Interesting times, the death of social democracy, and the strange suicide of the Labour Party’s right wing

Interesting times. An apocryphal Chinese maxim has it that to live through interesting times is a curse. Genuine or not, the sentiment appears valid. For all the brouhaha here in the UK over the Brexit vote, a bigger story might turn out to be why MPs in the Labour Party have decided to throw their lot in with the country’s political right wing and attack a leader supported by the majority of the members of their party. Unfortunately, the reason appears to be that many of those career politicians have swallowed the cool-aid of neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism has brought us to a scary place. The economics that drives neoliberalism was kept at bay by the flourishing of social democracy for about thirty years after World War Two. I grew to adulthood during the last twenty of those years. What we might term the years pre-Thatcher. The advent of Thatcher saw the victory of economics that celebrated the primacy of the market and denigrated the role of the state. At the same time, we were taught, in Thatcher’s chilling phrase, that there was no such thing as society. We were on our own and out for ourselves.

So began the rolling back of the gains in equality and opportunity that a fairer society and a welfare society brought with it when governments — and almost all the citizens of the UK at the time — believed in a managed, mixed economy. It was social democracy that created those benefits and they were developed deliberately to be a bulwark against the economic and social ills that had led to the Great Depression of the 1930s and, consequently, to the war just won.

Britain wasn’t alone in following the path to social democracy; the countries who accepted aid from the US Marshall Plan and turned their back on Communism as the answer sought to end egregious inequality, bigotry, political extremism, mass migrations, and endless wars.

It is no coincidence that the items on that list are once again common across Europe. Add to that climate change, which has been exacerbated by the same neoliberal policies that have reintroduced the other horrors.

And in the UK we can also add the savage divesting of national treasures as our transport, energy, and communications assets are delivered, not only to multinational corporations but also to the governments of other nations. In some cases, to the governments of nations that may not be our allies or have our best interests at heart, either now or in the long term. German state railways, for instance, extracts profits from our commuters and uses that to keep prices lower for German commuters. Perfectly sensible, of course, but you have to ask the free market champions in Westminster quite how the logic stacks up.

We are now a state whose democracy is subverted, not by the EU, however undemocratic that institution may be, but because our laws are written to benefit trans-national corporations. These corporations now see tax evasion as a valid business strategy and practice it with impunity. They also feel free to loot the treasury, either in the form of tax breaks and subsidies or by paying their workers starvation wages and letting the much maligned welfare state cover the difference that allows people to eat and have a roof over their head. The excess profits of these corporations are whisked offshore to their chosen slightly quaint sounding tax havens.

Perhaps if we renamed tax havens as pits of despair we might better convey their effect on the world. That money is not only stolen from the country in which it was generated, but is more or less removed from the global economy. I believe that a hardly significant fraction of the funds hiding in those pits of despair could eradicate global hunger and reduce poverty and inequality across the world. The obvious side effect of that would be to eradicate some of the causes of terrorism and war. A new economy built on renewable energy sources could provide employment on a huge scale while seriously impacting the depredations of capitalism on the climate.

But no. Big Oil and Big Gun (and Big Greed) prefer to continue to destroy the planet. This cannot be the sign of a healthy economic system. Keynes saw economics as a branch of moral philosophy; the goal was to improve the majority of lives. Neoliberalism turns that on its head. We live under a system that seeks to improve the lives of an increasingly small minority while ensuring that the planet on which we live becomes more and more dangerous every day.

Those Labour MPs so keen to do corporate dirty work have revealed themselves — despite the farcically artificial catalyst of Corbyn’s lukewarm support for continued membership pf the EU — to care not a jot for social democracy or for their party members. The timing of their spat is ominous. The Tories are in disarray and the country needs a message of hope. What these MPs are offering is a message of spite.