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During the recent election campaign, eligibility to govern became reduced in Tory political rhetoric to ‘having a plan’. But isn’t central planning a feature of the big, interventionist State, anathema to true blue Conservatives? And what ‘the plan’ was to achieve varied from stopping the boats to defeating Putin to growing the economy, all requiring well planned government action.
The accusation of not having a plan was mainly directed at Sir Keir Starmer, bearer of the ‘Ming vase’ full of policy positions vulnerable to ambush. He had good reason not to, as the French say, ‘vider son sac’ (speak his mind), confide in the public detailed policy priorities and how they would be implemented. Not an ideal exercise of democracy but one necessary for any Party wishing to win a general election. Faced with a right-wing Press and predatory social media, much of it supporting a collapsing ruling Party reduced to false claims and misrepresentation, hardly blameworthy. And perhaps there was an unrevealed plan behind the reticence. We are now half-way through a political dance of the seven veils. We’ve had the debates and interviews, a substantial Manifesto and Kings Speech, some elaboration of the new PM’s headline priorities, Rachel Reeves’ first speech to business leaders as Chancellor of the Exchequer with, shortly, her first speech in office to Parliament. The new government is determined - and has been so for some time - to establish its credibility both nationally and internationally. Something more than pragmatism, the makings of a plan, is appearing. But the big picture and the economic and political philosophy that shapes it, what we arrive at when the 40 pieces of legislation in the King’ speech are put together, and implemented, remains still out of focus. When I turned over Will Hutton’s This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain, Bloomsbury, 2024, to find Sir Keir Starmer’s bonanza of a blurb on the back cover, “a brilliant book.... read it if you haven’t already”, it seemed to promise a sharper focus. And indeed Will Hutton - former Principal of Oxford College, journalist and political economist, a former editor-in-chief of The Observer for which he writes a column - provides both a big picture and a detailed policy analysis. The book gives a coherent intellectual and historical account of the mess we are in, how we got here, and how we might emerge. It looked like a strong contender for what New Labour Mark 2 is all about. The headline formula Hutton applies is “an ethic of socialism with the best of progressive liberalism”. By this he means ‘blending’ the dynamism of the market and the restless energy of capitalism with the values of “fellowship, solidarity, fairness and mutuality”, informing a social contract to protect citizens from the risks of uncontrolled capitalism. Not a bad definition of social democracy or, come to that much of Catholic Social Teaching - though This Time No Mistakes never refers to this body of social thinking. Probably wise in these secular times. Not surprisingly Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1908-1915) in the Liberal “great reforming government” that fought the Tory-dominated House of Lords to create national insurance and an old-age pension prior to the First World War, is an early example of what Hutton calls the politics of balancing the We with the I. Then comes the Christian socialist, Richard Henry Tawney, who influenced much more than Anglican social thinking after the War. Tawney’s friend from Toynbee Hall days (1903), and Liberal hero, was William Beveridge, whose expertise in social insurance was taken up by Atlee’s 1945 Labour government. The other big name amongst the founding fathers of Hutton’s political economy is John Maynard Keynes who bequeathed Keynesian economics and the core belief that government intervention can stabilise economies. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (1933-1938) which sought to remedy the Great Depression, economic recovery, reform of the financial system and help for the unemployed and impoverished, was profoundly influenced by Keynesian thinking. Hutton describes how Harold Macmillan’s one-nation conservatism, support for the welfare state, his Keynesian approach, mixed economy with some nationalised industries and strong trades unions, represented a retention of a post-war consensus dominated by the thinking of his three heroes. The Conservative belief that the free market, individual freedom and a minimal state is the correct formula for growth stands out in stark contrast Macmillan’s approach which was finally dropped by Margaret Thatcher who wished to counter a ‘culture of dependency’, denounced the idea that people should turn to Government to solve their problems, and for whom there was no such thing as society. “There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first”. Take away Thatcher’s pragmatism, add the last 14 years of government, and we end up with an extreme right-wing version of Toryism and its discontents that almost destroyed the Conservative Party. The second half of This Time No Mistakes, detailing policy prescriptions for reform and how we might escape from the present economic and social crisis, shows an extraordinarily deep grasp of our multiple problems, both financial and social, and the policy work of different Ministries. The wide sweep of Hutton’s proposed reforms and institutional innovations, from restructuring pension funds to incentivising socially purposeful businesses committed to more than benefitting shareholders, makes them impossible to cover within a brief review like this. Just read them. They may well have influenced the thinking of the Chancellor and the Prime Minister and should be the subject of a national conversation. The rub is that most of Hutton’s proposals require funding either from government or private investors perhaps with the former leveraging the latter. The UK’s current debts are eating up government revenue and Starmer is self-limited by tight fiscal restraints to funding small-scale initiatives with maximum impact. Rachel Reeve is already having to find some wriggle-room. Credibility and Stability are the necessary first aims in the Labour plan. Hutton’s comprehensive analysis and prescriptions possibly foreshadow much of what is to come. It looks like being a long haul. See TheArticle 25/07/2024
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Sir Tony Blair’s message to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the Sunday Times included the following advice: “Avoid vulnerability to wokeism”. During the last decade, within the vocabulary of political abuse, the word ‘Woke’ leaked into the word ‘Left’. This was partly because both words have fluid meanings. But it was also an example of the Right’s skilful manipulation of language. On 13 November 2023 Rishi Sunak appointed Esther McVey, MP for Tatton, Minister without Portfolio, an appointment widely understood as Minister for Culture Wars, rooting out wokeism and pinning it on the Left.
Like so many words, ‘Woke’ migrated from the USA, originating in a call in a 1938 song by folk and blues singer Lead Belly, protesting the conviction of nine black teenagers falsely accused of rape, to ‘stay woke’ to racism. That call to be ‘woke’, awake to the persistence of racism, was powerfully renewed by Black Lives Matter in 2013 after the acquittal of police officer who had fatally shot an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American. In 2020, during protests at the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Black Lives Matter brought some 20 million Americans onto the street. A small number were responsible for looting and a prodigious destruction of property. Protest soon spread to other countries and the word ‘woke’ travelled with them. ‘Left’ as a political identifier has been around a long time. Its meaning has had 250 years to change from signifying the choice of seats in the French National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution to now naming a spectrum of political positions that share commitment to social justice, a fair economy, and internationalism. In short order, ‘Woke’ mutated to become an expletive directed at the ‘Left’ and at an ill-defined ‘elite’ accused of suppressing the common sense and language of ‘ordinary people’. Like a fish bone stuck in the throat, the UK had its Empire as well its slave trade, lodged in its national memory. It did not take long before accusations of woke were made against anyone challenging the normative story of Empire, bringing law and civilisation, or dwelling on the violence of imperial expansion and colonialism. In universities the noise of battle rolled over trimmed lawns and across seminar rooms. Even the National Trust came under fire for starting to provide information about slavery in properties where it was deemed relevant. The political landscape of the Left, of course, had also been changing. The supposed triumph of neo-liberalism after the ending of the Cold War reduced the ambition of the Left to achieving slow incremental change. A rightward slide gained pace as economies stagnated and inequality grew. Susan Neiman in Left Is Not Woke, Polity 2023, makes much of the Left swallowing whole the pessimistic writing of the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault and its impact on woke thinking. Foucault’s critical writings about justice as a chimera and power as the determining reality became key university texts. Moving out beyond the universities, the take-away, Foucault for the masses, was that trying to make things better is most likely to make things worse, feeding into a general loss of hope in progress. Behind any Enlightenment objective truth lay concealed a subtle exercise of power rendering an impoverished majority powerless. There was, of course, a reaction. In the words of the celebrated French economist, Thomas Piketty: “When people are told there is no credible alternative to the socioeconomic organisation and class inequality that exist today, it is not surprising that they invest their hopes in defending their borders and identities instead”. According to Left Is Not Woke, what the Left and woke share is “empathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs should be righted”. These are virtuous emotions. But emotions, as Hamlet’s replied when Polonius asked what he was reading, are expressed in “words, words, words”. Or, sometimes, in expressive acts like pulling down statues. And both the woke and their opponents certainly focus on words. In 2015, Benedict Cumberbatch had to make a grovelling public apology because, whilst supporting the cause of black actors, he had used the word ‘coloured’ not black. ‘Action not words’, as the Prime Minister said in his first press conference. As Neiman tartly points out, changing your pronouns in no substitute for changing your society. Virtuous emotions, like empathy, have proved no match for an - excluding - nationalist or ethnic consciousness. The Left absorbed a kind of exclusive collective identity that inadvertently magnified tribalism - Nieman’s word. But anyone’s identity is so much richer and broader than can be captured in a single word such as black, female, Jewish or even French. With the best of intentions, people are lumped together as the marginalized, as victims, rather than as individuals with a range of opinions, tastes, and sentiments. They have every reason to say – as I have once had said to me - “sometimes I just wish I could be me not the Muslim woman with a hijab”. And tragically, we have seen where victimhood as an integral part of Arab/Muslim and Jewish identity can take you in Israel/Palestine. Getting the right balance between the ‘we’ and the ‘I’ for the common good, is as important to the Left as to those neo-liberals who sometimes seem to share some of the Left’s values. Exclusive emphasis on national, ethnic, religious and gender identity, cherished components of diversity, risks forgetting the diversity of individuals’ character, integrity and skills which matter, not least in political life. For every diverse Obama government, not of course without its mistakes, there is an equally diverse Truss Cabinet promoting, in Neiman’s words, “the most extreme Tory policies in living memory”. Cancel culture is an unfortunate consequence of woke in action. Aiming to further the common good through sensitivity to people’s feelings and respect for their dignity, one result has been a damaging climate of self-censorship. But we all need a shared understanding of what and why certain language is offensive, and the difference between unintentional and intentional offense. And we all need to discuss matters that are contentious and sensitive, and not be blackmailed into silence for fear of offending. Each of us belongs to a tribe as well as to so much more. And whatever nationality or origins, whether Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or Hindu, male or female, we do, say and write things for many more reasons than being members of a tribe. With a new centre-Left government tackling the grave problems facing the UK - and found in both USA and Europe - what kind of society the Left stands for needs to be explored and discussed without fear. The analysis of Woke, that Neiman bravely attempts, is a good start. See TheArticle 06/07/2024 |
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