Archive
This is the end
As ex-readers may have noticed, this is an ex-blog.
The end came quickly, as I thought it might, but kind of hoped it wouldn’t.
I’ve got lots to do, and not that much time. Some of what I do will change people’s lives for the better, and some of it won’t. But if there’s one thing Dr Rieux in La Peste* and Rossmann in Amerika taught me, you’ve got to bleeding try. So the blogging’s got squeezed to the point of no return.
It’s not the end of me completely in written form; I’m planning to pop up in written form in other places, and I’ve not forgotten my commitment to part 2 of the Habermas post, or my follow up to Gove as fascist post, but both these starter essays, and others, have got me reading more voraciously, scribbling more incoherently and even thinking thoughts occasionally, more than I thought they would, and blog-based follow ups that no-one reads anyway now no longer seems to fit.
If you’re stuck for something to read, go re-read Stumbling and Mumbling. Chris is basically right.
Bye then.
* ”None the less, he knew the tale he had to tell could not be one of final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts.”
Message from Molière
I have addressed the Right’s self-righteousness on matters grammatical before, on the basis that trying to teach kids grammar out of context is really quite stupid and wrong.
But it occurs to me that a better critique of the latest outpourings of bilious silliness is best addressed, for want of a suitable rejoinder from a French lesbian poet, by an extract by the great seventeeth century comédien, Molière, who knew a thing or two about combatting the vanities of the ancien régime. In Les Femmes Savantes he takes the piss gloriously out the affected ways of those for whom ‘correct’ grammar is the be all and end all.
So I bring you a bit of Act II, Scene 6, in which the two grammarians, Bélise and Philaminte, aka. Michael Gove and Toby Young, defend the decision to sack servant girl Martine for the offence of bad grammar.
Philaminte
Elle [Martine] a, d’une insolence à nulle autre pareille,
Après trente leçons, insulté mon oreille
Par l’impropriété d’un mot sauvage et bas,
Qu’en termes décisifs condamne Vaugelas*.
Chrysale [confused husband]
Est-ce là… ?
Philaminte
Quoi ? toujours, malgré nos remontrances,
Heurter le fondement de toutes les sciences,
La grammaire, qui sait régenter jusqu’aux rois,
Et les fait, la main haute, obéir à ses lois ?
Chrysale
Du plus grand des forfaits je la croyais coupable.
Philaminte
Quoi ? vous ne trouvez pas ce crime impardonnable ?
Chrysale
Si fait.
Philaminte
Je voudrais bien que vous l’excusassiez !
Chrysale
Je n’ai garde.
Bélise
Il est vrai que ce sont des pitiés :
Toute construction est par elle détruite,
Et des lois du langage on l’a cent fois instruite.
Martine
Tout ce que vous prêchez est, je crois, bel et bon ;
Mais je ne saurais, moi, parler votre jargon.
Philaminte
L’impudente ! appeler un jargon le langage
Fondé sur la raison et sur le bel usage !
Martine
Quand on se fait entendre, on parle toujours bien,
Et tous vos beaux dictons ne servent pas de rien.
Philaminte
Hé bien ! ne voilà pas encore de son style ?
Ne servent-pas de rien !
Bélise
Ô cervelle indocile !
Faut-il qu’avec les soins qu’on prend incessamment,
On ne te puisse apprendre à parler congrûment ?
De pas mis avec rien tu fais la récidive,
Et c’est, comme on t’a dit, trop d’une négative.
Martine
Mon Dieu ! je n’avons pas étugué comme vous,
Et je parlons tout droit comme on parle cheux nous.
Philaminte
Ah ! peut-on y tenir ?
Bélise
Quel solécisme horrible !
Philaminte
En voilà pour tuer une oreille sensible.
Bélise
Ton esprit, je l’avoue, est bien matériel.
Je n’est qu’un singulier, avons est pluriel.
Veux-tu toute ta vie offenser la grammaire ?
Martine
Qui parle d’offenser grand’mère ni grand-père ?
Philaminte
Ô Ciel !
Bélise
Grammaire est prise à contre-sens par toi,
Et je t’ai dit déjà d’où vient ce mot.
Martine
Ma foi !
Qu’il vienne de Chaillot, d’Auteuil, ou de Pontoise,
Cela ne me fait rien.
Bélise
Quelle âme villageoise !
La grammaire, du verbe et du nominatif,
Comme de l’adjectif avec le substantif,
Nous enseigne les lois.
Martine
J’ai, Madame, à vous dire
Que je ne connais point ces gens-là.
Philaminte
Quel martyre !
Bélise
Ce sont les noms des mots, et l’on doit regarder
En quoi c’est qu’il les faut faire ensemble accorder.
Martine
Qu’ils s’accordent entr’eux, ou se gourment, qu’importe ?
Philaminte, à sa sœur.
Eh, mon Dieu ! Finissez un discours de la sorte.
* See here on the grammarian Vaugelas – this being an important theme of the play.
Michael Gove’s gerundial confusion
Today, the Times Educational Supplement reports on the spelling and grammar tests being forced upon primary school children against the advise of educationalists:
Experts consulted by the Department for Education described the tests, which will be taken by 500,000 Year 6 students this summer, as “really flawed” exams that ignore academic research on the best ways to teach grammar.
Debra Myhill, a professor of education at the University of Exeter, and Ruth Miskin, an expert on phonics and member of the national curriculum review team, were among experts who raised concerns about the spelling and grammar (Spag) tests when consulted by the government.
They are concerned that the tests do not ask students to use grammar in context, meaning they will not be able to apply rules more generally. “I did a very detailed analysis of the test and I had major reservations about it,” Professor Myhill told TES. “I think it’s a really flawed test.”
Today, coincidentally, my son was doing a practice paper for this test. It’s been provided by educational publisher CGP*. Here it is for sales online.
This is question 7, scanned as completed by my son:
The question asks children to say which words are nouns, and which are verbs. He says ‘flying’ is a verb, which is correct (Clever boy. It’s a doing verb**, he tells me confidently, as in ‘Gove is really flying by the seat of his pants with these ill-considered tests’ (I paraphrase).
Except, he’s wrong. Foolish boy. ‘Flying’ is a gerundial noun, as in “Flying by the seat of one’s pants in educational matters is unbecoming to a Secretary of State for Education. That’s what the Collins English Dictionary people say.
So is he right or wrong? Technically, it is a verbal noun, so it’s a noun, but are they expecting him to know that, or do they want him to display his ’verbs are doing words’ understanding. I honestly don’t know what answer is expected of an 11 year old, even of one who’s already sent chapters of adventure novels of to publishers, and who was a published comic-book author at the age of 7.
All of which goes to support Professor Myhill’s view that these grammar tests, with words out of context, are indeed ”really flawed”.
But I’m not sure Michael Gove** will care much that my son may grow up to believe that gerundial nouns are part of some kind of leftwing plot to reduce educational standards.
* I’m not clear on what basis CGP have set these sample tests, and what advice they’ve had from the Department for Education, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the distinction between noun and verb, taken out of context in this way, is likely to figure in the actual tests next month.
** Quick further research suggest it might be called the present or gerund participle of the verb.
*** Talking of nouns as verbs, I now suddenly remember that ‘gove’ can be a verb too.
The early institution building of a new NHS
The NHS is dying, pretty well exactly as I said it would some two years ago now:
Some scandals may emerge in time over ‘backhanders’ paid by the private hospitals to the private commissioners, and in some circumstances it will turn out that the people doing the commissioning are simply commissioning themselves in another name – the whole inefficiency of which the provider-purchaser split was supposed to stop – but it will all be a bit esoteric and complicated for people to understand, and there won’t be much of a fuss.
In fairly short order, we may get these new commissioners creating two tiers of provision from within GP surgeries, with one level of care for those not paying, and those who just happen to have signed the relevant insurance policy forms, which just happen to be in the GP surgery.
Insurance-based healthcare, and the exclusions that this brings, will come not through a government announcement, but by the surgery backdoor……
The consortia [now called CCGs] will end up being led by two or three ‘movers and shakers’ in each area, whose job will be simply to negotiate a decent deal for their colleagues and let the private commissioners get on with the rest. There will be no revolt in primary care, and in secondary care no-one will actually notice till it’s too late.
Two years on, it’s being more widely recognised that, as of 1st April, the NHS privatisation will being quietly but in earnest, as the section 75 regulations kick into gear, Clinical Commissioning Groups with often overwhelming direct financial interests in private providers put services out to the market, public provision withers on the vine or simply goes bust, and private insurance arrangements start to become the norm, initially for (the more profitable) elective healthcare, and then for the rest. As Lucy Reynolds from the London School for Hygiene & Tropical Medicine rightly notes, what comes next in this wildly ‘imperfect’ market is market abuse and health cost inflation. This inflation around the ‘cherry-picked’ services, Lucy might also have noted, will lead to the stripping of resources from the less profitable services – no health budget ring-fencing will protect that.
So what is to be done? By 2015, if and when Labour regains power, the promise of a repeal of the Health & Social Care Act (and the accompanying Section 75 regulations) may be a welcome statement of principle, but it will not significantly change the way in which services have already been privatised, seemingly irrevocably. In many cases, there simply won’t be the public services to transfer them back to, and the incoming government is likely to consider the full-scale implementation of NHS II a little too much of a fiscal challenge, even if the recreation of the cumbersome institutions of 1948 were desirable.*
What Labour can do, though – and needs to start thinking through now – is to tackle the local institutional architecture, in a way which creates the platform both for the establishment of local democratic control of both the type and quality of provision. If it gets this right, this might actually lead, in the medium term, to a better health service than we currently enjoy - as I’ve noted before, it does not become Labour to gloss over the very clear health and social care failings caused by the managerialist ideology that has held sway for the last thirty years.
More specifically in terms of local institutions, the Labour government-in-waiting should first consider retaining the Clinical Commissioning Groups. but diluting the power of GP practices within them by making theirs a minority voting position, through the introduction of members of Foundation Trust governing councils (increasingly focused on quality standards if the Francis Inquiry recommendations are carried through) along with elected councillor representation in keeping with Councils’ new public health function. The immediate impact of this is likely to be presumption against private sector provision where other options still exist (they won’t in many places).
Second, the Labour government in waiting should commit to ensuring that these new-style CCGs adhere both to the letter and spirit of the Public Service (Social Value) Act 2012 under which all CCGs (and the NHS Commissioning Board), have a duty to consider:
(a) how what is proposed to be procured might improve the economic, social and environmental well-being of the relevant area, and
(b) how, in conducting the process of procurement, it might act with a view to securing that improvement.
(Oddly, this is Tory legislation, aimed primarily at breaking the perceived monopoly power of local authorities, but can be used to the same effect against private sector dominance in healthcare provision. That will really piss off the Tories….)
These two relatively simply steps will set the direction of travel back against wholesale privatisation, although of course attempts to terminate contracts are likely to result in lengthy and quite likely unsuccessful legal battles, so early progress is likely to be quite slow.
Nevertheless, institutional change at local level by government, especially if accompanied by moves within the Labour party and the broader movement to re-energise Trade Councils, in a move away from the vapid Tory ‘consumer localism’ and towards a quality-oriented ’worker localism’**, could provide early impetus for the creation of a properly socialist health and social care system – a system fit for the 21st century (whether or not this is tax-based or progressive social insurance based doesn’t really matter as long as it provides for equitable provision) , with private operators increasingly steadily cleared out in favour not just of direct NHS Trust delivery, but also a new surge of worker co-operatives (although charities and social enterprises may also play a valid part).
* It is always worth remembering, in the context of the fetishisation of the 1948-style NHS, that until very late in the day a radically different – and I would argue preferable – NHS structure was being argued for. This was a much more decentralised and locally accountable system, rather than the monolith we grew to love despite it tendencies to managerialism (and I would argue that this is why service standards have declined in the NHS faster than in local authorities, say). See Rudolf Klein’s seminal The Politics of the NHS for more (the later edition is called The New Politics of the NHS but the early chapters are the same).
** This is not to argue for the introduction/retention of localised terms and conditions. Trade unions should of course be encouraged to negotiate at national level, and a properly brave/strategic Labour government would use the need to ‘renationalise’ the NHS, and to invest quality in the hands of its staff (as opposed to its bosses) as a rationale for the relatively painless (in terms of reactionary public opinion) repeal of restrictive trade union legislation. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath on this one.
The dangerous Dr Goldacre: Cochranian hero or garbage peddler?
A few months ago I launched a pre-emptive strike on Dr Ben Goldacre:
It strikes me that the impulse to control a problem rather than ‘uncontrol’ it away finds its most dangerous expression in the growing ‘evidenced-based policy’ campaign being headed up by all-round-good-guy-civil-liberties-defender Ben Goldacre, in association with the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights team. Between them, they have produced a convincing story about how society would be much better off if all social problem interventions were assessed through Randomised Control Trial methodology developed by the biomedical sciences. This is all very well, but the promotion of such scientific rigour overlooks the need, in order to fit the method, to atomise problems and interventions in a way which embeds garbage can model social policy practice. Ultimately, a problem and intervention focus diminishes the power of people to make their problems go away, and enhances the power of the state to make interchangeable those problems and the people who have them. But that’s a longer blog.
I never did get round to that longer blog. Fortunately, though, someone much cleverer than me has. Here’s Will Davies, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (and the brilliant Potlatch blog):
[T]he spread of medical epistemology into public policy is strangely anti-theoretical, thanks to a somewhat naively optimistic view of a single technique: the randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCTs operate according to induction. The facts are meant to speak for themselves; the data and the theory are kept neatly and self-consciously separate from each other. A medic, Ben Goldacre, has co-authored a paper on the policy applications of RCTs for the British government, which opens with the line ‘RCTs are the best way of determining whether a policy is working’…….
By adopting the inductivist epistemology associated with RCTs and Big Data, social policy-makers may learn a great deal more about the world, but may also become commensurately less sure of what it even means for a policy to work in the first place.
There is a risk that, as with RCTs in psycho-pharmaceuticals, diagnoses of social pathologies might start to spiral. Whole new problematic demographic sub-groups will start to appear to the gaze of the data analyst; new correlations of behavioural problems will be spotted; the perceived sources of our social, psychological and neurological malaises will simply multiply, and we’ll long for an age when it was all just a problem of the wrong ‘incentives’. Tesco’s Club Card is rumoured to produce 18,000 sub-groups of customer; the equivalent for the state would be 18,000 sub-groups of pathological behaviour to be nudged back into line. Without the extreme simplifications of rationalist theories, society would appear too complex to be governed at all. The empiricist response to the government’s paper title, ‘What Works’, might end up being ‘very little’, unless government becomes frighteningly ‘smart’. Alternatively, if theory no longer provides the procedures of evaluation, there is a risk that private backroom politics will do so instead…..
Nothing simply works unambiguously in social policy, gold standard or no gold standard. No policy delivers benefits without any ‘side-effects…….A policy might ‘work’ in terms of reducing unemployment*, but lead to an increase in family break-down. The inductivists response would be – yes, and that’s precisely the type of pattern that our new evidence centres will detect! So why use the rhetoric of ‘what works’, when it is plain that nothing unambiguously works, at least without also offering the standard (the QALY for social policy, if you like) through which ethical dilemmas and trade-offs will be addressed?
Will’s article is – like my earlier, less well formulated one - a call for the retention of political judgment at the heart of public policy, and a warning of what we risk by simply handing over control to the positivists, as the government now seems intent on doing. This is not to say that RCTs have no value, of course. But their use needs to be, of itself, a political matter, in which the area of research and the outcomes being tested are a matter for public and political argument.
This piece, therefore, isn’t a personal attack on Ben Goldacre (the title is just a brazen attempt at linkbait readership). It’s not an attack precisely because Ben recognises appears to recognise the issues raised above, in a way which Will doesn’t acknowledge.
In his most recent paper, on how RCTs might be become the norm in education policy-making, he stresses the need for professional involvement not just in the research, but in decision-making over exactly what research happens and why. The problem is that such a worthy aspiration can all too easily be hijacked by a governments (not just the current one) very keen on the idea of using research evidence to impose their own views of what success in education looks like, and less, but much less keen on the development of the kind of ambitious, democratically oriented research governance infrastructure that he advocates, and which he suggests will provide the ”opportunity…..to become and evidence-based profession, in just one generation”.**
So, for example, where Ben may take reassurance that “performance on specific academic or performance tests” have quite measurable outcomes, and means to improve such performance are therefore open to RCT methods, I see risks that RCTs might be used to embed such tests (and their associated curricula) at the cost of the wider educational enrichment of children.
Overall, I sincerely hope that Ben does turn out to be the leader, or a key opinion former in what would be a genuine Kuhnnian paradigm shift in governmental policymaking (or, as in the terms he uses in his new paper, that he becomes one of a new breed of Cochrane-style ”mischievous leaders, unafraid to question orthodoxies by producing good quality evidence”. Nevertheless, I can’t help worrying that Ben’s undoubted talents both as scientist and salesman are being co-opted for a deeply political process of depoliticisation.
To allay my fears, and get me (for what I’m worth) on side with his campaign for research both well-done and well-chosen, I’d like to set Ben a challenge – a challenge emanating from this sentence in his new paper:
Nobody in government would tell a doctor about what to prescribe, but we expect all doctors to be able to make informed decisions about which treatment is best, using the nest currently available evidence.
Quite right. There’d be uproar if a government minister started telling the medical what drugs were best, and s/he just wouldn’t dare.
But, as I set out at some length here, that’s precisely what the Prime Minister did to the nursing profession last January, when he casually announced that nurses would now be required to reorganise the way they work and institute ‘hourly rounding’, because he had heard that this was a good thing.
As I set out back then – using the available evidence - this was not just an utter outrage and insult to nurses, it also creates huge long-term risks of a downward spiral in care standards (as I set out more fully later, there may well be very different reasons for the apparent decline in hospital care standards, none of which have been picked up as possible causes by Cameron’s Nursing and Care Quality Forum (who now simply ignore my letters and emails), which was set up after he had made his intentional rounding decision and which has duly complied with his wishes without undertaking any further research.
But no-one but me noticed what was going on. Not even Ben, who you’d have thought might be alive to something so close to the medical profession. (I did tweet the importance of what was going on at him, in the light of my article, but he didn’t respond.)
So here, better late than never, is the challenge. If Ben really is a Kuhnian/Cochranian hero for our times, he’ll join me in a concerted call for a Randomised Control Trial around the use of intentional rounding in British hospitals, to establish whether it does actually improve care standards. The methodology will be necessarily complex, as outcomes are not tha easy to measures, but there are probably still enough wards left who have not instituted the new process to make it feasible to undertake the trial on the basis of existing organisational patterns (and therefore cheaply).
If he doesn’t bother, then I’m afraid I’ll be a little more convinced that, far from being a new Cochrane, he is indeed just a good exemplar of an actor in Olsen’s Garbage Can Model (this takes us neatly back to where I started): “a decision-maker looking for work”, content to take commission from the land of Gove for what is, if he’s honest, a somewhat thin paper bashed out on a wet Tuesday afternoon, happy to persuade government that they should look in his garbage can for a solution he came up with earlier.
Here’s hoping.
*Will Davies’ example is an apt one, since reducing unemployment through ‘nudge’ tactics, and an RCT to prove that such tactics do ‘work’, is the example the Behavioural Insights team in Cabinet Office are most keen to promote as evidence of their worth. However, I think there’s a somewhat wider ‘side-effect’ to be considered, which exemplifies more clearly than Will’s postulate the way in which the unchecked growth of RCTs (and other positivist methods) might act to depoliticise social policy. This side-effect is that reducing unemployment/getting people into work is embedded, via the research, as sine qua non of economic as well as social policy. While this may seem reasoable at the moment – after all, full employment remains a mainstream aspiration – it may well be that it is no longer an appropriate policy aim. As Chris has set out, it may be that, whatever macro-economuc policy decisions are taken, we are in for a long period of stagnation or low growth. Says Chris:
[I]n a stagnating economy, aspirations are dangerous. When there’s no aggregate growth, one person can “get on” only at the expense of another. Aspiration thus becomes a (near) zero-sum game, which is a recipe for conflict and social tension.
In such circumstances, it’s arguable that getting everyone into work becomes a very bad social p0licy (and more recently Chris sets out a ‘supply-side socialism’ alternative of a citizen’s income). But if, in the meantime, policy comes to be driven by research into the best way to attain a harmful and decisive outcome……..well, you know where I’m headed.
** It’s worth noting here that by far the biggest challenge such a step change is likely to face is the uncomfortable reality that success or failure in education is currently caused mostly by factors way beyond the scope of anyone involved in education, and not therefore amenable to teacher-based solutions.
Labour’s alcohol problem
Cameron had said he wanted to introduce a minimum price per unit for alcohol. Now it l0oks like there will be a u-turn. Ed Miliband says this is a sign of Cameron’s inability to organise things.
Miliband has, I’m afraid, got his reaction all wrong.
Had anyone from Labour HQ actually bothered to read the single piece of research behind the proposals, they’d have realised that it simply doesn’t say what everyone, in all parties, wanted it to say. As I have set out in detail, the research doesn’t prove that minimum unit pricing will reduce binge drinking, and it acknowledges that very clearly in the main report:
The elasticity matrices [the method used in the research] on their own are not sufficient to reveal the likely behaviour of the population to price changes, since these also depend on the preferences for beverage, drinking location and price point that the different sub-groups exhibit. However they do form a useful starting point for analysis, and can be compared with existing results from the literature. (p. 50)
This acknowledgment, and the other deep flaws in the research, will be set out in consultation responses (including the one I submitted), and the Tories will simply point to those responses to explain their u-turn. It doesn’t matter that the Tories’ real motivation for dumping the pricing proposal has nothing to do with the evidence, but is driven by a mix of electoral calculation and fear of taking on the Right of the part. By May, the narrative already being set out by David Davis - that the research doesn’t stack up – will have been firmly established.
Thus, by effectively coming out in support of minimum unit pricing, Labour is getting itself on entirely the wrong side of the debate. In a month or two, when the final government response to the consultation is published, Labour (and the SNP as a side effect) will be painted as the illiberal nasties who do don’t give a hoot about evidence but just want to punish the poor, while the Tories will have positioned themselves as the reasonable party, who consulted on the idea, listened to public opinion, and then took a mature, evidenced-based decision not to proceed.
In short, Labour is going to cop it on this one. Miliband may have had some fun today at PMQs, but the Tories will have the last laugh, as Labour is tarred with the very ‘authoritarian’ brush Miliband had worked so hard to avoid. The key lesson is that when Labour priorities media management over actual policy import, it does so at its peril. It should already know this, from the time it abandoned sound immigration policy in order to look tough, but maybe this time around it’ll learn…….
On Progress and the parliamentary candidate selection process
Richard Angell, Deputy Head of Progress party-within-the-party, had written an interesting column during the week on how Labour parliamentary candidates are selected. This might sound dull as ditchwater, but the process is actually a pretty key variable when it comes to what kind of person we end up getting to represent us in parliament.
Richard, who runs Progress’s member-only selection training, claims that:
the way in which ‘org sub’ has set about implementing changes – massively increasing the cost and more than doubling the time potential candidates need to spend in the constituency they hope to contest – are likely to make it easier for full-time politicos – whether they be ‘Westminster village’ thinktankers and aides to frontbenchers or trade union officials – and harder still for others to stand for Labour.
There are a number of problems with his ensuing argument.
First, there’s the decidedly worrying assertion that the extension of the selection period from four to eleven weeks means that:
it will not be a level playing field, as those who work for an MP, a think-tank, or trade union, are given all the time off they need to campaign.
Really? I’m not certain your average taxpayer, who generally foots the bill for those working for MPs, would be too pleased to hear that. Put simply, if that is happening, it should stop immediately. Likewise with trade unions. And the idea that people working for think-tanks can simply take paid sabbatical for an eleven-week period ignores they fact that think-tanks - like any other business – have to generate income in order to survive. As it happens, I know a think-tanker who is running for selection, and the idea that he can simply drop his work commitments for nearly three months looks a little absurd.
Then there’s Richard’s argument that needing £1,000 for 3 leaflets (in a 300 member ward) will militate against working class candidates. This is rubbish. First, many working class candidates will have some support from a union branch. Second, and more important, it doesn’t need to cost that much. As a councillor in a ward with 1,000 houses I produced a quarterly newsletter of eight to twelve pages for many years at no more than than around £150 per year all in, using an old Riso printer and buying the paper from Makro. No, it wasn’t glossy, but it was effective. I think Richard is simply assuming the Progress-style glossies are a prerequisite for a successful campaign, when in fact clearly low-cost materials can be just as effective with the right content (as Richard himself acknowledges with his DVD anecdote).
The most important flaw in Richard’s argument, though, is this:
Crucially, those going for selection will get the membership list – and the expense of an all-member mailing – before the party draws up a longlist, let alone a shortlist. This makes the cost of entry very high for some, with no guarantee of getting to make your case directly to the membership. The additional complication of supporting nominations makes the process more likely to favour insiders and ‘chosen sons’.
This conveniently ignores why the nominations process has been reintroduced. Obviously I can’t speak for the sub org on this, but I assume it is so that candidates get a chance, in more informal settings, to discuss local issues with members, and learn what their priorities might be, not least so that come the shortlisting this can be reflected in their interview. It seems to me perfectly reasonable that, come the longlisting, those doing the listing should consider thee extent to which local members and other parts of the labour movement have been convinced enough by the candidate that they then offer their nomination. To suggest that engagement with members and unions is simply a bureaucratic impediment is, I am afraid, something of an insult.
More generally, there is an assumption underlying Richard’s piece which requires challenge. This is that MPs are some kind of supremely talented breed, and that to fill a seat we need to catch the net nationwide for the brightest and the best – the clue is in the way Richard’s reference to “the time potential candidates need to spend in the constituency”. But as I’ve set out previously, the job of an MP is really just not that difficult - and the salary is broadly commensurate with the skill set needed for the job – and, we really don’t need to shop around nationally to get good candidates in place. I could name at least a dozen people in my own constituency who would make very good local MPs, most of them from working class backgrounds. While I’m not against people coming up from London to pitch in if they so wish, any move which makes it easier for local candidates who are already in (or at least close to) the constituency, should be welcomed.
Ultimately, Richard’s piece is a contrived defence of the status quo: MPs as overlords of their constituencies rather than servants of it. The NEC sub org committee has delivered a small victory for those who’d like to see candidates able and willing to engage with the genuine grassroots, and to do so in ways which favour working class candidates – such as knowing the local patch - over and above the glossy professional CVs and skills required to sell yourself to the party hierarchy.
Against Left Unity, for Left Action
I’ve been away from the blogs a bit over the last week or so, but three posts have caught my eye.
First, there’s Simon Caulkin, the Observer’s erstwhile management columnist, saying that the Mid-Staffs scandal has much the same roots as those at Enron and Lehman’s:
The terrible outcomes at Mid Staffs were the logical consequence of a disastrously flawed management system that systematically forces people to face in the wrong direction, counts the wrong things, and focuses management attention on the wrong part of the job.
This is “deliverology”, as unappealing in practice as in print, otherwise “targets and terror” – the direct public-sector counterpart of the ideologically-driven, shareholder-first management model that in the private sector gave us Enron, then sub-prime, Lehman Bros, and seemingly innumerable banking scandals in their wake. Unconsciously emphasising how closely the two are related, David Cameron’s big idea for preventing more Mid Staffs was performance-related pay for clinical staff – the very thing that in the financial sector brought the global banking system to the brink of collapse.
Simon is passionate, angry, at the failure of management, but he offers no solutions.
Second, there’s Duncan Weldon, who offers us a glimpse of what that solution might be, as he seeks to wrest the ‘supply-side’ from the Right’s icy grip:
[Stewart] Wood, who has been arguing for a ‘supply side revolution from the left’ for over a year now, is correct to argue that what is needed now is essentially a three-step process. First a boost to demand, second, supply side changes to boost productivity and thirdly making sure we have the right set of institutions in place so that the gains from productivity growth are not simply seized by those at the very top of the earnings ladder.
Taking the supply side seriously is nothing new for centre-left politics. Academics write of Attlee’s ‘supply side socialism’, whilst Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’ was essentially a programme of supply side reform. In this week’s FT Wolfgang Münchau wrote that whenever he hears talk of ‘economic reforms’ he first thinks of Willy Brandt arguing for pro-worker policy reforms rather than the current usual meaning of deregulation…..
The right policy programme now takes as its starting point the need to boost demand but recognises that we have real problems that simply increasing demand will not solve. The real significance of Ed Miliband’s recent speech, for me at least, was that vital recognition.
This is Duncan at his understated best. For “the right set of institutions”, we might read democratized control of the workplace – precisely the kind of reform I have argued is needed if quality of public services, in the NHS or elsewhere, is to improve.
For a moment, I am optimistic.
But with article number three, I come down to earth with a bump. Here’s Owen Jones with his call for Left Unity:
What is missing in British politics is a broad network that unites progressive opponents of the Coalition. That means those in Labour who want a proper alternative to Tory austerity, Greens, independent lefties, but also those who would not otherwise identify as political, but who are furious and frustrated. In the past two years of traipsing around the country, speaking to students, workers, unemployed and disabled people, I’ve met thousands who want to do something with their anger. Until now, I have struggled with an answer.
But if we could agree on some key principles, and avoid creating a new battleground for ultra-left sects, we could give the angry and the frustrated a home. We could link together workers facing falling wages while their tax credits are cut; unemployed people demonised by a cynical media and political establishment; crusaders against the mass tax avoidance of the wealthy; sick and disabled people having basic support stripped away; campaigners against crippling cuts to our public services; young people facing a future of debt, joblessness and falling living standards; and trade unions standing their ground in the onslaught against workers’ rights.
Such a network would push real alternatives to the failure of austerity that would have to be listened to; and create political space for policies that otherwise does not exist. Faced with a more courageous, coherent challenge to the Tory project, the Labour leadership would face pressure that would not – for a change – come from the right.
It is easier to discuss such an idea in a newspaper than put it into practice, but it is a mystery that such a network does not already exist. Though fraught with difficulties – never underestimate the ability of the left to miss an opportunity – the appetite is certainly there.
Indeed. “We should never underestimate the ability of the left to miss an opportunity.”
For here we are, with the theory and practice of managerialism in its death throes, and there goes an influential and eloquent voice on the left calling for one last concerted push against the austerity that it’s singularly failed to stop for the last three years.
So, once more with feeling………….Pouring energies into building a coalition of resistance out of the Coalition of Resistance and other anti-cuts networks is a strategic mistake of the highest order. Challenges to specific austerity measures will take place anyway, and while they should certainly be supported where it’s feasible that there might be at least some success (e.g. the bedroom tax) they don’t need any more coordinating than they’ve already got.
Instead, the undoubted intellectual and rhetorical energies of people like Owen, and the modest organisational competences of people like me, should be directed at hitting managerial capitalism where it’s weakest.
Initially, this may well be in traditional public services, where unions are still at their strongest. In the NHS, for example, we should be encouraged by and build on the great work of Gail Adams, Unison’s head of nursing, who for the second year is organising a nationwide spot-check of staffing levels*, such that the power of information is seized from management and the unions are able to go back to management and tell them what safe staffing levels are and when they expect them to be put in place.
We should be working with unions to localise this kind of approach, consciously and deliberately seeking to rip the carpet from under managerial feet, to replace ‘quality control’ with ‘professional pride’. We should be organising to revitalise and refocus our Trades Councils, the potentially crucial interface between workplaces and the wider community, which have become distracted by their own service delivery aims (if they have not withered away) at the expense of their core function. We should be organising with the NUT to build the competence and reach of social enterprises spun out of local authorities (such as Hackney), so that the most rapacious, lowest quality academy chains can bbe turfed out on their ear.
The examples go on – action in DWP to ‘safeguard’ vulnerable clients, banking union members coming together to challenge the quality of loan provision to SMEs (including the target-beating bureaucracy of making a rollover facility a new loan), unionising the childcare sector and working with local authorities to support the switch of private daycare to co-operative daycare, supporting new Foundation Trust** governors to listen to staff concerns separately from the Non-Executive Directors and then report back to the newly reformed Trades Councils, establishing professionalised local media operations through TUC start-up funding…..
In short, we should be organising to create a parallel mechanism to the Tory state, such that – come a Labour government – the state has little choice but to work WITH workers to reform the ‘supply side’, not seek to control them. No, it’s not easy, and yes, it will be piecemeal, but this should be about creating a genuine, conscious movement for positive local empowerment and accountability.
If we do none of these things, the state – whether it be a Tory or Labour government – will revert quickly to managerial type, just as it reverted to financial capitalist type soon after the 2008 crash, but this time around the targets, the controls, the sanctions, will be harsher and more random, as what Professor Gerry Stoker calls ”a strategy of governance by lottery”, first implicitly espoused by New Labour, is fully brought to bear (p.74-76). The workplace, if you still have one, will not be a pleasant place to be come the premiership of Mr Gove.
The task, As Owen notes in his article, is urgent. But Owen identifies the wrong task, while Duncan and Simon point us towards the right one.
* Declaration of interest: Gail and I go a long way back. We first used this ‘information seizure’ technique at St George’s Hospital, Tooting, back in about 1988, with reasonable effect (though I admit I was very naive about both the potential and the implications, so screwed up the final outcome).
** One small sign of managerial desperation and chaos is that in the NHS it’s been decided paid Non-Executive Directors are not sufficient safeguard against poor service, so unpaid Foundation Trust governors are to be given greater oversight over the people who are paid to have oversight over the services, while in education it’s been decided that the unpaid governors have failed and they need to be replaced by paid directors.
the alternative
On Habermas, Islamism and the great Left divide (part 1 of 2)
The Secular Respectable Left
‘Why on earth do some left-wingers side with Islamists, when Islamists are so evil?’ is an on-going question-cum-accusation, levelled at people like Nick Cohen at people like…….well, people like me.
Thus Nick Cohen in the Spectator, suggests the way the ‘classic’ British left side with the Islamist establishment means they are simply racists:
Other speakers [at the launch of the Centre for Secular Space] were from Southall Black Sisters, Bengali secular campaigns against Tower Hamlets’ Islamist establishment and Iranian resistance groups – classic left wing figures, in other words. Yet they are ignored or in the case of Sahgal fired for speaking out.
All emphasized how many in the British state and British left were racists hiding behind liberal masks. On the left, the racism came in the constant postponement of campaigns to improve women’s lives whether they are immigrants or in the poor world. Their suffering must always be subordinated to the struggle against ‘American imperialism’. This would be bad enough if we did not see from the far Left way into the liberal mainstream supposed progressives allying with clerical reactionaries and clerical fascists. They ignore the victims of theocracy and accept their oppression.
Similarly, Carl Packman at Left Foot Forward, blames the far-left for mix of political immaturity and ‘paternalism’:
And here is where the far-left and the British and American establishment can find harmony. While the latter needs the Muslim far-right in Saudi Arabia for cash, they keep quiet about human rights abuses. For the far-left the comradeship is just as dubious, if not slightly more immature.
Recently I was at the launch of a new book by Trotskyist writer and blogger Richard Seymour, who told a packed audience in Kings Cross that the Stop the War Coalition did not wish to pursue sectarianism, deciding who should and should not be marching against the war, but in any case those religious right-wingers might have had their minds changed through a union with the left……..
If this isn’t paternalist (Muslim beliefs, whatever they are, are only temporary, easily overturned), I don’t know what is.
In the end, goes the core argument of the Cohen/Packman/Harry’s Place nexus, the far left/lefties/liberals [1] are the real right-wingers here, and they either need to change their ways or shut up, while the Secular Responsible Left (my coinage, get used to it) get on with the real job in hand of promoting human rights.
For myself, I think this analysis is at least as ’immature’ as the politics it professes to critique. The suggestion that someone like Richard Seymour (he being a useful cipher for the broad doctrine of the leftist groupings around the SWP/Stop the War), is some kind of closet racist/paternalist, and that he’s “in harmony” with the British and American establishment, is frankly just silly [2]. Such an analysis fundamentally confuses agency with structure, and in the absence of any coherent analysis of why some on the far left/liberal left do seem to get aligned with reactionary Islam, the Secular Responsible Left falls back on the idea that, ultimately, they’re all just bad, wrong people.
In this two part article, I argue that such an approach is not simply politically immature in terms of its failure to distinguish structure from agency. I argue that is also deeply unhelpful as a political strategy for anyone really, really interested in a progressive socialism inclusive of human rights guarantees and the emancipation of the oppressed (and there can be no progressive socialism without that). In the end, accusations levelled at Seymour by Packman look and feel like sectarian squabbling getting in the away of constructive organisation, largely because that is what they are: ‘my integrity is bigger than yours’ political willy-waving fests may fill small halls of the like-minded, but they are not going to change the lives of marginalised women anytime soon.
Indeed the Secular Respectable Left is, I will argue (following John Gray p.125-6), more reactionary, more unhelpful to the cause of emancipation that they profess to espouse than are the far/liberal/mainstream left at whom they throw this same accusation.
Habermas and value pluralism
So what is a more ‘mature’ analysis of how some on the Left come, apparently, to side with the anti-human rights baddies against the goodies?
A good place to start is with the work Jurgen Habermas, who has devoted a large part of his career, from the early 1990s onwards, to resolving the tension that lies at the heart of the current debate: how do modern constitutional democracies best promote respect both for individual human rights and for the rights of groups of people to live by different cultural values (what has been termed the “struggle for recognition“), when such cultural values sometimes are so opposed to a liberal conception of human rights (and vice versa)? It is a resolution to this dilemma – itself a result of the multi-ethnic world that has developed through the 20th century – which forms Habermas’ whole ‘constitutional patriotism’ project, seeking to replace the comfortable majoritarian certainties of ethno-nationalist value consensus (comfortable for those who are included) with a newer commitment to a political culture which accommodates (and in time are, through discourse, adaptable to) different cultures and their value sets [3].
In Remarks on Legitimation through Human Rights (ch, 5 in Postnational Constellations: Political Essays) Habermas gets to the core:
The human rights discourse that has been argued on normative terms is plagued by the fundamental doubt about whether the form of legitimation that has arisen in the West can also hold up as plausible within the framework of other cultures. The most radical critics are Western intellectuals themselves. They maintain that the universal validity claimed for human rights merely hides a perfidious claim to power on the part of the West.
This is no accident. To gain some distance from one’s traditions and limited perspectives in one of the advantages of occidental rationalism. The European history of the interpretation of human rights is the history of such a decentring of out way of viewing things. So-called equal rights may have only been gradually extended to oppressed, marginalized, and excluded groups. Only after tough political struggles have workers, women, Jews, Romanies, gays and political refugees been recognized as “human beings” with a claim to fully equal treatment. The important thing now is that the individual advances in emancipation reveal in hindsight the ideological function that human rights had also fulfilled up to that time. That is, the egalitarian claim to universal validity and inclusion had also served to mask the de facto unequal treatment of those who were silently excluded. This observation has aroused the suspicion that human rights might be reducible to this ideological unction. Have they not always served to shield a false universality – an imaginary humanity, behind which an imperialist West could conceal its own way and interests (p.119-120).
It is this disjuncture between the rhetoric of universality and the practice of exclusion as the key means to establish and expand empire which is so meticulously detailed in Domenico Losurdo’s recent Liberalism: A Counter-History. And it is Habermas’ understanding of this ‘dialectic between subjugation and emancipation’ which provides for his key insight; this is to pick out both the negative and positive features of “occidental rationalism”: a tendency to ascribe any form of enduring inequality and exploitation to imperialism, which can hinder empirical analysis, balanced by a genuine openness other value sets.
The less respectable Left’s (Althusserian) engagement with value pluralism
This is precisely the situation in which some on the British left do now find themselves.
On the one hand, because the left positions itself primarily in opposition to the logic of imperialism (rooted, as Losurdo has set out so clearly, in the exclusionary tendencies of liberalism), it tends to see all events through this lens. Thus, as I set out in my recent anti-war left essay, the empirical evidence that some Western military intervention is not in fact motivated by a rapacious need for natural resources is discounted in favour of a narrative of post-colonial imperialism. In this narrative, the maxim that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ takes strong hold, and the tendency is simply to take the side of any group which also sets itself in opposition to the forces of Western imperialism [4]
On the other hand, there is the ‘positive’ dynamic, reflecting the other side of the coin of Habermas’ insight. This is that left-wing intellectuals of the Richard Seymour type appear to be genuinely motivated by their (Marxist) occidental rationalism to recognise that there are other ways of looking at rights than through the prism of liberalism.
In this reading, what the Secular Respectable Left see as a betrayal of liberal values and human rights can be seen simply as an acknowledgment by some on the left that there are other worldviews, which do not depend on the primacy of the individual, which are potentially as valid.
Take, for example two interpretations of this Harry’s Place article. ‘Lucy Lips’ attacks those she descibes the far left “anti-racists” (her inverted commas) for working with the East London Mosque, who in turn have hosted “Islamist preacher” Khaild Al-Fikri. As evidence, of the far left’s wrongness in its engagement, she quotes Al-Fikri from a previous conference:
Don’t be misleaded [sic] and misguided with those kaffir people who says it is freedom and you are a free man. They are kuffar. And when they say, and poison your mind with the word freedom, they mean there is no God. “Do whatever you want.” Because they are kuffar. … You need to protect your deen [religion] and iman [faith] because there are many things which will affect you, will come against you. Somebody will say to you “democracy, socialism, freedom”………And again for my sisters. Don’t be misguided. Don’t be misleaded [sic] by the kaffir theories and attitudes. You are very free when you are home with your husband and your kids. … Don’t say “I am a free woman, I want to run house, I want to work, I want to get money”. No! This is the duty of your husband.
Now, to my eyes, and to the eyes of most people reading this piece, this is pretty unpleasant reactionary stuff, at least at first reading. But stand back for a minute, strip away the insulting ‘kuffar’ term, and what you’re left with is little more than an expression of what Habermas has suggested: that the concept of ‘freedom’ is some kind of trap; that it is a Western invention aimed at diverting people from the true path of the divine; that Muslims should retain their own core ethical standards, even if they have to defend them against corrupt Western ones. Certainly, it’s arguable that the guidance on the role of women expressed here is, as Saeeda Shah has noted, an expression, of Islamic philosophy “misappropriated by those who have traditionally occupied the spaces of religious interpretation” (p.245), but notwithstanding the question of who, within a community, gets to establish community’s values and notms (and this is something I come back to in part 2), it still possible to recognise it as a valid expression of a particular ethical standpoint. And this, remember, is from someone widely considered so “extremist” that even to meet with a group which has previously invited him to speak under their roof is an indication of betrayal of all decency.
By way of comparison, here’s self-confessed American liberal Jonathan Haidt, talking about the period spent in Orissa (albeit a period I suspect is conveniently reconstructed for his arguments) during which he realised that the concept of freedom and rights might not have singular validity:
I had read about Shewder’s ethic of community and had understood it intellectually. But now, for the first time in my life, I began to feel it. I could feel beauty in a moral code that emphasizes beauty, respect for one’s elders, service to the group, and negation of the self’s desires. I could still see its ugly side: I could see that power sometimes leads to pomposity and abuse. And I could see that subordinates – particularly women – were often blocked from doing what they wanted to do by the whims of their elders (male and female). but for the first time in my life, i was able to step outside my home morality, the ethic of autonomy. I had a place to stand, and from the vantages point of the ethic of community, the ethic of autonomy now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused (p.102).
Haidt’s recognition that different societies might have equally valid moral bases for the way in which their members lives their lives (whilst also recognising that who holds power is a key determinant) is not new. Indeed, Haidt quotes anthropologist Clifford Geertz approvingly:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against is social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us. a rather peculiar idea within the contexts of the world’s cultures (p.126, quoted at p.14 in Haidt)
The challenge that Haidt and Geertz set themselves [5], as academics raised within the Western liberal tradition, is to put aside their preconception about what is morally correct, and embrace ‘value pluralism’. And this, it seems to me, is what those on the Left now prepared to engage with radical Islam are also trying to do. True, they don’t articulate it very well, preferring to explain any such engagement as anti-imperialist agitation rather than as a recognition that different worldviews, however alien to our own, have a validity for the simple reason that people have them [6]. Perhaps I even overestimate here the intelligence of some on the far left, though perhaps such a reliance on ‘tried and tested’ anti-imperialism narrative is understandable in the context of a media (including Harry’s Place) keen to misrepresent a call for the understanding of Islamic values as direct support for extremism.
Whatever the motivations, articulated or otherwise, of those on the Left prepared to deal with value pluralism, the important point is that only those on the (far) Left are prepared to engage with probably the most serious question of our times. That question is:
How, in a world in which capitalism has become the almost universal economic modus vivendi, and liberal values have underpinned the rise of capitalism, do we now best deal with the ‘struggle for recognition’ of a very different value set, in a way which both respects value pluralism but also pay proper heed to the emancipatory ideal that lies at the heart of what it is to be left-wing (whether this be Marxist or rooted in earlier Enlightenment thinking)?
Answering that question, again with reference to Habermas, is the task of part 2 of this article (coming soon). In the meantime, it’s worth noting (h/t @sunny_hundal) that attempts to reach out across the value-divide towards some form of long-term political/constiutional settlement, are not necessarily taking place in one direction only. No doubt the Islamic Society of Denmark are getting their version of Harry’s Place-style accusations of treachery from the Unsecular Respectable Islamists, but I applaud them as I applaud the efforts of those on the Left who are seeking some way forward, even while hampered by their Althusserian (see [4]) anti-imperialist ritual.
Notes
[1] Cohen in particular seems to use these terms interchangeably.
[2] In the accusation that the far/liberal left are operating in ‘harmony’ with the Western establishment, Packman finds himself in interesting company. Here’s revolutionary Marxist Samir Amin, the consternation of Alex Callinicos of the SWP, coming out in support of French intervetion in Mali, on the basis of an interesting argument that “reactionary political Islam” is in reality a support, rather than a threat, to Western imperialism, because its presence allows the imperialist powers to maintain their control over the people of the ‘triad’ (the US, Europe and Japan) in the name of a ‘war of the civilisations’.
Telle est la raison fondamentale pour laquelle les puissances de la triade – telles qu’elles sont et demeurent – y voient un allié stratégique. Le soutien systématique apporté par ces puissances à l’Islam politique réactionnaire a été et demeure l’une des raisons majeures des « succès » qu’il a enregistrés : les Talibans d’Afghanistan, le FIS en Algérie, les « Islamistes » en Somalie et au Soudan, ceux de Turquie, d’Egypte, de Tunisie et d’ailleurs ont tous bénéficié de ce soutien à un moment décisif pour leur saisie du pouvoir local. Aucune des composantes dites modérés de l’Islam politique ne s’est jamais dissociée véritablement des auteurs d’actes terroristes de leurs composantes dites « salafistes ». Ils ont tous bénéficié et continuent à bénéficier de « l’exil » dans les pays du Golfe, lorsque nécessaire. En Libye hier, en Syrie encore aujourd’hui ils continuent à être soutenus par ces mêmes puissances de la triade. En même temps les exactions et les crimes qu’ils commettent sont parfaitement intégrés dans le discours d’accompagnement de la stratégie fondée sur leur soutien : ils permettent de donner de la crédibilité à la thèse d’une « guerre des civilisations » qui facilite le ralliement « consensuel » des peuples de la triade au projet global du capital des monopoles. Les deux discours – la démocratie et la guerre au terrorisme – se complètent mutuellement dans cette stratégie.
For myself, I don’t buy the argument that, just because one political or ideological grouping does or says something than can be argued to be favourable to the interests of another grouping, that both these groupings must therefore have a common purpose.
[3] Casting Habermas’ sophisticated argument as simply as possible, constitutional patriotism acknowledges that in modern culturally plural societies the ethno-nationalism that used to bind people to a shared identity and thereby create the conditions for the legitimacy of the democratic state. That is, the two key underpinnings of the modern state form as developed in the 18th century – a national identity allied with a republican ideal of individual citizen operating in voluntary contract with each other to abide by the laws of the state – have become less firmly connected. Habermas’ believes that the 21st century state must find a new “functional equivalent for the fusion of the nation of citizens with the ethnic nation”, and that to do this we need to create a patriotic commitment to a legal and political constitution, however abstract, while allowing diverse cultures to flourish in their own terms. I’ll come back to this in part 2. For more, see Andrea Baumeister’s essay Diversity and Unity: The Problem with ‘Constitutional Patriotism’ for an intelligent critique.
[4] It strikes me that this tendency on the part of the Left to push aside any evidence that does not fit with the narrative of resource-hungry imperialism is, ironically, a good example of Althusserian interpellation. As Althusser says:
The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject. If he believes in God, he goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance (once it was material in the ordinary sense of the term) and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices ‘according to the correct principles’. If he believes in Justice, he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.
To this set of beliefs, we might perhaps add ‘Marxism’, in which name a large number of ritual practices have also been established. I would argue that, for many Marxists, who enter into that doctrine of their own free will, the act of interpellation is a strong one, with Marx(ism) maintaining all the key features of the (capital S) Subject. I wonder, indeed, whether it is this process of interpellation, and the commitment to ritual, which lies at the heart of the troubles both the SWP and the Catholic Church now face:
Were not men made in the image of God? As all theological reflection proves, whereas He ‘could’ perfectly well have done without men, God needs them, the Subject needs the subjects, just as men need God, the subjects need the Subject. Better: God needs men, the great Subject needs subjects, even in the terrible inversion of his image in them (when the subjects wallow in debauchery, i.e. sin).
[5] It’s worth noting here that openness to value pluralism is not a particular new concept at all. An awareness of the tension between universality and pluralism can be traced back at least as far as Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith, as an early liberal not caught up by the imperative felt by later liberals like JS Mill to justify imperialist expansion (on which see Jennifer Pitts), was not able to resolve these tensions, but the very fact that he – two centuries before Habermas was aware of them suggests that it continues to be an area still worthy of consideration. As Samuel Fleischacker has noted, in an interesting essay which argues that modern political philosophy might benefit from Smith’s implicitly anthropological approach:
Smith is unlikely to offer us any straightforward meta-ethical reconciliation between relativism and absolutism, and his promising hints about how, in ethics proper, to bring together pluralism and universalism, are undermined, to some degree, by his meta-ethical dilemma. But the problems he faces in these regards are our problems too, and thinking with Smith may help nudge us toward a solution to them, even if that solution is not explicitly to be found in Smith’s own work.
[6] Again, this is an ‘anthropological’ formulation, of the type which informs Adam Smith’s work
Hundal’s hubris
Sunny is in triumphalist mood, and thinks Labour’s fiscal conservatism has had its day:
The UK’s AAA downgrade wasn’t just a nail in the coffin of Osbonomics, it was also a much-needed kick in the groin to those on the right of the Labour party who thought opposing austerity was political and economic madness……Let’s not forget Black Labour – who published a pamphlet in 2011 saying Labour should ‘place fiscal conservatism at the heart of its message‘. How’s that working out for you guys?
Sunny is also completely wrong.
Labour’s fiscal conservatives are not quiet now because they know they have lost the argument. They’re quiet because they came out in 2011, won the argument hands down, and have gone home, put their feet up and relaxed for a bit with a nice glass of red. They simply don’t need to engage with people like Sunny (or me) because we don’t count.
Sunny needs to take a look beyond the media-heavy environment which he now inhabits, and see what’s going on when it comes to the Labour’s policy formulation.
Progress, the real party within the Labour party, is hosting regional events around the country to debate “the options and choices the party will face” if it comes to power in 2015. But fiscal expansion is not even on the table as an option:
An incoming Labour government in 2015 will not be able to countenance such increases in spending. Instead, the challenge of closing the deficit and tackling some of the long-term fiscal pressures the country faces will require some tough choices and radical thinking if Labour is to bring about progressive change.
(When I asked Progress if they’d set up an event in my area, they declined, pleading lack of resources. But look at it from their side. Why go through the hassle of being challenged by a nobody, especially a nobody who might be able to construct a coherent case against the parameters imposed on the debate?)
Similarly, Labour’s favourite think-tank, IPPR, argues its case for childcare from a determinedly fiscal conservative perspective; there will be no overall increase in spending:
Investment in childcare will help boost the employment rate, ease living costs for families with children and reduce child poverty. But finding the necessary funding will involve some difficult calls: should Labour seek to freeze child tax credits and child benefit or reform wealth taxation to generate additional revenues?
Everywhere you look, Labour is apparently preparing its own form of austerity: a little looser round the edges than the one that emanates from the Tories’ ideological drive for a smaller state, perhaps, but still very firmly in the fiscal conservative mould.
To what extent the In the Black Labour crowd (one of whom is from the aforementioned IPPR) are the cause of Labour fiscal conservative turn, or simply a reflection of a what was already developing, is an open question. I tend to think they have been the beneficiaries of (Dowding’s) systematic luck, whereby their “social location” made it more likely that what they wrote just the right nerve at just the right time within the just right bit of the party.
As for Sunny, he needs to get out more. First, he thinks people hate him for his “nuanced” approach to interventionism, when in fact the decision-makers didn’t even notice he wanted a say. Now he thinks he’s won the argument, when the argument was won months ago without him even being there.
Recent Comments