A glimpse of Conservative Ground Zero
There’s what I suggest is a most revelatory short post at the Adam Smith Institute today (via Iain Dale) today. Here’s the most salient part:
‘You will never streamline the public sector by Treasury ministers bullying departments over money. Instead, you need a complete review of what government does, what it has to do, what it can do better, and what can be done better by other people and by the public. All departments need to buy into that, and it needs a reform, not a finance minister in charge if everyone is going to trust the process and be a part of it. After all, the process may find that spending in some areas should be increased, even if other departments are found to be doing a lot of pointless stuff.’
The author even goes so far as to suggest who should lead this review; it should be Phillip Hammond, current Shadow Treasury Minister, with an enlarged brief.
In other words, the influential Adam Smith Institute wants to see an immediate post-election push towards savage public spending reductions in every single government department.
Dave the other day reported Dave Nellis as saying at Socialism 2009 saying: ‘In one, one and a half or two parliaments, one of these parties is coming for our NHS.’
The Adam Smith Institute wants to see it happen faster than that.
In one respect, of course, none of this is new. We know that the Conservative will cut public services, even if they are not as explicit as the Adam Smith Institute about the range of cuts.
But in another respect, what the Adam Smith Institute now proposes about HOW it should be done is deeply significant; in particular, we should read with some dread the notion that ‘you need a complete review of what government does, what it has to do, what it can do better, and what can be done better by other people and by the public’ (my emphasis).’
Tim Carpenter, a coherent commenter at Iain Dale’s, takes further the logic that lies behind this short statement of intent:
‘For this to make any sense one must start with the premise that the Government does nothing at all. Unless you do this, you are knocked flat by a bootstrapping tide of ‘wants’ puffed up to appear as ‘musts’. You end up arguing what to cut instead of making others argue what to include.’
From the perspective of the new right wing orthodoxy now emerging, this makes perfect sense.
New Labour remains content to frame its public spending cuts on the basis that people have a set of reasonable public service needs, and that it is reasonable to create some kind of minimum welfare net (at least for British citizens),
However, the new right now emerging in the form of people like Phillip Hammond now feel strong enough to dispense with such liberal niceties. For these new ideologues of the freemarket, the logical position is that we start not with the general population’s needs and how to meet them, but to work out what minimum state intervention is needed to a) keep property rights safe; b) stop workers from rioting.
Such a starting position does not lead to the re-formulation of a welfare-state – the zero-based budgeting proposed by the Adma smith Institute really is the Ground Zero of the welfare state.
Here, perhaps, we see a glimpse of the culmination of the Mont Pelerin project to roll back the welfare state completely, to take back once and for all the concessions the working class made in the 20th century through its revolutions and its threat of revolution. This is the ideology that lies behind the convenient managerialism of Easy Council consumer-speak, and the legislative preparation taking places behind it.
Phillip Hammond, we can see clearly enough now, is to be the ideological champion to Cameron that Keith Joseph was to Thatcher, with the big difference that this time round they are better positioned to succeed.
This neo-neo-liberalism senses now that it has largely won the public argument, not least in the way it has sold the idea that this recession was a product not of the illogicalities of capitalism, but of ‘big government’.
The left does not have its act together enough to provide a loud enough alternative explanation – its explanation is coherent enough, but it cannot be heard above the nationalist-oriented, media driven din. The left has not organised itself well enough to respond.
In May 2010 many on the Left will say it does not matter whether we get a Labour or a Conservative government; that they will be as bad as each other. Dave Nellis said so the other day.
They are wrong. Labour may have lost its way, but its methods still have some institutional basis in the social democracy of the post-war settlement.
The Conservatives are preparing intellectually to take the Thatcherite revolution to its conclusion – to do away with many or the core tenets of the postwar welfare state compromise between capital and labour once and for all – and the Adam Smith Institute is busy preparing them. And once it’s in train, there may not be that much the Left can do about it. The forces may simply be too powerful. Does the left want to run that risk?
You don’t have to love Labour to hope (and campaign) for a new Labour government, for there - strange though it must often seem - still lies the best chance for the British working class.
Numbers for brevity:
1)I don’t think they are the heirs of Thatcher – at least I sincerely hope you are wrong about this.
2)I’m not sure that the plan of stripping down to a night watchman state is within the statments you pull out. I think actually they express (or could express): “In an ideal world there would be no need for the state – we are not in an ideal world – what does the state need to do in order to rectify those imperfections?” (though it is so short as to be open to most interpretations). The two are related but different – the latter can go beyond Nozick in what it recognises as legitimate concerns of the state.
3) Expanding on not-Thatcher’s heirs. Thatcher didn’t believe in society. I think these guys probably do. But obviously who am I to say.
4) Why should how healthcare is provided be ideological? Surely what is ideological is who you think should shell out for it? Whilst the two don’t perfectly divide in practice (probably), isn’t the former really a question of economic *science* rather than political morality?
5) You can believe in privitising (whatever the hell that actually means in practice) the NHS without wishing to deprive the working class of healthcare. You may happen to think it would be more efficient, lead to a higher quality of healthcare, and place no more of a burden on the lower income groups than does the current system. I have no idea whether it would or no, and I submit that unless you have a Ph.D in Healthcare Economics, neither do you, really. We may both have educated guesses, but not a lot more than that if we’re honest.
1 & 3) Simply in terms of the leaders, the similarity between Cameron and Thatcher’s current position is striking. Neither he, nor Osborne as far as I can see, appear to be rabid freemarket lovers themselves, and their stuff around Red Toryism and their ‘right communitarianism’ seems sincere enough if a little half-baked.
But then Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite until her second term. It is not she that drove the ideological battle,
but the think tank and intellectual forces around her who found her a very willing learner. I think Cameron will find himself pushed very strongly to the right even earlier in a new administration by those will either be or set themselves up as being his gurus/project masters, and his parliamentary party will fall in very easily behind a new ‘strong’ orthodoxy.
2) Equally, I think your own notion of ‘the legitimate concerns of the state’ can be recast as being the ‘minimum necessary to ensure that capital operates untroubled by labour’d demands. so, yes, what I cast as necessary concession you may cast as meeting legitimate social need, but materially we’re still talking about a welfare state retrenchment.
3) I only raised the NHS via Dave Nellis’ quote in order to highlight how quickly it may be cut despite the current ringfencing assurances from Cameron.
I agree that who pays is more important than who provides, and the notion that the state has provided all services since the end of the war until the recent privatisations of surgery etc is palpably wrong, as it ignores a) the deal GPs cut at the start of the NHS to run their highly profitable services under contract to the NHS b) the deal consultants cut to similar effect c) the legitimate enough hiving off of many services to the voluntary sector e.g. MacMillan Care.
I’m not hooked to the current model of the NHS, which has many deficiencies – and many of those the result of class & gender power inequalities within its workforce.
I reject totally the notion that the health service (and this included the balance between preventative, primary and secondary resources) can ever be anything other than deeply political. Of course resource allocation is political, just as it was in 1944, when the consultants/GPs gave a little and gained a lot.
But that’s another post I have lining up on the history of the NHs, possibly under the somewhat provocative ‘Yes, the NHS was a 60 year mistake’ headline.
I posted the following comment on LibCon where this post also appeared (in annoyingly edited form). Unfortunately it got trapped in the spam filter and will probably be somewhat redundant by the time it appears, so I thought I’d post it here. The gist of what I’m getting at is that the state does get many things wrong, and if we (the ‘left’, broadly construed) don’t have a critique of this then we risk looking like we’re defending it when our prime concern is defending the likes of the NHS. Anyway, here goes (bet it gets marked as spam here too, due to the number of links…):
The problem is that there is waste in the public sector. If the left position is that the public sector, in its entirety, must be defended at all costs, then the left will always be tripped up by examples of pointless government spending. The state has suffered from ‘mission creep’ as the responsibilities granted to state bodies and quangos have expanded (not all of this expansion is fully funded either; it ends up draining money from other more useful areas of state provision).
I wonder if this is something that’s just a lot more obvious to people outside London, where the public sector share of the economy is dramatically higher. In the North-West, public spending is very visible, managed by a vast array of bodies whose responsibilities seem to change frequently and who are certainly not democratically accountable. Regional development organisations are particularly bad at this, as they seem to end up funding various subsidiary bodies which create a rather nebulous amount of value for the wider community. They are so far from democratic scrutiny that it’s impossible to control how they behave – there’s no feedback loop that links citizens in at all.
For example, in Manchester alone, you have these people:
Innovation Manchester (only a holding web page, although they’ve managed to produce a poll which unsurprisingly concludes that ‘networks’ would encourage more ‘open innovation’, and another which concludes that the way to ‘drive manchester forward’ is by the formation of ‘knowledge hubs’ (79%) and not ‘citizens and businesses who are ethical and radical’ (10%). Still, at least they’re on Twitter).
Manchester Knowledge Capital – this is a link to their partners page, which contains:
Marketing Manchester – another holding site, although there’s a PDF listing their 10-member board, chief executive and managing director (I though those two roles were interchangeable; seemingly not) and a couple of lovely org charts.
MIDAS, some kind of investment cheerleader. They’ve apparently been building links with Abu Dhabi, having recently sent a delegation including ‘civic, business and higher education leaders from bodies including Manchester City Council, Marketing Manchester, Manchester Investment and Development Agency Service (MIDAS), the University of Manchester, Manchester Airport, Manchester International Festival and a range of private sector representatives’ to visit. I can’t imagine why nobody from Abu Dhabi wanted to visit Manchester!
MIDAS, in turn, have their own list of partners, including:
Manchester Enterprises who ‘have become the Commission for the New Economy, responsible for leading on economic development, employment and skills on behalf of the Manchester city region’ yet are still in the process of ‘developing a new website to meet its needs’.
The Northern Way, which is engaged in ‘bringing together the cities and regions of the North of England to work together to improve the sustainable economic development of the North towards the level of more prosperous regions’.
New East Manchester, which seems to do an awful lot. The only part of their output I’ve seen is their glossy magazine, which we get free each month, but I’m sure they do other stuff.
And that’s just Manchester and only the bodies that I know about from being involved in a ‘creative’ industry. The same lot are duplicated in Liverpool, Preston and probably several other cities, towns and subregional administrative zones. This is before we consider the big daddy, the North-West Development Agency, and its associated organisations. My current favourite is North West Vision and Media who have recently contrived to pay real cash money for someone to produce a report on what makes iPhone apps successful. Yep, the North-West innovation scene is so hot that we need a public sector body to tell us how to make iPhone apps, because it’s so bloody difficult.
I genuinely could go on further. I know I’m probably sounding like one of those dreadful right-wing morons, raving on about the wastefulness of the state, but, well, in this case they’d be right. This is where our taxes go, not just on schools, hospitals, foreign aid, rape crisis centres and benefits. If it looks like the Tories are the only people who take this seriously, we’re fucked. Ironically, the Tories will probably boost spending on this crap and cut spending on hospitals, or something equally absurd, but from the position of a normal person the amount of state spending that we can see and detect is massive, and quite a lot of it looks pretty wasteful. Could we not just scrap the crap and increase the JSA or teachers’ salaries or something?
It did indeed get marked as spam, but I vet all the spam too so here you go.
Actually, Rob, you don’t sound like a right-wing moron. If your concern is that the State is wasteful, then I agree. If your concern is that there is no accountability for the waste, then I agree.
What I do not believe will happen though is that through top-down actions, or worse still, through privatisation or marketisation of yet more functions of the state that these problems will be sorted out.
This is one of the key distinctions between right and left on the issue.
I have a broader philosophical bone to pick, but one I think the Left often fails to address in a meaningful way with regard to how Capitalism portrays itself these days. (Know they enemy, etc.) I apologise for the length of the post but its brevity by necessity limits my ability to construct an “tighter” argument and leads to very general leaps in the argument. Anyhow.
The reply provided by #1 relies on the two premises. The first is that once you have established a monetary transaction price for any human activity, you have decided its entire social value. The market setting transaction principle takes hierarchy over all other considerations or, indeed, makes all other considerations irrelevant. (Often this transaction doctrine is portrayed as natural and beyond human intervention – free hand market mythology.) This transaction activity, alone and in isolation according to neo-liberal Capitalism, determines how markets should function (pratically implying that all markets have a homogenuous inherent nature) and that the outcomes are solely a book keeping affair.
Secondly we are told we need a Phd in Health Economics in order to even enter into debate. Health concerns are beyond the mere pleb to understand. One needs to devote one’s life, if we have the basic talent, to studying the market principles on health care. Only these people, chosen from the lottery of genetics and with a certain predisposition, are worthy to comment on the affects of policy, or the absence of policy, with regard to matters relating to health.
It is a very narrow perception of meritocracy based on the notion that someone becomes an expert by virtue of following an established course of study. This process obviously begs the question who establishes what is a worthy course of study? It also, by internal necessity, excludes anyone not deemed a so-called expert from taking part or from comment. The neo-liberal Capitalists again try to foist the notion that the so-called expert operates in a moral and social vacuum, or at least above the rest of humanity and by virtue of this position is an unquestionable authority.
Do I need a Phd to see how the free market, privatised doctrine of health care works in the US? We have plenty of data on deaths due to lack of privatised insurance coverage; low life expectancy in subsections of the US populace; and numerous economic indicators highlighting why even middle income familities face catastrophe when confronted with a major health crisis in one family member.
To claim no philosophy is to have a philosophy. To ignore the ethical considerations of public policy is itself an ethical basis upon which all human activity is measured. It is telling, imo, that the internal logic of the neo-liberal Capitalist think-tanks have to adopt an non-ethical framework for all human activity in order to legitimise their stance; to divorce each individual’s perceptions, thoughts and conclusions from their actual surroundings. It is a philosophy of vacuity where we mere mortals are lowered to the least common denominator of monied transactional beings. If your personal balance sheet is in the positive, you are deemed worthy and of value on a sliding scale of capital accumulation. If your balance sheet is in the negative, however one arrived at this point, one is deemed a loser.
I suppose one could dress this doctrine up as some sort of Darwinian construct where the economically fittest survive. Those who can’t afford the expensive free market exercise are losers and therefore merit their own demise. If, on the other hand, one believes that human society is constructed and orchestrated by humans, then the only conclusion to draw is that neo-liberal Capitalist doctrine is one of a modern variety of eugenics. In fact a New Zealand politician proposed paying for some people not to have children; presumably through surgical sterilisation. This idea morphed onto an Irish Political website in the guise of: “Pay low quality people not to have kids”. This thread had over 950 responses!
Yee just have to wonder at where this profit/capital accumulation based doctrine will take us in the future.
Yes, but that still leaves us with absolutely no critique of the mistakes made by the state. If we’re not going to privatise or marketise the wasteful elements, what are we going to do with them? To be honest, I really do think that we could abolish or substantially slim down many of the bodies I mentioned above with no meaningful loss to the public. There would be some short-term dislocation as this would involve making some people redundant, but if the money were reallocated elsewhere this would be negated to a large extent.
This is precisely why the ASI’s call to re-examine the role of the state is so powerful. Everyone will fill in the blanks themselves; I can think of things I’d like to abolish, so I welcome the call to re-think what the state does because I believe that my pet peeves may be addressed. Others will have their own agenda (some will target ‘political correctness’, Hannanites might want to take an axe to the NHS and so forth), but the effect is the same.
So, if I want to tackle the waste I mentioned, what can I do? Local council votes don’t matter much, as these institutions are city-regional or regional hence unaccountable. The Labour government instituted or promoted many of these (I think they technically form part of Lord Mandelson’s empire at BERR) and are unlikely to do anything about them. The Tories might, and what they’re cleverly doing is letting people believe that the cuts will fall on the genuinely wasteful bits rather than on the things that we value. Cameron’s rhetoric about the NHS reassures people further.
Meanwhile, the message that seems to come from the left is that nothing will be cut, nothing will be abolished, nothing will be reduced, even if this would create the opportunity to spend more money on benefits, the NHS, schools or what-have-you. We seem to be rejecting the notion that we should even be trying to identify waste, presumably on the basis of a bastardised Keynesian view that what matters is spending the money and less what it is spent on.
I should point out that the Lib Dems do want to scrap Trident, ID cards and also BERR for good measure, all of which are exactly what I’d want (and what I would imagine that most sane people would want), but they’re unlikely to be forming the next government.
Rob
I’ll echo Dave’s comments quickly (as have to go out) and say that it’s not right-moronic to criticise state waste/poor ways of doing things, and nor was this the point of my article (though the editing at LibCon might look as though it was at a quick read, as the comments over there suggest).
Just to save time now, I’ll link to an earlier article I did (at my previous site) which cover this theme – see http://www.bickerstafferecord.org.uk/?p=678 . Dave has also written on it, I seem to remember.
Just for info in context of your comment re: london perspective. I’m in Lancashire, smack bang between the norther cities you refer to, and with a decent awareness of all that the far reaching quangocracy of the type you refer to gets up to.
The main issue for the left is not size of state, but about who has power over it, but you’re right to point out that defending the status quo can come to get in the way of what we’re about (and this includes the NHS, which I sense I’ll be returning to a lot).
Ugh. thanks to that Snap thingy, I’ve just seen that my blog name has been hijacked by a fundamentalist chritain site. not very christian of them, i must say. Nor very ethical.
Rob I think you are bang on.
5. I’ll be even briefer, to the extent of nothing more than sketch remarks. Apologies but crisis at work.
a)I have to be honest – I have no idea how my post relies on market set values determining social value. That isn’t really even the position of super hardline classical economists (which I’m not).
b) Okay yes we can make lots of emotive points about meritocracy and the expert. But I take it you wouldn’t deem a lay-person qualified to determine the best cure for cancer, or to figure out why energy is emitted in quanta? Why then do we feel qualified to comment on the equally complicated mechanics of the healthcare system? Outcomes yes.
We are entirely entitled (of course, should go without saying, wouldn’t dream of saying otherwise) to say whether we want uneven quality of healthcare geographically, whether certain groups should have access to certain treatments above others where there is scarcity. But how you deliver those outcomes…
From the last para. it should be obvious I do not believe the expert should operate in a vacuum.
As for the data you cite on the US on its own it shows nothing. US healthcare is, it seems, rubbish, on an outcomes to inputs basis. But this proves sod all apart from “the precise way in which US healthcare works isn’t that great”. It doesn’t say anything about market based systems in general.
Your account of the “neo-liberal Capitalist” is interesting. I’m not sure how it de-ethicises public policy. There are a lot of values present in the questions asked of and conclusions drawn from the models. The main value, obviously, is that one doesn’t have a right to tell someone else how to live.
9. I’ll be as brief as possible. The respose wasn’t emotive in the least. Please cite emotive responses from the post; otherwise this retort merely smacks of a cheap journalistic gambit rather than effective debate. Anyway, what’s wrong with emotion? It’s a very natural human characteristic. A wee bit of passion wouldn’t go amiss, imho, these days.
Citing a market based health care system, the US system in this instance, isn’t a reflection on a market based health care system? Huh.
Your comparison in the area of experts is also rather suspect. Yeah, I need a cancer expert to deal with cancer. Let’s move the comparison on a wee bit. Do I need a mechanic to repair any and all the damage on my vehicle? No. I can learn to do many repairs.
Is economics such a tough subject that the layperson isn’t capable of understanding it? Imo, no. One could make a better comparison. Do I need a physical thearapist help my healthy child to take her first steps and eventually walk? No. Likewise, we most humans are quite capable to taking our baby steps into economics and progessing. A cert these day doesn’t certify proficiency, but rather an ability to adhere to and parrot back pre-defined course work; more often than not with a specific economic polity in mind.
“The main value, obviously, is that one doesn’t have a right to tell someone else how to live.”
The vast majority of the population is told how to live on a daily basis based upon laws ensuring specific social relationships between the individual (or specified groups)and property. More often than not, property is given priority. Every day the vast majority by necessity of survival in the present system trade their labour power and are explicitly told what to do in detail, even to the extent of regulating bodily functions. And most get their pocket picked for the priviledge. Freedom is determined by the social system.
“Secondly we are told we need a Phd in Health Economics in order to even enter into debate. Health concerns are beyond the mere pleb to understand. One needs to devote one’s life, if we have the basic talent, to studying the market principles on health care. Only these people, chosen from the lottery of genetics and with a certain predisposition, are worthy to comment on the affects of policy, or the absence of policy, with regard to matters relating to health.” – Maybe emotive is the wrong word. But can you explain how any of the considerations you raise are relevant to the ability of lay people (in which I include myself) to understand healthcare economics? Not to their right to talk about it – their ability to do so in an informed way.
Viz. US health system – my BMW (I wish) broke down today. Conc: all BMWs are unreliable.
(and that is barely a straw man)
I’m glad to hear that in your honest opinion economics isn’t so tough that the layperson isn’t capable of undertanding it. I’m curious: on what basis do you make that claim? And I will admit, the PhD point was hyperbole – but not radically so. I’m sure if a reasonably intelligent layperson sat down and spent a couple of months(starting with general economic principles, moving on to macro and micro and then healthcare) reading about the subject they could form a reasonably informed opinion. But almost none of us do. At best most of us read a couple of books and then consider we know about the subject.
Second on that: if that last bit about the failings of modern academia is meant to be an argument against my position then it doesn’t work. I said that you needed a Ph.D to understand healthcare economics – not that all Ph.Ds do understand healthcare economics.
As for the failings of academia I have some sympathy with you there.
Freedom is determined by the social system…possibly. Again, as much as I disagree with leftish economics I have a certain sympathy with its critque of capitalism. But that misses the point I was making. I said that the “neo-liberal capitalist” public policy was guided by a truly believed ethic – I didn’t say it achieved that ethic. It was in response to your argument (as I read it) that neo-liberal capitalist public policy was devoid of values.
As an aside: the reason they treat people as “monied transactional beings” is that they are trying to make it scientific.
Barney S. Let me first say that I don’t take a Pol Potish stand on education or intellectuals (as one could/might infer from my previous posts), and that if we kept at this long enough we’d probably end up agreeing on some issues; which I’d find more interesting than ending in mere stalemate or circuitous argument.
I actually think the most important people in society are teachers; not for imparting knowledge (though the 3 r’s are a bare necessity in modern life) but through the ability to impart rarer abilities: 1. to provide the ability to continue self learning 2. to look behind the mere words of a person and determine their motives, biases, and so on. It is from the later standpoint that I frame my own viewpoints (and therefore my biases) on the original post with a solid dollop of leftist analysis. I euphemistically call it looking under the rug. For the more serious, they would metaphorically go below the floor boards and analyse the foundations.
Having torturously set out my stall, it would simply be irrational to ignore the advice of those who’ve spent long hours studying health care issues. However, one should also recognise that these “experts” are social and therefore politcal animals. They have biases, just like myself, and therefore have agendas which they pursue. Imo, the best course of action is to publicly publish expert analysis rather than letting our politicos in turn further politicise social issues like health care. We have the means, via the internet, to publish entire expert’s papers, alternative experts opinions, summaries and pro-con analysis. In this context, the experts opinions can further everyone’s understanding and ability to analyse public policy such as health care. Simply, we need to democratise information.
Aside on the aside. Yeah, the nature of social inquiry is at its very basis somewhat opaque. I’ve been heavily schooled in the quantitative “arts”. I’ve spent a lot of time subsequently trying to strip away a certain mindset that develops by adopting a quant viewpoint. It has its own inherent biases built into the whole edifice imo. Lately, I moved somewhat from seeing the science part of social science as a mere metaphor into a more concrete methodology; sort of stealing scientific methods and applying them to a dynamic social analyses. Both Marx’s writings and some Capitalist Sociologists have informed my thinking in this regard. It implies “pratice” or experimentation. Yet an overall framework of Scepticism seems best when approaching the social sciences.
I agree with what you say about teachers.
The problem, I think, with “looking under the rug” as you put it, is that too often I have seen people dismiss the arguments of others purely on the basis of their social class/upbringing. When takes most academics and thinkers one knows little about them other than their school, parents’ jobs and general wealth. These alone are not necessarily sufficient to gauge motivation.
Secondly, even if one can say of a thinker that they are biased, it does not allow one to say that there arguments are wrong, insofar as such arguments pertain to mechanical conclusions. Depending on how you view these matters, mechanical can include concepts as nebulous as “the good” and “political right”.
Final submission: being aware of bias shoud add to, but not substitute for, critical analysis of argument. I sometimes feel that left wing analysis, because of the richness of its critique of bias, sometimes skimps on the critical analysis of arguments.
As an aside to an aside to an aside: could you explicate what you meant by
“Lately, I moved somewhat from seeing the science part of social science as a mere metaphor into a more concrete methodology; sort of stealing scientific methods and applying them to a dynamic social analyses.”
and
“Yet an overall framework of Scepticism seems best when approaching the social sciences.”
I have a idea what you mean, but the compression renders it somewhat ambiguous.