politics – Page 2 – Richard Brown

Socrates and Charlie Hebdo

Culture Secretary Sajid Javid got shot down in twitter-flames this week for referring to Socrates\’ writings, when defending freedom of speech following the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The thing is, as any classically-educated fule kno, that Socrates didn\’t write anything; that was Plato. Cue lots of sneering.

Well, fair enough, though the two philosophers are more or less identical for all practical purposes: Plato didn\’t write anything but dialogues in which Socrates was the speaker, and Socrates\’ philosophy is only recorded in Plato\’s writings.

More interesting, to me anyway, was the thought that even if Socrates was executed by the Athenians for his atheistic opinions, and his \’corruption of the young\’, he was far from being a believer in democracy and free expression (indeed, his association with shady oligarchs may have been one of the factors that led to his downfall).

For example, Socrates would almost certainly have banned Charlie Hebdo. In his discussion of the just city, The Republic, Socrates presents it as one governed by a paternalistic \’guardian-class\’ of warrior philosophers. Later in the book, Socrates expounds his theory of ideals (sometimes \’forms\’, but I think \’ideals\’ is less confusing). Put very simply, everything that we see in the universe takes its identity from its imitation of, or resemblance to, a metaphysical ideal. A table is a table in as much as it resembles the ideal Table; something is good in that it resembles the ideal Good.

This theory explains why, controversially, Socrates exiles poets (and depending on your reading, other artists) from his Republic. Their art is an act of mimesis, imitation, but worse than that – it is an imitation of an imitation. My depiction of a table is a poor copy of a poor copy of the ideal Table. Socrates also suggests that art, particularly effective art, inflames the passions, and is therefore inappropriate material for his serene and ascetic guardians. Anyhow, one way or another, the artists have to go, and certainly the publishers of satirical magazines would have had to go with them.

Socrates\’ conclusion troubled Victorian admirers (who had been happily going along with the rule by warrior philosophers up to that point), and it worried his interlocutors too; Socrates admits uneasiness with his conclusion, and challenges them to find counter-arguments.

I was reminded of this stipulation when listening to a man being interviewed about the prohibtion on images of the Prophet Muhammed last week. Generally, this prohibiton is understood in terms of the strictures against idolatry found in the Old Testament – we shouldn\’t confuse workshipping a God with worshipping an (imperfect) image (like the Golden Calf or the Fish-tailed God Dagon, whose followers are so enthusiastically smitten in the Bible).

The interviewee went further, explaining the prohibition in strikingly Platonic (or Socratic) terms: Muhammed was such an excellent, virtuous and handsome man, indeed the ideal Man, that any attempt to portray him is bound to fall short of the reality, and will therefore represent a slander on him. Plato (or Socrates) could hardly have put it better himself.

To be honest, I\’m not sure what this shows. Perhaps it is a) that if you throw enough classical education at people, some is bound to stick (however imperfectly) even 25 years later; b) that if you follow any metaphysical theory far enough, logic will lead you down some curious cul-de-sacs; c) that those who die because of expressing their views are not necessarily liberals; and d) that irrational prohibitions are not the exclusive preserve of the abrahamic religions, but can be found in \’rational\’ Greek philosophy too.

Now the Party\’s over

Party conferences have always been an acquired taste, but this year\’s (even without the McBride and Farrage sideshows) have seemed particularly remote from reality, alien rituals conducted by an alien species. But is this just the latest chapter in the slow decline of mass party membership, or is something else at play?

The Guardian\’s John Harris, former chronicler of BritPop and historian of new Labour, has been worrying for some months at how the Conservative Party has lost touch with mainstream conservatism, continuing to promulgate the neoliberal nostrums of open markets and free trade, deaf to a crescendo of grumbling from its once core vote. Outside the capital, in \’Alarm Clock Britain\’ (or whichever new-minted de haut en bas descriptor the narrative-mongers have come up with), Harris finds that open markets and globalisation are not viewed as paragons of efficiency and creators of wealth, but as destroyers of jobs and harbingers of instability.

Harris\’s argument was echoed in Aditya Chakraborty\’s analysis of falling party membership (and the takeover of the Conservative Party by financiers), and in the Guardian\’s reportage from Aldi in Worcester, the front line of this new class war, where shoppers proclaimed themselves either terminally disillusioned with all politics, or tending towards UKIP.

My reading habits are admittedly partial, but I don\’t think this us just a left argument: Peter Oborne\’s broadsides at the metropolitan political class are aiming at the same territory. The politicians at their press conferences look increasingly like medieval clerics debating transubstantiation, while the peasants ponder plague and turnips. The detachment goes beyond silly shibboleths about who knows the price of a pint of milk, a loaf of bread, a litre of superstrength cider, or whatever 21st Century staple politicians have to pretend that they buy.

Once you start to look for it, you can see this rancorous detachment everywhere. You can see it in the \’below the lines\’ comments in newspapers. These may invite provocateurs, trolls and other people with nothing better to do with their time, but there is a toxic undercurrent of resentment too. Sometimes expressed through racism or xenophobia, but sometimes simply presenting as a profound hostility to the political class, and an establishment that is seen as interested only in feathering its own nests.

The sense of alienation is polymorphous, and perhaps hard to analyse clearly, but it\’s harder still to see where it is going. The crowds are not out on the streets in the UK, and the protests of the Occupy movement never went far beyond St Paul\’s Churchyard, so will disgruntled citizens flock to marginalised parties of the left and right that diverge from the shared internationalist outlook of the mainstream parties, as Seumas Milne has suggested? Will unrest and violence erupt, maybe targeted at immigarnts and other easy targets as it has been in Greece? Or is a more profound change underway? It seems almost absurd to pose the question, but is Disgusted of Droitwich a British manifestation of the discontent that erupted in Taksim and Tahrir?

Writing in the latest LRB, David Runciman argues that the oil shocks and decaying industrial capitalism of the 1970s gave birth to what we now call neoliberalism, though it was years if not decades before the baby was named or its moment of birth identified. Flip forward 35 years, and ask whether the crisis of the past five years is a blip in the narrative of neoliberalism triumphant, or the beginning of something new. If the latter, pace Yeats (it is National Poetry Day tomorrow, after all), \”what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?\”

Policy-based evidence making?

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For someone with my politics, reading research from the Institute for Economic Affairs is never less than bracing, not least when you find yourself in sneaking agreement with it. The recent IEA report – Quack Policy – Abusing Science in the Cause of Paternalism by Jamie Whyte – takes a robustly sceptical cleaver to a herd of sacred cows: minimum alcohol pricing and lower speed limits, for example, fail to trade-off their supposed benefits with the pleasures of drinking and the convenience of driving fast. In many cases, Whyte argues, policy-makers start with their paternalistic opinions and prejudices, and then find the evidence to support them. Policy-based evidence making.

At first sight, basing policy on evidence rather than prejudice, blind faith or ideology seems uncontentious, a \’no brainer\’ even. But I don\’t think that scepticism about evidence-based policy should be the reserve of the type of people who will be harrumphing that there is no evidence for man-made climate change until the flood waters start lapping round their ankles.

Evidence-based policy has its roots in the concept of evidence-based medicine, which responded to the tendency of medics (alarmingly commonplace until the 1990s) to base interventions on custom and practice rather than any clinical data about what works.

The elision from choosing cancer treatments based on their demonstrable impact on specific physiological circumstances, to choosing policies based on predictions of human behaviour is not smooth, however. To start with, policy interventions are rarely based on controlled, randomised scientific trials that can isolate cause and effect from other factors. Even where a good result seems to have followed a specific policy – the reduction in heart attack rates following the ban on smoking in pubs, for example – the causal links are not simple. People and societies are more cussed, diverse and chaotic than cancer cells or bunions.

But there is a more fundamental sense in which evidence-based policy worries me. It takes the politics out of policy, and creates a technocratic world where efficiency and value-for-money are all; where white-coated analysts can dispassionately assess solutions, tinkering with the apparatus of incentives, nudges and penalties to perfect citizens and society. Tony Blair’s 1997 mantra – “what matters is what works” – was not just a financier-friendly disavowal of socialist dogma, but also a retreat from conviction politics (until their re-appearance after 9/11).

Evidence-based policy may have progressive aims (safer roads, better health, lower re-offending, fitter, happier, more productive people), but this managerialist approach excludes discussions of principle, of morality, of big ideas. It cloaks opinions behind assertions of scientific fact. This focus is also inherently conservative; it is about tweaking the current system to optimise the way it moulds individuals’ actions, rather than considering whether it is the system itself that is rotten.

The attraction of laws

Tbings fall apart and you wonder – increasingly – whether the centre can hold. Just as one part of the Government is offering to repeal laws on demand, in the name of \’cutting red tape\’, other ministers are promising to introduce some of silliest-sounding laws in history: a law to guarantee a level of overseas aid equivalent to 0.7 per cent of gross national income, and a law to put the \’military covenant\’, which recognises the sacrifices made by the armed services and commits to fair treatment, on a statutory footing.

The issue is not fair treatment for service personnel or to generous overseas aid. Both are laudable aims. But neither needs laws. Proper treatment of the armed services is a budgetary and administrative matter, as is overseas aid. These laws will not create new offences, new rights or new statutory powers. So why take parliamentary time up with them?

Three explanations suggest themselves. One is that the Government is grand-standing; using legislation to make these administrative commitments is simply a way of underlining their importance, of inscribing press releases on vellum. A second explanation is that the Government is simply trying to wrong foot any of its successors who would want to govern differently; what they could do by fiat, they will make their successors do by law (or face the consequences of trying to repeal legislation).

A third explanation is perhaps more disturbing, if less cynical. As our constitution forms the executive from the legislature, it must be easy to confuse making laws with governing the country. This must pose a particular problem to a Conservative/LibDem coalition. They are pledged to roll back the frenzied law-making of which they accuse the previous government. But they can\’t stop legislating, any more than a shark can stop swimming as it sleeps. Making laws is what Parliament does, what governments do. So, instead of seeking to meddle in the every day behaviour of citizens, they have turned their gaze inwards, and apply the harsh discipline of statute to themselves and their successors.

The lost art of keeping a secret

The foundation of British democracy is the secret ballot, no?

Voting this morning, I noticed something that had niggled with me previously (though I am far from being the first person to have noticed it). When I gave my name and address, a man tore me a ballot paper from a book, and the woman with the list of addresses read out a number to the man with the book, who wrote it on the counterfoil.

Didn\’t this mean that they could look at my ballot paper, and identify how I voted by cross-referencing with my electoral roll number, I asked? Yes, answered the Presiding Officer, but only on the orders of an Electoral Court, which was a very rare occcurrence. So the local authority would keep, indefinitely, a record of how every local elector had voted in every election? Yes, but it was kept safe.

The Presiding Officer was a thoroughly respectable looking gent (handlebar moustache, book about lancaster bombers), so I didn\’t pry further. I can also understand why some records are necessary, to test allegations that large numbers of ballots have been handed out as job lots to candidates\’ families and other such malfeasance.

But this secret recording of individual voting patterns still seems a bit rum. I am no more paranoid than one should be, but a lesson of modern times seems to be that all data is eventually leaked and/or fed into government databases. You can easily imagine the security services making a strong case for (limited, of course, checked and balanced) access to such information, so they could identify potential menaces to society voting for \’extremists\’.

We should, I suppose, feel glad that we don\’t live in a repressive surveillance state, that would abuse and misuse such personal information. Shouldn\’t we?

Who needs remote control?

It\’s commonplace (and generally inaccurate) to suggest that left and right are meaningless labels, that ideological differences between Labour and Conservative have evaporated, that we are all thatcherites now. Though the Coalition has outflanked Labour in its liberalism (it would be hard to imagine how to be more authoritarian, without introducing martial law), their economic policies are pretty dry, neo-con even.

But if clear blue water is visible in terms of content, an even more dramatic difference in style is becoming visible. Today, Ken Clarke is reported as criticising his colleagues for their tendency to leave ministers hanging when their policies prove controversial. Witness Andrew Lansley\’s \’pause to listen\’; witness Caroline Spelman\’s forced retreat from privatising forests.

The Coalition lacks the discipline and control mechanism of a strong Number 10 policy unit, endlessly second-guessing ministers and re-writing their policies. Ministers are free to announce pretty well anything they like – however radical, daring or plain mad it may be – but are also free to take the blame alone if they get it wrong. In this darwinian policy competition of rugged individualism, the fittest survive and the laggards are thrown to the wolves.

By contrast, for all its embrace of market capitalism, the Labour government stayed true to its collectivist roots. Even as Tony Blair became more and more presidential, the approach was stalinist: to borrown Bagehot\’s terminology, the \’dignified\’ trappings of collective cabinet government stayed in place, while the \’efficient\’ mechanisms of sofa government dictated policy throughout Whitehall.

Careless whispers

Reporting on the resignation of William Hague\’s special advisor this afternoon, the Evening Standard alludes, censoriously and primly, to \”rumours that had been circulating on the internet [about the nature of their relationship]\”.

Those will be the same rumours that were reported by the Standard diary (on the pretext of reporting on a Freedom of Information request) last week, and (in the guise of reporting on a \’row between bloggers\’) in earlier editions today, will they? Yes, I believe they will.

It\’s the stupid, economy!

With the last prime ministerial debate dissolving into inchoate chattering behind me, three night thoughts about the economy:

All three parties are continuing to evade the issue of where the cleaver should fall. Assuming we believe that the present level of public sector borrowing is unsustainable (or, which is not quite the same thing, that it risks incurring the wrath of the bond markets), we are facing deep and wounding cuts to public services. All this wittering about efficiency savings, reduced bonuses and more effective procurement is marginal at best and evasive in general. And the safeguarding of the NHS and education as sacrosanct simply means that the viciousness of benefit cuts or tax rises will be so much more acute elsewhere. When people look back on this disingenuous apology for a debate, they may be angry. They would have every right to be.

Cutting public spending will hit all sorts of people, me included. But it\’s less clear than it used to be what the public sector is nowadays. Since 1997, the process of privatising public services has accelerated. Companies like Capita, Serco and Veolia may not be household names, but they each have public sector revenues running into billions of pounds every year; they empty our bins, clean our streets, collect our council tax and run our trains. The public-sector income of big consultancies like KPMG, Price Waterhouse and McKinsey is lesser, but nonetheless considerable. The modern state is locked into a co-dependent embrace with an ever-growing parastatal private sector. Will cutting public expenditure boost or undermine this economic interzone?

Lastly, the three candidates fell over each other to laud manufacturing industry. Fair enough, except inasmuch as these were the same people drivelling on about \’knowledge economies\’ and other weightless chaff only years ago. Consistency, and a modicum of dignity, are maintained by talking nowadays of the importance of science and high tech manufacturing, rather than the dirty and – by implication – \’uncreative\’ factories of the past. But nobody has given anything more than sentimental or affirmatory arguments as to why serious manufacturing industry should take root in the ashes that remain, after three decades of systematic and determined de-industrialisation. Absent the public sector and the former \’masters of the universe\’ from the world of finance, and you have to ask, What of our alleged economy remains?

They are now vying with each other to say that teachers are valuable. And the sea wet. And that fiddle music is a great accompaniment to urban bonfires. Selah.

Kicking against the BRICs

Compared to the hubbub over Google\’s threats, media coverage of the banning of China\’s first \’gay pageant\’ was limited, but gave an interesting snapshot of something. I\’m just not sure what.

The Guardian had reported on plans for the event on 10 January, with organiser Steve Zhang suggesting that police could yet shut it down. And so they did. But this seemed to be very polite repression: police were reported to have had friendly conversations with the participants, who were told that homosexuality was a \’sensitive issue\’. Very different in tone to Russia, where \’gay pride\’ and similar events are regularly and violently broken up by police (and nationalist counter-demonstrations).

If the demonstration had been by a political opposition group, the situation would probably be reversed. Russia is a democracy, albeit a compromised and autocratic one, and opposition parties are at least tolerated. The harsh treatment of pro-democracy activists in China shows that ideological pluralism is still seen as a dangerous threat to stability. You can bet that Google searches for gay dating sites would be far easier to get past China\’s internet censors than phrases like \’Tiananmen Square protests\’.

At which point one starts to wander dangerously close to sweeping generalisations about value systems and cultural heritage, confucianism and christianity. One culture is concerned about social cohesion and harmony, the other about personal behaviour and sin. Both can be repressive, but in different ways and to different people.

Inertia creeps

I was in Chicago last weekend, at an event sponsored by the Council for the United States and Italy. The conference was about the challenges of city growth – housing, transport, environmental sustainability, government – and involved people from public and private sectors, academia, the military, and non-governmental organisations.

One theme that emerged was scepticism about the ability of elected city leaders to commit to long-term change, given the short-term imperative of electoral cycles. Some of us from public sector backgrounds suggested that this may not be as much of a problem as it seemed: given the much-criticised inertia of bureaucracies, 180-degree reverses in policy were much rarer than electoral rhetoric would suggest.

Which brings me to Boris Johnson\’s retreat from his plans to cancel the western extension of London\’s congestion charging zone. Despite commissioning a fresh consultation exercise, the capital costs of redrawing the zone, and the loss of revenue that would follow, clearly seemed too onerous. You can\’t imagine that any mayor other than Ken Livingstone would have introduced congestion charging in 2000, but now it is in place, it looks like it\’s here to stay.

Similarly, Labour did little to undo the Conservative settlement of the 1980s and 1990s, with the exception of some trade union legislation, and indeed built on many of the elements that they had most strenuously opposed in opposition. And you can only wonder whether an incoming Conservative administration would undo much of the current government\’s programme, from ID cards to Bank of England independence, against which they have so heartily inveighed.

Inertia is a mixed blessing. I railed against it when I was younger and today my views remain largely partisan (bureaucrats can be either valiant voices for common sense or obstructive dullards, depending on context). Famously frustrating to politicians like Tony Blair, inertia does perhaps serve to dissuade incoming governments from spending too much time unstitching their predecessors\’ policies.

Rather than an erratic see-saw of reversals, politics becomes a relatively smooth progression of cumulative change, for good or ill, moving on slowly. Perhaps, when Tony Blair complained of \”scars on his back\”, it was a back-handed tribute to the ability of the civil service (where nobody ever gets sacked for doing nothing) to temper change with continuity, to save us from relentless alternation.

This is conservative, to be sure, but \’conservative\’ as eloquently defined by Michael Oakeshott, not as cooked up in crazy-eyed think tanks: \”To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.\”