in a country that has historically had to put up with interference by the West, or where the only acceptable forms of government are those that satisfy the IMF and World Bank. A sub-text of much liberal commentary on the costs of Brexit has been the idea that the UK has been relegated from a nation that interferes in the affairs of others to one that is intefered with.

The plutocratic right has always been an international project, specifically to ensure the free movement of capital. When democracy looks like it might get out of hand, i.e. threaten private property, capital will up sticks and move elsewhere. Capital mobility is not simply about finding the best return but about minimising the risk of expropriation or (what amounts to the same thing in the minds of many capitalists) taxation. What has been little reported on is the way that initially isolationist and even autarkist rightwing movements have been repurposed in recent years, e.g. the anti-EU Front National became the grudgingly pro-EU Rassemblement National. This isn't due to any electoral calculation but because of pressure from its rich backers. While many saw opportunities in Brexit, notably the deregulation of capital flows through the City of London, few see similar opportunities in Frexit, with the country's continuing presence in the EU market being far more important to domestic and foreign capital. 

According to Wren-Lewis, "The fight against right wing plutocratic populism is not like previous post-war political battles between the right and left, over how society should be organised to best serve its citizens. Instead it is a battle over whether politics addresses the real world problems voters face, or whether it is instead preoccupied with a fantasy world." Politics has always dealt in fantasy, not least in the postwar era, from Churchill warning that Labour's 1945 manifesto heralded the arrival of a British Gestapo to Thatcher insisting that only monetarism could save British industry and reduce unemployment. As ever, what matters is not what people claim to believe but what those ostensible beliefs indicate, e.g. "Gestapo" was the hyperbolic inflation of worries about a nanny state but at root it reflected a fear that the state would seize private property. Likewise, monetarism was a technocratic rebranding of sound money: the idea that the interests of savers should trump those of consumers.

Wren-Lewis isn't simply wrong in his history here, he is obscuring that what we are faced with is not a novel situation but simply the latest round in the struggle between socialism and capitalism. The determination to rule out the possibility of any form of socialism has resulted in the advance and inevitable fall of governments of the ostensible "centre-left". They are incapable of reviving neoliberalism in its progressive, internationalist guise, but are also unwilling to properly embrace the legacy of postwar social democratic nationalism. Some have flirted with the idea of a national economy to outflank the far-right, but their unwillingness to consider nationalisation means they usually settle for a rhetorical nationalism that shades into xenophobia. The UK government promising to crack down on people-smuggling while opening up the NHS to foreign companies being illustrative.

Donald Trump doesn't mark the end of global neoliberalism because there is currently no effective opponent of neoliberalism within electoral politics. Until such time as there is, there can be no alternative and so neoliberalism will stumble on like a Zombie. The characteristics of its latest phase -  the populism, the plutocracy, the austerity - are simply amplifications of the nature of neoliberalism itself: the subversion of democracy to preserve property rights and impose the costs of capital's externalities on the general population. The re-emergence of a historically mild form of social democracy during the last decade, which was ruthlessly curtailed by the political establishment in both the UK and the US, indicates that the democratic appetite for an altenative exists, a point paradoxically reinforced by growing electoral disengagement. At present, it may seem hard to imagine how this could happen again, but it looked even less likely before 2015. Neoliberalism is dying and this gives rise to many morbid symptoms, not the least of which is the tendency to mistake a contingent form of rhetoric for substantial interests. The struggle of the last 100 years has been between democracy and private property, or socialism and capitalism, if you prefer. That isn't about to change.

AI Will Save Us All

One of the debates loosely collected under the rubric "The Great Stagnation" during the last decade was the question of why the productivity gains of the IT revolution were disappointing. This was an example of a failure of perspective, particularly in its comparison of the last quarter of the 20th century with earlier revolutions and the adoption of general purpose technologies (GPTs) such as steam power and electricity. Productivity is relative, not just temporally (producing more today from the same inputs than we did in the past) but spatially. The slow dissemination of technologies in the 18th and 19th centuries gave the UK a notable "first mover advantage", so much so that this phrase became pervasive in discussions of startups around the millennium. The lesson of history was that gradual dissemination, as much as government policy (e.g. protective tariffs or import-substitution), drove the catch-up of competitors with equal or better natural endownments such as the USA and Germany in the late 19th century. The greater rapidity of dissemination in subsequent technological waves, enabled in part by the cumulative effect of those earlier GPTs, has meant that first mover advantage has shrunk: a narrowing of the window of opportunity for the relative out-performance of peers. 

When all countries get the benefits of a new technology almost simultaneously the impact is diffused globally, but it manifests in different local productivity growth rates depending on the prior technological level. In simple terms, there is scope for a bigger step up in some areas than others. Consider the sub-Saharan African countries that skipped fixed-line telephony and went straight to cell networks and widespread smartphone usage after 2010. While the continent remains bedevilled by many structural impediments, it is now expected to be the second fastest growing region after Asia in coming years. Robert Solow's 1987 quip, "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics", was what you might expect from an MIT professor focused on the American economy. What he didn't seem to appreciate is that just as neoliberalism shuttered much of American industry and exported capital to peripheral nations, so it also exported productivity gains that might otherwise have been seen in the domestic data.

Perhaps the greatest impact of the IT revolution was that it enabled globalisation. While it was the container revolution and the falling cost of shipbuilding (as it moved to Japan and South Korea) that created the hard infrastructure for a huge increase in global trade, it was IT that enabled global inventory management and offshoring, which is why globalisation accelerated in the 1980s, not the 1960s. In other words, the productivity gains were revealed among developing nations able to leverage both the technology and low labour costs. Western corporations were able to tightly manage this process through technologies such as email, ERPs and CRMs, not forgetting the rapidly expanding and more reliable telecoms and datacoms that we nowadays take for granted. One part of the puzzle of Japanese stagnation, which started in the 1990s when North America and Europe were (relatively) prospering, was the country's reluctance to let go of the technologies that had powered its earlier boom years, such as fax machines and floppy disks. Other countries have read this as a lesson to embrace new technologies as soon as possible, which brings us to the current vogue for government AI strategies.

Much of the promise of AI is based on the assumption that it will drive productivity gains, but this can only be temporal rather than spatial because its dissemination is likely to take place pretty much everywhere at the same time. This is a consequence not only of that narrowing of the window of opportunity due to cumulative GPT waves (the most recent being the now-pervasive Internet), but because the technology itself is dependent on its concentration into global businesses that will necessarily seek maximum profit, and therefore rapid global spread, over national advantage (the tension between the MAGA right and the tech-bros in the US over immigration policy is reflective of this). Countries like the UK that produce national strategies for the development of AI as a productive industry, centred on light-touch regulation, facilitating infrastructure and leveraging "national data libraries", are seeking to combine the prescriptions of neoliberal development economics with the dirigisme of the postwar era, much as Joe Biden's administration in the US attempted more widely in respect of industrial strategy. It's not clear that this can succeed politically. That the electorate won't see the benefits any time soon is obvious, even to those who don't understand the technology. That AI's impact on wages may further erode the social solidarity necessary for a welfare state is perhaps less obvious as we try to peer through the hype.

The problem is that while the UK may well retain its position as a leading AI research centre this won't necessarily translate into a sustainable and significant economic advantage relative to other nations. What government subsidies will do is help defray the costs, both in cash terms and more importantly in terms of environmental externalities, for those global businesses that will dominate the sector, almost all of whom will be American. And you can be confident that they will pay minimal tax on their UK operations. But if the spatial advantage is likely to prove illusory, what of the temporal advantage? Will we at least see an above-trend improvement in domestic productivity? The first point to make is that if British firms have been slow in adopting new technology and working practices up to now, as evidenced by the poor productivity data, then it would seem unlikely that they'll suddenly embrace AI. The rate of the application of technology reflects multiple factors but the decisive one is usually management culture, and it's no secret that outside certain sectors and pockets (typically foreign-owned firms) British industry has poor calibre management.

The second point to make is structural. The UK's under-performance in productivity growth relative to its peers isn't because it lacks high-productivity businesses - there are many - but because of the composition of the national economy. The most obvious factor is the size of the service sector relative to manufacturing. Though the latter has shrunk relative to the former in all developed economies, the shift has been greater in the UK over the last 50 years. Achieving productivity gains in services is more difficult than in manufacturing where newer technology is often decisive. In services, productivity gains are limited by the human factor (the Baumol Effect), the greater difficulty in applying best practice to processes rather than tools, and by the low costs of entry (less need for plant and machinery). The latter encourages smaller, under-capitalised firms, which is a notable feature of the British economy. This is exacerbated by a tax regime that indulges sole traders ("Be your own boss"), small businesses (particularly family firms preserved by generous inheritance rules) and lifestyle companies (i.e. where the priority is a comfortable living rather than productivity).

If there is a strong sense of deja vu about the UK government's rhetoric about AI it is not simply because of its obliviousness to the structural peculiarities of the domestic economy or its proud technological illiteracy but because it sounds remarkably like the paeans once sung to globalisation by Tony Blair: "I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India." Thus Keir Starmer's recent article for the Financial Times opens "Artificial intelligence is the defining opportunity of our generation. It’s not a technology that is coming. It is already here, materially changing lives." The conclusion to the piece managed to be both needy and manic: "Put simply, that’s our message to anyone working at the AI frontier: take a look at Britain. Our ambition is to be the best state partner for you anywhere in the world. We can see the future, we are running towards it and we back our builders. Because we know that AI has arrived as the ultimate force for change and national renewal."

The cultish overtones are not just evidence that Blair's crazed eyes glanced approvingly over Starmer's speech. They point to the increasing desperation of the Prime Minister and his Chancellor as they find their economic strategy unravelling before their eyes. The idea that the financial markets would reward the return of "the grown-ups" to office has proven as naive as the idea that the UK could be shielded from the global turbulence now taking another turn as the implications of the second Trump Presidency are assessed. Insofar as Rachel Reeves had a plan, it was to defuse the Tories' fiscal bombs, provide enough extra funding to stop the NHS immediately keeling over, and otherwise sit tight and hope that improved business confidence would drive growth. Again, this studiously ignores the track record of the UK economy: the frothy nature of financial services growth around the millennium, the permanent scarring caused by austerity after 2010, and the sluggish bounceback after the pandemic as zombie SMEs staggered on. The fundamental problem of this government, like the New Labour administrations before it, is not that it doesn't understand technology but that it doesn't understand the UK economy. AI won't save Britain and it won't save this government.

Musk and the Cartel

The era of the political cartel, which broadly coincides with the neoliberal ascendancy, has been marked by both a rigid ideological conformity ("There is no alternative") and by a promiscuity in the exchange of policy positions. Ostensibly social-democratic parties adopting austerity and market discipline may be the most obvious example of this tendency, but we've also seen centrist parties adopt rightwing obsessions around multiculturalism and trans rights while rightwing parties reliant on wealthy donors have claimed to be the true "workers' party". Some of this is simple opportunism, but it also reflects a steady erosion in the transmission mechanisms of voter representation. With party members having less say in policy formation - a fact that coexists quite comfortably with a growing saying in leadership elections - and mass membership giving way to a hardcore of loyalists for whom policy is a second order consideration, party leaders have found it easier to flex their platforms. They have also found it convenient to rely on think-tanks for policy ideas. That these ideas are often contradictory and lack consistency is not an issue: they're in the business of selling products to meet short-term needs.

The result has been a growing disillusion among the wider electorate, reflected in falling turnout and low confidence ratings. The current Labour government's lack of popular support owes less to the traditional cynicism of "They're all the same" and a lot more to the feeling that they don't actually stand for anything. This makes Labour paradoxically predictable (they'll change nothing) and unpredictable (what promise will they renege on next?) It also makes it easier for "policy entrepreneurs" to disrupt the political field by offering the appearance of certainty, so long as they are willing to operate within the boundaries of the cartel (Nigel Farage is a member of the club, Jeremy Corbyn is not). Much of the increasingly common platform to be found on the centre-right, and which they have adopted in competition with the far-right, is made up of bold promises that could not possibly be fulfilled, such as the change to the ethnic composition of the nation. Unless you are prepared to go full Israel, there is no way to satisfy the expectations of racist and bigoted voters, which are about their neighbours (or some mythical London) rather than asylum seekers in small boats. 

A current example of this is the leader of the UK Conservative Party demanding a public inquiry into the "rape gangs scandal", despite there having already been multiple public inquiries that occured while the Tories were in government and whose recommendations they then largely ignored. This amnesia reflects more than political chutzpah. It highlights that policy adoptions are nowadays meaningless in opposition - something many Labour Party supporters are now ruefully realising - and should certainly not be taken as a guide to future action. They serve rather to position particular politicians relative to the perceived preferences of the party membership. A perfect example of this was Robert Jenrick, whom Kemi Badenoch defeated in the last Conservative Party leadership contest and who is now Shadow Justice Secretary, upping the ante by claiming that the "scandal" reflected the failure of integration and that multiculturalism had corrupted the rule of law. It's obviously nonsense, but more importantly it does not offer any kind of realistic solution, just bile. As such, it is very much in the tradition of Enoch Powell's "Rivers of blood" speech. That Jenrick has not been sacked tells you how far we have come since 1968.

In time-honoured fashion, the BBC has decided that the best way to address this unedifying sight is to ask Nigel Farage for his opinion. This is not simply a case of rightwing bias but a consequence of the structural imperatives that arise from the ideological flexibility of the cartel allied to his own talent at giving the media what it wants: unevidenced assertions, radical rhetoric not backed by substantive policy, and carefully calibrated outrage. The "Stop the boats" meme is a good example of the way that ideas first floated by the far-right (recall Katie Hopkins comments about "cockroaches") can spread horizontally across the political spectrum, even as the focus changes ("We are going to treat people smugglers like terrorists", according to Keir Starmer). This happens because there is only a weak countervailing vertical transmission from party members. Farage is attuned to this reality, hence his own party has little internal democracy and is run as a de facto private business. His BBC interlocuters, like Laura Kuennsberg, are also attuned to the need to defend their status within the politico-media class: peer pressure matters more than public opinion.

The recent intervention of Elon Musk into British politics has been fascinating less for the obvious ignorance he has displayed (hardly surprising if you get your understanding of the world from X's algorithms) than for the confusion it has sown among the UK's politico-media caste. At the level of government, this reflects the simple realities of the US-UK power dynamic. Just as Labour politicians like David Lammy, who once derided Trump as a "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath", now seek to kiss his hem as President, so they and others will accord Musk respect so long as he is seen as a favourite of the White House. Indeed, they will actively jostle to become his domestic agent. But Musk's intervention also highlights the weakness of contemporary political parties, notably the inability of the membership to enforce an even vaguely consistent line on the leadership, and the relative power that the media (whether old or new) has in framing public discourse. There are exceptions to this - e.g. the organic protests over Palestine that both the parties and the media have done their best to suppress - but in general public discourse has become coarser and more stupid as the cartel has flourished.

The tussle on the right between the Conservatives and Reform looks like an internal party contest over a declining (and passive) membership, but the importance of members has been over-stated. Shorn of their role in policy formation and with their ties to wider civic society attenuated by the decline of trade unions and volunteer organisations, party members these days are little more than occasional canvassers. And that is a trend that suits all parts of the cartel, as the pushback against Labour under Corbyn, and the subsequent membership decline under Starmer, clearly demonstrates. The fragmentation of the media since the 1980s has allowed politicians to rely more on direct contact with voters rather than indirect contact through members. A lot of the hesitancy over Musk arises from the fact that he is now a more effective conduit than Lord Rothermere, despite the steep decline of UK accounts on X. Where rightwing newspapers used to set the agenda of the BBC and ITV, it is now more likely to be social media, and particularly an outrageous tweet by Musk himself. This reflects the reality of American empire but it also reflects the decline of party democracy.