One of the benefits of living in the West is the freedom to criticize our politicians. The fact that the electoral system rarely reflects considered criticism is not the point. We have always known that it is centred on political parties that are run by small groups more intent on newspaper opinion, and on that brief moment when the ‘wisdom of crowds’ can shift power between them, than they are on the good society. The alternative would be the Athenian tyranny of Dubai – prosperity based on the dynastic management of good fortune and no discussion of politics in polite society.
But it is quite possible that the parliamentary system which has been our pride and joy since 1688, periodically reformed until it became a democracy, contains far more vestiges of the ancien regime than should be considered healthy in a modern society. It is quite possible that the balance of power can change to restore kings to power.
We know that the state – the target of so much parapolitical investigation – is only a transmutation of the monarchy and that the state can also get stronger relative to the people at any time. And perhaps Parliament has not moved as far as we would have liked from being a clique of gentleman desirous of preserving their property.
Investigators in both the US and in the UK have tended to assume that journalists should be concerned solely with failures to follow the rules (hypocrisy) or with anomalies and injustices for which new rules should be created. Investigators are almost painfully liberal. The forms of constitutionalism are important to them and this quaint belief in the system working properly, rather like the belief of peasants that the Little Father, the Tsar, would improve matters if only he knew what was going on, may have halted investigation into the flaws in the system itself, in the way that the rules are made.
In short, liberal investigators fear revolution, and fear the exposure of the lies and illusions within the carefully balanced society that has emerged over the last three hundred years as much as any traditionalist or conservative. And yet things are palpably beginning to fail. The US has a constitution that still permits lurches of adjustment to changed conditions – we think of Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, even Reagan – but the British system seems to offer us a different sort of lurch, from crisis to crisis with one step forward and two steps back.
Hindsight and Truth
But hindsight is a wonderful thing. After the invasion of Poland, Suez, the intervention of the IMF in the 1970s, the arrival of Maggie Thatcher, the Falklands War, the Iraq War, there are always those who see an inevitability that may never have been there in the first place. So it is with the current problems of New Labour, the shift of economic power to the East, the global credit crisis and a food crisis that might turn tin-pot tribal insurgencies into the real thing – urban revolts that can turn states into threats to their neighbours.
And yet, bluntly, there have been many people who cannot be accused of hindsight and who have predicted all these events and even suggested solutions. OK, so the timing was often out. Existing systems often have a remarkable ability to motor forward on the belief of the participants long past the point when they should have collapsed; and the actions of ‘great men’, from Hitler to Bush, have precipitated changes that might otherwise not have happened for years or perhaps decades.
Neither Carlyle nor Marx were wholly right: there are great trends but there are also the actions of man. There is the wisdom of crowds and there is the foolishness of cliques. But, today, those of us who did see what was coming have a right to criticise and to ask how it is that so much of the Western world has both failed to adjust to great trends and failed to manage the foolish actions of great men. After long thought, it comes down to flaws in our democracy that might well yet lay us low – as Athens and the Roman Republic were once laid low.
A club for no purpose but power
We have confused constitutional liberalism with democracy and our form of democracy has privileged surprisingly small networks of persons whose professional interest in power and fame has not led to wise leadership but to an accumulated group-think in which dissident thinking is as unwelcome as it is in any dictatorship. The elite does not deal with dissidence through terror or arrests at 4.00 am but by other methods, mostly by exclusion from the ‘club’. It takes courage to ‘live in truth’, especially if you have ever tasted the fruits of membership.
To join the ‘club’, you have to think like the ‘club’; but the ‘club’ is living in a fantasy in which words are substitutes for deeds and orders are taken for their effects. Nor is this a new phenomenon. The political genius of the group that surrounded Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in the 1990s was to see this system for what it was and then to develop rules for the acquisition of power that may have been shocking in their cynicism but which worked – at least for a while. The purpose of that power was, of course, ‘good’, certainly liberal and progressive.
But it was still political banditry. The bandits who captured New Labour and the British state really did and do believe that they could and can use the residual power of both to change the world for the better, within the rules of a game which they believed that they understood. The state could not run the economy but it could be used to twist the private sector to social purposes. The UK could not solve the problems of the world but it could engage a similar-minded US to a liberal progressive agenda in which American power would do ‘good things’ for poor people overseas. Meanwhile, the general population just wanted to be left alone: freedom not to be blown up, freedom to drink all hours, own second homes and travel overseas and freedom to emote (whether about Diana or Tibet or icebergs melting, it doesn’t matter). Give the people growth, security and feel their pain, and all would be well.
But all was not well because New Labour failed to understand a truth – a feudal truth, one recognised in Dubai and one that would have been recognized in Elizabethan England. This truth is that most people are not interested in the forms of politics: they are interested in the content. They ‘trust’ government to deliver them from the Four Horsemen and they are uninterested in the pretensions of the political class so long as the land is defended, the economy is sound and Acts of God (like disease and disaster) are held at bay. Now, in 2008, the government seems to have developed a pretty poor track record on all three. All the ‘spin’ in the world and all the Machiavellian manipulation introduced into the system by the members of the Shadow Communications Agency are as nothing if performance does not measure up to expectation.
The question of interest to investigators is what precisely we should be investigating about the ruling elite. Should we be investigating their failures to live by their own standards (hypocrisy)? Or should we be investigating the failures to use the power they have acquired (the anomalies and injustices unrelieved)? Or should we be investigating precisely how they acquire and wield power and what it means for them to lose power to another, equally closed, elite of professional politicians? It is this last that strikes me as most important.
How bust is the system?
If there is a swing to the centre-right at the next election, it won’t be because people are necessarily more or less left or right-wing but because Conservatives may seem to be able to offer a better deal in meeting the essential requirements of defence of the realm, economic stability and the ability to preempt and handle disasters. Indeed, New Labour may still pull a rabbit out of a hat and be returned to power – which really would be a damning indictment of the Tory or, indeed, any alternative.
But what if New Labour’s drive for power over a decade ago has broken the system more fundamentally? What if all it has done is to demonstrate that every generation of the political class under our current party-based parliamentary democracy, not just this one, has done nothing better than lurch from crisis to crisis, each time costing lives and property? And what if, without change, the next generation is doomed to do something similar because of the way the system has been allowed to develop?
Perhaps we might start with Asquith sleep-walking into war in 1914; but we also have Baldwin and Chamberlain sustaining bankrupt imperial systems rather than face the threats emerging in Europe; and Eden believing that British soldiery and diplomacy could suppress third world passions (a mistake repeated absurdly in 2003).
Economically, we have lurched from a flawed and corporatist wartime social democratic state that embedded the special interest of the trades unions and crushed market innovation to a consumer-driven credit-fuelled fantasy that was an accident waiting to happen.
So far, the British have accepted the myth of parliamentary democracy as serving its people well, honed on the settlement made between Crown and Country in the seventeenth century – and perhaps it did. It ensured no civil war and no revolution and no invasion and it seemed to preside over ever-increasing prosperity from then until now.
Perhaps the last serious internal threat to the system was not the Miners’ Strike, essentially a tidying-up operation, but the 1926 General Strike – a ten-day wonder that does not bear comparison with the killings and political pogroms that took place in Germany in 1918/19 and then again in 1934. Yet the last sixty years has seen a consistent failure to come to terms with the loss of global influence and relative (not necessarily absolute) economic decline by planning for these changes in advance.
Sclerosis
But if our elite has been in denial so has been the population at large – and, why not? Enjoy it while you can. Lurch from ‘fix’ to ‘fix’, buy time, something may turn up; but, above all, you can trust state and parties to know what they are doing, even if they fight like Kilkenny cats over the best way of doing it and seek advantage for their side of the game.
There is a certain wisdom in crowds and a value in competition that does mean that the system has more than survived, it has moved forward. But (I contend here) a sclerosis is beginning to emerge that can be dated to the mid-1990s and which suggests that a flawed but working system is being displaced by a system that contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Where might this change have taken place? Where did the sclerosis begin? I suggest it happened when the political class began to seal itself off from political fluidity from within and started to communicate with the public through the media. This is not the same sclerosis that had affected the economy because wartime corporatism was never properly adjusted to market reality and which saw the eventual revolutionary explosion of Thatcherism as a corrective.
The economy is not sclerotic. It is now anarchic and this is the fear: that political sclerosis is resulting in conditions that are leading, in practice, to a form of political anarchy that parallels what has happened in the economic zone. The state is not merely distrusted, it is ineffective. State tax rolls are under threat. Economic growth creates private but not public wealth. Citizens seek protection increasingly from outside the state system. Local community is replaced by kin and clan structures. Identity has displaced common shared belief in place and history. But why now? Is it just the inevitable result of globalisation? Or is this just an excuse? Let us compare before and after.
Before the mid-1990s, the normal form of politics gave priority to large closed systems, political parties in which the politics of place and class were negotiated under the leadership of independent figures who competed to negotiate power with the electorate directly and through the media. The media was broadly national, and organisation outside political parties was difficult and restricted to localities or to major single causes such as nuclear disarmament or housing. Coalition parties were the core of our democracy.
After the mid-1990s, ‘bandits’ had effected a revolution in one party that has changed British politics forever. Admittedly, its ‘reforms’ in the mid-1990s were based on the constant chaos of an indisciplined political movement under the whims of a baby boom generation for whom self-expression had replaced collective discipline. But, instead of reconstructing the original model of a party based on rules and negotiation, it drew a firm line in which the party was on one side and the professional political class was on the other. The purpose was power and the result was power, but the law of unintended consequences meant that party centralisation began to affect the rest of the constitution. Parliament no longer had to worry about one of the three legs of influence – party, constituency, government or opposition – since the party was now wholly the creature of the leadership.
Consequences
The focus of the parliamentarian consequently and rapidly shifted from relative independence in support of his or her party in government to an almost absolute support (with a few noble but excluded exceptions) for the executive led by his or her party. This was a quiet revolution – with echoes of Germany in 1934 – but the accretion of executive power was hidden in the folds of a party reform scarcely noticed by the press or wider public.
The next consequence was that the powerful elements in the party directed their attention to the executive at the expense of the weaker elements – local government leaders and trades unions negotiated directly with both party and government executive. Ordinary members lost their voice entirely, thereby breaking contact entirely with locality and increasing the tendency to use both party and local government as transmission belts for executive policy.
The point here is that this transmission belt was always downwards. Considered opinion on the ground was replaced with the famous preference for mass opinion surveys, focus groups and reliance on the media as rough but ready guides to public sentiment. This next proposition scarcely needs arguing: the loss was of a subtle understanding of changes on the ground. The consequent quasi-populist approach to public opinion, in which the executive cherry-picked what was acceptable and not acceptable, created the crisis of trust we have today.
So, as a result of nearly hidden changes in one part of a delicately balanced system, executive power was enhanced. The professional political class not only became more like a court to a monarch but a vital connection was lost with community opinion in favour of fluid bar room assessments of what was appropriate. This latter led to increased authoritarianism, militarism and an economic policy based on consumerism and credit – because that is what ill-considered opinion in bar rooms tends to want.
But there were other effects. If executive power was enhanced within one party, it effected change in other parts of the constitution. The state found itself dealing with personalities and not with a complex organisation: the party had been taken out of the equation. Quite quickly, the interests of the bureaucratic state and the political executive merged to become seamless and the more so as the political executive could pick and choose the intermediary figures between itself and the bureaucracy.
If the legislature became more supine, without the countervailing influence of party, and with other parties having to learn similar methods of discipline and control in order to compete electorally with New Labour, and with the executive more dominant, the judiciary became the only barrier (often relying on extra-sovereign European legislation) to executive pretension.
The rule of law displaced democracy. This is the most interesting development of all: liberal rule of law, whether through judges or regulators (witness the recent judicial ruling in support of a regulatory attempt to contest an executive decision in the BAE Systems case), has become the only opposition of consequence. As David Leigh of The Guardian has made clear, the police, to be regarded in our country as independent, and the media are increasingly becoming the natural collaborative opposition to the executive on investigative matters within the system.
This is topsy-turvy because liberalism is not automatically to be allied with democracy. A new constitutional arrangement has emerged in which the people are ruled by an executive dictatorship (merely checked by a first-past-the-post electoral system offering us three parties who are simply seeking to control the state and not represent the community), tempered by the rule of law and a free press; and in which the rule of law is only benign because of a loss of sovereignty to Europe and because of laws passed by the quasi-dictatorship itself. Indeed, the one saving grace of the political liberalism that underpins New Labour is that it has been prepared at least to encourage regulatory and legal (though not democratic) checks on its excesses.
And all this has happened because a coup d’etat was mounted, scarcely registered by the wider population, within a secondary part of the total system – a political party – one that breached the delicate balance of power between local community, competing politicians and national opinion and interest.
Yet this ‘coup’ was not a revolution against sclerosis but against anarchy (the real state of the Labour Party at that time) and so its authoritarian tendencies, unchecked, have led us towards the sclerotic. A sclerotic economy with a vibrant politics tending to the anarchic has been converted over thirty years to a sclerotic politics with a vibrant economy now tending towards the anarchic.
Perhaps we have a bust system that may not necessarily implode in revolution (no, that is not the British way) but which is doomed to inexorable slow decline, far worse than necessary because of the special interests at its head, much like eighteenth-century Venice or Holland. These are awkward questions to ask but, as psychotherapists will tell you, recognising the problem is necessary before a solution is available…..and it does raise specific questions as to whether David Cameron will do for politics what Margaret Thatcher did for economics, or whether he will simply try to work the system he has inherited a little better.
The politics of the credit crisis – who is on our side?
But first bread and then morals. Or rather, the economic conditions in which this sclerosis is present must be considered. At the time of writing, mortgage lending was expected to halve in the UK this year without more money being pumped into the market. The government and Bank of England were rumoured to be planning a state takeover of dodgy mortgage assets, a perfect example of ‘moral hazard’ in pure free-market terms and tantamount to using taxpayers’ money to save the bacon of the bankers.(1) Even The Financial Times editorialised that the ‘mea culpa’ of the Institute of International Finance may not be enough to prevent a dangerous backlash against the banks.(2) The Financial Times, of course, may note the coming backlash but, true to form, it cannot approve of it. It wanted governments to make a ‘principled stand’ for free markets in a world of high energy and food prices and rising income inequality. But what do we mean by free markets if the ‘capitalists’ (The Financial Times’ own term) have ‘not helped’? How far can we go on just accepting the market as, like a particular view of nature, beyond human control?
The sclerosis in politics is directly related to the acceptance of the primacy of the market in politics. The resistance of New Labour to democracy in both the party and state is directly related to its fear that ‘special interests’ (i.e. claims from the community) will upset another set of delicate balances – economic management based on the theory of competitiveness in a free market global economy. The specific flaws in New Labour’s economic policy are not the subject of this article. The concern here is only with the general flaws in its philosophy.
If we overmanage nature, we get the poisoned wastelands of the Aral Sea. But this is an extreme example: for several thousand years we have managed nature so that, wherever humans live, there is no pure nature left. Our countryside is the product of management. If we get it wrong sometimes, that is not an argument for acceptance of some nutty religion of radical environmentalism that would place humans equal to animals or even rocks and stones – and, yes, you will find such philosophers if you look carefully.
Maybe we have been getting it equally wrong about the market. Frightened by the extreme social poisoning of Stalinist planning or war-driven national socialism, the political Aral Seas of the twentieth century, we have started to become like the nutty environmentalist philosophers, placing this abstract thing called ‘the market’ far ahead of the human condition, not realising that it can be managed and tamed in the same way. Before pursuing this thought further, let us ask how our government and others propose to deal with the current crisis.
Those who live by the sword…
In April (and, of course, we might be overtaken by events) the UK was frustrated that the G7 seemed reluctant to coordinate global operations to deal with the current crisis; which is understandable when you think that the bulk of the G7 will really be placing themselves on the line to save a temporarily busted Anglo-Saxon economic system. Many of them have long had their doubts about freebooting Anglo-Saxon capitalism and can see the hazard in propping it up too readily. Of course, we Anglo-Saxons will bounce back, we always do; but is it the best system for our people or are we just habituated to it, like the Chinese to authority?
The ensuing domestic problems in the US and the UK are seen as the business of their respective governments by the rest of the West and probably quite rightly too. The British Chancellor, desperate to get support for international coordination, was even talking up the crisis, referring to it as the worst since the 1930s! Is it? If so, why is it? And is our political class relying on an ideology of the market to absolve them from responsibility, much as they did the Irish potato famine so long ago?
In the end, the G7 restricted itself, in terms of headline initiatives, to forcing banks to hold more capital to guard against risk. Even then, it planned to phase in the new rules gradually in case they made the immediate system worse. There was more, of course – the 65-point action plan from the Financial Stability Forum [FSF] that had included the headline policy was endorsed – but, as far as the current crisis was concerned, all that was heard was the loud bang of a stable door being bolted as the presumed tamed horses of credit crisis ran wild and free.
Globalisation has made the ‘international community’ (this is the term used for the anarchy of as many governments as need to be involved at any one time on any issue) powerless except to deal in advance with the next crisis. If the 65-point FSF plan is so easily endorsed now, the natural question which arises is why none of these political geniuses thought to do it earlier. It will deal with the next crisis perhaps but not this one. The old left argument that the system is in hock to capital may be less plausible than that its governors are all surprisingly uncoordinated, dim or lazy (or all three).
The problem of denial
We are now taking it on trust that the FSF (which has not popped up from nowhere) actually knows what it is doing with its proposed ‘college of supervisors’! No commitment was made to make capital requirements counter-cyclical (why, that might be embarrassing for a government like Gordon Brown’s that thought that it could busk its way through the good times without believing there would ever be bad times), nor to intervene in bankers’ pay. Hmmmmmm! Maybe a shift to an ‘all in hock to capital’ argument has its merits after all.(3)
My guess is that the poor old FSF, like the equally ignored UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, has long been ignored as telling inconvenient truths of more importance to us than the fashionable concerns about Chinese authoritarian operations in Tibet and the probably inevitable effects of climate change. And surely this is the point: Western Governments can really do nothing about Chinese (or Iranian or Russian) policy other than go to war, nor about climate change, but it is far easier to pontificate within the ‘international community’ and share blame on these issues than take on the full free market system and engage in the active planning of credit cycles and the supply of essential commodities through emergency stockpiling.
The Western political class raises to divinity those political technocrats who share their ideology – like the liberals who man the European Commission – but it ignores those who are concerned with very real strategic problems of global poverty and economic stability whose advice will always come down to planning, that dirty word for governments since the 1980s. No worries, the free market will take care of it! Yeah, well. There were many late Victorian holocausts as the free market spread through empire: the potato famine in Ireland was neither the first nor the last.
There is a horrible complicity between the emotionalism of the public – a process started in good faith by Bob Geldof but which has deteriorated into futile Facebook campaigning – and the refusal of government to engage in the political education of its population. We do not expect this from parties of the centre-right but we once did from parties of the centre-left. The decadence of New Labour and the American Democrats arises because they are now merely parties of mass reaction to waves of emotional enthusiasm that have now even begun to affect High Toryism under its new leader.
A system in denial
The entire system is still in denial. It still believes (as we were told in the mid-1990s) that the good times could still go on forever, with recessions being tiny blips of adjustment and the chickens never needing to come home to roost. It is as if long cycles, the science of earthquakes and the costs of creative destruction have all been lost in a Panglossian belief in the market. The current crisis may not yet have such an effect on our easy belief in the beneficence of the market as the Lisbon earthquake did on Enlightenment views of a benign Nature; but, if not, there must be a bigger shock yet to come one day. Nature has needed taming so that we can live on this planet and so does the market; and this belief is not incompatible with wild forests, parklands, private ownership of property and innovation. It is all about science, planning and education…… and it is probably no accident that both Bush and Blair have emphasized their religious faith in this context.
It comes as a sudden shock to realize that our rulers are all dealing with the global political economy along lines that are reminiscent of the theocracies and divine right regimes of three hundred years ago. All you have to do is substitute God’s Will for the market and you realize that, while our political system has moved on towards secularism and constitutional democracy, our economic system is still lurking in its Middle Ages. Whether Reagan-Thatcher or Clinton-Blair, whether Catholic or Protestant Divine Right, the model is both electorally attractive and flawed.
Many people in general feel comfortable (and this is their right) with a world made in God’s image (until that flood, earthquake or plague hits ‘em head-on and then it is a matter of faith in God’s mysterious and inscrutable ways). They have often required something like the Thirty Years War to get them to realize that it isn’t. God was not exactly standing guard duty for us at Auschwitz. When times are good, nice middle-class people cannot believe that the good times can ever be otherwise – just listen to the middle classes of Baghdad who privately recall Saddam with regret for his departure.
Death and taxes are the only things that people in general think of as inevitable. Many like to think that (a) God will pick up the pieces after death and (b) government will maintain stability and prosperity with taxes. Both propositions are matters of faith but, while we cannot know what happens after death (making Richard Dawkins no better than the Pope in this respect), we can certainly judge whether governments have used our taxes wisely in maintaining not just prosperity but also stability. Well, they have been found wanting.
Political consequences
Politicians often suffer from the fault of believing that they have god-like characteristics, though rarely as obviously as Roman Emperors. They may not be omniscient or omnipotent but they have more information and more power than we do. This leads them into the position of believing that they have more wisdom than we do. They do not. And I suggest that they have been exceptionally unwise in the conduct of affairs since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of globalisation. In their desperation not to repeat the Aral Sea errors of Sovietism, they have gone to the other extreme and tried to become economic noble savages and let the market run so free that it was inevitable that the economic equivalents of flood, famine and earthquake would appear. This is as serious politically as economically.
Let us look at the international security regime by way of an analogy. The UK has led with a global security model that emphasises international collaboration and coordination through multilateral institutions. The US is supposed to lead according to the good counsel of the UK and other similarly-minded allies. This is the very essence of the liberal progressive ‘third way’ model which has been promoted by the British intelligence and security establishment and which was central to the decision to follow the US into Afghanistan and Iraq. This model made one big assumption that seemed wise in the mid-1990s and now seems unutterably stupid as we draw to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: that the US had the will and capability to lead the world, and that the world had nowhere to turn but America. In fact, since 9/11, major countervailing regional powers have emerged (notably Russia and China), insurgency has proven harder and more costly to defeat than expected, and the economic correction is shifting power in one great lurch to the East.
The bad bet
This gamble on US leadership was built on faith not on facts. When Clinton sent cruise missiles into Sudan and Afghanistan, it was an action predicated on the widespread understanding that US firepower was so massive that no-one would attract its wrath. The restraint against Saddam over Kuwait actually implied massive reserve power. But the whole system depended on everyone knowing just how far they could go – which was not very far. Saddam Hussein, as supreme realist (considering US military doctrine during his tenure), simply did not believe that the US would engage in actual regime change, especially on an absurd political warfare concoction surrounding weapons that, even if he had them, he could not use. The rest may be history but current American weakness is precisely related not so much to the quagmire of Iraq (which has long since moved off the front pages) but the realisation that, like nuclear weaponry, such power is unusable without a willingness to go to levels of total war beyond anything acceptable to liberal society.
The issue here is that the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) misjudged not in its analysis (it understood the threat of total war as a tool, and the rise of China) but in its ability to persuade liberal society to be illiberal. The invasion of Iraq should really only have come after a massive programme of making the West much more frightened and authoritarian than it was. The complaints from the hardline security right about Iraq are not based on humanitarian concerns or sovereign rights but purely on the belief that 9/11 was a lost opportunity to create a West militant which could have slowed down or even reversed the rise of the East.
The misjudgements
The point here is not the strategic debate about the American national interest – that is for Americans to have – but the utter stupidity of our own domestic politicians on so many fronts.
First, our politicians did not see that there was no single American view but a struggle for power, even within the neo-conservative right, to establish a new balance of terror. No third party should offer unqualified support to someone who has not yet made up their own mind about what is right and proper.
Second, our security and intelligence community ceased to question their premises and became locked into an Atlanticist group-think about the nature of threats that had long since ceased to concern itself with ‘our country’ and became concerned instead with something far more inchoate and abstract – the West. There is no ‘West’ outside the perfervid imaginings of the elite unless you consider it embodied in NATO, and NATO is as confused and divided as Washington. The only rational policy is to balance national interests in common alliance against common threats – and the first stage is to work out precisely what it is that threatens Britain and why!
Third, they had no conception of the long term cost of a shift of policy of holding a monopoly of power that was never used to one in which that power was actually being used. I do not mean the trillion dollar cost of Iraq and the waste of funds trying to hold down Pathan tribal nationalism, but the long term cost of making the next use of that power only viable in terms of total war. From being a cautious ally of the superpower, supporting it even when it was wrong, the UK became complicit in a strategy that could only be used on terms that must now result in the mass murder of civilians.
Iran has now become the case study. The Iranian revolutionary right has crushed the liberal opposition precisely because it is associated with the West, confrontation is growing between the US and Iran not only in Iraq but in the Levant, and the US faces defeat by a thousand cuts or making a preemptive and unlawful strike which our current administration would find it difficult not to support. We could do little to protect our own troops in Basra from scenes that might remind some of us of Zulu: it might make a great film but that will not help the squaddies very much.
Whichever way we look, a small declining power on the North West of Europe has become drawn into a geopolitical challenge between the US and the Iranian Revolution, an old grudge match, because its elite (a) has failed to draw back from unintended engagement in the internal politics of an ally, (b) believes in abstractions that are only of interest to intellectuals and (c) has completely misunderstood the psychology of American power and what liberal societies can and cannot do.
The political sclerosis discussed above has been shown to be relevant to economic anarchy but it is also relevant to foreign policy mismanagement. The coup of 1996 within the Labour Party meant that protest was restricted to useless mass demonstrations and media comment on the one hand and a supine and rather dim Parliament on the other. We know that many of the politicians in the House were using the WMD claims as a useful excuse for not bucking the trend at the top while under pressure from the street.
The executive has pushed through a widely despised and incompetently managed foreign policy only because it can. In some ways, we are lucky that they really are useless and not malicious. These people could have had us all scared witless and voting out even the forms of democracy between 2001 and 2003 because of the alleged terror threat. Fortunately, their incompetence and the existence of a liberal (not democratic) bloc in the House of Commons have saved us from ourselves. But they chose to go down a policy route that has had us distrusting them ever since.
So, since they are not competent or malicious enough to take away what freedoms we do have, should we just relax and revel in the quagmire that they have made for themselves? After all, in the eighteenth century, Parliament was always voting funds for wars that seemed to make us richer by some curious alchemy. No, this incompetence that has saved us from their pretensions to power threatens our economic wellbeing. And it is not just a matter of Northern Rock!
Times change and empires fall
The attempt to ride the tiger of a global security system is precisely analogous to what is happening in the economic system. The UK tried to ride the US security tiger and its economic mate at the same time, one foot planted firmly on each back. This unraveled all the checks and balances that might have slowed growth but which would have made us better fitted to deal with a crisis emerging both from inflationary pressures and the major correction eventually required in the US.
The US is going through a very bad time, but it remains the country that is going to be the most powerful nation militarily and economically for at least another two or three decades. It needs partners who can deliver the resources to stabilise the world but not a self-appointed moral guide. Although France has futilely sought to displace the UK, both Atlantic powers are depleted, lacking the domestic political will to do what is necessary. They are also in the wrong place: Russia is no longer a threat and Germany is a wealthier and more pivotal ally.
Reality is not our political classes’ strong suit. The economic crisis and its costs are likely to have as drastic an effect on British humanitarian post-imperialism as the Depression of the 1930s was to have on the sustainability of the original Empire. It is no accident that the Wall Street Crash took place in 1929 and Britain was out of India within twenty years.
The political classes are now reduced to registering protests about Burma, Tibet and Zimbabwe on Facebook. This does little more than irritate trading partners from doing us the favours that we will so desperately need. Many Britons in the 1930s could not see the writing on the wall and that generation had its nemesis at Suez. The current political generation has still not ‘got it’ that even the US has not sufficient capability to bring order to anarchy across vast swathes of the world. It is time to look after one’s own poor and neglected.
J’Accuse
The British establishment lacks intelligence and flexibility. Its fixed ideas about what the British interest is means that it jerks from crisis to crisis, responding to, rather than predicting events. The availability of the protection of America just as the British Empire was unwinding should have been the prelude to withdrawal to Western Eurasia and a strategy of independence – it was not. The move back East of Suez by the last Prime Minister was an action of such overwhelming foolishness and hubris that it makes one question the sanity of the system that permitted it. How can a population of 60 million in the modern age be directed into such a policy at the whim of one man and his coterie? Because our political system has undergone a quiet revolution, that is why. Harold Wilson could defy the superpower on Vietnam not because he feared mass protests but because he feared the cost to his management of the Party. A real conspiracy theorist (which I am not) would see the hand of the US Embassy in the Labour Party’s Partnership in Power reforms (4) because the State Department was the ultimate beneficiary.
Similarly, the necessary market revolution against the sclerotic corporatism of special interests in the 1980s should have been the prelude to a new market-driven social democracy along European lines but was it? No, a greedy, desperate and anxious drive to create wealth in a race against time, against the rise of Asia in particular, has placed the country at the eye of the current economic storm with a collapsing national infrastructure and a population not ready for the hard times ahead.
But the ‘J’Accuse’, if there is one, has to be directed at our whole half-educated political class. This reached its nadir in the administration elected in 1997 but such a claim should not be interpreted as praise for their rivals. There is something very wrong with our political establishment at its very core. It lacks the jerky flexibility of the US system which might cause pain for its people but also enables renewal by appealing periodically and decisively to mass sentiment directly. Equally, it lacks the disciplined national planning that you might find amongst the Russian siloviki.(5) It is neither fish nor fowl, neither responsive to the people nor effective.
I do not have the answer – or if I do, this is not the time and place. But things are going to get much worse until the British public start to wake up about the ‘state they are in’; and a political administration, a constitution, is created that does not rely on being a constant marginal adaptation of the Revolution of 1688, a cosy club of less than competent insiders whose attitude to policy is to consider it mere content for public entertainment through a cynical media, whose servants are demoralised and whose political base is sclerotic and bankrupt.
Is that a call for revolution? Possibly. Is there an expectation of revolution? Not at all. The British will muddle through in genteel decline, neither desperate enough to permit change nor talented enough to affect it.
Notes
- During editing, it was announced that the Bank of England was providing a £50bn facility to swap mortgage-backed securities for Treasury Gilts – see <http://news.bbc.co.u/1/hi/business/7357880.stm>. Privately, City figures have told the author that £50bn merely scratched the surface of what might be required. However, the author has no crystal ball in which to foretell whether the Government was right to call the financial system ‘fundamentally strong’. Financial sources at the time of writing were highly pessimistic, media sources less so.
- See <www.iif.com/> The Financial Times editorial, available only to subscribers, is at <www.ft.com/cms/s/0/001441ee-082a-11dd-a922-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1>
- In fact, I am not convinced that this crisis is more than a massive correction, with pain for many, especially in the US, certainly not the long-predicted collapse of capitalism. There is every sign that the capitalist system will be dragged out of the mire by East Asian and petrodollar prosperity quite quickly – this time around. While you are reading this, it is possible (there is a time lag between drafting and receipt by you) that inflation is causing you more concern than recession. I am not claiming the prescience of the Rand Corporation.The question I am asking is whether it is in the national interest to run our economy and risk our social cohesion as a bubble, part of the froth on a global system that is running without guidance blown hither and thither by the winds of others’ decisions. Even if we come out of this completely intact and into the next cycle of growth, in time for a New Labour election victory in 2009, it will have been a close call – the sort of win that the addictive gambler will use to go back into the casino and lose all later. You cannot ever beat the house in the long run. No one has the system to do that.
- See for example <www4.labour.org.uk/Improving_Partnership_in_Power>
- See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silovik>
Tim Pendry runs the political analysis and media relations company TPPR, <www.tppr.co.uk/>.
He blogs at <http://asithappens.tppr.info/>