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