THE LOCAL STATE and the new municiaplism

I have been trying to interest an academic journal in publishing an article about the development and management of a local political strategy in the mid 1970s – namely Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) This was a very rare thing to attempt - the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Sheffield and some London boroughs may have been flaunting their left-wing credentials at the same time but the Strathclyde strategy was rather different - a serious and considered response to the "Born to Fail" report of 1973 which had exposed the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland and demanded some sort of official recognition. 

The English local authorities had pursued a deliberate strategy of confrontation 

with central government - but Strathclyde Region was at pains to seek (and 

gain) the support of the delegated central government in our country – namely 

the Scottish Office. A draft of the article can be read here 
It’s hardly surprising that the last few years have seen a revival of interest in 

the 1980s experience of local government. The Thatcherite stifling of local 

government had started shortly after her first election victory in 1979 and 

was full in swing – first with budgetary limits and then increasingly savage cuts.

But local government still had some autonomy in those days – whereas they have 

since undergone more than a halving of their income.  
What has been developing in recent years is a new “municipalism” which is 

receiving extensive coverage – some of which I list below

Stuart Hall has one of the best things I have ever read about THE STATE in 

a chapter of The Hard Road to Renewal – Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left ( 1988)

Instead of progressively withering away, the state has become a gigantic, swollen, bureaucratic and directive force, swallowing up almost the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks), in the name of the people, on the backs of the people. Who, now, can swallow without a gigantic gulp the so-called temporary, passing nature of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? On the other hand, the very same period, since the end of the Second World War, has witnessed a parallel, gigantic expansion of the state complex within modern capitalism, especially in Western Europe, with the state playing an increasingly interventionist or regulative role in more and more areas of social life. It has become far and away the largest single employer of labour and acquired a dominant presence in every sector of daily existence. What are we to make of that unexpected development, never adequately predicted in the classical Marxist literature?

Even more difficult to work out is our attitude towards this development. On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive, managerial and bureaucratic force in their lives.

However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new right, the free market ‘hot gospellers’, who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade.

And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling back the state’ – including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the left on the hop –hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground. Perhaps it might help if we knew how we got into this dilemma. This is a vast topic in its own right, and I propose to look at only four aspects here.

• First, how did the British left become so wedded to a particular conception of socialism through state management, the essence of what I want to call ‘statism’ or a ‘statist’ conception of socialism?

• Second, I want to sketch some of the reasons why the very expansion of the state, for which so many on the left worked so hard, turned out in practice to be a very contradictory experience.

• Third, I want to confront head on the confusion caused on the left by the ‘libertarianism’ of the right – the way Thatcherism has exploited the experience of welfare statism and turned it to the advantage of the new right.

• Finally, I want to consider some aspects of the changing social and economic relationships today which have influenced spontaneous attitudes on the left – what I call the growth of a left libertarianism. In conclusion, I can only roughly indicate some directions in which our thinking needs to be developed.

The chapter then goes on to track the history of the british understanding of 

the role of the state – with a collectivism coming into view in the the 1920s – 

particularly on the right.

It was precisely in this critical period, between the 1880s and the 1920s, when the parameters of British politics for the following fifty years were set for the first time – that statism took root in British political culture. In those days, what we now call ‘statism’ went under the title of ‘collectivism’. What is crucial for our analysis is the fact that there were many collectivisms. ‘Collectivism’ was a highly contradictory formation, composed of different strands supported in different ways by the right, the centre and the left – if, for convenience, we can use those somewhat anachronistic labels. Collectivism was regarded by many sections on the right, and by some influential sectors of the leading classes, as the answer to Britain’s declining fortunes. The country – the new collectivists believed – required a programme of ‘national regeneration’. This could only be undertaken if the old shibboleths of laissez faire were finally abandoned and the state came to assume a far greater role of organic leadership in society.

They believed a ‘populist’ bloc of support could be won amongst the

dominated classes for such a project, provided the latter were ‘squared’ by

state pensions and other Bismarck-type benefits. This was the programme

of both the ‘social imperialist’ and the ‘national efficiency’ schools, and of

the highly authoritarian populist politics associated with them. And though

they did not carry their programme in detail, they were extremely influential in pioneering the shift in the allegiance of British capital from its former commitment to laissez faire, to its newer link with a certain type of capitalist state interventionism.

Recommended ARTICLES on the new municipalism
Exploring the Potential of the Local State - Sheffield and the local state  

Beveridge and Cochrane (Antipode 2023)
The Uses and Abuses of municipalism by the british left (Minim 2022)
Prefiguring the local state D Cooper 2017
Whatever happened to local government? Symposium on 1993 Cochrane book 

by Ward, Newman et al (2015)

Whether the Local State? Neil Barnett 2013
 
Book

Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government  Ines Newman 

(2014) A very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which 

contains a useful glossary

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 paarse UK politics in a quite fascinating way  

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

Whatever happened to Rationality?

I was deeply affected by the “rationalistic turn” in the social sciences which coincided with my University days from 1960-64. My initial field of study had been modern languages simply because I had been good in school at French and German but I was soon seduced by economics and politics and duly switched in my final two Honours years to those subjects 

It’s only recently that some books have started to appear pointing to just how much military funding and the Cold War had contributed to the new focus of the social sciences on rationality. Robert McNamara best embodied the spirit of calculation first in the Ford Company, then in the US Department of Defence – where he introduced the idea of PPBS during the Vietnam war - and finally in the World Bank

But it was to be a decade later before I got properly into the works of people such as Herbert Simon, Etzioni, Lindblom and Wildavsky and indeed I studied them closely only in the 1980s as part of the UK’s first MSc course in Policy Analysis with Lewis Gunn in which I enrolled in the early 1980s

And it was 1992 before I came across “Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of Reason in the Western World” which I barely understood but loved - and was to be an early warning shot across the bows of the technocrats in what has, since the onslaught of populism in the past 5 years, become a continuous salvo. 

So it’s about time we sought some clarity - and perhaps balance – in this fraught debate about rationality and The Enlightenment. Particularly because the latest knight to present himself in the lists - in all his shining armour – is none other than Steven Pinker, the Panglossian Optimist and author of Enlightenment Now who has a new book called “Rationality – what it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters” with the embedded discussion thread being fairly useful. 

I sense, however, that getting through the bibliography below is going to be a long haul – so let me just flag the key reading up and we’ll see how it goes 

Background Reading

Crisis of expertise CEU 2021 syllabus A fascinating outline of a recent course run by the Central European University

The Dialectic of Enlightenment; by Horkheimer and Adorno (1947) It was these German emigrees of the 1930s who brought to America the critique of the enlightenment which arguably sparked the recent right-wing backlash. Ironic that they did so at a time when scientism was taking off with a vengeance!

The Origins of American Social Science Dorothy Ross (1990) Focusing on the disciplines of economics, sociology, political science, and history, this book examines how American social science came to model itself on natural science and liberal politics. Professor Ross argues that American social science receives its distinctive stamp from the ideology of American exceptionalism, the idea that America occupies an exceptional place in history, based on her republican government and wide economic opportunity. Under the influence of this national self-conception, Americans believed that their history was set on a millennial course, exempted from historical change and from the mass poverty and class conflict of Europe. Before the Civil War, this vision of American exceptionalism drew social scientists into the national effort to stay the hand of time. Not until after the Civil War did industrialization force Americans to confront the idea and reality of historical change. The social science disciplines had their origin in that crisis and their development is a story of efforts to evade and tame historical transformation in the interest of exceptionalist ideals. This is the first book to look broadly at American social science in its historical context and to demonstrate the central importance of the national ideology of American exceptionalism to the development of the social sciences and to American social thought generally. 

Reclaiming the Enlightenment – toward a politics of radical engagement by Stephen Eric Bronner (2004) The start of the left’s comeback 

Shaky Foundations – the politics-social science nexus in post-war america Mark Solovey (2013) embraced a strategy that rested on two key commitments, to scientism and to social engineering. The first commitment involved accepting, in a broad sense, a unity- of- science viewpoint, which assumed that the social sciences lagged behind the more mature natural sciences and which posited that the former should follow in the footsteps of the latter. Often this viewpoint meant the social sciences needed to rid themselves of their involvement with a wide array of humanistic forms of inquiry, including “soft” qualitative, philosophical, historical, and normative forms of analysis. Just as importantly, social scientists had to establish a clear distinction between scientific social inquiry and other value- laden spheres of social action, such as politics, social reform, and ideology, and especially Marxist or socialist perspectives.

More positively, this viewpoint implied that the path to scientific credibility and progress lay in the pursuit of more rigorous, systematic, and quantitative investigations that promised to yield accurate predictions about what individuals, social groups, and social systems, including economic and political systems, would do under stated conditions. The other key commitment, concerning the social sciences’ practical value, indicated that this work would contribute to the national welfare and human betterment more generally through social engineering applications. This commitment often rested on an instrumental viewpoint, which regarded social science knowledge, techniques of analysis, and expertise as apolitical, nonideological, and value free. A very common idea associated with this position suggested that basic or pure scientific inquiry, whether in the social or the natural sciences, produced value- neutral knowledge of a fundamental sort. Such knowledge, in turn, provided the basis for realizing desired practical goals in a couple of ways, depending on the specific domains of investigation. Certain lines of investigation sought to place the processes of decision making on a rational basis. Other lines promised to facilitate control over individuals, social groups, and social systems. Both manners of realizing social sciences’ practical value rested on a technocratic outlook, as their proponents generally assumed that leaders and managers in various sectors of society, especially in government, comprised the most relevant audiences for social science knowledge

As the first chapter’s consideration of the NSF debate indicates and as subsequent chapters explain more fully, basic questions about the scientific identity, practical utility, and political import of the social sciences attracted extensive attention and provoked considerable controversy in the early postwar years. The second, third, and fourth chapters examine the stories of the military, the Ford Foundation, and the new NSF, respectively, to describe how each patron staked out its importance within the context of a transformed and largely new Cold War patronage system, to analyze the ways patrons and the scholars who worked most closely with them addressed long- standing questions and contemporary disputes about the social sciences and their funding, and to illuminate pointed challenges that arose as these patrons sought to advance scholarship grounded in scientistic and social engineering commitments.

By midcentury nobody doubted that the recently unified Department of Defense (DOD) was and would remain the dominant patron of American science for the foreseeable future. So for social scientists seeking support for their work in the Cold War years, the enormous defense science establishment naturally had great significance. Building on a sizable body of work about the military– social science partnership that includes many excellent accounts of specific disciplines and interdisciplinary fields of inquiry, chapter 2 focuses on the development of military funding policies and programs and examines the struggles of social scientists to establish their presence in the natural science–oriented defense science establishment. These scholars encountered persistent conservative suspicions and often found it hard to gain support from their superiors in the defense science establishment, including skeptical physical scientists.

Under these conditions, social scientists had little choice but to argue strongly for scientistic forms of inquiry and their social engineering applications. Such ideas then became pervasive in military social science agencies and programs, thereby providing valuable support to many influential fields of research in ways consistent with those social engineering commitments. Moreover, these developments stimulated the growth of the military– social science partnership, which became increasingly important to American military operations and Cold War strategy by the time of the Kennedy administration. 

Cold war social sciences – knowledge production, liberal democracy and human nature  ed M Solovey and H Cravens (2012)

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2013/06/10/book-review-cold-war-social-science-knowledge-production-liberal-democracy-and-human-nature/

https://www.academia.edu/7398929/Cold_War_Social_Science_Specter_Reality_or_Useful_Concept

The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis; Aaron Wildavsky (originally 1979) but special edition with foreward by B Guy Peters (2018). This was the analyst who almost single-handedly held the rationalist school up to ridicule and showed how political judgement came into every key decision....

Nervous States – Democracy and the decline of Reason; William Davies (2019) A Fantastic and highly original book - reviewed here by one of my favourite political science writers - David Runciman

"When Michael Gove announced before the Brexit vote that the British public had had enough of experts, he was thought to have introduced something new and shocking into our politics. As his interviewer Faisal Islam responded incredulously at the time, Gove sounded like an “Oxbridge Trump”. Davies’s book wants to give us a sense of perspective on this feeling of outrage. We shouldn’t really be so shocked, because what Gove said is at some basic level true: the claim to expertise is deeply alienating to many people. And for that reason it is nothing new – the battle between the experts and their critics has been going on for centuries.

Davies traces it back to the 17th century and to two key developments in the evolution of modern politics: the attempt to distinguish reason from emotion and the desire to separate out war from peace. A peaceful politics built on reason created the space for expertise to flourish, including the birth of modern science and the launch of learned societies to champion its cause. Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying – and stable politics depends on the authority of the state. The problem is that these categories can quickly get jumbled up. Experts start to present themselves as the ultimate authorities and to view their specialist knowledge as the voice of reason. Instead of politics making expertise possible, experts come to assume that they are the ones making politics possible. That arrogance is what alienates people, and it helps to undermine the basic distinction between reason and emotion on which modern politics depends. It makes us feel bad.

Experts depend on stable politics to make their case – if everyone is fighting no one has time to listen to what the boffins are saying. This book does a good job of showing that the two-way contest between experts and the people is really a three-way relationship: both are fighting to claim the authority of the state. Davies also identifies many of the reasons why this fight has become so fraught in recent years. Some of it has to do with the pace of change. Expertise depends on our ability to fix the world in place long enough for an agreed version of the facts to take hold: it needs time to stand still for a moment. That doesn’t happen any more. As Davies writes: “The promise of digital computing, by contrast, is to maximise sensitivity to a changing environment.” Disruption is the watchword of Silicon Valley and it spells the death knell of conventional expertise.

The other great advantage that the new breed of data analysts has over technocrats and bureaucrats is that it appears to be on the side of our emotions in an increasingly emotional age. “The hostility directed towards experts stems from a deep-lying sense that, in their attention to mathematical laws and models, they are not really interested in individual people, their desires, fears and lives. Facebook doesn’t suffer the same alienation because its ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ are so utterly different. Its users express themselves in their own words and feelings.” Unlike analogue expertise, the digital version hides behind a touchy-feely interface, notwithstanding that what lies underneath is more technically complex than ever. “As the maths has become more and more sophisticated, the user no longer even experiences it as mathematical.”

These are sparkling insights, but Nervous States can’t decide whether we are living in unprecedented times or not. As a publishing strategy, it makes sense to talk up the novelty of the current moment, but the argument frequently cuts against that. Just as the idea of post-truth starts to lose its edge when we try to find an age of truth to contrast it with (there aren’t any), so the notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon.

For an account that is rightly sceptical of many inflated claims to expertise, Davies’s argument is often based on versions of the same. In one instance, he uses surveys to describe the current state of popular opinion without saying anything about the limitations of such an approach. He cites a 2017 survey that showed that while 53% of Ukip supporters believe torture works, 56% think it should be permitted, meaning 3% of Ukip supporters think that we should torture people just for the hell of it. “This is a political vision,” Davies writes, “in which the infliction of physical pain, and even death, is how authority should work, whether that be in the criminal justice system, school, security services or the family.” But that is a big claim to base on the views of such a tiny number of people (given Ukip supporters in this survey would have been a minute fraction of the whole, since almost no one was voting Ukip in 2017, we are talking about only a handful of respondents). What four or five people might think doesn’t sound like the basis of a political vision to me.

The notion of a world struggling to cope with feeling sounds more like a part of the modern human condition than a distinctively 21st-century phenomenon. Where it is useful to his account, he uses factual evidence to bolster his case, yet he often undercuts it at the same time. He draws on the statistical work of the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to show that falling life expectancy in the US is driving feelings of insecurity, particularly in regions that voted for Trump. But he also wants to argue that these same people feel more insecure because experts routinely ignore their bodily experiences. No doubt evidence of suffering and ignorance of suffering are both part of the story. But Davies does not explain how they are related. Sometimes the facts he uses are simply wrong. He states that we now live in societies where “around 50% of people go to university and 50% don’t”, something that divides us down the middle. But while it is true that around half of young people now go to university, among older generations the figures are much lower, which means that the large majority are still not university educated. Brexit is inexplicable unless this fact is taken into account.

This is an ambitious book with plenty to commend it, which covers many concerns in our age of political upheaval – from drone warfare and safe spaces to imperialism and the Anthropocene. It represents an attempt to join up the myriad dots of our anxieties, but I could not see a way through its maze of facts and feelings, authorities and counter-authorities.

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"