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

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

WHAT SORT OF FUTURE ARE WE LEAVING BEHIND?

Climatologists may overwhelmingly (the exact figure is some 97%) be convinced that global warming is a real and immediate threat - but the public is not so easily persuaded. Our reasons are many and diverse

• The world's climate tends to go in cycles – remember the Ice ages

• experts are increasingly suspect – their forecasts often turn out to be falsified

• technological innovations will save us

Beneath such rationalisations lies an almost religious belief in the idea of “Progress” which has recently become the subject of increasing criticism

As individuals, we deal with the threat of global warming in a whole variety of different ways -

• we deny it

• we mobilise and protest

• we accept fatalistically that future generations are doomed and feel guilty

• we invent a new vocabulary – of “resilience”

• and resort to notions of local self-sufficiency” and “degrowth”

This post is about two climate activists whose writing has engaged my interest in the last few days – Rupert Read and Jem Bendell. Read is one of the founders of Extinction Revolution but has just left his posiyion as a philosophy academic to concentrate on his activism. Bendell is a geographer who has edited a book jointly with Read

Let me start with Read's latest book - Why Climate Breakdown Matters (2022) which starts with reminding us of the anxieties we had in earlier decades

Not so well known is that in 1983, we came even closer to nuclear war. This was instigated by a flock of geese flying across the edge of the Soviet Union. The USSR’s radar systems misidentified this avian excursion as a series of incoming nuclear missiles. It was only due to the prompt action, or (if you will) inaction, of an intelligent and calm Russian officer (not even a very senior officer), that nuclear missiles weren’t released in response to those geese. Against protocol, he delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, until the looming threat was unmasked as simply birds. This episode is documented in a film called “The Man Who Saved the World” and the title is apposite: he did.....

Thankfully, Read's book is a short one. We are so overwhelmed with books on the subject (and many others) that I have several times appealed to writers and publishers to discipline themselves and give us shorter books (ideally half his length!). But because its a recent book, it's able to trawl over the writing of the past four decades on the issue and identify their shortcomings -

While discussion of the science is abundant, discussion of the social, political and economic ramifications of taking the science fully seriously is typically far more marginalized. For instance, most of ‘Political Science’ and of Sociology still simply ignore the way that the ecological crisis will entirely transform our world in the lifetime of students now studying these subjects at university. Browsing through the latest issues of top philosophy journals reveals a similar lacuna in the discipline, with some notable exceptions. This is insupportable and unethical. But it is part of a wider trend.

And why has there been so little focus on adaptation in climate activism, climate politics, and climate science? Adaptation is creeping steadily up the international agenda, but is still not being taken anywhere near as seriously as mitigation/prevention.

Most books on the subject are equivocal about future prospects but Read is emphatic that we are far beyond the tipping point - hence the emphasis on adaptation. He stresses the need to think about our children and the importance of future generations

Conventional wisdom in mainstream climate activism has until recently – until the game-changing advent of the likes of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion – said that if we direct people’s attention to the scale and severity of present and impending ecological collapse, then they will abandon all hope in the face of it and will fail to act against it. The consensus has largely been that messages of hope and progress motivate, while those of impending catastrophe and failure demotivate and alienate otherwise receptive audiences. In short, put on a happy face (p16)

Social responses we can expect to emerge as the intensity and frequency of disasters is amplified – as it will be. I draw on the work of disaster studies scholars that shows that the popular narrative of these events as a catalyst for the worst elements of our nature is (thankfully) hugely inaccurate. Instead, thoughtful and attentive empirical research suggests that disasters are often the scene of intense community building. This shatters an important cultural myth about human nature. More importantly, it is also a source of real hope for fast changes in our attitudes to climate breakdown. It may be that from the aftermath of disasters we can seize renewed vigour for creating a better and more resilient world. (p21)

An important theme which occurs in the book is that of challenging our obsession with economics growth - and leads me to the subject of degrowth which has been the subject of some challenging books eg Post-Growth – life after capitalism; by Tim Jackson

During the year 2020, the world witnessed the most extraordinary experiment in non-capitalism that we could possibly imagine. We now know that such a thing is not only possible. It’s essential under certain circumstances. The goal of this book is to articulate the opportunities that await us in this vaguely glimpsed hinterland. (p12) Post Growth is an invitation to learn from history

Beyond the ‘fairytales of economic growth’ lies a world of complexity that demands our attention. Those fairytales are coded into the guidance manual of the modern economy. They’ve been there for decades. They continue to distort our understanding of social progress and prevent us from thinking more deeply about the human condition.

The broad thesis of this book is that good lives do not have to cost the earth. Material progress has changed our lives –in many ways for the better. But the burden of having can obscure the joy of belonging. The obsession with producing can distort the fulfilment of making. The pressure of consuming can undermine the simple lightness of being. Recovering prosperity is not so much about denial as about opportunity.

Robert Kennedy's Kansas speech attacking growth

That single number ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country’, concluded Kennedy. ‘It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’.....

JS Mill was saying that a postgrowth world may be a richer, not a poorer, place for all of us. And it’s that vision of a richer, more equitable, more fulfilling world – glimpsed by Mill and demanded by Kennedy and developed by Daly – which provides the inspiration for the arguments in this book.

There's a great conversation with Jackson here and a critique of the book here

Let me end with a superb post from my favourite blogger about the chaos which seems to be descending on us all

In ‘chaotic’ economic and political systems that means oligopolies, bribes, extortion and other ‘officially illegal’ activities may prevail without limit. In some cases, organized crime actually substitutes its own laws, rules and constraints, to deal with the chaos.

What I think we are starting to see this century is gradually increasing levels of chaos in much of the world. In fact, the increasing number of the world’s economies that are dominated by oligopolies and organized crime might actually be a little less chaotic than countries that are still trying to play by the rules. In countries ruled by oligarchs and organized crime, you at least know who you have to pay off, and how much, and the consequences if you don’t. That may be despotic, but it isn’t chaos.

If the system collapses to the point that even oligopolies and organized crime cannot maintain order, then you have at least short-term chaos and possibly anarchy. Immediately, in order to get essential things done (like food and energy diThe Future is Degrowth A Vetter and J Vansint 2022stribution), ad hoc systems will emerge.

Resource

 a review of degrowth literature (2022) 

 Deep Adaptation – navigating the realities of climate chaos ed J Bendell and R Read (2021)

Rethinking Readiness – a brief guide to 21^st century megadisasters 2020

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/kenta-tsuda-naive-questions-0n-degrowth 2021

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii115/articles/mark-burton-peter-somerville-degrowth-a-defence.pdf 2019

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii112/articles/robert-pollin-de-growth-vs-a-green-new-deal 2018

Previous posts on the issue

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/07/why-we-disagree-on-wicked-problems.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/08/climate-change.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/11/is-patriotism-answer.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2022/08/why-polarisation-and-what-can-be-done.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2023/07/oberheated.html

And a newsflash https://bylinetimes.com/2023/09/06/courts-to-face-wave-of-protests-as-climate-campaigners-say-right-to-jury-trial-under-attack/

ON BIAS

There is a lot of talk in the UK of bias in reporting – whether it's the BBC or simple journalism. The reality is that it's very difficult to find examples of left-wing reporting – although the last post suggested we need to be cautious about this left-right classification, So I've attempted one of my famous TABLES which leads me to conclude that left-wing writing is very much a minority pursuit. But because the blogger site makes a mess of my tables I've attached the table as a pdf file - although I seem somehow to have succeeded in putting it below

People will note that I've drawn my net widely and included some bloggers – as well as someone no longer with us but whose ideas live on. The more names I added to the list, the more difficult it became to apply a suitable label about their “political leaning”

Some years ago I did an even more exhaustive list of good “journalistic” writers which readers may find interesting. It includes a fair number of writers who (in Hamlet's famous phrase) have shuffled off this mortal coil eg Arthur Koestler

Journalists have a reputation for digging up the dirt on people and institutions but John Harris (who figures in the latest table) is unusual in having started a series which celebrates the people doing good work in their UK communities

Writers I respect

	Normal source	Political leaning	Examples and COMMENT
Anthony Barnett	Open Democracy	liberal	A founder of “Open Democracy” and a writer famous for his long essays eg Out of the Belly of Hell (2020) but has also published several books on constitutional issues and on Brexit
Grace Blakely	Tribune	Harder left	Her many contributions can be read at the link at the title of the journal
Diana Coyle	Her blog and academia	liberal	British economist. Author of 9 books eg “Cogs and Monsters”
Matt Flinders	academia	liberal	British political scientist eg Flinders on democracy and a marvellous collection of his blogs in “What Kind of Democracy is this?” See also “Defending Politics”
David Graeber	Academia and activist	anarchist	Sadly David is no longer with us – here is my tribute
John Michael Greer	Current and previous blog	sceptic	One of the most stimulating US writers about the decline of industrial society eg “After Oil” and “The Ecotechnic future” with a strange interest in ancient druidry. This is his take on climate warming
Chris Grey	His brexit blog – and academia	open-minded	British organisational sociologist and author of several non-fiction books – on his subject and also on Brexit
John Harris	The Guardian	open-minded	Also famous for his “Anywhere but Westminster” videos
Chris hedges	Consortium news and his substack	left	Incisive, hard-hitting analyses of the reality of the American Empire
Anton Jaeger	New Left Review	left	His various pieces can be read here
David Jamieson	Conter	Soft left	The Conter site is “Against the Scottish Establishment”. David is its editor and host of its podcast
Owen Jones	The Guardian	Soft left	Author of several books eg “The Establishment”
Naomi Klein	various	open	Canadian writer and activist eg This Changes Everything
Andrew Marr	The New Statesman	liberal	Author of “The Making of Modern Britain”
James Meek	LRB	liberal	Author of several fiction books and of a couple of non-fiction
George Monbiot	The Guardian	Vaguely anarchist	Author of several books eg “Out of the Wreckage”
John Naughton	The guardian	Not clear	The paper's technology correspondent. Writer and academic. Author of several books including “From Gutenberg to Zuckenberg”
Dave Pollard	His blog	Diff to label	Dave is a Canadian – this a very useful post about what motivates him
David Runciman	London Review of Books (LRB)	liberal	David is a British political scientist with many books eg “How Democracy Ends” and “The Confidence Trap”
Jonathan Shafi	Conter site	Soft left	A Scottish free-lance writer
Wolfgang Streeck	New Left Review	Harder left	Wolfgang is a German sociologist and author of numerous important books eg “How will capitalism End?” and “Buying Time”
Gillian Tett	Various – inc Fin Times	Diff to label	Another anthropologist who has turned to financial journalism and author of several books eg “The Silo Effect”
Polly Toynbee	The Guardian	Centre leftist	Author of several non-fiction books eg “Dismembered”

CAN LABOUR WIN?

A recent post identified a widespread despondency indeed cynicism about contemporary British politics. Some forty years ago, there was a mood of hope - John Smith had commissioned the “Commission on Social Justice” Will Hutton was just about to publish his seminal text “The State We’re In”. John Major and the Tories may have won the election in 1992 but Black Wednesday a few months later destroyed the Conservatives' credibility – although they limped on before the overwhelming Labour victory of 1997.

Today there is little hope – the Labour party inspires little confidence, is seen as just too responsible not least for its expulsion of most of its left-wing critics. Just compare the party's 2017 Manifesto with its current “Covenant”.

Renewal is a soft-left journal (the link explains the term which publishes thoughtful articles and this one is a review of a recent book with the great title “Futures of Socialism - ‘Modernisation’, the Labour Party and the British Left, 1973-97”. This excerpt gives a great sense of an intensity of debate which has been lost in recent decades -

His book is a deeply researched history of ideological change on the British left in the late twentieth century. Murphy offers a fascinating guide to the debates about how to modernise socialism that raged across seminar rooms, conference floors, party documents, think tank pamphlets and periodical pages from the 1970s onwards. His findings make a powerful case against the commonplace portrayal of Labour in the late twentieth century as offering nothing more adventurous than a mildly humanised neoliberalism........

During the 1970s and 1980s a very large number of political actors on the left and centre of British politics became convinced that the model of centralised state-driven socialism associated with Labour’s heyday in power in the 1940s was out of step with modern Britain. Political formations as various as the New Left, leading trade unionists, disillusioned Labour revisionists, left-led Labour councils, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, the Liberal Party and the emergent SDP all agreed that there needed to be greater economic and political empowerment below the level of the UK state. Initially this was often framed in socialist terms as the extension of economic democracy through worker participation in industrial decision-making and trade unionists taking seats on company boards. But these ideas quickly widened (or perhaps moderated) to include passing power on to consumer and community groups, local councils (with Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council as a model) and co-operatives. At a theoretical level, these decentralising tendencies were forged into what Murphy dubs the ‘neo-corporatism’ advocated by David Marquand and Paul Hirst. Marquand and Hirst envisaged a British economy that looked a lot more like the West German social-market model, by combining federal constitutionalism with a more collaborative and long-term industrial culture.

All of this was premised on the assumption that Labour’s traditional political vision was too top-down and statist and thus out of step with a less deferential, more individualist society. This was said to be the vulnerability in Labour’s earlier model of socialism that Thatcherism had exploited, by offering a right-wing vision of individual economic empowerment that widened private property ownership and increased disposable incomes through direct tax cuts (a point that had been presciently made by Stuart Hall even before the Thatcher government was elected in his famous 1979 Marxism Today essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’).

Four quadrants can be used to plot the old and new left and right -

Old Left; supporting a strong state sector for infrastructure and health (inc insurance although the religious and cooperative sectors could equally have responsibility for this last)

Old Right; recognizing the role of the state in sustaining property rights and traditional ways of doing things

New Left; which has supported the liberation struggles of repressed groups and the onward march of post-modernism….

New Right; which tends to divide strongly between the economic agenda of the Neo-liberals (whose eulogies for “the market” conceals support oligopolistic licence and the spread of “commodification”) and the more traditional social agenda of the American Neo-Cons.

But how long can we keep using the term “new”? The UK “New Left” some 60 years ago – and the “New right” at Mont Pelerin a decade earlier.. e are surely, therefore, overdue another term…..and the one I suggest is “emergent”  (which Mintzberg, I think it was, first used to distinguish one meaning of strategy). And, as few people relish being labelled as either left or right, we need a mid-way point for them….That then gives a 3x3 matrix and the question is what terms to use for the resultant combinations……??? This is what I’ve come up with

key words/symbols for the various points of the political spectrum

	LEFT	CENTRE	RIGHT
OLD	Working class	Family, property	Tradition, duty
SOFT	Social democracy	liberalism	duty
NEW	Liberation struggle	consumerism	The individual
EMERGENT	The commons	identity	libertarian

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’.

‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognise that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

Scruton’s is not the only book this year to explore “the culture wars”. A site I must consult more often is the Society for US Intellectual History which carried recently an interesting comparison of a couple of books which throw light on all this -

‘Ideas moved first in the arena of economic debate.’ Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the dominant tropes in economics had been institutional, even among conservatives. Right-wing critics of the welfare state and state-managed economies did not speak of the market; they spoke of corporations and banks and ‘championed the rights of management and the productive powers of the free enterprise “system”.’

The idea of the market that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s – ‘self-equilibrating, instantaneous in its sensitivities and global in its reach, gathering the wants of myriad individuals into its system of price signals in a perpetual plebiscite of desires’ – dispensed with these settings and constraints.

It also dismantled the ‘troubling collective presence and demands’ of social democracy, turning unions, workers and the unemployed ‘into an array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces’.

Everyone became a buyer or seller, everything – kidneys, pollution – got bought and sold. The only thing holding it all together was the magnetic energy of these individual acts of exchange. Like most scholars of the free-market movement, Rodgers assigns great weight to Milton Friedman, ‘the University of Chicago’s most forceful politiciser’, and the right’s answer to J.K. Galbraith. He wrote columns for Newsweek, advised presidents (and dictators), and organised the ten-part PBS series Free to Choose as a counter to Galbraith’s 15-part BBC series on capitalism.

With his focus on the money supply as the source of economic well-being, Friedman helped popularise a ‘radically simplified model of aggregate economic behaviour’, in which ‘state, society and institutions all shrank into insignificance within a black box that translated money inputs directly into price outputs.’

But Friedman’s monetarism was also far more state-centric – the Federal Reserve played an almost heroic role in determining the direction of the economy – than most market theologians would have liked. What truly pushed the market into the culture – high and low – were the adjutants of Friedman’s revolution: the law professors and jurists, not just on the hard right (Richard Posner) but also on the squishy left (Stephen Breyer), who made economic efficiency the measure of all things and provided much of the rationale for deregulation; the second wave of free-market economists (Robert Lucas, for example, or Gary Becker), who took apart the field of macroeconomics in favour of game theory, behavioural economics, rational expectations and other individualist approaches; and journalists like George Gilder and Jude Wanniski who recast the market as a popular (and populist) vision of the good society.