![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[Politics] Where is Britain going?
In 1925, Leon Trotsky wrote a pamphlet titled “Where is Britain going”. As a historical document it’s an interesting read, considering how much of it came true. Obviously, he thought the dire predictions he made would be a bad thing if they came true and the whole thing was a bit of a warning to the revolutionary forces which would soon sweep the old order of Britain out and replace it with a glorious people’s commissariat not to lose their way, but that aside he made some pretty good calls, all things considered.
In it he identified the origins of the British Labour movement as being threefold: the desire of the working man to better his lot through work and education, the British tradition of dissent, be it religious or social, and the Fabian movement. He went on to warn against the Fabians. What would happen, he said, was that the bourgeoisie would seize control of the workers movement as its leadership and so, when the revolution happened, the workers would find that the same old plump and comfy middle class types were still in charge just like they always had been and the worker’s position would be no better.
I was looking at the front bench of the contemporary Labour party and thinking about this the other day. Can’t think why.
Still, if he was able to make predictions like that it’s no wonder Leon had to be got out of the way.
I’ve been idly thinking about the outcome of the election lately, and, post-conversations with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
annwfyn about the Labour party and the British left in general and the question: Where do they go from here?
You see, the more I think of it, the bigger the Labour party’s problem gets. It stems from the fundamental intellectual underpinning of the party, and subsequent history.
If there’s one thing the 20th century was about, it was about market against command economics. The thing is, market economics won hands down. Command economics was tested to destruction. It just doesn’t work. And the problem the British left, and the Labour movement has is that its intellectual foundation is one of command economics. Blair realised this, which is why he repealed Clause 4, but there’s a lot of people out there on the British left – and I do mean a lot – who still think a state-run economy is a fab idea. And it’s there that lies their problem. It’s an idea which has no realistic prospect of winning an election.
In continental Europe, which has lots more experience of Britain of command economics going horribly wrong for all concerned, the left have built themselves a respectable position within a market framework. Left-wing British people often say this country should be more like the Scandinavian Social Democracies but often don’t appear to know how they work, because the Scandinavians are by and large way more enthusiastic liberal marketeers than we are. What’s the minimum wage in Norway, or Sweden, or Denmark or Iceland? There isn’t one. What’s the inheritance tax rate in Sweden? There isn’t one. Indeed, Denmark is widely regarded in economic circles as having the most liberal market economy in the world.
The Scandinavians have realised that all the social stuff they want to pay for is really, really expensive and the best way to make the money is through liberal markets. Meanwhile in the UK the left fixes upon interventionist rent caps and energy caps and nationalising this or that…and lose. And are going to keep right on losing.
The thing is, whilst he Labour party squabble about just how much the inheritance tax rate should be the problem for them is bigger than that. In fact, I think it’s so big they can’t even see it. Whilst many of their members cling to command economic ideas, the Conservatives are busily colonising as much of the Social Democratic central ground which Blair captured and Labour have retreated from as they can under the economic circumstances. When you’ve got Boris Johnson airily calling for the living wage, you know that the ground the Labour party – and the left generally – wants to claim is at least in part in the hands of the governing power. And that’s where the problem for them lies.
For the Labour party, and the left in general, Blair was right. Bet you never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? The ‘Third way’ was a crack at Scandinavian Social Democracy, and he discredited it amongst his core support by killing 100,000 Iraqis and driving the economy into a tree. Having retreated from this ground the Conservatives are taking it, which gives them a commanding electoral position.
Because if the left want to win any elections any time soon, they’re going to have to abandon command economics. Again. And the problem they face is that Britain already has two established market economics parties – the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. They’ve had fifty or a hundred years to define the market economics ground as their own – hence New Labour being described by their more bananas former supporters as ‘Red Tories’ when they try to compete. In order to be competitive, Labour are going to have to take the economics fight to people who are not only already entrenched, but who are making inroads onto their old ground whilst they fight it out amongst themselves.
In truth, it’s hard to see where Labour, and the left still wedded to command economics, go from here. Their intellectual selling point has been disproven by events and others have got their ground. Other people have got market economics and trade sewn up as their USP’s, but those are the things you need to underpin and pay for social policies, and the voters have made their intentions clear. I keep saying that the things which win elections under normal circumstances are leadership and economics. One isn’t enough and right now they’ve got neither.
It’s quite likely that the left will retreat in upon itself. Trade and market economics are, by necessity, internationalist, so we’re seeing a rise in nationalism in traditional Labour areas. This isn’t surprising. Nationalism is another expression of command economics; a belief in the power of a monopolistic state to make everything better - thus we see UKIP and the SNP eating Labour’s lunch. (As an experiment, try pointing out to SNP supporters the similarity of theirs and UKIPs economic policies, or suggesting to pretty much anyone in the left-leaning LibDem or Labour party that UKIP are economically a left-wing party these days. You’ll be impressed by the vitriol your observation gets). Where else? The Greens?
I remember first reading Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis back in the early 1990s and ever since then I’ve had a lot of respect for the guy. One thing he’s said which I agree with a lot is that the great tragedy of the environmental movement is that it’s been almost entirely co-opted by the hard left. The reason is that this is a tragedy is that it alienates the very people whose support they really need in order to achieve their objectives by espousing centrally-planned command economic solutions. Lovelock has said that if the environmental movement is to achieve its goals it needs to involve the markets and their adherents. He’s right as well, but I can’t help but feel the Green party is so locked into a feedback loop of its own intellectual baggage (and that of the disaffected former Labour supporters) than it will never do so.
So command economics people retreat into echo chambers whose very insularity guarantees their failure. Meanwhile the remaining Labour movement finds itself in a position where it must take intellectual ground which it abandoned and now contains entrenched opposition in order to become actually electable.
Quite seriously, I’m at a loss where the British left goes from here. The SNP have peaked; the Conservatives in Scotland will start to eat away at them. The market economic Social Democratic ground has been taken from the Labour movement. Only petty nationalism remains. And that’s a minority interest. Where do future victories come from? The reinvention will be painful and time-consuming.
In it he identified the origins of the British Labour movement as being threefold: the desire of the working man to better his lot through work and education, the British tradition of dissent, be it religious or social, and the Fabian movement. He went on to warn against the Fabians. What would happen, he said, was that the bourgeoisie would seize control of the workers movement as its leadership and so, when the revolution happened, the workers would find that the same old plump and comfy middle class types were still in charge just like they always had been and the worker’s position would be no better.
I was looking at the front bench of the contemporary Labour party and thinking about this the other day. Can’t think why.
Still, if he was able to make predictions like that it’s no wonder Leon had to be got out of the way.
I’ve been idly thinking about the outcome of the election lately, and, post-conversations with
annwfyn about the Labour party and the British left in general and the question: Where do they go from here?You see, the more I think of it, the bigger the Labour party’s problem gets. It stems from the fundamental intellectual underpinning of the party, and subsequent history.
If there’s one thing the 20th century was about, it was about market against command economics. The thing is, market economics won hands down. Command economics was tested to destruction. It just doesn’t work. And the problem the British left, and the Labour movement has is that its intellectual foundation is one of command economics. Blair realised this, which is why he repealed Clause 4, but there’s a lot of people out there on the British left – and I do mean a lot – who still think a state-run economy is a fab idea. And it’s there that lies their problem. It’s an idea which has no realistic prospect of winning an election.
In continental Europe, which has lots more experience of Britain of command economics going horribly wrong for all concerned, the left have built themselves a respectable position within a market framework. Left-wing British people often say this country should be more like the Scandinavian Social Democracies but often don’t appear to know how they work, because the Scandinavians are by and large way more enthusiastic liberal marketeers than we are. What’s the minimum wage in Norway, or Sweden, or Denmark or Iceland? There isn’t one. What’s the inheritance tax rate in Sweden? There isn’t one. Indeed, Denmark is widely regarded in economic circles as having the most liberal market economy in the world.
The Scandinavians have realised that all the social stuff they want to pay for is really, really expensive and the best way to make the money is through liberal markets. Meanwhile in the UK the left fixes upon interventionist rent caps and energy caps and nationalising this or that…and lose. And are going to keep right on losing.
The thing is, whilst he Labour party squabble about just how much the inheritance tax rate should be the problem for them is bigger than that. In fact, I think it’s so big they can’t even see it. Whilst many of their members cling to command economic ideas, the Conservatives are busily colonising as much of the Social Democratic central ground which Blair captured and Labour have retreated from as they can under the economic circumstances. When you’ve got Boris Johnson airily calling for the living wage, you know that the ground the Labour party – and the left generally – wants to claim is at least in part in the hands of the governing power. And that’s where the problem for them lies.
For the Labour party, and the left in general, Blair was right. Bet you never thought you’d hear me say that, did you? The ‘Third way’ was a crack at Scandinavian Social Democracy, and he discredited it amongst his core support by killing 100,000 Iraqis and driving the economy into a tree. Having retreated from this ground the Conservatives are taking it, which gives them a commanding electoral position.
Because if the left want to win any elections any time soon, they’re going to have to abandon command economics. Again. And the problem they face is that Britain already has two established market economics parties – the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. They’ve had fifty or a hundred years to define the market economics ground as their own – hence New Labour being described by their more bananas former supporters as ‘Red Tories’ when they try to compete. In order to be competitive, Labour are going to have to take the economics fight to people who are not only already entrenched, but who are making inroads onto their old ground whilst they fight it out amongst themselves.
In truth, it’s hard to see where Labour, and the left still wedded to command economics, go from here. Their intellectual selling point has been disproven by events and others have got their ground. Other people have got market economics and trade sewn up as their USP’s, but those are the things you need to underpin and pay for social policies, and the voters have made their intentions clear. I keep saying that the things which win elections under normal circumstances are leadership and economics. One isn’t enough and right now they’ve got neither.
It’s quite likely that the left will retreat in upon itself. Trade and market economics are, by necessity, internationalist, so we’re seeing a rise in nationalism in traditional Labour areas. This isn’t surprising. Nationalism is another expression of command economics; a belief in the power of a monopolistic state to make everything better - thus we see UKIP and the SNP eating Labour’s lunch. (As an experiment, try pointing out to SNP supporters the similarity of theirs and UKIPs economic policies, or suggesting to pretty much anyone in the left-leaning LibDem or Labour party that UKIP are economically a left-wing party these days. You’ll be impressed by the vitriol your observation gets). Where else? The Greens?
I remember first reading Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis back in the early 1990s and ever since then I’ve had a lot of respect for the guy. One thing he’s said which I agree with a lot is that the great tragedy of the environmental movement is that it’s been almost entirely co-opted by the hard left. The reason is that this is a tragedy is that it alienates the very people whose support they really need in order to achieve their objectives by espousing centrally-planned command economic solutions. Lovelock has said that if the environmental movement is to achieve its goals it needs to involve the markets and their adherents. He’s right as well, but I can’t help but feel the Green party is so locked into a feedback loop of its own intellectual baggage (and that of the disaffected former Labour supporters) than it will never do so.
So command economics people retreat into echo chambers whose very insularity guarantees their failure. Meanwhile the remaining Labour movement finds itself in a position where it must take intellectual ground which it abandoned and now contains entrenched opposition in order to become actually electable.
Quite seriously, I’m at a loss where the British left goes from here. The SNP have peaked; the Conservatives in Scotland will start to eat away at them. The market economic Social Democratic ground has been taken from the Labour movement. Only petty nationalism remains. And that’s a minority interest. Where do future victories come from? The reinvention will be painful and time-consuming.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-07-07 07:50 pm (UTC)(link)Was that deliberate or a freudian slip?
no subject
no subject
Pretty much, I recall reading a leftish green blog in the early days of the coalition, before the Huhne's dodgy points scandal broke, talking about how awful his solutions were to environmental issues, 'far too wedded to markets, we know they never work'.
Most successful individual single change in environmental policies in my lifetime that I can think of is John Major's rebalancing of petrol taxes in favour of unleaded, a clear proof that markets work if given the chance.
I think you're right about aspects of Labour retreating in, they always have done, and even the supposedly "blairite, modern" candidate (whatever the hell that means this week) is a bit protectionist and Big Govt Knows Best for my tastes, let alone for proper markets work types.
The only reason I haven't filled in my ballot paper for Tim Farron already is I'm worried that The Left elements within the Lib Dems will take his likely landslide win as an endorsement of their insanity, and they're already annoying enough. The party isn't as market orientated as it should be given its history (and some of them cheerlead people like Cable constantly while completely ignoring just how dry and market based his economic positions actually are)
no subject
For the sake of full disclosure, I thought joining the coalition was, by and large, the right thing for Lib Dems to do. (I was and am writing from an outsider's perspective, which means I don't have a real personal or political stake in these things, but still.) Intermittently during the coalition, though, I suggested that Clegg was relying an awful lot on people who had almost to the man signed off on the Orange Book, and that it would've been tactically very, very important for him to keep the left wing of the party happier if he wanted to keep the party's support within a tolerable margin. I think the last election result at least suggests that my instinct on that was right. Are the Lib Dems less market-oriented than their history would suggest? I think I'd agree that they are. Are they less market-oriented than they ought to be? I couldn't possibly say. But I'm wondering how market-oriented the Lib Dems can afford to be, in the grand scheme of things.
no subject
Was in 2010, definitely, and I think it'll reclaim a fair chunk of that over time. But there's also some within the party who're a bit like that as well.
You weren't the only one saying/thinking that and yeah, you were right. Jennie was one of the prime movers in the conference call between Clegg's staff and a bunch of senior activists on the whole "Snooper's Charter" thing, and it was incredibly frustrating to be in the room during the discussion, and for her and those calling in, it took ages to get through to them that we weren't just objecting to mass email surveillance and similar because it was technically difficult and difficult to implement, we were objecting to the idea on principle because Liberals should be against the Govt spying on citizens without at least some sort of judicial oversight, etc. We didn't even realise this was the problem until a Very Senior Spad said something like 'oh, you mean you object to this on principle and not just practical grounds in a very shocked voice.
The disconnect was massive and weird, with refrains like "it's just an extension of RIPA", to which the response was "yes, and we objected to RIPA as well, you ought to be removing RIPA powers not extending it". Sorry, not an economics thing, but a Liberal thing that demonstrated the problem you mentioned.
Farron, for all his faults, has a very good record of taking on advisers that aren't thinking the same as him and checking people that know more on issues he knows he's weak on, failure to do that was one of Clegg's biggest flaws.
Worth noting that the old pre-merger Liberal rump was the remaining remnants, of the 6 major splits, 5 of the splits had ended up joining or merging into the Tories, the Liberals were very Left Wing before the SDP came along. A lot of the Macmillan era/early-Thatcher pro market "Tories" were really Whigs.
I think the big problem in British politics is we don't have a pro-market anti-corporatist voice that's actually listened to, both Farron and Lamb seem to want to position the party in that general space, which I'm happy with (Cable tried, but got misinterpreted constantly, too dry in presentation).
More markets, less big business, less talk about "consumer choice" more about innovative disruptive new entrants, etc.
no subject
no subject
Cable lost all interest for me when he went into his grand, five-year sulk whilst most of the rest of your party acted like grown-ups. He was great in opposition, but a massive, glaring weak link in government.
One thing I realised about Labour/Blairite interaction with the market was their encourgement of big solutions - having abandoned big state command, they went to big corporates. Less the frantic squabbling of markets, and more the ordered marching of giants. That also seems to be the preferred structure of the EU, which is why I just don't get why you fellows are such big fans.
no subject
no subject
A significant part of it, in my mind, was that they accepted the ballot box very early in the game. (Britain's Labour did so too, of course, and unlike the Scandinavian parties it did so without spawning off credible communist competitors to itself and seemingly with less of an internal wrangle.) The ballot box seems to put organic limits to how far one's ideological principles can go. In Sweden, Hjalmar Branting's revisionist and moderate position won over the smaller communist faction during the First World War, which paved way for a workable government coalition with the Liberals, and basically convinced people that Sweden's social democrats weren't a revolutionary or bolshevist group. In Denmark, a comparable socialist-liberal coalition eventually came into being under Thorvald Stauning, On the other hand, when Christopher Hornsrud put together Norway's first (minority) Labour government, and declared he was going to turn the country towards a more or less radical socialist programme, his cabinet got kicked out of office in literally something like sixteen days. Policies like those of Einar Gerhardsen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar_Gerhardsen), arguably the most definitive post-war Norwegian labour leader, probably weren't possible before the Norwegian Labour Party cleaned house somewhere around the early thirties or so.
no subject
...And it's the one are where everyone knows that there's no free market: land use, planning and building regulations, subsidies and credit supply are all 'artificial constraints' in a market that is nothing but artificial.
The socialist paradises of Scandinavia know that. So, too, do some very, very 'free market' governments: they all put serious money and regulatory effort into social housing for working-class citizens, and any denizens with a proven proclivity towards rioting.
But Labour have nothing to say about it.
I guess their fears are focused on landlords - a very important constituency for the Conservative party - and older middle-class suburban homeowners. They haven't noticed all those nice young middle-class couples borrowing everything they can, or shouldn't, for a 2-bed flat subdivided out of a house that looks a lot like the one they grew up in. As if this -or renting - doesn't represent a massive fall in middle class living standards.
You'd think someone would notice that...
I guess that Conservatism is the art of persuading people to vote against their own interests: it's working *for the Conservatives* but, oddly enough, not for Labour.
Of course, all those 'core' Labour supporters doing manual work and living in overcrowded slums can **** off and die of tuberculosis. Or vote UKIP. Or become a sullen underlass who can be conveniently distracted into racial violence in the total absence of any audible campaign for better education, housing, and jobs.
So your summary is probably true, and will remain so for a decade.
We'll need a war to deal with the underclass, you know.
no subject
So that, per se, isn't the problem. The problem is that over the last decade we've built dwellings for a million fewer people than the population has increased by. I cover that one here: http://davywavy.livejournal.com/551331.html
My opinion hasn't changed since I wrote it.
no subject
The big problem with that assumption is that it's complete arsebiscuits. People know what their best interests are, and don't need you or me to tell them what they are. In fact, if you begin from the assumption that other people are acting in their best interest, the world suddenly makes a great deal more sense.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-07-08 09:04 pm (UTC)(link)