Benjamin Franklin, Poor
Richard’s Almanack (1738)
If you’re going to keep on repeating lies, the risk isn’t
that others will start to believe them.
It’s that you’ll start to believe them yourself and end up trapped
inside them.
Thatcherites are now in that position, confronted by realities they
failed to anticipate, mainly because they were convinced that the rest
of the world plays by the same demented rules that they do.
Let’s start by taking a look at two of her favourite ideas.
The first is that the private sector is good and the public
sector bad. Thatcher famously told a
group of nationalised industry executives that if any of them were any use
they’d be in the private sector. It
doesn’t take long to work out the corollary: that in her view public services
should all be run by second rate managers to ensure that they fail. The very services for which as Prime Minister
she was responsible.
Today, many of those services are back in the public
sector. Owned by the Dutch, French and
German governments, to name just a few.
And there’s the problem for Thatcher’s successor. Either these nationalised firms are managed
competently, which is impossible, since they’re State-owned, or they’re not
managed competently, which ideologically would be much more comforting. And if indeed they’re not, then David Cameron
has just placed Britain’s
energy future in the hands of incompetent State bureaucrats in Paris
and Beijing. Which means they’re doing a more competent
job than he is.
Time for the second great idea. The idea that the State doesn’t have any
money of its own. According to Thatcher,
every penny it spends is wrung out of taxpayers, without whom it would be nothing. It never was true, since at the core of every
State is the common wealth, the rights of the community to things managed in
common. The air, the water, and in some
cases still, even tiny little bits of a once-common heritage in land. When publicly-owned industries make profits,
those profits too flow into the common treasury.
Today they flow into other countries’ treasuries, allowing
them to reduce taxation on their own folk.
In the case of railways, for example, our taxes go to pay operating
subsidies to companies owned by the railway administrations of France, Germany
and the Netherlands,
allowing them to invest more in their own systems. The case for public ownership of utilities is
that these are natural monopolies, providing things we need in order to live
and which, for various reasons, are impervious to competition. The prices they’re allowed by regulators to
charge are therefore little different from taxes. And by allowing other governments to buy the
right to make those charges, our own has in effect sold the right to tax us to
foreign powers. We are serfs for sale.
None of this was supposed to happen. Nationalised industries were to be replaced
by lots of little local companies all competing for business. Not national and international conglomerates
able to dictate terms to any government daft enough to let them. Totalitarian liberalism is unrepentant, since
if this is what the market produces then it cannot be questioned. The problem never lies with the market. It lies with the alternatives we champion,
with our failure to understand the rationality of values far superior to the
choices we are capable of making together.
For the liberals, we, the
customers, are the problem when we unite in our refusal to play by the rules.
Public anger at the sell-off of Royal Mail and at the deal
struck over Hinkley C with French imperialists and another foreign regime, one
with an even worse record on human rights, will not abate easily. Too many things are happening all at once for
that. The failure of even the Co-op
to act responsibly, destroying a treasured institution, has folk of goodwill
grasping at any straw that will re-assure them that the future is not one long
dark night of corporate piracy without end.
In the process, they will clutch at many straws that will soon blow away
in the wind.
The first thing we need to realise is that the UK, as it has
long been understood, cannot form part of the solution. It’s too late for that. Attlee’s Britain no longer exists. His model is not repeatable and it would be a
ghastly mistake even to try. It was
always bound to be a betrayal of truly democratic principles, as our forebears
in Common Wealth argued at the time. The
industries nationalised were managerialised, not democratised. Yes, there was a Scottish Region of British
Railways, but no Scottish Parliament to oversee it. There was a Wales Gas Board, but no Welsh
Assembly. In England there were ultimately regions
for electricity, gas and water, for railways, for hospitals, and for many other
things. But how many of them matched? How many were designed around areas that made
sense as the basis of future elected regional governments? Few, if any.
No wonder it all ended so badly.
Thatcherism arose in the 1970s as the establishment response to demands
for devolution-all-round. It preserved
London-based power by transferring the keys to Britain
from Whitehall
to the City, which is now in the process of handing them on to the Chinese.
The second thing is to beware any attempt by Labour to tap
into the demand for re-nationalisation.
For Labour, the nation is Britain and the clamour is there to
be manipulated in defence of a centralised union under its absolutist
control. There are better ways, ways
offered by the nationalist and regionalist movements of these islands. Labour, to misquote Aneurin Bevan, is simply
the future refusing to be born. It was
revealed this week that London and the
south-east of England
continue to be the principal beneficiaries of the mess for others which those in
power there have long sought to engineer.
With more to come. Labour will equally continue to argue that the social distribution of
power is everything, while its geographical distribution is irrelevant. Despite centuries of evidence to the
contrary, millions will go on believing it.
The third thing to note is that restoring common ownership
in a modernised form today has been made more difficult by the British State’s determined attempts to bankrupt
itself. How is it all to be paid
for? Even if assets are deprivatised at
the same 30-40% discounts at which they were privatised, that is still a huge
amount of money. Surprisingly little is
said about how easy it is to find the money to buy problem assets, like toxic
banks, or failing airports in Scotland,
Wales or Cornwall. Politically too, it’s a smoother path to attend
to precious lame ducks than to prise assets seriously worth having from the
grip of more reluctant sellers. It’s the
profits, not the losses, that need diverting from the private to the public
realm. Marx and Engels are rarely read
these days but they did wickedly point out that those who make such a fuss
about the sacred character of property rights are the heirs of those who got
rich by treating past property rights with contempt, say during the French Revolution,
the Dissolution of the Monasteries, or the Norman Conquest. A little less reverence where rights do more
harm than good would be no bad thing. In
a real crisis, the City’s worldwide paper ‘assets’ will amount to nothing at
all. What’s on the ground is what will
count.
Inevitably, such matters are ones of opportunity and
pragmatism rather than a precise strategy to roll forward the State. What we know is that the world is changing,
and changing faster than we have been willing to notice. The more successful countries of the future
will be those already thinking long-term, say 30-50 years ahead. Watch China’s
moves in Africa, and now in Europe, and weep
at our weakness in that regard.
Fortunately, we are not alone.
There are many, perhaps surprisingly many, parallel movements for change
in small nations and historic regions right across Europe and beyond, opposed
to dogmatic centralism in all its forms.
Wessex
is one piece of a very big jigsaw.
So what are the basic tasks a self-governing Wessex should
look to organise? One list of
‘foundation occupations’ for any well-founded society that doesn’t wish to be
occupied, economically any more than militarily, is as follows:
Category 1 – Occupations calling for the exercise of
considerable professional skill, e.g. administration, justice, security,
education, health. To the extent that a
society alienates these services it also alienates itself. The identification of these professionals
with the territory in which they work, its customs, its needs and its
interests, is what gives a society its essential character. Deprive them of the opportunity for loyalty
to place and no-one else will feel any either.
There is room for unsubsidised, non-core private sector involvement in
education, health and the law but public values are inevitably subverted if
that involvement enters core services.
Category 2 – Occupations with duties where incentives are
impractical, e.g. ambulance and fire services, post, prisons, traffic police,
waste collection. Target-setting is
likely to be counter-productive if it ends up degrading the service
provided. There is therefore no
substitute for managers sensitive to circumstances. The private sector has nothing to offer that
is not equally available to an adequately resourced public sector.
Category 3 – Occupations with specialist technical skills,
e.g. electricity, telecommunications, water and sewerage. These are areas where private sector involvement
has often been the norm, but on a tight leash given how vital these services
are to modern life. It’s likely that we
under-estimate the consequences of losing control over them. It’s also likely that they’ll become ever
more vital to our future and ever more vulnerable, e.g. to cyber-attack.
Category 4 – Occupations where productivity can be affected
by the worker, and where worker co-operatives could therefore be organised,
e.g. transport operation and maintenance.
The problems of worker co-operatives in these sectors do not relate to
the organisation of work but to the funding of investment. Every one of the transport co-operatives
resulting from privatisation has since been bought out by corporate
capital. To guard against any
repetition, that funding issue needs to be addressed. Capital, according to William Barnes (in Views of Labour and Gold), is no more
than that part of wealth that is rendered useful by labour. Considered thus, there is therefore no reason
why it should not be organised by means of a democratic process, though
necessarily on whatever scale, or scales, is commensurate with the needs of a
modern society. Does a transport company
with an ageing fleet always have to be bought out by those with the money to
replace it, or are there other options such as asset leasing?
Category 5 – Occupations whose nature could change with
circumstances. This is where watching
the signs really matters. There are many
services we normally entrust to the private sector, but what do we do when
things are abnormal? Where would we be
without tanker drivers or those overseeing the logistics of supermarket
deliveries? To whom do they answer in a
diplomatic crisis involving a foreign owner?
Let’s not panic. But let’s at least have the answers to hand in a
self-governing Wessex
region of the future that seeks to prosper in interesting times.
The age of scarcity into which self-government is born will
require a range of ‘foundation projects’ as well as occupations, though these
are less easy to predict from history. Let’s
not allow current prejudices to prevent us contemplating future solutions. They not only can be radical but will need to
be radical. Today is the anniversary of
the death, in 899, of King Alfred the Great, a Wessex hero, but also a warning to
us. Alfred took risks for the sake of Wessex, such as assuming responsibility for
kingless Mercians and Northumbrians, that were soon to lead to the unification
of England and, under the Normans, to the eclipse of Wessex for centuries to come. All his investments of effort, in the
physical infrastructure of military and naval defences, and in the defences of
the mind provided by his revival of learning, were ultimately ineffective
against the superior organisation and determined infiltration of hostile
neighbours, despite their relatively small numbers. High-tax, high-spend policies of the
Alfredian kind, directed towards rebuilding and securing a worthwhile society, won’t
always be effective, it’s true (a well-organised world actually makes a more
tempting target for top-down takeover).
It's just that they're always better than not trying at all and succumbing to
unintelligible chaos.
In the 1940s, Friedrich von Hayek wrote a famous critique of
the State entitled The Road to Serfdom,
yet still concluded that “In no system
that could be rationally defended would the State just do nothing.” The small, community-benefit
State we envisage for Wessex
is one that ought to do much more than nothing if it is to have a better chance
of lifting the yoke from our necks than the blind pursuit of post-Thatcherite
sell-out we endure today.
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