Sick

Today’s post is prompted by the story this week that Hillary Clinton has had to take time off from campaigning because she has pneumonia. In fact, she only took four days off – which, frankly, seems very little to recover from pneumonia - but this has been seized on by her political opponents as evidence that she is not up to the job of US President.

Although the political reasons for this are obvious, it seems to me to fit with a wider issue of the way that in the UK, at least, going off sick is frowned upon, and worse. It can be taken as a sign of unreliability and lack of commitment. The Sports Direct scandal revealed exactly this, with sick leave being counted against workers, who as a result were too scared to take it. But that case is the tip of a much larger iceberg. A 2015 survey found that one in four British workers were too afraid to take time off when ill, and the study suggests that they are much less likely to do so than workers in some other countries: in 2015 8.9% of British workers took more than 8 days sick leave compared with 25.3% of German workers.

If we discount the idea that the British are inherently healthier than the Germans, then it seems obvious that what is at issue is the politics and culture of work. Organizationally, it links to the more brutal management and work conditions in Britain, including the precarious employment terms discussed in my last post. Certainly self-employed workers take about half as much time off sick as those in employment.

British politicians routinely berate the public sector in particular for having higher levels of sick leave than the private sector even though both have fallen steadily for the last 20 years according to the Office for National Statistics. But Stephen Bevan of the Work Foundation and Lancaster University Management School explains that this difference (7.9 days per year in the public sector versus 5.5 days in the private sector) can easily be understood. It isn’t that public sector workers are malingerers, but a combination of the demographics, the more risky occupations and the better recording of sick leave that exist within the public sector.

In addition to this, I think that there is a very macho issue around taking sick leave. This seems evident in the debate about Hillary Clinton illness but, more generally in the sense that it is somehow ‘soft’ or ‘wimpy’ to ‘give in’ and take time off. Real men power on through it. The UK statistics bear this out, with women losing 2.6% of working hours to sickness compared with 1.6% for men (2013 figures).

It seems unlikely to me that it is any better for businesses than for individuals to work when they are sick. They are likely to be less productive, and to infect other workers. With the weather in Britain today having taken a decisive turn to autumn, we are now entering the season of coughs and colds. Personally, I find it intensely unpleasant if the people at work, in shops or on public transport are spluttering and sneezing all over me. In 1945 there was a splendidly amusing public information film (you can see it here) warning that ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases’ and instructing people to use a handkerchief. Well, that’s fine so far as it goes, but much better for all concerned to stay off sick until you get better, and for employers to support that.

Battling for Britain

I had intended to write a post about Owen Hatherley’s stimulating recent book The Ministry of Nostalgia, and then thought I wanted to write something about today’s EU summit where Britain is negotiating terms prior to a Referendum on continued membership. But it occurred to me that the two are in many ways linked.

Hatherley’s book picks up on something which I have also noticed and commented on in this blog, namely the grotesque historical spoonerism in which wartime and post-war austerity is invoked to justify swingeing public budget cuts. What was originally about shared suffering in order to build collective goods becomes the cover for their dismemberment. Hatherley analyses this “austerity nostalgia” at length, orchestrated in particular through the motif of the now ubiquitous ‘keep calm and carry on’ slogan. Originally devised (although not in fact used) as wartime propaganda, it now indexes a certain sort of British – or English – self-identity of stoical suffering.

Whilst most obviously consonant with the political projects of the right – and I will return to this – Hatherley deploys a most intriguing argument about how it fits in with a certain kind of leftist nostalgia which, whilst he has some sympathy with it, he finds to be ultimately impotent. That chimed with me because it is a nostalgia that I am prone to, as I wrote in my post about Jonathan Coe’s novelistic treatment of the same kind of thinking. And amongst the wide range of examples – many of them to do with architecture – that Hatherley deploys I was interested to see that one was Ken Loach’s film 1945, which I also posted about on this blog, even linking it to the perversity of the ‘keep calm and carry on’ motif! There’s also critical (but again sympathetic) mention of one of my favourite recent(ish) books, historian Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, as a key statement of leftist nostalgia. So, in short, Hatherley’s book both spoke to but also challenged many of the things I believe and am interested in. I am still digesting what to make of it and may well post about this in due course.

But this book also re-enforces my sense of what lies beneath the EU Referendum. For “austerity nostalgia” and its associated tropes seems very much to inform David Cameron’s avowed intention to ‘battle for Britain’ in his EU re-negotiation. The very fact of using such language is surely designed to underline its primary purpose: to persuade the undecided or only vaguely interested to vote to stay in. It is not that the things under negotiation are of any great significance – they are as irrelevant to those implacably opposed to EU membership as to those, such as myself, who are broadly supportive. But the language speaks to the softer edges of opposition, the hard core of which is animated by the still potent idea of Britain ‘standing alone’ during the war, and which seems still to dream of a world something like that of (an imagination of) early post-war Britain. It speaks to a sullen, resentful sensibility, sometimes vicious, other times sentimental. Local, not cosmopolitan. Pathetic (in its literal sense) but not always necessarily ignoble.

In a more practical vein, though, the re-negotiation shows the incoherence of the Brexit case in at least two ways. One is that the persistent complaint of those making that case is that the EU is ruled by diktat from Brussels, with no democracy. Yet when it emerged that even if Brussels agreed to the terms, they would be subject to ratification by the democratically elected European Parliament there was outrage. The other is that the terms of the re-negotiation were seen as hopelessly limited and yet even these had been ‘watered down’ as the protracted negotiation progressed. Yet it is an article of faith amongst Brexiters that on leaving the UK will be able to quickly negotiate with exactly the same counterparties a full-spectrum free trade deal on the most generous of terms.

Those two things seem to spell out the twin poles of the Brexit version of nostalgia. On the one hand, the idea of Britain being hamstrung; on the other of Britain being overweaningly powerful. A battle of Britain speaks well to this, since 1940 was the moment at which Britain was both at its weakest and strongest. But how long are we to live in the long shadow of that summer, now 75 years ago? In my book (Grey, 2012) about Bletchley Park (the wartime codebreaking centre) I write about how ‘the war’ was an omnipresent part of my childhood in the 1970s, since it had been the defining experience of my parents and teachers. One might have thought that this would have diminished in the subsequent years, but it has not. Hathaway notes how it is now the experience of our grandparents that gets referenced in austerity nostalgia. Certainly the TV channels remain full of wartime films and documentaries. I am not sure that any other country in the world is still so preoccupied with the war, unless it is Putin’s Russia which, by the way, would more than any other country be the benefactor of Brexit.

In this sense, though, one can certainly see the present situation as a battle for Britain in a rather different sense. The decision about whether to remain in the EU is in some ways a decision about what Britain is to be and how it is to think about itself. A Brexit would re-enforce the remark made in 1963 by American Secretary of State Dean Acheson that Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. That indeed is very evident in the historical and geo-political absurdity of the idea championed by many Brexiters of creating a politics and trade bloc based on the Commonwealth. And it would very forcibly bring home to British people quite how much the world has changed since 1940 since in a muted way the US, Indian and Chinese administrations have made it clear that Britain is only of interest as a partner to the extent that it is an EU member. Plus Britain itself would surely not survive Brexit, since Scotland, for sure, would become independent.

So this is the link between Hatherley’s perceptive book and the EU Referendum negotiations going on even as I write: is Britain, or England in fact, to be locked into a nostalgic fantasy of keeping calm and carrying on? Or will it embrace the undoubted imperfections of the EU and acknowledge the geo-political realpolitik of the present? This is about unquantifiable feelings, images and sensibilities but it will in the end come down to some quite precise, quite narrowly-ranged, numbers between 60-40 for in and 60-40 for out. The 20% difference between those two outcomes represents the undecided or shiftable vote that Cameron’s otherwise meaningless renegotiation is designed to appeal to. His gamble is that they can be persuaded to keep calm and carry on with EU membership and if he is right he will win the vote. The argument? Well, that has still to be faced up to, let alone won.

References

Grey, C. (2012). Decoding Organization. Bletchley Park, Codebreaking and Organization Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Judt, T. (2011). Ill Fares the Land. London: Penguin

Hatherley, O. (2016). The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso.

Lessons of history

History repeats itself, but never in the same way. I’ve been thinking about this saying (for which I can’t find a definitive source) as the British Labour Party has been tying itself into knots over whether to oppose the government’s welfare cuts. On one side of the argument is the proposition that the cuts are wrong and unnecessary. On the other that Labour lost the last election and should accept the prevailing, or anyway government, view that ‘hard choices’ must be made to balance the budget.

The historical resonance is with the early 1930s and the formation of the National Government or coalition of the Labour leadership, the Tories and the Liberals, which split the Labour Party at the time. For sure, this is not a repeat of that but in recent years very similar notions have swirled around. The formation of a Conservative-Liberal coalition in 2010 in the ‘national interest’ echoed the 1931 National Government, and the current debate has a similar flavour – some idea that a ‘responsible’ Labour Party must accept the terms of the Tories. And, as at that time, the axes of the debate are those of balancing the government budget and the concomitant need for spending, especially welfare cuts. It was the call to cut unemployment benefit by 20% that broke the Labour government in 1931. Moreover, the popular narrative that Labour had been responsible for the 1929 financial crisis (aka the Wall Street Crash) mirrors the narrative that holds Labour responsible for the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

So although not precisely the same, there is a great similarity between British politics now and then. I don’t know whether that is comforting or not. In one way, it is depressing to see the same pre-Keynesian nonsense about balanced budgets being trotted out all these decades after his work in exactly the same way as it was before, and not just in Britain but in relation to Greece and other countries. There are no certainties in economics but we do in broad terms know that Keynes was right, which is why even the IMF have indicated that the EU plan for Greece won’t work (and we might also look to Keynes’ assessment of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to see why the entire approach to Greece is storing up disaster).

In another way, the parallel is encouraging, at least in the parochial context of the British Labour Party. For it does show that even from a deeply unpopular and unpromising trough it is possible to recover. In 1931, Labour lost 225 seats and was reduced to a rump of 52, a far worse result than in 2015. But 14 years later they won a landslide majority and created the welfare state that, even now, shapes the British polity. Of course I know that in the intervening years there was the small matter of the Second World War but as business leaders and textbooks never tire of telling us, we live in times of unparalleled change – so who knows what the situation may be in 2029.

At the very least what history might teach us, imperfect teacher though it is, is that change happens not through the ‘realistic’ acceptance of the supposedly immutable truths of the present time but through a radical re-imagination of those truths. In Britain, that happened perhaps three times in the twentieth century: the Liberal landslide of 1906, the Labour landslide of 1945 and the Tory landslide of 1979. There was a fourth, botched, possibility in the 1997 Labour landslide of 1997. That possibility remains, pregnant, to be grabbed until it is forced upon us. As will happen not (I hope) because of world war but by the accumulated misery of unfilled roads; moribund emergency services, closed libraries, courts and nurseries; delayed operations or even the suicides engendered by welfare cuts.

The core of this is the democratic politics is about both representation and persuasion. It is not enough for Labour (or any other democratic political party) to represent the views of some or many people; it must also seek to change those views, through persuasion. That means believing in something and fighting for it; and if that belief is rejected then fighting again. In the end, that is how change happens.

Oxi and No

So Greece has voted 'Oxi'. The consequences are unclear, but the reaction so far from Germany, in particular, does not make my hope of a write-off and reconstruction very likely (I heard an interview on BBC radio this morning, that unfortunately I cannot track down to link to, in which a politician from Angela Merkel's party voiced this very forcefully). It is worth just pausing to reflect how extraordinary this is. If a major bank gets into difficulties through imprudent lending then it is deemed ‘too big to fail’ and is bailed out, as we saw several times during the financial crisis, although its sub-prime borrowers are left in debt. But when a state gets into difficulties through imprudent borrowing and its counterpart of imprudent lending, then bailout is deemed impossible. Or, to come at it from a different angle, lenders lend money on the basis that there is always a risk that it won’t be returned, and this is priced into the interest rate. So why, when a borrower cannot repay, is it deemed unacceptable for the debt to be written off? The general rule seems to be that under no circumstances can the lender lose out and under no circumstances can the borrower be let off the hook. So where's the risk, and the justification for the risk being priced in? Actually, the situation as regards Greece is even worse: not only can it not be forgiven but also it must be obliged to follow policies that will make it even less able to repay its loans.

But in this post I want to focus on the response on this end of the continent to events in Greece. They have been profoundly depressing. First, it has been seen as validating ‘austerity’* policies: 'look what happens if you don’t balance the books!'. The fact that it has been the pursuit of such policies in Greece since 2010 that has turned a crisis into a drama is completely forgotten. For that matter, the significant differences between Greece and Britain (principally, that Britain can print its own money and that its debt is completely differently structured) are never mentioned. By the way, we see today just how extreme austerity policies in the UK have now become, with it being reported that terminally ill benefits claimants are being questioned by welfare officials as to when they expect to die.

Second, and far more bizarre, is the spectacle of the anti-EU political Right lining up to cheer far-Left Syrizia, as in articles by veteran Tory Europhobe John Redwood and UKIP leader Nigel Farage, presumably on the usually dubious principle that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. What they miss (or presumably don’t care about) is that Syrizia, and the Greeks who voted 'oxi’ in yesterday’s referendum, are rejecting the rule of global financial elites and the ideology of neo-liberalism. Yet what the British Europhobes have in mind in exiting the EU is an even more intensive embrace of these.

Redwood and Farage make as their prime argument that the Greek crisis reveals the gap between democratic nation-states and an undemocratic and overbearing EU and Eurozone (EZ). What this neglects is that the lack of EU democracy (which is indeed a serious problem) is a consequence of the fact that Europhobes like them in the UK and elsewhere have always refused to countenance a democratic European polity, deriding it as a federal ‘super-state’. The consequence is precisely the lack of democracy they now bemoan and, moreover, the fact that the entire basis of the Eurozone crisis is (as both Right and Left agree) that it is a monetary union without a fiscal union. And why is there no fiscal union? Because that, too, would require the European polity to which Europhobes are implacably imposed.

I expect that the attempt to tie together the Greek crisis with the case for Brexit will intensify, especially if Greece were to end up leaving the EZ or even the EU. For some voters it will be as simple as feeling that given the turmoil in Greece, Brits should pull up the drawbridge (as if, somehow, the rest of the world would then disappear). But for political leaders to encourage that by making false connections is deplorable. There are precedents, of course, such as the way that the French vote against the EU Constitution in 2005 was hailed by British Europhobes as supporting their view when, in fact, it was in large part a vote against a more neo-liberal EU.

The present case is even more clear. The Greek ‘Oxi’ in their referendum was a rejection of neo-liberalism and a vote for a more fraternal, collective EU project. A British ‘No’ in the forthcoming referendum would be a rejection of a fraternal, collective EU project for a more intensive neo-liberalism. 'Oxi' and 'No' do not mean the same thing.


A minor footnote. Yanis Varoufakis, who resigned today as Greece’s Finance Minister, is, so far as I know, the only politician of any note to have an academic publication in the organization studies literature:

Varoufakis, Y. (2008), ‘Game Theory: Can it Unify the Social Sciences?’, Organization Studies 29, (8-9): 1255-1277.

For an analysis of the role that Varoufakis’ knowledge of game theory may have played in the negotiations, see this article by the always interesting journalist and blogger Neil Clark. The answer, by the way, to the question in the title of Varoufakis' article is both 'oxi' and 'no' (and 'nein' and 'non') - but that is another story.

* I put 'austerity' in scare quotes because it is not just a euphemism but an objectionable one, invoking as it does the collective sacrifices of the post-war austerity that laid the basis for the NHS and the welfare state in support of a drive to erase the last vestiges of the post-war collective project.

Unhealthy management

The British National Health Service (NHS) is one of the largest and most interesting organizations in the world. It is perhaps the key legacy of the post-1945 Labour government, establishing the principle that healthcare is available free at the point of use and on the basis of clinical need. Almost 70 years later, an authoritative report by the Commonwealth Foundation in 2014 identified it as the best overall healthcare system of a range of developed countries (the others were New Zealand, Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada and the US), and the best in eight of the eleven criteria of the report, and in the top three for two of the other three criteria. And this was achieved despite having lower spending per head of population and/or as a percentage of GDP than those, and other, countries.

Perhaps as a result, the NHS has always been a target of dislike, even hatred, for neo-liberals because (rather like the BBC) it demonstrates how non-market, collective provision of services can be both more efficient and more equitable than market provision (by contrast, the US system was the worst of those covered by the CF Report). As such, it has for the last thirty years or more been subject to endless reforms to marketise it through actual private provision or internal competition, and to introduce private sector disciplines and management to make it more efficient. Successive governments have insisted that ‘throwing money’ at the NHS is no good – what is needed is this market-accented reform. Yet, despite this, it is constantly depicted as being in crisis, with daily stories of its failure.

The irony is that these stories reflect, precisely, the consequences of the neo-liberal reforms. This week, there are two such stories. One is about the spiralling cost of employing agency nurses and doctors (i.e. not employed by the NHS directly but bought in). The other is the ‘fatcat’ pay and perks of senior managers. It’s true that both these things are problems – but why have they come about?

In the first case, it’s because of the demand for labour market flexibility and the assumed wastefulness of paying the overheads (sick pay, pensions etc) of permanent staff and the government have been warned for some time that their market-focussed policies were causing the problem. In the second case, the roots of the problem go right back to the 1980s when the neo-liberal claim was that to get the ‘best’ managers the public sector had to pay the going private sector rate. So in both cases supposed public sector waste is a direct consequence of the assault on … public sector waste.

These are case studies in the problematic nature of efficiency which I discuss a lot in the book (especially pp 130-131), but in the case of the NHS this has a particular inflection. The efficiency of the NHS, as attested by the study mentioned earlier and others, arises from the fact that the benefits of healthcare are themselves collective. Innoculation is an obvious example: it is effective to the extent that it is widespread across the population, and it will only be widespread across the population if it is not rationed by price but available on clinical grounds. But the same is true even in less obvious cases – for example, the ill-health of an individual employee impacts upon his or her employer and colleagues. And, for that matter, a collective system will always be able to get better prices on drugs than an individualised system, and the costs of medical procedures always fall as they become mass, standardised procedures (think cataracts and hip replacements).

It has become a truism that the costs of healthcare are rising in all developed countries because of ageing populations, the fact that healthcare inflation is higher than general inflation, and the costs of new medical procedures arising from almost daily scientific advances. The only way to address this is, precisely, by throwing money at it. It’s getting more expensive and that expense can’t be met from efficiency savings. It’s a pervasive meme of neo-liberalism to imagine national finances as if they were household finances. Very well, then. Knowing that granddad and grandma are going to be living longer and needing increasingly expensive healthcare you divert resources to that. But we know that this works best (it’s cheaper, and the outcomes are better) when it is done collectively. The US spends 17.7% of GDP on healthcare compared with 9.4% in the UK (2011 figures) but with much worse health outcomes because of its system. Imagine if the UK spent at US levels using the NHS system! It would be a Rolls-Royce health system.

There are two familiar objections to this, both of them fallacious. One is that the NHS entails the rationing of care. That is true, but it is true in all systems. In an insurance-based system such as the US it is done by insurance companies adjudicating on individual cases, whereas in a socialised health system like the UK it is done via expert assessment of the cost-benefit ratio of treatments.

The other objection is that a tax-based system like the NHS is unsustainable because there is only so much tax that people can pay, so what is needed is a mixed private-public system of the sort found in France or Germany. It’s worth noting, though, that those co-payment systems are also under strain. Even more to the point, people don’t miraculously have money to spend on health insurance that they don’t have available for taxes. To see the problems of co-payment systems one only has to look at what has happened to NHS dentistry which has moved to such a model. And let's be clear what this means: it means people pulling out their own teeth without anaesthetic.

The issue, then, remains one of the best mechanism for translating spending into healthcare. In Britain, no politician is really willing to challenge the free at the point of use principle, an interesting illustration of how deeply embedded the collective principle is, despite the neo-liberal decades. Instead they say that so long as the free at point of use principle is retained, it does not matter whether the provider is public or private. In this model, the NHS is simply a commissioner of services. But this neglects the other cornerstone of the NHS: provision on the basis of clinical need. In other words, private providers will only provide services at no charge if it is cost-effective for them to do so, hence they ‘cherry-pick’. There is no way of squaring this circle: collective provision is both cost-effective and equitable because it is collective provision.

Working assumptions

This post is inspired by Martin Vogel’s thought-provoking piece, on the excellent Vogel Wakefield counter-consultancy blog, where he discusses the politics of organization. In particular, he points out how little conversation there was during the British election of the changing nature of work, the social purposes of business and similar themes. With economic debate (and not just in Britain) dominated by the single theme of government fiscal deficit and cultural debate by that of immigration, work – so central to most people’s lives – barely got a look in.

True, there were some marginal references. Labour did seek to open up issues of lack of employment security, lack of quality jobs, and zero hours contracts. The Conservatives did talk at times about the number of jobs created in the British economy in recent years. Both parties talked occasionally about apprenticeships. But huge issues about under-employment, about the effect of technological change on white-collar employment, and about productivity (again, see Martin Vogel’s post for more on this) didn’t get mentioned at all. Moreover, nothing much was said on the many issues adjacent to or around work – for example the highly uncertain future of pensions and the exploding need to provide care for the elderly, much of which will be done as unpaid work, especially by women.

Perhaps it is the case that modern politics is incapable or unwilling to talk about such large and long-term issues. Indeed, it is not just in relation to work that big issues are neglected. In particular, no one in British politics seems willing to take a good look at Britain’s role in the world, something which has been ducked since, arguably, 1945. In fact, with the exception of the issue of EU membership, foreign policy of any sort did not figure in the election. And this is not just an issue for Britain. The mechanisms of international governance seem unable to gain any traction at all on a range of pressing problems from Ukraine, through to the dire and increasingly unstable situation right across the Middle East. The central structures of the UN, specifically the permanent membership of the Security Council, again reflect the world in 1945, not 2015.

One factor here – pertaining to work as much as to security – is the way that globalization, whilst largely created by the decisions of nation-states, has now undercut the purchase that nation-states have upon policy, leaving a political vacuum. From this viewpoint, what can national politicians say about, for example, job insecurity, pensions or de-skilling other than to see it in terms of the ineluctable effects of the global free market? The same could be said about things such as corporate tax avoidance which I posted about earlier this year. We just don’t have the political structures to deal with this situation, and very few people talking about how we might create them.

Yet there are some levers which national governments do have, especially around education and training, that might be pulled at least with respect to issues of employability and productivity. One reason why they do not get much discussed is, I suspect, the increasingly dysfunctional effects of media management. Political strategists seek simple, constantly repeated mantras to ‘frame the narrative’ – the fiscal deficit being the obvious example – which are by definition incapable of speaking of or to complex, inter-related problems. Add to this the almost inevitable short-termism of the electoral cycle and it is perhaps unsurprising that long-term problems get shelved for another day – witness the huge difficulties of developing a global approach to environmental sustainability.

Coming back to work, and thinking just from the standpoint of organization studies, I think that one striking and problematic feature of the subject is just how little it actually has to say about work. This is partly to do with the demise of what used to be called industrial sociology and the concomitant rise of studies that are more concerned with consumption and identity than production and the workplace. It probably also reflects the way that organization studies takes place almost entirely inside management and business schools, with more emphasis on management than on work per se. It certainly reflects the growing ‘theoreticism’ of the academic literature, with a disdain for ‘merely’ reporting what is actually happening in the workplace and an insistence that each academic paper should make a suppose ‘theoretical contribution’, something I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. As Barley & Kunda argued in 2001, there is a need to “bring work back in” to the discipline, but it is an argument that more than decade later shows little sign of being heeded.

In 1974, in a book probably better known in the United States than elsewhere, the writer and oral historian Studs Terkel published Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, the title of which is self-explanatory. Its coverage ranged from farm workers to dentists, tennis players to nuns. It’s difficult to think of anything remotely like this book now, and certainly not anything by an organization studies academic. The neglect of work within political discourse may be an intractable problem but within the more limited terrain of organization studies may not be irredeemable. And who knows, perhaps the two might be linked. After all, an organization studies that educated students into the realities of contemporary working life might not only prepare them better for those realities but also encourage them to ask political questions about it.

 

References

Barley, S. and Kunda, G. 2001. ‘Bringing work back in’, Organization Science 12: 76-95.

Terkel, S. 1974. Working. People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon/Random House.

The triumph of accountancy

This week, Natalie Bennett, the leader of the UK Green Party, suffered what has been described as a “car crash” interview on the day of the launch of her party’s election campaign. Challenged about the costing of her party’s housing policy, she experienced what she called a “brain fade” and couldn’t answer the questions. I didn’t hear that interview until later, but I did hear two others she gave that day and, frankly, neither of them was impressive when it came to questions about the funding of Green policies.

Naturally enough this provided ample ammunition to critics of the Green Party, but my reaction was to wonder about the way that political debate is now framed almost entirely in terms of accounting: what are the costs of this or that policy and where will the money come from? This is a relatively new development. In the past, political programmes were articulated in terms of broad commitments, principles and ideologies.

This isn’t a nostalgic false memory on my part. I went back and checked the manifesto of the British Conservative Party for the 1979 election. This was the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power effecting what is agreed by both supporters and critics of Thatcherism to have been a political sea-change. Yet it contains virtually no numbers and nothing in the way of costed policies. I went further back, to Labour’s 1945 manifesto at another sea-change election which created the post-war welfare state. Again, no costing of policies.

It might be argued that this is a good thing, that politicians should make concrete proposals so that they can be held accountable for their delivery, and that policies should be pragmatic. On the accountability point, it is chimerical. Does anyone think that politicians have become more likely to deliver their promises because they were costed? In practice, the earlier costings get forgotten or departure from them is readily explained away by reference to changed circumstances (and perhaps quite reasonably so, again undercutting the case for costings). Actually, this is very similar to the way that public sector management has in recent years been configured in terms of accountability, with more and more information (league tables etc.) being produced in order to give taxpayers and ‘customers’ re-assurance. Yet, at the same time, trust in public institutions has nose-dived.

On the pragmatism point, the problem is that what it validates is a stultifying small-c conservatism. The journalist Zoe Williams wrote an interesting article on Bennett’s interview, where she says:

“We have lost faith in any of the large available understandings of how structural change takes place in history,” the philosopher Roberto Unger said in a recent lecture in London “and as a result we fall back on a bastardised conception of political realism, namely that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it approaches what already exists.” This is the whole of British politics encapsulated in two lines: unless a policy looks exactly like what the mainstream parties are suggesting; unless it can be funded by minor tootling on existing tax instruments (and even that will be called a “raid”); unless it will leave the fundamental structures totally unperturbed – then it is the most outlandish idea that anybody has ever heard.

This is really the key point. By focussing on narrow issues of accounting, wider issues of over-arching principle are not just avoided but stigmatised and rendered illegitimate. One interesting aspect of this is that it reflects the complex, schizophrenic way that the language of politics and of business have intermingled. On the one hand, we have a discourse about ‘visionary leaders’ who charismatically inspire us with broad brush stories about where we, as organizations or societies, are going. Not for them mundane, prosaic budget spreadsheets. On the other hand, we have the ‘no such thing as a free lunch’ accountants, poring over the last penny of expenditure and the detailed cost-benefit calculus of every decision. In politics, leaders who lack the requisite charisma are seen as not looking like prime minister material but if they try to articulate a vision of a better society they are eviscerated for not having done the sums. Somehow, politics manages to fall into two traps: those of individualised charismatic leadership and bloodless accountancy. What gets lost is the sense, present in both the 1945 and 1979 manifestos (albeit in very different ways), of a collective project to re-imagine society, with the sums being left to take care of themselves.

None of which is to say that Natalie Bennett did a good job in those interviews, just that her mistake was to try (and fail) to answer the questions within the terms they were put, rather than to challenge their underlying premise. In that respect, at least, she might take a lesson from Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigration party UKIP. When challenged on the dire economic consequences of his policies he said that these mattered less than the principle of controlling immigration. Readers of this blog will be aware that I am by no means a fan ofUKIP, but the idea that politics should be about big discussions of the shape of society is surely right.

Tony Benn (1925-2014)

Tony Benn, the veteran British socialist has died, aged 88. Like Margaret Thatcher, whose death last year I wrote about in another post, he was one of the figures who defined the politics of my youth, although of course he was far less successful and influential than her. As Benn got older he morphed from his status in the right-wing press as ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’ to being considered a national treasure, in a way that Thatcher never did. That was to cease to take him seriously, but it explains why, whereas her death provoked very polarised reactions his got a more eulogistic response. Thus his death has produced a lot of, to me slightly nauseating, comment from the right about how they didn’t agree with him but respected him. In some ways, it would be more respectful for those who disagreed with him to denounce him, as happened with Thatcher.

Benn was an interesting figure for many reasons. One is that he represented a version of the left – the far left, if you like – which grew not out of Marxism but a kind of Christian socialism (it is not clear that Benn, himself, was a Christian, but he grew up in and was influenced by it and seems to have been diffusely religious). His memoir, Dare to be a Daniel (2004), in its very title as well as its content reflected this. In a strange kind of way he embodied some of the ‘Victorian values’ that Thatcher herself professed to admire: hard work, dedication to duty, moral commitment, independence of mind. But, really, the tradition of Christianity he exemplified was that of the diggers and levellers and those various strands of radical Christianity described in Christopher Rowland’s (1988) book of that name. It is a tradition quite different to the kind of conformist moralism that Thatcher evoked and sought to enact.

Another reason for interest is that he had a very strong sense of history. His diaries and memoir are saturated with an understanding of, in particular, the history of the British Labour Party, its achievements and limitations (of which – to link my two points - he remarked that it had never been a socialist party but had always contained some socialists, just as the Church of England had always contained some Christians). Again, this developed out of his childhood, growing up in a family embedded in the Labour Party. He was one of a literally dying breed of politicians who was formed by the experience of the Second World War (his elder brother was killed in it, and Benn himself served in the RAF), and by the socialism of the post-war Attlee government. As I wrote in my ‘review’ of the Ken Loach film The Spirit of ’45, the experience of war provided both a moral case for a better society but also pointed to the tools of collective endeavour and central planning that would deliver it.

These are very much organizational issues, of course, and relevant to the choices that still face us. Benn stood for a form of collective endeavour that was different (by being collective) to neo-liberalism and (by being non-marxist) to communism. And his engagement with radical Christianity is in some ways reminiscent of the kind of liberation theology that finds an echo in Critical Management Studies’ interest in emancipation. Oh, and we should also note that he was an heroic smoker - the 1993 'Pipe Smoker of the Year', no less. 

The Spirit of 45

In a previous post I made reference to Ken Loach’s latest film, The Spirit of 45, without, I must admit, having seen it, only having read some reviews. Loach is an important and, in the UK, a rare film director, committed to socialism and to socialist art. Land and Freedom, his 1995 depiction of the Spanish Civil War, is, I think, one of the most significant political films of recent decades. It recounts the utopian promise of the POUM militia during the Spanish Civil War, which combined internationalism and gender equality with economic collectivism. And it recounts the betrayal of this dream by Stalinist Communism leading to the eventual victory of Fascism. In many ways the defeat of the POUM marked a terminal point in the history - to date, at least - of a certain strand of non-statist left-wing theory and practice. It was a political tragedy, the effects of which are still playing out in Europe and beyond. But the film is also a moving love story. That love is most evident in the complex relationship between the central, narrating, character, Dave Carr, a working class Liverpudlian who has come to Spain to fight fascism, and Blanca, a Spanish fighter in the POUM. Loach depicts the tenderness and ferocity of their love skilfully and movingly. But there is also a love, no less profound for not being sexual, between the various members of the POUM unit.

The complexities of love – in this case that between brothers – and its intersection with politics can also be found in another of Loach’s greatest films, The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006). The setting for this harrowing film is the struggle for Irish independence and the subsequent splintering of the movement. As in Land and Freedom there is at the heart of the film a struggle between idealism and compromise articulated through human relationships. These two films form just part of Loach’s prodigious output over the last 50 years – a remarkable body of work.

So I came to The Spirit of 1945 with very high – maybe too high – expectations and ended up feeling a bit disappointed. Politically, I agree with pretty much everything Loach is trying to say. The Labour reconstruction of post-war Britain with its emphasis on socialism, the common good and policies of nationalisation and public welfare provision – and this in the face of far more difficult economic circumstances than now -  is, absolutely, an inspirational model for the present time. But I thought that the connections and lessons between that time and now were too weakly drawn.

For me, the problem was the rushed attempt to explain what Thatcherism had done. It’s not that Loach is wrong about this but it made the film less hard-hitting (and especially, perhaps, for those watching it for whom the Thatcher era is itself an historical memory) than if there had been more direct comparisons with today. It would have been better to go from 1945-51 to today. For example, on nationalised electricity, some explicit comparison with the nonsense of ‘customer choice’ now – requiring endless calls to call centres to ‘achieve’ a best rate that promptly becomes anything but. Or, on railways, focussing not just on the accidents that followed privatization but on the massive rises in fares and of public subsidies to the private companies (far greater than nationalised  British Rail ever received) that are happening right now. There were occasional moments (e.g. the brief discussion of contracting out of hospital cleaning) where this was achieved, but in general I felt that the ‘now and then’ linkage could have been much sharper. In some ways, I felt the whole thing would have worked better as a Loach drama than as a documentary, for example depicting a family in 1945 and the grandchildren of the same family now.

I also disliked the very traditional and I think sentimental emphasis on the idea that what is needed (and will come) is just for the working class to realise its strength (in Marxist terms, to move from being a ‘class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself’), and the accompanying idea that the problem with Labour is that it has become too middle class. On the one hand, the 1945 administration (its leader, Clement Attlee, being a good example) were often middle-class. On the other hand, in Britain (and elsewhere) now, it is the middle class who are being systematically destroyed by ‘austerity’ economics and politics. I don’t think that positioning things in terms of working vs middle class is true either to ‘the spirit of 45’, which was about a sense of a national collective project, or to the current crisis which (as the film suggests) requires a national collective project in opposition to and defiance of a global elite: that is the real division, not that between what are after all – to put it in Marxist terms - just segments of those who have nothing but their labour to sell.

With all those criticisms made, this is a rare and valuable film. Just to see the way that in 1945 socialism was quite openly and unapologetically spoken of, at a time when the present British Labour Party is scared to even mention the word, or to articulate any policy that is a cigarette-paper away from the neo-liberal consensus is refreshing. By coincidence (I think) I have also recently been re-reading Denis Healey’s autobiography The Time of My Life (1989). Healey, whose career culminated in being Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1970s, would be considered to be on the right of the Labour Party at that time although by today's standards his brand of moderate social democracy seems radical so far has the political ground shifted since then. His political career started with an unsuccessful attempt to become a Labour MP in 1945, and his views – like those of a whole generation of politicians of both Left and Right – had been formed by the experience of Fascism and the Second World War (Healey himself was a beach master at the Anzio Landings in 1944). His account both of the 1945 election and of the political consensus it formed very much echoes Loach's film: the determination that the sacrifice of the war would provide the foundations for a better society. The experience of war provided both a moral case for such a society but also pointed to the tools of collective endeavour and central planning that would deliver it.

In that context, it’s instructive to make the comparison between that age of austerity and our own. In the post-1945 period austerity – symbolised by the rationing that continued until 1953 – meant collective sacrifice in order to build the collective good. What it means now is collective (albeit unequal) sacrifice in order to sell off the common good – via the final privatizations of what remains of the collective health and welfare provision of the post-war period. Invoking the language of austerity in order to pervert its original meaning is both clever and disgusting. I’m struck by the way that the wartime slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ has in the last few years become ubiquitous in Britain and yet, somehow, its meaning has changed from collective stoicism to dumb acquiescence, a kind of resigned acceptance that, to use that iconic Thatcherite phrase, there is no alternative.

Loach’s The Spirit of 45 has the merit of reminding us that there was, and there still is, an alternative.