Waking up the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy
Larry Elliot and Dan Atkinson
London: Constable, 2007, p/b, £7.99
This appeared just as the last issue of Lobster was going to print and has been widely reviewed since then. Extracts were published in The Guardian and The Mail on Sunday, where Elliot and Atkinson are economics editors respectively.
This is a prolonged Bronx cheer and a sneer of contempt at NuLab and all its works; and thus, for me, a total pleasure to read. E and A have written a full-on demolition of NuLab’s economic and, to a lesser extent, social policies. One of the chapters, the best one, is called Bullshit Britain. That should have been the book’s title.
Their central target is the kind of delusory thinking expressed by Martin Kettle when he talked of a ‘progressive consensus built round open markets and social justice’.(10) This is bullshit, would say E and A: open markets are the antithesis of social justice and a moment’s reflection on British social history would show this. To deny this is just fantasising. Which is what E and A think NuLab has been doing for the last decade.
Take the environment. E and A say of the Stern Report on global warming (now safely dumped into the recycling bin and forgotten in Whitehall) that
‘it was the perfect report for the government………..it allowed New Labour to say that it was necessary to make “hard choices” while at the same time validating the failure to make a choice. This was the party that……..thought it was possible to fight expensive wars while cutting the defence budget and to make Britain the knowledge economy of the world while reducing per capita spending on the universities, so it came as little surprise to find it effortlessly squaring the circle on climate change.’ (p. 194)
They offer, on p. 221, as NuLab’s two big ‘master-fantasies’, the beliefs that ‘we can borrow without limit………and caring for the environment is entirely compatible with endless economic growth.’ If anything they are being rather kind to describe these as fantasies, with its implication that our leaders are mistaken. I’m rather afraid all we have are politicians who are driven by NuLab’s major policy imperatives: pleasing the City and following what focus groups tell them. I do not believe that Brown, Balls et al are unaware of the consequences of what E and A call the borrowing binge we have been going through in this country in the past few years, or that they believe we can be green and drive to Tesco in our 4x4s. It’s worse than that: they just can’t see how to change things without alienating the City and/or the voters and are afraid to try.
What E and A attribute to NuLab people as fantasies I see more as bullshit rationales for policies for which they can see no popular alternatives; or for policies which they feel unable to change without looking foolish for adopting them in the first place – for example the promulgation of the target-setting culture throughout the public sector, or the PFI system. These are politicians, after all, professional politicians. They are not interested in the truth and only interested in the welfare of this country’s citizens in so far as that is compatible with their careers and their sense of self-worth. Peter Oborne’s view of them as a new political class is apposite here (see Tom Easton’s review essay on p. 38).
As to their other major ‘fantasies’, notably the one that says the ‘knowledge economy’ will replace manufacturing, these stem from the desire to please the City. Because we can have the City in its present form or we can have manufacturing: we cannot devise policies to suit both.
Some of this is funny; occasionally it is brutally patronising to our political leaders. Their comment, for example, that ‘The difference between Germany’s record trade surplus and Britain’s widening trade deficit is that Germany has factories, Britain has The Office’, is both – and catches the tone and central theme of this book.
Some of the book’s content will be familiar to readers of this magazine, Private Eye’s coverage of the PFI fraud, or Elliot’s column in The Guardian. What may not be so familiar is a section near the end, in which in a couple of pages they offer an analysis of NuLab’s origins, tracing them back through the formation of the SDP to the pro-EEC campaign in the referendum of 1975. They see in these groups a common thread: the pretence that tough choices don’t have to be made. They show that the pro-EEC campaign lied that membership of the EEC didn’t mean change to this society; they show the SDP flunked the tough choices while pretending they had made them; and NuLab has followed in their footsteps. But why stop the historical trail at 1975? The pro-EEC group can be traced back to the Gaitskellites in the early 1950s; and this is the American tendency whose central claim in the post-war era was that there was no need for tough choices – i.e. about the distribution of wealth – because American production methods would generate enough wealth to satisfy all human needs.
Nor are E and A afraid to look the alternative in the face. If we must – there is no alternative that I can see – rebuild British manufacturing (and I would add agriculture and fishing), doing so is incompatible with our membership of the EU in its present form (and the EU isn’t going to change) and the fetish for free trade. We are, more or less, back in the late 1970s again, before the City used the economic ignorance of Mrs Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe (and North Sea oil revenues to pay the dole and police overtime) to reinstall itself in the driver’s seat. We may have no alternative but to go back and take the road towards European-style social democracy – Sweden rather than America, say – and this could only be done in the traditional manner: tariff barriers, control of trade, and state control of finance. It is going to take an economic catastrophe to get this kind of thinking onto the agenda of the major political parties or the major media; but with oil heading towards $100 a barrel as I was writing this review, that crisis may not be so far away.
Notes
- ‘The financial crisis could be a historic chance for Brown’, The Guardian 24 September, 2007