It's political economy, stupid

As much as I enjoyed myself, a weird feeling stalked me as I shuffled through corridors from event to event, panel discussion to panel discussion at last weeks' Fabian conference. In retrospect it was a restlessness that the answer to every question earnestly pondered – What can the left learn from the right? How do campaigners deal with the deficit?- belligerently remained the same, even if the wording changed, or the faces of the speakers differed from the last.

When you drill down into so much of centre-left soul searching in 2011, the absence of a coherent political economy lies at the root of almost all of it, even if it's rarely acknowledged.

The last few years have finally seen progressives get their critique of neo-liberalism right. Space has opened up after the financial crisis for us to question effectively previously untouchable dogma over the efficiency of free markets and the evil of state intervention. Meanwhile, the extent of public anger over bank bonuses and popularity of the 50p top rate of tax chips away at Blairite mythology that 'aspirational' swing-voters will always view increased taxation as 'the politics of envy'. Labour has even started to find its feet in arguing against the pace of deficit reduction (Ed Balls' famous Bloomberg speech is still the pick of the bunch), while turning to focus on stagnating average incomes (Liam Byrne is good on this here).

These are all sound intellectual advances. But the problem is that at the moment, they remain just that. It remains for progressives to colour these in with practical policy, and then to sell these in a way that is accessible to the wider public and activists knocking on doors. The reason the right has been ascendant for so long on economics is because they have a philosophy that cascades down from the the thinktank ("Free markets are the best way to efficiently allocate capital, government intervention always leads to inefficiency") to the doorstep ("governments shouldn't pick winners, it's bloated and should get out of the way"), translating to peoples everyday experiences or emotions ("why should the government waste my money? I am the best judge of how to spend it"; "We can't go back to the 1970s"), out of which flow practical policy implications (e.g cutting corporation tax, privatisation, deregulation). The latest example of this is the Tories misconceived idea that the private sector will necessarily 'pick up the slack' on unemployment resulting from cuts to public spending.

Meanwhile on the deficit, the right remain aided by the famous imagery of 'maxing out the creditcard' or 'household budgets' ("I have to balance my books, why shouldnt the government?").

The centre-left still cannot compete with this. Even if we are now challenging these ideas at the level of the thinktank, our arguments from there remain fractured or incomplete. For example, if we are agreed that New Labour became over-reliant on tax receipts from financial services, how should we look to 're-balance' our economy? This will usually prompt talk of 'broadening our industrial base' (as echoed recently by Ed Miliband), but what does this mean? How do we make our industry competitive in a globalised economy? Likewise, if we are agreed that median wages are stagnating, how do we get them to rise? Is it just a case of growth as an end in itself, or should the government be directing investment in to certain areas? If so, how? By what means? Assuming we believe in capitalism, what should it look like? How should we translate complex Keynsian arguments over public spending into bite-size chunks of common sense?

These are just a few of the critical questions that, from what I can see, are not being progressed or followed through on. Even the most prominent centre-left writing of the last few years (e.g Ill Fares the Land, Them and Us, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism) is vague on policy, usually impotently acknowledging that it 'doesn't have the answers', but we should at least 'ask the questions'. A lingering sense I got from people at last weeks conference was that if we just taxed the bankers more, everything would be ok. Some are happy for the left to simply be the new 'conservatives', acting as stalwarts of public services under attack from budget cuts.

This is not enough. As popular as it may be in the short term, it doesn't constitute a coherent economic argument and it will not win elections or change the country in the way we want. For all the huff and puff over the end of neo-liberalism, it is still the right who are the radicals, still social democrats who are on the defensive. This does not represent a substantive change in the pre-crash, post-1970s state of play; progressives just have more numbers on the field than they used to, more men behind the ball. To win, it needs to be far more creative.

The rewards for doing so would be great. A coherent alternative political economy would give the left the chance to turn so many debates on their head. Take welfare dependency as an example. Instead of pandering to hatred of those dependent on welfare and extending the current logic of just cutting benefits (or alternatively ignoring the issue), we could legitimately ask why bottom end wages are so low that living on meagre unemployment benefit is a more attractive option, and map out how we can get them to rise. Or, on the banks, we wouldn't need to be held to ransom by obscenely paid financiers who threaten to pack up and head for pastures new every time the status-quo on tax or bonuses is challenged.

Unfortunately, this seems a long way away. Gordon Brown's 'markets need morals' was a good start, but what was it underpinned by in practice? It read more as a plea. Ed Miliband's current problems on the economy are just a projection of the centre-lefts wider dilemmas. Increasingly, it seems we have started an argument we cannot finish. This is the the extent of the challenge for the likes of Ed Balls, as he puts his feet under the table as shadow chancellor. Obviously, I don't have the answers, I'm just asking the questions...

Why ending control orders might not be such a 'fucking car crash' for the coalition afterall

Jerry Hayes has an interesting blogpost this afternoon over at ThinkPolitics on the ending of control orders and the inevitable screams of anguish and betrayal it'll bring from the Tory right. Cameron has been whispering for months that the political battle over the powers, which give the police the right to put terrorist suspects under virtual house arrest, will be a "fucking car crash" for the coalition.

But i've got a niggling feeling that in the long run it might not be so bad for the government. Or, at least, if it is a car crash not as many voters as they think will slow down to take a look as they pass by.

Firstly it almost goes without saying that headlines such as "Nick Clegg 'wins fight to scrap control orders'" (if not the Sunday Times' spin on it) are fantastic for the Liberal Democrats and exactly the sort of coverage I think they need to be generating in order to stand a chance of survival in the run up to the next election.

But even for the Tories, are Cameron's fears really justified? While polls may still suggest public support for strong anti-terrorist measures, all polling on voters' priorities in the run up to the election put the economy far above terrorism/national security. This is not to say they don't care - when confronted on the issue - about the latter, but it is clearly not at the centre of the agenda in the way it was under Blair and in particular following the 2005 attacks. Economic, not physical, security now dominates the political landscape. While the Tory papers will kick up a stink, I'd be amazed if it's not knocked off the front pages by the end of the month. I suspect there is no longer the climate of fear among ordinary voters to sustain it further than that.

Another - little discussed - reason to believe the hysteria will tail off is that control orders is also an awkward topic for Labour. Ed Miliband has made obvious his desperation to dispel the perception that Labour is authoritarian, especially as he seeks to woo disaffected Lib Dem voters. Under pressure from Blairites to out-flank the Tories to the right on crime and human rights, I'd be surprised if he goes to any length to keep an issue in the air that would serve to again highlight his own internal divisions. A trap is laid for him there.

To this backdrop, as Hayes recommends, some political manoeuvring with the security services and a narrative around greater surveillance should provide enough cover in the short-term for the Tories to credibly argue they are not soft on terrorism.

Finally, if the storm on control orders does pass and the idea of the government being weak on terrorism fails to set in among voters, it's worth quickly considering the wider implications. With any luck, it could help shape something like a new political consensus on national security with - heaven forbid - some balance restored to the debate, ending (or at least changing) Westminster's long established tradition of dutch auction whereby each side tries to out-posture and out-scream each other, whipping up as big a shit storm as possible in an effort to prove the other is 'weak'. Cameron's predictions of a "fucking car crush" are predicated on such rules of the game, but it's possible - and here's hoping - the PM himself hasn't quite caught up with the new landscape the economic crisis has foisted upon us. The fact that Brown's attempt (straight from the New Labour rulebook) to posture on detention without trial fell flat in late 2007 is a promising omen in this respect. If the Government stand firm, they can ride this out and the country will be a better place.

Fear itself: Insecurity, not ideology, is the key to understanding the Lib Dems' predicament

Suddenly everybody is an expert on the Liberal Democrats. Among the weirdest outcomes of this years political convulsions has been the transformation of previously disinterested commentators into self-appointed emissaries from planet yellow, explaining the every move and thought of the party in coalition.

The tool of analysis which most of these sages have settled for their chin-stroking is that of the 'Orange Bookers' v the 'Social Democrats'. They inform us that the Lib Dems are led by economic liberals 'at odds' with the social democratic 'grass roots' or 'old guard'. This enables them to explain the history of the coalition as a product of this divide: Clegg was always 'instinctively closer' to Cameron than Brown; the two are "bound by their shared hostility to the state" (Steve Richards); "Just as much as Blair and Cameron, Clegg aims to replace British social democracy with a version of Thatcher’s market-based settlement" (Jon Gray). Even Andrew Adonis recently echoed such a view.

But this is misguided. There are differences in outlook, of course, but the party doesn't factionalise along these ideological lines. The Lib Dems who have rebelled most so far are hardly left-wing ideologues and it's simply not true that the leading lights of the party share a centre-right ideology. It's more complex than that. Chris Huhne, for instance, wrote Reinventing the State, the book frequently touted as the ying to the Orange Book's yang, while Cable comes from a Labour background and he and Clegg devised for the party a whole host of policies (on tax, inequality, banks etc.) which can scarcely be called Blairite.

More to the point, the 'Orange book' analysis obscures the main driver of Lib Dem behaviour since 6^th May: fear. Fear of another election, fear that the coalition will fall apart, fear of electoral decimation at the hands of the Tories.

Most detailed histories written of the Coalition so far suggest it itself was conceived in fear. During negotiations and after, Cameron held up (explicitly and implicitly) the threat of a snap second election in autumn should the Tories be forced into minority government. There's a good chance this would have allowed them to blame Lib Dems for the preceding 'muddle' and turbulence, campaign for a majority and wipe many of the already fragile marginals the Lib Dems hold off the map. It seems the fear of this, with a deal with Labour not viable, is primarily what drove Clegg to lock himself and his party so firmly into a five year coalition, rather than any 'confidence and supply' arrangement.

The trouble the party is now facing, is that this logic is now perpetuating itself over and over again and it is spiralling the Lib Dems into electoral oblivion. Fear that the coalition will collapse and of the resultant election seems to be playing a significant part in justifying faithful parroting of the Tory line, word for word, on almost every issue.

This has lead to the Lib Dems being almost indistinguishable from the Tories, and seen the party's poll ratings plummet. Yet, ironically, the more the polls sink the more the logic justifies itself, as by implication the worse the election performance would be. This is a large part of the architecture of the Lib Dems own 'There is No Alternative' narrative on the coalition.

It's a dangerous gamble, based on the premise that if the economy recovers, by 2014-2015 the Lib Dems will be rewarded in the polls. But polling since May has already shown cuts and fees have punished the Lib Dems disproportionately to the Tories. So if Tory/Lib Dem poll ratings and electoral performance are not fixed to each other, then neither should the Lib Dem and Tory line.

So where now?

While not being an expert myself, I'd say it's been fairly obvious from the start that the main way the Lib Dems can succeed in coalition is by being seen to sand down the edges of Tory extremism and carrying, as far as possible, the 'equidistance' ethos of opposition into government. But their current approach of hugging the Tory line close from the beggining militates against this, limiting Lib Dem influence and hamstringing the party's ability to promote any genuine concessions.

Take higher education reform as a case in point. The Browne review reccomended lifting the cap on fees. But that day, Cables support for the review was full throated. It was Cameron, then Willetts, that signalled the row-back and eventually the retention of a cap. This should have been the other way around! The Lib Dems initial echoing of the Tory line left them no room to sieze on improvement to Browne. If they had taken a step back, staked their opening position a little more carefully, briefed their opposition a little more openly, put their name to row-backs, they could possibly have limited the damage they are suffering on this issue now. At the very least, this approach provides a good template for other, less totemic, policy issues going forward.

Instead, their actions suggest that behind closed doors the Lib Dem leadership is being bullied by the Tories and their spindoctors. Its probably also a case of Westminster politicians operating according to Westminster orthodoxy: difference equals 'splits', splits are bad. But the Lib Dem leadership needs to think outside this political box. Just hanging is not a strategy that will ensure the party's recovery.

What is needed is at least a kind of 'ochestrated disagreement'. Clegg and co need to argue for room to be seen to disagree from the beggining on certain issues, to be seen to force concessions and claim them as their own – school sport presents the latest opportunity. They need the spirit of their coalition negotiations within government, to openly define themselves as much against the Tory right as Labour. This would give them a platform to build on for the 2015 election, wheras on present course it's difficult to imagine how they could forge one.

The leadership should argue with Coulson and Cameron the need for flexibility in this respect – there is no reason if they are aware of this strategy that it will break the coalition. Moreover, the Tories own poll ratings are worsening and there's no guarantee they themselves would fancy their chances in a snap election. The Lib Dems may have more room for manoeuvre than they think in this Coalition- but if they don't start to properly use it, they'll continue to lose it.

Why Tony Judt matters: George Orwell and political writing

I wanted to write a quick blog on historian Tony Judt, author of works such as Postwar, who died recently of Lou Gehrig's disease. In 2009, Judt won an Orwell Prize. It hasn’t gone unnoticed among commentators that in recent years this award has been showered upon those not exactly in keeping with the spirit and meaning of Orwell’s writing (think Peter Hitchens).

This seems to underscore a wider abuse of the great man’s legacy, with every agitprop left-wing writer going attempting to lay claim to his mantle, explicitly or implicitly, at some time or another - usually using his name as a kind of smug trump card to prop up their arguments. But in Judt, I think, the Orwell Prize has found a fitting home and Orwell’s spirit an unlikely echo.

Most of Judt’s obituaries and especially those in US newspapers mark him out as a radical or controversialist, owing mostly to his 2003 essay Israel: the alternative in which he argued a bi-national state the only just and sustainable solution to the Middle East conflict. Yet this was the same man who wrote that if there was to be one lesson from the 20th century, it was that “the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying the consequences”.

This apparent contradiction between the radical and the pragmatist often left Judt in the cold. "I'm regarded outside New York University as a looney tunes leftie, self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university, I'm regarded as a typical, old-fashioned, white male liberal elitist", he recently quipped.

But such positioning is what made Judt such a great writer. He was no pacifist or fence sitter, but as a documenter of the Soviet Unions’ crimes his writing was characterised by a rejection of ‘master narratives’, whether Marxist or neoconservative, which sought to explain or reduce every phenomenon through an over-arching ideology; that is, absolutism so cocksure it invariably finds its most natural expression through violence and bloodshed - but always, as Judt regularly quoted Camus as noting, the bloodshed of others.

Instead Judt argued that “incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek”. His creed was that of a thread of social democratic ideas which though argued for belligerently never believed it could explain or befit any event before it had happened, and so in acknowledging its infallibility naturally found expression through words and argument, a passion and commitment to slow democratic struggle, to faith in the everyday banalities of activism and collective thought above the outlandish fashion statements parading as serious politics of Chomskyite vogue.

It is this which puts him most firmly in the tradition of Orwell. Orwell was one of the most important authors of the 20th century, but he is misunderstood if he is quoted as a guru of untouchable truth and virtue. As Christopher Hitchens has written, he is best appreciated as an ordinary man who first and foremost battled his own imperfections, prejudices and pride in the pursuit of intellectual integrity.

The point here is that this is an extremely difficult pursuit – as Orwell wrote, “to see what’s under one’s nose requires a constant struggle”. It is also a rather unfashionable one. Countless writers and thinkers set themselves up as tellers of ‘impolite truths’ or contrarians but often this is simply a posture - in reality they’re as liable to the same intellectual contortions as their enemies, as they try to make events chime with their over-arching view of the world or their notions of the human race’s unstoppable historical trajectory. This is not to sneer; the reason true intellectual integrity is so hard-won is because the kind of Manichean, ‘us v. them’, crusading visions of the world are so seductive. The complex problems of the world are much easier when seen through one lens. This is why even great writers like Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen or Johann Hari ended up supporting the Iraq invasion as an extension of the humanitarian interventions they backed in the 1990s despite huge qualitative differences - they got so caught up in the excitement of a ‘new age of liberal interventionism’ or a ‘clash of civilisations’ they just filtered out the inconvenient facts and in doing so discredited their own doctrine. It’s also why so many ‘anti-imperialists’, of which there are too many to mention, end up excusing the most hideous crimes as long as the perpetrators are anti-American.

It’s because Judt took humility as the starting point of any political world view that he largely avoided such intellectual obfuscations and, ironically, in hindsight got so many of the big calls right. His suspicion of dualisms and utopia meant he hardly ever strayed from a clear sighted empiricism. Subsequently he could make radical and often prescient arguments, such as in Israel: the alternative, powerfully based on specific facts on the ground rather than as a wearing anti-establishment posture, while also being able to judge when outright overhaul of institutions was unnecessary*. He proved that it is intellectual honesty alone that renders the dichotomy between the pragmatist and the radical a false one.

There is a crucial final dimension to this. This is that though he had an outstanding grip on the English language, Judt was not a fancy writer. He didn’t deal in the ‘paradigms’ or the flowery jargon which characterizes much academic writing. Like Orwell, his writing was short, sharp and to the point – and all the bolder for it. In this respect his clear thinking was reflected in his clear writing. As Orwell famously observed in Politics and the English Language, and Judt likewise in ‘The Marxism of Louis Althusser’, the more intellectual contortions an author is trying to pull, the more evasive and unreadable their writing. Thus hard-won intellectual integrity is strongly related not just to accuracy of argument, but clarity of argument, and clarity in return to accuracy; it’s a delicate, mutually reinforcing relationship which hardly anyone gets right. Judt did.

Perhaps he did because as a historian first and foremost, he felt distanced from the New Left political writers of the 60s who, though important, tended to tip into dense ‘structuralist’ explanations of everything and carried within their “expressly opaque” writing (Judt’s term) a deep suspicion of traditional academic empiricism. But he did so mostly because he doubted himself constantly, watched himself constantly for hypocrisy and double standards, policed his writing for cant or bunkum. The world desperately needs more intellectuals like this, and with Judt’s passing it has lost perhaps its best, its most inspirational – and above anything else – its most truly radical of all.

Tony Judt: 1948-2010
Some writings of his for anyone interested:

What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy? (Remarque lecture – truly brilliant if you get the chance to listen/watch)

Israel: the alternative
The Dilemmas of Dissidence
Albert Camus: the best man in France? (in Reappraisals - can't find an online link?)
The Gnome in The Garden: Tony Blair and Britain's 'heritage' (likewise)
What Have We Learned, If Anything?
'Edge People'
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Goodbye to all that? Leszek Kolakowski and the Marxist Legacy
Night
Captive Minds: Then and Now
Words

*The best and funniest manifestation of which comes at the end of a brilliantly detailed and rich 1987 essay. The essay speculates on the future of Central and Eastern Europe after the overthrow of the Soviet Union in revolutions lead by intellectuals committed to liberal democracy. “If we are lucky”, Judt wrote, “there are some very dull times ahead”.

In defence of Ooh-missus!: why Andrew Pierce's article marks a worrying trend in the gay community

I've never met Andrew Pierce, but I can't imagine he's much fun in bed. His rather joyless little column in The Daily Mail yesterday, 'Why I, as a gay man, abhor these TV queens' follows in the footsteps of 'Why I, as a gay man, agree with the Pope' in February. Whether this is just lazy sub-editing on the Mail's part or old Andy is developing a camp sitcom-style catchphrase of his own is unclear. Nevertheless, it seems he is fast developing into the Mail's 'House gay' of choice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with criticising the attitudes or values of gay men, but take a look at the bile that drips from Pierce's fingertips in his latest offering. He rails bitterly against “the prancing, preening fashion icon Gok Wan”, the “lisping, limp wristed” Alan Carr, Graham Norton - “with his mincing, ooh-missus act” - and Julian Clary, “who has made an entire career out of making Larry Grayson look butch by comparison”. These “simpering, soppy, superficial cissies” give “ordinary [gay] men” a bad name, he says.

That the Mail has to resort to channelling its resentment towards the gay community through the proxy of a gay man is a strange victory of sorts for the gay rights movement, I suppose. Ironically, it is the history of that movement which Pierce owes his throat-clearing, 'as a gay man...' identity politics-stylee prefix to – a history he betrays by using his article to define himself against other gays. By so thoughtlessly bashing 'camp personalities' he inherently looks to set up a discursive divide between 'ordinary' gay men and 'camp queens'.

This seems to reek of a desperate plea for acceptance to his conservative audience; “Accept me, I'm not like them!”. He swears to them that most of his gay friends just want to watch Football and “worry far more about the state of the economy than over whether Kylie has found true love” (and what a hoot they sound!). Sadly, though, this kind of self-loathing should be placed in the context of a worrying trend within the gay community, where the more gay guys become integrated into mainstream society, the more they become embarrassed by their peers in the gay world. Go to any gay dating website and you'll see men describing themselves as, and looking for, “straight acting guys”; “no queens please”, “Sorry, I don't like camp guys”, and so on.

Many gay guys, at some point, feel alienated by mainstream gay culture and can become resentful. This is usually – like it was for me - just a stage on the path to self-acceptance, owing more to how we feel about ourselves and fretting over what our family or friends will think of us. The trouble is more and more gays are becoming stuck in that stage, legitimising it with the kind of intellectual froth Pierce echoes: gay identity doesn't 'define them', it's 'just who they fuck'; through this view, gay clubs, gay pride seem rather old hat. The corollary is often – as it is for Pierce – that all this is needless now gays have “genuine equality”.

But this is deeply misguided and dangerous for a number of reasons, not least because there are many remaining battles to be won by the gay community at home and abroad. Related to this, though, it ignores the history of camp. It was not 'ordinary gay men' who lead the Stonewall riots, kicking back against police harassment and sparking the gay rights movement in the Western world, but drag queens. That movement was not led successfully by people who defined themselves against others being oppressed or denigrated in a scramble for the lifeboats, but who wore their homosexuality proudly, loudly and with a sense of togetherness and brotherhood against outright hostility.

Most fundamentally, the gay movement which 'camp' spearheaded has achieved what it has because it was radical. It was not fuelled by a desire for Pierce's conservative ideas of equality (non-discrimination, marriage etc.), it has just come to land there in modern times. It was originally linked to a much wider political and social critique; it wanted to change institutions not just be accepted by them, to challenge conservative ideas of 'normal' gender roles not be subsumed within them. Through this prism calling camp an 'act', even if true (a tricky argument anyway based on its complex interaction with orthodox femininity), misses the point and betrays the original cause. Such ignorance could also partially explain so much of the gay worlds disgraceful treatment of transgender members of the community.

I don't mean to imply here, as Peter Tatchell has, that any gay who is not a radical is a sell-out. It is rather that people who bash 'camp' at least partially owe it the comfortable place within mainstream society (and columns in the Daily Mail!) from which they emit their prickish sneers, and should understand and respect its place within gay history.

Just because people like Pierce feel they don't need gay identity, or gay clubs, or gay pride, doesn't mean others cast out by their families or society don't. What binds gay men is not just 'who they fuck' but a shared history of exclusion, denigration and (until recently at least) out right oppression.

Articles and attitudes like Pierce's splinter solidarity and carry within them historically illiterate, depoliticised concepts of sexuality and identity. As worryingly, they are complacent, potentially offering a new cloak for those who wish to attack the gay community or unpick its successes. I've lost count of the number of times straight guys have said to me words to the effect of “You're fine, it's the mincers I don't like”. It will not do for people like Pierce to legitimise this modern form of homophobia. It's high time they thought twice before being so selfish and lazy, and recognised whose rather more fabulous shoulders they stand on.

Twitter: @SteveAkehurst

Also see: The hilarious David Hoyle's little rant!

New Labour meets its maker: cuts, TINA and the future of centre-left politics in Britain

There was a strange and queasy moment during last months Queen Speech debate when, returning Harriet Harman's questions from the Labour side of the House, David Cameron leant over the despatch box and advised: “Let me give a little warning: I can tell you, having sat on the Opposition Benches for the past nine years, that opportunism does not work.”

Coming from a politician as intellectually vacuous as Cameron, the hypocrisy was enough to make your eyes bleed. The queasiness, though, came from the ring of truth to the statement and its broader implications. Labour have not formed a coherent intellectual argument against the Conservatives, the new Coalition government or the significant cuts in public expenditure imminent. Neither have many prominent progressive figures.

Conservative language on cuts and the economy is now largely hegemonic in public life. It's widely seen as a matter of absolute necessity that cuts are deep, immediate and far reaching. Phantoms of Greece are summoned and we're told (wrongly) that our situation is analogues, and that all hell will break lose unless cuts are made. A state of exception/emergency style logic has been set up through which every decision to cut is explained and incorporated, no matter how small the saving or socially damaging the impact; case in point here is the cancelling of a loan to Sheffield Forgemasters, essentially described as regrettable but 'unavoidable'. In sum, the politics is being stripped out of highly political decisions.

This is the way Conservatives do business. The whole Thatcher era was built on the idea that a small state and free market was an unavoidable necessity, that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to neo-liberal prescriptions of economic growth, the state ('waste') and the market ('efficiency'). Opposing it was like opposing ageing. Now, as then, the refrain in face of opposition is: “ah yes, but what would you do?”. The worrying sign is that much of the public accept the TINA argument, as surveys and the Conservatives unblemished poll ratings attest (here and here).

Many in the Labour ranks seem to think this support simply owes to the Coalition's honeymoon period; that once the pain kicks in voters will come home. But the problems are more systemic and they involve New Labour's ability to counter the TINA narrative.

That problem is that New Labour, owing to a post-mortem of its defeats in the 70s and 80s, is itself predicated on a peace pact with Thatcherite/neo-liberal political economy and the TINA argument, from which Conservative arguments on cuts emerge. This is not to say it continued Thatcherism, but it accepted it as a framework for economic growth, believing a trade off between investment in public services and free market economics to be a false one; basically their departure from Conservatives concerned what to spend the proceeds of growth on, rather than the model for generating that growth.

What followed was, rightly or wrongly, an adoption of much Conservative language and idioms; idolising 'wealth creators', a view that a sustainable economy could centre on financial services, unfettered movement of labor, 'you can't pick winners', a focus on 'choice' in public services, that government should 'get out of the way' for entrepreneurs, and so on. Many of the policies which flowed from this world view (de-regulation in particular) lead to the very financial crisis which now puts a question mark under the previously untouchable neo-liberal model (such crisis were not supposed to happen in dynamic, free market economies, afterall).

But by broadly adopting that model's language and economic logic, Labour has helped entrench it among the public and tied its own hands in opposition to cuts, not least by posturing to the markets before the election that cuts would be deeper than under Thatcher. That's why it now seems opportunistic and doomed in its tentative forays into Keynsian language (talking about jobs, government stimulus, pushing back against the deficit hawks), when for years it parroted neo-liberal mantras and defined any alternative as an untenable return to the past. At the top level, at least, it has lost a language of social value, of state involvement in the economy, that is now so unfamiliar as to seem cheap and unrealistic.

That is why many mainstream Labour party activists needs to take the opportunity of a leadership election to assess how much they believe in the idioms I listed above, a wholesale critique (rather than temporary), which need not lead to outright rejection by the way, of the fundamentals upon which New Labour was based. You can see a partial attempt at this in its intellectual acrobatics over the movement of labor and immigration, where it seems to be trying to face in both directions at once. It is not currently a party with coherent ideas of political economy or language; until it is, its policies will continue to seem like a series of positions and postures.

In undertaking this review, it would carry with it the future of progressive politics in Britain (at least while the Lib Dems are locked into coalition) and Western Europe, which desperately needs an over-arching, alternative economic vision for spasms of unrest or discontent to coalesce around.

This does not have to indulge a culture of betrayal that says all New Labour has done is wrong, but to realise that the New Labour project was a product of its time, and times have changed. Significant doubts over the neo-liberal/Thatcherite system of economic growth have arisen for the first time in a generation. Opposing it need no longer be seen as electoral suicide. The public could, over time, be swayed by a credible alternative narrative, especially if lefties are savvy and play on events cleverly (the crash as private sector failure, bankers greed, forthcoming pain from public expenditure cuts etc.).

Such a narrative would not be afraid to talk about raising income tax again, about a higher minimum wage, or the inequities private education still entrenches, for instance. More importantly, it would not be afraid to talk about government investment and stimulus to create a re-balanced economy, less dominated by financial services in London, so kids growing up in Stoke or Leeds have more options than either going to University or getting a job in a call centre or supermarket (Paul Mason has done a great piece on this). It would not row back the moment it was accused of being 'anti-city' or 'anti-aspiration'. In sum, it would not be afraid to talk about the state again, in the face of a Conservative ideology which sees the state as the problem.

Only if New Labour, and the left, can generate an alternative political economy in this way, can their opposition to Tory cuts seem anything but opportunistic, and the idea that There Is No Alternative be chipped away at and finally dislodged. One of Blair's many talents was an ability to spot a moment and build an agenda around it. His post 9/11 words, which defined change in the international political system in the last decade, could and should easily apply to the economic system in this. "The kaleidoscope has been shaken, the pieces are in flux", he said. "Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us.". It is into this spirit which progressives, of every stripe, should tap in to in 2010.

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Twitter: @SteveAkehurst

Bit more reading, for anyone interested:

Ross McKibbin

Simon Johnson

Tony Judt

Guardian editorial

Dean Baker

Jon Cruddas

Laurie Penny

Stuart White

David Aaronovitch and John Harris

Paul Krugman

An appropriate number of cheers for the PC brigade!

An article I wrote for Leeds Student online.
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An appropriate number of cheers for the PC brigade!
Political correctness has had a bad name for too long. It's time we took pride in being PC
By Steve Akehurst

I was amused to read in LS recently that two shirtless men promoting for RAG were asked to cover up by the Union’s Equalities Officer after a complaint was lodged about ‘objectification’. I thought the best bit of this escapade was one of the men’s angry response. Storming out of the building, he’s reported as saying: “This is political correctness gone mad!”

In terms of parodying yourself out of an argument, this could only have been bettered by him jabbing his index finger down onto a conveiniently nearby work surface and bravely declaring: “Do you know who the most oppressed minority in this country is? Straight, white, middle class men!”. Very 2005, dear! Yet it reminded me that somehow ‘political correctness’ remains a derisory phrase in public life. I don’t see why it should be.

Political correctness at its heart is just the recognition that the power which shapes our lives lay everywhere; that norms inherent in acceptable language, tone or behaviour shape our society, our personal relationships and how we feel about our place within them.

In this sense PC has always been around. You would have been admonished in the 1950s for blasphemy; you’d still be today for slandering the armed services. No one calls these right-wing norms ‘political correctness’ - why? If you’re frowned at and deemed sexist in polite society for calling a woman a ‘cunt’ then it’s because times have changed, not because you’re about to be hauled off to a Gulag. Likewise, that “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour” isn’t an acceptable election slogan in 2010, as it was for the Tories in 1964, is also a function of political correctness.

More institutionally, ‘Political correctness’ in the form of Equalities officers, workplace training schemes, International Womens Week and so on is just a recognition that minorities currently face a culturally uneven playing field, and that efforts should be made to combat this at every level.

Paranoia over this leads to a ludicrous position in national life where ‘PC gone mad’ is used to resist any change to the status quo. If you want to argue against being criticised for using the term bum bandit then do so on its merits, don’t hide behind reductivist arguments about free speech. “You can’t say anything these days can you?” Yes you can, we’ll just tell you you’re an idiot.

This is the fine line between censor and censure that gets lost in debates over PC. Of course it’s frightening and unnecessary if norms of politeness are actually enforced by law and an old man is carted off to prison for holding an offensive placard, but such instances are extremely rare.

The much criticised ‘twitter mob’ which complained about Jan Moir’s infamous Daily Mail article were not asking for her to be slung in jail – why shouldn’t they be able to collectively express their disaproval? It’s vital for any healthy, democratic civil society that they do so.

That’s all that happened to our two shirtless friends. No one called the police or asked for RAG, or say the Shirtless Men Solidarity Group, to be banned by Union diktat from organising on campus - heaven forbid, that would be really despotic. Someone made an individual complaint to a democratic representative, who then acted on it by making a request.

At the very least, these slightly excessive incidents are a price worth paying for the wider cultural shift in the UK towards tolerance that PC has cemented. At best they get people thinking about the ways their behaviour impacts on others.

It’s about time that more of us were proud to be politically correct and that we stood up, jabbed our index finger down onto a conveiniently nearby work surface and declared that ‘PC gone mad’ has gone completely bloody mad!