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LRB | Vol. 28 No. 1 dated 5
January 2006 | Ross McKibbin

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The Destruction of the Public Sphere

Ross McKibbin

That the next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon
Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it
will be fought we don’t, in part because the present prime minister will
not disclose when he intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown
are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities. Cameron
simply because he is unknown; Brown because he’s known only as a bruiser
who tenaciously defends his own patch, not as a man who has to lead a
government and a political party. Any prediction as to the character of a
Cameron or Brown government must, therefore, be tentative. Such a
prediction might be that Cameron would lead a moderately unenlightened
businessman’s government; Brown a moderately enlightened businessman’s
government. The difference between the two, while a bit more than wafer
thin, will hardly register on any political scale.

In his campaign for the leadership Cameron was more anxious to give
impressions than facts, and one impression he was anxious to give is that
he is a man of the centre. Yet apart from his keeping clear of the
law-and-order rhetoric which burdened his predecessors and his rival,
David Davis, there is not much evidence of a new beginning. He has dropped
virtually none of Michael Howard’s baggage: he simply proved more adept at
reordering it than Davis. He has persisted in arguing that we can have
both lower taxes and better public services: an argument the electorate
regards sceptically and something that has eluded all British governments.
He has repeated, and appears to believe, the self-serving conviction of
British businessmen that they would be world-beaters were it not for
over-regulation, red tape, high taxes and Brussels. Although he concedes
there is ‘society’, a ‘we’ as well as a ‘me’, his is to be a highly
privatised society increasingly shaped by ‘social entrepreneurs’,
charities, do-gooders, people with axes to grind, and our old friend
‘faith groups’: in other words, a society based on the model of a market
and restored social hierarchies. Cameron is as Eurosceptic as any of his
predecessors; he even wishes – that touchstone of scepticism – to withdraw
the Conservative MEPs from the Christian Democratic grouping in the
European Parliament. And despite his keeping clear of law-and-order
rhetoric, those who seek rational immigration policies or prisons that do
more good than harm will almost certainly look to him in vain.

Gordon Brown, though alleged by the Conservatives to personify Old
Labour, differs little in substance from Cameron. His, too, will be a
businessman’s government – even if businessmen refuse to acknowledge it.
His surprising decision to abandon the new corporate financial reporting
rules shows how far he will go to assure businessmen that he is business
friendly. And his fundamental order of priorities differs little from
Cameron’s. He has always wanted to create an economic environment
conducive to an American idea of business success: the aim of both major
political parties in the last ten years. The way he has financed much of
the country’s social infrastructure, via the PFI, could not be more
business friendly. Bad for the country, but unquestionably good for
business (and lawyers, and consultants). In two ways, however, he has
acted differently from recent Tory chancellors. He has, first, expected
something in return from businessmen – measurably increased productivity –
which they have been unable to achieve: hence his constant fiddling with
largely futile fiscal incentives. He has, second, permitted significant
and long-overdue increases in public expenditure – now, alas, ending –
whose effect has been wholly benign; and that has made it hard for the
Conservatives to revert to the damaging policies of the 1980s and 1990s,
as Cameron has tacitly accepted.

For the rest, Brown’s record is more difficult to read. For whatever
reason – a desire not to forfeit his chance of the leadership or genuine
belief – he has acquiesced in all Blair’s follies, not least Iraq.
Whatever his private doubts, he has been in practice as servile as Blair’s
other ministers and shares as much responsibility. We do not, however,
know whether he would have initiated the folly. Like Blair, he is obsessed
with America, but his obsession is different: it is America as an economic
system that obsesses him. It is hard to see him crusading in Iraq, other
than inadvertently. Although, like Blair, he believes the private sector
is invariably more efficient than the public, his enthusiasm for the
marketising of everything seems less complete. As a Scot he might simply
be indifferent to the English educational system, but it is unlikely that
a Brown government would have produced the recent white paper on education
– though officially he supports it.

As to who will win the next election, the balance must favour Brown,
but it is three years away and the longer Blair stays the more difficult
it becomes for Brown. Furthermore, he has had a lucky ride as chancellor
and that won’t last. For all his ‘prudence’ and obstinate
Treasury-mindedness, he has not always been a particularly prudent
minister. The prosperity over which he has presided, as has so often been
the case since 1979, has been based largely on inflated house prices and
mountains of private and national debt. What distinguishes him from the
pre-1979 chancellors is that the balance of payments (hugely in deficit)
has recently not acted as a serious constraint on consumption. But our
rate of growth is now significantly below Treasury predictions; and given
Germany’s extraordinary export performance – achieved despite having to
prop up its old East Zone – compared with Britain’s, Brown might well come
to regret the foolish triumphalism of the last few years, as will all
those other purveyors of embarrassing wisdom (virtually every economic
commentator) about how much the Germans have to learn from us. Moreover,
Brown, though clearly respected by the electorate, is no charmer. On the
contrary, his public manner is designed to intimidate, the opposite of
Cameron’s.

Nonetheless, even if electoral circumstances are more favourable to him
than they were to his predecessors, the next election will not be easy for
Cameron. He is inexperienced – though he has done a surprisingly good job
at not looking inexperienced – and it’s certain that Labour will give him
a rough ride. He has had to overcome the fact that he is an Old Etonian,
which is sort of a problem now – though he has also done that rather well.
Above all, he is shackled to the Conservative Party. Unless there is a
remarkable change in the pattern of voting – the complete collapse of
tactical voting, for example – it will be exceptionally hard for the
Conservatives to win under the present electoral system. At the last
election, for instance, they polled only 3 per cent less of the vote than
Labour but won 158 fewer seats. Sociological and demographic changes have
also worked against them; though not irreversible they will be hard to
reverse. And there is still a sense in which the Conservative Party is not
of the real world. Its infantile reaction (fully shared by Cameron) to
possible reductions in the British EU rebate – like its attitude to Europe
generally – is not the behaviour of a party which wants to be taken
seriously.

Is any of this important? Does it matter whether Brown is prime
minister rather than Blair, or Cameron rather than Brown? Does it matter,
indeed, whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government? At the
moment, not much. There are several reasons for this. The first is that
the country’s political elite is now largely divorced from the country;
probably to a greater degree than at any time since the 19th century. This
elite is drawn from an increasingly narrow social range: primarily from
the law, the media, political and economic consultancy and ‘research’. In
the present cabinet, for example, there is only one former trade unionist.
Whatever their formal political allegiances, they are all the same kind of
people who think the same way and know the same things. Their authority
has been increased by the way the prime minister runs his government – in
an informal, ad hoc and disorganised manner that marginalises the
administrative Civil Service.

The members of his cabinet believe, and are constantly told, that
political victory lies in the ‘centre’, which is where they must be. To
argue this, however, is fundamentally to redefine the word ‘centre’: fifty
years ago those in the ‘centre’ were likely to be Keynesians. The extent
of this redefinition is made clear by Blair’s belief that unless the
recent white paper on education becomes law Labour will cede the ‘centre’
to the Tories. This is an absurd belief but is presumably gospel in the
prime minister’s camarilla. In a less mealy-mouthed age both the
Labour and Conservative Parties would be thought on balance right wing,
with the Labour Party more ambiguously right wing than the opposition. We
have now a right-wing government and a right-wing opposition, while a
centre-minded electorate has to choose which of the two is more palatable
– that is, least right wing. Much of the electorate is now so divorced
from the political elite that it does not even bother to make that choice:
thus the exceptionally low turnouts of the last two elections. What we do
not know is whether under Brown the Labour Party will be more like a party
of what was once understood to be the centre, instead of being, as it is
under Blair, centreish in little bits. To judge by his record so far,
however, this seems improbable.

The second reason it will not make much difference is that the two
major parties fundamentally share the same ideology. Despite assurances
that the political elite is interested only in what works, this is the
most intensely ideological period of government we have known in more than
a hundred years. The model of market-managerialism has largely destroyed
all alternatives, traditional and untraditional. Its most powerful weapon
has been its vocabulary. We are familiar with the way this language has
carried all before it. We must sit on the cusp, hope to be in a centre of
excellence, dislike producer-dominated industries, wish for a multiplicity
of providers, grovel to our line managers, even more to the senior
management team, deliver outcomes downstream, provide choice. Our students
are now clients, our patients and passengers customers. It is a language
which was first devised in business schools, then broke into government
and now infests all institutions. It has no real historical predecessor –
there was no equivalent ‘Keynesian’ vocabulary in the 1940s and 1950s –
and is peculiarly seductive. It purports to be neutral: thus all
procedures must be ‘transparent’ and ‘robust’, everyone ‘accountable’. It
is hard-nosed but successful because the private sector on which it is
based is hard-nosed and successful. It is efficient; it abhors waste; it
provides all the answers. It drove Thatcher’s enterprise culture. It lies
behind Cameron’s social entrepreneurs.

It is more powerful than the kind of language Flaubert satirised in the
Dictionnaire des idées reçues since, however ridiculous it might
be, it determines the way our political (and economic) elites think of the
world. A remarkable example of this comes in the government’s recent
proposal to privatise or partly privatise the probation service. This is
probably the most preposterous legislative proposal in living memory but
is justified on the grounds that we need ‘a vibrant mixed economy’ of
probation. As for the probation officers themselves, they are to be swept
away and replaced by ‘offender managers’. The language might be laughable,
but it is now the language shared by all those who command, Labour or
Conservative, and is one way they wield power.

This ideology has also been destructive of the public sphere. It began
under the Conservatives and, far from being reversed under Labour, has
been advanced by them into territory the Conservatives did not enter. The
contents of the latest white paper on education, the legislation that will
save the ‘centre’ for Labour, are the most overt manifestation of how far
Labour has gone. Virtually every premise on which this paper is based is
false. You cannot combine a socially structured educational system with
social justice, and that is so even if discrimination at admission is
technically prohibited. Not everyone can get their first choice under such
a system. It is not arithmetically possible. And schools can’t expand and
contract as though they were supermarkets, unless they are what used to be
called in Australia ‘portables’. Parents are not the best judges of their
children’s education any more than they are the best judges of their
children’s health – something most parents know perfectly well. The
pressure for ‘parent power’ doesn’t come from them.

The expansion of ‘faith’ schools is indefensible. The secular tradition
is central to the Labour Party, not because Labour was anti-religion – far
from it – but because it recognised that specifically religious schools
(even the old ‘aided’ elementary schools) were socially divisive. That a
government which has faced the consequences of a sectarian educational
system in Northern Ireland and is obsessed with Islamic extremism should
be simultaneously promoting religious secondary schools in England is
astonishing. Furthermore, it is clear that when they think of ‘faith’
schools the writers of the white paper don’t have in mind the Anglican
‘aided’ schools. These are to be private venture schools where faith is
strongly held. And since they are to have considerable powers to alter the
curriculum, be ready for rows over creationism. It is not true that
schools are the main variables in the education of children. Children are
influenced by their schools; but they are as strongly influenced by their
families, their peer groups, their physical environment, their wealth or
their poverty. ‘Failed’ schools are usually the result of ‘failed’
cultures: ‘failed’ cultures are not the result of ‘failed’ schools. A
government which was really interested in educational reform would tackle
seriously the relative poverty which underlies most forms of cultural
‘failure’. But the degree of comparative poverty has scarcely changed
since Labour came to power in 1997.

Behind the white paper is a ferocious ideological utopianism impervious
to social reality. The country’s health and educational systems have been
subject to countless pieces of legislation since 1979. All of it, whether
from the Conservatives or Labour, has tended in the same direction: the
re-establishment of the NHS and schools on the basis of a competitive
market. None of this legislation has ever satisfied its authors for long.
Few ask why the educational and health systems seem now so subject to
(failed) permanent revolution, given how stable their regimes were before
the late 1970s. One answer is that ideological utopias can never be
achieved precisely because they are utopian. The other is that the
competitive market simply does not work in such systems. It usually works
well where it works at all, but there are important areas of our lives
where it does not work at all, and collective activities such as education
and health are two of them. Much of the legislation in these areas has
left its authors dissatisfied and thirsting for more not just because it
has not worked but because it cannot work.

Above all, the white paper is an attack on the public sphere and on the
idea of democratic citizenship. The proposal effectively to neuter the
LEAs and to encourage the supposed independence of secondary schools,
whatever form their independence takes, turns citizens into supplicants.
Our relationship to the state, to the public sphere, is analogous to our
relationship to such property as we have. In a sense we ‘own’ it. We might
feel that the state has not given us what we are entitled to, but that is
because we have a sense of entitlement. As citizens, we approach the state
not as supplicants but as people who claim a right because we are
citizens. We do not, however, approach schools run by faiths, or
businessmen, or universities, or crackpots, as citizens. We approach them
as people seeking favours. And that gives the ‘providers’ social authority
incompatible with a democratic state.

This attack on the public sphere has a further consequence. It replaces
strong intermediate authorities (the LEAs) with weak ones, just as the
‘agencies’ and the misnamed ‘citizens’ charters’ did under the
Conservatives. It purports to give freedom to heads, parents, the
community, but in fact increases the power, though not the
‘accountability’, of central government, which makes the legislation even
more attractive to government. If this document in anything like its
present form is passed with significant Labour support, the Labour Party –
absolutely – loses its raison d’être. But even if a significant number of
Labour MPs revolt, in all probability it will be carried in something like
its present form because the Tories will support it. Cameron is an
enthusiast. He agrees with Blair (and we must assume Brown), and his
decision to support the white paper is a recognition that they all inhabit
the same intellectual world.

The final reason to doubt that much will change under Brown is the
institutional decay of the Labour Party and the cabinet. Most of Labour’s
institutions, like the national executive or the annual conference, are
mere shells. The cabinet meets only to be told what government policy is.
We are now used to the notion that Iraq has been a disaster, that it was
the result of a shocking error of judgment. We are also aware of the way
Iraq, and indeed all Blair’s policies towards the United States since
9/11, have corrupted British politics, endangered the security of the
country, been responsible for attacks on our liberties which only a few
years ago would have been thought inconceivable, irreparably damaged the
reputations of all those involved, and implicated Britain in American
policies which in many cases appear criminal. In a few years’ time people
will be amazed that neither the prime minister nor his cabinet has been in
any way held to account for all this.

The reason for that has to do with the structure and recent history of
the Labour Party. The party’s institutions have always been weak, and the
‘reforms’ of the last 20 years made them weaker. They don’t act as a
makeweight to the Parliamentary leadership. The Parliamentary Party, also
always weak, but now much less diverse than it used to be, is largely made
up of men and women of a Blairite caste of mind. This narrowing of its
base reflects the social narrowing of the country’s political elite and is
a result of the same pressures. Thus the majority of the Parliamentary
Party voted in support of the Iraq war – though 122 did not – as they have
for ID cards, 90-day detention (291 against 49), and no doubt will in
support of the new education bill. Patronage and the whips have much to do
with this, but it is also central to New Labour’s strategy. New Labour
(not unreasonably) took the view that the party’s old pluralism had
degenerated into destructive factionalism in the 1970s and early 1980s,
and concluded that in no circumstances should that be allowed to happen
again. Labour MPs, therefore, have been socialised into a system which
rates the possession of power, and hence loyalty to the leadership, above
all else. Whatever the original intention of the strategy this means that
the party leadership can do more or less what it likes; and has. And Brown
almost as much as Blair is responsible for this.

Ross
McKibbin, a fellow of St John's College, Oxford, is the author of
The Evolution of the Labour Party. Cultures and Classes: England
1918-51 came out in 1998.

Other articles available from the 5 January 2006 issue

What I heard
about Iraq in 2005
Eliot Weinberger

Special
Frocks
Jenny Turner on Justine Picardie

He shoots! He
scores!
David Runciman on José Mourinho

Short
Cuts
Thomas Jones : ‘Extraordinary Rendition’

At Tate
Modern
Peter Campbell on Henri Rousseau

From the archive

Diary
Tom
Paulin : Trimble's virtues

Short
Cuts
Thomas Jones : War Talk

Diary
Stuart
Kerr : On Trial in Turkey

Degrees of Not
Knowing
Rory Stewart : Does anyone know how to
govern Iraq?

Marching
Orders
Ronan Bennett on the new future of
Northern Ireland

Short
Cuts
Paul Laity on worst case scenarios

Other articles by this contributor:

How to put the
politics back into Labour
Ross McKibbin: Origins of the Present
Mess

Why did he risk
it?
Ross McKibbin: Blair, Brown and the US

Nothing More
Divisive
Ross McKibbin: The Great Secondary School Disaster

The
Tax-and-Spend Vote
Ross McKibbin wonders whether the election
will improve New Labour's grasp on reality

Make enemies and
influence people
Ross McKibbin tells Tony Blair what to do

Mondeo Man in
the Driving Seat
Ross McKibbin on Blair's Government at
Mid-Term (1999)

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1997-2006

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2 January 2006

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