Labour-Saving Devices
Bryan Gould was a contributor to a BBC Radio programme about the current situation of the Labour Party. The programme was broadcast on 7 September. Below is a link to the programme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tmt99/Labour_Saving_Devices
Good Government Matters
Government over recent times has got itself a bad name. Politicians are of course always regarded as fair game, particularly by media whose proprietors often see themselves as competitors for power, but the critics’ task was of course made immeasurably easier by the expenses scandal. The damage suffered as a consequence of that self-inflicted wound has cleared the way for a renewed assault – by right-wing politicians and media alike – on the whole concept of government.
The notion that government is the problem, not the solution, is of course not new, and was famously and explicitly asserted by Ronald Reagan. It has never been strictly true of course that the right have disowned government as such; what they have wanted is government that serves the narrow interests of a privileged minority rather than a wider society. So, right-wing governments (including New Labour) have generally overseen an expansion of government in areas like security, law and order, defence, and – in economic policy – maintaining the value of assets and preserving the privileges of the wealthy.
It is nevertheless a surprise that the new coalition government should feel so clearly mandated by what was at best a confused election result to commit to smaller government as the central element in its programme. The major task faced by the coalition after all is to lead the country out of a financial crisis that, having been created by the failures of the private sector, was only just averted by the government doing what only government could do – using its authority and legitimacy to underpin the banking system and guarantee the value of the currency.
It is surely one of the miracles of the modern world that a private sector meltdown whose malign consequences are still with us, and against which the only defence proved to be the power of government, should have led to savage cuts in the role of government.
It is to be expected of course that – in tough times – the powerful should try to shift the burden on to the less powerful whose diminished voice means that they are less able to complain. The speed with which the lessons of the crisis have been re-interpreted in favour of less government rather than more is testament to the ability of the powerful to defend their interests. What is a surprise, however, is the readiness of other elements – including the junior partners in the new coalition government – to abandon government as the major means of achieving economic recovery and re-asserting the need for social justice.
A loss of faith in government seems now to have infected opinion across most parts of the political spectrum. Even on the left, there is a marked tendency to look for salvation anywhere but government. It is almost as though the left has concluded that – so disappointing was the experience of being in government – there is nothing more to be gained from that quarter. Nothing more clearly demonstrates how thoroughly New Labour let down its supporters.
Much political activism on the left now takes the form of community-based initiatives of one kind or another – whether it is support for a local currency or various forms of collective self-help or the development of local power schemes. The common factor in all of these small-scale projects is their conviction that ordinary people should take responsibility for changing society, or at least their bit of it, and that government is just another part of the conventional power structure – along with the bastions of capitalism – that has to be overturned.
There is much talk of the need to engage “civil society” as the essential element in changing society. Government, it seems, is to be by-passed as a snare and a delusion. There is an almost romantic sense that ordinary people possess an innate wisdom and goodness that are somehow sullied and rendered ineffectual by the formal and structured processes of democratic government.
No one, of course, who wants to see a better and fairer society could object to the impulses that drive these initiatives. But it is distressing to see the efforts of earlier generations to achieve universal suffrage and democratic government so casually set aside. Our forebears saw the power and legitimacy of representative and elected government as the essential safeguard against the overwhelming power of the capitalist and boss, the one guarantor that the interests of everyone and not just the powerful would be properly protected and advanced.
Community-based initiatives have their value but, as a means of changing society, they are too small-scale, fragmented and dispersed to make much impact. Nothing will better serve the status quo than the concession that government should be limited to protecting the interests of the powerful and that proponents of change should look elsewhere. A new Labour opposition leader can best confront the coalition and restore the faith of Labour supporters by re-asserting that good government matters.
Bryan Gould
22 August 2010
One Gaffe After Another
David Cameron is deservedly up against it, it seems, in trying to persuade the voters to see his public spending cuts in a positive light. Not surprisingly, many will marvel at how the greed and irresponsibility of the financial sector’s fat cats should somehow have been parlayed into the launching pad for what the Prime Minister admits is intended to be a long-term assault on the role of government.
But it seems that he is determined to make the task even harder than it need be by insisting on offending his audience and then compounding one gaffe with another. His apology to a pensioner in Hove for depicting Britain in 1940 as a junior partner to the United States in the war against Hitler was achieved at the cost of offending a whole new range of people who might also claim to have played a role in 1940.
David Cameron was almost pathetically keen to correct his blunder. He assured his critic that he was well aware of the true situation in 1940. Apart from, we were told, a few Polish and French pilots, Britain had stood absolutely alone against the Nazi threat.
Well, no one who lived through those days (and admittedly I was only one at the time) could cavil for a moment at David Low’s famous cartoon following the fall of France and his sombre and defiant pledge, “Very well, alone.” Nor would anyone begrudge the recognition of those French and Polish pilots who played their part in helping to fight the Battle of Britain.
But, while he was about it, one might have hoped that Britain’s Prime Minister would not so pointedly have revealed an apparently complete ignorance of the significant role played by pilots from the Commonwealth. Australian and New Zealand pilots in particular were especially prominent. Many distinguished themselves with feats of valour and daring; many lost their lives, flying alongside British pilots over British skies.
The statue of New Zealander Sir Keith Park in Trafalgar Square is testimony to the leading role he played in helping to direct the Battle of Britain. And David Low himself was of course a New Zealander.
New Zealanders and other Commonwealth citizens have long since reconciled themselves to the fact that their relationship with Britain has travelled a long way since a New Zealand Prime Minister could say at the outbreak of the Second World War “where Britain stands, we stand; where Britain goes, we go”, and then commit the farm workers and shopkeepers of his tiny country to a war half a world away in which they suffered a greater proportionate loss of life than almost any other country.
We have grown sadly used to the euro-centricity of modern Britain that allows visitors from Europe to join the UK citizens’ queue at entry ports while New Zealanders must queue as aliens. We accept that Britain has the right to decide its own future, even if that meant turning its back on a trading partner which denied itself the produce of its own land in order to send food supplies to Britain at a time of great danger.
What is disappointing, however, is that – in the course of correcting one error – today’s British Prime Minister could so thoroughly demonstrate how little value is given to the history that Britain and New Zealand, and the Commonwealth more generally, share. If, quite properly, he was ready to recognise the role of pilots from other countries, did he have to reveal so little awareness of the sacrifice made in that common cause by those from far-flung countries who chose to make that distant theatre of war their business too?
It is one of the mysteries of the post-war world that a Britain which found itself at the head of the most extensive and potentially influential group of countries in the world – a Commonwealth embracing a quarter of the world’s population and some of the world’s most significant emerging economies – should so carelessly, through neglect and ignorance, have thrown that huge advantage away. If realpolitik counts for little, one might at least have hoped that common courtesy and common sense would have avoided giving unnecessary offence. Iran and Pakistan are bad enough. Does he have to add Australia and New Zealand to the list?
Bryan Gould
6 August 2010
What Is The Point of a Coalition If Only One Voice Is Heard?
Nick Clegg’s performance in the election campaign’s televised debates promised briefly to stand election projections on their head. The voters seemed to decide when the crunch came, however, that more was required than a pleasant demeanour and a winning smile.
Election arithmetic, though, came to his aid and gave him and the Lib Dems another chance to show what they were really made of. Sadly, he seems on course to demonstrate for a second time that there is no substitute for substance.
Personality and personal relations do of course matter in politics; and it is certainly true that the personal chemistry- a shared social and educational background perhaps – between Clegg and Cameron seems to provide a glue that might hold the coalition together for a time. But, if the Lib Dems are to make a success of government, they need more than goodwill and a conviction that nice people will prevail. They need a searching analysis of the country’s problems and a hard-headed agenda for resolving them.
That is especially important when they find themselves in bed with partners who are not only much bigger and nastier than they are but who have a positive surfeit of ideological conviction and a ruthless determination to make it count. Nick Clegg is simply ill-equipped to stand up to the George Osbornes of this world. He seems to have gone along with the basic strategy of cutting the deficit, come what may, without firing a shot.
How else to explain the extraordinary spectacle of a supposedly left-of-centre party and its leader tamely endorsing a budget strategy that is positively perverse and that threatens a re-run of the global recession that similar neo-liberal doctrine produced less than two years ago? How is it that a financial crisis that failed to become a full-scale depression only because governments and therefore the taxpayers – and our government and our taxpayers in particular – bailed out the failed financial institutions has become the launching-pad for savage cuts in public spending and a punitive scaling back in the role of government?
Why should anyone believe that throwing people out of work, and then cutting the support available to the unemployed, will somehow set the economy back on its feet? Why should anyone believe that the government’s finances – including an indebtedness massively increased by the billions spent on the bail-outs – can be restored by ensuring that tax revenues are depleted because economic activity is flattened?
The government’s determination to give priority to cutting the deficit, at the cost of any other objective, makes sense only if economic policy is to be deliberately handed over to the perversely irrational. Our policy-makers seem to be running scared of the “bond vigilantes” – the very people whose irrationality created our problems in the first place – and to have a naïve faith on the other hand that the “confidence fairy” will work her magic. It will be interesting to see how long confidence remains in the face of this assault on common sense and economic reality.
It is disappointing that this fairy-tale nonsense is swallowed whole by so many commentators, and that attempts to debunk it are portrayed as the ravings of the mindless and the angry. It is not – pace Guardian leader-writers – the duty of coalition ministers to close their ears to argument. There is of course a distinguished and long-standing intellectual pedigree – from Keynes to Krugman, Stiglitz to Skidelsky – for the view that government’s responsibility in our situation is to maintain the level of economic activity, so that its own finances as well as those of others are restored as soon as possible. And, those with a knowledge of economic history will know that George Osborne is all too faithfully following in the footsteps of those like Herbert Hoover who followed similar policies in 1932 and plunged us all into depression.
That pedigree and that hard-won experience are not so easily dismissed. We might have hoped that someone who chose to lead his party into government might have been better equipped for the task. Nick Clegg is not, sadly, unique among politicians in seeming almost totally bereft of any understanding of economics but nevertheless convinced of his fitness to make major decisions about our economic future.
The least we can expect of our senior politicians, surely, is that they will make sure they know enough to be able to reach their own conclusions on the major issues of the day. It is not enough that these issues should be debated in the columns of our best-informed journalists. They should be debated at the very heart of government. What is the point of a coalition if only one voice is heard?
Bryan Gould
5 July 2010
This article was published in the online Guardian on 5 July.
Leaning Against the Market
When Lord Myners proclaimed this month that “there is nothing progressive about a government that consistently spends more than it can raise in taxation” he gave support and comfort to one side of an argument that is at the heart of the new government’s agenda – what to do about the government deficit.
Lord Myners’ intervention was all the more significant because it came from someone who, just a few weeks ago, was a minister in the Labour government. He weighed in on the side of those who seem to assert that the first priority of the new government must be to get the deficit down; but he may have also given us a clue as to why Labour’s position on this issue during the election campaign was so confused.
Most commentators agree that the global financial crisis has prompted an overdue resurrection of the reputation of last century’s greatest economist. But, for Lords Myners it seems, Lord Keynes may never have existed. He continues to exhibit an unreformed attachment to one of the most common fallacies in economic thinking over the past thirty years.
It is a common assumption in right-wing thinking that the government should be regarded as merely an individual person or corporation writ large, and that it should therefore always act as a prudent individual would do. Although most individuals would plead guilty to the charge of borrowing in order to build or acquire an asset (like a house), the government – according to this view – must never spend beyond its means. In a recession, when individuals stop spending and investing, and the government’s tax revenues therefore decline, the government must also slam on the brakes.
This view is especially ironic when a large element in the government’s indebtedness is the money provided to bail out failed institutions, and especially banks, in the private sector. But, more importantly, it completely overlooks the responsibility of governments during a recession to lean against the logic of the market.
As Keynes saw, a government that behaves in a recession as everyone else behaves will simply make the recession worse. It is the special role of government in that situation not to retrench but to use its huge resources, its ability to create new money through “quantitative easing”, and its responsibility to take the longer view and to act in the common interest, in order to stimulate the level of economic activity so as to shorten the recession and thereby restore its own financial position as soon as possible.
A government that ignores that responsibility and focuses narrowly on its own short-term financial position is likely to see the recession last longer with inevitable longer-term consequences for its own tax revenues and finances. A braver government that lives with a deficit as its contribution to a counter-recessionary strategy will see its tax revenues recover faster and – paradoxically, it may seem – bring the deficit under control sooner than it would otherwise have done.
None of this means that government spending should be let rip. If the deficit is to be effective in bringing the recession to an end, the spending must be economically worthwhile. The new government is quite right to scan the whole of its expenditure so as to eliminate wasteful, unnecessary or ineffective spending. The spending that is undertaken must not be focused on consumption but on encouraging investment, employment and improved productivity. The goal must be investment in an improved economic performance for the future so that a double bonus is obtained – an immediate counter-recessionary boost to the level of demand in the economy that takes the form of a counter-cyclical stimulus to longer-term productive capacity.
To follow this course requires political courage and political leadership. The Lord Myners of this world are always quick to condemn a departure from what passes as orthodoxy. It is not something that should be sub-contracted to officials. The new government has received plaudits for setting up the Office for Budget Responsibility and George Osborne has now announced greater regulatory responsibilities for the Bank of England. But these agencies cannot be expected to take the tough decisions about the overall course of the economy that are now necessary. That is what we elect governments to do. The new government must step up to the mark.
Bryan Gould
16 June 2010.
This article was published in the online Guardian on 14 June.