Fiscal Conservatism

It has a worrying history when you consider how influential these ideas seem to be coming within mainstream political discourse in the UK.

The Lib Dems

Well Nick Clegg has warned today of the “bold” and “savage” cuts that will be necessary after the election. He’s also due to tell Lib Dem activists how, unlike the Tories with “conman Cameron”, his party are “the only party offering change for real – change for good”. So this is the state of British politics: the Conservatives embrace the unashamed and radical austerity of Tory councils, Labour have reluctantly accepted and disingenuously accepted austerity and now the Lib Dems have accepted ”austerity for a social purpose”. Hurray for liberal democracy! Robert Reich offers an account of defecit hysteria, which applies as well to Britain as it does to America:

In this respect, national budgets are like family budgets. It’s dumb for an indebted family to borrow more money to take a world cruise. But it’s smart even for an indebted family to borrow money to send their kids to college. So too with the Obama budget. Public investments, just like family investments, build future wealth. They allow faster growth. They make the debt-to-GDP ratio even lower and more manageable over time.

What drives this though? It’s plausible that in the case of the Conservatives it’s predominately a deliberate attempt to push through a social agenda at the expense of economic well-being: the communitarian rhetoric of Cameron’s inner circle is (a) limited to an influential but extremely small group at the heart of the party (b) a different articulation of the same ideas of one nation toryism which have frequently served as an ideological shield concealing naked class interests. Even where it is honestly held, its sheer vacuity offers no possibility of translation into the language of governance so it’s left with little role beyond justifying actions privately and publically. Notwithstanding the difficulty of assessing the extent to which it is honestly held, the likely rise of Hannanism (i.e. 21st Century Thatcherism) will probably herald its demise.

It seems in Labour’s case that this tired, withdrawn and paranoid administration has lost any capacity or will to shape the political terrain. So while some soft social democratic tendencies within Labour have attempted to articulate a case for public spending, they have done so within the unchallenged framework of public finances which are ‘out of control’. For all the manifold flaws of New Labour, it’s obvious they’ve had an ideological commitment to public spending: albeit one which caused them to naively embrace the City of London as a black box to fund it, as well as an equally naive (and pernicious) embrace of public sector reform to justify the funding.  They want to out flank the Tories on the left without surrendering their right flank and thus imperilling the ‘big tent’ which their entire electoral project has been founded on for the last 15 years. In trying to square this circle they simply end up looking absurd.

So what of the Lib Dems? Their commitment to austerity seems an inevitable product of the ascendancy of the Orange Book within the party. Far from offering “change for real” and “change for good” the new leadership of the Lib Dems offer the newest and most confident restatement of the neoliberal agenda which has dominated British politics for almost three decades. Yet mainstream political debate within Britain is so profoundly eviscerated that electoral strategy and actual policy formation take place in entirely distinct domains: what parties tell the electorate is a product of strategy, as part of a media war of attrition, with no basis in or connection to internal policy formation. British liberal democracy, never the most impressive or equitable of institutions, seems rather fucked.

Brand Obama

I just came across this intriguing article about the branding strategy underlying Obama’s presidential campaign. While the importance of branding to his victory has been much commented upon, I didn’t realise until reading the article quite how the strategy went. Every aspect of his presentation was designed and its  coherency was maintained to a degree which, as the “leading graphics designer” puts it, was “unprecedented and inconceivable to us”. I guess the success of the strategy can be seen in the extent to which the brand has gone viral; with the murals representing the best of the ensuing torrent and merchandise the worst. When you look at sites like Artists for Obama in this light, it points to the plausibility of Bordieu’s invocation of the “new manner of doing politics that needs to be invented” and the “unique and irreplaceable role that writers and artists can play” in this politics:

To  give symbolic force, by way of artistic form, to critical ideas and analyses. They can, for instance, give a visible and sensible form to the invisible but scientifically predictable consequence of political measures inspired by neoliberal ideology.

It would be easy to be depressed by the success of brand Obama were it not for what it suggests about the potential power of these strategies in other spheres. Of course the unavoidable question is whether the power demonstrated in this case, as symbolic form is given to moral sentiments (namely hope), is partly a product of the uses to which it was put? Would it be possible to affect a similar response outside the context of a US presidential campaign which, for all its purported bottom-up approach, was one of the most closely and successfully managed  which the world had ever seen? Would it be possible to affect a similar response when symbolic form is given to moral and political critique rather than anaesthetising sentiment? As distasteful as the idea of branding may seem, I think these are important questions.

“Don’t say racial purity, say identity!”

Rooting for Brown?

I now find myself in the surprising position of rooting for Gordon Brown and hoping that he manages to survive the current attempt on his career. My dislike of Brown is quite simply outstripped by my loathing of Purnell. Is it really a surprise that of all the Blairites it was Purnell who was willing to actually thrust the knife into Brown’s back? Undoubtedly a sign of his ambition. If Brown survives and restores his authority then, one might hope, this could be the end of Purnell’s career and, having overstepped his mark, he will have no significant future in politics, ultimately doomed to retire a broken and bitter man, resigned to pursuing some private sector career which will forever fail to satisfy his burning desire for power and influence. As much as I want Brown to  fall, it’s important to bear in mind that it would (a) most likely leave Blairite’s back in power (b) mean that we’re denied the public spectacle of Purnell’s career dying a slow satisfying death.

It annoys me when I find Boris Johnson endearing

My descent into reformism continues abashed…

I was just reading an article on the BBC website about the parliamentary fallout from the expenses scandal. It outlined some of the reforms that are being ‘considered’ in an effort increase political engagement and revitalise parliamentary legitimacy. Obviously there’s a huge degree of public relations in this but, even so, it surprised me how desirable I found some of the reforms listed to be: 

Indeed, so shaken has the political establishment been by the expenses scandal that they are suddenly contemplating all kinds of ideas they had previously rejected as unwise, unworkable or hopelessly idealistic.

These include (but are not limited to):

• Proportional representation – Ending what critics see as the inherently unfair “first-past-the-post” system of electing MPs

• Fixed term parliaments – Ending the advantage to the ruling party of choosing the polling date

• A written constitution – Setting out voters’ rights and limiting the power of government

• A fully elected second chamber – Ending the power of patronage and expelling the few remaining hereditary peers

• Curbing the power of the whips – Freeing MPs to to vote with their conscience more often rather than following the party line

• Fixed terms for MPs – So they do not become too cosy and complacent in their roles

• Boosting the power of select committees – Electing the chairmen rather than having them chosen by the whips and handing them greater investigatory powers

A parliamentary liberal democracy that’s been through these reforms is still problematic to me. However it’s much less problematic than things are as they currently stand. 

Neoliberal coup in Hungary

The governments of the Czech Republic and Hungary recently fell almost simultaneously. It was late March and in both cases something happened unusual. The main opposition parties, after having succeeded in undermining the governing coalitions, paradoxically have shown no interest in calling immediate early elections which they would be very likely to win – and thus be able to form their own governments. Instead, all the major parliamentary parties rediscovered common ground for collaboration and decided to form a so-called “government of technocrats” headed and formed by unknown bureaucrats or businessmen with no visible connection to any political party.

I’ve just been reading  a great analysis of recent events in Hungary where the economic crisis has produced a strikingly unified action amongst the political class. The political contest that supposedly characterises post-communist democracy in Eastern Europe has magically vanished and the real structures of power and control find themselves foregrounded as the brittle neoliberalism on the periphery of the European system threatens to implode in the face of massive capital flight, shrinking tax revenues and the austerity measures resulting from acceptance of the IMF’s loan. If you transplant the chain of events into the context of British party politics they become rather bizarre. As the New Statesman article puts it,

Bajnai [the New Hungarian Prime Minister] is not a member of any political party, but a friend and former business partner of both Gyurcsány and the SZDSZ leader, János Kóka. Imagine if in Britain the Lib Dems held the balance of power in the next parliament and Nick Clegg installed an old business buddy, who was not an MP, as PM.

However it’s in this apparent absurdity that the ideological logic of neoliberalism stands revealed. The austerity measures demanded – after all, there is no alternative - are claimed to be purely technical and the government is acting post-politically as it shits all over any substantive concept of a democratic politics. In effect you have the suspension of liberal democracy and, for all intents and purposes, a coup on behalf of the economic elite of Hungary. Yet within the symbolic universe of neoliberal parliamentary democracy it’s all perfectly coherent and proper.

Setting up of the “governments of technocrats” is a way of leaving the dirty work of destroying millions of lives of working people to individuals without a direct political allegiance to any parliamentary party and without any responsibility to answer to any of their voters. In reality it is a political coup against all the workers, a method aimed at confusing and disorientating people. It is a cunning move aimed at pushing through drastic austerity programmes, according to the script of world capital and its major institution IMF, euphemistically called “reforms”. How long all this will last is another matter.

A deeply cynical and political move to preempt social transformation through the seizure and consolidation of power can be presented as a formally sound and non-political response to changing circumstances: not only revealing the investment of the entirety of the political class in the maintenance of the status quo – and thus the profoundly hollow nature of substantive democracy – but also the immensely oppressive and quasi-fascist potentialities contained with neoliberal discourses of governance. You can’t help but wonder what similar events in the UK would look like?

 

The new legitimation crisis?

As a result, Parliament itself no longer looks like our greatest national institution. Instead, it has been exposed as an organised criminal conspiracy whose primary purpose is to defraud the taxpayer and serve the vested interest of a venal political class.

From the Daily Mail’s website. Where’s this all going to lead? I was listening to a lecture by David Harvey recently where he makes a convincing case that while the financial crisis is unlikely to lead to anything other than a consolidation of class power: witness the recent large-scale acquisitions in finance and beyond, as those left standing rationally take the opportunity to take over fallen rivals on the cheap. However the process of this is likely to engender a new legitimation crisis as the theory and the practice of neoliberalism stand more publicly contrasted than ever before, with the former increasingly represented in the popular consciousness as a facile and deeply ideological legitimation of the latter. The contradictions inherent in it are coming to the fore as, far from there being no alternative, the bail out of the system involves massive coordinated and concerted action of a sort that is so utterly at odds with the fundamental premises of the vast ideological edifice that’s been so painstakingly constructed over the last few decades. In short: (1) people are going to be much less likely to believe this sort of bullshit when the contradictions inherent in it have been so clearly exposes (2) people are going to be much less moved by neoliberalism’s lop-sided conceptions of individual freedom and consumer sovereignty at a time of global recession.

Against this background, what should we make of the current backlash – albeit led by the right-wing press – against MP expenses? The kind of uber-mundane ‘corruption’ of which they’re being accused is very much a product of the managerialism that has come to dominate the political class, understanding themselves as the technocratic stewards of a fundamentally managerial project: governance of a post-industrial nation in a globalised and post-adversarial world. This perhaps accounts for the vacuousness of New Labour’s ‘morality’ as they have attempted to reimpose explicitly moral concerns on a set of institutional and cultural structure that systematically precludes them. I think it’s important that proper criticism doesn’t lead to popular calls to return to the good old days - when politicians were moral and selfless – but rather to tracing out the causal links between large scale economic restructuring over the last few decades and the culture and practice of modern politics. So that far from being a isolated phenomenon, explicable purely in terms of the poor characters of today’s modern politicians – as opposed to the noble statesman in days of yore – they are both symptom of a wider neoliberalization of social life, as well as a major agentive force in entrenching and exasperating that process. 

Is anyone really suprised?

Somebody in London is stopped and searched every three minutes, according to new figures obtained by BBC London.

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/8034315.stm

I find it hard to see how anyone could be particularly shocked by these statistics. It seems little more than a truism to observe that, particularly in the absence of any substantive external oversight or institutional constraints, granting police powers like this will invariably lead to mission creep. Even on the most mundane day-to-day level, it’s obvious that faced with a choice about what powers to utilise – whether on the part of individual officers or higher up the chain of command – the police will, over time, choose to utilise terror laws that increase the scope of their powers when there’s no real counter-incentive to doing so. Why bother establishing grounds for suspicion when you can simply invoke section 44? Likewise, as we can see from the massive increase year-on-year, the normalisation of these procedures in turn makes them more likely as they become a mundane part of the institutional culture, at least within London.

Again rather surprisingly the BBC reports that the “success rate” is just over 0.035%, amounting to 65 arrests - and no charges - for terror offenses. Of course to criticise their use in terms of a ‘low success rate’ is profoundly ideological, assuming as it does that (a) the intentions underlying are unambiguouslyy  ‘to catch terrorists’ rather than also being, say, to inculcate a politically expedient climate of fear in the capital (b) that there is no problem in principle with the laws or their use but rather simply with their effectiveness. Since the G20 sections of the media have started to catch up to the fact, albeit in a largely inadequate and superficial way, that the culture and practice of policing in this country has taken a deeply worrying turn in the past decade, as long-standing trends towards the politicisation and pseudo-rationalisation of policing have been exasperated by New Labour’s paranoid centralism and their cynical cultivation of an ‘anti-terror climate’. Yet the media have been hugely complicit in these worrying trends, as vacuous ideological fault lines produce trivial debates about ‘bad apples’ and ‘police effectiveness’, which render the structural significance of these changes far more opaque than they would otherwise be. How should we understand these changes in police culture and practice in terms of the wider institutional and ideological restructuring of the British state  into the captain of UK PLC, negotiating the choppy seas of our ‘globalized’ world?