The political, moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the current Conservative party

 

The UK is currently suffering a level of strike action not seen for decades. There is a simple reason for most of that - it is government policy. Take the continuing strikes in the rail industry. According to the Financial Times two weeks ago: “Employers had planned to offer a 10 per cent pay rise over two years to the RMT union, but were blocked by the government, which controls the industry’s finances, according to three people familiar with the matter” by adding tough new conditions at the last minute.

Or take the unprecedented strike by many nurses. Nurses have seen a large cut in their pay relative to those in the private sector since 2010. The government’s current pay offer will see that continue. Quite simply, nurses are being forced to strike because the government insists on reducing their standard of living compared to private sector workers as well as making their working conditions more intolerable. Now if for every nursing vacancy there were hundreds of applications then you could make a case for lower pay, but the opposite is true, partly because many nurses are leaving the NHS. It is a similar picture across the public sector.

Of course the government tries to assert that none of this is true. Instead they like to pretend that they are on the side of poor suffering Joe Public, and also like to claim that somehow it is the Labour opposition’s fault that we are seeing all these strikes. Given the level of misinformation we have in this country many (although for nurses certainly not a majority) will believe them. The reality is that the government thinks these strikes will work to their political advantage in returning some core Conservative support they have lost in recent months. In other words, they are making these strikes happen, despite the inconvenience this will cause and the damage it will do to the country, because they believe it’s to their party's political advantage.

Governing in a way that harms the country but boosts your flagging popularity is a good measure of political and moral bankruptcy.

But strikes are not an isolated example in an otherwise sea of policies the government is enacting to benefit the country. Take one of the most pressing issues of the moment, which is the crisis in the NHS. UK citizens are dying who would otherwise have lived because ambulance waiting times have sky-rocketed, A&E departments are overloaded and delays for many basic operations are at record levels. A key reason for this is a lack of beds and infrastructure, made acute by the number of patients being treated in hospitals with Covid, together with an inability to pass on patients to social care

Neither is an excuse for the government to do nothing! On the contrary, dealing with both is what any government is there to do. But where is the government action to create more NHS beds, and the staff that goes with them, following the emergence of Covid? What are the government’s plans to deal with the crisis in social care? Once again, by refusing to pay NHS staff more, and failing to provide the resources to attract more people into social care, the government is actively making things worse.

The new Prime Minister made a big speech announcing a new policy last week. But it wasn’t about the NHS or social care, or the growing poverty caused by the cost of living crisis. Instead it was about people crossing the Channel in small boats, mostly to claim asylum in the UK. Shortly afterwards some died trying to make that crossing in icy waters. Yet, as Lewis Goodall points out in this excellent summary, Sunak’s speech did not contain the one policy that could solve the problem of small boat crossings at a stroke, which is for the government to provide a means for asylum seekers from wherever they come to claim asylum safely.

Once again, the problem of Channel crossings is a problem of the government’s own making. By failing to provide any safe route for asylum seekers from all but a few countries to claim asylum in the UK, they create the demand for small boat crossings and the smuggler gangs that facilitate this. Why don’t they want to provide a safe route for asylum seekers? Because they want less asylum seekers in the UK compared to most other comparable countries. While some countries that have the same goal erect high barbed wire fences on their borders, we have the English Channel.

Those in the Conservative party, if they were being honest, would say they were just doing what their supporters want. Those in the Labour party who do not point out the truth about Channel crossings would say the same about the voters they need to attract to win the next election. There is some logic for such claims, because the UK’s FPTP voting system and our right wing press bias policy towards the interests of those who just want less people claiming asylum in the UK. But if this is the politicians’ excuse, why lie about it, and call those making the Channel Crossing ‘illegal migrants’? It means politicians are going beyond what they need to do to represent these voters. They are not only helping to put people’s lives at risk just for party political gain, but they are distorting or concealing the truth from those they represent. [1]

Take the biggest crisis facing the world today, climate change. What does the current government do? Opens a new coal mine. A government that lets people die just to win votes, or puts the future of humanity at risk for a bit more money today, is a good indication of political and moral bankruptcy.

It seems the government has given up on the business of governing, and instead its actions are determined only by what gains their party a few more votes. You might be cynical and say it is ever thus, but I think this is wrong. Whatever you might have thought about her vision, Margaret Thatcher did have ideas about how to make the UK a better place. Some of that might have been destructive, like reducing union power, but it was also constructive, like helping to create the Single Market for EU trade. There were of course some policies designed just to win votes, like selling council houses for example, but there was also a clear set of new ideas about how to improve the economy and individual opportunity.

The same is true for the Labour government of 1997-2010. Gordon Brown could list the many ways it had made lives better through specific policies in a conference speech. It too had a vision. If we call the vision of Thatcher neoliberalism, we could call Labour’s vision neoliberalism with a human face. Yet it is hard to imagine Rishi Sunak giving a similar speech about the achievements of Conservative led government since 2010. Austerity left the UK permanently poorer, put UK public services in a dire state, and yet UK taxes are at a record high. Brexit has bought further economic misery but hasn’t brought any benefits worth listing in a conference speech, with even immigration at record highs.

To describe all three governments as embodying neoliberalism misses these key differences, and therefore misses the political and moral bankruptcy of the current government. Yes, it still spouts neoliberal platitudes, but they have increasingly become clichés designed not to try and make the country better off with more opportunities for its citizens, but instead used as a mask for funneling money to friends, donors or potential future employers. So the UK’s private water companies are protected at the expense of sewage in our rivers and on our beaches. Energy companies are allowed to keep their record profits if they invest in producing more climate warming oil. Private companies with the right political connections are paid over the odds with public money to provide unusable PPE, then paid with public money to store it and then other private companies are paid with public money to dispose of it. I have described all this as a transition from neoliberalism to a form of plutocracy elsewhere.

Once we see austerity as the huge mistake it undoubtedly was, we can see that the bankruptcy of the current government did not start after a referendum in 2016, but from its very start in 2010. Wanting less public services and taxes without changing what the public sector does turned out to be as foolish as it sounds. With this, and nonsense like Britannia Unchained, Conservative ministers took the platitudes of neoliberalism [2] and thought that together they made a coherent and realistic vision, yet they remain in denial that this pursuit has done nothing but harm to the UK economy.

All this represents an intellectual as well as a political and moral failure. A failure to see that growth under Labour before the financial crisis matched that under Thatcher, and also more than matched growth in other G7 countries, yet with better public services and without the advantages of growing North Sea Oil revenues. A failure to recognise that increasing taxes to bring NHS spending up to European levels was popular. A failure to learn from the fact that the Global Financial Crisis reflected a lack rather than an excess of government regulation. All these showed at the very least the limitations and dangers of unbridled neoliberalism, yet these lessons were ignored

This intellectual failure didn’t end once the Conservatives were in power. After unjustly blaming, with the invaluable help of their press, immigrants for many of society's problems in opposition, Cameron set up immigration targets he either couldn’t hit or wasn’t willing to hit, yet his party used immigrants as a scapegoat for the effects of austerity. This played into the hands of populist Brexiters, who only had to link immigration to free-movement to make their case. After Brexit it seemed that the exclusive motivation of Conservative MPs became power for power’s sake, exemplified by the election of Boris Johnson. His own moral bankruptcy does not need retelling, although it is worth noting that public money is still being used to defend his lies over Covid partying.

When a government refuses to use our money to pay nurses a decent wage or relieve severe rationing in the health service, but instead spends it on defending the obvious lies of a disgraced former party leader, that is a pretty clear sign of political and moral bankruptcy.

It is true that the Covid pandemic would severely test any government. But the current government, including the current Prime Minister, failed that test repeatedly. Long term planning for a pandemic in the form of stockpiles of equipment was allowed to become useless under austerity. Once the pandemic started, an initial hope that the pandemic could just be ignored led to little contingency planning, yet that hope was scuppered once data arrived. Over the summer of 2020 Sunak championed spending public money that helped create a second wave of infection, and pushed Johnson to listen to a tiny minority of experts who were against lockdowns. Johnson himself, under the influence of some newspaper owners, began to distrust the centuries old methods of dealing with pandemics, so scientific advice was frequently ignored and lockdowns delayed. Tens of thousands died unnecessarily as a result.

If there is one image that sums up the moral bankruptcy of the current Conservative party for me, it is the massed ranks of Conservative MPs in the summer of 2021 sitting on the crowded government benches with hardly a face mask to be seen, even though the government’s own advice at the time was to wear masks in crowded indoor places. It was just like partying in No.10, except it involved nearly all Conservative MPs in an unashamedly public way. Here were our elected representatives putting their own personal convenience, vanity or warped ideology above the interests of those around them, and by implication above the interests of those they represented. The Conservatives have been labelled the nasty party with much justification, but since 2010 they have become a party whose only aim seems to be to look after themselves.

[1] At the end of the day it’s a policy that makes a minority suffer, and a few die, so that some voters can feel happier. The primary responsibility for those policies lies with the politicians that enact them.

[2] For example 'government should get out of the way', reward the 'wealth creators', or 'regulations hold back business'.

When people warning about incipient fascism are criticised rather than laughed at is the time to worry about incipient fascism

I’m old enough to remember left wing demonstrations in the UK when ‘fascist!’ was a standard chant. On most occasions back then it was a ridiculous accusation, and as such it was rightly laughed away. But times have unfortunately changed. With authoritarian regimes in some East European countries, Trump’s election and subsequent behaviour, and far right parties gaining ground in other countries, fears of a return of something like fascism are no longer a laughing matter.

When Andrew Marr interviewed David Lammy a week ago, he suggested Lammy talking about appeasement of the ERG in the same terms of Hitler or apartheid was “unacceptable”. Not ludicrous but unacceptable, and by implication something Lammy should apologise for. Quite rightly, and so refreshingly for a Labour MP in the glare of TV lights, Lammy was having none of this. He said his comments were not strong enough. When Marr protested that these were elected MPs he was talking about, Lammy reminded him that the National Socialists had elected MPs. In 1932 they were the largest party in the Reichstag.

Nigel Farage is not an MP, but the BBC seem happy not just to give the launch of his new party considerable airtime, but also to do so in an uncritical manner. After the BBC had chosen the soundbite from his speech about putting the fear of god into MPs for what they had done to us, no one was given airtime to warn about how dangerous that kind of speech was, and that one MP had been murdered by the far right, another plot foiled and about many other serious threats to MPs. I think it is fair to say that the launch of the Brexit party was news and had to be covered, but to provide no kind of critical balance whatsoever was a strange decision.

Discussions of incipient fascism go in the wrong direction when direct comparisons are made to fascism in the 1930s. Equally ticking off check lists of signs of fascism just beg the question of how many ticks mean we should be worried. There is no generally accepted definition of fascism. We need to be more analytical, but also to update the analysis to the circumstances of today.

Much of the academic discussion of this issue takes place under the umbrella of studying populism. I think this is a little unfortunate, because the populism umbrella can be spread very wide to include any political party that challenges an existing party political structure. If you are interested in incipient fascism a better conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The real people quickly becomes those that support the populist leader. The others, especially immigrants or minority religions or races, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. Populists of the Müller type will be strong on nationalism, as well as threats from within and without. Intimidation and violence against opponents is never far away. Populists will talk about the elite that has been leading the country astray, and how they as leader has to constantly battle against this elite, even though they themselves are often part of that elite.

I think a critical aspect of Müller’s account is that populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of pluralist democracy if they believe they are frustrating what the populist leader perceives as the will of the people. Authoritarian populist leaders deny the necessity of democratic pluralism, such as an independent judiciary or an independent media. The people, as expressed through the populist leadership, takes precedence over all other elements of pluralist democracy, and these elements must be made to bow before that will or be replaced by those who embody that will.

A clear example of what Müller is talking about is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. He has pledged to create an illiberal state like Russia or China. Perhaps as a result, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at a 2015 EU summit dispensed with diplomatic protocol to greet Orbán with a "Hello, dictator." To further this aim he has gone about controlling the media and courts either directly or through placement of allies, with complete success. This together with a lethal combination of extreme nationalism, scaremongering about migrants and antagonism against Muslims and Jews keeps him popular. NGOs have been attacked, which has led to legal proceedings by the European Commission. A host of public bodies like its fiscal council, the central bank, and the national elections commission, have been abolished or their independence limited. An international university in Budapest has been forced to close down.

Yet Hungary is still a democracy in the sense of having reasonably genuine elections. When occasionally the opposition does win a local election, Orbán unleashes the full might of his nationalist, enemies at the door, enemies within narrative at them. With almost total control of the media and civil institutions, he can make life very difficult for the opposition. He won his last election with ease.

I would argue that this is the incipient fascism of today. It is possible that Orbán’s nationalism and control of the media and other parts of the state will allow him to maintain total control for many years. If at some point in the future a unified and effective opposition does arise, we will see if Hungary moves back to democracy or to something worse than the elected dictatorship it now is.

It is also easy to see many of the traits of a Müller populist in Donald Trump. He is impatient with the constraints of the judiciary, and is more than happy to fill vacancies with barely qualified or unqualified individuals who will do what he wants. He plays up threats from within and without. He has a penchant for dictators in other countries. He endlessly criticises the ‘fake news’ that comes from an independent press, and instead favours the Republican/Trump propaganda that comes from Fox News. When asked whether he was concerned about death threats that followed his disgraceful attack on one of only two Muslims in Congress he basically said no. His own Republican party provides no check on his actions.

But in what sense can any of this be applied to the single political project called Brexit? The ERG are a disparate group of MPs, whose common cause is to push for the most extreme form of Brexit. There is no single authoritarian leader among them. So can Müller’s concept of populism still apply to this project and some of those who push it?

Let’s begin with what happened shortly after the 2016 vote. That referendum did not specify how we left or under what circumstances Article 50 should be triggered, but May decided that she uniquely understood what the referendum meant and parliament did not need to be involved. The Prime Minister wanted to start the Article 50 process without consulting parliament. The issue went to court, and when three judges decided parliament did have to approve the decision, the Daily Mail described them on its front page as enemies of the people.

The Brexit press and those promoting Brexit frequently talk about the will of the people, thereby excluding the 48% who did not vote for it. Indeed Remainers are often accused of sabotaging Brexit, and being the elite that those carrying out the will of the people have to defeat. EU citizens living here are effectively ignored, and were not even allowed to vote in the referendum. When the costs of Brexit are mentioned, we will often be reminded of how the British stood alone in WWII and came through the hardship of war. This is nationalist imagery at its most potent and dangerous. At one point the Daily Telegraph managed to find common cause with the authoritarian regime in Hungary and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew for his ‘plot’ to stop Brexit.

To sum up, Brexit and those that push it have displayed almost every element of Müller style populism. I have not even needed to refer to links between various Brexit politicians and the German AfD, Steve Bannon and various far right groups. Or about law breaking in order to win the vote, and the lack of enthusiasm shown by the police in investigating this. Brexit displays the same populist characteristics that you see in Victor Orban or Donald Trump. Add the violence that Brexit has inspired and the pro-Brexit right encourage with their talk of treason and we have every reason to warn about incipient fascism, as Michael Heseltine pointed out.

It is also naive to imagine that all this will stop if we end up leaving the EU. Steve Bannon is creating a network of far right parties that will use immigration and islamophobia to undermine existing parties and then pluralist democracy. Islamophobia has already been employed by the Conservatives in trying to stop Sadiq Khan becoming mayor of London. Brexit of the kind proposed by May will undermine living standards for working people that have hardly grown for a decade. This stagnation, coupled by unfettered and growing inequality, is the kindling that Bannon and his network hope to set alight.

In my view this has become so dangerous partly because the political centre fails to see it. The Brexiters are appeased by May rather than isolated as John Major did. Those termed political moderates fret about the leader of the Labour party as much if not more than incipient fascism. I cannot quite decide whether the BBC is just blind to all this or elements within actively promote it. A lesson of history is that the far right is at its most dangerous when it is appeased by a centre that is more concerned about the threat from the left.

How Brexit threatens pluralist democracy in the UK

A pluralistic democracy is a democracy with many centres of power. Typically that involves an executive (the government) and parliament, central and local government, an independent judiciary and an independent press. Countries differ in how pluralist they are: the UK has a more permanent civil service than the US but its second house of parliament does not have equal power to the first.

Plurality is embodied in conventions as well as institutions. In a two party system the other side is respected as embodying the wishes of part of the population, and there may on occasion be cooperation between politicians on different sides over certain issues. In addition plurality itself is respected: the government does not normally contest the power of parliament and the judiciary, for example.

Although there was room for improvement before Brexit (power was pretty centralised), the UK was a pluralist democracy. This post is about how Brexit has begun to threaten that. It began with how the Prime Minister, encouraged by a section of her party and a large section of the press, interpreted the referendum result. The country was almost equally divided. That should have meant that the form of Brexit should have tried to take account of the fact that almost half of those voting wanted to stay in the EU. Instead the Prime Minister chose a form of Brexit that appealed to a clear minority of parliament.

Perhaps partly because of this (but I suspect also because of her temperament), Theresa May chose to marginalise parliament as much as she could. She didn’t want it to vote on whether Article 50 should be invoked. That battle went to the supreme court, and she lost. The press that had played such a crucial part in getting a majority for Brexit called the judges ‘enemies of the people’ or similar. If judges had hoped for some defence of an independent judiciary from the government they were disappointed.

However the executive did not only aim to take power away from parliament on this one decision. In the bill that transfer EU laws to the UK, various Henry VIII clauses were inserted which gave the executive the power to ignore parliament. The opposition voted against these clauses, and eventually May was forced to retreat when some Conservative MPs rebelled. These rebels have been branded saboteurs on the front pages of the right wing press. As of now it remains the case that MPs will not be given a meaningful vote on the terms of the final Brexit deal: if they vote against the government says it will leave with no deal.

The government has also done its best to try and conceal the analysis the civil service has done on different forms of Brexit, and ministers have lied to parliament and the public in the process. The Prime Minister and ministers seem happy to lie to the public about the imaginary Brexit dividend, and the broadcast media fails to question these lies. Ministers appear to have no qualms in calling the leader of the opposition a traitor based of fanciful stories in the right wing press.

Is there something inherent in Brexit that has brought about these attacks on pluralistic democracy? To an extent I think there is. Brexit is a fantasy project that will actually do the economy harm, and as I argued here when politicians attempt to conceal the truth from the public they tend to become more authoritarian. As the dreams of some Brexiters fall apart on the rocks of the EU negotiations and the Irish border, no doubt similar attempts will be made to conceal that truth from the public as well.

However I think there are two other factors linked to Brexit that have helped this form of populism emerge in the UK. The first is the character of Theresa May herself. She shows a disregard for people that I cannot remember in previous Prime Ministers. The current excesses of the Home Office with respect to immigrants who have lived here for decades is a direct result of her ‘hostile environment’ policy, which she seems happy to continue. She took the decision to ignore the wishes of the 48%, and she also decided to use EU migrants in this country as bargaining chips in the negotiations. The government seems largely indifferent to the increase in attacks on immigrants since the Brexit vote. Her focus seems entirely on keeping her party together, whatever the collateral damage in terms of broken individual lives.

The second factor is the right wing press. In other countries we have seen the dangers of the state (or head of government) controlling large parts of the media. The same problem arises with Brexit. At its best the press can expose government failure and corruption, but at its worst it just acts in its owners self-interest. When those interests happen to be aligned with the interest of the government then the press acts as the state's propaganda arm. It has been the right wing’s press that has banged the ‘will of the people’ drum, which is classic populist (as in anti-pluralist) trope. The situation has been made much worse by the BBC’s apparent indifference to negative news about Brexit: its lack of interest in the Cambridge Analytica link to referendum overspending allegations is deeply worrying.

Understanding why we have seen attacks against pluralist democracy in the UK helps answer the question of how permanent these threats might be. Parliament is to some extent fighting back at the attempts by the executive to reduce its power. If Brexit is neutralised as an issue, the force behind attacks on pluralistic democracy disappears, unless of course it is replaced by something else. However Theresa May could remain as Prime Minister for a lot longer than people imagined after the election of 2017 [1]. The right wing press will still be with us, with their message amplified by the BBC. The situation in the UK is not as bad as it is in the US, where the entire Republican party seems to have given up on pluralistic democracy, but that is cold comfort for a country that often boasts of its democratic heritage.

[1] That includes myself. When I wrote about the Conservative zugswang, I actually underestimated the bind the Conservatives were in. I confidently said “The Conservatives will not fight another election with May as their leader.” That is now less clear. As long as Brexit remains a live issue, which it will do until the end of 2020 at least, the majority of Conservative MPs dare not replace May because the party could elect someone like Rees-Mogg to take her place.

Ian Dunt vs Owen Jones: a comment on a brief debate

When two of my favourite commentators on current political events, Ian Dunt (ID) and Owen Jones (OJ), cross swords, albeit briefly twitter style, the chance is that there maybe something interesting going on. I can see what I suspect annoyed OJ in ID’s piece, but I think OJ’s response was too easily sidetracked in the confusion that is history. I am going to stay on more familiar UK (and US) ground.

The general theme is ID’s piece is totally laudable. It is essentially a warning against populism of the type Jan-Werner Müller describes, and which is embodied in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. I also think he is almost right when he writes:

“Every constituent part of the Orban programme exists here: the anti-semitism, the focus on Soros, the relentless fear-mongering about immigrants, the demonisation of the EU and its institutions, the attacks on Islam, the undermining of an independent judiciary, and, most of all, the widespread conspiracy-squint - the idea, popular on left and right, on almost all matters of political consequence, that shadowy and powerful forces are undermining the people's will.”

I say “almost” because this is an undifferentiated list, and the emphasis is put on what I regard as least important. For Müller populism is a moralised form of antipluralism. The populist politician talks about the “will of the people” even when the people may be just a subset of the population, but the wishes and beliefs of the remainder are of no weight and are not acknowledged. They become instead the enemy within. To overcome that enemy within (be it Jews or Muslims or liberals) and the enemy outside (the EU trying to force Hungarians to accept immigrants), the leader needs total control, which means subjugating an independent judiciary, an independent press and other independent institutions. For Müller, populism is an attack on pluralistic democracy, attempting to replace it with some kind of autocratic or plutocratic democracy. Orban’s Hungary has so far been a very successful (in terms of longevity) example of this form of populism.

Where I started to disagree with ID’s piece is where he tries to do the classic centrist thing, which is to imply that the dangers of populism in the UK come from both left and right. In immediate historical terms this is nonsense. Immigration as an issue was revitalised by the Conservative opposition and the right wing press in the early years of the Labour government. In 2001 William Hague talked about Tony Blair wanting to turn the UK into a ‘foreign land’. The right wing papers started producing negative stories about immigrants, long after the rise in non-EU immigration in the late 1990s and long before the rise in EU immigration from 2004, and popular concern about immigration rose with this increase in press coverage. The best explanatory variables in explaining concern about immigration were readership of the Mail, Express and Sun, in that order. All three were better predictors of concern about immigration than whether people voted Conservative.

When the Conservatives became part of the coalition government in 2010, this emphasis on immigration became official policy. By now the idea that immigration was ‘a problem’ that needed to ‘be controlled’ was firmly entrenched in political discourse. Conservatives found it attractive because it could persuade socially conservative left wing voters not to vote Labour, and because it became a useful scapegoat for the effects of austerity. The right wing tabloids also found it attractive because it became a means of winning the Brexit vote. And it is Brexit where we have seen populism in full force in the UK: talk of the ‘will of the people’ as if the 48% who voted Remain did not exist, attacks on the judiciary, on the civil service, on parliament and on universities. The EU is the enemy without, and Remainers are the enemy within.

To the extent that populism has come to the UK, it has come from the political right, not the political left. Yes Labour in government eventually felt they had to play along with the immigration problem theme, and yes there are Lexiters on the left. But the motive force for attacks on immigration and Brexit comes from the right, not the left. [1]

Much the same point can be made about the US. Trump was voted into office as a Republican, and he remains unchecked in office because of the Republican party. To suggest that Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for Trump is just nonsense.

In this story of how populism came to the UK, and represents an ever present threat in the UK, Labour’s problems over antisemitism do not even deserve a footnote. Antisemitism is a big part of Orban’s campaign and rhetoric, personified in his constant attacks on George Soros, but that theme has been repeated not by Corbyn but by the same right wing press that focused on immigration and gave us Brexit. Antisemtism is a problem within Labour, but the source of that problem is the Israel Palestine situation. It is not, and never will be, a part of a Labour government’s appeal to the electorate. It will not be a Labour government that tells people that have lived here for scores of years that they now have to leave the UK and say goodbye to their friends and family. It is not and never will be the Labour party that runs an Islamophobic campaign for mayor of London.

In Europe and the US, the threat today of an authoritarian, anti-pluralist government comes exclusively from the right. To lose sight of that makes dealing with that threat much more difficult.

[1] There are plenty of centrist Remainers who insist Brexit is as much Corbyn’s fault as it is the government’s. Apparently the fact that Corbyn campaigned for Remain does not count because he didn’t put enough energy and passion into that campaign. When he says he would vote Remain again he must be lying because no one ever changes their mind. Accusing Corbyn of being too ready to accept the referendum result is fine by me, but to put him in the same class as Johnson and Gove is just token centrism.

A road to right wing authoritarian government

This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller's ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes

“In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a new constitution, weaken checks and balances, and radically reduce media pluralism. Instead, he presented himself as a competent mainstream Christian Democrat. In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) party went out of its way to stress its character as a reasonable conservative party which simply wanted to provide more benefits to families with children.“

The idea that most voters should see beyond the mask to understand who politicians really are is ridiculous. As the 2016 US general election showed, the information content of the broadcast media can be increasingly small.

Does Trump provide a counterexample of this, because he was an 'outsider' who was elected? I would say no for two reasons. First, the Republican party had played a large part in creating the political environment that allowed his populism to win votes. Second, the Republican party seems quite content to behave in ways which complement Trump's authoritarianism. (By attacking the CBO, for example.)

The message is that if you want to investigate populist regimes (using populist in the Müller sense) you need to look at political elites rather than the electorate. I think he is right. But what makes an elite adopt an authoritarian path? I am sure there are many answers to that question, but what I will try to do below (in no doubt a very 'untutored' way) is to show one route in what had been a pluralistic democracy by which elites from the right can move in a populist, authoritarian direction. I'm an economist, so I use a simple model.

Here is a two dimensional variation on the familiar left-right diagram. The additional dimension is sometimes called 'identity' or 'culture'. Let us assume that voters are evenly distributed inside the circle. (Not necessarily a good assumption: see here.) In a two party system you might expect both parties, if their main concern was to be elected, to adopt positions that put them close to the centre. This is because the party a voter will vote for is governed by the party that is nearest to them.

But suppose that a party wants to take a less centrist position, either because its backers wish this or because its politicians believe is some ideology. To be concrete, suppose the party of the right wants to adopt a very right wing economic policy that involves, for example, distributing income from most people to the very rich. In a one-dimensional left-right space such a party would be doomed. But suppose their opponents, for whatever reason, were fairly liberal. If we assume that the left is fairly moderate on economic issues, then that places the two parties at the position given by P in the diagram above. That leaves them evenly matched. (To see why, see below.).

The party on the right will want to focus on their socially conservative platform, while the party on the left will stress their more 'moderate' economic platform. This looks like a stable situation, which contains no threat to a pluralistic democracy. What could change to upset it? Here is just one possible route.

If the right has more influence on the media than the left, they can campaign on a platform that differs from the platform they intend to implement. If you can pretend that you are a moderate party on economic issues rather than an extreme right party, and this pretense works, then your party wins. So in terms of voter perception, the party on the right moves along the upper arrow from position P to C. The left party might respond in kind by pretending they are less liberal than they are, but because they have less media influence they cannot move so far from their true position. If we look at the campaign positions of the two parties, marked by C, it is intuitively clear that the right wing party wins any election. (The dotted lines show a proof – see [1])

We see this in the US with tax cuts (pushing the idea that lower corporation taxes will mainly raise wages), in the UK with austerity (which was really a policy to shrink the state much further than most wanted, dressed up as some kind of moralistic injunction that governments should be like households) and especially Brexit, where advocates pretended there would be no economic cost to leaving the EU. The counterpart of hiding a right wing position is to emphasise conservative issues. This is most obvious with the culture war in the US, together with the politics of race. In the UK the key social issue was immigration, which the Conservatives started focusing on from the late 1990s. (The great thing about immigration as an issue for the right is that it can be (falsely) given an economic dimension.) Again Brexit is an exemplar, with not just immigration ('protect our borders') but nationalism ('take back control').

While this results in short term gains for the right, as a tactic it is unstable in the longer term because governments once in power implement their real economic policies. We will move back from C to P on the lower arrow. Voters observe tax cuts for the better off at their expense, they observe the impact of austerity and, in the UK, they observe the consequences of Brexit. It may take some time, but right wing leaders know they are vulnerable to reality winning out over spin, so they may wish to take actions to offset the democratic consequences of being found out.

There are lots of directions this authoritarian turn can take. Taking greater control of the media, either directly by shutting down critical media or buying off media owners in exchange for support, is one direction we see taken in Hungary. Gerrymandering is favoured by Republicans in the US. Portraying opposition leaders as traitors is favoured in the UK. Ramping up nationalism and the 'threat' from immigration almost everywhere.

Politics that is exclusively along the social conservative/liberal axis can degenerate into a kind of identity politics where you just vote for your tribe. As Müller writes

“The problem starts when citizens view every issue purely as a matter of partisan identity, so that the credibility of climate science, for example, depends on whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. It gets worse when partisan identity becomes so strong that no arguments from or about the legitimacy of the other side ever get through.”

The path to authoritarianism I set out here is not meant to be the whole story, and is not meant to correspond with any particular country. What I hope it does illustrate is how an authoritarian government can emerge when a party adopts a very right wing economic policy, and pretends it has not. It happens without voters changing their views or preferences in any way. It is authoritarian populism that comes from the behaviour of right wing elites.

[1] To see which party wins (assuming my geometry is correct), draw a line between the two positions, and then draw a line at right angles that bisects it. Every voter on that line is indifferent (equidistant) between the two parties, and therefore every voter either side of the line votes for each party.

The two types of populism within Brexit

When I read this by Hungarian academic Tamas Dezso Ziegler, I could not help thinking he had a point. The point, as I understand it, is that by calling people like Trump or Farage populist, when at the same time we call Syriza or Podemos populist, we are in danger of diminishing or normalising the danger the former pose. He suggests this wide definition of populism

“could be useful because there is not necessarily a moral evaluation behind it: if they would use far right demagoguery, or fascist politics, it would show something dangerous, extreme. It would ring the bell to us all. Populism does not do so.”

We could add that talking about “right populists” and “left populists” allows the academic to show a kind of balance.

There seem to me to be two definitions of populism. Dani Rodrik defines populism here as parties/politicians/movements with

“an anti-establishment orientation, a claim to speak for the people against the elites, opposition to liberal economics and globalisation, and often (but not always) a penchant for authoritarian governance.”

The problem I have with definitions like this is that they seem to be encompassing rather than natural. By this I mean that it includes things that do not obviously go together, but instead are chosen so that they encompass some list of political parties. Virtually every candidate for Congress in the US declares that they will ‘sort out Washington’, so appears anti-establishment and for the people rather than elites. In contrast, authoritarian governance is optional. What seems to be doing the work here is opposition to liberal economics and globalisation.

It seems to me that a quite different conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The others, be they immigrants or the 48%, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. And, critically in my view, populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of democracy if they believe they are frustrating what they perceive as the will of the people. The populist, if you accept Müller’s account, denies pluralism. They are naturally authoritarian, and so are happy to tear down the elements of a pluralist democracy. [1]

Thinking in terms of left or right tends to get in the way here. The more appropriate axis to thinking about this definition of populism is social liberalism and conservatism. A social liberal, almost by definition, is not going to attack democratic pluralism. Once we recognise that, we can see why parties of the right that use socially conservative policies to attract votes are particularly vulnerable to morphing into (or being taken over by) populists in the Müller sense. Indeed this is a point he himself makes, as I quote here.

It seems to me that Brexit can illustrate both types of populism. The definition of populism based on anti-globalisation might describe quite well the average Leave voter. The Leave voter tends to be against immigration, and as a result be prepared to roll back globalisation, and this often goes with a belief that the elite or establishment no longer listens to them. In contrast some of the prominent Brexiters, and certainly the newspapers that swung the referendum vote, are populists in Müller’s sense. They are quite happy to talk about the will of the people, and take away power from judges and parliament to ensure the will of the people as they see it prevails.

This is why I have considerable sympathy with the Hungarian academic who I quoted at the start of this post. Populists in the anti-globalisation sense may be a problem, depending on your view of globalisation and liberal economics, but they are not really dangerous for democracy. Populists of the kind Müller describes are, as our history tells us.

In the US, we are not just talking about Trump, but most of the Republican party: a party that appears to go to any length to preserve its gerrymandering of voting districts. In Hungary and Poland we have seen many attacks on pluralistic democracy justified by nationalism and racism. Both, like Russia or the far right in the US, are happy to scapegoat someone who happens to be a wealthy Jew as an enemy of the people for the crime of standing up for liberalism. That certain UK newspapers find common cause with these authoritarian regimes and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew on their front pages should be a wake-up call that these newspapers are no longer part of a pluralist democracy but have become instead its enemy.

[1] Tear down rather than reform. Of course when reform becomes destroy has to be judged, but in most cases that is not very difficult.

If we treat plutocracy as democracy, democracy dies

The snake-oil salesmen

There are many similarities between Brexit and Trump. They are both authoritarian movements, where authority either lies with a single individual or a single vote: the vote that bindsthem all. This authority expresses the movement’s identity. They are irrational movements, by which I mean that they cast aside expertise where that conflicts with the movements wishes. As a result, you will find their base of supporters among the less well educated, and that universities are seen as an enemy.  Both groups are intensely nationalistic: both want to make America or England great again.

It is easy to relate each group to familiar concepts: class, race or whatever. But I think this classification misses something important. It misses what sustains these groups in their beliefs, allows them to maintain their world view which is so often contradicted by reality. Both groups get their information about the world from a section of the media that has turned news into propaganda. In the US this is Fox, and in the UK the right wing tabloids and the Telegraph.

A profound mistake is to see this media as a symptom rather than a cause. As the study I spoke about here clearly demonstrates, the output of Fox news is not designed to maximise its readership, but to maximise the impact of its propaganda on its readership. I think you could say exactly the same about the Sun and the Mail in the UK. Fox and the Sun are owned by the same man.

Even those who manage to cast off the idea that this unregulated media just reflects the attitude of its readers, generally think of this media as supportive of political parties. There is the Conservative and Labour supporting press in the UK, and similarly for the US. In my view that idea is ten or twenty years out of date, and even then it underestimates the independence of the media organisations. (The Sun famously supported Blair in 1997). More and more it is the media that calls the shots, and the political parties follow.

Brexit would not have happened if it had remained the wish of a minority of Conservative MPs. It happened because of the right wing UK press. Brexit happened because this right wing press recognised a large section of their readership were disaffected from conventional politics, and began grooming them with stories of EU immigrants taking jobs, lowering wages and taking benefits (and sometimes much worse). These stories were not (always) false, but like all good propaganda they elevated a half-truth into a firm belief. Of course this grooming played on age old insecurities, but it magnified them into a political movement. Nationalism does the same. It did not just reflect readers existing views, but rather played on their doubts and fears and hopes and turned this into votes.

This is not to discount some of the very real grievances that led to the Brexit vote, or the racism that led to the election of Trump. This analysis of today's populism is important, as long as it does not get sidetracked into debates over identity versus economics. Stressing economic causes of populism does not devalue identity issues (like race or immigration), but it is the economics that causes the swings that help put populists in power. It was crucial, for example, to the trick that the media played to convince many to vote for Brexit: that EU immigrants and payments were reducing access to public services, whereas in reality the opposite is true.

Yet while economic issues may have created a winning majority for both Brexit and Trump, the identity issues sustained by the media make support for both hard to diminish. Brexit and Trump are expressions of identity, and often of what has been lost, which are very difficult to break down when sustained by the group’s media. In addition both Trump and Brexit maintain, because their proponents want it to be maintained, the idea that it represents the normally ignored, striking back against the government machine in the capital city with all its experts.

But to focus on what some call the ‘demand’ for populism is in danger of missing at least half the story. Whatever legitimate grievances Brexit and Trump supporters may have had, they were used and will be betrayed. There is nothing in leaving the EU that will help the forgotten towns of England and Wales. Although he may try, Trump will not bring many manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt, and his antics with NAFTA may make things worse. Identifying the left behind is only half the story, because it does not tell you why they fell for the remedies of snake-oil salesmen.

As I wrote immediately after the vote in my most widely read post, Brexit was first and foremost a triumph for the UK right wing press. That press first fostered a party, UKIP, that embodied the views the press pushed. The threat of that party and defections to it then forced the Prime Minister to offer the referendum the press wanted. It was a right wing press that sold a huge lie about the UK economy, a lie the broadcast media bought, to ensure the Conservatives won the next election. When the referendum came, it was this right wing press that ensured enough votes were won and thereby overturned the government.

Equally Donald Trump was first and foremost the candidate of Fox News. As Bruce Bartlett has so eloquently written, Fox may have started off as a network that just supported Republicans, but its power steadily grew. Being partisan at Fox became misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

Fox became a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up, believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It was Fox News that stopped Republican voters seeing that they were voting for a demagogue, concealed that he lied openly all the time, that incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. It is not reflecting the views of its viewers, but moulding them. As economists have shown, the output of Fox does not optimise their readership, but optimises the propaganda power of its output. Despite occasional tiffs, Trump was the candidate of Fox in the primaries.

We have a right wing media organisation that has overthrown the Republican political establishment, and a right wing press that has overthrown a right wing government. How some political scientists can continue to analyse this as if the media were simply passive, supportive or even invisible when it brings down governments or subverts political parties I do not know.

The plutocracy

Trump and Brexit are the creations of a kind of plutocracy. Politics in the US has had strong plutocratic elements for some time, because of the way that money can sway elections. That gave finance a powerful influence in the Democratic party, and made the Republicans obsessive about cutting higher tax rates. In the UK plutocracy has been almost non-existent by comparison, and operated mainly through party funding and seats in the House of Lords, although we are still finding out where the money behind the Brexit campaign came from.

By focusing on what some call the demand side of populism rather than the supply side, we fail to see both Trump and Brexit as primarily expressions of plutocratic power. Trump’s administration is plutocracy personified, and as Paul Pierson argues, its substantive agenda constitutes a full-throated endorsement of the GOP economic elite’s long-standing agenda. The Brexiteers want to turn the UK into Singapore, a kind of neoliberalism that stresses markets should be free from government interference, rather than free to work for everyone, and that trade should be free from regulations, rather than regulations being harmonised so that business is free to trade.

It is also a mistake to see this plutocracy as designed to support capital. This should again be obvious from Brexit and Trump. It is in capital’s interest to have borders open to goods and people rather than creating barriers and erecting walls. What a plutocracy will do is ensure that high inequality, in terms of the 1% or 0.1% etc, is maintained or even increased. Indeed many plutocrats amassed their wealth by extracting large sums from the firms for which they worked, wealth that might otherwise have gone to investors in the form of dividends. In this sense they are parasitic to capital. And this plutocracy will also ensure that social mobility is kept low so the membership of the plutocracy is sustained: social mobility goes with equality, as Pickett and Wilkinson show.

It is also a mistake to see what is happening as somehow the result of some kind of invisible committee of the 1% (or 0.1% and so on). The interests of the Koch brothers are not necessarily the interests of Trump (it is no accident the former want to help buy Time magazine). The interests of Arron Banks are not those of Lloyd Blankfein. Instead we are finding individual media moguls forming partnerships with particular politicians to press not only their business interests, but their individual political views as well. And in this partnership it is often clear who is dependent on whom. After all, media competition is slim while there are plenty of politicians.

What has this got to do with neoliberalism? which is supposed to be the dominant culture of the political right. As I argued here, it is a mistake to see neoliberalism as some kind of unified ideology. It may have a common core in terms of the primacy of the market, but how that is interpreted is not uniform. Are neoliberals in favour of free trade, or against? It appears that they can be both. Instead neoliberalism is a set of ideas based around a common belief in the market that different groups have used and interpreted to their advantage, while at the same time also being influenced by the ideology. Both interests and ideas matter. While some neoliberals see competition as the most valuable feature of capitalism, others will seek to stifle competition to preserve monopoly power. Brexiters and their press backers are neoliberals, just as the Cameron government they brought down were neoliberals.

I think there is some truth in the argument, made by Philip Mirowski among others, that a belief in neoliberalism can easily involve an anti-enlightenment belief that people need to be persuaded to subject themselves fully to the market. Certainly those on the neoliberal right are more easily persuaded to invest time and effort in the dark arts of spin than those on the left. But it would be going too far to suggest that all neoliberals are anti-democratic: as I have said, neoliberalism is diverse and divided. What I argued in my neoliberal overreach post was that neoliberalism as formulated in the UK and US had made it possible for the plutocracy we now see to become dominant.

By the nature of an unorganised plutocracy, what types of neoliberalism hold sway may be largely random, and depend a lot on who owns media organisations. It leads to a form of politics which is in many ways unpredictable and irrational, with an ever present tendency to autocracy. This is what we are witnessing, right now, in the UK and US. It is not the normal politics that either of these countries are used to, although it may be more familiar to those in quasi-dictatorships. We all know about how the Republican’s tax cutting bill just happens to favour real estate moguls who inherit their money as Trump did. This is simple corruption, enacted in a corrupt way. That the President of the United States retweeted a British far right group that inspired an individual to murder a British MP is not normal. When Brexit supporting MPs respond to the Irish border problem by saying ‘we are not going to put one up’ this should not pass as an acceptable response: it should be laughed at as the nonsense it is.

When politics becomes the whims and mad schemes of a small minority that only listen to themselves, unmodified by the normal checks and balances of a functioning democracy, it should be treated by the non-partisan media for what it is, not normalised as just more of the same. If we treat a plutocracy as a democracy, democracy dies. We should not be fooled that this plutocracy looks like normal politics just because the plutocrats have taken over the main party of the right.

A dividing point

We are very close to a point where neoliberalism becomes something much worse. The POTUS is following a fascist strategy of demonising a religious minority. If Mueller’s investigations proceed as expected, but he is sacked and/or the Republicans block any attempt at impeachment, we may have passed that critical point. If the Brexiters succeed in breaking away from the EU’s customs union and single market, the UK may have nowhere else to go but the arms of a permanently Republican US.

If there is a way of escaping this fate, and rescuing democracy in both the UK and US, it has to involve a democratic defeat of the right wing parties that allowed this plutocracy to emerge, and indeed encouraged it and then made bargains with it when it believed it was still in control. The defeat has to be overwhelming and total. Those who brought us Brexit and backed or tolerated Trump have to be disgraced as the harbingers of disaster. Their control of the Republican and Conservative parties must end.

Only that will allow the left, and I think it has to be the left, to end a system by which elements of the plutocracy can control so much of the means of information. In the UK that means extending rules that apply to broadcasters, suitably adapted, to the press. In the US it means not just bringing back the Fairness doctrine repealed under Reagan, but also bringing controls on election spending similar to those in the UK (and the UK controls need to be strengthened). In short, we need to take money out of politics to ensure democracy survives. Give journalists the freedom to write about or broadcast the news as they see it, rather than as their employer want it to be seen.

Why the left rather than the centre? The centre will agonise over what this means for freedom of expression or freedom of the press and therefore nothing much will happen (see Leveson), as nothing happened under Clinton or Blair. That may be a little unfair to both leaders, because the danger of plutocracy may have been less obvious back then, and the media was more restrained. But with Brexit and Trump no further evidence is needed. The left should see more clearly how in practice this freedom is in reality just a freedom to sustain a plutocracy. Only it will have the courage to radically reverse the power and wealth of the 1%. I fear the centre will not have the will to do it. Although Anthony Barnett’s focus differs from mine, he puts this point very well here: if all you want to do is stop Brexit and Trump and go back to what you regard as normal, you miss that what was normal led to Brexit and Trump.

That will have many wise and sensible people shaking their head, but the alternative does not work. Defeating or impeaching Trump and letting the Republican party survive in its current form achieves little, because they will go on gerrymandering and Fox news will go on poisoning minds. The energy of Democrats will be spent on trying to clear up the damage Trump has caused, and the next autocrat from Republican ranks who wins power because they will ‘clear the swamp’ will be smarter than Trump. In the UK, if the Conservatives survive in their current form, their ageing membership is in danger of selecting more Brexit nutters who will overwhelm the dwindling number of reasonable Conservative MPs. We will find the BBC, if it survives at all, will become more and more like the mouthpiece of a press dominated by plutocrats. [1] In either case a critical point will have passed.

I know from many conversations I have had that there is a deep fear among many of leadership from the left. Here the UK is ahead of the US. The story in the UK used to be that the left could never win, and it was a plausible story, but recent events have cast great doubt on it. That remains the story in the US, but there are good reasons for doubting it there too. There is no reason why all of the disenchanted who fell for the lies of the snake-oil salesmen could not support radical remedies from the left: identity and the media are strong but it is economics that dictates the swings.

In the UK now the story seems much more elemental: that somehow the left threatens the existence of capitalism and democracy. In truth there is no way Corbyn could persuade the Labour party to abandon democratic capitalism, just as there is no way Sanders or Warren could do the same in the US. All we are talking about is rolling back many of the results of neoliberalism. But it is difficult to logically convince someone the ghosts they see do not exist. In contrast to these ghosts on the left, the dynamic of plutocracy that I have described here is very real, and it requires radical change to bring an end to this dynamic.

[1] This is why arguments that say the UK press is becoming less powerful because of its falling readership fail. If this press dominate the news agenda of the broadcasters, they do not need many readers.