The public analyst in crazy times

My eldest granddaughter about a year ago went through that stage where she was always asking why. Now her favourite question is ‘what’s happening’. I thought of this when listening to this talk by Paul Krugman, titled ‘public discourse in a time of crazy’. Paul asks how should people who deal with facts and rational argument cope with a post-Trump world where those running the show appear to attach no positive value to either. [1]

While he says himself he is still adjusting to this new world, Paul suggests in this lecture that there are three paths which should be avoided. He calls them appeasement, emulation and quietism. The last is actually a real word, I discovered, and it means a “calm acceptance of things as they are without attempts to resist or change them”, a kind of retreat. I suspect it is the only one of the three that could tempt Paul himself.

It seems to me that appeasement is a good way to describe what has been happening to the UK’s parliamentary Labour party for perhaps a decade. First we had austerity, which began to be appeased in an apparently mild way while Darling was Chancellor, became stronger with ‘too much, too fast’, and ended up with some arguing after 2015 that austerity was the way forward. We are now seeing the same with immigration. What starts as the innocent ‘recognising people’s anxieties’ has now become ‘well at least Brexit allows us to control immigration’.

Appeasement is wrong for many reasons, not least because it is a terrible political strategy. If you no longer appear to champion anyone’s cause, but instead just become the ‘lite’ party (Brexit-lite, immigration-lite), you stop getting votes. Partly because people can vote for the 'real thing' (non-lite), and partly because you are not credible. This has got nothing to do with moving too far to the left or right, or Corbyn’s original [2] election: just look at Andy Burnham.

Emulation is to attempt to outdo Trump or Brexit in their own world of meaningless phrases and downright lies. But that is not a world that Paul Krugman (or myself) could live in. The scientific method is too deep in our bones to make this possible. We are not about the write posts which have the subtitle “a response to justified criticism’.

How does any of this relate to my granddaughter? The reason is that I think the premise for Paul’s talk is not real. There is no puzzle about what people like him should do now. We do what we have always done: ask what is happening and why. We put forward plans for what should happen once these dark times are over, plans that come from good explanations of the what and the why. When Paul talks about Appeasement and Emulation, he is really talking about what opposition politicians and their advisers should not do.

What people who analyse the evidence and ideas lose when Trump becomes President is any sense that we are participating in a conversation, a public discourse, that includes people who have power. Even those politicians who are in opposition cannot really listen because they will have their hands full limiting damage. Or in the UK case, they are too busy fighting each other.

2016 has not seen a sudden transition to this world, but more the blocking out of the remaining lights that pierced this post-truth darkness. We have effectively had a Republican Congress at constant war with a Democrat White House since 2011, and that Republican Congress increasingly under the control of the Tea Party and Fox News. The UK and Eurozone have been dominated by completely unnecessary austerity since 2010. As I used to say about austerity around 2012 or 2013, we had won the intellectual debate but the world went on as if we had lost.

I was thinking along these lines after talking to the Treasury Select Committee on Tuesday. I wrote a post just before I went, on why the OBR was perhaps being too optimistic about Brexit. Yet when I offered to explain the reasons for this to the Committee, no one seemed to want to hear. Politicians want to make the most of Brexit, when in reality all they can do is limit the damage. Politicians want to recognise people’s anxieties about immigration, when really they have to tell people that they are wrong: not about their grievances, but their belief that this has much to do with immigration.

We can, and should, continue to rage against the dying of the light. What is difficult, in this time of crazy, is being able to put that rage aside, and engage in a form of quietism, a retreat from the here and now of political discourse. Not a retreat into any kind of acceptance of where we now are, but instead into asking what and why, and from the answers to those questions to planning for the time when facts get back into fashion. But more than that. Using the answers to the what and why to prevent us lapsing back into our current post-truth world.

[1] Of course politics has always been driven by ideology as well as evidence, but there is a critical difference between wanting to find evidence to back your ideology, and not caring about evidence at all. We seem to have moved from the former to the latter in recent years. This is related to Frankfurt’s concept of political bullshit.

[2] I say ‘original’ here deliberately of course. Whatever his motives, Owen Smith did see why it was important to champion the anti-Brexit cause.

The benefit cap: more media driving policy

Yesterday I talked about how the media, and the right wing tabloid press in particular, plays a major role in determining not only government policy on immigration and the EU, but also determining the policy of the Labour opposition (on austerity, immigration and the EU). Yesterday also saw the introduction of a reduced benefit cap in the UK, which is another issue where both government and opposition policy has its origins in the tabloid press.

The benefit cap imposes a maximum figure you can receive in benefits (where benefits include child benefit). The previous cap hit around 20,000 households, mainly those with large numbers of children or paying very high London rents. (This and subsequent figures come from here.) The new lower cap will hit nearly 90,000, and its impact will be felt throughout the country. Those already capped will lose a further £3,000 per year (in London) or £6,000 per year (elsewhere). The government expects those households newly affected by the cap to lose an average of £2,000 a year.

The origin of this cap come from countless stories like this in the tabloid newspapers. Such stories, which are hardly ever contextualised in terms of how typical they might be, understandably annoy many people. As a result, the policy of a benefit cap has proved very popular. The government formalised motivation for the original cap with the idea that no one on benefits should receive more than they could by working. But as Declan Gaffney explained in this superb post:

“people are not generally better off on benefits than working: that’s the effect of having a minimum wage to which levels of in-work support (tax credits and housing benefit) are calibrated. As long as someone is working 16 hours a week at the legal minimum hourly wage, they are better off in work. So the principle that the public approves – the one they are in fact approving when they give their support to the cap- is already built into the social security system. But as the public is not generally familiar with the workings of the system (why should they be?), they are not necessarily aware of this.”

However the cap was quantified by comparing all the income of those out of work with just some of the income of those in work.

“So child benefit, child tax credit and housing benefit are included on one side of the comparison (out of work) and excluded on the other (working). You can demonstrate anything if you’re prepared to rig the comparison in this way, and that is precisely what the government has been doing.”

It is difficult to imagine any other motivation beside garnering popularity or appeasing the press for why the government introduced the benefit cap. The original cap raised relatively small amounts, but had a large negative impact on already poor children. The evidence suggests that only a very small percentage of those hit by the cap were encouraged to find work or move. But such was the popularity of the cap, that both the LibDems and Labour accepted it ‘in principle’. Gaffney’s post contains this very revealing quote from the LibDem Lord Kirkwood

“I want to make it clear that I am implacably opposed to a household benefit cap in principle. People's eyes glaze over when I try to explain my main reasons. I tried it in Grand Committee and by the end people looked at me as though I was possessed..... What I should really like to do with Clause 94 is vote against the whole thing. However, my noble friend Lord German and one or two others took me into a dark room, sat me down and said, "That wouldn't be sensible because the great British public know the square root of next to nothing at all about the detail of the technicalities". He has persuaded me that I should mitigate Clause 94, and I am prepared to do that.”

The benefit cap is also an example of where an opposition tactic of ‘accepting in principle’ but tinkering at the edges just becomes failed appeasement. Gaffney ends by saying: “there are costs attached to this strategy, in terms of the quality of political debate and more generally in the endorsement it gives to a big untruth about the social security system and those who are relying on it.” His post was written about the initial cap in 2012, and yesterday’s intensification of the policy suggests he was absolutely right. (Contrast with the bedroom tax, which Labour did oppose.) [1]

In 1966, Ken Loach made the television play Cathy Come Home about homelessness. In a small way it shocked the nation, by making many people aware of something that was otherwise unreported. Today what we have on television is Benefit Street. Ken Loach recently made the film I, Daniel Blake about the victims of the government’s benefit system which has helped create the huge expansion of food banks. But if the film was shown on TV today, I doubt whether it would have the same impact as Cathy Come Home. The idea that most benefit claimants are in some sense fake remains embedded in the public consciousness, and the belief is supported by the same media that initially helped create it. It is another politicised truth: a falsehood that politicians and the political media pretend is true.

 [1] The danger of conceding the principle can also be illustrated by austerity. Once you accept that the deficit is a problem that requires an immediate solution, there are no limits on how much austerity you have, as public credit will always go to those to try and solve the deficit problem quickly.