Did the Left win the 20th century?

This seems the thing to blog about, so here goes. Rick's post persuaded me it was worth a try.

The obvious definitional caveat:. to simplify, let me suggest that the left is concerned with the achievement of rational social relations. That leaves plenty of room for disagreement on 'rational', which the left has certainly displayed over the years. It also carries different meanings in different spheres. In the social and cultural spheres, it means the elimination of rank and status, and the reform of social institutions and practices. In the political sphere, it means the reorganisation of economic life. The left has been relatively successful in the first, but failed in the second.

Political economy

It oversimplifies to say that government is larger now than it was in the twentieth century. The argument over the People's Budget was less about the expansion of social policy than it was about how it would be financed: the Conservatives wanted to use import duties and opposed the introduction of a higher rate of income tax. You can be on the right (as I am) and say that rising prosperity and technology caused the state to expand in this way, as we could afford and it could provide more collective goods; ideological fervour was secondary.

At any rate, the expansion of the fiscal state was never the left's purpose - only a means to the end of social justice. Instead, the left's hope was that they could use the state to change the way our economy functioned, ​to allow for a more equal distribution of goods and the end of exploitation. That was the cause by which Labour supplanted the Liberals as the party of the left, and from the 1920s to the 1990s defined political life.

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"Depleting" North Sea oil

"There is no doubt that oil played a big part in bankrolling Thatcher’s agenda and in allowing Britain to address a chronic balance of payments problem that had besieged post-war government... But history should also record that Thatcher missed a trick in not diverting some of the proceeds of oil revenue into an oil fund, like Norway and others did. Instead she used the lot to support current spending, including covering the costs of large-scale industrial restructuring and funding expensive tax cuts to woo middle England."

That's Guy Lodge in the New Statesman, arguing that the Thatcher government was monstrously irresponsible in not creating a sovereign wealth fund (as we'd now call it) from North Sea oil money. This is an allegation that was made at the time, and has not improved in the retelling.

​Lodge says "oil and gas in the North Sea are part of the nation's capital stock". Well, yes and no. Oil and gas reserves only have value insofar as they're being depleted. Compare it to motorways or Buckingham Palace and you can see the difference - we leave them there and we can use them and get value from them. With oil, yes "to tax this stock and spend the money in a flow of current expenditure it to deplete the stock", but if the stock isn't depleted, it doesn't produce any value.

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Inequality in the Thatcher/Major years

Inequality certainly did increase in the 1980s, of this there is no doubt. Contrary to the suggestions of some on the right, it did not increase significantly during the Blair/Brown years. On the other hand, despite some not insubstantial efforts by Gordon Brown, they had little success in lowering it - there was a slight fall in the early 2000s, as tax credits were introduced, but this was soon reversed.

This may lead to my excommunication from polite society, but generally speaking, I'm not that bothered by income inequality.​ Providing it is not won simply by extracting rents (more a concern in the high tide of the recent banking boom), I'm all for people becoming richer. And yes, I know, a lot of it does come down to luck rather than effort or merit. But unless or until somebody can find the criteria that allow us to distinguish luck from judgement, while we need to cushion the obvious cases of bad luck, we shouldn't get too picky.

After all, the apparent sins of the 1980s and 1990s expansion of income inequality are that they were an unfair downside to the achievement of a better economic performance than we had in the 1970s. Maybe. I think little reflection goes on with that 'unfair', and I think too much of the causation is attributed to policy choice and too little to wider changes. Here though, I want to consider some of those wider changes but also the consequences of the increase in income inequality.

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Thatcher: what would Maggie do?

Years after she had withdrawn from the frontline, but before she passed away, Thatcher loomed over British politics like no other. If you're on the left, you often signal your dislike of the current coalition by saying they're "worse than Thatcher". If you're on the right, Thatcher is the yardstick by which all Conservative leaders are to be evaluated (and found wanting). If you're in the centre ground, you measure the innovation of policy reform by saying that "this goes further than Thatcher ever dared to go".

Except for the odd very specific case, that last one is utterly meaningless. For example: no, Thatcher would not have implemented the health reforms currently underway. On the other hand, at the time she presided over the National Health Service, it was pretty much entirely a command economy with little in the way of effective management and financial control. If she started from where we are now, she might be willing to do more or less than those reforms. ​Thatcher did much to make British government the way that it is today, but she governed three decades ago.

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Huntington's "most important political distinction"

"The most important political distinction among countries concerns not their form of government but their degree of government. The differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities. Communist totalitarian states and Western liberal states both belong generally in the category of effective rather than debile political systems. The United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union have different forms of government, but in all three systems the government governs. Each country is a political community with an overwhelming consensus among the people on the legitimacy of the political system. In each country the citizens and their leaders share a vision of the public interest of the society of the traditions and principles upon which the political community is based. All three countries have strong, adaptable, coherent political institutions: effective bureaucracies, well-organised political parties, a high degree of popular participation in public affairs, working systems of civilian control over the military, extensive activity by the government in the economy, and reasonably effective procedures for regulating succession and controlling political conflict."

Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 1968, p.1

Thatcher: a traditional Tory states(wo)man

This is the first of three posts on the Thatcher legacy in terms of politics and policy. In this post, I focus on her aims and intentions, and suggest that she was less the radical than her critics and fans insist, and many supposed paradoxes of her time in office can be understood through the lens of traditional Tory statecraft. In the second post, I will look at the implications of this understanding of Thatcher's programme for the ongoing controversy over the future of British conservatism. In the third post, I will look at the way broad social changes contrived to create the Thatcher moment but also to ensure it had many unintended - and sometimes unwanted - consequences.

Thatcher's fiercest critics and most devoted fans can all agree that she was a disruptive leader, either innovating or inflicting a new neoliberal doctrine to overturn an established social democratic settlement. If you're a fan, you see that settlement as bankrupt, and celebrate her pursuit of a smaller state. If you're a critic, you see her as the hatchetwoman of capitalist revanche, overpowering the patterns of progress that had evolved since the war. These perceptions found deeply-held convictions. For many on the left, for example, anger over Thatcher's break with the postwar consensus has never gone away; Ed Miliband's comments about moving the centre ground reiterates the belief that it can (and should) be reversed.

This has never seemed a wholly satisfactory explanation. As many have pointed out since Lady Thatcher's passing, she was far more pragmatic than the official version allows; clear in her aims but always willing to adapt to short-term circumstance. Memories of Thatcherism as a self-consciously transformational neoliberal programme owe much to her third, abbreviated term; look back on reporting of her first two terms, and Labour's radicalism was the story. And there is always the paradox, raised by Andrew Gamble, of how a programme concerned with achieving the free economy rested so much on asserting and centralising state authority? And this being so, what was Thatcher about?

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Wealth and the bottom 50%

"Thatcherism’s flagship domestic projects of selling council houses and extending share ownership from three to nine million made the ‘property-owning democracy’ her central theme. Yet the Thatcher era was marked by an unprecedented concentration of wealth. Phillip Blond notes that the share of non-property wealth and assets of the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 12 per cent in 1976 to just 1 per cent in 2003."

That's Sunder Katwala in an article that's well worth a read on Thatcher's ideological impact.​ I may well have more to say on the article, but I just wanted to correct the record on the assertion cited from Phillip Blond, concerning the concentration of wealth and therefore the failure of the 'property-owning democracy' programme.

The specific factual claim is true, but highly misleading.

 

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