Assessing a government’s record

Is a balanced judgement on a government ever possible?

I’ve just finished a book about New Labour under Tony Blair. He was PM for 10 years – from 1997 to 2007, leaving office just before the global financial crisis broke – and this particular book, “Broken Vows – Tony Blair, the tragedy of power”, published almost a decade later, purports to be an assessment of his government’s record - at least in the fields of health, education, immigration, energy and “the wars”.

Tom Bower is a well-known British investigative journalist who has profiled commercial rogues such as Robert Maxwell, Tiny Rowlands, Conrad Black, Bernie Ecclestone (of F1 fame) and Richard Desmond let alone characters such as Klaus Barbie but offers more sympathetic profiles of Prince Charles, Simon Cowell and Boris Johnson.

His bibliography lists the books he relied on – basically 40 memoirists and not a single one of the many writers whose serious analytical accounts of the period were available if only Bower had had the patience to read serious material.

It’s significant, for example, that no mention is made – whether in the bibliography or the text – of a book which had attempted an assessment both fair and accessible - The Verdict – did Labour Change Britain? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker issued several years earlier in 2010. 

And that is certainly the question by which it is reasonable to hold both Blair and New Labour to account. “Modernisation” was Blair’s mantra – conservatism the enemy whether it rested in the trade unions or the civil service – both of whom he regarded as the immediate enemy.

Indeed such was the suspicion of the civil service from the very beginning that virtually all New Labour Ministers threw their senior civil servants’ advice notes into the bin. They had their manifesto – strongly enforced by both Blair and Brown, the “Iron Chancellor”.

Not only Civil Servants but the Cabinet was treated with utter contempt – if it had not been for the Blair-Brown tension which would often break out in open conflict, the resultant system might have lapsed into total “groupthink”…..

Sadly, however, Bower doesn’t bother to use (or even make reference to) the excellent analysis available in British Government in Crisis (2005) by Christopher Foster who had been both an adviser and consultant but prefers instead to rest on a critique of the vainglorious Michael Barber of “deliverology” infamy

Strangely, only in Education had New Labour come with coherent plans for the future. Bower’s story is one of the system staggering from one crisis to another – with no lessons learned other than the need to return to Conservative policies which Blair not so secretly had always favoured. 

These days, we associate New Labour with four main things – PR “spin”, the Iraq war; a globalist encouragement of immigration; and huge budgetary increases for health and education. But there was a positive side which even an ex-adviser to Margaret Thatcher recognises in this critical review of “Broken Vows”.   

But – despite the claims in the Introduction - Bower’s book is NOT an attempt to judge a government – let alone dispassionately. As is abundantly clear in the devastating picture of Blair portrayed in the book’s opening chapter and Afterword, this is a hatchet job on a man whose greed, superficiality and delusions were already evident to most of us 

Those wanting a serious analysis of New Labour should better spend their time on -

New Labour – a critique Mark Bevir (2005) Not the easiest of reads – the author is a post-modernist academic if also a social democrat – but starts from the position that New Labour used slippery language and ignored its traditions. But excellent on options and traditions ignored...

The Verdict – did Labour Change Britain? Polly Toynbee and David Walker (2010) written by journalists sympathetic to Labour who supply a reasonably balanced assessment – if one rather light on references.

Populist – and proud of it

Since 2011, I’ve blogged about populism four or five times – mainly in a neutral definitional way. But a combination last week of a couple of articles in The Guardian and Open Democracy with my reading of R Eatwell and M Goodwin’s recent little Pelican book National Populism – the revolt against liberal democracy; (2017) got me into surfing mode on the subject and to some disturbing thoughts……

Let me start with how I saw things at the end of a couple of days

- Talk of “populism” surfaces whenever things seem to be slipping from the control of “ruling elites”

- Such talk has occurred every 30 years or so in the past 150 years – the 1880s in the US and Russia; the 1930s in Europe and Latin America; the late 1960s globally; the late 1990s in Europe 
- as a professional and intellectual discipline, Political Science has adopted a rather disdainful view of democracy and a “scientist” approach to its methodology - marginalising those few academics with serious interests in notions of the “public good” being embedded in government programmes

- The US tradition of populism has never died - whereas the European tradition is sceptical at best (with the exception of the French whose celebration of revolt seems part of their DNA)

- But the younger contemporary American academics seem to have lost their sense of history and have produced rather aggressive celebrations of liberalism (Y Mounk)

The reader should now be warned that the next few paras represent a rather jaundiced take on academia…. As a social “scientist”, I have long had a healthy skepticism about the overconfident claims of particularly economists – and have even been known (as long ago as 2010) to challenge the political scientists for hiding their heads in the sand. Not for nothing is Social Sciences as Sorcery; Stanislaw Andreski (1972) one of my favourite books – and I was delighted to be able to download it in full yesterday……

2008, of course, should have been the death knell for economics since it had succumbed some decades earlier to a highly-simplified and unrealistic model of the economy which was then starkly revealed in all its nakedness…..Steve Keen was one of the first economists to break ranks very publicly way back in 2001 and to set out an alternative - Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned.
This coincided with economics students in Paris objecting to the homogeneity of syllabi and reaching out to others – creating in the next 15 years a movement which has become global

This is a good presentation on the issues (from 2012) and I am now reading an excellent little Penguin book The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins (2017) from their experience of stirring things up on the Manchester University economics programme. The book’s sub-title says it all!

Dani Rodrik is one of the few economists with a global reputation to support them (Ha-Yoon Chang is another) and indeed published an important book recently reviewing the state of economics - Economics Rules – the rights and the wrongs of the dismal science; (2016) which was nicely reviewed here

The Financial Times recently reviewed several other such books - so the situation is not beyond repair but we have to be realistic. Academic economists have invested a lifetime’s reputation and energy in offering the courses they do - and neither can nor will easily offer programmes to satisfy future student demands for relevance and pluralism….. chances are that the next cohort will be more pliable... 

Academic Political Science  may not have quite the same level of pressure to change as in Economics but increasing questions are nonetheless being asked of it about the implications of the populist zeitgeist for the celebration of liberal democracy which masquerades as political science departments of US universities.

So what does all this mean for the present anguishing over populism?

I graduated in the 1960s as a “Labour” populist – although I never expressed it quite like that! I was schooled in the writings of RH Tawney, Ivan Illich, Paolo Freire, Saul Alinsky, Peter Marris and Martin Ryan; and inspired at various times by such distinctive and competing Labourites as Nye Bevan, John Strachey, GDH Cole, Hugh Gaitskell; RHS Crossman, Tony Crosland and John Mackintosh. The result of such a mish-mash was a pragmatic centralist with an anarchist streak…..I was one of the contributors to the famous 1975 Red Paper on Scotland and had sympathies with the alternative economic strategy and the Lucas Plan

And, despite the senior position I had reached in the 80s, I remained committed to ensuring that that the ordinary, decent citizen’s voice and collective efforts were respected and encouraged. I may not have been a Bennite but I respected the man.

I left the UK in late 1990 and therefore never knew New Labour and its insidious contribution to the current cynicism about politics – Neil Kinnock may have been the Labour Leader but John Smith was the solid leader-in-waiting…From 1978-1990 the articles of the maverick Marxism Today journal plotted the various ideas absorbing the British Left during that critical period. Gordon Brown even contributed a piece (in late 1989) which indicated if not populism a strong ideological flavor..

And Jeremy Corbyn is, of course, and always has been an ideologue – not a populist. But the fascinating 2017 British Labour Party Manifesto also has a strong populist streak…It’s a pity that so few of the chattering political and economic classes in Britain have yet been able to produce books which pick up the analysis from the point we had reached 30 years ago before New Labour seduced and traduced the Labour tradition….

Populism Resource

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-road-tosomewhere.html

http://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/controlling-masses.html

http://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/we-need-to-talk-aboutpower.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2016/11/populism-what-is-it.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/02/collapse-of-honourable-profession.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/02/what-is-populism.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/04/populism.html

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/12/guardian-populism-europe-cas-mudde-hillary-clinton-immigration-tony-blair

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/for-a-left-populism-mouffe-review

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/populism-douglas-hofstadter-donald-trump-democracy

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2018/08/29/book-review-for-a-left-populism-by-chantal-mouffe/

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/populism-without-the-people/

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/zombie-liberalism/

https://globalreports.columbia.edu/books/the-populist-explosion/ John Judis (2016)

http://counterpoint.uk.com/publications/

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1972/07/20/populism-socialism-mcgovernism/

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/10/28/the-promise-of-populism/

http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/bibliography/bib111bLSE.pdf

more on UK coalition government

The tectonic plates begin to move in the UK. Three months into the new coalition government, there is apparently an announcement brewing that the very powerful Audit Commission (with some 2,000 staff) is to be phased out. New Labour’s regime of targets (criticised in this blog and website) was immediately abolished by the new government – thereby making thousands of civil servants redundant to purpose (I’m not yet sure what is actually happening to them). The Audit Commission became part of this command and control regime of Gordon Brown - although it was actually set up by Conservative (and technocratic) Minister Michael Heseltine in 1983.
And there is some horror that some ex-Labour Ministers and MPs are acceptiong jobs in the new coalition government – the awkwardly independent (and highly esteemed) Frank Field as poverty adviser; and one of the previously tipped contenders for Labour leadership (Alan Milburn) who was brought back by Brown as an advisor on social mobility is being tipped to take a similar role in the coalition government. A third Labour ex-Minister who developed some expertise in pension reform (Purnell) is also apparently being brought into the coalition fold to continue that input. Frankly I don’t know what the fuss is about. New Labour continued the neo-liberal agenda under both Blair and Brown. And noone can claim to real expertise in the fields of poverty, social mobility and pensions – so thank god those who had shown some interest and commitment are being encouraged to stay around! Of course “two jags, two shags and two bogs” Prescott is dutifully fulminating labour tribalism – but who listens any more to such crap?
I’m now well into David Marquand’s Britain since 1918 – the strange career of British Democracy which gives a superb perspective on these latest manoeuvrings.
Temperatures in Bucharest are 38 – and here in the mountains a lovely cool breeze is blowing as I salute the Bulgarian Khan Khrum’s Chardonnay!
The Inquisition Painting is Ilyas Phaizulline's

moral choices

Since I arrived in the mountains on Thursday afternoon, my nose has been stuck in 3 of the 17 or so new books which were waiting for me. The first a political blockbuster about the last half of New Labour rule in the UK which has gripped me for reasons well captured in these quotations from 3 reviews -

The End of the Party is a civil-war epic, at the close of which the house is on fire, the crops are laid waste, and the cast of characters is either dead or dispersed. The fratricidal conflict described here is between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their respective armies of followers and, for as long as these two are both centre stage and slugging it out (ie, for approximately 450 pages), Rawnsley’s narrative has a theme and a drive that give it a compulsive readability (Robert Harris)

But it is only through appreciating the sheer perversity of his decision needlessly to write what Rawnsley calls "an emotional blank cheque" to two very different men – Gordon Brown and George W Bush – that you begin to realise how dramatically skewed his period as prime minister became. In both cases, he made bargains that turned out entirely in the other man's favour. In trying to explain his disastrous inability to confront Bush, a man possessed, as Rawnsley says, with considerable "peasant cunning", it has always been the conventional wisdom to say that Blair was a sort of head prefect with a fatal weakness for sucking up to headmasterly power. For that reason, it is said, he ignored Bill Clinton's stark warning "He's using you". But in these pages it is not so much power as mere activity which drives Blair. What on earth are we to make of a man who, on the day he left No 10, had already inked in 500 appointments for his first 12 months out of office? What are we to make of a government which came up with 3,600 new criminal offences in 10 years?
Any psychiatrist who began to question the behaviour of a leader permanently surrounded by half-eaten bananas would already have noted that images of insanity haunt the whole volume. Blair's closest confidant, Alastair Campbell, was a manic depressive who bears out Booth Tarkington's observation that arrogant people are the most over-sensitive. At one point, Campbell admits to liking nobody in the world but his partner and his children. Brown's corresponding best friends were significantly known as Mad Dog McBride and Shriti the Shriek. Most interestingly, Blair kept quiet about his private beliefs because he worried that voters might think of him as a "nutter" who communed with "the man upstairs". His principal reason for leaving No 10, after his suicidal refusal to call for a ceasefire during the Israeli assault on Lebanon in 2006, appears to have been his fear of being taken out through the door as unhinged as Margaret Thatcher. "I don't want to leave like her."

Chris Patten cuts through the infighting to pose the basic question about the achievements of the 13 years of New Labour rule -
So here we are. What has it all been about? A devolved administration in Edinburgh, half of one in Cardiff, a hard-won settlement in Belfast, no advance in Brussels, a splurge of public spending, a mountain of debt, Brown's very own "boom and bust", the stuttering beginnings of reform to our education system, the mother and father of all scandals in the mother of parliaments. But there has not been what Tony Judt recently called for, a redefinition of social democracy, an end to economism, the restoration of values to political debate. All that we got was the Third Way, described by Judt as "opportunism with a human face".
For more reviews of the book see the omnivore book review site -
The second book Three Cups of tea - one man's mission to propote peace one school at a time could not be a greater contrast. The story of how a young and peniless American climber repayed a debt to people in a remote Pakistan village.
A vivid account of what one determined person can achieve.

The third book is Jonathan Watt's When a billion Chinese jump - how China will save mankind - or destroy it.