Missionaries

A great new post from Richard Hamas about "Missionaries"  

I have spent twenty years watching a certain kind of man arrive in this part of the world, and I have never once managed to like him. Today the mercenary comes with a consultant’s slide deck. He has flown in from Geneva or Washington or, lately, from a regional office in Singapore that lets him claim he is local. He is courteous, often genuinely kind, and he is here to help. He has a framework. The framework has pillars. He will run a workshop, and at the workshop there will be a maturity model — a diagram, usually with five stages, along which your country can be plotted like a patient on a chart. Thailand is at stage two. Vietnam is showing even more promise. The framework doesn’t say where he is standing, because that’s stage five. Stage five is the end of the road. It’s the place from which the diagram is drawn. He doesn’t experience himself as standing anywhere specifically. He experiences himself as describing how the world actually is. I have watched him do this in ministries and in town halls and in the air-conditioned function rooms of hotels that charge more for a night than the people outside earn in a season. I have watched him explain participatory governance to communities that were governing themselves by consensus when his own ancestors were burning each other over the question of transubstantiation. And I have watched the faces of the people receiving the help — polite, attentive, entirely unconvinced — waiting for him to finish so the real conversation can resume after he leaves. They have seen him before. They saw him a hundred years ago. He was wearing something different then. He is not selling nothing. This is what makes him so hard to be rid of. If the consultant were a pure fraud, a snake-oil salesman with an empty bottle, he would have been laughed out of the region decades ago. He is not altogether bad. The commodities in his case are partly real. Independent courts do protect people from arbitrary power. Constitutional constraint does correlate with lower corruption. The dispersal of authority does, on the whole, make ordinary life less frightening, and I wouldn’t raise my children under a government that lacked these protections. I have lived close enough to the alternative to mean that without sentiment. The benefits are not propaganda.

And that’s precisely the problem. A man carrying something worthless is easy to dismiss. A man carrying something valuable, who has mistaken the value of his cargo for a licence to lecture you from a pedestal, is the hardest figure in the world to answer – because the moment you object to his posture, he holds up his cargo and asks whether you are really against good courts and clean government. Of course you’re not. You are against the posture. But the posture has hidden itself behind the cargo. It’s the oldest trick in the West’s book, and they’ve got away with it for so long. Pluck up the courage to pull the mask off the consultant, and you find the missionary. And behind the missionary, paying the fare for them both, is the mercenary who was always there. The resemblance is not a metaphor, nor is it an insult I have thrown in for effect. It’s a structure and a real one. Once you have seen it, you can’t stop seeing it. The missionary who came to this region in 1850 believed, as today’s consultant believes, that he had arrived from a more advanced situation. A place of authority. He read the people in front of him as lacking something – sophistication, perhaps? In his case, they were souls in the dark rather than institutions below benchmark — and he understood that lack as temporary, curable, and on its way to resolution under his guidance. He had a single path in mind. It was the one his own civilisation had walked, and he interpreted his presence as support along the way. The cruelty of what he was doing was folded, always, inside a promise. You are not being conquered. You are being saved. You are being given better knowledge.

Change the vocabulary and the costume and you pretty much have today’s consultant. Souls are institutions. Salvation becomes development. Damnation equates to underdevelopment, then transition, then the long purgatory of the almost-but-not-quite-democratic. And “transition” is not an abstraction. It’s the IMF arriving with a structural-adjustment programme, conditioning a nation’s place in the modern world on a plan it didn’t choose, drafted by economists who would have been wounded to hear the word ‘missionary’ — the cure once again administered from outside, for your own good, on terms you were not invited to set. The missionary’s Gospel becomes the consultant’s methodology. The custodian who once carried scripture now carries an index, and he would be upset — sincerely, deeply wounded — to be told he is doing what the missionary did, with the same zeal, because he has been taught that the missionary is the embarrassing ancestor his entire profession was invented to replace. He can’t see that he has inherited the man’s bones. He believes he has buried him.

Between the missionary and the consultant stands the whole imperial century. The mission civilisatrice — the civilising mission, France’s gift of itself to people it was simultaneously bleeding — kept the structure intact and only swapped the deficit from damnation to barbarism and the cure from the church to the lycée and the colonial administration. The white man’s burden was the same skeleton raised to the pitch of self-pity; the custodian is now so exhausted by his own benevolence that he asks you to feel sorry for him for the weight of all the help he is obliged to give. Heathen, savage, native, underdeveloped, transitional, not-yet-democratic: it’s one word, spoken across five centuries, and the word means ‘behind’. Behind us. Less advanced. On our path but not yet arrived at the place we already occupy and from which we so generously and so tirelessly reach back to pull you forward. There’s a name for what he becomes at that pitch, and it is not his to take. He becomes the martyr. The word belongs by right to the ones who died under him – the resisters, the burnt villages, the actual dead – and he claims it anyway, because he has discovered that suffering is the one currency a refusal cannot argue with. This is the custodian’s second face, and he turns it to you the moment the gift is declined. He does not withdraw from the road. He bleeds for it. He shows you the cost he has borne to bring it – the years in hardship posts, the fevers caught in your service, the comforts surrendered at home so that you might be improved – and the wounds become a charge against you. To say no to the offer was a disagreement. To say no to the martyr is ingratitude, an injury done to a man who gave everything for your sake. The colonised are not even permitted the dignity of refusal, because refusal now spits on a sacrifice. This is the cruellest turn in the whole repertoire: the subjugated is made to feel he has wounded the one who came to subjugate him. The declaration that announced the rights of all mankind was written by societies that held slaves and ran empires, and no contradiction was felt. I want to dwell on that for a moment, because the usual response is to call it hypocrisy and move on. ‘Hypocrisy’ is exactly the wrong word — it lets everyone off the hook too lightly. Hypocrisy is a gap between what you preach and what you do. This was not a gap. The men who wrote the universal declaration of human worth and the men who ran the plantations were frequently the same men, holding both notions in the same mind without tension. The absence of that strain is the whole point. The university was not betrayed by the empire. The universal was announced ‘from’ the empire, at its height, by its beneficiaries, and the colonised were not left out of the grand human family. They were given a place in it. That place was behind everyone else. They were inside the universal human family in the only role the universal had ever written for them: candidates, provisional members, interns who would receive the full dignity being described as soon as they had been developed enough to deserve it, on a timeline their liberators would set.

This is the discovery the postcolonial writers spent fifty years trying to force into the Western view, against a resistance that was itself the proof. Frantz Fanon, writing from inside the experience, described a colonised world in which every native value had been classified as an absence before the native could open his mouth — the deficit assigned in advance, the verdict entered before the trial. Edward Said showed how an entire scholarly apparatus had built the East as the West’s slow, sensual, backward shadow self, a shadow self to be studied precisely so that it could be administered. And the decolonial writers who came after, Walter Mignolo among them, pushed the hardest claim of all: that the West’s inspirational story of progress and its darker story of conquest are not two stories but one. This was the same movement seen from the sunny and the shadow side. The universal itself — the very ambition to speak for all of humanity at once — was not the cure for empire but its symptom. Only the powerful have ever been positioned to claim they speak for all of humanity but from nowhere in particular. They have made that claim every single time from a place as particular as a flag. You can wave the postcolonial writers away as the West’s guilty conscience talking to itself, and many do. So notice that the same suspicion grows in liberalism’s own garden, planted by people who owe Fanon nothing. John Grey, who reached the position from inside liberal philosophy rather than in revolt against it, spent a career arguing that the Enlightenment belief in one universal civilisation toward which all societies are heading is a faith and nothing firmer – the Christian conviction that there is a single truth and a single history leading to it, with the providence stripped out and progress bolted into the vacancy. Same shape. Same single destination. Same suppression of the local by the universal, now riding reason and markets instead of grace and mercy. Alasdair MacIntyre drove at the joint from another angle entirely: liberalism is not the neutral referee among rival ways of life that it claims to be. It’s one way of life among all the others, with its own parish and its own past, that’s pulled off the most audacious move available to any tradition — disguising its own explicit commitments as the absence of commitment, its parish as the whole of reason, so that to disagree with it is not to hold a different view but to be irrational and superstitious and behind. The referee is a player who has talked everyone into letting him keep score.

That is the reflex laid bare, and here is why it can’t be fixed by good intentions. Make the consultant kinder. Make his framework more participatory, his metrics more culturally empathic, and his workshop more humble. You have improved the cargo. You have not touched the posture because the posture was never in the cargo — it was in the standing-apart-from, the path that runs one way, the diagram drawn from a vantage that calls itself stage five and refers to you patronisingly as stage two. A gentler custodian is a custodian still. A more enlightened mission is still a mission. The structure is perfectly capable of absorbing its own critique and emerging unharmed, now with a chapter on listening and a budget line for local voices, still drawing the map from the same spot it always drew it. I have sat through that workshop too. The humility is new. The vantage point exactly where it was before.

I should be careful here not to swing to the lazy verdict waiting on the other side, because it’s just as false and far more popular. The lazy verdict says the cargo is fake too — that the rights and the courts and the constraints are nothing but the empire’s pretty packaging; that the West’s whole moral vocabulary should be binned as the cant of the strong. That is nonsense, and comfortable nonsense, the kind that saves you the work of discerning the real from the rotten. It can’t explain the dissident in the cell who reaches for the language of rights against her torturer and is not fooled into doing so. It can’t explain why the powerless, again and again, in Manila and Seoul and Jakarta, have picked up exactly this vocabulary and turned it on their own rulers — not because they were tricked into it but because it stung, because it worked, because there was something real in it to grip. A creed that was only a weapon of the strong would not fit the hand of the weak so well. Both claims are true at once. You have to hold them as that or you understand nothing: the goods are beneficial, but the manner in which they are carried into the world is imperial. The substance is defensible. The grammar is not. And the substance is the perfect hiding place for the grammar, because a man certain he is offering you something good can almost never see that he is offering it as a superior to an inferior. His sincerity is the disguise. The better his gift, the more total the blindness.

Blindness is the real cost, of course — not to us, the helpers, who can see him perfectly well and always could, but to him. This is the part the consultant would least expect and least believe. A civilisation that takes its own values as universal loses the ability to recognise them as values — as choices made by certain people under particular pressures that cost something and excluded something and might have gone another way. It can no longer find itself on a map that holds other positions, because it has confused its own position with the map. And a power that can’t see itself as one position among many has disabled the most fundamental instrument of statecraft: the ability to imagine how it looks from somewhere else. Somewhere that’s not itself. It reads every refusal as backwardness or bad faith. It can’t conceive that a society which has heard the offer in full and declined it might be neither stupid nor hostile, but simply standing somewhere else, on ground of its own, with good reasons. That man believes he is looking through a window at the world. He is not. He’s looking into a mirror, and the finer his civilisation’s real achievements, the more flattering the reflection and the less reason he has ever to doubt the glass. He cannot see past himself because he doesn’t know that’s all he has been seeing. I have argued elsewhere that the West misreads Xi Jinping’s China as an enemy when it’s better understood as a rival worldview. I will not repeat that case here. I want only to land it where this argument has been heading all along. Because China is where the whole five-hundred-year reflex meets, at last, a society too large and too old and too successful to be plotted at stage two and told to wait. Here is what the West can’t hear Beijing saying. The sharpest charge China levels is not that liberalism is false, or that rights are a fiction, or that democracy is a Western swindle—those are charges the West knows how to answer, and answering them is almost entertaining, because the answers are good and the answering changes nothing. The charge that really lands, and that draws no reply because it can’t even be received, is this: that the West has lost the capacity to tell the difference between ‘we believe this’ and ‘this is universal’. That it can no longer feel its own deepest commitments as commitments — as the hard-won inheritance of a particular people — and so can offer them to the rest of the species only as a standard the species is failing to meet. The accusation is not aimed at the content of the creed. It’s aimed at grammar. It says: your empire didn’t end when the flags came down. It changed clothes. It set down the rifle and the Bible and picked up the benchmark. The path was the same path. It has only ever led to one place – back to itself.

And then the trap snaps shut, and it’s worth watching the mechanism, because the West springs it on itself. When China declines the benchmark — when it refuses to accept that liberal procedure is the measure of its legitimacy and insists that a different history has produced a different and equally mature form of order — the West reads the refusal as ‘the proof’. Only an enemy, the logic runs, would reject what is self-evidently meant for all mankind. But the refusal is not enmity. It’s the wholly predictable act of a civilisation confident enough to look the custodian in the eye and decline his path and his gifts. And by misreading that confident refusal as aggression, the West confirms the precise charge being made against it: that it can’t conceive of a genuine difference, only of a defective sameness, of a student who has not yet been brought far enough along. And beneath the strategic alarm runs something older and more wounded, which the martyr explains and fear alone does not. There is an injured astonishment in the way the West receives China’s refusal — a sense that Beijing has not simply declined a model but failed to be grateful, snubbed a gift the West suffered to extend, and withheld the thanks owed for a century of being shown the path to enlightenment. We did not only offer; we sacrificed, or so we have told ourselves, and a civilisation that will not walk the road we bled to build is guilty of more than rivalry. It is guilty of ingratitude. This is the martyr’s logic arrived at the largest scale history affords, and it blinds at exactly the moment clear sight is most needed because a man waiting to be thanked cannot hear what is actually being said to him. China is not refusing to honour our wounds. China is telling us the path was never universal — that it led, as every path we have ever offered has led, only back to ourselves — and we cannot receive the message, because we are still standing there, holding the gift, nursing the slight, and waiting for a gratitude that is never going to come.

The evidence for the prosecution is placed in our hands, and we seize it gratefully, because seizing it spares us the one recognition the reflex exists to prevent — that we are standing somewhere in particular, that our universal is a local inheritance that once travelled under arms, and that the people who will not treat it as the measure of all the earth are not lagging behind us on our path at all. They are somewhere else. On their own ground. The Chinese see us clearly. We have spent five hundred years making sure we could never see them back. The missionary and the consultant would still despise each other if they met. Each would see in the other everything he had defined himself against. Neither could afford to notice that the heathen and the not-quite-yet-democratic are the same person; that the path to salvation and the path to good governance are the same path; and that in five hundred years of arriving in other people’s countries to bring them forward, we have not once managed to imagine the people we found there as anything other than slower travellers on a path we own. Until we can — until the West can experience even one of its own convictions as a conviction rather than as the structure of reality itself — every difference the world presents will keep reaching us as a threat. And we will keep doing what we are doing now, with the largest civilisation on earth, which is mistaking the edge of our vision for the edge of the world.

AN INTERESTING POLEMIC

How Did Britain Come to This? - a century of systemic failures of governance Gwyn Bevan (2023) The book looks at how systems of governance developed under four different rules of the game in Britain.

• First, the UK’s version of the minimal state in the 1920s and 1930s nurtured the growth of William Beveridge’s five giant evils of Want, Idleness, Squalor, Disease and Ignorance.

• Second came the planned state as developed under Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which tackled Beveridge’s five giant evils but ran into problems in the 1970s, in council housing, running public services, high government borrowing, inflation and unemployment (‘stagflation’).

• The Attlee settlement was largely dismantled by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative gov­ernments from 1979 to 1991. The Thatcher settlement of neoliberalism began by developing the third institution of the marketised state.

• That still applies to education, has been abandoned for the NHS after three failed attempts, and morphed into the fourth institution, the financialised state, in which ‘only money matters’.

The dysfunctional consequences of this apotheosis of neo­liberalism include: the demise of successful private corporations; the Global Financial Crisis of 2008; unaffordable housing; and failures in government outsourcing and privatisation. Its structured inequalities in opportunities and incomes mean that a small minority live in a plutonomy of luxury watches, super yachts and private jets, and nearly 30 per cent of British children live in poverty, with many of their families having to choose between eating and heating in the winter.

Afterword

10.1 Pathologies of neoliberalism Ronald Reagan began his 1981 presidential address by remarking on how, in the US, The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle. That address is remembered, however, for setting out the case for neoliber­alism in one sentence:

‘In our current crisis, government is not the solution to our problems: government is the problem.’

In 1989, towards the end of Reagan’s second term, he drafted an executive order to establish a new gov­ernment agency. It was to act on the findings of the secret Project Socrates, led by Michael Sekora, which had diagnosed the underlying cause of America’s declining competitiveness. That project found that the falling competitiveness of the US was the consequence of its institutions shifting their focus from technological innovation to ‘increasingly sophisticated economic shell games to maximize profits’ (emphasis in original). That was the outcome of taking seriously Friedman’s 1970 doctrine that:

there is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception [or] fraud.

Reagan’s term of office ended before his executive order could be signed.5 His successor, President George Bush, abolished Project Socrates. In the 2000s and 2010s, increasingly sophisticated economic shell games continued to be played in the financialisation of the economies of the US and UK, with four pathological consequences. The primary pathology is the corrosive impact of financialisation on what used to be great companies in the real economy (see Chapter 5). The mission of maximising shareholder value overturned almost all other arguments about what was needed to build great corporations – by making money the core mission and sole rationale of the organisation and those who work for it. In the 1990s, Boeing was the world’s most commercially successful air­craft company, thanks to the success of its 747 aircraft, which was designed and developed by people who ‘eat breathe and sleep the world of aeronaut­ics’.6 After its takeover by McDonnell Douglas 20 years ago, Boeing’s core mission became ‘improving the company’s financial profile’. In 1976, Fred Hirsch wrote:

In principle, individual maximisation can be held to its social pur­pose – making the best of opportunities for all – so long as it oper­ates on the basis of properly designed and implemented rules; yet individual maximisation means manipulating these rules too.8

In 2018, in Indonesia, Boeing’s 737 Max 8 airline, ‘which was practically new, crashed minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on board’. In 2019, in Ethiopia, another Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed, again killing all 346 people on board. On 22 September 2022, the New York Times reported that:

Boeing reached a $200 million settlement with U.S. securities reg­ulators on Thursday to resolve an investigation into claims that the aircraft manufacturer and a former chief executive had deceived investors about problems with its 737 Max plane … The aircraft manufacturer last year reached a $2.5 billion settlement with federal prosecutors as part of a deferred prosecution agreement … Last year, a group of Boeing directors agreed to a $237.5 million settlement with shareholders who accused them of failing to adequately oversee the company, allowing the lapses that led to the crashes.

The secondary pathology is the consequences of major shocks to the body politic in the US and the UK as a consequence of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Everyone could see that the rules of the game in the institutions of financialisation were privatising gains and socialising losses and that under­mined trust in our institutions. Fiona Hill was brought up as the daughter of an unemployed miner and midwife in Bishop Auckland and went ‘From coal house to White House’, becoming an adviser on foreign affairs to US Presi­dents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. She saw the same pathologies led to those in the deindustrialised areas, which had been left behind, to vote for new political settlements: in 2016, for Brexit in the UK, with its promise to ‘take back control’, and Donald Trump in the US, as the 45th president, with his promise to Make America Great Again (MAGA).12 Brexit now makes the British economy look like a team of athletes who used to struggle to compete in the Olympics and have decided to go on a fast-food diet: they can still run but not compete effectively. Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat in the presidential election of 2020 resulted in that infamous day of 6 January 2021, when five people died in the Capitol in Washington. That ceased to be Reagan’s miracle of ‘orderly transfer of authority’.

The third pathology is a set of direct malign consequences from the growth of the UK financial sector and its lobbying power. John Muellbauer and David Soskice highlight the following:

• lax regulation and generous tax treatment of capital gains and hedge funds;

• a seamy underbelly of the UK financial and property service sector, abetted by the UK’s overseas territories, making international tax eva­sion easier;

• credit-fuelled property booms, and high property prices; and

• diminished productivity growth.

The fourth pathology is, perhaps, the most troubling of all: the low productiv­ity of the UK as compared with other countries in Europe, and the UK’s rate of increase in productivity over the decade to 2018, which was the lowest in the last 250 years. The UK’s stagnating economy is why there have been histor­ically high levels of taxation and failing services (for example, nearly 26,000 waiting more than one year for treatment in the NHS). Those struggling to deliver front-line services are trapped in a vicious circle of being underpaid and overworked, which creates problems of retention and recruitment, and so staff leave. The government’s plans to tackle staff shortages in emergency care were deemed to have been misdirected for ‘a demoralised and burnt-out workforce seeing high rates of people leaving, and a social care system devastated by years of squeezed budgets and bad pay’.

10.2 Second thoughts on markets and quasi-markets

The quintessential neoliberal philosopher Robert Nozick, in 1974, argued that the market ought to be allowed free rein. He carefully chose what then seemed to be an innocuous example: the willingness of baseball fans to pay to watch one of the sport’s greatest players, Wilt Chamberlain. In his book “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”, Michael Sandel offers troubling examples of what the rich can now buy: access to an elite university, shooting endangered black rhinos, and the right to immigrate into the US. He still has the ticket from when he was 12 years old and went, with his father, to watch their baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, play in the World Series. They lost and he was devastated. There was then little difference in the prices of admission for the two types of seats, box seats and stand seats. The market for sport is now financialised. In 2012, a box seat to see the New York Yan­kees costs $260.21 I remember, when I was 18 and at school, paying out of my pocket money to watch George Best play for Manchester United at Old Traf­ford. Those who now pay up to £239 to watch a game at Manchester United are buying not only hospitality but also exclusivity. Sandel’s argument is that these changes have undermined how watching sport used to develop a strong sense of belonging to the same local community.

Timothy Besley responds to Sandel’s book by showing that economists have recognised the problems he illustrates when only money matters. I noted above that Julian Le Grand’s quasi-market theory is that this encourages those who are ‘knights’, who are altruistic, and discourages ‘knaves’, who are driven by self-interest, because the former are rewarded and the latter penal­ised by changes in market shares and funding. Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak question the efficacy of seeking to generate incentives from financial gains and losses for those who have chosen to work in not-for-profit organ­isations. They argue that high performance of public services follows from matching their missions to the motivation of those who deliver them. For example, teachers who derive intense satisfaction from educating the young are committed to their calling as professionals and do not seek large financial rewards. This approach stands in radical contrast to the mission of maximis­ing shareholder value and financialisation by re-emphasising the core mission of the organisation and those who work for it. Chapter 8 showed that health­care is an exemplar for where markets fail and where effective alternatives have been implemented. We would expect a quasi-market for schools to work best in cities. But it failed in London, which is why the Blair government launched the London Challenge. This combined ‘experimentation on the ground, [and] rapid feed­back and learning by advisers and officials, with strong project management across different strands of the policy’. It ran from 2003 to 2011 and improved the performance of secondary schools in inner London local authorities from being ‘the worst performing to the best performing nationally’. It has had an abiding impact. In 2019, Farquharson, McNally and Tahir showed that more than three-quarters of local authorities where at least 70 per cent of primary school leavers met the expected level in reading, writing and maths were in London. They also found that the impacts of poverty, as indicated by eligi­bility for free school meals (see Chapter 7) on attainment at GCSE in London schools was around half of that in the rest of the country. They emphasise that this was ‘entirely driven by better performance among disadvantaged pupils, meaning that lower educational inequality in the capital is a result of “level­ling up” rather than levelling down’.

Although Julian Le Grand and Samuel Bowles start from David Hume’s maxim, with which this chapter began, they argue for, and against, the use of market mechanisms as a system of governance of public services. Le Grand was aware of the risk that introducing quasi-markets could crowd out altru­ism by turning ‘knights’ into ‘knaves’. Samuel Bowles argues in The Moral Economy that this is what quasi-markets are designed to do, because individu­als are motivated either by altruism or by market mechanisms, but not both. And, as these processes cannot be separated (as is required for quasi-markets to work), market mechanisms undermine, rather than reinforce, ‘knightly’ behaviour. Market mechanisms also typically fail to provide sanctions for ‘knaves’ because it is so problematic for a failing provider (school, university or hospital) to exit the market. What happens instead to failing providers in a quasi-market is that they continue to provide a poor service with inadequate funding. That is what happened to the comprehensive school of Chelmsley Wood council estate, and was found by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for schools in England (see Chapter 4). Hume observes that ‘it appears somewhat strange’ that his political maxim ‘that every man must be supposed a knave … should be true in politics which is false in fact’. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that most who choose to deliver a public service start out aiming to be ‘knights’. So, we require a more discriminating system of governance than treating all as if they were ‘knaves’. Ian Ayres and John Braithwaite lay out the principles of regulatory discrim­ination of a strategy of tit-for-tat based on the conduct of those providing services: being punitive for ‘knavish’ and persuasive for ‘knightly’ conduct. Adam Oliver proposes a system of governance by reciprocal altruism, which offers an alternative to a market mechanism. Reciprocal altruism has two dif­ferent systems of negative reciprocity, which sanctions unacceptably poor per­formance by ‘knaves’, and positive reciprocity, which encourages excellence from ‘knights’. Diagnoses of, and remedies to, the pathologies of neoliber­alism have been developed by those known as ‘behavioural economists’. That raises an obvious question: isn’t all economics about human behaviour? To which the answer is: not when it is based on mathematical models abstracted from institutions and human behaviour.

David Hume’s close friend Adam Smith has a strong claim to be the first ‘behavioural economist’. His Theory of Moral Sentiments emphasised the importance of sympathy, that we feel loss more acutely than a gain of sim­ilar magnitude, and introduced the concepts of positive and negative reci­procity. Scholars of Smith’s work have sought to reclaim the breadth of his vision of society from its misrepresentation by neoliberal economists (including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman).Glory Liu reviews the scholarly literature on what is known as ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’, namely the cognitive dissonance between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Chicago School’s version of Smith as ‘an economist who believes in the social productiveness of self-interest alone, and whose meta­phor of “the invisible hand” illustrates how free markets – not government – protect and promote individual freedom’. Jesse Norman’s book on Smith lucidly sets out how ‘In Friedmanite fashion [the discipline of economics] has long been overly preoccupied with its own models rather than the real-world phenomena they are supposed to represent’. In 1976, Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics and celebrated the 200th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations in his paper ‘Adam Smith’s Relevance for today’. Jesse Norman describes that paper as a ‘master class in adjusting the facts to fit one’s own theory’: Friedman was being economical with the truth in his account of Smith’s position on Britain being overgoverned, the efficacy of free markets, and the importance of the ‘invisible hand’. Schol­ars of Smith’s work have sought to reclaim the breadth of his vision of society from its misrepresentation by neoliberal economists (including Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman). Jacob Soll argues that they failed to understand that Smith’s thought was grounded in Cicero’s economic vision in which ‘good morals … drove a healthy market’. Glory Liu points out that Barack Obama cited Smith:

They who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people should have such a share of the produce of their own labour to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged.

Obama translated that to mean ‘if you work hard [you] should make a decent living [and] be able to support a family’. The failings of neoliberalism to deliver a promised land after 40 years of trying can be understood as a conse­quence of a fundamental misreading of Adam Smith. In economic behaviour, what matters is not only, or even primarily, money.

10.3 Governing by reciprocal altruism

In the UK, teachers, doctors and nurses, who provide vital public services, were three of the top four most trusted professions in 2020 (the other was engineers). The reputational damage from ‘naming and shaming’ mem­bers of these professions for unacceptably poor performance brings a loss of esteem that undermines their core identity – like being unfrocked in public. The regime of ‘star ratings’ is an exemplar of how that sanction of negative reciprocity tackled unacceptably poor performance in the English NHS. If ‘naming and shaming’ does not work, then negative reciprocity requires dismissal – as applied in the ‘star rating’ regime (see Chapter 8) Negative reciprocity is, however, limited in scope: it can be effective only when performance is unacceptably poor, for example if waiting time at a hospi­tal for a hip operation were three years (and the target were 18 months) but not if it were 19 weeks (and the target were 18 weeks). Positive reciprocity encour­ages high performance through collegial benchmarking with recognition for high achievement by peers and the public. Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak describe that kind of competition as sustaining and supporting the mission of excellence to deliver outcomes that benefit citizens. Positive rec­iprocity is encouraged through recognition of excellence by awards in a pro­cess of ‘naming and faming’, for example from winning a Nobel Prize. In the US, the Sammies are annual awards of medals that highlight excellence in the federal workforce. Our honours system does not do the same for our public servants. Positive reciprocity is most effective in concert with negative reciprocity. For example, it would have been futile to try to develop collegial competition for developing care of high quality at Mid Staffordshire hospital between 2006 and 2010 (see Chapter 1).

Oliver argues against trying to use the same system for both positive and negative reciprocity. But that is what we do for public services in England with, for example, NHS star ratings, school league tables, and inspections by the Care Quality Commission and OFSTED. Christopher Hood argues that it is easier to implement punitive policies, such as negative reciprocity, in big countries because of the substantial relational distance between the gov­ernment and those who deliver public services. This may explain why the devolved government in Wales stopped publication of school league tables, and did not follow England in implementing a regime similar to ‘star ratings’ in its NHS, with consequent worse outcomes in Wales than in England. Oli­ver argues that positive reciprocity of learning through collegial competition against benchmarks needs to operate at a regional scale. Regions need to be large enough that there are enough producers of public services to learn from each other but small enough that the key players in each organisation can meet in the same room at the same time to learn from those delivering excep­tional performance, as in the London Challenge. As so often in the case in the UK, that was a localised one-off exercise. We need to institutionalise that capacity to learn as integral to our running of devolved public services, as in the network of the Interregional Performance Evaluation System across and within Italian regions (see Chapter 8). Veneto, which is part of that network, showed more resilience when Covid-19 hit Italy than did Lombardy, which is the only region in Italy that persisted with trying to make hospital competi­tion work. At the end of March 2020, Pisano et al reported that the mortality rates per 100,000 were six in Veneto and 50 in Lombardy.

George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton developed the economics of identity, which explains the power of negative and positive reciprocity for public ser­vices as compared with financial incentives. Negative reciprocity defines what is, and is not, acceptable behaviour. They describe the initial rite of pas­sage for new cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point (‘R day’). They are stripped to their underwear, have a severe haircut, are put into uniform and required to salute and address an older cadet ‘until they get it exactly right, while being reprimanded for even the smallest mistake’. The mission of West Point is:

to educate, train, and inspire the Corps of Cadets so that each grad­uate is a commissioned leader of character committed to the values of Duty, Honor, Country and prepared for a career of professional excellence and service to the Nation as an officer in the United States Army.

West Point has developed processes to develop a cadre for whom reciproc­ity (not self-interest) is fundamental. Akerlof and Kranton highlight the profound sense of identity imbued within that cadre. For example, a soldier would rather risk his life than let down his peers and, after leaving military service, will experience acute disappointment on being offered jobs by poten­tial future employers who assume that only money matters.

If we look to developing governance based on reciprocal altruism, the UK’s current constitutional arrangements look like one hand clapping. England has the scale for negative reciprocity but lacks a regional organisation for positive reciprocity. The devolved countries are at the scale for positive reciprocity but lack the relational distance for negative reciprocity. Devolution in England remains problematic because, as I found, officials in Whitehall devolve power as willingly as a leech gives up sucking blood (see Chapter 1). A review of devolution in Manchester pointed out that devolution in England has resulted in ‘very little local autonomy, major areas not devolved and hardly any tax raising powers’. But the evidence from more than 20 years of fuller devo­lution to national governments within the UK has shown them to be more vulnerable to producer capture, which is why their schools and hospitals have tended to perform worse than in England. Devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is necessarily asymmetric because the scale of England dwarfs that of the other countries. That means that it makes no sense to have a Parliament for England. That does not, however, justify our two deficiencies compared with proper federal arrangements.

First, our public services are funded by taxes on a UK-wide basis without a constitutional basis for agreeing what should be the UK-wide elements of policy: for example, charging for medicines and other prescriptions (which continues in England only) or not charging tuition fees for undergraduate education (which continues in Scotland only). Second, one promise of federal arrangements is that they offer a laboratory to experiment with different kinds of governance so enable learning about which works. We have experiments across the UK but lack the capability to learn from them, partly because we lack a federal institution to negotiate arrangements for reporting performance across our countries. Over time it has become increasingly difficult to com­pare public services’ performance across the four countries of the UK – a blind spot that reduces the scope for citizens to put pressure on their govern­ments to remedy their shortcomings. Requiring each government to collect basic data, following common definitions, so that performance can be com­pared and lessons learnt, does not constrain the different parts of the UK from having different priorities or pursuing different policies. This was recognised in the Concordat on Statistics of October 2021 in which the UK government and devolved administrations agreed on the objective of producing ‘coher­ent/comparable statistics at the UK and disaggregated levels’. But, in August 2023, it was reported that the UK statistics authority had problems in being supplied with comparable NHS data.

The development of performance monitoring at the national and regional levels in Italy offers a good model for a new constitutional settlement for the UK in which there is full devolution to regions within England combined with effective scrutiny of their use of public money and by the devolved coun­tries of the UK. An example is the performance agreements linked to funding for government departments as implemented by the Treasury under Gordon Brown in the Blair government in the early 2000s. In a new constitutional settlement, the Treasury would report to the public on how effectively their taxes are being used by the devolved countries and English regions. And these bodies would develop their own systems of comparing performance of local providers of public services by developing collegial competition between them. These services would include healthcare, and all education except for an elite set of internationally competitive research-intensive universities. Regions would also look to develop means of better use of our resources for healthcare along the pathways of care and education over a lifetime.

10.4 A new political settlement

In 2022, Peter Hennessy, writing in A Duty of Care, hoped Covid-19 would be followed by a new political settlement, as after the 1942 Beveridge Report (see Chapter 3). William Beveridge set the agenda for the Attlee government with his five giant evils: Want, Idleness, Disease, Ignorance and Squalor (see Chapter 3). This is a game you can play. My take on our current five giant evils is as follows:

• Want (or poverty and lack of means) was caused by the economics of less eligibility for the unemployed. Beveridge showed that the UK could have afforded to abolish it in the 1930, and how that could be done in the 1940s, in a system of social security. In modern Britain, Want has re-emerged as a giant everywhere. The high cost of housing in a financialised market is a primary cause of poverty. And, contrary to Adam Smith’s view of a well-ordered society, all too often having a job offers no escape. In-work poverty means too many have to trade off heating and eating, or childcare versus employment.

• Idleness was a consequence of market failure that sustained armies of unemployed people over a decade. Now regulatory failures of com­plex markets generate Insecurity in our future supplies of privatised water and energy, from toxic social media (the murders of Jo Cox and David Ames give menace to the anonymous death threats our MPs receive every week), in our financial institutions, and from the existential threat of climate change and developments of artificial intelligence (AI).

• Disease was prevalent from lack of access to healthcare. Now we have Ill-health from overall policy systems so designed that many people ‘freely’ choose ways of living that have resulted in ‘epidemics’ of obesity and diabetes.

• Ignorance was caused by lack of access to secondary education. Now we have Miseducation, with degrees awarded by our bloated univer­sity sector, from which only 25 per cent of graduates earn enough to pay back their student loans in full. Uniquely across the OECD, our younger generations of people in the UK are no more numerate or literate than those born four decades earlier.

• Squalor was caused by the mismatch between where people lived and opportunities for employment, leading to very poor living environ­ments. While some problems here have been ameliorated by post-war economic growth, rundown areas remain on almost the same scale, leaving people living in them vulnerable to Despair, where those on benefits or with gloomy jobs see no escape for themselves (or their children) from a life of drudgery, low pay and low status. In the US, despair is a leading cause of deaths from drugs and suicide.

Beveridge’s 400-page report was focused on tackling Want. (His recommen­dation for the governing principles of what became our NHS was because this would tackle Want – and, of course, Disease.) He described the five giant evils in two short paragraphs. It is beyond the scope of this book, and my knowledge, to suggest how we tackle what I have suggested are our five giant evils. Indeed, the purpose of this book is to inform debate over their causes, so others more expert than I can debate how we ought to tackle them. I conclude with the following observations on our systems of governance.

• We are still living in the Thatcher settlement based on neoliberalism as if there were no alternative. Indeed, Colin Crouch, in 2011, described what failed to follow the Global Financial Crisis as “The Strange Non-death of Neo-liberalism”.

• For neoliberalism to die, we need a new political settlement: the ena­bling state, which recognises that now market failures are the problem of government. As Chapter 5 argued, it would be a mistake to go back to the Attlee settlement based on the state ‘rowing’. This new settlement is where the state steers different systems of governance: regulating markets where they can work effectively (not just for shareholders and senior executives) and developing alternatives where they do not.

• Effective devolution is vital to developing an enabling state in the UK, with consequent radical changes in the skills, staffing and attitudes of those working in Whitehall and Westminster.

TWO MORE

Two useful reminders of Britain's past -

Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England Francis Beckett 
and Mark Seddon (2018)

CHAPTER FIVE BACK TO THE ’30S WITH MAGGIE

Labour England had at its heart the idea of social, public and cooperative

ownership as part of a mixed economy. It shared the same vision as the Scandinavian social democrats or the German and French socialists.

The idea that Labour was committed to public ownership of the corner shop was one ritually trotted out by the Conservatives – who, nonetheless, up until the mid-1970s had little intention of reversing the public ownership of the utilities for instance. Indeed, Edward Heath’s government nationalised Rolls-Royce in the early 1970s to save it from possible closure – just as David Cameron’s Tory government was to nationalise failing banks that had brought the Anglo-American economies almost to their knees decades later. But for Margaret Thatcher and her arriviste new Tories, the promise of a new Britain of small shareholders was a powerful one. Glitzy television advertisements urged the public to buy into what they already owned.

‘Psst, don’t tell Sid!’ was the advertising line used to accompany the selloff of British Gas. ‘Buzby’, a yellow canary, did the job on British Telecom. No matter that within a dozen or so years the privatised public utilities were largely in the hands of the big corporate shareholders, many of them based overseas. Even a former Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was to speak out against the sell-off of the ‘family silver’. But it would be another thirty-odd years before the grand larceny that had been the sale of often profitable nationalised industries began to be seriously questioned. On the privatised British railways, for instance, a ticket costs far more than on the nationalised railways in France. Furthermore, some of the organisations being subsidised to run trains over tracks in Britain were nationalised foreign railway companies, such as the French SNCF. When the private operators failed, they were usually rewarded with more franchises and more taxpayers’ money. When the East Coast line returned to public ownership and proved hugely successful and profitable, the government handed it over to the same failing privateers, including the company owned by the subsidy junkie Sir Richard Branson. Tony Blair and his closest cohorts in New Labour refused to countenance taking back at least some of the utilities into public ownership. Rather the reverse, Peter Mandelson was to cite the ludicrous corner shop claim as he and Blair set about removing any commitment to common ownership in Labour’s constitution. Blair would usually excuse himself by saying that it was ‘too costly’, or in the case of the Post Office, blame the European Union for forcing Britain to outsource its publicly owned companies.

Outsourcing and privatisation were to continue apace as the remnants of the family silver were flogged off. But back in the early 1980s, Labour’s praetorian guard, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), had to be broken before the real process of breaking up and selling public assets was to begin in real earnest – the National Coal Board being one such target. The year 1983 had been marked by a small eruption of seemingly unplanned, unrelated events that were in turn to explode into much bigger and profound struggles. These were to determine the future of the declining trade union movement in particular.

The first came on the Ides of March and with the decision of the miners in one of the last remaining pits in the Rhondda Valley, Lewis Merthyr Colliery, to call on their union to come to their aid over plans to shut it on the grounds that it was no longer profitable. Profitability in coal mines was one of the great industrial bones of contention of the late twentieth century. A mine could go from being profitable to making a loss in fairly quick order if one face stopped being mined while another was under development. The miners’ union had long argued that pits should only be shut if exhausted. In Germany, France and the Netherlands, a long-term approach, based on retraining and bringing new industries into areas with a declining coal industry, was the preferred option. Not in Britain, though. On two occasions in 1984 and in 1992, Tory governments had no compunction whatsoever in shutting down whole swathes of the industry, without any realistic employment prospect for those affected. While doing it, they appeared to take some collective enjoyment in humiliating those they had targeted. The national leadership of the NUM under Arthur Scargill and his deputy Mick McGahey had long predicted that a hidden Tory plan to run down the coal industry – and Lewis Merthyr – was to be just the beginning of a major pit closure programme.

This was the first whiff of grapeshot in the battle that followed the Tories’ victory in the May 1983 general election. In March, Scargill had called for a national strike as a show of solidarity against the threat of pit closures nationally. In a portent of what was to come, he also suggested that strike action could take place without a national ballot of miners being held. Yet barely a week later, on 8 March, a majority of miners voted to reject a national strike in support of the striking Welsh colliers in a secret pithead ballot. Lewis Merthyr was shut soon afterwards and unlike most of its sister pits whose iconic architecture and headgear was soon to be bulldozed from the landscape, was reinvented as the Rhondda Heritage Park. On a visit to the park a few years after the convulsive strike of 1984–85, Mark Seddon recognised former south Wales area NUM stalwart Ivor England, now dressed in Victorian collier’s gear in his new role as a tourist guide. ‘It’s bollocks,’ said Ivor. ‘But it’s a job. And most jobs, well they’ve vanished like an autumn mist from these valleys.’ Would Margaret Thatcher have opted for an early general election had the miners voted for an all-out strike in support of their doomed colleagues in south Wales in March 1983? Would she have risked another general election framed by pictures of striking miners, picket lines and a bitter struggle for the survival of the coalfields and risked an Edward Heath-style debacle? For when Heath had asked the British electorate, ‘Who governs Britain?’, in the middle of a national miners’ strike over pay in 1974, voters had responded with a fairly definitive answer: ‘It’s clearly not you!’, and sent Harold Wilson back to Downing Street, with Michael Foot as the Employment Secretary to work out a pay deal with Britain’s miners. Britain was a changed place a decade on, but probably not changed enough to produce an entirely different set of circumstances. The Tory government backed off from confrontation in 1981, under the threat of industrial action from the NUM.

Historically, Conservative governments had always avoided confrontation with the miners. Harold Macmillan had once famously warned that as with ‘Eton and the Guards’, all Tory Prime Ministers should avoid taking on the NUM. Winston Churchill, when asked in the 1950s whether he had settled with the miners on his terms or theirs, replied, ‘On theirs, of course. One must have electric light.’ The appointment of Ian MacGregor, a former American business executive who had been presiding over the shrinking of the British steel industry, to head the publicly owned National Coal Board in March 1983 was to set the scene for much that was to follow. Industrial convulsions continued. Workers at Ford’s giant Halewood plant began a strike over the unfair dismissal of a colleague. Labour’s campaign document ‘The New Hope for Britain’, outlining its strategy for fighting the next general election, proposed an ‘emergency programme’, to be enacted upon taking office, with increased public investment in transport, housing and social services. A ‘national economic assessment’ was to be undertaken in co-operation with the trade unions. Also included were proposals to withdraw from the then European Economic Community (EEC) and the establishment of a nonnuclear defence policy by removing nuclear weapons from US and other bases. The campaign document was to morph into a Labour manifesto,  enthusiastically embraced by, among others, the young, upstanding candidate for Sedgefield, Tony Blair. Blair had squeaked into winning the parliamentary nomination on the casting vote of the chairman, Jack Burton. Moreover, this, according to folklore, had been helped by Burton’s decision to wave aloft a letter from Michael Foot that waxed enthusiastically over the qualities Blair had demonstrated in fighting the hopeless seat of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire a year or so earlier. Blair, despite his later detestation of the Labour left, always had a soft spot for Foot. The manifesto was dubbed ‘The longest suicide note in history’, by Manchester Gorton MP Gerald Kaufman. Foot famously and quite uncharacteristically never forgave Kaufman for his outburst, coming as it did in the middle of the general election. Labour’s national campaign is remembered for the general chaos that surrounded it. Shadow Cabinet ministers frequently didn’t know where they were supposed to be and sometimes turned up at the wrong venues. And yet the enthusiasm that often met Michael Foot as he travelled the country seemed to suggest that the polls were guilty of underestimating the number of his supporters. Foot’s arrival in Norwich coincided with the arrival of footsore participants taking part in the ‘People’s March for Jobs’, who had marched from unemployment-hit towns in the north-east of England to protest the rising level of joblessness and deindustrialisation. Mark Seddon recalls going to meet the marchers, who were consciously adopting the mantle of the Jarrow hunger marches of the 1930s, as they arrived at the approaches to the city. Foot’s natural empathy was well received by them and the image of the day which made it onto the front pages of some of the national press was of the Labour leader, his arms draped around the shoulders of one of the young female marchers who sported a magnificent pink Mohican and multiple nose piercings. Foot then got a rapturous reception in the ancient and packed St Andrew’s Hall in the city, as the marchers finally arrived.

But for all of the enthusiasm, the uplifting oratory and the hard work of activists, the campaign was succeeding in motivating existing supporters, but few others. When Michael Foot arrived in Norwich, two Labour MPs represented the city. Yet after the general election, both had been swept away and replaced by Conservatives to the genuine shock and disbelief of virtually everyone who had been there battling it out on the doorsteps. Margaret Thatcher was returned to office as Prime Minister with a majority of 144 seats. Labour won the fewest number of seats since the Second World War. Among the prominent parliamentary defeats were those of Shirley Williams, whose Crosby constituency was captured by the Conservatives; Bill Rodgers, whose Stockton North seat was one of only four gained by Labour; and Tony Benn, who lost the newly redrawn Bristol East to the Tory candidate, Jonathan Sayeed.

Generation Left Keir Milburn (2019)

In the next chapter we examine the impact of the event of 2008 on the technical composition of the working class. I will argue that the older generation are still tied to the neoliberal hegemony of finance while the young seek to escape it. The event of 2008 provides a shared generational location for the young and disadvantaged. But the emergence of a coherent new political generation requires events of a different kind. A Left generation requires a rupture caused by a moment of collective action that exceeds the existing sense of social and political possibility. In chapter 3 we will name these types of events ‘moments of excess’ and propose the 2011 international wave of protests and revolutions as a prime example. We will examine this wave as the first iteration of an emerging political composition, examining its forms for traces of 2008’s impacts on the technical composition.

The events of 2011 created a Left generational unit, and in chapter 4 we examine this unit’s turn to electoral politics to gain hegemony over the much larger but politically ambiguous generation of 2008. This turn brought them into conflict with a previous Left generation, the Third Way Left, formed by the events of 1989 and characterized by their compromise with neoliberalism. The event of 2008 undermined that generation’s formative assumptions, leaving them unable to understand or deal with the current generation gap. This means it falls to Generation Left to deal with the current situation, and in chapter 5 I suggest ways that the current generation gap can be overcome. This will involve reinventing the categories of youth and adulthood to break their current entanglement with private property ownership, shifting them instead towards the kinds of common ownership which can act as a solution to the generational divide over access to material security. Only in this way can we ensure that our current ‘storms of youth precede brilliant days’ for all generations.