THE DECLINE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

It was just over a decade ago that the (rare Coalition) government asked the British public whether they wanted to change the First Past the Post electoral system and its citizens (by a 2/3 margin) gave a resounding NO – thus losing the opportunity to loosen the grip the the Conservative and Labourl parties (uniquely) have on the British mind. Virtually all European countries have very different electoral systems which value consensus and lead to coalitions. But European citizens have, since 2000, become very cynical of politicians – and Britain is no exception

The previous post looked at the influence Harold Laski had on the Labour Party in the interwar years. Parties are elusive animals – difficult to pin down as the famous parable about the elephant and the blind men recounts. But political parties have a very clear purpose which I tried to explain in a 1977 article

The modern political party is a creature of a pluralist society - in this role its function is to:

• recruit political leaders

• represent communitygrievances, demands etc.

• implement party programmes - which may or may not be consistent with those community demands.

• extend public insight - by both media coverage of inter-party conflict and intraparty dialogue - into the nature of governmental decision-making (such insights can, of course, either defuse or inflame grievances!)

• protect decision-makers from the temptations and uncertainties of decision-making.

These days, they probably perform only the first and fourth of these roles – which perhaps accounts for the public cynicism which Peter Mair explored in this 2006 article in NLR developed, after Mair’s too early death into the seminal Ruling the Void book of 2013.. And the two British parties are torn by profound internal divisions – with the right-wing elements in both having so far won out. Today’s post continues the focus on the Labour party and will use 4 books which have appeared in the past couple of decades to give a sense of those divisions. The first and last titles, it should be noted, are the only ones which offer a compendium of views – the others are written by sole authors and reflect, as a result, a rather partial view.

Title	Takeaway
Interpreting the Labour Party ed Callaghan et al (2003)	Useful about the period from the 1970s to  the new millennium
Political Economy and the Labour Party Noel Thompson (2003)	Excellent on the different strands and phases  of the party
The Moral Economists Tim Rogan (2017)	Fascinating study of people such as Tawney  and EP Thompson
Rethinking Labour’s Past ed Matt Yeowell (2022)	Seems a very useful stock-taking

The next post will try to give a more critical appraisal of each of the books

An Inspiring but neglected UK Intellectual of the early 20thC

It was Horia-Roman Patapeivici‘s praise of the clarity of Harold Laski’s A grammar of politics (published in 1925) which set me off yesterday in pursuit of the giants of the British Labour movement who are all too rarely celebrated. I’ve selected several figures, starting with Laski – GDH Cole and RH Tawney being older inspirational figures to whom I hope to do justice in future posts.

Laski was born in 1893, got himself married at the age of 18 (to an older academic), graduated with first class Honours from Oxford University in 1914 but failed his military physical and took an academic position (in history) at McGill University in Canada in 1916 – also lecturing at Harvard whose Law Review he edited, making many highly-placed American friends.

Returning to the UK in 1920, he was made Professor of Political Science at the LSE in 1926 – by which times he had published several popular books

“promoting pluralism, especially in the essays collected in “Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty” (1917), “Authority in the Modern State” (1919), and “The Foundations of Sovereignty” (1921). He argued that the state should not be considered supreme since people could and should have loyalties to local organisations, clubs, labour unions and societies. The state should respect those allegiances and promote pluralism and decentralisation”

He was one of the few leftists to pay attention to the State (his student, Ralph Miliband was another) – indeed it was the very first chapter of his “Grammar of Politics” where he set out what was then the highly controversial view (for an academic) that it reflected class interests. This is a subject of considerable interest to me and I was sad to see that the classic work in the field – Bob Jessop’s The State – past, present future (2016) fails to mention Laski – even in the index.

In a highly insightful memory of Laski, Miliband put it very well

It is his treatment of these themes which gave Laski so remarkable an influence on the intellectual configuration of his times. For a period of some twenty-five years, Laski contributed more to the discussion of the meaning and challenge of Socialism than any other English Socialist. From 1925, when his Grammar of Politics was published, until his death in 1950, countless men and women were given a new insight into the problems of their times because they heard or read Laski.

Miliband went on, in the same essay to argue that

"The Grammar of Politics" is one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made by an English Socialist to give concrete meaning to the ideals of the Labour Party. Sidney Webb, who was not given to exuberant praise, called it a 'great book'.4 The modem reader is unlikely to go quite so far, not least because so many of the ideas of the Grammar have now been accepted as part of the common currency of contemporary thought. But there can be no doubt that it remains one of the few fundamental 'texts' of English Socialism.

Laski was, by all accounts, an inspiring lecturer (many of his students later becoming leaders of newly-independent nations) and I particularly enjoyed his own admission that he owed that to his early experience of lecturing to soldiers during the Great War. I know from my own experience in the late 1960s how valuable it is to have your academic language knocked out of you by no-nonsense citizens.

Although he became a Labour activist when he returned to the UK, he turned down an offer of a parliamentary seat and one in the House of Lords in the early 1920s and became a left-wing critic (not averse to using revolutionary language) - chairing the Labour Party Conference in 1944 and becoming its chair 1945-46 where he earned the stern rebuke from Atlee that “a period of silence from you would be most welcome”

FURTHER READING – the following are, for me, more accessible texts than “The Grammar”

The Foundations of Sovereignty Harold Laski 1921

The State in Theory and Practice Harold LASKI 1923

The Limitations of the Expert a short and fascinating article by Laski (Fabian Society 1931)

The danger of being a gentleman – and other essays; Harold Laski 1939

Reflections on the Revolution of our Time Harold Laski 1947

SUBSTACK ENCOURAGES EASILY-BRUISED EGOS

I’ve just been thrown off a substack to which I was a paying subscriber for daring to make a negative comment about Ian Leslie’s latest post which was about a member of the gilded elite I had never heard of and which read to me like a typical entry in a celebrity columnist. This is what Leslie said in his reply -

This is absurd. The piece concerns one of the biggest financial news stories of the last year and the ethical questions surrounding it. I can't help it if you haven't been paying attention but just because you haven't heard about the story doesn't mean it's not important. The piece is quite clearly critical of the elites it describes; hardly brown-nosing. I will now voluntarily cancel your subscription for being such a dick

For anyone actually interested in the contretemps and Leslie’s stupid reaction I suggest you try to access https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/can-we-blame-sam-bankman-frieds-parents

The irony is that Ian Leslie wrote a (good) book called "Conflicted" in which he extolls the benefits of disputation - something which he clearly can't now bear!!

My blogger friend Boffy was kind enough to send me a note of support, making the good point that substack people tend to develop their little bubble which brooks no criticism – except that he put it rather more eloquently viz

Typical of the intolerance of a lot of discourse, nowadays, fuelled by the fact that large sections of the petty-bourgeois Left have closeted themselves away in "safe spaces" so as not to have to justify their arguments and behaviour, and can simply massage their ego by only talking to sycophants in their own tiny silos, whilst "no platforming", i.e. bureaucratically excluding any alternative view. It is actually the basis of totalitarianism.

So, even when they could simply defend their arguments, they now choose, often, not to do so. The whole atmosphere generated by the idea of "safe spaces", is also one that generates paranoia, particularly in the era of the Internet/social media, in which anyone, as with you, in this case, who simply posits an alternative view, even if based on a lack of knowledge/information, is immediately identified as being a cunning "bad actor", to be excluded without further ado. No good will come of it, and the Left certainly will only go backwards rather than forwards on that basis, much as happened with Stalinism in the 20th century.

UPDATE; And Ian Leslie is simply wrong in saying that "this is one of the biggest financial news stories", since there is a far more important issue – namely the US prosecution of Google for its monopolisation - see John Naughton’s latest article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/30/google-antitrust-us-department-of-justice-court-case-monopoly

THE PIC - is of some French bookmarks I bought in a flea-market a decade or so ago. The ones at the top are wooden; those at the front plastic. And they are on the oak desk in my Carpathian mountain house

A Change from my usual technocratic reading

My normal reading tends to be on technical matters – about, for example, the dangers facing democracy; clinate change; development; or reform – in which a problem and possible causes are identified and solutions floated. I often get bored and impatient with the dryness with which an important tale is told – so it came as a great delight when I stumbled on At Work in the Ruins – finding our place in a time of science, climate change, pandemics and other emergencies by Dougald Hine (2023). Instead of the usual dryness, I find an almost poetic originality – a baring of the soul. Let Hine introduce his work

When we start to talk about climate change, we enter into a conversation that is framed 

by science. How could it be otherwise? Climate change is a scientific term. It refers to a 

set of processes that are described by the natural sciences. Yet climate change also asks

 questions that science cannot answer. Some lie downstream of the work of science. When 

it comes to what to do about climate change, responsibility passes from the scientists to the 

engineers and the economists, while psychologists and marketing experts are brought in to 

figure out how to ‘deliver the message’ and ‘drive behaviour change’. 
In the rooms where I was brought together with religious leaders and artists and Indigenous 

elders, it mostly felt as though we were being enlisted in this downstream effort. The hope 

was that we had some wisdom or experience or practice that might help the news from the 

climate scientists to reach the wider public imagination. But the point that I would make in 

those rooms – and that often seemed to land and lead to fruitful conversations with the scientists 

present – is that there are also questions that lie upstream of the work of science and take 

us beyond the frame it draws. These are not about what needs doing and how, but about 

how we got here in the first place, the nature and the implications of the trouble we are in. 

Such questions might sound abstract compared to the practical concerns of those who want 

to find solutions, but how we answer them has consequences. It shapes our understanding of 

the situation, what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of 

solutions we go looking for.

You could hear this vulnerability in the voices of those at the heart of the climate movements 

that erupted in 2018 and in the quieter conversations going on within the local groups that 

formed during that moment. Yet all this talk was still taking place within the vessel of science,

 and this produced strange contortions and contradictions. The language of science is 

understated by design. It is hardly suited to speaking in prophetic tones, but this was the 

signature of these movements. The strangeness of the shift in register applied as much to 

Greta Thunberg, who was fiercely careful to keep her statements within the bounds of the 

scientific consensus, as it did to Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam or to Jem Bendell, the 

Cumbria University professor whose self-published paper ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for 

Navigating Climate Tragedy’ – based on his alternative interpretation of the scientific data 

– went viral that autumn. Whether in alliance with or antagonism to the actual climate scientists

, the calls to action were increasingly framed in the name of something called ‘the science’. 

An understandable shorthand for the consensus over the key processes of climate change 

built up over decades of research by thousands of teams around the world, this way of talking 

also had the effect of invoking a singular authority whose implications remained to be seen. ‘

Unite Behind the Science’ read the placards and the hashtags, and the more this message 

was repeated, the stronger the frame of science around our climate conversations became 

and the less room there would be for looking beyond that frame.

It may seem odd to be calling a book premised on the world ending
shortly “delightful” but it is one of these rare ones which makes
you look at the world differently.There’s an excellent video discussion here for 

those of you who prefer to see the interaction and how people deal with difficult 

questions

Two things happened next to change the context of anything that any of us 

might have to say about climate change. First, in the time of Covid, the political 

invocation of science took on a new colour. Faced with a novel threat about which 

there was far less scientific understanding or consensus than climate change, politicians 

nonetheless discovered the effectiveness of introducing radical policies in the name of 

‘following the science’. Meanwhile, the implications of the demand to ‘Unite Behind the 

Science’ became clearer. I saw the people who had taught me to think carefully about 

science and the questions that it cannot answer on its own, when they attempted to 

address the questions raised by the pandemic, being told by angry, frightened readers 

to ‘Just shut up and take the fucking vaccine!’ Or being scolded by their peers for drifting 

towards ‘conspiracy theory’. In the name of ‘the science’, it is possible to decree what 

should be done and to close off the possibility of further public conversation.

And I particularly liked his image of a fork in the road

Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic 

foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change. We would always have 

come to this fork, one way or another. As long as the goal was to have climate change 

taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking 

climate change seriously might mean. As we near that goal, though, the differences in 

understanding come more sharply into focus. But we have reached that point, or something 

like it, under conditions in which the authority of ‘the science’ has been supercharged.
Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly lit 

highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, 

from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad 

swathe of liberal opinion and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy 

\of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale 

efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a 

version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those 

who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships,

oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic

growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world 

worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may

recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to 

nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport 

adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of 

life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that 

path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent

on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without. 

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, 

from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about 

the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, 

will lead inexorably to their solutions.

A critical review of the book can be found here  

Further video discussions about the book

https://www.youtube.com/@dougald

Feb Leeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iCzlw9e2hM&ab_channel=DougaldHine better sound

April 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B42sHf9p80&ab_channel=JohnGIClarke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaCatcin7n8&ab_channel=DougaldHine

A CALL TO ARMS

I’m re-reading an important book about Artificial Intelligence - all the more important since it comes out of the conversations had by 3 individuals teaching a course on the subject - System Error – how big tech went wrong and how we can reboot (2021) by a philospher, a top-level computer scientist and a political adviser/”scientist”. Such a multi-disciplinary authorship gives me more confidence in the book although its emphasis on the importance of values is perhaps an indication of the philosopher’s influence. I had forgotten that I had posted about it a couple of years ago

At 400 pages it could and should be much shorter and fails two of the tests I set some 3 years ago for non-fiction books

• its intro doesn’t summarise each chapter to allow the reader to get a sense of the book’s thrust (some chapter subheadings do give hints)

• it lacks the short guide to further reading which might help the reader understand any author bias

The chapters headings do give some guidance about the book’s argument-

1. The Optimisation Mindset – where tech engineers are set up as the bogeymen

2. the Unholy Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists

3. The Race between Disruption and Democracy

4. Can Algorithmic decisions ever be fair?

5. What’s your Privacy worthwhile?

6. Can Humans flourish in a world of smart machines?

7. Will free speech survive the Internet?

8. Can Democracie rise to the challenge?

Here are some excerpts -

When we uncritically celebrate technology or unthinkingly criticize it, the end result is to leave technologists in charge of our future. This book was written to provide an understanding of how we as individuals, and especially together as citizens in a democracy, can exercise our agency, reinvigorate our democracy, and direct the digital revolution to serve our best interests

We must resist the temptation to think in extremes. Both techno-utopianism and -dystopianism are all too facile and simplistic outlooks for our complex age. Instead of taking the easy way out or throwing our hands up in the air, we must rise to the defining challenge of our era: harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies. We can’t leave our technological future to engineers, venture capitalists, and politicians. This book lays out the dangers of leaving the optimizers in charge and empowers all of us to make the difficult decisions that will determine how technology transforms our society.

There are few more important tasks before us in the twenty-first-century. When we act collectively, we not only take charge of our own destiny, we also make it far likelier that our technological future will be one in which individuals will flourish alongside, and because of, a reinvigorated democracy.

Concluding Chapter In the blink of an eye, our relationship with technology changed. We once connected with family and friends on social networks. Now they’re viewed as a place for disinformation and the manipulation of public health and elections. We enjoyed the convenience of online shopping and the unfettered communication that smartphones brought us. Now they’re seen as a means to collect data from us, put local stores out of business, and hijack our attention. We shifted from a wide-eyed optimism about technology’s liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. It’s no surprise, then , that trust in technology companies is declining. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists. 

It need not be so. There are many actions we can take as an initial line of defense against the disruptions of big tech in our personal, professional, and civic lives. Perhaps the most important first step is one you’ve already taken by getting to this point in the book, which is to inform yourself about the myriad ways technology impacts your life. To fight for your rights in high-stakes decisions, you need to understand whether an algorithm is involved. In contexts such as being denied a mortgage, losing access to social services, or encountering the criminal justice system, you may have a right to seek more transparency into the processes.

One of my criticisms of “System Error” is that it lacks a short guide on “further reading” for those who wanted to get guidance about key books in the field. This, of course, is not an easy task. It requires authors to put their prejudices aside and try to identify the most important texts – not just contemporary but in the field as a whole. These are my suggestions -

Background Reading on Technology
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul 1964

The Revolution of Hope - toward a humanized technology by Eric Fromm 1968

The Republic of Technology Daniel Boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era Zbigniew Brzezinski 1980

The Technological System Jacques Ellul 1980.

The Impact of Science James Burke, Isaac Asimov (NASA 1985)

The Whale and the Reactor – a search for limits in the age of high technology Langdon 

Winner 1986

The Technological Bluff Jacques Ellul 1989

The Second Machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant 

technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Interesting that I can find only a couple of critical books in the new millennium!! 

Were previous generations really that more critical??

Are Centrists Evil?

The older I get, the more radical my opinions become. This is not how its supposed to be – although this fascinating analysis of 40 years of plotting british attitudes does say that -

“The public first began to look to government rather more in the wake of the financial crash of 2008-9, though in the event that mood appears eventually to have dissipated. However, the same cannot be said, so far at least, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations of government in the wake of that public health crisis have never been higher. The public shows no sign so far of wanting to row back on the increased taxation and spending that has been part of the legacy of the pandemic, not least perhaps because of their dissatisfaction with the state of the health service. Meanwhile, there are now also record levels of support for more defence spending. So far as the public are concerned at least, the era of smaller government that Margaret Thatcher aimed to promulgate – and which Liz Truss briefly tried to restore in the autumn of 2022 with her ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ – now seems a world away.”

Ultimately any political party that wants to survive has to respect these trends and work within them. Public opinion may well swing back in the other direction in the future, but for now anyone who thinks the Truss programme is one voters will buy is entirely delusional.

Duncan Green of Oxfam has a useful post about the report which focuses more on the increased libertarianism of the UK rather than on expectations about the State

This blog has, on occasion, confessed my erstwhile liberalism or “centrism”. For example I did recently find that this Rory Stewart video interview about “the truth about British politics” just before the UK general election of 2019 was “brilliantly thoughtful” – not least for the care with which he treated the questions; hardly the most common of a politician’s responses. But a devastating profile in The New Statesman about Stewart’s book tour promoting “Politics on the Edge” has made me realise how shallow that reaction was.

It’s a book of recrimination, anger, shame and oblivion. It is about the failures of the Conservative Party, the failures of Britain, and the failures of Rory Stewart who said “he kept coming back to Tacitus” as he wrote. The Roman historian’s Annals describe the eclipse of the senate: its powerlessness under successive emperors and its descent into servile degeneracy. “Politics on the Edge” has the same message: parliament once knew better days. Its members are squandering a precious inheritance. Their failures are moral. Stewart thinks it will “make a lot of people angry”.

Stewart’s big mate these days is, of course, Alastair Campbell – the two of them have presented for the past year what has become the UK’s favourite podcast “The Rest is Politics” which I find a bit too smug and self-satisfied but which does exude a good sense of the “centrism” which is the focus of my concerns. Campbell actively promotes The New European weekly which has gone so far as to feature an excerpt from Stewart’s new book

But why do I find this “centrism” so objectionable?

Is it just GUILT about my previous incarnation?

Perhaps this post from 12 years ago gives a sort of an answer

In 2011 I was invited by a Romanian journal to write a piece about the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. My article was entitled “The Dog that didn’t bark” but the editors carried the warning that it was “a view from the left”. At the time I posted that certain issues arose from such labelling -

• Do the editors not realise that use of such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about freedom of expression?

• It has been recognised for a long time that the left-right labelling makes little sense. Wikipedia has an excellent briefing on this. And I recommend people do their own test on the political compass website - which uses two (not one) dimensions to try to situate people politically.

• Criticism of the logic and effects of “neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least the ordo-liberalism which has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.

• Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly signals that I have no truck with statism. All my political life I have supported community enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions. My business card describes me as an “explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last 20 years as the open nature for my search for both a satisfactory explanation of how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to be unacceptable trends. I admit to having been attracted in my youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late 1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level, by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.

More recently I have generally been a fan of the writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM). As an academic I was convinced by the critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation” and was the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional economics.

But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s (which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the political compass). I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an influential Scottish regional politican, used my role to create more open processes of policy-making. Indeed community activists and opposition politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party.
I held on to my leading political position on the huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The definitions I give in Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power reveal the maverick me.

For the past 20 years, however, since I left the UK to work as an adviser on institutional development in central europe and central asia , I have not been involved in politics. My interest is to find some common ground in all the critiques of the current social and economic malaise – and to develop some consensus about the actions which might be taken.

Conclusion;

The heading to this post was deliberately eye-catching – meant only to challenge the all-too-easy liberal acceptance of the way things are. “So isst die Welt und musst nicht so sein” is still my watchword. Rory Stewart may have too high a profile for me but still remains a very interesting guy – this interview has him parse UK politics in a quite fascinating way 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6ZyJ-3H8g&ab_channel=NovaraMedia