Waiting For the Great Leap Backwards?

I had been wondering exactly what the Coalition now expects to happen. They've pushed through the budget, they've handed down the pain to the operational bits of the public sector in eye wateringly-tight financial settlements and they've (just about) got through the first really tricky Commons vote, the one on tuition fees.

Were they, I mused, now hoping a spirit of grim, 'post Dunkirk-like determination in adversity' to take over the country and we all pull together through these straightened times till the sunny uplands of a private sector led recovery are reached? That we collectively roll up our sleeves and build the Big Society out of whatever happens to be at hand?

Andrew Rawnsley says not: they want to unleash revolutionary cultural change on the country, and especially its public sector. He makes a rather far fetched analogue with Mao,

"I have heard one important figure in the government talk of unleashing a "cultural revolution" in the public services and another hailing devolution of power away from the centre using Mao's old slogan: "Let a thousand flowers bloom."

.... I have actually heard more than one member of the cabinet explicitly refer to the government as "Maoist".

Just about anywhere you look in Whitehall, there is a secretary of state unleashing upheaval. Ken Clarke challenges two decades of orthodoxy about the criminal justice system. Michael Gove battles the educational establishment to create his "free schools". Iain Duncan Smith has ambitions to be the man who definitively reformed welfare. Chris Huhne is dramatically recasting energy pricing. Nick Clegg wants to rewrite large parts of the constitution. Over at health, Andrew Lansley proposes the greatest upheaval in the NHS since its foundation. They are urged on from within Number 10 by the prime minister's principal strategist, Steve Hilton, who is probably the most Maoist person in the government. He has been heard to tell colleagues: "Everything must have changed by 2015. Everything."

Rawnsley manages to weave into his case the blurted out remarks of one Nick Boles MP , who claimed that chaos in local government is not only coming but is to be welcomed, as it is an alternative to intrinsically impossible planning. (In other news: Tim Worstell manages to work this up into a moment of Hayekian purity, somehow implying an obscure linkage between butterflies flapping their wings in the Amazon and the socialist calculation debate. Or something like that.)

Rawnsley's wrong. He's looking in the wrong bit of Marxist history for his analogies. I think I'm coming round to the view that what this lot are doing is much more akin to Stalin's scorched earth policy in WW2. They're not engaged in a 'regressive modernisation' as Stuart Hall so famously called Thatcherism. They're simply trying to lay waste to territory they don't expect to occupy for very long, to make it unusable by their opponents.

I suspect, deep down, they know their moment is passing, that the political and economic conditions which allowed neoliberal economics to become the default consensus of governments throughout the Anglo-American world have come to an end. The Great Moderation is over, it went down the pan in the Credit Crunch. The systemic default modes of managerial and political thought based on neoliberalism continue for want of a positive alternative, but the old certainty is gone. This may be their last chance to shrink the state for a long, long time. They're going to take it, come hell or high water.

Osborne, Disciple of '60s Childcare Guru

Young Gideon Osborne was on the Today programme this morning, doing a fair imitation of a politico with the wind in his sails. Others will deconstruct his appalling budget better than I, but I was struck by his sheer chutzpah on one matter: having announced yesterday that all non protected public service departments are facing a 25% cut when the figures are sorted out in the autumn, he backtracked a little and seemed to say that if larger 'savings' can be found in the benefits budget then cuts to services need not be quite so severe.

Now where have I heard this sort of thing before? Oh yes: Dr Spock, the childcare guru of choice for your average concerned parent in the 1960s and 1970s, so quite possibly someone Gideon's own mater and pater encouraged their nanny to read.

You may recall the good Doctor's advice on how to encourage a toddler to eat properly - give them a closed option in the form of a choice: "Are you going to eat your greens up before or after you eat the meat?"& it worked, as a whole generation of people who are now grandparents will testify.

Well, mainly it worked. There is also the case of my friend Andy. A couple of weeks into this new Spock inspired regime 3 yr old Andrew was eating his greens - but then he turned round and asked, "Dad - are you going to buy me an ice cream before you take me to the park or after you take me to the park?" .

Which does seem to me to be precisely the place for opposition to this lot to start from.

Michael Gove: Encouraging Educational Leylandii

Michael Gove is a very, very clever politician - probably the most dangerous person in government at the moment from my point of view, despite the odd spot of entertaining hypocrisy in his past. (yes, there's a reason for the dodgy photo - follow the link).

I think he is dangerous because he is the one who seems to have properly thought through how to dismantle the support for - as oppose to simple cut - a basic state funded service. I suspect him of being one of those right wingers who have read their Gramsci and really understood the concept of 'hegemony'. If his educational policies are successful he will have moved education out of the 'health' box - where there remains strong public support for an universalist service - into the 'housing' box -where private satisfaction of our needs is seen as normal and 'social' housing is seen as residual, welfare provision.

His plans focus on two main points: 'enabling' parents to set up so called free schools, and 'liberating' high performing state schools to become Academies. Note the language of freedom implicit in the presentation: both polices are suppose to give consumers (parents) and staff (well, managers) powers now held by town halls. This was once the language of the left. The danger for the left is that in opposing them they sound as if they're defending bureaucrats and stuffy procedures against the wishes of ordinary people. What's more, New Labour - not a group I consider co-terminus with 'the left' - has the not inconsiderable problem that Academies were their idea in the first place.

Let's get one thing clear however: there is nothing to stop Toby Young and co going off to start a school for their children as it is. But what they're actually asking for is the right to take large chunks of public money and set up a school which they can run as they like, more or less - or rather appoint any private sector provider they might like. &, here's the rub, they'd be taking this public money from the national government, not the town hall, riding rough shod over the local educational ecology. Contrast this with the local partnership approach of Britain's first parent promoted school. It's a different world view.

Similarly, the so-called freedoms of Academies should be carefully picked apart by the left. The freedom to ignore large parts of the National Curriculum? Bring it on - but do it for all schools, and let's have some backstops to prevent nutty creationists taking over the show. Given these caveats there is nothing to oppose here. Nor is there any in principle reason to get too hot under the collar about devolving currently centralised budgets to schools - and even introducing some flexibility into nationally negotiated pay scales is a pill which, after careful union negotiation, the left might be able to swallow. The key issue is admissions. Who controls who gets to go to which school? Again, this is about the local educational ecology.

All schools have what economists call 'externalities': by virtue of their very existence they don't just affect the children who attend the particular school they also affect the choices open to children who don't.

So let's try the Gove trick: let's try and put the case against his reforms in the language of our opponents. To take a favourite Daily Mail theme, schools are like leylandi: they don't just affect your own garden when you plant them. They can bring your neighbours' pleasure and appreciated privacy, sure - but they can also block out the sun. It really ain't a private matter when you put them in the soil - it's a community matter. It's a matter of local social ecology.

Education is a community garden and Toby Young or prospective Academy Heads shouldn't be able to plant just what they like without some say for the rest of us.

Lopsided Inheritance

The big news yesterday was, of course, the surprise announcement that most modern humans descended from ancient stock that left Africa early on are, in fact, 1%- 4% Neanderthal.*

So species inter-breeding is possible within the wider human family.

But I wouldn't expect to see even 4% of the Lib-Dem programme make the statute books if Clegg gets into bed with Cameron.

& we're still left with the mystery of why exactly the Neanderthals and modern humans couldn't co-exist in Europe....oh, hang on there's another analogy just forming in the back of my brain...


*As anyone who has ever watched an interview with Blackburn Rovers' manager already knew.

Jumpers for Goalposts: On Football and Banks

I've been thinking about how bloody dreadful going to the football was when I was young: the leery crowds, the lack of adequate safety measures, the simmering mood of aberrant masculinity, the pig pens of stadia. I did go, nonetheless, and got various kinds of joy from it, not all of which I care to confess to at this distance in time.

It was seen as a game irredeemable tainted with hooliganism, racism and misogyny; a sport played in dangerous, antediluvian premises. All too often, it really was like that. As Heysel, Hillsborough and the Bradford fire revealed.

This was well before the days of When Saturday Comes and the Mark Perryman Liberation Front (aka Philosophy Football) you understand. Football was not cool. It was seen as the sporting analogy of those old nineteenth century smokestack industries Mrs. Thatcher was busy closing down - a survival of a less attractive, class bound past. The future, surely, was individualised, participative sporting activity (going to the gym, jogging and so on) involving choice, not attendance at ritualised mass events? Especially not mass events so overwhelmingly dominated by men, and often uncouth young white men at that.

It didn't turn out like that did it? Sure, a lot more people go to the gym than they did in the 1980s (although I seem to see fewer joggers these days). But football is still a mass spectator sport of choice - indeed, the mass sport. It's just that its now advertised on the telly with multi-racial families moving sofas to the edge of a pitch and running onto to comfort 'dad' when he gets tackled. A sanitised - and to a degree, de-misogynised - version of the old 'mass' entertainment has been sold back to us as 'niche' entertainment. How did this happen?

First, Mrs.Thatcher cleared the ground with her imposition of all-seater stadia and other safety measures. Secondly, Europe, in the form of the UEFA ban on English clubs after Heysel, economically forced a degree of painful change as well. Thirdly, and probably most important, was football's discovery that it could form a symbiotic relationship with an emerging and socially disruptive new technology, satellite TV. TV made English football rich. Football, with movies (another survival of mass entertainment from the pre-WW2 years), acted as the cutting edge which allowed 'niche' satellite TV to disrupt the old oligarchical, 'top-down' system of public broadcasting. So football made Murdoch and co very rich as well.

Now my hunch is that all this may have already peaked. English football is deeply indebted, and even Abramovich is facing something of a financial pinch. But that's not my major concern at the moment. What I want to tease out is the potential for a metaphor.

The global crisis means something is going to have to change in our national economic structure. The government needs to sweep away the dangerous aspects of our banking system just as Thatcher swept away those old death-trap stadia. This has to mean, at the very least, a return to 'pre-big Bang' division between retail and merchant banking and quite possibly a version of Richard Murphy's 'network banking' idea. International co-ordination is necessary to enforce a cultural change in world finance, just as the UEFA ban after Heysel was intended to do in English football. & the remains of our manufacturing base needs to be energised to engage with emerging technologies, especially green technologies, to provide a way forward in terms of employment and sustainable wealth creation.

Epochal Change by Powerpoint

I've just had one of those, " Naw, that's ridiculous....isn't it?... No, I mean - isn't it?" moments. See what you think of his 28 slides. A fuller, more recent speech can be found here. His basic premise: the USA is heading for a (end of the) USSR moment...

Inevitably via B&T, collector of the unnoticed crumbs of global politics that fall between the cracks of the latticework of media coverage ....

It's Not the 1930s as Long as We Have a Policy Re-brand Option

In the last fortnight or so Ian Dale has slyly set off a no doubt intended brouhaha in the left blogosphere by claiming that Socialism and Fascism were kissing cousins; the dread Nick Cohen further fuelled this with a review of some book which absurdly claimed that Liberal America shared intellectual roots with Fascism. Lots of the left have lined up to disabuse them of this silly conceit. A moment’s thought – actually, a moment in a GCSE History class – shows the reason why: Fascism was a rightwing response to the challenge Socialism and the growing power of organised labour posed, a century ago, to the rule of capital. Insofar as it shared some policy features with the left it did so to defuse the challenge, and re-found the rule of capital on what was intended to be a more secure basis. It didn’t work out like that, obviously, but that was always the intention.

Anyway, both Fascism and, somewhat later, the challenge of labour faded. Free market ideology ruled the intellectual roost. Till now. Suddenly we find quite a lot of what appear to me to be serious devotees of capital suddenly accept that bank nationalisation may be the immediate way forward. There is no currently visible ‘challenge from labour’ in the sense Europe experienced such a challenge in the years around WW1. There is no viable way out of this* crisis which doesn't involve a re-founded capitalism because there is no significant body of opinion anywhere on the globe demanding that there should be. So the advocates of the rule of capital probably don't need a formal political movement like Fascism which aped Socialism in a nightmarishly warped manner in order to undercut and destroy it.

No: all they need today is re-branding. The so called Swedish solution - temporary nationalisation of the banks, the setting up of a bad bank and resale of 'good' assets back to private sector - isn't really nationalisation at all. Oh no - its 'pre-privatisation'.

*I’ve not given up hope for the next crisis, though. People’s views will change as this one bites.

"Hang on a minute, lads. I've got a great idea"

So says Michael Caine at the end of the Italian Job, as the crooks balance precariously in a coach with its back end - the end with the gold in - perched half way off an Alp. One wrong move and the gold slips out of the door and down the mountain - but trying to pull it back towards the criminals means approaching the gold and tipping the whole coach off the mountain.

Why does this quote remind me of that scene?

"We know that by pulling out money, we’re not serving anyone’s good. Including ourselves." Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation. This is the famous modern “balance of financial terror.” If Chinese officials started pulling assets out of the U.S. and touched off a run on the dollar, their vast remaining dollar holdings would plummet in value, losing the savings of the Chinese as well as ruining the American economy. In other words - the whole coach tips off the cliff.

But there's more: Caine says the film ended the way it did because there was going to be a sequel:

"In the coach I crawl up, switch on the engine, stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out. The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over. There are a load of Corsican Mafia at the bottom watching the whole thing with binoculars. They grab the gold, and then the sequel is us chasing it."

Yeah, I can see America doing quite a lot of 'chasing' after all this, even if they get out of their coach alive - that is, get away with a bad recession rather than a full blown repeat of the 1930s. But who, exactly, will they be chasing?