A new landscape?

Within less than a fortnight some of the consequences of Brexit are becoming clear. What was dismissed as ‘project fear’ turns out to have been true. The pound has collapsed, the FTSE-250 has collapsed, foreign investment has collapsed, the UK is facing breakup and the political system has broken down. These aren’t just short-term things and they will reverberate for years to come. A country that a week ago seemed like a bastion of stability now seems a scary and unstable place. The leaders of the leave campaign have mainly disappeared and those that are left don’t know what to do. Someone said to me the other day that the issue is not that the remainers are ‘bad losers’ but that the leavers are ‘bad winners’: at their moment of victory they regret it and exit.

The UK media are hardly reporting the big strategic and economic issues and are obsessing about the Westminster politics of who will lead the political parties. That matters, a bit, but does not begin to speak to the political and economic meltdown that is happening. For that, you have to go to the foreign press. And there is also a cultural meltdown, most obvious in the rise of racist abuse and attacks. This has been widely reported but to personalise it a friend of mine, out shopping in the afternoon, was punched in the face for having a foreign accent; a Chinese student I know was spat at and told to pack her bags. Welcome to post-Brexit England.

I’ve written before about how the divide now is between cosmopolitans and locals, and Tony Blair – of whom I have plenty of criticisms, but few can doubt his sensibility to events – has said something similar, arguing that the political cleavage is no longer left versus right but open versus closed. So the shape of twentieth century politics, based on capital versus labour, no longer makes sense and nor do the party structures that mirrored it.

We need, fast, a political realignment around this. What we currently have is a situation where the locals (or closed) have defeated the cosmopolitans (or open) but the irony is that the former look to the latter to deliver what they have voted for. It’s striking that about the only person in the UK showing any sort of leadership now is Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England. And who is he? A technocratic expert, and an immigrant to boot!

This new politics certainly makes for some strange bedfellows, especially between the internationalist left and the global free-market right; but this is the landscape that we are now going to have to work within. It makes a nonsense of the politics of most of my lifetime, and I am still adjusting to it. I talked to a friend of mine the other day, a lifelong working class socialist, who said that he wanted the working class who voted Brexit to suffer unemployment and punitive public service cuts so as to teach them the error of their decision. That seems incredibly harsh but he said the alternative is to infantilise those voters by saying that they did not know what they were voting for. We shouldn’t patronise them, and so we have to say that they have to accept the consequences of their choice.

I kind of understand that argument and at all events I see a very strange situation having opened up in which the people expected to sort out this mess are those in business, the civil service, civil society or even academia who largely did not vote for it and who were derided as the experts and the elite. Where are the leaders of populist insurgency? Nowhere to be seen. So their insurgency is to be put into practice by the very people they have rejected. I’m not sure that there has ever been a situation quite like that in modern history.

We are very, very far from seeing the dust settle on the Brexit vote, but I think that the dynamics I have described here define where the dust will settle. And, if so, that has an import far wider than Brexit as it seems to define what the politics of post-globalization will look like. This isn’t a matter of merely British interest. For one thing, when such a big economy makes such a bizarre decision it has global effects. But, beyond that, it could be said that Britain led the industrial revolution, led the neo-liberal post-industrial revolution and is now leading this post-globalization, post-truth, revolution.

I don’t pretend to have a complete handle on this, and these are just preliminary thoughts, written during a crisis which is both personal and political. In a few months they may seem naïve or just misguided; and the one thing which social science should teach us is to be wary of prediction. Even so, I think that what has happened here these last few days and what it will mean over the next few years is something fundamental which will change all our lives.

What lies outside of organization studies?

I received an interesting email about this blog the other day. As the sender did not post it publicly I won’t reveal his name but I suppose it was what used to be called a ‘green ink letter’ in that the language was a little intemperate and capital letters and exclamation remarks abounded (and I would just mention that this is not necessarily the most effective way to make one’s arguments). The main point he made was that most of what I write about on the blog is not organization studies but economics and politics and he was particularly exercised by my posts on British membership of the EU. Why, he asked, don’t I just stick to writing about what I know about, meaning organization studies?

The answer to that is important to my view of what organization studies is, or should be. Because I don’t recognize any real distinctions between organization studies and economics and politics or, for that matter, social science or social affairs or history (all of which I often write about), philosophy (though I rarely write about it) or literature (which occasionally I do). That’s actually one of the key messages of the book.

One reason for that is the fairly obvious one that organizations exist within an economic, political and social context so anything about that context is relevant to organizations. In Europe (and more widely), the EU is certainly an important part of that context and although my correspondent clearly disagreed with my views on the matter, the robustness of his email leads me to think that he very much agrees about that importance. Another reason is that the organization-context distinction (or, more often in organization theory, the organization-environment distinction) is a bogus one: they are mutually constitutive. As I argue in the book (p.93), somewhat counter-intuitively organizations are part of their own environment. And a third is that politics, economics and the social are themselves organized both in general and in terms of specific organizations (e.g. political parties). No one bats an eyelid if leadership researchers invoke examples of political leaders alongside business leaders – so why should it not be the same for organization studies in general?

All this suggests another, and I think genuinely interesting, question: does it mean that there is nothing that lies outside of organization studies? I am really not sure. Certainly there is little which lies outside organizations, in that all human life has a collective and therefore organized aspect. Even Robinson Crusoe, sometimes invoked in economic theory as an atomised individual, relied upon stuff that he had rescued from his shipwrecked boat, and both the boat and the stuff were there because of organization. And as soon as he met another (black) person he turned him into a slave – effecting an organization on the basis of how he had learned to organize. So maybe organization studies is about everything?

There are parallels in other subjects. Economics is actually a good example in that it often seeks to recast all human experience in terms of its own categories, and politics can claim that everything is in some sense political. In recent years I’ve noticed that geography has become ever more expansive in its scope, perhaps on the basis that everything, after all, occurs in space and in a place. Anything social must in some sense be amenable to sociological analysis. And does anything about human behaviour lie outside the ambit of psychology? I suppose that many facets of art and science lie outside of organization studies, and that it would be immensely and absurdly flattening to try to argue otherwise. Still, all facets of art and science are in some way organized, and in this regard organization studies has (or could have) something to say about them. Perhaps only aesthetic experience lies wholly outside organization studies?

Like many academics who work in organization studies my training was outside of the field. In fact, although the email correspondent suggested that I should stick to organization studies as that is what I know about, the reality is that I probably don’t have anything like the comprehensive knowledge of the subject that I might be assumed to have, and probably should have. In my case my training was primarily in political philosophy and to a lesser extent economics; for others in the field it was anthropology, psychology and sociology amongst other things. This is actually becoming less true, as the growth of organization studies means that younger academics are more often trained in the subject, and usually within business schools. I am inclined to think that this is change for the worse, although it may well be that they have a more thorough grounding in organization studies per se than do I and others of my generation.

Anyway, I don’t propose to limit myself to the conventional repertoire of organization studies, but I can see the danger that the more it is about everything the more it may be about nothing. Even so, what strikes me more, as regards this blog, is that it is actually rather repetitive in the things I write about. So my belated New Year resolution (with no promises that I will stick to it) is to try to extend my range a bit further. That will not please my correspondent, alas, but since his main complaint was about my “fascistic”, “Quisling”, “big business [loving]” and “liberal-left elitist” support for British membership of the EU I fear that I am unlikely to do so. And I am sure I will continue to post about British membership of the EU – in fact something about the extraordinary intellectual legerdemain (if this does not slightly flatter it) by which its supporters can simultaneously be cast as fascists, traitors, corporate lackeys, liberals and leftists would be well worth writing.

Everyone needs a Willie

The phrase ‘every Prime Minister needs a Willie’ was uttered by Margaret Thatcher, apparently without realising the double entendre it contained. It was a reference to her sometime deputy as Conservative Prime Minister, William Whitelaw. Whitelaw’s significance to Thatcher lay in the fact that he provided a point of connection between her and the wider Conservative Party, especially during the early years of her leadership in the late 1970s and early 80s. For it is easy to forget that during those years Thatcher was engaged in remaking her party, in a process that was by no means unopposed from within, away from its traditional, pragmatist and patrician form and into a much more ideologically-motivated neo-liberal entity.

This did not happen all at once, by any means, and the presence in her first cabinet in particular of ‘Tory wets’ (the more traditional, centrist, one nation Conservatives) are a testament to this fact. Not only was there an ideological battle here but also Thatcher, both in her class background and her gender, did not fit the established image of a Tory leader. Willie Whitelaw’s significance lay in being both doggedly loyal to his boss but also being trusted by the wider party, since he was very much from its traditional mould (public school, Cambridge, ex-army). He was thus able to be a conduit between traditional and new Tory parties.

In the 1990s, a very similar role was undertaken within Tony Blair’s New Labour party by John Prescott, who also became Deputy Prime Minister. Here again a party was being re-made towards a more neo-liberal posture, but this time against a traditional backdrop defined in terms of socialism, or at least social democracy, and trade unionism. That constituency was alien to Blair’s ideology and his personal background (public school, Oxford, ex-lawyer) but one that Prescott, a working-class former trade union official, was steeped in. Like Whitelaw he formed a key conduit between traditional and new Labour parties.

I have been recalling these two because of the current situation within the Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn is seeking to re-shape Labour away from Blairism and also, like Thatcher and Blair, has a persona that only appeals to some sections of his party. In some ways his situation is more complicated than Thatcher’s or Blair’s in that he differs from both the new right of his party (too left-wing) and from the old left (too liberal and metropolitan). At all events he faces opposition and mistrust from, at least, its MPs, very few of whom wanted him to become their leader (his support base being, rather, amongst party members). One reason that task is proving so hard, I would suggest, is that there appears to be no one willing and able to act in the kind of conduit role that Whitelaw and Prescott fulfilled; someone trusted by the parliamentary rank-and-file and willing to use that trust in support of the new leadership.

If anything, Corbyn seems more inclined to seek to surround himself with those who agree with him, with this week’s sackings of shadow cabinet members for ‘disloyalty’. That is always a temptation for any leader but it carries with it enormous dangers. In the long run it leads to isolation from dissenting opinions (something that played a part in the downfall of both Thatcher and Blair, and probably of many business leaders) and hence the well-worn problem of ‘group think’, and that of cultism*. But in the short-run it hamstrings the necessary process in any form of politics, including organizational politics, to build what are inevitably forms of coalition. It seems related in some way to the well-known – within critical organization theory, at least - limitations of seeing leadership in terms of individuals: precisely because leadership involves coalition building it also requires a broader set of appeals than are likely to be provided by a single person. Corbyn needs urgently to find his Whitelaw or Prescott or even, given his particular situation of being neither Old nor New Labour, a couple of them.

* For an excellent analysis of cultism in leadership, and indeed of the dangers and difficulties of leadership including the over-focus on the individual, see Dennis Tourish’s The Dark Side of Transformational Leadership: A Critical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2013).

Europe: a defining issue

Regular readers of this blog – if there are any! – will know that I am very committed to the UK remaining within the EU. With a referendum on this now certain to be held within the next couple of years, the different sides are lining up.

I am in favour of UK membership not because I think that the EU is perfect or beyond critique. It isn’t. In particular, it is very lacking in democratic structures. But the reason for that is primarily because such structures are resisted by Eurosceptics, in the UK and elsewhere, who see them as building a ‘federal super-state’. And even in its present form I see the EU as a bulwark against the hyper neo-liberalism that I believe would characterise the UK in the event of exit, and which is certainly the ambition of most of those seeking exit. Moreover, I see the EU as having knitted together, in the aftermath of both World War Two and the Cold War, a relatively stable, peaceful and prosperous continent. It is easy to forget, but in both 1945 and 1989 that prospect would have seemed very far away.

I’m also dismayed by the level of ignorance and toxicity in UK debates about the EU. Some of this is just stupid, as with the idea that the EU wants to ban bent bananas. Other times it is pernicious, as with the misguided linking of the EU and the European  Court of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and the misrepresentation of what that Court and Convention do.

A couple of years ago I would have said that come a Referendum the UK would undoubtedly vote to stay in, and by a large margin – say 60/40. Now, I am less sure that this is so, mainly because of the, again, ignorant and toxic debates about the refugee crisis (by which I mean that being in or out of the EU would make no difference whatsoever to this crisis or to the relatively limited way that it affects the UK). If I had to guess, it would be that the outcome will still be a narrow vote for ‘in’. But that is not good enough, because without a clear result the demand for a further vote will immediately arise.

It may seem strange that in taking this view I line up with corporate and global financial voices that are also pro-EU. But there is a perfectly respectable ‘leftist’ case for staying in. And in any case my position is no less strange than those on the Left who line up with UKIP in arguing for exit. In fact, I don’t think that the EU debate is a straightforward left-right one, it is more a debate between what in another post I called ‘Cosmopolitans and Locals’. If Britain is to be a tolerant, sophisticated, multi-cultural and prosperous country then the 'cosmopolitans' have to win; if the 'locals' win then Britain will be a bigoted, fearful country permanently locked not just in a world that hasn't existed since the 1950s, but, even worse, in an idealized imagination of that world.

So, for me, this has become the defining political issue of the times for the UK. And it matters far beyond the UK since if Britain were to exit the EU it would have huge ramifications throughout Europe and beyond. I’ll be doing what little I can to persuade British people to vote to stay in, and my first efforts are a blog post on The Conversation website and a follow-up interview on BBC Radio Merseyside today (the interview starts about six minutes in to the link). But I expect to be doing much more.

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.

British election result: Decisively indecisive

So the British election is over, and it has turned out to be rather different to what the polls predicted, with a majority Conservative government having been elected. At first sight, it’s a return to business as usual – one of the two main parties forms the government. At second sight, things look much more complex and unstable.

For one thing, this will be a UK government which is really only supported in England. In particular, the fact that the SNP won almost all of the Scottish seats has radically changed the political landscape, and can only make it more likely that there will be pressure for second referendum on Scottish independence. But Wales and Northern Ireland, too, have not supported the Conservatives in number, yet will have a Conservative government. That may well place limits on what is seen to be legitimate.

On the other hand, the fate of the predominantly English UK Independence Party (UKIP) was notable. Despite being given unprecedented media coverage after the broadcasting regulator declared that they were to be treated as a major party, their claims to be a People’s Army on the move have been eviscerated. They got 13% of the vote and just one MP. Sure, this reflects the unfair nature of the First Past the Post voting system in the UK but they knew about that all along, and still made grandiose predictions. This looks, for the time being anyway, to be the end of the UKIP surge.

The failure of the Labour Party is truly historic, mainly because they have lost their traditional Scottish heartland to the SNP, whilst also losing out in England. The Scottish situation is really the final consequence of the New Labour project, which presumed that it could move the party to the right in order to garner English marginal votes and automatically hang on to its core vote. This election finally saw that idea fall apart. Labour had actually moved a tiny way to the Left but still lost Scotland, and additionally alienated the old Labour North and the floating south of England. They just about held on in Wales. It’s very hard to see where Labour go now. Returning to a New Labour approach certainly won’t bring Scotland back to them. Going further to the Left won’t give them gains in the south of England.

Yet it could be argued that this was a good election for Labour to lose: had they, as the polls up to the election suggested, formed a minority government with SNP support then it would have been a torrid experience, beset by accusations of illegitimacy. Equally, Conservative joy may dissipate when the problems of managing a small majority with a large number of MPs hostile to their leader and willing to vote against their party become clear.

But by far the biggest consequence of this election result – and it matters quite as much for Europe and beyond as for Britain – is that it is certain that there will be a referendum on EU membership. That will split the Tory party and possibly rejuvenate the Labour Party (it’s notable that they are strongest in cosmopolitan London where UKIP are weakest) as a pro-EU party. It will exacerbate the division between England and Scotland. It’s not impossible to imagine a complete re-alignment of British politics via the EU Referendum, rather as has happened in Scotland in the wake of the independence referendum. At the very least, it will make for some new alliances: the City and big business and Labour and the SNP and centrist Tories versus UKIP, Tory Eurosceptics, Irish Unionists and the far Left. We are in for interesting and unpredictable times.

Vox Populi

In 1959 the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht published one of his most famous poems, Die Lösung (The Solution), which contained these lines:

…. the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

It was a biting satire of the Communist repression of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany and indeed was written at that time, and only published later, and then in West Germany, so subversive was it seen to be by the communist regime in the east. Since then, it has been taken up as an anti-elitist text, expressing how the political class see those who they represent as a problem.

I have been thinking about this because it seems to chime with much political sentiment in Britain at the moment. Last night the leaders of the ‘main parties’ (increasingly, a misnomer) were questioned by an audience of the electorate and the general verdict was that the audience ‘won’ by savaging the politicians. Here, supposedly, were the salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk sticking it to an out of touch elite.

My own view is completely different. It seemed to me that the audience engaged in the laziest and easiest kind of debate. Every politician is a liar and not to be trusted – but no one questions the audience as to what they want, other than a representative democracy. Any fact or figure can be thrown in by the audience, no matter how incorrect – and it is ‘elitist’ to challenge it. People who would rip into politicians for ‘gaffes’ complain when the politicians offer carefully calibrated answers to avoid gaffes. For the audience, every issue is easy, but they would not last five minutes if they themselves had to navigate the complexity of almost every issue. If the politicians talk about general principles, the audience denounce them as being fact-free; if they talk about facts the audience denounce them as lacking principles.

I had a similar reaction when I watched a Channel 4 debate between young voters and politicians this week. At one point, one of the audience got huge cheers for saying that she and her generation had no idea what the different parties stood for. But every day the media reports on the parties and their policies, and politicians bend over backwards to find new ways of engaging with people. Doesn’t she have some responsibility to engage in turn?

Heaven forbid that we should return to the political deference of bygone eras, when politicians were not challenged and the assumption was that the great and the good knew what was right for the rest of us. But now that situation has been inverted, and any ignorance, any cynicism, any sneer against politicians is taken as reasonable. The easiest and cheapest applause comes to the person who says that ‘they are all the same’.

But in most constituencies there are candidates ranging from Greens to UKIP, and in many constituencies candidates from the harder left to the harder right. They are not all the same, they stand for different things. It’s true that the electoral system in Britain makes it hard for smaller parties to gain representation, but even then the share of the vote matters in giving parties a legitimate voice. For example, for years the Liberal Party (as was) secured only a handful of seats but it had a certain legitimacy because of its vote share. Voting always makes a difference because legitimacy comes from the franchise, not the turn out, and abstaining has exactly as much effect as voting. But I think this is anyway just a sideshow – people point to the idea that their vote doesn’t count as an excuse for opting out of serious political engagement.

The lazy, easy sneer at politicians is meat and blood to more populist, supposedly anti-politics, parties such as, in the UK, UKIP. Yet as soon as politicians from such parties are elected, the contradictions are made clear. For example, UKIP MEPs take massive salaries and expenses from the EU even as they denounce it, and rarely turn up to vote. It’s actually the ultimate example of self-serving politicians but is greeted as if it were the opposite. Relatedly, on my local council, the UKIP councillors elected found it impossible to actually do their job because they couldn’t understand the procedures and legal framework of the council’s business. Caught up in slogans about ‘LibLieCon’ and the ‘Liberal Elite’, when it came to the actual business of governing and making practical choices – moving, so to speak, from being audience to being players – they just couldn’t cope. Within six months of being elected they had resigned. That isn’t an anti-UKIP point, by the way, just an illustration of the disconnect between anti-politics sentiment, of whatever persuasion, and politics itself.

I’ll finish with a telling quote, also usually attributed to Bertolt Brecht, although the attribution is not clear:

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”

British election: the second leaders' debate

In this latest post on the British election I will write about the most recent leader debate, televised last night. This was again dominated by the format. Because of the complex negotiations over these debates neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg were present. Instead, it was a debate amongst the ‘opposition leaders’: Natalie Bennett, Nigel Farage, Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon and Leanne Wood (see previous post for party affiliations). This made for some odd dynamics. All were opposed to the absent leaders, and could freely attack them, although interestingly only Cameron was attacked; Clegg was not even mentioned. Within the five, one could configure the alliances as the four on the left versus Farage; the three women versus the two men; Farage and Miliband as the only pro-nuclear arms leaders versus the rest; Miliband as the ‘mainstream’ leftist versus Bennett, Sturgeon and Wood; Miliband as the only potential Prime Minister versus the rest; and many other permutations.

The prime axis of debate and the dynamic of most interest was between Miliband and Sturgeon as the increasingly likely pairing to form the next government. Both had a difficult task. Sturgeon had to show electors in Scotland that they can still avoid a Conservative government even if they don’t voter Labour, and that there is a deal to be done with Labour if they do, but that it won’t involve too much compromise. Miliband had the even harder job of trying to appeal to left-wing Scottish voters without frightening floating English voters; and frightening the Scottish voters into thinking that he won’t do a deal with the SNP whilst leaving open the door to such a deal given that it is probably the only way he can become Prime Minister. The consequences of the Scottish independence referendum, which I wrote about at the time, are still evolving in complex ways.

One consequence of this is that whereas many people, including me, though that the main issue to watch in this election would be how UKIP fared in fact that is beginning to look like a sideshow. There is no UKIP surge in the polls, if anything a slight falling off, and it is looking increasingly unlikely that they will win many seats or will have a role in the post-election negotiations. In the debate, Farage made little impact and was consistently outgunned, especially by Wood, Sturgeon and Bennett. And he made one enormous, but revealing, error when he attacked the audience as being left-wing and reflecting what UKIP regard as BBC bias. In fact, as David Dimbleby, the chair of the debate, immediately pointed out, the audience had been selected on a proportional basis by an independent organization, not the BBC.

Apart from being a tactical error, this reflected two other important features of UKIP. One is their propensity for paranoia and victimhood, fed by their belief that they speak for a ‘silent majority’ and its collision with the fact that, as the opinion polls suggest, they only speak for something like 10-15% of the population. The other is more interesting and hasn’t been picked up in the media discussion about the debates. It is that UKIP have made big play of their claim to speak for, and be supported by, the traditional Old Labour Left. They are to some extent right in that, which is not surprising because there has always been an element of the Old Left that is nationalistic and anti-immigrant. But if that is their pitch, then attacking the audience on the basis that it was left-wing seems contradictory. Either you are beyond such distinctions or you’re not.

For me, as in the previous debate, Nicola Sturgeon was the most impressive performer. She has a clarity that the others lack, and seems at once on top of the facts and figures of political debate but also human and empathetic. Farage seemed out of his depth and uncomfortable, and although he will surely have appealed to his core supporters, as he would come what may, he didn’t make the break out from that group that he would have wanted to. He seemed isolated and marginal. Leanne Wood again stuck mainly to her Welsh credentials, which was surely sensible tactics. She has done well in these debates, without dominating them. Bennett made lots of interesting points, and as in the last debate didn’t collapse in the way that her performances earlier in the campaign might have led people to expect. But the fact is that it is difficult for her to be the alternative voice when that ground is occupied so effectively by Sturgeon and, anyway, it is highly unlikely that the Greens will have many - or even any – seats in the next parliament. Miliband I thought was wooden. There has been much talk that he has been having media coaching and, if so, it shows. In a way he has become a better presenter, but at the expense of appearing synthetic. I also thought that he seemed uncomfortable when challenged from the left about being too close to the Tories because I suspect that, in his heart of hearts, he agrees. He has shifted Labour just a tiny fraction to the left of where New Labour was, but he dare not go further because (to be charitable) he knows that this would led to him being destroyed by the right-wing press, by sections of his own party, and losing votes in key English marginal seats.

Maybe the most interesting moments came right at the end, when the three left of centre women embraced, and then went to shake Miliband’s hand, whilst Farage stood alone, sweating and tired-looking, at – with an obvious symbolism - the far right of the podium. There was a sense here – if we leave aside the positioning of post-election negotiations – of a new kind of politics for the UK. For the first time in ages a confident Left, cautiously approaching a cautious Labour Party emerging from the shell of New Labour; an absent, patrician landlord in the form of the Conservatives; and a resentful, baffled split-off from the Conservatives in the form of UKIP standing alone, moaning about bias.

I should say that the polls on the debate disagree with me. The Mirror/Survation poll immediately after scored Miliband the winner, with 35% saying he had won, 31% saying Sturgeon, 27% Farage, 5% Bennett and 2% Wood. A CityAM study of the social media response ranked the participants in this order: Wood, Sturgeon, Bennett, Miliband, Farage. It’s worth saying that Survation polls routinely over-estimate UKIP support compared with other polls whilst CityAM, because of its London demographic, might likely to underestimate UKIP (I am not sure what methodology is used).

As for the election opinion polls, these continue to show Labour and Conservative neck and neck, and the probability is still that there will be a hung parliament. At that point things will get really interesting. My take at the moment is that there will be a minority Labour government supported by the SNP. Actually, there’s nothing controversial about that as a prediction, although if it happens it will surely lead to claims that it is somehow 'illegitimate'. But I also think that Miliband will be pleased with such a scenario, as it will enable him to pursue the agenda he wants and to sideline the New Labour elements. If this happens, then the Tories are likely to fall into crisis and shift to a strongly Eurosceptic stance, I would guess under the leadership of Liam Fox. This will neuter UKIP and make the main political faultline in the 2020 election one between Labour/SNP and Tories pursuing an EU Referendum. It’s crazy to look so far ahead of course but if Labour are smart they will hold a referendum themselves and would in all likelihood win it on a stay-in ticket. All pure speculation of course!

British election: All change and no change

On the tenuous basis that Easter is a time for new beginnings, I’ve given this blog a minor facelift. The headline font is changed to orange which matches the book cover better. I’ve also updated my profile and the picture, much as I would like to remain forever youthful. Exciting times, but now back to the election.

I wrote in my last post that Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP was widely seen, including by me, as having been the best performer in the Leaders’ debate. She arrived back in Scotland to a rapturous reception. It is interesting to see the response to this from the British media, which has not attacked either Leanne Wood or Natalie Bennett who are not seen as a threat, but have gone to town on Sturgeon. Saturday’s Daily Telegraph led with a leaked story that Sturgeon secretly supported the Conservatives to win the election. This would, of course, be very damaging to her if true and she immediately issued a denial. The supposed leak is now being investigated.

Meanwhile in another right-wing paper, the Daily Mail, Sturgeon is depicted as “the most dangerous woman in British politics”, accompanied by a suitably scary picture in an article dripping with contempt and fear. The line of attack is two-fold. One is that she is a supposedly rabid left-winger (actually she is what in other European countries would be seen as a mainstream social democrat) who would try to “impose big-state socialism” on a Miliband government. It’s an odd accusation since the Mail has always depicted ‘Red Ed’ Miliband as a red of the deepest hue, not least in its despicable attack on his father, which I posted about at the time. Why, then, would Sturgeon need to “impose” such and agenda? The other prong of the attack is slightly stranger, but possibly more potent and we are likely to hear more of it if the current opinion polls hold. It is that it would be illegitimate for Scottish MPs to affect British politics against the wishes of the English, and were it to happen it would cause a crisis for the political system. But that does not begin to make sense. The political Right, including the Mail were all out against Scottish independence at last year’s referendum, insisting that Scotland should remain in the Union. How, then, can it be illegitimate for Scottish MPs to shape British politics? And, after all, Scotland in the 1980s had to accept Tory governments which had almost no electoral support in that country. Yet that was seen as perfectly legitimate: it was the overall national vote that counted, not the way it was composed as between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom.

There’s no great surprise in any of this. The British press is for the most part relentlessly right-wing and has for decades launched vitriolic attacks and character assassinations on anyone remotely departing from the Conservative Party script (as with former Labour leaders Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock). In that way, I can understand the situation of those who I otherwise disagree with. New Labour’s courting of the mainstream media and UKIP’s resentment of it both make sense. But I wonder whether it any longer holds the power it once did. People now get their news from multiple sources, mainly from the internet. Even in the heyday of the print press it was said that the majority of Sun readers voted Labour, despite the paper’s anti-Labour editorial stance. Now, I would think that the print media is even less influential. And the Mail article, the opening sentence of which referred to Sturgeon's "stilettoes and new hairstyle", was curiously dated (gosh, she's, you know, one of those women) as was the patronizing follow-up on how she has become "sexier with age". At all events, the opinion polls seem to have been unaffected by the leaders’ debate and its aftermath.

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.

The British general election

This is the first of what I plan to be a series of posts about the UK general election in the run up to polling day on May 7^th. I realise that this may seem rather parochial and as such may be of limited interest to readers of the blog from outside the UK. But I am not so sure that is so. Much of what is happening here has counterparts in many other countries. For example, there is a breakdown in trust in the political process and the emergence of new parties which are to some extent extremist (though perhaps less so than in other countries), and one consequence of this is that the result is far less predictable than at any other recent election.  Moreover, much of the context of this is the unfolding of the consequences of globalization and of the financial crisis. The other thing to be said at the outset is that this focus on politics may seem at odds with the focus of the book and this blog of the book, which is on organizations. But here I would just re-state one of the basic arguments of the book, which is the inseparability of politics and organizations.

In this first post, I’ll just make some orientating comments. The period since the early 1990s saw a remarkable convergence between the two main parties, Conservative and Labour, with both being committed to the neo-liberal order, even though one was notionally a party of the Right and the other of the Left. That is to say, both converged on globalization, deregulation and privatization or marketization of public services. The assumption of that convergence was that Britain would continue to be a two-party system as it has been for many decades, with the Conservatives holding on to all the voters whose views were further to the Right than its policies and Labour holding on to all those to its Left. That assumption didn’t quite hold, even at the last election in 2010, principally because the ‘third party’, the Liberal Democrats, garnered quite a bit of support, especially from the Left, not because they diverged from the economic consensus of the other two parties but mainly because they alone had opposed the Iraq War. The consequence of this was a hung parliament and a Conservative-LibDem government that enacted a programme of fiscal austerity.

Although that austerity programme is a defining feature of the current election campaign, it is in a way a sideshow. The proposition is that Labour wrecked the economy with ‘left-wing’ policies, and it was rescued by right-wing policies. But of course the economic wreck of the financial crisis was a wreck of neo-liberalism, which happened to occur when the notionally left-wing party was in power but would have happened in exactly the same way even if they had not been (as in the United States). Moreover, had Labour happened to have won the last election they too would have implemented a similar fiscal austerity programme. In effect, Conservative and Labour parties have become two rival management teams, not differing very much in ideology or policy. And at this election, too, for all that Labour have perhaps very slightly shifted leftwards under Miliband (though to nothing like the extent that the media portrayals of him as ‘Red Ed’ suggests), the alternatives are really only between the extent of continued austerity and a few percentage points either way on the size of the state and the speed of deficit reduction.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the two main parties are only narrowly separated in the opinion polls. For what has happened now is that the assumption that voters had nowhere else to go but to that of the main parties to which they least objected has broken down. In Scotland, a social democratic Scottish National Party (SNP) has, as an unintended consequence of their failure to win the independence referendum, grabbed a massive chunk of the hitherto automatic Labour vote. In England, the anti-EU, anti-immigration United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) has grabbed a chunk of the Conservative vote, and a part of the traditional Labour vote. Meanwhile, the Green Party has bitten off pieces of the Labour and LibDem votes. All three of these parties, different as they are, are very clearly alternatives to the neo-liberal consensus of the last 20 years. Each has fractured what were in effect the coalitions of the Conservative and Labour parties. UKIP fractures the nationalist/traditionalist and globalist coalition that Thatcherism created. The SNP and Greens fracture the social democratic and free market coalition that New Labour created. Yet the differences between UKIP/Green/SNP (and some potentially kindred voters in other parties) mean that there is no possibility at all of them forming a unified movement. Not the least of these differences are wildly incompatible notions within and between each of them as to the meaning of local/national and global/international. To put it crudely, UKIP are nationalist (on the EU, immigration and aid) and globalist (on defence and trade); SNP are nationalist (on Scottish independence and defence) and globalist (on the EU and immigration); the Greens are localist (on trade and defence) and internationalist (on aid and immigration). These differences become particularly acute in relation to the European Union (see my post here) and also relate to the tension between cosmopolitans and locals (see my post here).

In 1957 the American political scientist Anthony Downs published An Economic Theory of Democracy. It got taken up as an endorsement of a two party system such that each party would go to the centre ground and then take all the votes to its left or right. In fact, it only predicted that if certain assumptions about ideological consensus and the distribution of ideological views held good. In Britain, they have held until very recently. For example, in the two British elections (1955 and 1959) either side of Downs’ book Conservative and Labour parties between them secured about 99% of the vote on a turnout of about 78%. Even in 2010 they got 87% of the vote up to 96% with LibDems included, albeit on a 65% turnout. But for the forthcoming elections the current national opinion poll average is: Conservative 33%, Labour 34%, LibDems 8%, UKIP 14% and Greens 5%. And in Scotland the SNP is polling in the high 40% and Labour in the high 20% areas, pretty much an exact reversal of the 2010 election.

Outcomes are difficult to predict, but a Conservative or Labour majority government are the least likely possibilities. More likely are either a Conservative government pulled to the Right by reliance on UKIP or a Labour government pulled to the Left by the SNP. Either result would mark a significant moment in British politics and could have important ramifications for the wider world.

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.

What's in a picture?

Further to my recent post on the perils of Twitter, another British politician has come a cropper because of a tweet. This time the victim (or villain, depending on your take) is Emily Thornberry, who tweeted a photo of a house displaying large St George’s flags (i.e. the English flag) and with a white van parked outside. The context of this is a little complicated to understand outside of England so I will try to summarise it.

The house that was pictured is in the constituency of Rochester and Strood, where there was a by-election yesterday which was won by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) who are opposed to British membership of the EU and to what they believe are too high levels of immigration. If you want some background, I have written about UKIP elsewhere, and also about British debates about immigration. UKIP have recently attracted high levels of electoral support, first in European elections and now in two by-elections where they have won seats in the British parliament.

Whilst being a party of the Thatcherite Right, they have a populist appeal that is increasingly attracting traditional working-class Labour voters in a way not dissimilar to the way that Thatcher herself was able to do in fact. This is where the tweeted image becomes important. The English flags can be taken to reference a particular strand of working-class English nationalism. ‘White van man’ is an expression connoting a stereotypical working class tradesman – not, actually, the traditional industrial working class, then, but perhaps a skilled, self-employed worker. Again, very much the segment of the working class that Thatcherism appealed to, and now UKIP. Thus Thornberry’s tweet was widely interpreted as derogatory towards working class voters, and she resigned her position as a member of Labour’s front bench.

This interpretation has great purchase because it plays into a narrative whereby Labour politicians (and politicians in general) are depicted as an out of touch ‘metropolitan elite’ who are alien to working class sentiment and interests. That Thornberry is an MP for Islington, stereotypically a part of London associated with multi-culturalism and 'trendy lefties', compounded this. It is an aspect of the cosmopolitans and locals split I discussed in another post, and has it counterpart in many countries apart from Britain

This situation is fraught with strange ironies – the UKIP leader and its two MPs are all men educated at elite, fee-paying public schools who used to work in the City of London, and so hardly horny handed sons of the toil, and UKIP are notably cool on trade union and employment rights whilst being four-square behind global free markets and deregulation. Elitist Emily Thornberry, by contrast, grew up on a council estate and went to a State school.  As for the Labour Party, its leader is simultaneously denounced as a left wing firebrand and as having abandoned its left wing roots. That is all part of the long-term consequences of the Blairite New Labour project, and is another topic.

What I want to focus on here is something different. It is that the tweeted picture was instantly read in a particular way. It had no accompanying text other than to say that it was taken in Rochester, so it was almost entirely a matter of the picture being interpreted in the way that it was. Other interpretations were surely possible. It could have been taken to mean that this was a working-class seat that Labour should be aiming to win (they have held it in the past), for example. Or it could just be seen as the habitual Twitter post saying ‘this is where I am today’. But John Mann, a Labour MP, criticised Thornberry’s tweet because he said that the symbols of the English flag and the white van were emblematic of traditional Labour values, so she had insulted traditional Labour voters. This seems truly peculiar: if it is the case (which I doubt) that these were symbols of Labour values then how could it be ‘insulting’ for a Labour politician to depict them?

That it was read the way that it was I think points to another irony of the present political situation. It is a pervasive trope of UKIP supporters that they are hamstrung by ‘political correctness’ and are not ‘allowed to say what they really think’ as a result; in particular that they are ‘not allowed to talk about immigration’ (bizarre, since it is constantly talked about). Yet what this episode shows is something quite different. Let’s assume that the picture did indeed mean something like: ‘look, this is the kind of people who vote UKIP: English nationalists from the self-employed skilled working class’. Would this really be so awful? Isn’t it the case that, as UKIP themselves say, they attract such support? Is it so terribly derogatory and sneering to say this, and yet fine to ‘sneer’ at the ‘middle-class metropolitan elite’? Isn’t the real ‘political correctness’ in play that any implicit criticism of UKIP support is immediately positioned as unacceptable?

We seem to be a long way from organization theory, I know, but that is not really so. What lies beneath all of this is the nature and consequences of global capitalism and in particular the international mobility of what management textbooks would call the human resource. Politics in Britain, as in many other countries, is struggling to come to terms with what this means – in terms of employment, wages, employment protection, welfare, healthcare and communities. These are serious issues for all of us and yet no politician seems able to discuss them seriously. Into that gap has stepped, in Britain, the beery, blokeish populism of UKIP but that offers no realistic answers. That would not matter, except that by positioning elitism in terms of things like the supposedly sneering nature of a tweeted photo this populism makes it all but impossible to discuss the actions of the real elite, who do not tweet but buy and sell our companies, jobs, lives and livelihoods and for whom welfare, healthcare and community are entirely irrelevant. UKIP have nothing to say about this, of course, but nor do any of the main political parties in Britain.

Immigration matters

I have written several times on this blog about immigration, because it is so intimately linked to organizational life in many countries. In the UK, almost all workplaces now contain a wide mix of nationalities, especially from the rest of the EU. But of course immigration is deeply unpopular, and has fed the growth in support for UKIP in the UK, and many other anti-immigration parties across Europe.

This puts mainstream politicians in a very difficult situation in a democracy. Some voters are anti-immigration for reasons that are out and out racist, but not all anti-immigration sentiment is racist (although it does not follow, as some claim, that none of it is). Instead, it arises from concerns about jobs and wages, and about space and public services. Yet as regards EU migration, which is what animates current debate in the UK, the number of immigrants into the UK is about the same as that out of the UK – around 2 million people. So in the absence of free movement within the EU, the UK population would be about the same, meaning no difference in terms of space. And in terms of public services, it probably reduces usage because immigrants to the UK tend to be healthy, working-age people whilst many emigrants from the UK are elderly retirees.

So far as jobs and wages are concerned, the effect of immigration is limited. There is not a fixed pool of jobs in an economy (this is the ‘lump of labour fallacy’) and, empirically, the effect on wages is negligible, and such effect as there is mainly attributable to illegal employment practices. Moreover, the idea that immigrants claim benefits is a myth: immigrants overall pay more in than they take out of the benefits system. So too is the idea of ‘health tourism’ – that immigrants come to the UK in order to access free medical treatment. It’s notable that the fears and myths about immigration are always most strongly held in places where immigration is low. Thus the UKIP vote is much lower in, for example, London, than it is in rural parts of Yorkshire

But it is almost impossible for politicians to counter these various fallacies and myths, even when they know that that is what they are. At the same time, any well-informed politician will know that economies such as the UK’s need more, not less, immigration because of their ageing demographic.  The consequences of that demographic are accepted by people when it comes to policy on health or on pensions, yet not when it comes to immigration and employment. An anti-immigration policy would spell disaster for the UK and many other old industrial democracies.

So no responsible politician could advocate draconian limits to immigration; yet no sensible politician can ignore the extent of anti-immigration sentiment amongst voters. It is this disjuncture which feeds the populism of UKIP and similar parties. Populism may be popular, but it entails pandering to people by giving superficially appealing and easy solutions which are in fact detrimental to those same people.