A historical perspective. One among many.
I hope we can all agree that it is hard to change someone’s mind using arguments if their understanding of history is very different from yours.
Over the past week, I’ve spoken to people I know who have far more sympathy than I have with the rioters currently disfiguring Britain’s streets. The most striking thing for me is the way that their understanding of British history, throughout our lifetimes, is so different from mine that I may as well not bother arguing with any of them in the first place.
I’m not even saying they’re wrong, but the depth of difference on this subject points to an unbridgeable chasm about current affairs.
By contrast, a very different conversation I had recently was with a friend with whom I share many views about the modern world. But we still managed to disagree about something, namely….
Why is our country going through its current conflagration?
In his view, the analogies with the emergence of pre-war fascism were more relevant than I thought they were. I argued that our politics is much more low-stakes and we are thankfully not surrounded by men who had been driven mad by the horrors of the trenches and then nearly starved during the depressions that followed The Great War.
Unlike my grandparents’ generation (all born around 1910), we’ve all been through a prolonged period of prosperity and growth. Between 1945 and the early 1980s productivity growth was rapid and wages kept pace. This was down to the success of social democrats and — in particular, for all of their flaws, trades unions.
Our generations have not been brutalised by war or penury. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything to complain about, because — in my view — we took the wrong corner towards the end of the 1970s. But I also don’t see too many purposeful fledgling stormtroopers out there, filming each other looting their local Greggs either.
I’m less alarmed than he is.
And then it occurred to me that I’d find it useful to have my summary of recent British history written out in longhand. My general understanding of what happened, and how did we get to where we are.
I thought that writing it down would make it useful if ever I got into a more heated debate with someone about the nature of modernity in future.
So here it is.
I think we can trace the current mess to the point at which capitalism worked out how to decouple the growth in productivity from the accompanying growth in wages.
It needed to do this while keeping consumption up at acceptable levels and retaining the consent of voters. And it did it by using the advantages of part-ownership of the public sphere to firstly halt the pesky Crosslandite trajectory parliament was leading us down — and then increase the level of private ownership of that public sphere.
It used the tools that one uses to control the public sphere (press ownership, funding of a growing privatised force in civil society — or ‘lobbyists and think-tanks’) to politically marginalise unions and parliament, thereby uncoupling productivity and wages.
It did this by denigrating representative government, using siren calls for stilted versions of transparency and accountability. The quality of democratic governance fell, corporations could sidestep regulation, and a deadly combination of managerialism and deregulation that resulted from this decline led inevitably to the financial crash of 2008.
From this point on, not only had the popular share in productivity stopped growing, but productivity itself was halted. The degrading of representative democracy which happened as part of the power-shift away from Parliament and towards the public sphere meant that democracy lost many of the incentives, and indeed, the ability to govern the country well.
As the influence of the political parties similarly waned (they were no longer the mass-membership entities of the post-war years with 4,000,000 party members in the early 1950s — pdf) they also became a playground for political hobbyists and cranks.
Politics became more plebiscitary, and in 2016, the UK voted for a policy that no parliament would ever have endorsed. Westminster then proceeded to enact that policy in a way that no previous parliament would have done so.
As I said at the time, I was less worried by Brexit than I was by the plebiscitary character that begat it. Not only were the feedback loops broken, but governance was less interested than ever before in any other interests than those already over-represented in the public sphere.
So there it is. My view of pre-election Britain was one where the pole-star the country was rowing towards were the interests of lobbyists, and the policies concocted by privately funded think tanks.
Positions that were promoted by media entities that were owned more for the purpose of bullying regulators, and projecting the crankery of their owners, than for building good news organisations.
In the meantime, with the leadership of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and the preposterous ‘Rwanda policy’ handling of illegal migration, British politics completed its trajectory (started by Mike Yarwood) of turning itself into a pantomime. A bit of misdirection narrated by the breathless Kremlinologists that pass for political journalists, and a playground for cranks and grifters.
This is the problem of our age as I see it — the one I hope our new government will solve, if it can ever notice it in the first place.
It’s also the silent prelude to most arguments that I make, so you may find it useful one day if you’ve ever wondered why I’m being such a dick about some point we disagree on.
I’d be interested in reading your version of this by the way...
