The political consequences of Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage, as leader of UKIP, was critical in making Cameron commit to an EU referendum. As a key player on the Leave side in the referendum he helped gain a narrow victory. Conservative Brexiters then turned a vote for a negotiated deal with the EU into a headbanging demand to leave without any deal at all. When that failed to be agreed by parliament Nigel Farage re-enters the picture talking about humiliation and national betrayal and demanding a No Deal exit. The political consequences of Farage have already been immense, and they do not look like they are going away. What further havoc is he likely to cause?

With the exception of the EU referendum itself, his influence has nearly always been through the Conservative party. It will be through the threat he poses to Conservatives in the future that will define his greatest influence now. Although Brexiters will never admit this, they must be hoping that Farage decimates the Conservative vote in the European elections. The Brexit party have announced no policies beyond a desire to get on with Brexit, by which they mean leave with No Deal. His support is not that surprising given the even larger support for No Deal in the polls. If you think its unusual for so many to abandon the Conservative party you are also probably still wondering how so many people could vote for Trump.

Brexiters will argue that they have to move their own party’s policy from leaving with some kind of agreed deal to leaving without a deal (perhaps after another fruitless attempt to negotiate away the backstop), otherwise Farage will seriously damage their vote in any general election. They would be correct, particularly if Labour drop their pointless desire to negotiate a Brexit deal of their own. One Brexiter has even suggested an electoral pact with Farage, where they divide up Westminster seats between them.

The candidates for the next leader of the Conservative party will be falling over themselves to appeal to a membership a majority of whom favour No Deal (see here and a recent Times/YouGov poll). That process may itself lead to some kind of commitment to No Deal and not to hold a People’s Vote. But MPs and Conservative party members will also be thinking of selecting someone who can match the charisma of Farage. If he survives the preliminary votes by MPs, Boris Johnson may seem an irresistible choice. He is currently the clear front runner in a recent poll of members.

It is possible that whoever was elected, and whatever the commitments they made during their campaign, might try and steer some kind of middle course between the two wings of the party. But Farage would always be waiting to call betrayal and attract Tory votes in the forthcoming general election. The only escape route I can see is to change the backstop back to its original form, where it only applies to Northern Ireland. Whether that option could get through parliament is unclear. As the DUP are bound to end their arrangement with the government in those circumstances, a general election would have to follow.

If instead the new Prime Minister did commit to No Deal, the issue is whether they could get that through parliament. With the current set of MPs that seems unlikely. Nevertheless they will see it as their only chance of making Farage go away. The Conservatives have dug a deep hole for themselves, and they will believe that the only way forward is to dig some more. That policy would lead to defections or resignations by some MPs, but the leadership and other Brexiters would take that as an opportunity to replace them with Brexiters in due course.

There is one possibility which in normal times we would not even think about but which unfortunately we now have to. That possibility is that the government led by someone like Boris Johnson decides to leave without any deal without consulting parliament, using the 2016 referendum to say that the people are more important than parliament. My understanding is that technically they could do so, but it would be a constitutional outrage in most MPs eyes. Parliament would almost certainly find some opportunity to give voice to their objection, but what if the government took no notice?

A major constitutional crisis like this means many things could happen. It is possible the EU would not accept the withdrawal unless it was approved by parliament. Parliament could refuse to pass any legislation associated with withdrawal. Having to worry about such things illustrates how far along the populist road (in the Jan-Werner Müller sense of the term) we have gone.

It is more likely that the government would settle for the long game, with the hope that through time and a General Election it could get enough MPs to get No Deal through parliament. If the EU loses patience and refuses an extension, the government could call an election talking about bullying from the EU and turning nationalist rhetoric to maximum volume.

Could a Conservative party pushing a no deal exit ever win a general election? If the election took place after parliament had revoked Article 50 or a referendum had chosen Remain, voters would soon decide that they really didn’t want to go through the process again. Indeed the longer we stay in Brexit limbo the more people will prefer to forget about the whole thing. That and a slim majority would put some pressure on any new leader to hold an early election.

Could a recently appointed Conservative Prime Minister beat Labour in an early election? It is not impossible, particularly if the Labour leadership are still clinging to a belief that Brexit should take place. But I also think it is rather unlikely. Boris, like May, is a good foil for Corbyn, as this poll suggests. Those who think a Prime Minister should be serious rather than a buffoon will tend to choose Corbyn. More people would rather Remain than leave without a deal, including some Conervative voters. As John Harris points out, the young middle class of suburban England many of whom voted Remain are learning how not to vote Conservative. On non-Brexit policies Labour will win the cities hands down, and attract many in more traditional heartlands.

How did the Conservative party find itself in a position where its only slim chance of winning a general election is to embrace a policy opposed by most of business and which will inevitably have a very serious impact on the economy? The first blunder was of course the decision to appease UKIP and Tory Brexiters by promising to hold a referendum. The second was a failure to pin down the Brexiters to commit to some form of leaving before the referendum. The third was to fight a terrible campaign. But even then a wise leader would have seen the gift that having a leader of the opposition who wanted Brexit presented and gone for a conciliatory Brexit, which would have at least allowed a Withdrawal Agreement to be passed by parliament. In fact Theresa May did practically everything wrong, including adopting the fateful ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ mantra.

The bigger picture answer is that we are seeing the consequence of what in my book I call neoliberal overreach. It was the Conservative party and its supporting press that began the long process of whipping up anxiety about immigration. It was a Conservative government that embarked on sustained austerity during the worst recession since the war that lead to the slowest recovery for centuries, and it was they who erroneously blamed immigration for the resulting collapse in public services and real wages.

When you flirt with the tools of the far right and encourage the fears the far right play on, you are in great danger of getting into bed with them. Farage’s work on the EU is nearly done, but he will be ready and waiting for the next nationalist cause he can take up, and any future Conservative Prime Minister will be too weak in electoral terms to resist his siren call. The Conservatives have only have themselves to blame for playing with fire in the first place.

Lecture on The Lies We Were Told

Too busy to write a post today, but I thought I’d take the opportunity to publicise my forthcoming lecture and discussion on my book. Its at Kings College, Bush House, 44-46 Aldwych, London at 7pm on 23rd May. I’m lucky to have Rachel Shabi, contributor at the Guardian and Professor Aeron Davis, Deputy Head of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London to lead the discussion. The lecture is organised by The Progressive Economy Forum, and further details are here.

In the lecture I want to focus on three big lies told by politicians but also aided and abetted by the media. By big I mean lies that led to profound changes in most peoples lives or how we are governed. The first was austerity, where most of the media ignored mainstream economics and pushed the nonsensical idea that we should reduce the deficit in the middle of a recession. The second was the 2015 election, where the slowest recovery for centuries and unprecedented falling real wages were sold as a strong economy. The third was immigration, where scare stories in the right wing press fueled fears in parts of the country that had seen very little immigration. Together with similar disinformation about the EU, this culminated in Brexit, where one part of the media acted as propagandists and the other part balanced truth with lies.

These lies did not come out of nowhere. They were part of what I call neoliberal overreach, by which I mean using political deceit on a grand scale to pursue neoliberal ideas. William Hague when leader of the opposition talked about the UK becoming a ‘foreign land’. Neoliberals had no interest in curbing immigration beyond its ability to capture votes. Once in government you had austerity, which used deceit about the imperative of reducing the deficit to shrink the state. I discuss the extent to which even Brexit can be included as neoliberal overreach. Deceit requires lying to the public in a major way, which was only made possible by the support of the right wing press and the broadcast media turning a blind eye.

It is free (of course) but you do need to book your ticket here Hope to see you there, .

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Triangulation or bipartisanship does not work when one side goes off the scale

Brad DeLong describes himself as a Rubin Democrat, which he defines as “largely neoliberal, market-oriented, and market-regulation and tuning aimed at social democratic ends.” It is a natural position for an economist to be: it is generally more efficient to tweek markets than destroy them. But he thinks the time has come for this kind of Democrat to pass the baton over to the left. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

That is an unusual thing to say, on either side of the Atlantic. In the UK the left under Corbyn is in the lead, but you see few of the people who used to run the Labour party saying anything similar. Instead some have conducted a relentless campaign to undermine him. Not only is DeLong unusual, I also think he is probably right, so I want to examine the reasons he gives.

The key point he makes is that the political right has torn up the normal rules of the game, by both moving further to the right and becoming totally partisan. This was very clear in the Obama years. Obama pursued Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

There is much less bipartisan cooperation in the UK compared to the US, but I think there is a clear analogy with triangulation. The lesson Brown and Blair drew from the defeats of the 1980s was that Labour needed to win the middle class, and that meant moving policy to the centre ground. There was little attempt to reverse the neoliberalism of Thatcher, but instead to mitigate its social effects.

But the problem is that the political right in both countries were not playing by the same rules. They had a quite different strategy, which was to shift policy on issues like taxation and the size of the state to the right, and instead try and win elections by pushing a socially conservative agenda. (Here is a formalisation.) There is no triangulation here, but instead an attempt to hide a right wing agenda by starting a culture war. [1] As the right has control over a section of the media, they can also misrepresent their own and their opponents position. That control, together with ineffective scrutiny by the non-partisan media, allows politicians to lie to an extent that would have been thought inconceivable a couple of decades earlier.

When the right adopts this strategy (what I have called elsewhere neoliberal overreach), attempts by the left to get bipartisan agreement or triangulate policies moves what most political commentators call the centre ground of policy to the right. This has two effects. The first is that policies that would be popular among a majority of the population don’t happen. It is often noted that Corbyn’s policies are popular, and the same seems to be true in the US. Second, those supporting the left wing party become dissatisfied with it, and try and move it back to where it once was.

A vivid illustration from the UK of how triangulation fails is immigration. The Conservatives, together with their allies in the media, decided to use immigration as a major weapon against the Labour government. Gradually the increase in the number of stories about immigrants living on welfare and ‘taking our jobs’ began to move immigration up the list of issues voters were concerned about. Immigration numbers were increasing because the government knew this was good for both the economy and public services, but newspapers used words like “mass”, “vast”, “large scale”, “floods”,“waves”“army”, or “hordes”. With a few exceptions it was not voters in areas where migration was increasing that were reacting, and the best predictor of voter concern was which newspapers voters read.

Eventually Labour decided they had to try and triangulate, by talking tough on immigration. The case for immigration was no longer made. The false belief that immigrants made access to public services worse became ingrained. This allowed the Conservative government to deflect a lot of anger over austerity on to immigrants, and it eventually led to Brexit. The strategy of triangulation was a disaster. It is interesting that since the negative impact of reduced immigration on the economy has become clear with Brexit, views on immigration in the UK have shifted to become positive rather than negative.

Another consequence of the right not playing by the old rules is a lack of proportionality. I remember reading Paul Krugman during the Clinton vs Sanders primaries. I think Paul mainly favoured Clinton because Sanders was too populist, which naturally grates for someone who knows and cares about the detail and the difficulties involved in populist policies. But I also remember him writing that the Republicans might be hard on Clinton but that would be nothing compared to what the right would do if Sanders was the Democratic candidate. I’m not sure that was correct, because the right were not playing by the old rules where you had to stick to facts.

As a result, Clinton was accused of all kinds of imagined crimes by Trump, and the non-partisan media played along by obsessing about her email server. Much the same happened in the UK if we look at the 2015 and 2017 elections. The right wing press relentlessly attacked Corbyn in 2017 with wild charges about what he would do as PM, but what they did to centre-left Ed Miliband (‘red Ed’) in 2015 was not that different. Their attacks were not proportionate to how left wing their opponent was.

I think you need to add in one additional point here, and that is a public that is looking for radical solutions, by which I means solutions that move away from the status quo. The reason for this is not hard to understand: the worst recession since WWII following the financial crisis, stagnant and declining real wages, and geographical areas (rural, towns) that seem to be falling behind more dynamic cities.

The lesson of Brexit and Trump is if you fight a culture war and lies with just well researched and targeted policy proposals, you lose. It is better to fight a culture war with an alternative vision and popular policy proposals, and a bit of class war too. I am not suggesting that you don’t have well researched and targeted policy proposals behind that: as DeLong says “we are still here”. But this is the time for radicals on both sides. I suspect Sanders would have been more effective than Clinton at taking on Trump, just as Corbyn was very effective at taking on Theresa May.

You might have noticed that I have said very little about policy divisions between the left and centre-left, and that is because in practice I don’t think they are very important. In both countries the left cannot implement much that the centre-left disagrees with, and much of what the left want to do the centre-left are prepared to accept. [2] (Maybe not rich Democrat or Labour donors, but crowdfunding means that is unfortunate rather than fatal.) The key question is whether the centre-left allows the left to lead when it needs to lead, or instead fights against the left and keeps the right in power.

Let me end with Brad again.

“Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side.”

Some in the UK may feel that statement just does not apply here, but they need to ask whether DeLong is right and it is the left’s time to lead, because what he says about the political right in the US applies equally to the UK.

[1] Cameron talked the talk of centre triangulation, but that did not happen in practice (with the exception of one or two issues like Gay marriage and the aid budget). With austerity he pursued an attempt to shrink the state that Thatcher could only dream of, and the degree to which the Tories wanted to shift policy to the right was masked by the Coalition’s other partner.

[2] One of the problems we have in the UK is supporters of the left who do not understand this, and act as if the centre-left is the enemy and it can win without them. But the centre-left also needs to recognise that on some big issues like financialisation they have been wrong and the left has been right. Some discussion on US issues here from Paul Krugman.

The Tory party lost its way from 2010, not 2016

“I have had it up to here with the Conservative party.” So writes a one time editor of the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona. It is a good read: for example

“A chilling populism is now creeping into the language of mainstream Toryism: the language of treachery, snarling tribalism and impatience with anything that smacks of prudence, compromise or caution.”

He is talking about Brexit of course, and he is entirely right. What he misses, in my view, was that this problem did not begin with the EU referendum, but six years earlier, with the Tory ‘modernisers’, Cameron and Osborne.

I think d’Ancona gets to the heart of the problem when he writes

“By tradition, the strongest claim the Tories have had to office is a belief that ideology should be subordinated to reality. Even Margaret Thatcher – the most explicitly ideological of Conservative prime ministers – was ousted to stop the poll tax and to salvage Britain’s relations with Europe.”

Thatcher began neoliberal hegemony in the UK and a lot of the policies she introduced were popular, at least at the time. Her revolution was introduced with some caution, and when her caution ran out she was deposed. That caution, at the level of senior ministers or the party, had gone by 2010. The clearest indication of that is austerity.

Sound public finances, which d’Ancona says he supports, should never apply in the middle of a recession. We have known that since Keynes. As a result, in every post WWII economic downturn the government has focused on recovery and not the rising deficit. The single exception before 2010 was under Margaret Thatcher in her infamous budget of 1981. But that austerity was very different from 2010 for three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

1. The deficit was not targeted for its own sake, but in a failing attempt to hit a money supply target.
   
   
2. The deficit was mainly reduced by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending, which is more demand friendly. 2010 austerity preferred spending cuts to tax rises.
   
   
3. The austerity experiment was short lived and quickly reversed.

I do not want to minimise the damage done by the 1980/2 recession. My point is just that Thatcher and her ministers saw that monetarism was not working and they ditched it. Not soon enough but it was reversed. To use d’Ancona’s words, ideology was subordinated to reality.

The contrast with the austerity that began in 2010 is clear. As I never tire of saying, almost every first year economic undergraduate around the world is taught that in a recession you stimulate demand. Nowhere do the textbooks talk about worrying about the resulting deficit at the same time, because that implies austerity rather than stimulus. Unlike Thatcher, in 2010 there was no runaway inflation. The debt funding crisis that Coalition politicians were so fond of telling us about was a figment of a few City economists’ imaginations.

By 2012 it was obvious that austerity was a huge mistake. The recovery was nowhere in sight, and a key reason for this were large cuts public sector investment. It is no good complaining about the Eurozone crisis when you are cutting spending while interest rates have fallen by as much as the MPC dare. That is a schoolboy error. An imminent funding crisis implies rising interest rates on UK government debt, but by 2012 those rates were falling. The majority of academic economists who predicted that austerity would damage the recovery had been proved right. But did Cameron and Osborne change their policy, as Thatcher had done, and switch to fiscal stimulus? Of course we know they did not. Reality did not get a look in.

In economic terms austerity was the most damaging aspect of reality denial by the 2010 Tory based government. I calculated that austerity cost the average household £10,000, but the true figure may be much more if we allow for the damage austerity did to the supply side of the economy. It is certain that cuts to social care and the NHS cost lives: it is just a question of how many thousands of lives we are talking about. Austerity represented political deceit at its worst. Voters accepted nonsense pushed by the government about its credit card, and this allowed Tories to achieve an ideological goal of a smaller state which was otherwise unpopular.

If that was not bad enough, austerity also helped sow the seeds of Brexit. When people in communities that had been left behind voted for Brexit they said things couldn’t get any worse, and they said that in part because of austerity. But this was not the only grand deceit of this Tory led administration. They established a target for immigration that they had no intention of meeting because they knew the damage meeting that target would do. But their rhetoric that immigrants were responsible for the ills caused by austerity was a major reason that Cameron lost his referendum. A Prime Minister who had falsely told the nation why it was essential to reduce immigration had no answer to those who pointed out it could not be completely controlled because of Freedom of Movement.

Cameron did not just make a mistake in allowing a referendum in the first place. Through his ruinous policy of austerity and his demonisation of immigrants he ensured that referendum would be lost. d’Ancona is right that Europe brings out the worst in the Tory party. It shows how Tories can elevate ideology and party above the interests of the country. But that did not start in 2016, but with the destruction it has sown since 2010.

Governments of fools?

Dominic Raab was widely mocked for his remarks about only recently understanding the importance of the Dover-Calais crossing (I defy anyone not to laugh at this from Artist Taxi Driver). The derision may be a little over the top, as it was when Gove was misquoted as having had enough of experts, but they and more serious admissions of ignorance are ridiculed because they reveal a deeper truth. As in the US, those ruling us in the UK do not really know what they are doing to a much greater extent than in previous years (see George Eaton here).

That last sentence perhaps requires clarification. They are not fools without any purpose. Brexit is a triumph of the heart over the head. They know what they want, and just do not care too much about the damage it will do. But the ‘misunderstanding’ by Brexiters over what they signed up to in December 2017 that persisted for weeks shows how dangerous not paying much attention to facts (in this case the words of an agreement) can be. Theresa May wasted at least a year completely misunderstanding the EU, and firing those in government that did. Perhaps her biggest act of ignoring the obvious was embarking on the Article 50 process without any prior discussion of what was possible and what was not, which as many people noted at the time was a sure way of ensuring the EU got pretty well what it wanted. If you do not believe all this, read Chris Grey here.

If you are tempted to put this all down to the unique stupidity of Brexit, or the uniqueness of Donald Trump, you really need to read my new book (short summary here). These traits were there with austerity, or the ‘hostile environment’, if you did the research. Economic historians of the future will discuss at length which did more needless economic harm to the UK economy, austerity or Brexit (assuming Brexit goes ahead). The only real debate about George Osborne, who committed the UK to pro-cyclical fiscal policy in the middle of the Global Financial Crisis, was whether this reflected deliberate deception or unforgivable economic ignorance (chapter 1.13 of my book), and if the former whether it was all about shrinking the state or a more superficial search for political advantage. In later years it became simple deficit deceit for neoliberal ends. In the US the priority of the Republican party for years has been tax cuts for the rich paid for by reducing state services for the poor, and a selective concern for the deficit combined with imagining tax cuts pay for themselves have been useful devices (lies) to achieve that. .

If politicians on the right display wilful ignorance to achieve their goals, they have knowledge of a kind that exceeds their opponents on the left by miles. They are extremely well versed in the arts of political spin, or more generally of getting votes by disguising the true objectives of their policies. Part of this works through think tanks, and part through the right wing press. In turn both these groups, plus politicians themselves, put huge pressure on the media (in the UK the BBC in particular), and that pressure works. The table below comes from this study and shows how often the BBC used political sources in 2007 and 2012:

Whereas the bias towards Labour was small in 2007, and was perhaps expected as they were also the government, by 2012 Conservative sources were almost double Labour sources. (Ironically LibDem sources declined in 2012, despite being in government.) Something similar happened to think tanks, according to this study comparing 2009 and 2015. For example in 2015 the IEA was referenced about 3 times more often than the IPPR. The detail in the paper of where the right wing bias was most prevalent is noteworthy although not that surprising.

Even when the BBC does manage to maintain balance, as it did in the 2016 referendum, this is often at the expense of facts and expertise. (Much the same occurred in the US before Trump was elected, as I recount in Chapter 7.8 of my book.) This leads to an obvious danger which we can see the political right exploiting more and more in both the US and UK. Whereas spin used to involve distorting the truth by selective use of facts or inventing clever but misleading slogans, it can now involve simple lying, as I experienced with my own work recently. Has this really got worse over time? I cannot cite any hard evidence for the UK, but there does seem to be that impression (see the first few tweets of this thread and this article by Stephen Bush). In the US there can be no doubt things have changed: not just Trump but with much of the Republican party over issues like health care or climate change.

This emphasis on the right of getting people to vote for you at the expense of examining the impact of your policies is reflected in the careers of many of the Brexiters, as William Davies points out. Trump was a TV star before he became President. Reagan was a movie star, although he at least was a Governor before becoming President. It is hard not to see these trends in right wing politics as starting with Reagan and Thatcher, and that much abused term neoliberalism. It was Thatcher that really began the politicisation of and disdain of the civil service, when being ‘one of us’ was valued over expertise.

You do not need experts, or you are only interested in experts who are one of us, because you have an ideology to guide you to the truth, or you are suspicious of any expertise that does not share your ideology. One of us is one who shares an ideology, in this case the ideology of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism wants as much as possible to be organised as a market. If that includes democracy itself (democracy is just a market for votes) then there is nothing preventing you employing all the tricks of advertising, preferably not encumbered by any regulators. Politics becomes the art of selling, rather than the assessment of policy. [1]

Why do I call the period after 2010 in the US and UK neoliberal overreach, as opposed to straight neoliberalism in the 1980s? After all there are some similarities in the UK between the two periods. Both Osborne and Thatcher started their terms in government with economic experiments that went against received economic wisdom. Both tried austerity (a fiscal contraction in a recession). I don’t want to minimise the harm Thatcher did to parts of the country, but her austerity was temporary [2] and the monetarist experiment was quickly abandoned, with the result that the recovery was only delayed by a year or two and the economy in aggregate eventually recovered in the true sense of the term. In contrast the slow recovery in the UK, US and Europe since 2010 seems to have had permanent and large negative effects. An interesting question is how much this difference between the two periods in the UK reflects different degrees of control over the media.

But the main reason I call what happened after 2010 overreach is that the neoliberalism of both Reagan and Thatcher was in many ways popular, and so there was less need to dress policies up as something they were not. In 2010 there was no popular demand for a reduction in the size of the state, so it required a form of subterfuge: what I call deficit deceit. Tight targets for immigration made no sense for neoliberals who wanted to reduce red tape for firms, but it was useful as a way to deflect anger over austerity and win votes.

A better way to describe Brexit than heart over head is the triumph of ideology over knowledge. Neoliberalism isn’t the only ideology behind Brexit. There are elements of English nationalism that William Davies discusses in his piece noted above and Anthony Barnett discusses so well in the Lure of Greatness. But the disinterest in facts or experts  and the absence of shame in telling whatever lie is required to get what they want is very much part of what I call neoliberal overreach. To those to whom evidence based policy is natural they appear fools, but they know exactly what they are doing and in terms of deception they are rather good at it.

[1] In this particular sense Labour from the 1990s to 2015 were not at all neoliberal. For example contrast Labour's 2003 Five Test analysis with the current government's lack of interest in the analysis of different types of Brexit. The glaring exception was Iraq, and that reflects what happens when you erroneously believe the national interest is to follow neoliberals in the US.

[2] Fiscal policy was tightened from 1980 to 1982, but this was almost completely reversed by 1984. In contrast fiscal policy was tightened in 2010 and it continued to be tightened until the present day.

A decade of political deceit

It is tempting sometimes to portray the Brexiters (the politicians and the media leading the Brexit campaign, not those who voted Leave) as bumbling fools who just are not very good with reality in all its detail. Boris Johnson encourages that idea, particularly when you know his true reason for supporting Brexit is personal ambition.

I considered writing up a little fantasy shortly after water was discovered on Mars, Johnson had resigned as Foreign Secretary and May had won a vote by breaking pairing. I imagined the PM had convinced Johnson to captain a spaceship put together by the New UK Space Agency so he and David Davis could sign a trade agreement with whatever lived on Mars. It had to be hush hush so the EU did not try and get there first. When Johnson expressed concern that he might miss the vote on the final deal May assured him his vote would be paired, and when he returned in triumph the leadership would be his. After days when the press asked where is Boris, NASA reported receiving distress calls from what seemed like a spaceship heading in the direction of the sun.

But while Boris is in it for himself, the motives of many members of the ERG are rather different. As Time Bale describes, they need Brexit to be able to fulfill their vision for the UK, ably described in Britannia Unchained, written in 2012 by Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss. He calls them hyperglobalists. It is a UK of less welfare provision and even more ‘flexible’ labour markets, so that UK firms can compete ‘unhindered’ with the rest of the world like some kind of imagined Asian dynamo. Sort of Thatcher on steroids.

I’m not too interested on this occasion in the idiocy of such a plan, but the fact that this was never on the side of any red bus. It is another example of political deceit of the highest order. Their plan is not why most people voted Leave: quite the opposite in the case of many. As Tim writes:

“Does this disjunction between what “the people” currently say they want and what they supposedly need actually bother Tory hyperglobalists, except insofar as it prevents them, at least for the moment, from revealing all?

No – the reason being that they are Leninists, in the same way that Margaret Thatcher, their inspiration and icon, was a Leninist. Just like her, in 1979, they believe they know what we want better than we do ourselves right now. And just like her, they have a crusading vision whose details, inasmuch as they’ve been fully worked out, are best kept under wraps until the time is right and we can be made to realise – they hope gratefully rather than grudgingly – that there truly is no alternative.”

We have been seeing rather a lot of this Leninist deceit lately, similar to what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine, or what John Harris describes as "the odorous whiff of the hypocrisies and deceptions that tend to come with privilege". Austerity as a very costly device to shrink the state, for example. And immigration targets which Cameron and Osborne knew would hurt the economy if they were seriously pursued, but made them nevertheless to help attract social conservatives to vote Conservative. Pretending immigration was a problem for the NHS or welfare payments was also a useful way to deflect criticism over the impact of austerity.

I know some people will respond that all politicians deceive, and of course they do in minor ways to sell policies that help ‘their side’. But politicians who deceive at such a high level because they are Leninists at heart are something less common. It is hard to argue that any of the Prime Ministers before Thatcher were so willing to hide their true intent. Occasionally perhaps for certain foreign ventures: Eden, and then Blair. But not Brown or Miliband. The SNP over the cost of Independence, certainly. But austerity, lying about immigration and Brexit still seem an order greater in terms of the extent of the deception: promising X to really get an undisclosed Y.

There may be a reason for why this total deceit is relatively new, and it has to do with how the political process is perceived as part of neoliberalism. If you see politics like a market place, policies have to be sold like products, and politicians are the salesmen as Chris Dillow describes here. [1] So if you can sell a car by creating an image of what that car embodies, so you can sell a policy by pretending it is something else. The fact that you do not have the equivalent of the Advertising Standards Authority for political advertising just makes doing that more attractive.

Just look at the lack of shame in pretending that austerity was all about clearing up the mess Labour made (a claim easily refuted by looking at the data), or that the economy was strong when it was actually very weak in 2015. But that was dwarfed by what was to come with Brexit. Nothing was sacred in doing whatever it took to win that vote. And when it was shown that this included overspending during the campaign, they had no shame in spinning this as a mere allegation by Remainers. Anything goes, including disrespecting our pluralist democracy, just so they get what they want. 

This is all related to what I called neoliberal overreach, and whether it was something we could have easily avoided or something that was bound to happen. For many neoliberal politicians and advocates their ideal economy and society is not achievable through honest campaigning, because it is not what the great majority of people want. In 2016 48% of people wanted higher spending and taxes, while less than 5% wanted lower spending and taxes. Rather than patient persuasion they prefer complete deception, and crucially the ideology can be seen as endorsing that. For this reason, I am happy to add Brexit to austerity and anti-immigration rhetoric as examples of probably inevitable neoliberal overreach.

[1] Chris Dillow suggests that one of the first great neoliberals, Margaret Thatcher, did not share this view. Perhaps her ideas were sufficiently popular - at least for a time - that she didn’t need to pretend they were something else. It would be interesting to know if Tim Bale agrees.

The bankruptcy of the centre right: Brexit edition

If you want to see how the centre-right can lose out big time you just need to look at the US. Last week a Republican senator who had been critical of Trump lost to a Trump loyalist in a primary. Partisan voters prize loyalty, you may say, but this is loyalty to someone who lies all the time, and prefers the US’s traditional arch enemy Russia to its traditional allies. The US is just a few threads away from becoming yet another elected dictatorship. One of those threads is the Mueller investigation, and we will see if any Republican ‘rebels’ who want to impeach Trump are made of sterner stuff than the Brexit rebel Conservative MPs.

The story of neoliberal overreach is in part about how centre-right politicians set in place or promoted causes or institutions that would allow for the ascendency of the hard-right and then eventually their own demise. In the US this stretches from repealing the fairness doctrine, which led to hard-right talk radio and then Fox News, to increasing the role of money in elections and finally allowing Trump to win the presidency. In the UK it involved promoting austerity and an immigration target that was bound to fail, both of which directly led to Brexit.

Once these conditions have been set in place to win votes or shrink the state, there seem to be two stages in the process through which the centre-right concede power to the hard-right. The first stage is a belief that the centre-right are still in control when clearly they are not, or a blind optimism that the hard-right can be easily bought off. In the UK that is the stage where Cameron gave in to UKIP and newspaper pressure and agreed to a referendum on EU membrship. The centre-right make concessions to the hard-right to preserve party unity.

The second stage is where the hard-right have control, and play on this centre-right belief in party unity to prevent the centre-right from rocking the boat. [1] We saw this in the US under Obama when the Republicans scorned all the President’s overtures for bipartisanship. In the UK we are seeing it right now in how easily most Remain voting Conservative MPs are happy to go along with the current farce, and how easily the small band of rebels can be persuaded to cave.

The latter is due in part to our equivalent of Fox News conducting a hate campaign against these rebels. There is nothing subtle about this: try to vote against the government to prevent a national disaster and those big four right wing newspapers will headline on saying you are going against the will of the people and even imply you are a traitor. Whipping up this kind of hatred is no joke when followers of the ultra-right have already murdered one MP and tried to murder another. Yet before you start feeling some sympathy for the rebels subject to these newspapers attacks, remember these same centre-right Conservative MPs were quite happy to indulge the same papers by voting down Leveson 2.

It is also a result of the BBC increasingly shying away from anything that could be construed as critical of the government, and dumbing down political discussion. The rabid right wing press pretend that any form of dissent from the government’s chosen path of implementing Brexit is betraying the will of the people, confusing the government with the people just as authoritarian governments have always done, yet the BBC panders to the idea that these rebels are really trying to stop Brexit by constantly labelling the rebel MPs as Remainers.

As a result, Conservative MPs duly voted through substantial increases in executive power at the expense of parliament. There is now a grave danger that they will get played by the Brexiters. The Brexiters should by now know that any deal that can be done will be some form of soft Brexit, remaining in the Customs Union and Single Market for goods for sure. That is not the kind of divorce they wanted. They keep saying that the possibility of No Deal must be kept in play to increase our negotiating power, having conceded all our negotiating power by invoking Article 50 with no discussion and little plan. Perhaps the real reason is that they would not be at all unhappy that through their belligerence time for a deal disappears, and we get No Deal by default. Chris Grey calculates there are only 62 working days left to do a deal, and May is not even near the range of possible deals yet. If the Brexiters plan is to talk out a deal so we exit without one, it seems to be going very well.

For months I have been saying that No Deal would not happen because parliament would not let it happen. I still think it is unlikely, but as a result of the votes last week and the UK side in the Brexit negotiations going backwards since December I am much less confident than I was. The slide from a pluralist democracy to an elected dictatorship or a right wing plutocracy [2] is full of moments when sensible people say this could not possibly happen here.

[1] Contrast Conservatives voting on block to sweep aside the Lord’s amendments to the Labour rebellion over the EEA. Often the fact that Labour MPs have views for which they are quite prepared to vote against their leadership is seen as a political weakness, but what we are seeing right now is the Conservative desire for party unity as a colossal political weakness.

[2] Before anyone objects, of course this only applies to the UK on the single decision of Brexit, for now. But Brexit is perhaps the most important change in UK politics since the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the way this change has come about does show structural similarities to the transformation of the US Republican party that led to the election of Donald Trump.

A hostile environment

The received wisdom on immigration goes as follows. Growing public concern about increased immigration to the UK led the Coalition government to put in place a target for net migration, and then enact measures to achieve that target. Creating a ‘hostile environment’ to discourage immigration was part of that effort. The Windrush generation and descendants are unfortunate victims of overzealous or box ticking officials.

Almost everything in this received wisdom is wrong. Although immigration has never been popular, active concern as reflected in opinion polls increased followed the Conservative party highlighting the issue as a way to attack the then Labour government (Hague: foreign land, Howard: are you thinking what we are thinking), and more importantly an increasing number of articles in the right wing press portraying immigrants or asylum seekers in a negative light. Most people didn't think immigration was a problem locally, but they perceived it was a problem for the country as a whole. The best predictors of immigration concern was readership of the Mail, Express and Sun. 

In my post about neoliberal overreach, I listed austerity and immigration as the two ways in which the 2010 Coalition government went too far in an effort to achieve neoliberal goals. Austerity was what I call deficit deceit: using scare stories about the deficit to shrink the state. The focus on immigration with the tens of thousands target was also deceit because most of the government had no intention of achieving that target. The hostile environment policy was there for show, as part of the deceit. The 'go home' vans were meant to be seen by the public, not illegal immigrants. Most of the government knew that seriously trying to achieve their immigration target would damage the economy, but rather than tell the public this they continued the facade to take votes off Labour and UKIP. 

The facade came back to bite the Conservative government during the Brexit referendum. Cameron could not credibly start talking up the benefits of EU freedom of movement while at the same time putting policies in place that made it appear as if he was trying to hit his own immigration target, and then failing to do so. In that sense the Conservative's immigration policy created the Brexit disaster. 

Part of the facade of trying to hit that target was the hostile environment policy. Some ministers were right to suggest that the policy was “almost reminiscent of Nazi Germany”. To say that the policy only applied to illegal immigrants misses the key point: people were assumed guilty of being illegal until they could prove, and pay to prove, that they had a legitimate right to be here. Being assumed guilty could mean losing your job or your home. If the Home Office made a mistake, the applicant had to pay to try to put it right. If the mistake was large enough, they could be detained without trial.

What is worse, the policy entrapped landlords, employers and nurses into acting as extensions of this Home Office regime. Some, fearing the consequences of getting things wrong, were bound to be tempted to discriminate against anyone who was not white and did not have a British accent. In that sense the policy actively encouraged discrimination. But the Conservative party didn't mind, just as it didn't see any problem in conducting an Islamophobic campaign against Sadiq Kahn 

The hostile environment policy, like austerity, has ruined people’s lives. Some are Windrush, some are not. The Home Office were warned about how the policy was entrapping innocent people in 2014, but did nothing. Rudd and May could see what the policy was doing to innocent people caught in their net, and they made no attempt to change anything. They only acknowledged problems when they were forced to by public opinion. [1]

Like austerity, the Conservative party’s focus on immigration seemed like a useful political tactic at the time, as well as playing to the xenophobic elements in the party’s base. Like austerity, the policy started to do real harm to innocent people, yet the leadership showed no inclination to dilute or abandon their policy. While Cameron and Osborne could see that the immigration target was only there for show, they had given the responsibility of achieving it to someone who didn’t get the deceit. Worse still, Theresa May seemed quite happy with any collateral damage as she stubbornly pursued the impossible.

So austerity and the hostile environment continue, because the Chancellor and Prime Minister respectively are committed to these policies, and seem indifferent to the consequences until forced to undertake partial palliatives. This is why I called both policies neoliberal overreach. Past Labour leaderships have unfortunately felt they had to tag along with both or suffer electoral costs. Liberal Democrats were part of the government that enacted both. The media helped construct or went along with narratives that made both policies seem essential. But there was a small group of Labour MPs who opposed both policies on principle, and continue to do so. Is it any wonder that it is they who now lead the opposition party? Is it any wonder that the political and media consensus that enacted neoliberal overreach will do anything they can to prevent that group gaining power?

[1] The same public opinion that supposedly was clamouring for policies to control immigration. It is sometimes said that most people dislike immigration not immigrants. When confronted (thanks to persistent strong journalism) with the human consequences of anti-immigration policy on actual immigrants, the public pull back. Most of the public lack the ideological zeal and indifference to its human consequences of many of their political leaders.

On free trade and free markets

Jonn Elledge had a nice piece in the New Statesman about free trade. The question he poses is how Brexiteers can exalt free trade but want to leave the most developed free trade area in the world, the EU. The answer he gives is to distinguish between ‘free to’ and ‘free from’. When economists talk about free trade they mean free to trade, which is what the EU has achieved through regulatory harmonisation in particular. Brexiteers mean ‘free from’ in the sense of trade free from government intervention.

I think we can go beyond what Elledge says and make exactly the same point about the term ‘free market’. A Brexiteer might think of a free market as a market free from government interference, including government regulations. An economist would be more likely to talk about a free market as one where people were free to trade in a socially optimal way. The state might be required to make that happen in many ways.

To take just one example, markets can sometimes not exist because of information asymmetries, but if those asymmetries are removed then people can beneficially trade. (Economists will immediately recognise this as Akerlof’s famous market for lemons.) Removing those asymmetries does not necessarily require government, but government could play that role. If it did, we would have a free market as an economist would define it, but only as a result of what some on the right might call government ‘interference’. As Mariana Mazzucato would argue, the state can also create markets through organising research and development.

Two governments that harmonise each others regulations can create better markets in both countries by increasing competition. Equally there are other government measures that make markets work better. The most obvious example is to reduce monopoly power, which reduces prices and increases the quantity traded in that market. In truth the idea of a market completely free from government is semi-mythical: all markets work within a legal framework created and enforced by the state. When some people complain about government interference in markets, and eulogise ‘free markets’, they are really just complaining about forms of interference they do not like and are using the notion of freedom to glorify their distaste.

Nevertheless, I think this distinction between ‘free to’ and ‘free from’ its perhaps a way of resolving something of a paradox that I talked about in my neoliberal overreach piece. The paradox was whether Brexit can be described as neoliberal, as it involves the apparent illiberal destruction of a free trade area. If you see neoliberalism in practice or ‘in action’ as not so much a coherent (if flawed) unified theory (as here, for example), but rather a collection of views that encompass not just free trade but also promotion of the market and dislike of certain market interference, then neoliberal overreach can occur in any of those dimensions. [1]

So those like Osborne who wanted a smaller state so taxes could be lower (and perhaps for other reasons to) went for austerity as a means of achieving that. Those, like most Brexiteers, who wanted less regulation (including no state interference in how they personally avoid paying tax) pushed Brexit, even though it involved reducing the ability to trade. What Colin Crouch calls corporate neoliberals turned a blind eye to growing monopoly and rent extraction.

While all three groups were happy to eulogise free trade and free markets, conflicts arise over the interpretation of free. For the Brexteers free trade means freedom from government interference, while for Osborne it meant free to trade. For corporate neoliberals free markets means markets that are free from government limits on monopoly and attempts to avoid rent seeking, while ordoliberals want the state to control monopoly so markets are free to work for society.

Today for most people most of the time the idea of freedom generates positive emotions (although that itself is a social phenomenon, as Adam Curtis among others explored.) It is therefore a word worth expropriating for a political cause if you can. But by noting that conflicts arise between ‘free to’ and ‘free from’ we can perhaps see that all politicians are doing is trying to promote a form of freedom that suits their cause.

[1] In an interesting piece, Will Davies argues against the need to want to define political or social terms precisely as if they “connect cleanly and unambiguously to some object”.