This Too will Pass – patterns of decline

The beauty of doing a series of posts is that it gives you a chance to consider them with a critical eye – with what we might call “peripheral vision”! - and to see how they might be made more “rounded”. That’s what I’ve been doing with this last series – producing a 30 page paper which incorporates material I had written previously about both Brexit and the issue of Decline which, sadly, has become rather fashionable.

The result is a paper entitled This Too will Pass – patterns of decline

update; I thought I had completed this paper (about UK decline) but found myself drafting a conclusion  reflecting on the frenetic nature of change which took me onto "accelerationism" and then the 2015 book "Inventing the Future - postcapitalism and a world without work" which I had dismissed when I first tried to read it but now find a good read.

The updating has allowed me to argue that there are several elephants in the room in any attempt to understand the current malaise of the UK. One of these is the state of the British Labour Party with another being the way that party has been portrayed by the ideologues who own the british press Just three companies controlled 90% of the UK newspaper market in 2021 – up from 70% in 2015. How can the UK call itself a democracy in such a condition?

Further Update; John Harris is one of the few UK  journalists to break out of the "Westminster bubble" to focus on what people outside London are feeling and saying. He's also the host of the "Politics Weekly" podcast. Here he is in Grimsby recently reporting on the calamity of life in that town   https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/vieo/2022/oct/31/the-town-where-brexit-died-but-hope-survives-video

How can Britain survive? part VI of a series

 The UK has experienced 2 major shocks in the last 6 years – Brexit and Covid – on top of 40 years of relentless neoliberalism. The series has been trying to explore the effect this has this had on the UK’s social, political and institutional health,

I have to say that I find a surprising paucity of material about this. I’ve mentioned The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s (2021) but this is really the intellectual history of an idea and doesn’t, unfortunately, try to explore the effect that it has had on our social, political and institutional lives. 

One of the few authors who, clearly and strongly, frames Brexit as a consequence of the global financial crisis of 2007/8 is sociologist William Davies whose essays can be accessed in both the Guardian and the London Review of Books but collected in This is not normal – the collaps hee of Liberal Britain (2020) which he nicely introduces thus

There are various preoccupations throughout this book -

• the abandoning of liberal economic rationality,

• the declining authority of empirical facts,

• the main-streaming of nationalism,

• the hatred of ‘liberal elites’,

• the effect of big data and real-time media on our politics,

• the new mould of celebrity leaders,

• the crisis of democratic representation.

These are all linked in ways that I’ve endeavoured to show. The over-arching theme is of a shift from a liberal polity based around norms, laws, expertise and institutions to a neoliberal one based around algorithmic surveillance and financial calculation.

The task for the kind of ‘real-time sociology’ that I was engaged in with these essays is to straddle the fast-moving world of the news cycle (which has grown significantly faster in the twenty-first century) with the search for underlying structures and conditions. This is not unlike the kind of ‘conjunctural analysis’ that Gramscians have long aimed at, and for which Stuart Hall’s work has been the model. Hall always encouraged us to pay attention to the new and unprecedented, and not simply view history as a predictable unfolding of underlying mechanics. Many of the essays in this volume perform a kind of brokerage service, moving between unfamiliar and shocking political events and familiar social and political theories, including many of the classics – Marx, Hirschman, Arendt, Foucault, Weber. In scurrying back and forth between my Twitter feed and my bookshelves, the hope is that we can understand what’s going on, without either wishful thinking or denial of the genuine conjunctural novelty.

And it is really odd that the best (weekly) analysis of the condition of British politics comes not from a journalist or political scientist but from another sociologist – this time of the organisational sort whose blog has been following Brexit for more than 6 years - namely Chris Grey’s Brexit and Beyond. What makes his blog remarkable is the forensic logic with which his weekly post dissects the various arguments of that week – replete with copious hyperlinks and reminders of the typologies of previous argumentation. Just look at the incisive power with which Grey assesses the possibilities and constraints facing the UK’s latest Prime Minister

The other analysis I’ve picked out is Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment; Aeron Davies (2018) based on 20 years of researching elite figures in five areas associated with the modern Establishment:

• the national media,

• the City,

• large corporations,

• the Whitehall civil service and

• the major political parties at Westminster.

Over that time, I have interviewed and observed over 350 people working in or close to the top. The book is organised in four parts. Part I surveys the elite state of play in Britain as it is now. Chapter 1 argues that the Establishment, as it has been conceived, is coming to an end. Chapter 2 looks at how elites, by trying to get ahead, have destabilised the very institutions on which their power is based. Part II looks at how leaders have adapted to get to the top.

Those most suited to pleasing their assessors get there first.

That means PPE degrees and MBAs rather than qualifications in law or engineering; media management and accounting skills instead of creativity and entrepreneurship. Sellers now trump makers, and bluffers outrank experts.

Part III reveals some of the ways elites stay at the top once they get there. As Chapter 5 shows, joining the club means sharing its culture and ideas, and adopting dominant norms and positions, no matter how nonsensical.

Chapter 6 looks at the secrets and lies that underpin elite power and control. Some are systematic and organised, and some are simply the lies leaders tell themselves. Chapter 7 shows that leadership has been transformed into a numbers game because numbers can be tallied up in a way that ideas can't. And because elites co-create the game, they can also change the rules as and when they need to.

Part IV focuses on exit strategies and how canny elites survive when it all goes wrong. As Chapter 8 shows, leaders follow far more than they lead. It's safer that way. And when the going gets tough, the tough join the herd. Chapter 9 is all about mobility, because the modern leader must be ready to up and go whenever things start falling apart.

Staying ahead no longer means staying on top of one organisation or nation but floating across several. The conclusion tries to join the dots and briefly explores what solutions there might be to the current problems of leadership

The revolutionary english - part v of a series

A few years back, I had occasion to comment that the Brits have a reputation for respecting tradition which is totally undeserved. Their government style (at least since the mid 1960s) has been one of the most revolutionary – putting even Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “waves of creative destruction” to shame. Brexit is simply the most recent example A few others -

- In the mid 1970s the system of local government was decimated – the average British local authority covers 150,000 people - more than 10 times the European average

- the system has been subject several times since then to massive upheavals

- about two thirds of British civil servants now work in relatively independent Agencies

- virtually everything that can be privatized or contracted out has been so dealt with, with almost no services returning to the municipalities as has been the trend, for example, in Germany

- the National Health Service has been subjected to a never-ending series of organizational upheavals over the past 40 years

- in the mid 2000s, New Labour totally changed the political structures of English local government, encouraging the concentration of power in the hands of a few Cabinet members or a directly-elected mayor.

I supported some of these changes so it’s not the nature of the change I want to draw attention to – it’s rather their frequency and intensity; and the fact that British governments were able to force change through with so little effective opposition. That simply can’t happen in Europe where –

• the French, for example, are notorious for the strength of their protests about basic rights

• German Governments bound by constitutional constraints and a Federal structure of power-sharing; and

• the Italians bound by inertia.

Not for nothing did a British conservative Minister describe the British system as one of “elective dictatorship”.And, in the 1980s, an American political scientist drew attention to this in a book about French and British styles of centralisation subtitled “British dogmatism and French pragmatism”

I have in this series been trying to understand what has brought a country so admired just a decade or so ago to its knees. The last post suggested that the rot always starts at the head – and the first real sign of things going badly wrong was probably the British decision in 2001 to thrown in its lot with the Americans and invade Iraq – although there were signs of hubris a few years earlier with the Kosovo war.

More than half of all British Prime Ministers were educated at Oxford University (30 out of 57) – and most of them at private schools such as Eton Little wonder they have such a sense of entitlement – with Boris Johnson being in a class of his own. Chums – how a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK (2022) uses one journalist’s experience at the University to explore how and why the establishment split over Brexit - and the radicalization of the Conservative Party by a relatively small band of right-wing ideologues who happen to have been educated at Oxford. It’s a fascinating story

But I said I wanted to look at the recent and sharp decline of Britain from various perspectives. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian journalist and David Walker was, for a time, Director of one of the sections of the abolished Audit Commission and they have jointly written books which have tried to assess (as objectively as possible) the performance of both Labour and Conservative governments of the past few decades. In 2020 they gave us The Lost Decade 2010-2020 And what lies ahead for Britain; Polly Toynbee and David Walker which has only now come into my possession.

And then there is the UN rapporteur on poverty and human rights Philip Alston’s report on the UK which came out in 2018.

a fifth of the population lives in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line,1 and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. Various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%. For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.

A year later, there was an appropriate follow-up All together now? One’s walk in search of his father and of a lost England; Mike Carter (2019). Both trace the horrific impact of growing poverty in the UK

The Strange Death of Liberal England – part IV

The Strange Death of Liberal England was a famous book which came out in 1935 arguing that the Liberal party had been destroyed by its struggles over the House of Lords, the suffragettes, the trade unions and the Irish question - although its opening paragraph contains a significant line about "the terrible plutocracy of 1910-14". It was written by George Dangerfield, a British-American journalist in a fascinating modern style which makes it a great read..

Today. it’s not any particular political party which is under threat in the UK - but rather the entire fabric of its society. With another young, inexperienced (unhealthily privileged/rich) and deeply right-wing politician now in charge, he may or may not be able to stem, to an extent, the disastrous loss of confidence in the country’s capacity. This twitter thread argues that his Cabinet choices are hardly those of a man with an inspiring vision. Let me summarise what this series of posts has been trying to say -

• the UK has, for the past 40 years, been increasingly in the grip of a mad scheme to “marketise” as many public services as possible

• New Labour may have increased public spending on health and education for a few years but otherwise continued the Thatcherite doctrine of market freedom

• 6 years of Brexit have destroyed the UK’s reputation

• the lies and weaknesses of its political leaders have made the country the but of ridicule

• Brexit has totally distracted since 2016 the UK machinery of government – with government unable to focus on anything except the political, legal and administrative consequences of that decision

• the British government machine used to have a Rolls-Royce reputation

• a decade of austerity has wreaked havoc on its institutional capacity

• although it’s difficult to find evidence for such an assumption

It’s odd when we audit and measure everything which moves, to discover that indices of institutional health as so thin on the ground. Government may have given us League Tables which measure the performance of individual schools and hospitals -but seem to have difficulties letting us know how well the departments of State are doing with their task of managing the tens of thousands of schools and hospitals. In 2015, the Conservative government abolished the Audit Commission which had been auditing the affairs of local government and handed the job over to a private sector - which had proved itself incapable of revealing the truth about corporate business. True, we still have a National Audit Office with 800 staff but it’s accountable only to the UK parliament, not to government – with this being an example of one of their “overviews”. It’s nicely presented but the closest it gets to anything which might be called “performance assessment” is a box on customer satisfaction.

So we have to go elsewhere for material which might give us a sense of the effects of 40 years of what, rather reluctan tly, I have to call neoliberalism. The rot, they say, starts at the top – so I begin with one of the rare books which allowed a sociologist to interview the elite at the top of the industrial, financial and government sectors of the country in the new millennium - Reckless Opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment; Aeron Davies (2018)

It is the result of twenty years of intense research, over 350 interviews with the heads of corporations, senior civil servants, journalists, politicians and public relations firms. In response to Brexit, Aeron Davis wrote this slim but telling volume in less than three months. It is, in effect, a short anthropology of how the United Kingdom’s elite became clueless at governing.

Davis’s report is thus a frontline account of the way the political, industrial, financial and media elites are disabled by their own culture and methods from acting in the collective interests of the country. “No one seems to trust anything or anyone else’. Davis observes that

‘self-interest and competition has left politicians willing to destroy their parties, civil servants their departments, chief executives their companies, and journalists their publications’.

He then sets out to explain how the new elites undermine the institutions they head. The reporting of quarterly returns by fund managers prevents long-term investment.

Within this world, leaders have to sell themselves continuously and rely on specialists in corporate affairs to attract investors. Communications teams spend 70 per cent of their time ‘keeping stuff out of the papers’. One result is the fading of rooted expertise and the rise of short-term consultants. This shift, echoed in politics and government, is leading to a massive loss of institutional memory essential to self-belief. It is not just bosses that come and go at speed. In 2009, Davis wanted to find out more about weapons of mass destruction decisions in Iraq, only to find there was only one person still in the department with the relevant knowledge. Of twenty-five permanent secretaries at the time, eleven had been in the post less than two years.

The parallel, insecure worlds of government and commerce, are run on ‘self-deception’, much of it embedded in the self-serving systems of ‘communication’. ‘Greater transparency’, Davis claims, only leads ‘to more mystification’. Finance directors manipulate the rate of return to serve the public listings of the share price, and when successful,move on before the consequences are realised. Many financial journalists are in effect ‘embedded’, writing to other specialists and reinforcing a small world that believes almost religiously in the free market.

The series will continue with a look at some other important books which explore the UK condition from a variety of perspectives

The collapse of government in the UK

This latest series of posts is trying to understand how british governments have in recent decades been brought so low as to have become the subject of international ridicule.

For more than 40 years (1979-2022), it hasn’t mattered which British government was in power – the economic model remained the same. And that has been worship of the market. If public utilities weren’t being privatised, they were (in health and education for example) being “contracted out” viz public money being used in a “mock market”. Except that this has, for specific health procedures, been increasingly a staging post for eventual privatisation – with patients having to pay (often to American companies who have been invited in by the government).

Schools have been increasingly the subject of mock competition – with league tables supposedly identifying and rewarding “performance”; local government removed from its management role; and charities and religious bodies invited to take over. “Choice” was one of Tony Blair’s most important principles for the “modernisation” of public services New Labour undertook. There was a time when countries were interested in learning from one another – and Finland’s schools are remarkable for the way in which teachers are trusted by society to conduct their business without the regulatory control which has been such a feature of the UK – with a huge growth in managers at a time when, otherwise, the state was being significantly scaled down. “Hollowing out” was the term used– although that was more than 2 decades ago. .

One of the devices New Labour inherited from the Tories was the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which allowed Gordon Brown to rack up huge government debt to private companies who just wallowed in cash. A hospital or school would be commissioned with money borrowed from the private sector – with the subsequent interest payments costing the taxpayer 3-4 times the original cost. One result is that hospitals are now paying billions of pounds in interest payments to private companies

New Labour also followed Thatcherism in its treatment of the Civil Service which has an important role in challenging the practicalities of political preferences. After 18 years of Conservative rule, New Labour was suspicious of the civil service and chose to ignore its advice. Political adviser positions multiplied and “sofa government” kept the decision-making political. This, of course, is a recipe for the dreaded “groupthink”, the importance of which has been reasserted in recent books by Matthew Syed and Gillian Tett

Much more could be said – about the way corrupt practices have seeped into everyday government decision-making; about the scale of lobbying in the UK; about the dramatic decline of public trust in government.

Brexit was the last nail in the coffin – with propoganda from both sides insulting our intelligence and the immigrants whom Bliar had let so carelessly into the country in 2004 serving increasingly as a scapegoat for the damage and indignities heaped on the precariat during the post-2010 Austerity. Brexit has damaged both the political and administrative machine equally with the scale of the unravelling 40 years of EU membership stretching what was left of the previously famous capacity of the UK civil service to breaking point – particularly when its political “masters and mistresses” proved to be uninterested in such detail.

The country now finds itself with a multi-millionaire Conservative Prime Minister whose privileged background does not inspire confidence. After 12 years in power, the party to which he belongs needs to show some sign of humility.

But it is the country as a whole which needs to ask itself some very tough questions about how on earth it has reached this point of disaster, draw some fundamental lessons – and develop a serious strategy. Make no mistake, this is a profound crisis both of government and of “governance” (a word I rarely use except critically)

In using these terms, I’m trying to convey the message that changing personnel and structures takes us only so far; what is required is a deep change in how we as a society approach the future. We’ve been having debates about computers and artificial intelligence for almost half a century – have we really learned so little? The pandemic gave us, momentarily, a sense of possibilities – Ireland and Iceland have both given us recent examples of a more positive type of democracy. And why should our voting be restricted to the political sphere (and only every few years) when we have the example of industrial democracy to demonstrate the importance of extending the meaning of democracy?

Further Reading

The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed A Davies and B Jackson et al (2021) This is really an intellectual history of an idea and doesn’t, unfortunately explore the effect that neoliberal ideas have had on our institutions. For this, the work of David Marquand is useful

Democracy at work – a cure for capitalism Richard Wolff 2012 A must-read!

The political economy of cooperatives and socialism Bruno Jossa 2020 A curoius book - with only the chapter on Richard Wolff perhaps being worth reading

George Monbiot’s piece in today’s Guardian demonstrates that he is the only person able to raise his vision from the current spectacle and recognise the scale of the change Britain needs

The UK Puzzle

The last post didn’t do justice to the seriousness of the question it raised. It was a rather self-indulgent whinge at the rage most of us Brits feel about the English upper-class twits who pollute our political culture. We think ours is a democracy – when, deep down, we know that it is no such thing and are humiliated by the realisation.

I had actually wanted to bring the story slightly up-to-date with a few comments about how managerialism (in both the private and public sectors) had somehow managed to insinuate a semi-feudal element into our organisational systems. In schools and the health system – as well as the industrial and financial sectors – the power of managers seems to have become all-pervasive - for no obvious reason.

We experience this in the workplace as a malevolent form of bullying – but we need to be more aware of the real evil which is senior managers taking millions in buy-back share options which artificially inflate share prices to their (short-term) benefit

I was, of course, aware that the Netherlands, as an old Imperial power, posed an immediate threat to my argument about class and Empire - but Boffy (my old friend and fellow-blogger) was soon on the trail and suggesting that the real issue is the development of what Christopher Bett calls “rentier capitalism”

Governments enable and support rents and rentiers in many ways -they help shield assets from competition – through the granting and enforcement of strong Intellectual Property rights, for example. They also shield rents from tax, most notably via generous treatments of capital gains and of income from property.

The main problems with rentier capitalism are twofold. First, rentiers are inclined to sit on and sweat their income-generating assets, rather than innovate; it is a recipe for economic stagnation. And second, because incomes accrue disproportionately to the asset-owning elite, it is an engine for growing inequalities of both income and wealth. You only have to look at the London housing market to see that process in action.

Rentier capitalism is not unique to contemporary Britain. It exists, and has existed, much more widely, geographically and historically. But, courtesy of policies that have been almost unimaginably rentier-friendly since the 1970s, the UK is rentier capitalism’s apotheosis, where its prototypical ills – vast inequalities combined with entrenched stagnation – are on full display.

“Let’s talk about the real money,” George Monbiot wrote in 2014. “The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-working families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent.”

I’ve taken this table from Bett’s 2020 book on the subject to explain the multiple forms which rent extraction takes these days. When we talk about “the economy” we are simply unaware of what I agree with Boffy is a dramatic new form of extractive power.

Table P.1 Forms of contemporary rentierism

Asset	Primary means of gaining asset control	Principal income streams
Financial	Creation of credit money by private banks Acquisition of financial assets in primary and secondary markets	interest Dividends Capital gains
Natural resource reserves	Leasing agreements with mineral rights owners	Product sales
Intellectual property	Registration of rights (e.g. to patents, trademarks) with state intellectual property	Product sales Royalties
Digital platforms	Organic creation	Commissions Advertising fees
Service contracts	Bidding processes (various)	Service fees
Infrastructure	Privatization of state-owned enterprises licensing by government	Service fees Licensing fees
Land	Acquisition in markets Privatization of public-sector landholdings	Ground rent

Not enough of us understand these now forms of power – the question, however, is how exactly such developments account for the implosion of political power in the UK?

One book which may help answer the question is The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed A Davies and B Jackson et al (2021)

Why has the UK fallen so far – so fast?

They say that understanding is 90% of problem-solving or – as Einstein once put it -

“if I was given an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes trying to understand it and just 5 minutes to solving it”.

The UK may have been the first country to industrialise and certainly had in the 19^th century a very good record for scientific understanding but – since then – it has had a deplorable attitude to critical thinking. My question today is why the country finds itself with its reputation in total tatters?

Brexit, of course, is the immediate reason but, in the spirit of the five why s, I want to go much deeper and to explore what it is about british/english institutions that might explain the disaster which has overtaken the country in the 15 or so years. We were, after all, always “semi-detached” from the EU project. “Decline” has been a favourite conversation piece since the 1960s reaching a pinnacle in the debate surrounding Martin Wiener’s 1981 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 which argued that the Victorian middle class had been seduced by the values of the aristocracy and lost its edge to the competence of the Germans.

Certainly the monarchical, imperial and class trappings of the British system are not a pretty sight – and have got up my nose since I became a Scottish politician in 1968. What accompanies imperial success is, of course, a lazy complacency which reveals itself in upper-class English arrogance and, in its political class, in sheer HUBRIS (in my book the worst sin). The old Etonians really still imagine that they are a superior race = and Johnson;s fall from grace has still not persuaded them otherwise. Until the country faces this reality, it is doomed – however much well-intentioned think-tanks put out documents (such as this most recent) trying to persuade us differently

Public intellectuals and the question of british decline is a very good review of th e dbate until 2001 by English and Kenny

The UK self-destructs

Truss has gone - the 4th UK Prime Minister to fall on the sword since 2016. The UK is destroying itself under this latest government. 

The situation is unravelling with such speed that it is difficult to find an article which does justice to the situation. 

Let me rest for the moment with this useful article which picks up all the key points 

An Important Milestone

The blog is proud to announce that it has achieved half a million clicks!

It started in 2009 and I never imagined that it would still be running 13 years later – although my statistic is dwarfed by a friend’s blog which has clocked up three times as many clicks for a highly specialised blog which posts daily with a Marxist exegesis and the occasional contemporary comment.

Most blogs milk the writer’s specialism. And, indeed, that’s how I started – having worked for 20 years in ex-communist countries on issues of “institutional development”. Forgive the jargon – it’s the term used by consultants to describe the dubious processes used to justify the establishment of state structures which then allowed western capital to ravage central European societies. It should be noted that I defined “consultants” in my little, sceptical Just Words as “con-merchants who act as Sultans”. 

I started this blog a few months later – with three objectives

· This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

· I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

· A final motive for the blog is more c omplicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?

And the blog has become something to which I devote most mornings. I came young to responsibility (becoming a Chairman of a social work authority at the tender age of 28) giving me a certain sense that what I was doing had some wider significance. And by the time I was 32 I found myself one of the leaders of a Region responsible for the public services of half of Scotland. And able to use this position to develop new ways of doing things – and having the luxury of sharing my reflections about our work in academic and other journals. A year ago, I mused about these aims using the johari window to be a bit more personal than I normally allow myself.

It’s appropriate that the 60 page paper I put up recently on the blog focused on how various writers have treated the issue of change since understanding change and making appropriate interventions has been the story of my life since 1968.

Memoirs and autobiographies allow us all to reflect on our lives – and I recently posted a very personal selection of what I considered to be some jewels in this genre. A recent example was a collected tribute (or Festschrift) to one of the true greats of decision-making entitled An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) which takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues and has him assess their veracity in a final chapter.