This is my first post for Substack. You can sign up to my blogs there at kellnep.substack.com
It is, perhaps, poetic justice, or maybe poetic injustice, that this, my first Substack blog, responds to the views of the friend who encouraged me to write for Substack in the first place.
David Aaronovitch and I meet up for coffee from time to time to chat about the issues of the day. We agree on enough to make our conversations congenial, and disagree enough to make them interesting. Last week, David aired an argument we had recently about the aims of the Labour Party – and, by extension any mainstream party. He makes serious points that deserve a serious response.
His full case can be read here; here is my summary.
David says that many of the big problems facing Britain today flow from the incompetence of the last Conservative government, not its ideology. Dramatic examples of this have been Brexit, Liz Truss’s disastrous mini Budget, Rishi Sunak’s plan to remove asylum-seekers to Rwanda, and allowing our prison system to be engulfed by crisis. A more competent government would have steered clear of these traps.
Agreed. Indeed, we could go further: think of HS2, Andrew Lansley’s botched reform of the NHS, and a hopeless planning system that kept Britain short of homes: incompetence on steroids.
At the same time, David gives credit to one big thing that the Conservatives got broadly right: getting the Covid vaccines and rolling them out during the pandemic.
Agreed. (Though buying PPE was a different story: incompetence combined with fraud.)
I accept that a reputation for competence is probably the single most important virtue for a mainstream party hunting for votes at election time. Indeed, I have made this point myself a number of times in recent years, with supporting polling evidence. This year, clear majorities regarded Sunak as the weak leader of an incompetent government. He was doomed.
So where do we disagree?
The heart of David’s argument is that rival mainstream politicians all want broadly the same fundamental things: those that Amartya Sen set out in his 2009 book, The Idea of Justice.
David summarisesthese as a society that “seeks to remove the impediments and create the circumstances to allow the individual to reach their fullest potential – to enhance their capability.”
David concludes: “The big political questions are around how to realise these improvements. And increasingly I’ve come to realise that much of this is simply about good government as opposed to bad government and not about ideology at all. In fact, when pure ideology does make a big entrance into our politics it’s usually disastrous.”
Note the words “simply” and “pure”. They sweep away the complexity of real life and narrow the argument to a binary choice: politics-free “good government” or “pure ideology”.
This is where we disagree.
A good starting point for exploring this is something the historian Tony Judt wrote in 1997. In an article for Foreign Affairs he recorded the collapse of industrial jobs and community spirit in many countries, and predicted the subsequent populist response to these trends. He linked this to a long view of the century in which he, David I all grew up. Judt surveyed the enduring failures of laissez-faire capitalism and the rival tyrannies of communism and fascism, and concluded:
We now know that some version of liberalism that accords the maximum of freedom and initiative in every sphere of life is the only possible option. But that is all we know. … We no longer have good reason to suppose that any single set of political or economic principles is universally applicable. [Judt’s emphases]
In other words, there is much still to debate, and the outcome of these debates will and should vary from place to place and time to time. This should be a liberating time for liberal democracies. Dogma is dead. The very uncertainty that Judt describes gives us space to think and argue. Indeed it demands that we do.
Who, though, should be the protagonists and what should they debate? In an open society, of course, anyone should feel free to join in and say what they like. However, let us narrow down the question: what is the basic function of political parties in today’s world?
The most obvious answer, whose truth is permanent whatever else changes, is that parties give citizens the choice as to who wields political power. The power of one-person-one-vote elections to “kick the rascals out” is the most fundamental of democracy’s virtues.
I would also argue (and on this I suspect David would agree) that another sign of a well-functioning democracy is that the main parties agree on many basic things. A degree of continuity has great merit. It would be ruinous for every new government to tear up everything its predecessor has done. In today’s Britain there is broad cross-party consensus that includes support for universal education and health care, free speech, a market economy subject to some degree of regulation, an independent judiciary and membership of Nato. Few if any mainstream politicians want to reverse the social reforms of my lifetime, from the abolition of capital punishment and theatre censorship to support for gay marriage and the principles of race and gender equality. Thank goodness.
My proposition is that this still leaves much to be contested, and where reasonable people can disagree on what “good government” looks like. What is the right balance between (lower tax) private consumption and (and higher tax) collective provision? What legal rights should workers, consumers and tenants have when dealing with employers, vendors and landlords? Should a more equal society be an explicit national objective – and, if so, which policy levers should the government pull? How should we balance personal freedom against rules to reduce carbon consumption and outlaw air pollution and dirty water? When, if ever, should human rights be curtailed to combat terrorism? Should we impose legal curbs on social media and the misuse of AI? Do we need some kind of identity system to help people who are registered citizens and detect those who aren’t? To what extent should we combine with other countries to tackle common problems, from defence to climate change, and how far should we keep ourselves to ourselves?
Each question raises both moral and technical issues; the word “good” straddles both: which policies will work and, separately, which chime with our values. We can acknowledge the skill of our civil servants in setting up the poll tax and implementing George Osborne’s austerity measures – and of our troops when they invaded Iraq – without supporting the decisions to do these things.
Now, I think David makes an important point. Political debate tends to be too much about worthy ends, and too little about effective means. We need smart solutions, not just those that are morally satisfying. Competence natters more than rival Left and Right-wing ideologues ever recognised.
However competence is not everything. We need the right processes to make the big choices about our future. Political parties that reflect alternative sets of values are not the only forums for debating these issues, but in a democracy they provide the least imperfect mechanism for deciding the broad direction in which we prefer to travel.
Rival parties rooted in competing values have another advantage. They provide reasons for citizens with no political ambitions of their own to engage with the political system, not just live with its decisions. Imagine parties full of technocrats who have no values of their own. Who on earth would join such parties, other than to wield power or, if they are corrupt, grow rich? Parties without a core set of values would be parties without a cause, and leave a democracy without a heart.
If you think that is obvious, so do I. But let us concede that parties with a heart can easily go astray. Cause-driven parties tend to attract enthusiasts, and enthusiasts tend to fall into the trap that, as David rightly describes, has ensnared much of recent British politics: of neglecting competence in the quest to live the dream. Brexit, Liz Truss’s mini budget and hostility to immigration are all examples. In leadership elections, the passions of party activists have given us Iain Duncan Smith, Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, as well as Truss.
There is no perfect solution to this. Democracy is untidy, slow and prone to error. Parties can take years to undo their mistakes – witness the Tories after they lost power in 1997, and Labour after 2010. A healthy, mature democracy is one that balances passion with practicality: one that accepts disagreements, plays them out in a civil manner to agreed rules, decides what it prefers, accepts that compromises are inevitable and chooses policies that work.
Sure, that happens far less often than we would like. The trouble is, the alternative is worse, and potentially more dangerous. For all its flaws, competitive democracy, grounded in parties with distinct vales, is better than anything else that anyone has tried.
Over to you, David.
Peter Kellner. The Politics Counter 