This is the type of middle-class demi-libertarianism that I am seeing all the time now.

And like all libertarianism it relies on a complete absence of knowledge of history and a terrifyingly simplistic view of the world. It worries me that people over the age of 15 actually buy this libertarian nonsense.

Having said that, governments like the Blair government do provide ammunition for the loony libertarians by trying to control too much of our personal behaviour. Planning is needed in economic matters, but left-leaning parties these days seem too little inclined to exercise planning in the economic sphere and too much inclined towards petty interference in everyday life. While Nanny is busy telling us we mustn't go outside without putting our vest on, and introducing legislation to making wearing our vests compulsory, the economy goes down the free market toilet.

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But there's always the other side of the coin. If you refuse to wear your vest and get pneumonia as a result - should I as a taxpayer have to contribute towards your hospital bill?

Not saying I'm totally on either side, but there are reasons why both sides exist.

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But there's always the other side of the coin. If you refuse to wear your vest and get pneumonia as a result - should I as a taxpayer have to contribute towards your hospital bill?

Yes, absolutely. Otherwise you get either a nightmare of petty bureaucratic interference in people's lives. You end up having to create the Vest Police to enforce the new vest laws.

Or you get the other nightmare of libertarian selfishness where people think they should only pay taxes to fund programs they personally approve of. I could just as easily argue that as a taxpayer I shouldn't have to contribute towards schools just because you decided to have children. Or that I shouldn't have to contribute towards providing buses just because you were irresponsible enough not to buy a car.

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ammunition for the loony libertarians

Yes, I think that's true.

However, there have been policies in the other direction - for example the Freedom of Information Act, the right to walk in the countryside - which have extended freedoms.

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Unfortunately it's the petty infringements on personal freedom that really get noticed. And they attract the attention of the tabloid media.

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And journalists will lie about that - I remember in the 1980s there was talk that 'feminists' were abolishing the phrase 'man-hole cover' and we were forcing people to call them 'person hole covers'. And I was a feminist, and I used to say to people that we had neither the power nor the inclination to do any such thing, but that didn't make any difference.

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Exactly. And unfortunately even the most extreme infringements on personal freedom sound plausible, because there are enough loonies on the left as well who do come up with things that really are almost as silly as that, so it's not hard for the media to invent such stories and have them believed.

It's always the extremists who get noticed and end up on the telly, whether they're left-wing nutters or right-wing nutters. Sensible moderate pragmatists don't make good TV and they don't sell newspapers.

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I honestly think that in this sort of debate the role of the powers and abuses of journalism do not get examined (and blamed where appropriate) anything like often enough.

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There have been several days over the past few weeks that I could have quite easily scrapped the FOI Act. Yes, it's a very good thing, but it's too often than not abused.

That's just me though.

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Well, I moan about the nannying and interference as much as the next comfortably-off middle-class person, but a lot of this would go away if They did stuff competently. It's not about policy, it's about implementation.

Unlike 1945, there's plenty to go round now and yet the people at the bottom still don't get a fair go. I don't understand why we can't put decent schools/hospitals/etc everywhere AND free them from central control, instead of wasting huge amounts of effort on spurious choice mechanisms. All it takes is effort and ability from the people running the thing, but we're not going to get that any time soon, irrespective of who wins the election.

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Would it be great to have quality without central quality control? Yes. But that would be something way different from modern society.

Would it be great to have better quality control, with greater lattitude for variation within quality? Yes, and that actually might be achievable. That's a plan worth making.

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... I think the saying about "easy to despise what you've always had" rings rather loudly these days...

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Yes. I know people would say that also applies to freedoms. I'm glad there are people worrying away about things like, but I think there is a danger of throwing baby out with bathwater.

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My perspective is admittedly a distant one, but it seems like the things people resent Blair most for are really a result of his authoritarian tendencies, rather than centralising ones. (Of course, there is the question of whether the average person dislikes ID cards for the civil liberties implications or because they don't want to pay for it. Not that I blame them for that--passports cost a staggering amount as it is.)

It seems mind-boggling to me to criticise Attlee for things that surely most people in Britain have benefited from. (I'm sure the super-rich don't much care.) It seems that at a certain point, it's got to click that something had to have happened in the last two or three generations for your life to be different from that of your grandparents.

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It's boggling to me to suggest that the Attlee reforms amounted to 'the control and planning of every aspect of daily life'. But this is just the smear that will be used again.

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There is that too.

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I know the Conservatives are going to win the next election

That's a dangerous thing to think and say, IMO - and anyway, something I'd never bet money on. No election is ever decided until the votes are counted and as The Man said, a week is a long time in politics. But the best way to make a thing happen is to tell yourself it's inevitable.

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I think it's better to face the facts. It's better for people to realise that's what we are on the brink of. Though I hope you are right.

ETA - sorry if that sounds grim and cross, I'm not cross at what you said, I just feel very gloomy right now.

Edited at 2009-05-26 04:19 pm (UTC)

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Churchill may have been a charming charismatic guy

This puzzles me - when was he that? He was a good war leader but hadn't been popular up till then, not surprisingly since he was a rampant snob, racist and ultra-right, and after the war he was drunk most of the time.

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I am guessing he was charismatic, from the way people reacted to him at the time and since. Sometimes god-awful people can be charismatic.

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I know we don't agree politically, so I'm not going to try to persuade you otherwise!

But it is worth noting that the Butler Education Act was passed in 1944, under Churchill's National Government (and steered through parliament by Butler, a Tory). And all parties were signed up to the NHS and extensions to the National Insurance scheme in their 1945 manifestos.

The extension of this to 16-18 year olds and the legal requirement for parents and LEAs to ensure that children went to school was also brought in under Conservative governments in the 50s and early 60s.

All parties have steadily improved access to education since the 1940s, until the Tories replaced the HE grant with loans in the 1990s (which, although I think it was a retrograde step, as it happens, didn't impact on statistics of access to higher education), and Labour introduced tuition fees in the 2000s (which I also think was a retrograde step, and as it happens, has shown some negative impact on accessibility for the poorest).

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It's true that the Tories from the mid-forties to the seventies largely went along with a consensus which had it roots in the necessities of war. As Orwell pointed out in 1940, the war could not be run or won on free-market capitalist principles. The cross-party war government therefore did indeed introduce socialist measures, to keep the country going, which then came to full fruition under Attlee.

I think the various post-war Tory governments' implementation of socialist welfare policies left a lot to be desired - but they didn't launch all-out assault on social welfare until Thatcher.

Just as the Conservatives partly went along with the welfare state, so the current Labour party has partly gone along with Thatcherism. I totally disagree with them about that decision. But, the alternative is not to go back to full-on social dismantling. However, unlike hafren, I think that is going to happen.

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See, this is why more people should read Machiavelli. Different forms of political organisation are appropriate for different times, as exemplified in Machiavelli's account of the institution of dictatorship in the Roman republic.

A senior figure in the Scottish architecural heritage establishment once passionately defended high-rise towers to me on the grounds that they were a temporary, pragmatic solution to a pressing problem. He was right. While high-rises have had some negative social consequences, at least they got a roof over people's heads. However, what we're now doing is blowing up all these high-rises, and replacing them with much more human-friendly, low-rise housing. We're doing this because we now have the resources to do these things.

I think there's a political equivalent of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Brutal dictatorship satisfies the most basic political needs - ending anarchy. As we move up the scale of needs, we need increasingly more democratic, more liberal forms of government if the higher needs are to be satisfied. We've moved up since 1945 - a good bit of that was due to the Atlee government, which is rightly renowned, but it is precisely because of their good work that we don't need that kind of government any more.

The decisions of the Atlee government left a legacy of problems for us to deal with, however necessary those decisions were at the time. The high-rises are one example. Another is the centralised form of the NHS. At the time the NHS was being founded, there was a debate within the Labour government over whether to follow a centralised model or a localised, distributed model. The centralisers won. Looking at the performance of the NHS compared to less centralised public healthcare models in Europe, it is at least arguable that if the Atlee government had made the opposite decision then we might have a better NHS now than we do. At any rate, whatever their reasons for making that decision then, there is no reason why we can't reorganise things to suit us better in the present day.

I normally hate analogies in poitical argument, but I'll indulge myself in this one. Computing in the present day is becoming ever more distributed, with ad hoc arrangements of applications linked by light interfaces. This has resulted in an explosion of new ways of using computing power that were unheard of a few years ago. In the seventies, there were good reasons for putting everything on great big mainframes: but if you tried to argue that we should stick to mainframes because they worked in the seventies, people would think you were mental. Indeed, the analogy goes further: some people at IBM are arguing for a return to mainframe-style computing, as it does offer certain advantages, but they are doing it by partitioning mainframes into lots of little virtual machines, so as to take advantage of modern distribted computing techniques. Perhaps an analogous approach to health or education would be optimal?

Finally, here's a concrete example of the harms of centralisation. There are national targets for treating heart disease and cancer, as these are the biggest killers in the UK. But they are much less of a problem in Cambridgeshire, where mental health problems are a much bigger issue. But, due to the national targets, health care in Cambridgeshire is skewed away from the real priorities. Mental ilness kills people, usually a lot younger than cancer or heart attacks. Wouldnt it be nice if the health care system in Cambridgeshire could set its own priorities?

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Your architect friend was right - I moved from a situation where there were five of us living in one room to a high rise flat. That was the optimal solution at the time. Obviously the situation could have moved on - it has in some ways - but in fact decisions which were made under Thatcher have reduced and degraded the supply of council housing. So, change is not always in good faith. Sometimes it is an undisguised effort to destroy.

So this is the problem - there needs to be movement, but we are like those people in 28 Days Later, trying to change the tyre, while ravening hoards are coming ever closer and closer. They aren't coming to fix the car.

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I agree that there were unintended consequences of the right-to-buy scheme in the 1980s.

However, things have been substantially worse for the last decade than they have at any time since the war. The estimable poverty.org.uk has a graph that illustrates just how badly served the poorest in society have been for the past decade.

http://www.poverty.org.uk/83/index.shtml

However, credit where credit is due, they have dragged the housing situation back to the levels it was at in the mid 1990s.

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My key point is that these were not unintended consequences: the right to buy program was a deliberate sabotage of social housing. It was stated as such. It wasn't disguised at the time. The same thing was done to public transport - explicitly, undisguised.

There was a deliberate intent in the 1980s to destroy public capital, and we are paying that price right now.

This deliberate intent to destroy both makes reform difficult, and means that talk about reform from the sabotaging group must be treated with great caution. For example, many proposed 'reforms' of the BBC are bare-faced efforts to destroy it. This doesn't mean the BBC does not need improvement, but it makes improvement more difficult than it needs to be. Similarly education, health, public transport.

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I completely agree with you.

(I've replied properly on my LJ, breaking my hitherto-unblemished try-not-to-post-about-politics rule.)

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Just to point out - as I did in my original post - I did not decry the slum clearance programme. The slum clearance programme, begun in the 1930s and substantially delayed by the effects of the war, was absolutely essential. What I did decry was the manner of the programme, which put a lot of effort into creating buildings and put no thought whatsoever into the quality of life of the people living in them. Within a short time of the building of the high rises, the people moved into them were vociferously complaining that their quality of life was worse than it had been in the slums. That is not a well thought out housing plan.

As for rationing, the simplistic dichotomy between food and deformity was simply not the case. During the war, when there were absolutely no imports of food, less food was rationed than in the post-war period. At the same time as rationing was being extended after the war, food exports from Britain increased.

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Well, would a decentralised free market system have led to adequate nutrition? And what are you saying here, that post-war rationing was not really needed, but it was imposed for purely authoritarian reasons? That there was plenty of food and fuel, but the government just couldn't stop themselves from imposing rationing? Even though it gave them a perpetual public relations headache?

What's happening in your post, in your comments, and in the political climate of this country, is summed up in an old adage: 'The best is the enemy of the good'. If we destroy anything that is not optimum, then we inevitably destroy the good. For some people this is the point - and you must have seen it - 'Oh the NHS has waiting lists so let's scrap it'.

On the other hand, making positive criticism and proposing improvements can only be a good thing. But which is being exhibited in any given case?

So, to my mind, it boils down to good faith. I do not believe that the Tory assault on public welfare since Thatcher is a good faith effort at improvement. The role of privileged Whiggish fellow-travellers in all this worries me a great deal. People in your comments thread comparing Attlee to the gestapo. It's nonsense.

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"People in your comments thread comparing Attlee to the gestapo"

?

Nobody came even close to that.

And you are reading attacks where no attack was made. As I said in the comment thread on my post, I think the Attlee government was the best that Britain has had in well over 100 years. I wish we could get back to many of the things they achieved. (Similarly, I think the Thatcher government was the worst we have had, though in many ways Blair came close.)

And I repeat, as I said many times, my original post was not about Attlee, but about Wilson, or to be more precise the notion that the roughly 20 years from Macmillan taking the premiership to Heath losing in 1974, was in many ways an aberration in British political history since both parties exhibited a view of the nature of government at odds with that exhibited both before and since. If you want to interpret that as a rabid attack on old Clem or a fervent warcry for the Tories, it is up to you, but that is actually very far from the truth.

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'The Labour Party in those days was sufficiently authoritarian in its approach that Churchill's broadcast speech in the 1945 election claimed that they'd have to set up "some sort of Gestapo" - yes, he said that - to enforce it.'

The Labour party 'were so authoritarian' that Churchill compared them to the gestapo? That was the causality?

Or, your words:

'But it was still exactly the same centralising, controlling urge that characterised the Blair government. It was the control and planning of every aspect of daily life that led the post-war government not only to retain but actually to extend rationing'

In my opinion it was not an urge to control of every aspect of life which led to rationing. And by extension, the social provision which is currently being dismantled is not an expression of an urge to control.

The reason I take this seriously is because this demi-libertarianism will provide a moral figleaf for privileged people to vote for increasing inequality, decreasing social mobility, a diminished welfare system.

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Income inequality is now at its highest level since records began, and wealth inequality has increased sharply since Labour came to power. If you're worried about people voting for increasing inequality, you're about twelve years too late.

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We are hitting the buffers of neoliberalism right now.

I liked (the wrong word) this article by David Marquand on the Guardian yesterday.

Sadly, the furore over ­parliamentary expenses looks suspiciously like displacement activity...
On a deeper level, no alternative ­governing philosophy has replaced the now bankrupt neoliberalism of the recent past. Brown (the only major European leader who has grasped the scale of the crisis) is flying by the seat of his pants. He is doing as well as could be expected, but it is not enough. The US, China and probably India are strong enough to weather the current storm. The EU – the last, best hope for European ­civilisation in the continent of its birth – is in grave danger.

I think this is true. David Cameron, and more significantly George Osborne, are way out of their depth.

Something very, very bad could happen. It really could and all this stuff is vanity.

ETA - I'm not accusing you of vanity - my meaning is like Ecclesiastes

Edited at 2009-05-28 03:51 pm (UTC)

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Oh, and to return to your first question:

"Well, would a decentralised free market system have led to adequate nutrition? And what are you saying here, that post-war rationing was not really needed, but it was imposed for purely authoritarian reasons?"

No, I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm just saying that the situation was far more complex than you have made it out to be. Britain desperately needed the money raised by food exports (remember, at this point the USA was calling in the massive loans that had kept the country afloat during the war). One cost of this was increased rationing in Britain itself. So the extension of post-war rationing was, in a sense, precisely a result of the free-market system. It wasn't - it could not be - a simple either/or between centralised planning and free market economics.

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