Liverpool Defies the Tories

The chief assumption of the commentariat in advance of the Labour Party annual conference in Liverpool was that Corbyn & co would find themselves on the back foot, fighting off the demand for a People's Vote and continuing accusations of antisemitism. In the event, they finished on the front foot with an offer to support the government in the Commons vote on the Withdrawal Agreement if Theresa May secures "a deal that includes a customs union and no hard border in Ireland, if you protect jobs, people’s rights at work and environmental and consumer standards". Despite the ecstatic welcome given to Keir Starmer's promise that remain remained in play, the People's Vote campaign is now effectively dead. Labour has not been bounced into the promise of a second opportunity to vote remain and the most likely scenario, should it manage to topple the government (still a long shot) and enact a further referendum (which wouldn't necessarily follow), would be a choice between no-deal and a revised deal that fulfilled the criteria laid out this week. In essence, Corbyn has called the remainers bluff by making it clear that the only (if remote) chance of a second referendum with a remain option lies through the election of a Labour government. For some remainers, that will be too high a price to pay.

While Corbyn will never be wholly free of the charge of antisemitism, it should be obvious by now that the accusation cuts little ice with the majority of party members (the demonstrative support for the motion on Palestinian solidarity was telling even if it meant that the interests of Palestinians themselves remained marginalised) and is not a priority for the wider public. In retrospect, the distraction from Labour's substantive policy evolution over the summer has been slight. I don't imagine this will prompt any reflection among the media, many of whom seem to have decided that the next big scare will be Corbyn's "threat" to their free-speech. You can expect this to be picked up at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham next week, though I suspect the major theme will be the trusty old standby of national security: Corbyn (and McDonnell) as the terrorists' friend, the apologist for Russia and Iran, the quisling coward who wouldn't launch ICBMs at Buenos Aires in defence of the Falklands etc. Despite Corbyn's antipathy to violence, we can also expect much pearl-clutching over Labour's plans for various tax bombshells, not to mention the jacquerie of industrial democracy.

Labour's evolving policy platform remains modest by historical standards (and even conservative by recent standards in the case of defence and policing) but it is clearly more in line with pubic opinion than the pro-business, pro-austerity, pro-rich programme that the Conservative Party has found itself defending, almost by default, as its imaginative energies are sapped by the rolling disaster of the Brexit negotiations and the much-delayed but still inevitable leadership challenge. The headline-capturing ideas floated by John McDonnell, such as the Inclusive Ownership Fund that would see workers having voting and dividend rights in their companies, should probably be taken with a pinch of salt at this stage as they are clearly still gestural. They are part of the war of position rather than the war of manoeuvre, to put it in Gramscian terms, the aim of which is to normalise the return of social responsibility to discussions about the workplace. Predictably, liberal commentators who have traditionally espoused pious hopes of just such a thing have been prominent among those quibbling over the practicalities. The free-market right have, to give them credit, correctly identified that this is really a debate about taxation. Their problem is that support for increased taxes on corporate profits and unearned income is "the new common sense".

The likely shape of a Brexit deal has been clear for some time as regards the future trading relationship: it's either Canada or Norway. But neither model would adequately address the issue of Ireland, meaning that any deal will necessarily have some bespoke elements: the "plus". A free-trade agreement is only feasible if Northern Ireland is treated as a separate regulatory jurisdiction. While this does not undermine the "constitutional integrity" of the United Kingdom, as some have fatuously claimed, it would mean a goods border in the Irish Sea and the continued oversight of the ECJ in Northern Ireland. Theresa May's get-out clause for a possible compromise is that she would be willing to accede to this if it were mandated by the Northern Ireland Assembly, but that presumes the cooperation of the DUP. That qualification has been interpreted as giving the DUP a veto on the "backstop" agreed with the EU last December, however it is just as plausible to see it as her attempt to manoeuvre the DUP into a position where they would have to take responsibility for the imposition of a deeply unpopular hard border.

Norway is currently a member of the EU Single Market via the EEA, but not of the EU Customs Union. Nor is it subject to the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy. A deal that would avoid a hard border in Ireland would require membership of the (or "a") Customs Union at a minimum. Objectively, Labour's six tests can only be passed by a Norway+ deal in which the UK remains in the Customs Union and (with some minor variations) the Single Market. The issue of freedom of movement could be finessed by a strict application of the current rules (e.g. requiring EU citizens to find a job within three months or return home, which would probably necessitate an expanded ID card system), but this would be Brexit-in-name-only (BINO). Critics of this are right to say that we might as well stay in the EU as all we achieve is a paradoxical loss of control and sovereignty, making Brexit self-defeating in its own terms, however it remains the best outcome within the constraints of the 2016 referendum result and the Good Friday Agreement.

Essentially the two options are about the direction of travel after the end of the transition period. Canada+ would provide the platform for future divergence - a point that the likes of Michael Gove have been quite open about. What they haven't explained is whether they expect Northern Ireland's alignment with the EU to alter over time. Keeping that door open will be crucial to the support of the DUP, whose existential cause remains divergence from the Republic. Norway+ would provide a platform for future convergence, which means the door would be open to eventual re-accession. For this reason, remainers would be wise to start supporting rather than berating Labour, but that presumes they're pragmatists. Their track record suggests otherwise. Over the last two years, they have repeatedly played the wrong hand: questioning the legitimacy of the 2016 referendum; prematurely pushing an EEA amendment in the Commons; insisting on a People's Vote on the final deal with no thought as to how one might be brought about. In large part, this is because their campaign has been dominated by those whose day job is undermining Jeremy Corbyn.

Over in the blue corner, Theresa May grimly hooks her arms around the ropes as the blows rain in. The imminent Conservative Party annual conference may not be as awful as last year, but its shrill defiance of both the EU and Labour is unlikely to make attractive viewing for any but Tory loyalists. The Chequers Plan is now little more than a battered placeholder. The Brexiteers are pushing for a minimalist Canada free trade agreement but without any compromises on Northern Ireland, which will once more be solved by "technology". The lure of a no-deal flounce remains strong among the ultras. The pro-EU "rebels" are increasingly distraught that their preferred outcome will essentially be Labour's. Naturally they will balk at that and glumly vote with the government on a Withdrawal Agreement that is likely to be closer to Canada. If May can get the DUP onside (a very big if) then she should win the vote with a  bit to spare, avoiding the need for Chuka Umunna to bail her out by putting "country before party". Labour's hopes of a victory in the meaningful vote that might in turn lead to a vote of no confidence depend on May alienating the DUP, but while the DUP might "rebel" on the first they'd have nothing to gain by supporting the second.

The most likely scenario now is Canada for Great Britain and Norway for Northern Ireland, but this will have to be dressed up in such a way as to make a DUP rebellion difficult. While its core supporters are attracted to a deal that binds it more closely to Britain, reintroduces the border with the Republic and undermines the Good Friday Agreement, there are few votes for such a hard-line stance in Northern Ireland. If she has any sense, May will threaten the DUP with a local referendum on the acceptance of a special regulatory status, thereby bypassing the impasse caused by the suspension of the Stormont Assembly. The price the DUP may demand for their cooperation will be high, perhaps even including May's resignation. One of the themes of the Brexit drama has been the claim that "nothing has changed", both as a defence of the government's chaos and as an analysis of the fundamental balance of power in the negotiations. While nothing changed at Salzburg, and it is unlikely that anything of real substance will emerge from the Tory conference, something did change this week in Liverpool. Labour has defied May to secure a Norway deal in the national interest and thereby jeopardise the unity of the Conservative Party. As sure as eggs are eggs, May will find reason to put party before country.

Sky's the Limit

The news that the US media giant Comcast has beaten 21st Century Fox in an auction for the UK-based broadcaster Sky probably won't prompt much political comment during the conference season, beyond perhaps some cheerful rumination on the eclipse of the Murdoch empire. With Fox simultaneously selling most of its TV and film production assets to the Disney Corporation, the Dirty Digger and his scions will fall back on their newspaper business, though their enhanced liquidity means you can't rule out another buying spree elsewhere. For all the framing of this as a titanic corporate battle, or the final frustration of one of the leading media entrepreneurs of the last 50 years, it should really be seen as a routine piece of business in a sector that is constantly cannibalising and reconfiguring its constituent parts. What is ostensibly driving this latest round of buyouts is the belief that only a handful of very large companies will be able to compete with Amazon and Netflix in a future market centred on the streaming of premium content - i.e. live sport, films and original TV productions. The assumption is that only "global players" will thrive, but this calls into question the future of "national" media, which is politically important.

There are two secular trends discernible in the history of media: a tendency towards consolidation and a profusion of content. The latter is mainly driven either by the emergence of new media, which usually generates novel content, or by the increase in channels available to existing media, which usually spreads existing content more thinly (the "great age of TV" enabled by DVD boxsets and streaming is more about quantity than quality). Both are constant features. Whether new media allows new content producers to enter the market largely depends on whether it lowers the cost of access. TV is an example of an expensive medium, hence early channels emerged out of existing radio corporations, such as CBS and the BBC. The Internet is an inexpensive medium, both for production and broadcast, hence the profusion of content, but it did not take long for the lion's share of online attention to be dominated by both a small number of platforms and traditional content providers. As each wave of new media technology recedes, the now broader media industry consolidates.

Depending on the economic climate, consolidation is contingently justified either as a defensive play (we must get bigger or die in a bearish market) or an offensive play (we must buy market share to quickly expand in a bullish market), but it is clearly a structural feature of a sector that rewards cartelisation and monopoly, hence the persistent need for regulation over media ownership to ensure adequate plurality. Contemporary old media, such as  newspapers and TV, claim that the structural dynamics of Internet publishing, such as network effects and zero marginal costs, are leading to a new and more dangerous form of monopoly in which platforms like Google dominate. This claim of novelty is misleading. The dominance of the BBC in the pre-Internet age was a product of the network effect of the licence fee, while the dominance of Facebook in the US today is nothing compared to that of Hearst in newspapers and radio in the 1920s. In comparison, Google's dominant position in online search has been marked by a broadening of access to independent content, not by a narrowing.

Much of the animus of the modern newspaper industry (and to a certain extent the TV industry as well) towards the likes of Google and Facebook arises from the belief that they are "outsiders" who don't share a journalistic culture and the supposed civic values that this entails (films like Spotlight and The Post are celebrations of an ethical world that would never countenance phone-hacking - no siree). This was particularly evident in the fearful responses to Jeff Bezos's acquisition of The Washington Post in 2013. In the event, the Post has changed little in it's coverage or editorial slant (it's still performatively baiting the President, as if to consciously evoke Watergate, while otherwise toeing the neoliberal line) though it has clearly improved its online presence by leveraging Amazon technology and placing a greater emphasis on consumer analytics. The alien culture that Bezos has introduced to the Post turns out to be just a more ruthless mode of capitalism. Journalistic culture will adapt to this, just as it adapted to the rise of the "yellow press" and tabloids.

Many old media mergers in recent years have been explained as the search for economies of scale in the face of the threat of new media, from the Guardian Media Group acquiring the Observer to Trinity Mirror buying the Express titles. This is the defensive play. In fact, this process of consolidation long predates the appearance of the commercial Internet. For example, the broad media economy in the US was dominated by 50 firms in the early eighties but by only 23 in 1990 (cited in Herman & Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent). The deregulation and relaxation of competition rules in both the US and UK in the 1980s enabled new market entrants, but it also stimulated aggressive buyouts. To narrow this down to the UK press, Murdoch's acquisition of The Times and Sunday Times was the defining move of the era, not the launch of Today, and it produced a more relaxed regulatory environment that would lead to further consolidation and eventually Murdoch's failed bid for outright control of Sky, none of which can be blamed on the impact of the Internet.

This process of consolidation, which has been increasingly international since the 90s, has been paralleled by one of homogenisation. As well as straightforward acquisition and expansion across national boundaries, there has been a tendency for domestic media organisations to increasingly adopt global norms, which largely means American norms. Two examples of this are the growth in generic lifestyle content and entertainment coverage, reflecting the inter-dependence of different media. With newspapers and TV both having absorbed the subject matter and style of magazines in the 80s, it's striking to recall just how little arts and entertainment coverage was provided by daily newspapers and TV news in the 70s. A consequence of this is that old media have been obliged to adopt a more cosmopolitan outlook (pun intended) because so much lifestyle content and entertainment is now international - from avocado toast through Fitbits to the Avengers - reflecting globalised capitalism. This causes tonal problems for intrinsically nationalist media like newspapers, who find themselves oscillating between isolationism (yay, Brexit) and internationalism (yay, Netflix).

What matters in lifestyle and entertainment coverage is not the specific commodities but the way that they are presented, from the giddy listicles of "The best teen films of the 80s" to the archly ironic coverage of high fashion (the complete oeuvre of Hadley Freeman, in other words). This is a distancing from the real world where hard choices are about self-denial not ranking, and where vicarious pleasure is no longer a harmless bit of fun but a reminder that certain things will always be out of reach, like a home of you own. That magazines themselves are losing readers is a paradoxical tribute to the hegemony of the magazine form across other media. While many are prepared to attribute this decline to the impact of the Internet, in reality it would have happened anyway as advances in print production allowed newspapers to provide a more colourful experience and the expansion of daytime TV targeted audiences (notably women and the elderly) that were traditional consumers of magazines. Why buy Cosmopolitan once a month when you can read The Guardian or watch Loose Women every day?

The press's solipsistic coverage of its own industry in the early Internet age - from defensive mergers to the merit of paywalls - gave the impression of an existential struggle, but the reality is that the rate of firm consolidation or title exit over the last twenty years has not been substantially different to the period before the arrival of the World Wide Web. The move of Internet firms such as Amazon and Netflix into programme production has been less transformative than the impact of TV on the Hollywood studio system in the 60s and 70s, or even the deregulation of TV in the 80s and 90s. Social media has not challenged the dominance of traditional media firms in terms of news content or opinion, though it has made visible the long-standing dissatisfaction of media consumers. "Echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" are a myth. Their prominence in the critique favoured by established organisations is a guilty admission of the shift of media since the 60s away from "admass" towards the creation of virtual communities of taste, quite at odds with real communities and far more granular than class formations, for the purposes of commercial targeting.

We can draw two conclusions. First, consolidation is the industry norm and occurs regardless of the emergence of new media. Second, the expansion of content leads to homogenisation even as it claims to service ever more specific demographics. Insofar as there has been a fundamental change over the last twenty years, it has been the increase in cross-border consolidation, not the impact of the Internet. The threats we face in terms of the erosion of media plurality and variety come not from the likes of Amazon and Google but from the structural dynamics of the media industry and the way that these are amplified by globalisation and deregulation. I doubt that either Comcast or Fox was too concerned by Jeremy Corbyn's comments that "change is coming" and that there was a need to "democratise" the media - they certainly don't appear to have priced this risk into their bids - but we may be approaching a fork in the road. We could be facing Brexit-inspired Tory deregulation leading to greater US domination of the UK media (a more worrying development than chlorine-washed chickens), or a Labour government committed to tighter regulation and antipathetic towards foreign ownership. If it happens, the latter will be condemned as censorship, but it will be more in keeping with the attitudes cultivated by a "nationalist" press. One way or another, Comcast's acquisition of Sky probably marks the start of a new era.

Exhausted Metaphors

Seeing Owen Patterson on the platform as the European Research Group launched its report on the Northern Ireland border recalled to mind one of the more striking metaphors of recent years. Asked in 2013 about a badger cull that he had been responsible for as Secretary of State for the Environment, he explained that the cull had failed to meet its targets because "the badgers have moved the goalposts". This was a metaphor both mad and strangely beautiful in its originality. Metaphors have been much in the news of late, with Chuka Umunna criticised for using "call off the dogs" in relation to Labour Party members seeking to hold MPs to account, and Boris Johnson criticised for referring to Muslim women as "letterboxes" and calling Theresa May's commitment to the Northern Ireland backstop a "suicide vest". Umunna's canine comparison probably wasn't as deliberately insulting as some imagine, but it also lacked any hint of irony or self-awareness given the hounding of Jeremy Corbyn. Reducing people to inanimate objects is literally dehumanising, but Johnson's crack about veiled women was at least an attempt at humour, however ill-judged, while he has a point about the potentially fatal nature of the backstop: it must compromise either Brexit or the constitutional integrity of the UK. My own view is that the latter is mostly myth anyway, but that is not a view shared by the DUP and they hold the key to the next act of the Brexit drama.

The optimum moment for the Brexit ultras to challenge Theresa May and force a no-deal "clean break" came and went in the first quarter of this year, once it was clear that she was edging towards maximum alignment as the only strategy that could satisfy the terms of the provisional agreement made with the EU last December. While the recent Chequers statement remains a dog's dinner that is unacceptable to the EU27 in its current form, it was a public statement that maximum alignment is now the only game in town. The resignations of David Davis, Steve Baker and Boris Johnson proved to be less the trigger for an insurgency and more the concession of temporary defeat. This doesn't mean that May is now secure as Prime Minister. There is a chance that she will be defeated in the Commons on the "meaningful vote" on the withdrawal terms, which could lead to a vote of no confidence and an early general election, and even if she survives that first vote there is a strong chance that the Conservative Party will push for a "true-beleaver" thereafter to manage the negotiation of the future trading relationship during the transition period. She remains terminally damaged by the 2017 general election and few expect her to lead the party into another.

That the ultras passed up the opportunity to challenge May earlier this year proved that they, like the Tory remainer "rebels", are all bark and no bite. This means that the fate of Brexit and the government will be decided by the coming Commons vote on the withdrawal terms, assuming May manages to steer the ship into port. The encouraging words from Michel Barnier suggest this is almost certain to happen, though what floats in on the tide may not look particularly seaworthy. Much of the "deal" will remain deliberately opaque, particularly with regard to the future trading relationship and the role of the ECJ, but the substantial issues will be clear enough, simply because the EU27 will insist on clarity around its red lines, notably Ireland. This will probably mean a de facto and indeterminate continuation of the customs union and some elements of the single market in order to avoid a hard border. It will be sold by May as "Canada plus" - the UK's position as a rule-taker and ancillary to the EU dressed up as a free trade agreement between equal powers - but it will be interpreted as Brexit in name only by many on both sides of the argument.

The ultras will probably split (they already appear to be at loggerheads over attempts to firm up their counter-proposals). The "pragmatists", probably led by Gove within the government, will insist that the deal is a glass-half-full and that the potential for future divergence has been secured. They will attract enough ultras to reduce a Tory rebellion to a hardcore, which may be as few as single figures if the threat of a general election defeat remains likely. The chance of remainers such as Soubry and Grieve finding reason to oppose the government is negligible. For all the talk of the epoch-defining nature of the vote, self-preservation will be uppermost in many minds. The DUP is the most volatile element in the government's Commons majority, and the one bloc of votes that could trigger a general election through a no confidence motion, but they will find it difficult to publicly oppose a deal that avoids a hard border. That said, they have a long tradition of finding obscure reasons to thwart Number 10 and their game-plan all along has been to encourage a breakdown in negotiations so that a hard border could be blamed on the EU. Their absence from this week's ERG press conference simply indicates that they are holding their cards close to their collective chest.

Labour will oppose the deal, both because it's likely to be a hot mess and in order to topple the government, but some on the right of the party may be unable to resist the temptation to put "country before party" and so support May, arguing that half a loaf (and the distant prospect of reaccession) is better than none. That Labour will probably be offering a larger portion of the same loaf will be dismissed by reference to the bird in the hand being worth two in the bush, and thus an implicit claim that Labour under Corbyn cannot win a general election. This will no doubt convince the centrist commentariat but will go down like a bucket of cold sick among the vast majority of Labour Party members, including those on the right. For this reason there will probably only be a handful of rebels, including those whose days in the party are already numbered, such as Umunna, and eccentrics like Kate Hoey (who will probably follow the DUP line) and Frank Field (who may have been formally expelled by then anyway). There isn't going to be a British En Marche but nor is there going to be a new National Labour.

It is impossible to predict the number of rebels, but my guess is that they will be small on either side. If Labour commits to a more formal relationship, such as membership of the customs union or the EEA, perhaps with the proviso of a second referendum to ratify a revised deal, then this could reduce the numbers even further. The prospect of a defeat for the government would then depend on whether any Tory remainers would vote against the whip. History suggests that only Ken Clarke would have the guts to do so, in which case the vote will largely follow party lines and, assuming she keeps the DUP onside, May will have achieved her immediate goal. However, this won't tighten her grip on the premiership. Instead she will be more vulnerable to a leadership challenge as the new priority for leavers will be to ensure there is one of their own in Number 10 ahead of the final negotiations on trade. Boris Johnson's rhetorical focus on trade deals has been transparent all along, though I think he has pissed-off too many Conservative MPs to be sure of making the final shortlist for a vote of the membership.

Assuming they don't bottle out, the handful of Labour "rebels" around Umunna will lose the whip. I doubt they'll join the Conservative Party, though there will be plenty of encouragement from media centrists talking up the need for a government of "national unity" (or even "all the talents", God help us) as we face the transition. More likely is that they will form a groupuscule in Parliament that will seek an electoral accommodation with the LibDems (the first time as tragedy etc). Hoey, like Field, would probably sit as an independent. None will survive the next general election. I also doubt there will be any Tory MPs defecting to UKIP, not just because of that party's move to the far-right under Gerald Batten, but because of their desire to stay within the Conservative fold and exert maximum pressure for divergence. Given the deal's ambiguity, there will be scope for a hardening of the terms between March 2019 and December 2020. With Johnson and Davis busted flushes, Michael Gove will seek to place himself at the head of the ultras, though there will be resistance to this given his track-record. There will also be friendly articles in The Times and Daily Mail suggesting that Gove's treachery towards Johnson in 2016 has proven to be justified by subsequent events.

The choice of metaphors tells us something about the speaker. Johnson's are colourful, excessive and casually brutal. The Northern Ireland backstop is less a suicide vest than an admission that the Good Friday Agreement moved the constitutional goalposts (something that the anti-agreement Gove has never been shy about admitting). The defence of Umunna by his supporters, that "call off the dogs" is a figure of speech devoid of any animus, is an inadvertent admission that he lacks imagination and originality. Of course, it would be the same even if he deliberately set out to insult ordinary party members. His recourse to shrill hyperbole - calling the Labour Party "institutionally racist", for example - suggests a man who is less than careful in his choice of language, though this won't stop the Orwell-botherers in the press rooting for him. One dimension of the gradual shift in public sentiment over the last couple of years has been the exasperation with tired and empty language, from "Brexit means Brexit" to "strong and stable". Though the public harbours doubts about both Corbyn and McDonnell, one thing they seem to like is their plain-speaking. After a quarter century of the messianism and PR-speak of Blair and Cameron, perhaps there is nostalgia for the "dull and uninspiring" rhetoric of the Major and Smith years.

Prosperity and Justice for All

The significance of the IPPR report, Prosperity and Justice: A Plan for the New Economy, is that it would not have been produced as recently as five year ago. Then, Ed Miliband was denounced as a Bolshevik for the modest proposal of a cap on energy prices. That the Conservative government has now implemented such a cap is merely routine opportunism. That a think-tank closely identified with New Labour has developed a plan for the economy that centres on social justice - i.e. equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity - suggests a more fundamental change in attitude. This is reflected in the language. For example, the word "worker" appears six times more frequently than "entrepreneur" in the report. However, "socialism" is nowhere to be found and "capitalism" only appears in the notes in reference to other publications. This remains at heart a centrist view of the world, but that in turn shows the extent to which the Overton Window has shifted in the realm of political economy. Some commentators have associated that shift with the impact of Brexit, or with Labour's strong showing in last year's general election, but a better analysis is that they were symptoms of a country becoming both more radical and more pro-social since 2010. In retrospect, Ed Miliband's failure in 2015 looks to have been the result of his timidity.

The positive response by John McDonnell, who compared it to the Beveridge Report, might suggest that the IPPR's thinking provides a strong indication of the contents of Labour's next manifesto, and that the latter will therefore be cautious but presented as radical and transformative. On the other hand, McDonnell may be reminding us (with no little irony) that the 1945 Labour government went much further than the Liberal Beveridge did in his proposals, particularly in its plans for the NHS. One piece of evidence to support the latter view is that McDonnell's first major policy statement since the report's publication has been to advocate "ownership funds" whereby a portion of a company's profits would be used to buy non-tradeable shares on behalf of the employees that would provide collective voting rights and potential dividends. This is significantly more radical than the IPPR's suggestion of tax incentives for employee ownership trusts (EOTs) and co-operatives. What McDonnell appears to be suggesting is closer to the Meidner Plan than John Lewis.

The immediate response of the right to the IPPR report focused on the proposals for the greater taxation of wealth (removing the lower rates for CGT and dividends, replacing inheritance tax with a lifetime gifts tax etc), rather than on the proposals for increased worker power or greater state intervention in industry. While wealth and its associated hierarchies have always been the right's priority, they have historically cloaked this in concerns over the competence of the state and the need to encourage private enterprise. Sociologically, this suggests that the right is now dominated more by rentier interests than the entrepreneurs of the Thatcherite imagination, which would certainly accord with the evidence that the Tory Party's electoral support is now even more dominated by the over-60s. The response of the left has been broadly positive, albeit with some caveats about excessive caution, however I can't help thinking that this is because the report is essentially comforting rather than challenging, and even a bit nostalgic. The importance accorded to exports and R&D is strongly reminiscent of David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, while some of the suggestions in relation to state-led investment and technocratic support for improving productivity carry the flavour of the Wilson years.

The welfare system and education are both "out of scope", which seems odd in a report addressing social justice, but this means that the report can delicately avoid ideas that might challenge the fundamental tenets of social democracy, such as a universal basic income (UBI). Insofar as education does get a look in, there is still an emphasis on the panacea of "improved skills", despite the fact that the two decades since Labour won the 1997 general election on the mantra "education, education, education" have not produced a notable improvement in labour calibre as measured in GDP or productivity. While poor management is cited as a factor in the latter, the connection between the UK's management culture and private education does not come in for scrutiny. All that said, the report's recognition of the importance of power in the economic sphere is welcome, though its unashamedly industrial focus ("we need to shift from trade deficits to what we call 'new industrialisation' across the UK") means that it tends to ignore the importance of power in areas such as the professions and the self-employed.

In terms of those parts of society and the economy that are addressed, the report is still within the paradigm of New Labour. For example, its proposals around housing are still biased towards purchase rather than rent. Saying that "one-third of all new housing should be social housing for rent; one-third genuinely affordable (in perpetuity) for sale; and one-third for sale at market prices" seems radical in the current context, but this will not reverse the historic shift of rentals from the public to the private sector while it isn't explained how you make a third of new builds "genuinely affordable (in perpetuity)" in an open market. A radical policy would be an immediate moratorium on right-to-buy and for 90% of all new builds over the next five years to be council houses for rent. Together with controls on private rents, improved tenancy rights and punitive taxes on empty properties, this might stand a chance of making a small dent in the housing problem over the course of a parliament. In reality, a fix will take a generation, if only because of the headwinds of an ageing population and declining household density. The challenge is at least a big as that of post-war slum-clearance and needs to be addressed as systematically.

Poor productivity is correctly analysed as largely a problem of too many small businesses and too many poor managers, rather than a feckless or unskilled labour force, but the solution is essentially cosmetic in its focus on the coaching of firms. While poor productivity isn't a general problem (there are many high productivity firms in the UK), it is still structural. The key issue is that there are weak incentives for SMEs to consolidate and invest. Raising the minimum wage and empowering unions will both help, but a more radical approach would be to raise the cost of starting a business (or make it expensive to maintain a failing one) in order to dissuade poor performers. In other words, if you can't deliver an above-average rate of productivity from the off, you shouldn't be forming a new firm. That might seem "anti-entrepreneurial", but it should be clear by now that the UK's indulgence of the "entrepreneurial spirit" over the last thirty years has actually been counter-productive, leading to a low-productivity, low-wage economy. Instead of Schumpeter's brave entrepreneur and creative destruction we've had lazy lifestyle businesses and cannibalisation.

The concerns over monopoly are fashionably centred on technology platforms like Google and Amazon, but this tends to downplay that competition between large businesses has declined across many traditional sectors for reasons that have nothing to do with new technology. One reason has been financial engineering, leading to anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions. There is also the problem that natural monopolies that have been privatised, like rail and energy, simply don't produce real competition. Paradoxically, nationalisation would actually reduce the degree of monopoly in the private sector. The IPPR's solutions for restraining the tech giants range from a new quango, the Office for Digital Platforms (OfDigi, no less), to network neutrality and protecting open standards (another example of the essential nostalgia of this report, harking back as it does to the 1990s and an earlier conception of the "new economy"). One that caught my eye was "requiring companies and public institutions to keep audit logs of the data they feed into their algorithms and be prepared to explain their algorithms to the public on request". A statement on what the algorithm is meant to do will not expose unconscious bias or errors of omission in scope. A better proposal would be to require companies to provide a public interface for their algorithms that anyone could feed their own test data to.

Overall the IPPR report is a positive development, though less for the specific proposals than for the rehabilitation of the twin ideas that the state can both positively influence the economy and effect social justice. It is an argument for an activist government, but that in itself does not mean the IPPR is breaking with neoliberal orthodoxy so much as rejecting the extremes of post-Thatcherite laissez faire, which means an evolution from the thinking of the New Labour days rather than a revolution. I suspect the report's chief value for the contemporary Labour Party is in the normalisation of the idea that the state can intervene in the economy. The danger is that it encourages the strain of social democratic nostalgia that has been visible since 2008, leading to a policy framework centred on what David Edgerton characterised as "productionism". The positive sign is that John McDonnell in particular appears to be up for more radical ideas, notably in relation to ownership and social protection. I doubt the IPPR report will have as lasting an influence as Beveridge, but it is a sign of which way the political wind is now blowing.

The Future Nation State

This is a follow-up post to my earlier review of David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History, looking at the contemporary political situation in light of the postwar "national economy".

Edgerton's focus on the social democratic era and the 1945 government's pivotal role in shifting towards a national economy will obviously be of interest to the modern Labour Party. If the current division between the left and right has meaning beyond factional antipathy, it is over the degree to which the party should become more national in its thinking on both the economy and welfare: a move towards more planning and more social investment and away from the free movement of capital and an austerity justified by the demands of the global bond market. That the right of the party have steered well clear of this topic, preferring to focus on the unifying emotionalism of their defiance of Jeremy Corbyn, suggests a desire to avoid addressing the fundamental differences that exist between the sovereigntist "old right" (Blue Labour, various Northern MPs) and the Blairite globalists. That defiance has now extended to the suggestion that Corbyn's internationalism is problematic for Labour, essentially because it distracts from the party's domestic programme.

This strikes me as wrong and ahistorical, being an example of the media's obsession with propriety and the political caste's assumption that foreign policy is of little interest to "civilian" voters. In fact, internationalism has always been a strong feature of the Labour Party, even during the height of the national economy years. For example, in 1960, Hugh Gaitskell, the then Labour Leader and very much on the right of the party ideologically, addressed the inaugural rally in Trafalgar Square of the South Africa Boycott Movement, which would shortly afterwards be renamed the Anti-Apartheid Movement. To put this in perspective, Corbyn is a patron and former chair of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign but has given only qualified backing to the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (BDS) against Israel that the PSC supports. Another example is the way that Harold Wilson - a man whose image as a national technocrat who preferred to holiday in the Scilly Isles suggested a pronounced insularity - was acutely sensitive (if not always sympathetic) to the party membership's internationalism in his handling of South Africa, Rhodesia and Vietnam.

The commitment to international solidarity began to decline during the 1970s as the British state turned away from the national economy towards greater integration in the global economy, leading it to adopt a more pragmatic (or unprincipled) attitude towards foreign relations. For example, though the wider labour movement was strongly supportive of the Chile Solidarity Campaign following the 1973 coup, the Labour government of 1974-79 was gesturally sympathetic but reluctant to impose sanctions for fear of damaging trade, and only withdrew the British ambassador after the torture of Dr Sheila Cassidy, a UK citizen, in 1976. This history is significant on two counts: first, as an example of the growing friction between the left and the right of the party that would reach a crescendo in the early-80s; and second, because it provided a precedent for Thatcher's foreign policy towards South Africa, notably her opposition to sanctions. That antagonism within Labour was not simply a left-right issue, though it aligned that way at the time, but a fundamental disagreement over sovereignty. The left saw sanctions as a tool of government policy, while the right (like the Conservatives) saw government interference in the operation of the market as illegitimate both at home and abroad. For the left, internationalism was the logical corollary of a national economy. For the right, internationalism was made redundant by globalisation.

Labour's internationalism bifurcated in the 1980s between traditional concerns over human rights and the UK state's complicity in their abuse and the new cosmopolitanism of the EU. The locus of the former shifted to the unions and local government (where it was held up by the Tories as evidence of "loony leftism"), while the latter became the focus for the PLP and the party apparatus, leading some to imagine that taking a holiday in Umbria was a form of solidarity. This highlights a key point that is ignored in current debates: that the internationalism of the Labour leadership tends to positively correlate with the strength of the "national economy". That Tony Blair's rejection of the party's concerns over Iraq came at the peak of neoliberalism is no more a coincidence than Gaitskell's support for the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Jeremy Corbyn's "obsessions" are both more reflective of the wider party membership and the broad labour movement than his critics allow, and there is nothing inherently antagonistic between them and domestic policy. In fact, there is an argument to be made that Labour will only feel comfortable pursuing a more nationalistic economic programme if it can integrate it into a more internationalist worldview, much as the civic nationalism of the likes of the SNP requires a strong rejection of xenophobia and an emphasis on sovereignty in terms of self-determination rather than exclusion.

While the stars appear to be aligning for Labour, imagining that it will form the next government is a lot easier than imagining a national economic programme on a par with the Attlee years or even the Wilson administration. Labour cannot go backwards, not least because the limit of its ambition, given the weight of legislation required to undo decades of neoliberalism, would be to wind the clock back to somewhere around the late-80s (which the media, with no trace of irony, would present as a return to the 70s). In reality, Labour must develop a new conception of the national economy that addresses contemporary concerns about wages and housing in a very different environment to that of the postwar era. For all the popular festishisation of manufacturing, productionism isn't going to make a come-back, so John McDonnell and his advisers need to come up with a strategy for the low-pay, insecure services sector that isn't a race to the bottom while promoting higher-value services in a globalised market. While housing supply is short of demand, price is a bigger problem than capacity and mass-housebuilding is a long-term strategy rather than a short-term fix. A Labour government would do better to focus on property taxes and rent controls as ways to free-up underutilised capacity and restrain housing cost inflation.

The problem for the Conservative Party is that while the delusion of a return to an Edwardian-style economy based on deferential trade networks is limited to the Brexit ultras, the bulk of its MPs would be reluctant to embrace economic nationalism beyond the purely cosmetic, hence the failure of George Osborne's "march of the makers" to turn up and the damp squib of Theresa May's industrial strategy. They are essentially free-trading liberals, albeit of a more pragmatic bent than the Britannia Unhinged crowd. However, many (and perhaps a majority) of its party members and voters would be happy to commit to an approach that was more nationalist and protectionist (in the sense of pro-social protection as much as pro-tariffs), but with top notes of xenophobia. Though this might suggest that there are voters that Labour could peel off, a more likely scenario is that the next Conservative Party leadership contest will feature a strong nationalist (and chauvinist) candidate. Boris Johnson burbling about burkas and channelling Churchill is still the likely choice of party members if he can make it to the final vote. The advantage of this for Labour is that it shifts political debate to favourable ground: how the state can be used to fashion the economy in the interests of the people.

A reprise of the national economy years isn't on the cards, but a shift back towards emblematic nationalisation is, for example in the case of the railways. However, the more significant impact of the past will be in the revival of the idea that a nationalised service should serve the nation as a whole, rather than just privileged groups like metropolitan commuters, so we can expect to see more interest in a cross-Pennine route than HS2 and more investment in areas like South Wales. A return to the public provision of buses, and the transfer of social care to an integrated NHS, is likely to transform the role and esteem of local government. Though Brexit might appear to open up the twin vistas of Singapore and Salazar, i.e. laissez-faire free-trade or an autarkic nationalism, the reality is likely to be more continuity than change, at least as far as the economy and daily life is concerned. The more fundamental shift will be in the reconceptualization of government as an actor within the economy, which arguably has been underway since 2008. In many ways, the defining feature of conventional politics is the refusal to acknowledge that the role of the state has changed.

The tragedy of Greece was not just about protecting French and German banks but refusing to accept that a nation state could exert any meaningful control over its own economy outside of restraining public expenditure. That centrists appear terrified of a Labour Party promoting mild social democracy is merely a continuation of this. Edgerton's books reminds us that not only is a different approach possible, but that it was one that was pursued by both the Labour and Conservative parties, albeit with substantive policy differences. It was also successful and popular, even beyond the point at which competitor economies such as Germany and Japan recovered and declinism infected the political imagination. Perhaps the biggest difference between the postwar years and the post-Brexit future will be the end of the warfare state, particularly if a Labour government has the courage to cancel the Trident programme and forswear any delusions of being a global player in areas such as the Middle East. A policy of economic nationalism articulated in traditional Labour Party terms - i.e. socially liberal and with a side-order of international solidarity - is likely to prove popular, not just on the grounds of nostalgia but as a rational response to Brexit. Ironically, this will also owe something to a common perception of reduced circumstances, showing that the myth of decline remains a powerful factor.