Steel stories

I’ve recently read two extraordinary and, I suppose, largely forgotten novels, both published in the early 1940s, and both three-generational sagas set mainly in the Pittsburgh steel industry from the 1870s to the 1930s. That setting will immediately pique the interest of students of organizations because of course it was here that Frederick Taylor developed the tenets of Scientific Management, in a context which I mention briefly in the book (p.33-35). The steel mills of Pittsburgh and surrounding towns might very well be regarded as the birthplace of many of the management techniques and organizational processes that dominated industrial capitalism and continue to have much purchase today.

The novels are The Valley of Decision by Marcia Davenport, originally published in 1942 (hereafter, Valley) and Out of this Furnace by Thomas Bell, originally published in 1941 (hereafter, Furnace). It is perhaps telling that both books were subsequently re-published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, attesting to their significance as historical records as much as works of fiction. Both were based to a degree on direct and indirect personal experience.

The authors

Marcia Davenport (1903-1996), born Marcia Glick, was for a time married to Russell Davenport Junior, whose father, Russell Davenport Senior was a senior manager at, first, Midvale Steel and, later Bethlehem Steel. Those names are again resonant within organization studies as they were the companies where Taylor worked and, indeed, Davenport and Taylor was close associates at Midvale, and Taylor was hired by Bethlehem on the recommendation of Davenport (Misa, 1999: 184). Apart from this family connection, Marcia Davenport had, during a previous marriage, lived in Pittsburgh and amassed documents and letters about its steel industry which were the basis of the book (these are now archived at the University of Pittsburgh).

Thomas Bell (1903-1961), born Adelbert Thomas Belejcak in Braddock, one of the Pittsburgh steel towns, was the grandson and son (on his mother’s side) and the son (on his father’s side) of Slovakian (more precisely Lemko and Rusyn) immigrants who worked in the steel and other industries in and around Pittsburgh. Bell himself worked as an apprentice in the steel industry before becoming a full-time writer. Furnace is a fictionalised account of three generations of his family.

The Valley of Decision

Valley tells the story of three generations of the Scott family, of Presbyterian Scottish ancestry, who own a small but successful steel mill in Pittsburgh, but the pivotal character is Mary Rafferty, who is from a working-class Irish Catholic family and in 1873 begins working life as a maid to the Scotts. Her brother, James, works in the Scott mill and is an organiser for the ‘Amalgamated’ (the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Maker). Mary and Paul Scott, the son of William, the firm’s owner, fall in love and despite the class and religious differences his family support their engagement. However, the marriage is abandoned after James Rafferty murders William Scott in the course of a bitter strike.

Subsequently, in a long and convoluted drama, Mary ends up being Paul’s housekeeper and also begins to befriend the newly arrived Slovak immigrants. Disparagingly called ‘Hunkies’ (meaning Hungarians, though in fact most of them are not), they are kept out of the best jobs by the earlier generation of Irish immigrants and are regarded as almost sub-human by the mill owners. Mary’s particular friend is Julka, matriarch of the Hrdlicka family (in fact, partly Czech and partly Slovak: there is a brief reference to Czech disparagement of Slovaks).

In the third generation, Claire Scott marries Anton, the son of Julka (she has become an official in the newly independent Czechoslovakia). And, indeed, Pennsylvanian Czechs and Slovaks had played an important role in the achievement of this independence, which was declared by Tomas Masaryk – who became its first President in 1920 – in Philadelphia in 1918. His son, Jan, who was Czechoslovakia’s Foreign Minister from 1940 until his death in 1948, was Marcia Davenport’s lover and Anton appears to be based upon him. The later sections of the book are concerned in particular with rise of Nazism and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, and the case against US isolationism.

Throughout the long book, which has many sub-plots and characters, there are recurring themes of class (including fine gradations within the middle and upper classes) and ethnicity, and of violent capital-labour conflicts. There is also an ongoing story of attempts to keep the Scott mill as an independent family-owned and run firm in the face of massive consolidation within the steel industry, led by the magnate Andrew Carnegie, to form what eventually became the United States Steel Corporation. This gives rise to frequent family and boardroom conflicts over the decades (and a sub-theme is how the successive generations shift from being active entrepreneurs to remote stockholders). It could be regarded as showing the distinctions between early capitalism, very much informed by the Protestant Work Ethic à la Weber, and the development of monopoly and finance capitalism.

Out of this Furnace

If Valley focusses primarily on the steel industry owners and their interrelations with the Irish and, then, Slovak workers who labour in their mills, Furnace is centrally and solely concerned with the experience of Slovak workers and their families. As alluded to in Valley, but shown in minute detail in Furnace, this is a story of appalling hardship told through the central characters of the Kracha and Dobrejcak families. The first generation story centres on Djuro Kracha, the second on his daughter Mary and her husband Michael Dobrejcak, the third on their son Dobie.

These families, like the Hrdlickas, are emblematic of the massive flow of  Slovak emigrants (and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe), fleeing poverty, persecution and compulsory military service under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some half a million Slovaks came to the US between 1880 and 1920, of whom about half came to Pennsylvania, mainly to Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Bell regarded their treatment as a hidden and shameful part of American history, and their contribution to US industrial development as having been ignored. The Slovaks, largely from rural and agricultural backgrounds, arrived in the hope of a better life but experienced grindingly hard and very dangerous work (death and maiming are commonplace, and Michael is killed in an industrial accident) for pitiful wages.

They also face discrimination and cruel stereotyping from both mill owners and managers and from Irish workers, which keeps them in the very worst jobs and housing. Although not depicted in the book, Bell’s uncle was effectively murdered by Irish or possibly Scottish workers (there was also a major group of Welsh workers in the Pittsburgh steel industry, but they do not appear in either book). In short, a life of constant struggle is depicted – a struggle to survive and to create the basic elements of a decent life against almost insuperable barriers.

Shared themes

One of the central themes of Furnace, as in Valley but more strongly so, is the struggle of trade unions to organize and to improve working conditions and pay. In both books there are references to the 1892 Homestead strike – a pivotal defeat for American organized labour in the period - and in Furnace there are accounts of brutal strike-breaking activities during the failed 1919 Great Steel Strike and, again, the growing dominance of Carnegie’s big corporate conglomerate – though here seen from the perspective of the workforce rather than the owners of an independent firm.

In the third generation, through the character of Dobie, and with the Amalgamated giving way to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) trade unionism finally achieves a degree of success and is certainly represented by Bell as the best and only hope for the workers to achieve a modicum of dignity. (In Valley, a SWOC activist in the 1930s refers disparagingly to the Amalgamated, James Rafferty’s union in the 1870s, as outmoded, just as, for Rafferty, the Sons of Vulcan union that was one of the Amalgamated’s precursors was ancient history).

Another very important theme in both books, but again more strongly in Furnace, is the pivotal role played by women in holding together Slovak families (and also, in Valley, Mary’s role in holding together the Scotts, but this is depicted more as a feature of her individual character than as a wider cultural characteristic). Often, they were brought over to America after their husbands or fiancés had established themselves in a job. They are depicted as only having had paid employment when unmarried and this seems also to be the case for the Irish women, and that work appears to have been mainly domestic service. Before her marriage, Mary Kracha has a job as a maid with a wealthy mill owning family just as Mary Rafferty’s working life began as a maid with the Scotts in Valley. In both cases the contrast of the opulent houses where they work is compared sharply with the squalor of their own homes.

Once married, with their husbands working backbreaking 12 hour mill shifts (when work was available), women faced the constant drudgery of housework in an environment made filthy by industrial pollution, the expectation of near annual childbirth, the common experience of early widowhood, and, frequently, their own early deaths (Mary Dobrejcak dies of TB as, in real life, had Bell’s father). Yet they maintained their families and frequently supplemented family incomes by taking in boarders – typically young male steel workers, since men outnumbered women greatly at least in the early period. The strong sense of community Bell depicts is partly down to the role of women but also because, in common with, but possibly to an even greater extent than, other immigrant groups the Slovakian migrants of this period lived in close proximity.

Whilst Valley contains many realistic depictions of the hardship of both Irish and Slovakian workers – and there are some oblique references to prostitution and drunkenness - it is to a degree a romantic melodrama and not a demanding read (it was, in fact, turned into a film with Gregory Peck and Greer Garson). Furnace is far more gritty and harrowing, and although it does depict the very tender love between Mary and Michael Dobrejcak that love is blighted by hardship and tragedy. Nor is it a romanticised picture in that some characters, especially Djuro Kracha, are shown to be cruel, sometimes violent, frequently drunk, and in some cases dishonest and manipulative.

Overall, despite the partial uplift of growing union success towards the end of the 1930s it is – and, based on the Afterword to the University of Pittsburgh edition, it’s clear that Bell intended it to be – a deeply painful account of lives deformed by poverty, injustice, and prejudice. In that, it speaks to the experience of so many immigrant groups both past and present. There is passing reference (in Furnace, but not Valley) to the experience of Black Americans, with “negroes” brought in, initially as strike breakers, and experiencing discrimination from Slovaks which, as Dobie observes, replicated some of the hostility Slovaks had themselves previously faced from Irish workers, just as the Irish had from the English settlers.

Relevance for Organization Studies

Together, apart from many other things, these two books fill out the point I make in the book about the role that ethnicity played in the development of Taylorism. Much of that was about discrimination and prejudice, epitomised by Taylor’s dehumanising and derogatory use of the “mentally sluggish” Bethlehem worker ‘Schmidt’ (actually Henry Noll, of Dutch descent) to illustrate the benefits of his system. Bill Cooke (2003) includes this example in his explanation of the continuities and inter-relationships of slavery, and the management of slaves, and modern management theory and practice – something that has been systematically excluded from established histories of management.

Arguably there were ways in which it broke some of these prejudices down. I note (p.35) how the Taylorist emphasis on managers hiring ‘scientifically’ on merit broke down the power of work gang leaders and even give the hypothetical example of Irish foremen discriminating against East European immigrants. I am not sure where I got the idea of that particular example from, but, amazingly, something almost identical features in one of the most dramatic scenes in Valley, when it emerges that a skilled Slovak worker – Charlie Hrdlicka, Julka’s husband -  trained at the Skoda works, has been forced to do menial work because the Irish work gang leader will not hire “Hunkies”. Paul Scott immediately promotes him (and, when criticised by the Irish foreman, challenges him to strike with the reminder of what had happened at Homestead).

I suggest in my book that this is a version of the ‘ethic of impersonality’ which forms part of Paul du Gay’s defence of bureaucracy. Yet it can also be read as an example of one of the ways that Taylorism, in particular, formed part of a much more complex history of ‘race management’ (Roediger & Esch, 2012). On Roediger & Esch’s analysis this history (as Cooke also argues) reaches back to slavery, and also explains the racial segmentation of hierarchies such as that between the Irish and Slovak workers (or between white and Chinese workers in the construction of railroads), with Taylorism as a new, ‘integrationist’ but still racialised episode within this history.

It’s no longer a novel (no pun intended) proposition in organization studies that novels can be a source of great insight and ‘respectable’ evidence, and I find these two to be particularly so, for several reasons. Firstly, they provide a quite extraordinary amount of really detailed information about working practices and industrial relations in the steel industry in this period. Second, and perhaps relatedly, their structure and focus means that taken together they provide a multi-generational, multi-ethnic and multi-class set of perspectives on that industry and period.

Third, and I think most significant, is the way that these novels disclose a small but significant part of the hidden history of management and organizational theory. Within the textbooks, certainly, you would hardly discern what these theories are actually about or where they came from. I am quite sure that Taylorism would be far better taught and understood through reading novels such as these rather than through the sanitised, ahistoric, asocial, bloodless non-stories of most ‘Introductions to Organizational Behaviour’.

References

Bell, T. (1941) Out of this Furnace. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Cooke, B. (2003) ‘The Denial of Slavery in Management Studies’, Journal of Management Studies 40 (8): 1895-1918

Davenport, M. (1942) The Valley of Decision. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

Misa, T. (1999) A Nation of Steel. The Making of Modern America 1865-1925. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Roediger, D. and Esch, E. (2012) The Production of Difference. Race and the Management of Labor in US History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Windrush, targets and the cultural panic about immigration

The still ongoing Windrush scandal has now claimed the scalp of Home Secretary Amber Rudd, primarily for misleading Parliament by saying that there were no deportation targets when, in fact, there were. The wider picture is that it was these targets which were part of the reason why the Windrush citizens were wrongly identified as illegal immigrants (for those unfamiliar with how and why this happened, see this briefing).

The organizational use of targets and the effects of doing so are widely discussed within organization theory, and figure frequently in the concept of goal displacement discussed in my book (pp. 26-30). In brief, one way that goal displacement arises is when following the target (or, more generally, a rule) becomes an end in itself: that is, as if the purpose of the activity were to meet the target, rather than the target being a means of achieving that purpose. The Windrush scandal is a textbook case: the purpose of the rules was (ostensibly – I’ll come back to this) to remove illegal immigrants. The targets were a means of achieving this.

What happened in practice was that staff sought to meet the target and focussed solely on that. It is easy to envisage how this happened. Under, presumably, great pressure to meet their targets staff would seek any reason to identify someone for deportation. Thus any inexactitude or deficiency of documentation would be ceased on, and there was no incentive at all to try to understand the reasons for it. On the contrary, there was a disincentive to do so: the system was set up to look for reasons to deport more people, not to find reasons not to do so.

The calamity for the Windrush generation was that although they were perfectly legally entitled to live in Britain, they did not have the necessary paperwork to prove it (having not been required in the past to have such paperwork). Thus they appeared to meet the criteria for deportation and were treated accordingly. In the terms discussed in my book, this is an illustration of what happens when instrumental rationality trumps substantive rationality. Following the rules (no paperwork = no right to remain) trumped both ultimate purpose and ethical conduct. In the process, many lives have been destroyed.

Nor was the issue just one of Home Office staff, targets and deportation. Under recently introduced laws, landlords, employers, the NHS and benefits offices were also required to check immigration status. When Windrush people could not do so, they lost their jobs, benefits, homes and healthcare. In this way, too, lives were destroyed. To call it a scandal is to understate things: what has happened is an abomination: an example of the horrific potentials of instrumental rationality (as discussed on p.23 of my book).

But this did not arise simply as a result of organizational incompetence. It grew out of a political and cultural panic about immigration going back many decades. For as long as I can remember there has been a populist meme that “we’re not allowed to talk about immigration” and that “the elite is ignoring the people’s concerns about immigration”. This is nonsense. Again for as long as I can remember immigration has been talked about and complained about.

In recent times it has become common to hear anti-immigration sentiment expressed in terms of ‘of course it wasn’t a problem in the past, it’s just now that the numbers are higher that it’s a problem’. Nonsense, again – it was complained about just as much in the past, and in exactly the same terms, as it is now. Indeed, the treatment of the Windrush generation when they originally arrived is testament to this (in fact, amongst the far Right, the date 21 June 1948 [when the original Windrush ship docked in London] is still used as a code for ‘when Britain ceased to be “racially pure”’).

Moreover, for an equally long time – certainly going back to the 1971 immigration controls (which are directly relevant to Windrush, since it was these which ended the entitlement that they had, but those who had arrived prior to 1971 had been guaranteed the right of permanent residence) – the ‘elite’ have been bending over backwards to address complaints about immigration. Indeed, politicians have quite erroneously endorsed wholly exaggerated complaints about, for example, ‘benefit tourism’ and ‘health tourism’. Indeed, the latter are two of the reasons for the introduction of the rules of which the Windrush generation have fallen foul.

It is out of that fetid soil that the Windrush scandal has developed. And although the public and the press are now up in arms about it – perhaps, it has been argued, because those affected are depicted as ‘the right kind of immigrant’ - they should remember that it was public and press demand that pushed politicians into creating the “hostile environment” that led to it. That represents a major failure of political leadership, for sure, but in a democracy the public also have to accept responsibility for the policies they have sought and endorsed.

That phrase – “hostile environment” – is being justified on the basis that it ostensibly related just to illegal immigrants. But the reality is that it is impossible to separate it from a wider hostility, not least because it created an environment of presumption of guilt of illegality in the absence of proof to the contrary. Indeed, that is precisely what has been revealed by the scandal. Moreover, it has a much longer history than even the post-1948 period.

So, as always, but in this case particularly strikingly, the way that organizations conduct themselves is inseparable from broader political, ideological and cultural issues. The laws that were made, the targets created to enforce them, and the way in which those targets were operationalised may be the immediate focus of the Windrush scandal, but they are the end result of a deeper, older and much darker story.

Jobs for the boys

Today, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has produced a widely-reported research document showing the huge growth of part-time working amongst British men in recent years. Specifically, amongst men aged 25-55 in low-wage occupations, those working part-time work has risen over the last 20 years from 5% to 20%. The 20 year timescale indicates that this is a long-term trend, not just an effect of recession.

There are various issues arising from this. Those highlighted by the IFS are that part-time work is much more common now amongst men in low-wage occupations than it is amongst men in higher paid occupations; and that the trend for women is exactly the opposite (the percentage of women working part-time in low-wage occupations has fallen).

These seemingly dry statistics are extremely important. Interestingly, they do not show increasing inequality (which the report shows has actually fallen) but they do imply increasing insecurity and precariousness in employment. In particular, they probably help to explain at least part of the populist convulsions in the UK and elsewhere which are largely driven by angry, white, working-class men whose place in the world has been threatened. Within that, the regional discrepancies in men’s employment and wages are also important, as they then join together with resentment against the ‘metropolitan elite’ to drive populism.

However, the particular aspect I want to focus on is the way that these figures speak of a kind of crisis of masculinity. For generations in Britain (and elsewhere) masculine identity has been bound up with being ‘the breadwinner’. That is both an economic and a cultural – and psychological – notion. Economically, it requires stable, secure and reasonably well remunerated employment. That is the ‘bread’ bit. Culturally, it enables having a successful place in the world. That is the ‘winner’ bit. And taken together, it is a potent identity: bread + winner = breadwinner.

It is important to understand that the loss of this identity is both economic and cultural because it explains why the corresponding improvement in women’s situation does not ‘compensate’ for the deterioration in that of men. It’s not enough to add together the overall household position and conclude that nothing has changed because economically the household is just as well off in absolute terms and (if the IFS Report is right) even in relative terms. That does not assuage the cultural and psychological hurt of lost identity and meaning.

A generation ago, as explored in Paul Willis’s fantastic ethnography Learning to Labour (1977), young boys could disdain education because an unskilled factory job was there for the taking. That world has disappeared, but the sons and grandsons of those in the study have not moved on (see also Dolby et al., 2004). The sub-title of Willis’s book was ‘how working class kids get working class jobs’, but those jobs – in the form they once existed – have massively declined.

The most under-achieving educational group in the UK is now white working-class boys, three-quarters of whom fail to achieve five good GCSEs. This directly impacts upon their employability, as does the more nebulous issue of behavioural skills (time-keeping, self-presentation etc). Thus just as the opportunities for good jobs erodes so does the capacity of white working-class British boys to get whatever good jobs there may be, feeding directly into the populist anger against immigrants seen to be ‘taking’ the jobs. It is a situation that was starkly exposed by the 2010 BBC documentary The Day the Immigrants Left.

The biggest problem in all this is that three separate issues have come together: the changing nature of work in developed countries; immigration; and what it means to be a (working-class) man. Populist politics speaks to the first two, but it has nothing to say about the third. The period that saw the transformation of work and the global economy also saw a transformation, through feminism, in understandings of what it meant to be a woman. I don’t mean by that the tired old trope that feminism has, somehow, undermined or de-masculinized men. That’s nonsense because it is not a zero-sum game in which ‘advances’ for women come at the ‘expense’ of men. I mean that what has still not occurred, and urgently needs to occur, is a transformation in understandings of what it means to be a man.

That is not to say that the only problem here is the cultural understanding of masculinity. Economics and culture are indivisible, which is why the feminist movement has always been about changing both economic and cultural realities. It has to be both. And because it has to be both, the populist approach to the new situation of men is inadequate, because it is solely economic. If (and, in my view, when) it fails to deliver it will leave working-class men even angrier and even more economically marginal. To avoid that, the old equation that real men = real jobs needs tackling on both of its sides.

Yes, we need more real jobs for both men and women. But we also need men to understand that being a ‘breadwinner’ is not the definition of a ‘real’ man and, moreover, that there are many different ways and many different potentials for masculinity that have little or nothing to do with work. Part-time work may well be a problem for many economic reasons, for both men and women; but it doesn’t carry the meaning of not being a ‘full-time’ man. To put it another way, if feminism broke the link between femininity and unpaid homemaking then what we need to do now is to break the link between masculinity and paid work.

References

Dolby, N., Dimitriadis, G., & Willis, P. (2004). Learning to Labour in New Times. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour. How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough, UK: Saxon House.

Lost in history

I am not going to write yet again about the EU Referendum today, or at least not directly, but rather about some reflections prompted by an article that appeared in The Guardian today by John Harris which was about the referendum but with a particular take. Harris, who is an invariably interesting journalist by the way, argues that many inclined to vote to leave the EU are reacting to having had huge and rapid social changes “imposed on them”. They should not, therefore, be patronizingly dismissed as “irrational, unhinged and gullible”.

Whether or not this is a valid reason for voting to leave the EU is an open question, and as I say not what I want to discuss here. Rather, it seems to me that the sentiment Harris is reporting is a variant of something I discuss and criticise at length in the book (especially pp. 88-92): the idea of a world in rapid, perhaps unprecedented, change which makes mandatory constant organizational change. It is one of the many ways in which organizations and politics are both connected and harmonic, something which is becoming a regular theme of this blog.

What strikes me most is how unchanging these claims are, and how they are both meaningful and meaningless. Harris is talking about the period since Britain joined the EU, so the forty or so years since 1973. But in 1973, which I can just about remember (I was 8), similar sentiments were expressed, and very vociferously too. The past, it seemed, was not just another country but, in the past, we had been another country. The memories of war, Empire, social cohesion and civility may have been refracted through the lens of nostalgia but they had their counterpart in more objective analyses of relative economic decline, shifting centres of geo-political power and changing social norms.

It was common then to hear adults talking about how ‘the country has gone to the dogs’, that ‘we won the war but we lost the peace’ and, though I can’t recall hearing these exact words, that ‘I just want my country back’. Some of this, as with the present EU debate, was about immigration but, also as with the present EU debate, it was part of a more inchoate sense of unchosen changes. Indeed it’s worth remembering that this kind of sentiment was a big part of what lay*, a few years later, behind electoral support for Margaret Thatcher, including her remarks at the 1979 election campaign about British people feeling ‘swamped’ by immigration. And yet people now are wont to say that immigration ‘used to be ok’, even though their predecessors did not say anything like that at all.

So that sense of unchosen change isn’t new and perhaps this means that it is actually itself rather patronizing to uncritically accept it as an authentic, respectworthy sentiment. If anything it is just an unremarkable truism: 2016 is different to 1973, just as 1976 was different to 1933 in all kinds of ways, most of which were not ‘chosen’ and could not reasonably have been ‘asked’ about. Why would anyone expect otherwise? The issue seems to lie more in a sense that this change is going somewhere frightening or, perhaps most frightening of all, that it is going nowhere. It’s this fearful sense of being lost in history that I want to explore.

Fear of redundancy, fear of being left behind, fear of being judged unequal to the demands of change. That this fear is largely orchestrated through an invocation of hordes of Asians and Slavs – or, in more politically acceptable language, the challenge from the emerging economies of China, India and Eastern Europe; or the anodyne ‘global economic race’ – serves to underscore the perhaps not racist but certainly racialised tang of contemporary stories about Britishness. We may have no clear idea of what the future holds, but we are continually told that failure to change will mean that the future will occur elsewhere, in a faraway country of which we know little. There is therefore an easy translation from the ubiquitous experience of change in the workplace to a fear of foreign competition, and an easy translation from that to fear of foreigners in general and immigration and European integration in particular.

It is indeed quite remarkable that the bullishness about change in the organizational sphere has been so comprehensively unmatched in other areas. The most charitable interpretation of British involvement in the Iraq war is that it was animated by a desire to maintain the ‘special relationship’ and to influence US policy – a desire which was a continuation of British foreign policy since 1945 and which persists to the present day. New Labour’s attitude to the EU, initially relatively conciliatory, later became rather similar to that towards Old Labour: one of hectoring calls for modernization and change in the face of global competition. The Coalition government after 2010 was relatively muted on the EU because of the presence of pro-EU Liberal Democrats but the Conservative administration since 2015 is defined by degrees of hostility to the EU relations. (Interestingly, these two foreign policy areas are in conflict, since the US relation to the UK is refracted through the UK’s membership of the EU, as President Obama is beginning to make clear).

Back on the home front, immigration and asylum policies have also been animated by fear. There is no doubt that New Labour were more relaxed about multi-culturalism than was Thatcherism. And Cameron’s ‘Notting Hill’ conservatism has largely followed them in this, which in part explains the rise of UKIP (which was not just fed by the EU issue but the sense that Cameron is not a ‘real Conservative’ e.g. in terms of gay marriage legislation). Nevertheless, across all recent governments policy in these areas has been draconian and it is noteworthy that the case for tolerance has mainly been made in purely economic terms – the economic need for immigration – so that it is in effect inseparable from the mantra of change as an adjunct to global competitiveness. There is no real suggestion that immigration is related to either our past responsibilities as a colonial power or to our future possibilities as a cosmopolitan society. It’s just an economic presence, bereft of past or future.

It would be unfair to ascribe this culture of fear solely to the polity. It is also the case that any capacity to be positive about the future is limited by the rabidity of a press where it is not just the tabloids which are filled with blood-curdling stories of new causes for alarm. On Europe, immigration, asylum, crime, terrorism, paedophilia as well as health, climate change and, notoriously, house prices the media tell of a world to which a cringing fearfulness is a quite reasonable response. Yet it is not a fear of anything in particular, even if it attaches at moments to something specific. A combination of rolling news and limited attention spans means that each fear is registered, instantaneously forgotten and superseded by a new terror. What endures is not any specific anxiety but a generalised neurotic dread. But whilst fed by the media this climate has been able to flourish at least in part because it fills the vacuum created by the political failure to articulate any compelling future vision of ‘the good life’.

There is clearly a symmetry between the febrile atmosphere engendered by the daily kaleidoscope of media-fuelled panics and the managerialized politics and political managerialism in which ‘the only constant is change’. If we want an image of contemporary Britain it would be of a person running in terror away from an unseen yet omnipresent enemy, but running on a treadmill rather than a road. Standing at the side is a sadistic personal trainer in the form of politician, manager or journalist cajoling and bullying the runner to go faster, to redouble the effort to go nowhere on pain of being engulfed by the invisible demons which lie in wait for those who fail to keep up. The ‘global race’ has no finishing line. It is a journey with no beginning, no end and no purpose or meaning beyond its own self-fulfilling imperative to keep moving at any cost.

This is not, as is conventionally supposed, because we** are too wedded to the past but rather because we have too little sense of ourselves as located within the past-present-future continuum which more truly constitutes history. If, when I was a child, the problem was the weight of the past then for the coming generation it is the weightlessness of the future. When I was growing up, British identity was, unhappily and ultimately unsustainably, that of an old person stuck in the past with memories of a great empire, a heroic war, of glories lost. That is still discernible, but it is now much more akin to someone with Alzheimer’s disease. Anyone who, as I have, has had the misfortune of witnessing this condition will know that what makes it so devastating is not simply that the sufferer recollects so little of the past and is often over-attached to those distant fragments which are flickeringly remembered. It is also that there is no conception of the future, and the present is just a fear-filled moment of transitory but ever recurring change. 

*Surprisingly from a present-day perspective it also in part lay behind the decision to join what was then the EEC in 1973. I can remember my highly Conservative – and conservative – primary school headmistress inventing a song about a ‘beautiful dream’ as part of a celebratory pageant of this event. I played – and I hope this will amuse anyone reading this who knows me – one of the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, then a slang term for Swiss bankers. Whether these gnomes were depicted positively or negatively in the pageant I unfortunately can’t recall.

**By ‘we’ I mean ‘we British’ but similar things may well be true in other countries. I think this is so in France, which I know quite well, and probably in the US and elsewhere. Indeed something like what I have said here seems to apply to US and is expressed by Donald Trump when, as in his now notorious ‘ban all Muslims’ speech he cried plaintively about the need to work out “what the hell is going on?”. Obnoxious as it was, it did express this sense of ‘historical lostness’ that I am trying to explore, and Trump’s popularity is surely a consequence of that sense.

Sovereignty and Brexit

As a UK Referendum on EU membership gets closer, much is being made by those urging exit of the idea of national sovereignty. Indeed for some Brexiters this is the defining issue. What they mean by sovereignty seems to be that a country can make its own laws and act independently of all other countries.

Whether such a situation ever obtained is highly questionable; but it certainly hasn’t obtained for the UK or any other country in recent times. Like other countries the UK is bound into a web of multiple sovereignty-sharing arrangements regarding trade, defence and security via a multiplicity of bodies including the UN, the WTO, NATO and, yes, the EU. Indeed it is ironic that many Brexiters parade the idea that the UK on Brexit could ‘reclaim’ its seat on the WTO as a triumph of sovereignty (by which they mean that whilst remaining a WTO member the UK has since 1973 been represented in trade talks by the combined EU delegation). It’s an irony because the WTO has over 160 members and yet the Brexiters argue that within the 28 strong EU the UK ‘has no say’.

A similar irony is present in the Brexiters’ idea that the UK could lead a new Commonwealth trade bloc. Apart from the fact that there is no appetite in the Commonwealth for such a bloc, its 53 members are highly unlikely (for obvious historical reasons) to want to be lead by Britain! And if sovereignty is the issue, what could matter more than who can direct people in war? Yet Brexiters are quite relaxed about – and mostly in favour of – pooling sovereignty in NATO, which entails British troops being led by foreign generals.

Going back to trade, it’s notable that right-wing Brexiters have no problem with the idea that international ‘markets’ dictate what governments can do, and see no problem of sovereignty in that. Meanwhile, left-wing Brexiters point to the secretive EU-US negotiations to impose the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) on the UK, but are oblivious to the fact that even more sovereignty-violating deals are struck by ‘sovereign’ states outside of the EU, as the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) shows. In parenthesis, TPP, which includes as six of its twelve members Commonwealth countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, New Zealand), also shows how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of a Commonwealth free trade zone. In further parenthesis, TPP is an example of the regional platform trade deals (the EU being another) which have emerged because of the failure of the WTO to enact a global deal, showing how superannuated is the Brexiters’ idea of the WTO as the arena for trade deals.

Brexiters habitually advance their sovereignty argument in terms of a claim that a large percentage of UK laws are made in the EU. The percentage given varies, sometimes being quoted as 80% but in recent months 65% has been the typical claim. The true figure is 8-14%. Then there is another, and very potent, line of Brexit sovereignty argument: that the EU interferes in the UK by imposing human rights judgments upon it. But neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the European Court of Human Rights are EU bodies. The UK was signed up to them (and in the case of the Convention largely created it) before it ever joined the EU and would be a party to them even if it left the EU.

Then, of course, there is the issue of immigration. Surely it must be a matter of sovereignty that a country can decide who enters and leaves its borders? As regards the Brexit debate several different things have been conflated. One issue, of course pressing at this time, is that of refugees and asylum seekers. But the rules governing that are not EU rules but those of the UN’s 1951 Convention. Moreover, since the UK does not belong to the Schengen Agreement and is exempt from the EU refugee-sharing agreement, it is in any case not directly affected by the crisis. Indeed, were Brexit to occur, the only consequences for borders would be to move the UK border from France to the UK and to require a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, both of which would have devastating consequences, firstly for border control and secondly for the still fragile Northern Ireland peace process.

But Brexiters’ arguments about sovereignty and immigration are also concerned with free movement of EU citizens, not just refugees and asylum seekers. Here, they point out that the UK has no choice but to accept immigrants from the rest of the EU. And they are quite right. That is part and parcel of the single market, which the neo-liberals amongst them want. For you can’t have a single European market without free movement of people any more than you could have a single market in the UK whilst having border controls between, say, Cornwall and Devon or Lancashire and Yorkshire. Left-wing opponents of the EU should welcome this, because it means that the international mobility of capital is matched, within the EU, by labour mobility. Why should workers have to stay where they are, beholden to globally free-wheeling companies to give them jobs?

And in any case, when it comes to free movement within the EU, British people do it quite as much as anyone else, and the numbers of EU citizens living in the UK is about the same as the number of UK citizens living in the rest of the EU. In round numbers its about 2M people in both directions. Many of these British immigrants fail to learn the local language, 'take' jobs from locals, push up property prices, and put pressure on local health systems.

In short, the sovereignty argument of the Brexiters is completely flawed, but actually it is worse than flawed. The globalization of economics and markets has created a political vacuum in terms of the democratic political regulation of capital, and it is that which has created the real crisis of sovereignty. The solution – and let's be clear, it's the only solution – is democratic transnational governance structures. And the only such structure in the world today, imperfect as it surely is, is the EU.

Trading places

This week, the Indian Prime Minister visited the UK just a couple of weeks after the Chinese President did the same. Both were sumptuously hosted, but the main events were trade deals. In between the two visits, though much less reported, the UK-Brazil Joint Economic and Trade Committee (JETCO) met in London.

This in itself tells us something about the global world economy. Whilst of the BRICs Russia’s relations with the UK remain frosty, for complex political reasons, the other three countries in this admittedly artificial bloc are being actively wooed by the Britain and many other countries.

This gives, in part at least, the lie to the repeated claim by those who want Britain to exit it that EU membership precludes the signing of trade deals. In part, because it is of course true that the UK cannot negotiate deals with third parties that would give EU single market access. But that should be good news for Eurosceptics since, were it possible, it would also be possible for any member state to do the same and thereby commit the UK to trade deals it had had no input into.

And these deals also reveal something else. They are predicated in large part upon UK membership of the EU. The Chinese President – in a highly unusual intervention – made it clear during his visit that his country saw trade relations with the UK in terms of the EU, and urged against Brexit. The Indian PM was entirely unambiguous in saying that he saw the UK as India’s “entry point into the EU”.

The Brexiters’ idea that outside the EU there would be a queue of countries lining up to sign preferential trade deals is quite clearly nonsense, as the US have made clear. And any notion that the Commonwealth would be the locus of a new trade bloc is equally preposterous. Australia and Canada have made that clear and the fact that India’s visit to the UK came after visiting 28 other countries speaks volumes. This isn't any longer the world of Imperial Preference.

What did interest both China’s and India’s leaders was something quite different to trading with the UK post-Brexit. Both were concerned about the restrictions put upon visas to visit, work and study in the UK. All these – like the Brexit debate – have got caught up in the British panic about immigration, which is doing real damage, both economic and cultural, to the UK. International students are increasingly turning their backs on British universities as a result. But Brexit also matters to British universities, and this week they came out and said that it would be a catastrophe.

The over-arching debate in all this is not simply about Brexit, it’s about a realistic understanding of what the world is, and the UK’s place within it. These recent events underscore, like it or not, the realpolitik of that place. And it certainly isn't where Brexiters think it to be.

Crisis? What crisis?

The flow of people across Europe, mainly fleeing war in Syria, is the biggest news story across the continent. Sometimes the focus is on arrivals in Greece, other times points of transit in Macedonia or Hungary. In the UK much attention is given to the people gathered at Calais, trying to get to Britain, although the numbers here are much smaller than those in many other places.

Invariably, this is described as a crisis. But I think that is misleading in two ways. First, it implies that it is a temporary phenomenon that will soon be over. That is highly unlikely, although the end of summer may well temporarily reduce the numbers of people making the dangerous sea crossings to Europe. Second, it implies that what is happening suddenly arose from nowhere. That is highly misleading. It is a situation that has been developing over several years, mainly as a result of war, instability, poverty and repression in the Middle East and Northern Africa. The ‘crisis’ motif is also rather offensive in that it suggests that it is the countries of Europe that are suffering: yet if there is a crisis, then those experiencing it are surely the people whose lives have been destroyed, setting them on horrendous journeys of desperation?

Beyond the way that what is happening now has a past and a future that makes the idea of a crisis moment implausible is something else which is more directly relevant to the themes of the book and to the study of organizations and management more generally. It is the nature and meaning of globalization. Every student of management, and for that matter every citizen and voter, has been told for decades that we live in an increasingly globalized and inter-connected world. But that almost always references the globalization of organizations, markets and trade. Moreover, it has a sanitized, upbeat sense of a world of opportunity. Yet global inter-connectedness applies no less to people, and can have a reality which is more about squalid suffering than the breathless, bloodless nostrums of corporate strategy documents.

Confronted with these people and this reality it seems that many in Europe recoil in horror. In many countries, including the UK, that is exacerbated by years of highly negative and stigmatic depictions of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. So whereas in the UK (as I point out on pp. 106-7) the globalization of ownership has been treated as a matter of no importance, the globalization of people is a very different matter.

There’s little point reprising all the familiar and fallacious responses that have always been made to immigration (except when we do it – then we are ‘expats’): that ‘we are full up’, that it will cause unemployment or housing shortages, that it will damage cultural cohesion. However, I do want to discuss an increasingly vociferous comment about the current situation that I have noticed, which is that those who think that refugees should be allowed to settle should personally offer to house them, otherwise they are hypocrites.

This seems a very peculiar logic. By extension it would mean that those who want a health service should turn their houses into operating theatres, those who want schools should hold classes in their living rooms, those who want electricity should have power stations in their back gardens or even dig the coal to fuel them. Or perhaps more pertinently that those who don’t want to admit refugees should be obliged to go and tell them why and to man the barricades to keep them out.

I am not a psychologist, but I think there is a psychological logic to this illogic. Precisely because when people, rather than ownership, move around the globe it acquires a human face, and the response therefore takes a human form. That can sometimes call forth an empathetic response. But it can also fuel a bitter anger against those making such a response, which is what fuels the ‘hypocrisy’ charge. This I think is a psychological defence against the witnessing of suffering: to say that those who insist on acknowledging that suffering are to blame.

Beyond that, there is a tendency – visible, too, in debates about poverty, unemployment and welfare – to blame the victims. In the case of refugees this takes the form of saying things such as that they should have sought asylum in the country of first entry (a dubious legal argument, and in any case a wholly unrealistic one), or that they seem to be young, healthy males who should not have abandoned their families and countries (this latter seems especially perverse – it is always those who can undertake migration who do so). Here I think the psychology derives from the terrifying fear that any of us could be poor, unemployed, ill or, in this case, displaced by war. By configuring such fates as individual failings (laziness, dishonesty, cowardice, avarice) those doing so can indulge the fantasy that it would never happen to them, since they are made of sterner and better stuff.

So these illogical responses are driven by fear and, in a certain way, a sensitivity to suffering. Yet we should not feel too much sympathy. Those fears may be psychologically real, but they hardly equate to the material reality of being bombed out of one’s home, having one’s life ripped up, and being left with no alternative but to embark on an arduous, dangerous journey into the unknown. That’s a crisis.

Strivers and scroungers

In this post, I want to pick up on an oblique point in my previous one. I mentioned there how a very potent political trope is to draw a distinction between scroungers and strivers. Scroungers, here, are those who do not work and rely on welfare benefits. Strivers are those who are in work and, by implication, are seeking to better themselves through work. I was reminded of this not just in writing my post on Greece but also, today, by an announcement by the British government that inheritance tax liability is to be reduced. It’s the justification that is relevant here, because it was couched in the argument that “hard-working families” who had saved to buy a home and improve it should be able to pass the fruits on to their children rather than to the tax collector.

This term – “hard-working families” – has become a cliché in the political lexicon. It’s a strange expression in and of itself. What is a hard-working family? One in which every family member (and how extensive does it have to be?) works hard? Are single people who work hard part of it? Should the idle rich be taxed more? What about those who go to work every day but slack off?

In relation to inheritance tax it seems especially strange. The new policy is aimed primarily at those whose houses have become very valuable, and in the UK housing market, especially in London, they have indeed become very valuable. But this has nothing to do with work, or saving, or home improvements. All you have to do is sit there and it happens. Recently it was reported that in many parts of Sothern England house price inflation earns homeowners more than they receive in wages. So there’s no particular virtue, and certainly no hard work, or even any work at all, involved in accruing an inheritance based on home ownership to pass on. Moreover, what of the recipients of this inheritance? Manifestly, they have not put in any hard work at all. So why, if hard work is the cardinal value, should they receive anything?

The counterpart, of course, is an equally incoherent – and very longstanding - narrative of the deserving and undeserving poor. Indeed, in the same package as the inheritance tax changes are further restrictions on welfare articulated through exactly the same distinction. Ironically, many of those who will suffer as a result are, indeed, hard-working families in receipt of tax credits to top up low wages. Nothing new there, either: the Speenhamland system of the early 19^th Century was similarly a subsidy for low wages, as the Poor Law Report of 1834 demonstrated.

And those most poignantly affected by welfare changes are the disabled. Here, again, a narrative of the deserving and undeserving is in play, with endless stories about fraudulent claims from the ‘bad back brigade’ accompanying sentimental and self-congratulatory statements of sympathy for the ‘genuinely’ disabled, which seems to mean those who are so self-evidently handicapped that even the most stony-hearted cannot deny it. Or perhaps not, since in some cases people who cannot walk, talk or feed themselves are being called to the job centre. At all events, plans to shift disabled people on to jobseekers allowance suggest a belief that they are ‘shirkers’ and not ‘strivers’. Yet when it comes to migration, the narrative reverses. Here, the problem is the strivers – the economic migrants – pretending to be asylum seekers, or in other words ‘bogus’ asylum seekers. These strivers are to be rounded up into detention centres and deported pronto. Whereas, in a long-remembered phrase, unemployed workers should get 'on their bike' and look for work, an idea espoused by the government as recently as 2011, those who get on the boat (and risk their lives) to do so are the most dangerous of scroungers.  

There is no logic in any of this, unless it is the logic of spite and division. Which is not to say that work – whether ‘hard’ or not – is unimportant. On the contrary, work is massively important both economically and in terms of self-worth and identity. But work bestows or enables value and identity; it does not express it, nor does it disclose any fundamental morality. The idea that it does is deeply rooted, though, enabling the idea that poverty and suffering reflect individual moral failure rather than systemic inequality or just dumb luck. Over a hundred years ago, the founding figure of organization studies, Max Weber, wrote one of the most important books about modern society, a book that influenced me deeply - The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It still has much - all too much - to say about the contemporary world.

Old New Labour

I’m going to continue with my posts about what is now the aftermath of the British election but before doing so I just want to restate why I am doing so on a blog which is first and foremost about studying organizations. There are two reasons. On the one hand, politics and organizations are really inseparable. The British political landscape matters for both British businesses and public sector organizations. But more importantly what lies at the heart of British politics, and has done for at least three decades now, is a contestation about different models of capitalism and of organization.

Britain matters not because it is still the seventh largest economy in the world, but because it has been the template and cheerleader for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model of capitalism with all that implies for organizations in terms of an emphasis on shareholder value, labour market flexibility, privatization and deregulation. Crucially, this conception of how to organize both the economy and work has been a joint production of Conservative and ‘New Labour’ governments. In that context, the defeat of Labour in the recent election matters, as to a limited extent the party offered a break with this model, by urging greater regulation of markets and more protection for workers. So its defeat has implications for the future of organizations and of working life.

In this post, I want to focus on what has been a wholly predictable response to Labour’s defeat by the architects of New Labour. Both Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson have denounced Labour’s campaign for its failure to occupy the ‘centre ground’, by which they mean departing from that Anglo-Saxon model. If Labour is to win, they say, it must go back to being ‘New Labour’, whose defining hallmark was to accept the Thatcherite or neo-liberal settlement.

There is a huge irony in this. The central tent of New Labour in the early 1990s was that circumstances had changed and that Labour therefore also needed to change to reflect this. Yet now that formula, now more than two decades old, is held up as an unchanged and unchangeable verity. But even if it were to be accepted that the New Labour diagnosis were right at the time – and that is highly questionable, because by the time of their 1997 election victory pretty much any alternative to the Conservatives would have been a winner, so discredited – it isn’t right now.

Labour lost the 2015 election for two main reasons. First, because its hitherto impregnable heartlands in Scotland switched to the SNP because it offered a more social democratic programme. Those voters were sick of New Labour and won’t be regained by returning to New Labour. Second, because in key English marginal traditional Labour voters switched to UKIP, mainly because of anti-immigrant sentiment much of which derives from New Labour’s European policy. So, again, those voters aren’t going to be won back by a return to New Labour. But, equally, Miliband’s Labour were far too scared of the issue of immigration – probably because of the disastrous ‘Mrs Duffy moment’ of the 2010 election – to really challenge those voters. At all events, Labour’s 2015 travails were the consequence of New Labour, and cannot be solved by a return to New Labour.

Generals always fight the last war, not the present one, and the interventions of the New Labour old guard are a perfect example. If there is to be an effective strategy for Labour in the future it won’t be based upon nostrums derived from a quarter of a century ago, any more than New Labourites would have based their early 1990s approach on the basis of what worked in the late 1960s.

British election: the leaders' debate

This is the second of my posts on the British General Election, this time on the televised debate between the party leaders which was held last night. This is only the second time there has been such a debate in the UK, and the format was different to last time. In the 2010 election only the leaders of Conservative, Liberal Democrats and Labour participated. This time, following various political machinations, they were joined by the leaders of the Greens, SNP, UKIP and Plaid Cymru (the Welsh national party). Thus the full cast was Natalie Bennett (Greens), David Cameron (Conservative), Nick Clegg (LibDems), Nigel Farage (UKIP), Ed Miliband (Labour), Nicola Sturgeon (SNP) and Leanne Wood (Plaid Cymru). The debate lasted for two hours and was organized around four questions on the economy, the health service, immigration, and the future for young people.

In many ways it was this format that had the biggest effect. It meant that each leader had relatively little time to speak and when they did it was highly structured. There was little audience participation (I think by instruction from the broadcasters) and it was hard for any of the leaders to really get a sense of audience reaction – there was little applause, no catcalling and just one heckle towards the end. In short, the atmosphere felt quite sterile. Certainly it was difficult for any single leader to dominate proceedings, and none did.

Opinion polls and comments since the debates suggest that no one emerged as a clear ‘winner’or ‘loser’, although Nicola Sturgeon has been the most widely praised. I think this is deserved: she gave a strong, calm and confident performance. One quite likely permutation of the election result is a Labour minority government supported by the SNP and if so that will be an interesting outcome, since Sturgeon is some way to the left of Labour and would be likely to push strongly against austerity economics.

As for the other leaders, David Cameron, who had been resistant to the debates taking place, seemed somewhat ill at ease and disengaged. He can be an accomplished speaker and expectations would have been quite high that he would stand out, so I would think his supporters would be disappointed. Ed Miliband, by contrast, started against low expectations since he is widely seen as lacking charisma. Thus it was relatively easier for him to exceed expectations, so his supporters may be relieved. It would be hard to say that either of these two – the only ones with any expectation of becoming Prime Minister – decisively defeated the other.

Nigel Farage will have had high expectations from this debate. He is often an accomplished and effective speaker, skilled in projecting an image of straight-speaking normality. But his style relies a lot on the use of humour and bombast, and the rigid format and stage-managed audience weren’t a good format for these. He wasn’t able to dominate proceedings as he might have done in a head to head, and it was notable that Cameron and Miliband barely addressed him, treating him as almost an irrelevance. He was also the only one of the leaders who looked physically uncomfortable. His supporters profess themselves pleased but there was no breakthrough moment of the sort they would have hoped for.

Of all the leaders, Natalie Bennett started with the lowest expectations given recent painful media performances (which I discussed in another post). To exceed them all she really had to do was not implode, and she easily exceeded that bar. Leanne Wood was probably the least known of the politicians to a national audience and gave an assured performance, albeit one which (not unreasonably) mainlined on Welsh rather than national issues. Sturgeon, by contrast, had tended to emphasise the role SNP MPs could play in Westminster politics. But it was Wood who garnered one of the few rounds of applause of the night, in a sharp put down of Farage’s claim about immigrants using the health service.

Nick Clegg’s performance in the debate has been less commented on in the media than that of the other leaders. It was actually quite punchy and fluent. But whereas at the last election debate his was the runaway success, attracting by far the most praise and interest, the context has now changed and he has neither the edge of being a newcomer challenging the political establishment nor the significance that attaches to the prospective Prime Ministers.

Overall, we didn’t learn very much that was new, and it seems unlikely to me that many viewers will have changed their voting intentions on the basis of the debates. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating evening and, again, this was because of the format. Firstly, there was a far wider range of views represented than has been normal in British politics, and with each leader being given the same amount of air time these views were represented as all having equal weight. That felt like a refreshing change following an era which, as I wrote in my last post, has been dominated by the shared neo-liberal orthodoxy of Conservative and Labour parties. Secondly, the dynamics of the debate felt changed by the presence of three women – who, relatedly, each represented ideologies at odds with neo-liberalism. Since Margaret Thatcher’s departure, British politics has been heavily dominated by white men in suits and suddenly that domination has evaporated (as regards the men, but not the white bit). It was Thatcher who coined the phrase ‘there is no alternative’ (to free markets), otherwise known as Tina. But Tina, for one night anyway, was banished by Leanne, Natalie and Nicola.