Consumerism as the new political force

It’s appropriate that the first book I picked from my shelves after Denis Healey’s gripping insights into the issues confronting the UK from the late 1930s to the 1980s was JG Ballard’s last novel Kingdom Come (2006)

I am not a great fan of novels – biographies and histories have for me much more depth and integrity - although I do admire various proponents of the short story (such as William Trevor and Carol Shields. Recently I came across a beautiful (American) edition of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - examples of which you can find here 

But Ballard was a real original – “dystopian” is the adjective used to convey the apocalyptic element of his themes. 

As someone who has wanted to bomb the new gigiantic shopping malls which have been sprouting all over Sofia in the last 5 years and slowly killing the lively local shops, I really take to the theme of Kingdom Come 

Ballard's central idea is that consumerism slides into fascism when politics simply gives the punters what they want, becoming a matter of consumer-style choices, choosing not to have a mosque next door, for example. Along the way, there's an almost satirical indictment of contemporary life…... 'This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity,' says Richard Pearson (its central character – an advertising agent - whose father has been shot in the Mall): 'In short, the town was an end state of consumerism. I liked it and felt a certain pride that I had helped to set its values.'

If the (shopping) mall is evil, its nostalgic opponents - a secretive cabal of locals, one of whom bombs Pearson's car - are little better. Their leading light is a fascistic reactionary of the 'kingdom of Surrey' variety. Pearson himself, although relieved to find his father isn't the Nazi sympathiser he seemed, puts his talents behind an actor turned politician to whip up the new mall fascism, regretting the racist attacks but loving it all as an exercise in PR and marketing.

The book is mired in ambivalence and the only things it takes a clear line against are racism and sport. Sport is 'the big giveaway' of dangerous boredom: 'Give them violent hamster wheels like football and ice hockey. If they still need to let off steam, burn down a few newsagents.' Ballard's characters are prone to improbable speechifying: the new landscape of retail parks, airports and motorways might seem like hell to the old middle class, but 'that's the Hampstead perspective, the view from the Tavistock Clinic. The shadow of Freud's statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul'.

The book is a vehicle for concepts, one-liners and poetic fragments: 'elective psychopathy' will replace war and sex; 'Violence is the true poetry of governments'; 'Think of the future as a cable TV programme going on for ever'.

My favourite is excerpt is -

People accumulate emotional capital as well as cash in the bank. And they need to invest these emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quiety about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantsasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some reasons its called shopping. But its really the purest kind of politics……..

Ballard itemises a modern Britain of Malls, barcodes, CCTV, stores and barbecues, but the book has a less human engagement with ordinary life than this suggests. It's the idea of modern reality invoked in abstract, conjured up as the background for more obsessive rituals of Ballard's own. Hi-tech surroundings lead to violent behaviour, until the mall is overtaken by apocalyptic .

Some good quotes from the book are here - Best reviews are here and here 

This time not Daumier - nor Gillray - to head the post but Georg Grosz's "Riot of the Insane"  

The managerial revolution

Denis Healey’s Memoirs (Time of my Life) may be almost 25 years old but have not lose their power to inspire with age - 4 posts so far from me this week trying to identify exactly why our political class no longer seems “fit for purpose” or able, at any rate, to “hold a candle to” the 97 year-old Healey (He’s a lot thinner now than this 2006 video shows).

It is some three years since I addressed myself seriously to the issue of the “impotence of our democratic process” – some of the relevant posts are here. 

My concern then was the failure of most of the books to analyse seriously the efficacy or capacity of the “governance  process” as a whole 

We have, of course, countless academic studies of the operation of the political parties, of voting systems, of the British Parliament, of the Executive or Cabinet, of local government, of devolved arrangements, of the civil service, of public management (whether Ministries, core exectuve, agencies), of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the European dimension etc – and a fair number of these are reasonably up-to-date. But most of it is written for undergraduates – or for other academic specialists who focus on one small part of the complex jigsaw. There is so very little which actually tries to integrate all this and give a convincing answer to the increasing number of citizens who feel that there is no longer any point in voting; that politicians are either corrupt or hopelessly boxed in by global finance and corporate interests. 

The recently published Blunders of our Governments seems to offer such a larger picture but is little more than a rather breathless tour of policy disasters by two political scientists – with results which show up the basic shortcomings of such a specialised academic approach

We are left with a central question – is the British problem one of political centralisation? of government overreach? A failure of the political class? Adversarial politics? Civil service incompetence? Corporate takeover? Or is it, as post-modernist academics tend to argue, one of unrealistic expectations and misunderstanding?

We have certainly become more demanding citizens in Europe as a whole….showing none of the deference which senior politicians could expect in the immediate post-war period.

We view politicians such as Denis Healey as giants now, I suspect, simply because, in the 1960s they were giants – with an experience and education few could then challenge, certainly not those slaving in industrial plants. It was the 1964 Labour government which started the opening up of university experience from about 5% of the population in my day to its present figure of almost 50%s - many of them imbued with a highly rationalistic belief in “modernisation” – becoming “experts” in various social sciences designed to change the world for the better.

I should know because I was one of them – and well remember the sentiments I had then of being one of a select band with a mission to clear out the dead wood.

Management and Social science has become the new religion with its nuspeak language - not only from politicians (who now have little experience beyond that of politics) but in the new batallions of banks, communications and services (private and public) – and yet has become the real reason for the dissatisfaction we all have these days. We just don’t seem able to accept that the complexity of the modern world (and sophistication of the multifarious discourses) make it impossible to “solve” most of the “problems” we experience.

The French used to talk of La Pensee Unique – to describe the uniformity of thinking and discourse about the market used by the powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways it was a better phrase than “The Washington Consensus” or “Neo-liberalism” since it identified the propagandist nature and poverty of what passes for thinking of our global elites.

We thought that the global collapse spelled the end of neo-liberalism. Instead a new form has become entrenched – not least amongst the new “insecuritat” which forms the bulk of working people in Europe… 

postscript; I have to confess I struggled with this post, having a feeling that there was an important insight approaching but not quite able to grasp it... That, it should be said, is generally a good sign - of something contradictory or original trying to get out......

Ruling a Void

OK - the last 2 posts gave the 10 golden rules for corrupting the political class – at least according to Anthony Jay the highly successful scriptwriter of the "Yes Minister" television series of 35 years ago.

The question is whether these in fact give us the basic reasons for the “hollowing out” of British (and European) democracy……during that period. 

Voters and citizens no longer consider that parties and politicians represent their concerns – they vote in decreasing numbers and with increasing cynicism. 

Let’s remind ourselves that Jay identified the following stratagems for the powerful to retain power  -

• Centralise revenue
• Centralise authority
• ensure the Prime Minister is captured
• Insulate the Cabinet
• Enlarge constituencies
• Overpay MPs
• Appoint rather than elect
• Ensure that civil servants are permanent – but Ministers highly temporary
• Appoint more staff
• Keep state affairs secret – whatever the laws about Open Government may say

I’ve read a hell of a lot about democracy during this period. You might indeed say that its been my bread and butter since, between 1970 and 1990, I got my cash variously from state coffers - a combination of Polytechnic and local government sources - operating as a local government politician and writing about the various efforts to improve its practice.

My (much better) fees since then have come overtly from commercial sources – but all of the companies I have worked for since 1991 have been under contract to the European Commission. And the focus of my work in the last 20 years has been the building of the capacity of local and central government systems in central Europe and Central Asia…….Its ironic that the democratic models we held up to those “transitional systems”  for emulation proved to be disintegrating even as we spoke……Talk about hubris!

I find it curious, first, that I seem to have been the first to upload Anthony Jay’s piece – and therefore to subject it to analysis. The academics who write about democracy (and there are thousands!) clearly view the satire as beneath their dignity….

But Jay score 8 out of 10 in my reckoning for his analysis – I would fault only his points about staffing. Civil servant contracts have actually become highly contractual – and also the subject of fairly severe cutbacks. But the fact still remains that it is the senior (rather than junior) staff who have been laughing all the way to the bank…….with inflated salaries and pensions.  

The question remains, however, whether his points (however satirically meant) actually capture the true reasons for the collapse of political legitimacy? 

One point, for example, commonly made in discussions is that the political class has now become younger and very incestuous – moving quickly from academia into think-tanks and positions as aides to politicians before themselves becoming politicians. In short, they accumulate favours and networks which make them highly dependent and malleable….. And they use a managerial language which not only alienates but reflects a consensual ideology about the limits of state action enshrined in “neo-liberalism”.

Peter Oborne is a British journalist who wrote a critical book on this subject in 2008 called The Triumph of the Political Class. A month ago he enthused about a new academic book about the “hollowing of democracy” and it is to his views I want to devote the rest of this post. The basic question about the reasons for the degeneration of politics will be continued in future posts.

Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.

Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” 

The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government. All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment.

However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.

Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position. To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so. 

The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”. I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties.

The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland. These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.

Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.

His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.

The painting is Daumier's "Belly of the Beast"

The hollowing out of Democracy

Re-reading Denis Healey’s memoirs brought home to me how puny and spineless (“hollowed out” is perhaps the appropriate phrase) our current politicians now seem – compared with the generation of Healey and his friend Helmut Schmidt (who celebrated his 95th birthday just before Christmas). How has such degeneration happened? It was that question which prompted me to look again at Anthony Jay’s essay “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” and to reproduce parts of it yesterday. 
I was also prompted (by Healey's mention of "politics as a vocation") to look again at Max Weber’s classic talk on “Politics as Vocation” delivered in the heat of revolutionary Germany of 1919 - and to discover that a major talk on this subject was given just a week or so by the Head of a British Think Tank. For the moment, however, let me finish with the excerpts from the satirical piece from the Head of the Civil Service about the tactics for castrating the political process

5. Enlarge constituencies.  Our present electoral system derives from the 1832 Reform Act. It was a very dangerous system. The average number of voters in a constituency was only about 1,200, which meant that an MP could personally know virtually all of them. This meant that, if he was liked and respected locally, he would be re-elected, even if he disobeyed the whips and voted in accordance with the demands of his constituents and his conscience rather than the instructions of his party. This severely weakened the Prime Minister's control on which the system depends.But, since then, we have contrived, in the name of democracy, to increase constituency sizes to 50,000 or 60,000, so that no MP can be elected on voters' personal knowledge of him. They vote for the party, and if the party does not endorse him, he will not be elected. His job, therefore, depends on the Prime Minister's approval and not on the respect of his constituents; a splendid aid to discipline. Equally, we have increased the typical urban constituency ward to about 25,000, with some four councillors. Since one councillor to 6,000 people might have led to an undesirable independence of thought and action, we have arranged matters so that a group of four councillors jointly represent the whole ward, so that householders are unlikely even to know the name of their democratic representative. They, therefore, vote (the few who take the trouble) according to their party preferences, thus reinforcing the hold of the national parties on local government.

 6. Overpay MPs.  Even when MPs depend on the party machine for re-selection and re-election, some are occasionally tempted to step out of line. This risk can be significantly reduced if rebellion means not only loss of party support but also significant loss of income. Few will risk forfeiting the now generous emoluments and allowances of an MP and reverting to the humble salary of a school teacher, social worker or minor trade union official simply on a point of democratic principle. It is, therefore, our duty to encourage all increases in MPs' pay

 7. Appointments, not elections. Parliament, of course, has to be elected, but, as we have seen, this causes little problem so long as the government maintains its firm central control of the MPs. The system, however, is deeply flawed: it can substitute craven capitulation to the ignorant and irresponsible mob for sensible control by a cultivated and experienced elite.It is our duty to resist this with all our strength. The preservation of civilised values in a country of some 60 million people cannot be entirely discharged by a few of us in Whitehall: much of the task has to be delegated to people such as BBC governors, the ITC, the Arts Council, the Commission for Ancient Monuments, National Heritage, the Fine Arts Commission, magistrates, the Bank of England and a host of authorities, commissions, councils, tribunals, regulatory bodies, agencies, working parties, advisory committees and quangos of every description. The only sensible way to fill all these posts is by government appointment, so that proper care can be exercised in their selection and so that the incumbents, when chosen, will know to whom they owe their new eminence, while those hoping for such posts (as with honours and peerages) can be trusted to behave responsibly in the hope of favours to come. 

8. Permanent officials, rotating ministers. The task of preserving a cultured and enlightened nation requires continuity. That continuity must rest with those of us who know what we are fighting for and fighting against. It cannot possibly be entrusted to politicians. We have, therefore, built an excellent system of a few transient amateur ministers who are coached, informed, guided and supported by a large department of permanent, experienced officials who enable them to take the correct decisions.You have now served our department for 30 years; your present minister has held his job for 10 weeks and cannot, on average, expect to be there for more than another 12 or 18 months if he has any ability. If not, there is no problem. You will, therefore, I am sure, be able to prevent him making any foolish popular decisions before the music stops and he scrambles desperately for an empty chair. Furthermore, our electoral system ensures that when the populace becomes dissatisfied with the system, they can be deluded into thinking they are changing it by replacing one lot of inexperienced amateurs with another, leaving the professionals to continue uninterrupted, and relieved of the burden of the few ministers who were starting to understand their job. The new arrivals can quickly be helped to realise that the purpose of government is not to carry out the will of the electorate, but simply to secure its consent to the measures proposed by its betters. 

9. Increase the number of public employees. “Public ignorance is our ally".Any government must employ staff, if only in the Armed Services, the police, the judiciary, the Diplomatic Service and the Exchequer. But those basic functions on their own cannot justify the level of taxation and degree of control that we need to fulfil our historic function. We, therefore, need to increase the number of public employees whenever the opportunity presents itself.
There are three reasons for this: it increases the volume of government revenue, it extends the area of government control, and it enlarges the pool of voters who have an interest in preserving the system that employs them. 

10. Secrecy. One of our greatest allies is public ignorance. It is, therefore, imperative that the minimum amount of information be disclosed to the press, parliament and the public. Our success is based on the principle that no information should be disclosed unless there is a good reason why it should be.From time to time, opposition parties press for a freedom of information Act, but oppositions become governments and it does not take long for a government to discover that real freedom of information would make their job impossible. It is, however, a good idea to pass the odd freedom of information Act, so long as its provisions do not actually free up any important sensitive information. It is significant that the only party that has consistently argued for real freedom of information has not held office since 1915. 

Beyond this, I can only point you towards the breathtaking achievements of our colleagues in Brussels. To be frank, I do not see any prospect of our rivalling them. Their commissioners, like our permanent secretaries, do not have to endure the ignominy of grubbing votes from the plebs, and, unlike us, do not have to pretend to be subservient to a political master. 

Being answerable to 15 ministers from different countries, most of whom are hostile to each other, and would be even more hostile if they could understand each other's languages, gives them almost complete independence of action. They have also ensured that only the Commission can bring forward legislation, thus avoiding the tedious, irritating and ill-informed ministerial scrutiny we have to endure drafting Bills. 

And since the European electorate speaks so many different languages, it is impossible for genuine European political parties to form, thereby making any serious danger of democracy quite inconceivable.
Obviously, success on that scale is out of our reach, but we can look on Brussels as a guiding star which we must follow, even if we know we cannot land on it.

The slow, relentless corruption of the British political class

Just how much Government has changed since 1945 comes through very vividly from reading (again) Denis Healey’s Memoirs which I wrote about yesterday. It has changed dramatically in what it does and how it does it. And it has changed also in the nature of its political governance.

Healey reminds us of the phrase used by the Labour party in the run-up to the 1964 General Election when they talked of “the thirteen wasted years” – meaning those under Conservative rule from 1951. “But”, Healey notes wryly, “eleven of these years were wasted by the Labour Party” as it engaged in mammoth ideological struggles relating to nuclear weapons and public ownership. 

The 6 subsequent years of Labour rule from 1964-1970 were disappointing – with British membership of Europe becoming an increasingly contentious issue. Although that was finally resolved in 1975, just after Labour regained power in 1974, difficult economic issues dominated the late 1970s and paved the way for 18 years of highly ideological Conservative rule from 1979.   

During that period, a new generation of Labour politicians vowed to bring a new discipline to the party – thereby creating “New labour” which totally altered the way politics was done. The party leader became imperious; labour politicians passive; image everything; and corporate power the name of the game. The rest of Europe’s social democrats sat up and took notice – Tony Bliar became the man to copy. Any pretence at democracy disappeared (see Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void– the hollowing of western democracy; or this article on corporate power for some British examples) 

Perhaps the best critique of what has happened is a short satirical essay by Anthony Jay (the man who brought us Yes Minister) – Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped which I've taken the liberty of reproducing on my website. It takes the form of the advice given by Sir Humphrey (the retiring Head of the Civil Service) to his replacement. It beautifully captures the mechanisms which have been used over the past 50 years to corrupt the political class. Here is the first section (the final section will follow)

The first two rules for neutralising democracy are:

1. Centralise revenue. The governing class cannot fulfil its responsibilities without money. We, therefore, have to collect as much money as we can in the centre. In fact, we have done this with increasing effect over the years, with three happy results.The first is that we can ensure that money is not spent irresponsibly by local communities. By taking 80 or 90 per cent of the money they need in central taxes, we can then return it to them for purposes of which we approve. If they kept it for themselves, heaven knows what they might spend it on.

The second happy result is that the larger the sum, the harder it is to scrutinise. The ₤6,000 or so spent by a rural parish council is transparent and intelligible, and subjected to analysis in distressing detail. By contrast, the three or four hundred billion of central government revenue is pleasantly incomprehensible, and leaves agreeably large sums for purposes which the common people would not approve if it were left to them. It also means that a saving of ₤1 million can be dismissed as 0•0000003 of annual expenditure and not worth bothering with, whereas it can make a lot of difference to the budget of Fidelio at Covent Garden.

The third result is that the more the government spends, the more people and organisations are dependent on its bounty, and the less likely they are to make trouble. 

2. Centralise authority. It goes without saying that if Britain is to remain a country of civilised values, the masses cannot be trusted with many decisions of importance. Local government must be allowed to take decisions, but we have to ensure that they are trivial.Meanwhile, we must increase the volume of laws made centrally. We have an enviable record of legislation growth, with hardly any laws being repealed, which it is now your duty to extend. If you are under pressure to provide statistics showing your zeal in deregulation, you will find many laws concerning jute processing and similar extinct industries which can be repealed without too much harm. We also ensure that, where local government has authority to act independently, there is an appropriate structure of scrutiny, review and appeal to control its excesses. I am sure you will want to protect this.You will also want to ensure that every Bill contains wide enabling powers, so that unpopular provisions can be brought in later as statutory instruments which MPs rarely read and virtually never debate. You should be able to achieve three or four thousand of these in a good year. 

The rest of the rules flow from the first two

·         capture the Prime Minister
·         Insulate the Cabinet
·         Enlarge constituencies
·         Overpay MPs
·         Appoint rather than elect
·         Permanent officials – rotating Ministers
·         Appoint more staff
·         secrecy

 3. Harness the Prime Minister. this is the most important of them. Happily, it presents no problem. Governments today are even more hostile to democracy than we are, though for a different reason. They come to power on a tide of promises and expectations which are never capable of realisation, but which have secured for them the exquisite luxuries of office, fame and power which they are desperate to retain.It is not hard to convince the Prime Minister that, to fulfil the expectations, he needs to acquire more revenues and more powers.

 4. Insulate the Cabinet. This involves more than just our standard technique of keeping ministers too busy to make a nuisance of themselves. They must be kept, as far as possible, well away from any contact with the sweaty multitude.This means avoiding public transport by use of private cars, avoiding the National Health Service by private health care, avoiding sink schools by living in affluent suburbs or by private education, travelling business class or in private planes, staying in first class hotels, and always having security staff to usher them through crowded concourses.Of course, they will affect to resist this at first, but when we point out the security risk, the tragic loss that their departure would entail, the enormous value of the time of people so important, and the possible political embarrassment of being caught on camera in confrontation with protesters, they acquiesce with gratifying rapidity.

Appropriately, the painting is a Gerog grosz again!

The post-war British social democrats

I’m cast back to the 1960s by the news of the death last week of the great folk-singer Pete Seeger - at the age of 94.

And to the lives of some of the great British social democrats it has been my privilege to know – however distantly. So this will be one of several posts…..

 I was introduced to Seeger’s radical songs by an amazing Scottish left-wing couple – Norman and Janey Buchan  – just after my election in 1968 as a local councillor in a West of Scotland shipbuilding town. I became Norman’s election agent in the 1970 General Election (he had been first elected in 1964, being a well-regarded teacher until then) – and then became Janey’s colleague in Strathclyde Region in the mid 1970s.

My rationalistic approach did not find Janey’s exuberant radicalism at all easy – but her goodness spoke strongly to me. In 1979 she became MEP for Glasgow – somewhat maverick but respected by many. Norman was an utterly dedicated socialist whose honesty and purity powered into you. He did occupy two junior Ministerial positions but never enjoyed that side of life - his commitments to popular struggles (and culture) were much stronger..... 

Coincidentally I am re-reading one of the best of British political autobiographies of the 20^th century – Denis Healey’s Time of my Life (1989). Healey was someone who did not suffer fools gladly - he famously (in acerbic tones) described the 1979 Labour Party Manifesto foisted on us by the extreme left as "the longest suicide note in history"!
Perhaps aptly, the best of the (admittedly few) reviews of his memoirs which I have come across is Clive James' (of highly-deserved Cultural Amnesia fame). It is a bit of a retrospective since he wrote it in 2008 and I make no apology for its length - both the subject matter and the reviewer deserve this courtesy!

Healey was born near London in 1917 and raised mainly in Yorkshire, as the Scholarship Boy of a hard working family. After grammar school, he gained a double first at Oxford, spent a brief period as a starry-eyed young Communist, and went on to serve in the British Army during the Second World War. At Anzio, a graduate course for those who survived it, he was Military Landing Officer for the British assault brigade. His experiences in the frustrating Italian campaign, a grim education in the art of the possible, translated readily to postwar British politics. After six years as the Labour Party's International Secretary, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Leeds in 1952, and served for 35 years on Labour's Front Bench both in power and out.
 In Government he was both Defence Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in Opposition he was Shadow Foreign Secretary. Whatever the post, he showed such conspicuous ability that many still wonder why he was never Prime Minister, but the best answer is probably the most obvious: though he had the common touch, his superiorities were too striking. Among them was a wide range of learning, worn without pretension but not easily emulated.

………The book is a delight to read, and would be significant even if it were dull, because Healey was such a substantial representative of that generation of British left-wing idealists in the late 1930s who favoured Communism as an answer to Fascism, until they found out the hard way that the two brands of totalitarianism were effectively identical. To put it bluntly, they learned that grand plans kill. ….Delightful from start to finish, his autobiography is an education in itself, disheartening only in its implicit suggestion that it takes the near-breakdown of civilisation to produce a generation of politicians who can appreciate the value of what was almost lost.

But perhaps we should try to demonstrate its quality with an initial quotation. Try this: "I was worried by a streak of intolerance in Gaitskell's nature: he tended to believe that no one could disagree with him unless they were either knaves or fools. Rejecting Dean Rusk's advice, he would insist on arguing to a conclusion rather than to a decision. Thus he would keep a meeting of the Shadow Cabinet going, long after he had obtained its consent to his proposals, because he wanted to be certain that everyone understood precisely why he was right."That comes from page 154 of my paperback edition, and there is something to equal it on almost every other page of the book. One doesn't say that cultivation ensures political acumen. If it did, Neville Chamberlain would have been the most effective Prime Minister in British history. But an empty mind is rarely reassuring.

I've written here fairly frequently about politicians - and generally negatively. But the social democrats and civil servants who came to power in Britain in the post-war period had an experience and education which was unique............... 

A cultivated man across the whole range of the arts, Healey was a gift from war to peace. If there had been no war, the dazzling Double First in Greats might have gone on to be an academic, a scholar, a critic, a writer, a star broadcaster, or any combination of those five things. But the war sent him into politics: real politics, Labour politics, not the Communism he had briefly embraced when too young to know the difference. (Sir Isaiah Berlin once said that most of those bright young people who enrolled in the Communist Party in pre-war Britain didn't really want a revolution: they were just liberals who wanted to feel serious.)

In parliament, Healey's mere presence on the Labour front bench was enough to make the Conservatives look like philistines. Not all of them were, but few of those who weren't had a mind as well-furnished as his. Their culture was part of their inheritance. He had to acquire his, and went on acquiring it throughout his career, out of a passion that was never stilled even by the crushing, necessary boredom of political committee rooms.
 .......Nevertheless he is careful to put in plenty of self-deprecation. Opponents are allowed their opinions. If it turns out, as it almost invariably does, that Healey's opinion was better, he tries not to crow. He forgets to record that in 1945 he advised his fellow Labourites not to be panicked by evidence "that our comrades on the Continent are being extremist". ........ Pushing tolerance to the limit, Healey even has good words for Harold Wilson. At the time, Healey's contempt for Wilson's opportunism matched Wilson's fear of Healey's competence: the multilingual Healey was uniquely qualified to be Foreign Secretary, so Wilson kept him busy with every post except that.
The good words make Healey's portrait of Wilson even more devastating.

 In a Presidential system, Healey would have for certain taken the top spot, because he was dynamite on TV. In the British system, however, the party must be pleased before the people, and never since Gaitskell has an intellectual managed to please the Labour Party, unless, like Wilson, he is ready to wear disguise, or, like Michael Foot, to talk shapeless waffle on his feet in order to offset his scholarly precision on the page.
Besides, Healey was an unequivocating advocate of nuclear deterrence, and would have had a chance at the leadership only if he had equivocated. (Foot, who was helped to the leadership by his advocacy of the opposite, equivocated in the other direction in order to win the general election, and the strain helped to ensure that he clamorously lost it.) Healey never flaunted his culture, but he could not conceal it. It was there in the way he talked, and even in the way he listened. He might demolish somebody else's argument in a few sentences, but he took it in first. Healey has an ear for rhythm, and anyone who has that will hear rhythm wherever it occurs. He was delighted by every sharp mind he met. His reputation for brutality might have arisen among those who knew that they did not delight him. There was a sharp critical ability at the heart of his wide powers of appreciation, and his excellent memoirs are a reminder that we should value the kind of figure more interested in cultivating his mind than polishing his image, even though he is likely to be sidelined by a man who is better at the latter than the former.

Clive James’ own highly exuberant style of writing can be excessive – and indeed does often mar what is otherwise the incredible achievement of Cultural Amnesia which gives vignettes of various figures (mainly literary) of the 20^th Century whom James considers worthy of remembrance. Quite a few are now completely forgotten – and James is to be congratulated for bringing them back to life. A sample of his (generally) cutting comments can be read here

I always feel that James writes like a graphic artist – the sort who do the caricatures which capture the essence of a person  
The painting is "The Builders" by Stanley Spencer

In Memoriam

1 February is Remembrance Day here in Bulgaria for Victims of Communism - but has been so only since 2011. September 9^th (1944) is the date which occurs in most of the accounts I have read since it was then that the Communist takeover of Bulgaria took place and the lynching, execution and incarceration of thousands of people got underway– but it was on 1 February that

…….the death sen­tence was passed upon 147 peo­ple from the polit­i­cal elite of the Third Bul­gar­i­an King­dom, includ­ing 67 former MPs and 22 min­is­ters from cab­i­nets dur­ing 1940-1944, among them prime min­is­ters of that time Bog­dan Filov, Dobri Boz­hi­lov and Ivan Bagry­an­ov, as well as the three regents – Prince Kyr­il of Pre­slav, Prof. Bog­dan Filov and Gen­er­al Niko­la Mihov. The sen­tence was passed in the Pal­ace of Jus­tice at 4 pm on 1 Feb­ru­a­ry 1945. The same night, the best known of the defend­ants were exe­cut­ed at the Cen­tral Sofia Cem­e­tery and their bod­ies were bur­ied in a com­mon grave, but it was not before August 1996 that a Chris­tian cross was erect­ed upon it. The sen­ten­ces were jus­ti­fied entire­ly on polit­i­cal grounds. The main defend­ants had first been sent for inter­ro­ga­tion to the former Sovi­et Union and aft­er their return to Bul­gar­ia and estab­lish­ment of the Peo­ple’s Court, their sen­ten­ces were agreed upon between the Polit­i­cal Bureau of the Bul­gar­i­an Work­ers’ Par­ty (BWP) and the Sovi­et lead­er­ship. Present day research of the activ­i­ty of the Peo­ple’s Court leaves no doubt that the entire legal pro­ceed­ings were polit­i­cal­ly biased and the fate of the defend­ants was decid­ed on out­side the court­room.

August 23 was actually named as European remembrance  day for victims of communism and Nazism  - although both Hungary and Latvia commemorate the victims of communism on February 25.  
I am an outsider so should be careful about comments....I have to wonder, however, about the appropriateness of contemporary Bulgarian politicians selecting the best date for such commemoration. Most people these days would not hesitate to string the political class up (God forgive me!). I don't, of course, know anything about how the Bulgarian establishment was viewed by its public in the early 1940s - but it could be argued that it is more appropriate to remember the thousands of more ordinary people who, for a variety of (often dubious) reasons, were summarily executed in those early days of chaos.  

It was bad enough that the judiciary put its stamp on such decisions but just as appalling was the way partisans and others took justice into their own hands and bludgeoned people to death in the even earlier days of the collpase of the old regime. Many ordinary people must have been amongst the perpetrators and constitute a blot on the country's reputation. One reason perhaps why the present-day politicians prefer another date for remembrance.....

The Professional as Modern Harlot

The journal Scottish Review deserves an award for the “biggest bang for bucks” category of global journalism – and/or social comment. Its distinctive contribution is, in a few pithy clear and elegant paragraphs, to demolish the pretensions of the professional classes - whose comments and opinions (and exclusions) now reflect (if not shape) the power structures of modern societies. Forget the “filthy rich” corporate class! It’s the smooth talking of the “chattering clases” siding with (rationalising) the "power elite" which we should have been concerned about during all these decades…   (Those interested can read a full version of the classic 1956 book by C Wright Mills here)

“Cui bono” is the basic question all of us should ask of the stances taken by those who have (somehow) achieved the status of “opinion makers” – whether as academic, journalist, economist, think-tanker, politician, senior professional (civil servant, police, medic) or "quangoist" – all paid by the public (in one form or another) but choosing to lick the arses of one or other of the elite which actually pays their salary. No place for the unwashed public – except perhaps those who have made it to retirement and can afford to shoot from the hip!

And it is indeed a retired academic which lets loose in the latest issue of Scottish Review – in a piece about corporatism

One of the striking features of social change in recent decades has been the way in which diverse institutions, ostensibly serving very different purposes, have come to operate in much the same way.In the past, differences in the aims and practices of the public and private sectors, and in the management styles of employers and organisations representing workers, were clearly visible.

However, since the ascendancy of the 'third way' championed under New Labour, western democracies have embraced a form of market 'progressivism' that has blurred the old ideological divide between capitalism and socialism. This has had some interesting consequences – for the operation of trade unions, the public sector and of NGOs, for example. Many union leaders continue to employ the socialist rhetoric of the past but their actions often fall well short of the principles which motivated the pioneers of the labour movement. In this sense it is no exaggeration to suggest that they have been assimilated into the ideology which they claim to oppose. They have become part of the corporate class, whose tentacles are now evident in places well beyond the boardrooms of multinational companies.

What is the evidence for this? Leaders of trade unions now have much in common with senior executives in major companies: both groups enjoy large salaries and various benefits in kind (cars, travel, expenses, etc.) and are well insulated from ordinary members, or customers, through the protection of personal assistants, departmental managers and procedural barriers. The corporate class rewards itself disproportionately compared with ordinary employees. This is seen clearly in the private sector where share options and bonuses are used to boost already generous salaries. But it is now evident in the public sector as well. Last week two Scottish examples of this were reported. Assistant chief constables were awarded a £10,000 a year pay rise at a time when some civilian staff in Police Scotland were being made redundant. This was described by Graeme Pearson, a Labour MSP and himself a former deputy chief constable, as 'lacking in sensitivity'. The rises followed substantial hikes to the salaries of the chief constable, Sir Stephen House, and his four deputies when the new single force was set up last year.

Even stronger criticism was attached to the news that university principals had been awarded an average increase of 4% at a time when staff are taking industrial action over a pay offer of 1%. Many university principals now earn over £200,000, substantially more than the UK prime minister and Scotland's first minister. 

The manoeuvres of the corporate class within the public sector can be seen in many other areas: in the salaries and leaving packages of senior officials in local government and the health service; in the way in which complainants find themselves obstructed by bureaucratic rules and procedures, whose main function seems to be to protect the 'integrity' of the institution rather than lead to a just outcome; by the way in which organisations that are supposedly designed to facilitate proper scrutiny of public bodies (such as the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman) limit the scope of their inquiries. 

In his book, 'The Corporation', Joel Bakan states that 'the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies'. Its mandate is to pursue its own self-interest, regardless of the harm it may cause to others. Those at the top of such institutions construct the rules to ensure that they are the prime beneficiaries (whether seen in terms of money, power or reputation).Bakan goes as far as suggesting that corporations are reshaping human nature so that self-interested materialism is not just a part of who we are, but the ultimate goal to which we should be striving.It's a scary prospect.

I’m reminded of the book  - The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World (Routledge 1996) by Harold Perkin, Professsor of History at Lancaster and North-Western Universities (until 1999) who, in previous books, studied the rise of professional society and looks in this one at Twentieth Century elites in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan - finding their behaviour equally deficient and morally irresponsible.

It’s a book which should be given to each individual when (s)he makes it into their country's "Who's Who" and is clearly part of the "system". It’s a story of greed - of the "haves", those who have access to the resources and prestige and how they try to retain it - with catastrophic results for the stability of their countries.
A few years earlier, a powerful but different critique of our elites had been launched by Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites.

But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch.

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."

The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "labouring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.

The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders."

Lasch proposes something else: a recovery of what he calls the “populist tradition,” and a fresh understanding of democracy, not as a set of procedural or institutional arrangements but as an ethos, one that the new elites have been doing their best to undermine.

It has to be said that neither book made much impact – perhaps they were just seen as “moralizing”.  Contrast that with the impact made in 1958 by JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.

Has any recent book, I wonder, made the same impact? Perhaps The Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone  by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) comes closest.