Review: Isabel Hardman, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians

This is a hand-wringing book by an Establishment political journalist about Establishment politicians and Parliament. It’s readable, full of interesting anecdotes, and good in the parts which emphasise Parliament’s failures at what is supposed to be its job, legislation. The detail assembled there is worth having. The book pairs with the more academic work The Blunders of our Governments, by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe,  reviewed on this Blog on 11 June 2013 and mentioned several times by Isabel Hardman.

One book can’t do everything but three things are missing which bear on Hardman’s case.

First, the history. We may think of Parliament as sovereign in the UK, but technically it is the Queen in Parliament who is sovereign. That technicality is explained by a history in which Parliament developed as a creature of the Executive,  that Executive finally formalised as a Cabinet which constitutes Her Majesty’s Government, its head appointed (and still appointed) by the Sovereign. So Parliament developed as second fiddle, though by the 19^th century it came to acquire more power than ever did the state Dumas of Imperial Russia. Its power expanded with the expansion of the franchise, but its members remained subject to Executive manipulation, the carrots of jobs and bribes, and later the sticks wielded by  government Whips. Theresa May’s billion pound bung for the votes of ten DUP MPs did not come out of nowhere. It was an ordinary exercise of Executive prerogative.

Second, the voters. Those who argued for the expansion of the franchise through the 19^th and early 20^th centuries twinned their case with a demand for the expansion of popular education so that voters would be prepared for their tasks as citizens. But the British educational system never got into the business of educating citizens; it stuck with God, the Queen and school uniform and still does. As social media have now made clear, if tabloid newspapers had not already done so, the result is that many “citizens” are not really up to their job.

Third, there is the long term decline of Great Britain, a decline marked by periodic adventures - Suez, Iraq, Brexit - which each time leave it a weakened power. The decline has now gone so far that one can reasonably speak of a failing state - Hardman instances several areas (for example housing and social care) where the state has ceased to cope with the demands created by demographic and economic change. 

In failing states, politics does not attract all the talents; it attracts the crooks and the also-rans. When it comes to it those are people who can’t deliver. The Conservative Party likes to tell the story of Harold Macmillan who as Housing Minister in the early 1950s got considerably more houses built than his (talented) Labour predecessor - much or most of it, social housing. He did it with the benefit of what was still very much a war time command economy, it’s true, but he did it without benefit of computers or social media. Nowadays, you can be put in charge of Brexit, as was David Davis, and simply not turn up to work, throw in the towel - and still get invited onto state TV as if you might have something worth hearing about. Put in charge of negotiating trade deals, as was Liam Fox, you can end up able to show the Faeroes and Fiji and not much else; but you keep your job and continue to appear on state TV.

Review: Owen Jones, The Establishment

This is a straightforward Them (the 1%) and Us (the 99%) book. It's lucid, well-documented, compelling and sometimes - as in the chapter on the police - scary. Rather than concentrate on its many strengths, I will focus on my doubts.

(1) Trade Unions. It's true that the assault on Trade Union power, led initially by Mrs Thatcher and continued ever since, has helped produce a much more casualised, readily exploitable, and lower paid labour force than existed for many industries - but not all - in the 1960s and 70s. But that assault was possible because the old Trade Unions pissed off a lot of people and not just the bosses.

There has always been some tension between the goals of trade unions and the aims of socialist or social democratic political parties. The former are designed to advance the interests of sections of the labour force; the latter to advance the interests of all workers. Those aims can conflict. In the UK the miners, for example, got into the habit of expecting everyone to stand up for their pay claims - partly playing on other people's guilt when they didn't themselves do such dirty or dangerous work - until a point was reached (for me, in 1984) when people no longer wanted to jump when the miners said Jump! Oh, the miners might get sentimental about the nurses, but that's not the same as a proper discussion about who should be paid what and why. 

Look at France, which retains strong unions ever-ready to strike, and what you see, partly as a long-term consequence of unions pursuing sectional interests is, on the one hand, large groups (notably in the public sector) with very good terms and conditions of employment and, in stark contrast, two big, overlapping, excluded groups: young workers ( or would-be workers) and migrants from France's former colonies, mostly blacks and mostly Muslims. Whatever the rhetoric - and there's an awful lot of it in France - the effect of sectionalism has not been favourable either to equality or fraternity. 

(2) The Big State. Around the world, more egalitarian societies have bigger states, taking a larger share of GDP. This is a bit depressing because in the UK at least, the state has a poor record for efficiency and transparency. To this day, the National Audit Office churns out report after report documenting the waste of billions. Transfer activities have an inherent inefficiency because when you take from A to give to B, there are always administrative costs and, on top of that, there is often bungling. It would be nice if we could cut out the middleman.

Apparently, there is just one major state - Japan - which scores well on equality but has a relatively small state (for details, see Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level). 

How could you achieve both a lot of equality and a smaller state? It could be done, for example, by legislating high minimum wages and capping top wages. If that is combined with the use of inheritance tax as a major source of state revenues, you can dramatically level the playing field. The last thing I can get enthusiastic about are systems which make heavy use of indirect taxes (VAT) and subsidies such as tax credits and housing benefit. On the other hand, when you legislate for equality then if you are way out of line with market forces, you just end up with black markets, dual systems, evasion and so on. That is, unless people are satisfied with their situation - Owen Jones, for example, points out that nowhere else in Europe do bankers expect to be paid such huge amounts as those in London. And in Germany, at least,corporate greed seems much less common - big companies are kept in the family, not asset stripped and bankrupted by their bosses. So there are cultural issues - and I suspect they include such things as the culture of stag parties and men-only football (In Germany at the time of the World Cup, I was amazed to find the streets full of painted, flag-waving but mixed-sex and sober groups).

(3) Profit. Owen Jones spends a lot of time denouncing the selling off and outsourcing of public services for private profit. Leave aside that there exists some support for this because people got fed up with crap public services. Concentrate on the issue of Profit.

Suppose it cost the public sector £150 to provide some identifiable chunk of a service - like issuing a TV licence or producing a chest X ray. Now suppose a private firm comes along and offers to do it for £100 plus a whacking £25 profit. It's still better value for money than the public service. Why not let them have their profit?

Since there may be important reasons to keep a service public, the first response to this situation should be to ask why the public service is more expensive and whether it can be made more competitive. Frequently, it can indeed be made more competitive - and Owen Jones is quite right to point to the purely ideological commitment to private provision which characterises our recent governments and which led, for example, to the selling off of the one public service rail franchise (the East Coast mainline) which just happened to be more efficient and more profitable than any of the heavily subsided private sector rail rackets. 

To make Profit the enemy is a dangerous oversimplication (as in "People not Profit"). People can benefit from Profit - but not from ideologies of Profit which is what we are currently offered.