As many readers of this blog will know, Open University academic Ivan Horrocks is a regular provider of thoughtful comment on many issues on this blog. He offered this comment yesterday in response to my blog on the Gagging Bill. I thought it far too significant to be lost in the comments section, so reproduce it here to give due prominence to this theory on the Tory tools of government:
I for one was first alerted to this bill by you, Richard (and have since done as much as I can to object to it), so thanks for that and your continuing stand against it. But you are absolutely right to highlight the dangers inherent in a “pause”. As Zoe Williams points out, at the head of the article you quote from:
‘Looking at the pause in action during the health and social care bill in 2011, it seems designed to concede enough small, technical things to humiliate its key defenders and bore everyone else into submission — while slipping in enough new, large things to show the world who was in charge once the government hit play again. Humiliation, shmumiliation! What doesn't unseat you makes you stronger.'
One of the things I think those of us interested or involved in UK politics have to been slow to acknowledge (and I single out the Labour Party here) is that since May 2010 the Tories (with the help of the see no evil, hear no evil, and do nothing to combat a whole lot of evil, Lib Dems) have brought a new set of “tools” and “techniques” into government. The “pause” is one example. Almost all had been seldom if ever seen before in this country, though they are often par for the course in the US, which is quite obviously where they've been imported from (as with almost everything else the Tories do).
The most fundamental and most dangerous (to the majority of the citizens of this country) has been a complete departure from any semblance of evidence based policy making. Ideology now trumps everything. The counter argument will be that ideology always plays a role on political policy making. And so it does. But as far as I can ascertain no UK government in the 20th or 21st century — not even the Thatcher governments — have been so intent on the pursuit of ideological policies to the exclusion of all else.
The second and related technique is a willingness to go to any lengths to support or claim some legitimacy for evidence free policies. The complete and clearly deliberate disregard for what we might best refer to as the honest (i.e. accurate) use of statistical data, or other material, is one such example that's been fairly well reported on. It's worth adding that employing this technique is made all the easier with the existence of a plethora of consultancies and such like who would pretty much say anything as long as they see a £ sign or lucrative contract at the end of it.
The third has been a very rapid and extensive programme of populating all policy advisory/consultative groups that are of any significance with supporters (or at the very least, sympathisers) of the neo-liberal project, be that in health, environment, defence, taxation, or indeed, the purpose and operation of government and public administration.
The fourth is bringing together (we could say breeding and nurturing) a group of people (the Cabinet/Front bench, including such people as Grant Shapps) who are entirely relaxed with this approach to government and policy making. One of the outcomes is that it's nigh on impossible for any journalist, be they from TV or elsewhere, to ever get a member of the government to admit to a mistake or error of judgement.
I could go on but they are the main strands. In the process the Tories have redrawn the political and governmental landscape of this country to one which more closely resembles that of the Tea Party — Democrat divide in the US. As I noted above, Miliband and his team have been extremely slow to recognise this, and have only recently started to respond in an effective manner (they are not alone — there are far too many political commentators who are still framing this government's actions using pre 2010 points of reference). But as we've seen with NHS privatisation, the Tory government will never drop anything they see as part of their ideological crusade, and the gagging law is part of that crusade — whatever the Lib Dems may convince themselves into thinking.
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Hear, hear, I agree entrely with Ivan’s view!
And certainly nothing in their agenda equates to any recognisable form of democracy.
And along come investor-state dispute settlements to provide large corporations with another income from litigation against countries…
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=investor-state+dispute+settlement
http://tpplegal.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/isds-domestic-legal-process-background-brief.pdf
I thought we had a coalition government??
Are there not two parties running the country. Or is this blog just aimed against the Conservatives. Whilst saying how wonderful the Labour party was but doing nothing for the country.
There are clearly two distinct brands of thinking in the government and one dominant party
Paul, first of all I said nothing about ‘how wonderful the Labour party was’, but I can tell you that evidence based policy making enjoyed it’s heyday under the first two Blair governments, though it diminished in visibility – though never disappeared – later. One reason for that was the Blairite belief in the third way – neither left nor right, and largely ideology free (as they thought/argued, though much of what was delivered was inherently neo-liberal “lite”). The approach to policy formation was to “triangulate”: drawing in ideas and evidence from various sources to produce what was hoped would be the most effective policies and approaches. Personally I don’t have much time for a lot of what the Blair governments’ did, but in my opinion their approach to policy making was miles removed – and better – than the current government.
Second, of course we have a coalition government, but my view on the effectiveness of the LibDems at constraining the ideological mission of the Tories is perhaps hinted at in my comment about ‘hear no evil, see no evil, etc LibDems. To be frank, the Tories have run rings around the Lib Dems since the early days of the coalition. If I had to hazard a guess why it’d be that the Tories came into government with a pretty well formulated agenda for what they wanted to do and a strategy and tactics – including what I refer to here as tools and techniques – for how they’d get it done. The LibDems fell into government and they’ve been trying to work out how to deal effectively with that role and manage their (junior) relationship with the Tories ever since.
The upshot has been that while Clegg and co can legitimately point at a few policies where they’ve been able to take the edge of the worst aspects of a bill or proposal, in many policy areas they’ve simply let the Tories follow their ideology driven agenda.
The “pause” in this instance, takes them to the week BEGINNING 16th December- suspiciously close to Christmas- when assorted peers might no longer be in London. Pauses also allow momentum to be lost- and as we saw with the Health Bill- allow more trojan horses to be come in.
This bill is just part of an overarching strategy. I’m not sure it could be described as a conspiracy more the convergence of interests of a narrowly defined elite. The goal is to clear the field of play of any voices raised that run counter to the advance of neoliberal ideology. The green voice, the communitarian opinion, the egalitarian perspective act as a sea anchor slowing the advance of government by market forces.
Anyone who sees no risk of permanent damage to our society should read this:
http://www.cens.uni-bonn.de/team/board/armin-falk/1morlas-and-markets.pdf
Markets have a tendency to corrupt moral values. It helps if there is no opposition. Nothing is free in the neoliberal world not even speech.
Bill, there are only two plausible explanations for the entire strategy of the Coalition. Either they are too incompetent to understand the consequences of their actions, or lack of them, eg Duncan Smith and the fiasco with Universal Credit, or they are totally committed to inflicting neo-liberal orthodoxy on this country by all and any means available to them. Given their record on the misuse of information, ie propaganda by any other name, and their determination to silence dissenting voices, I find it totally implausible to give the Coalition the benefit of any doubt by describing it as incompetent.
Representative democracy in this country is rapidly approaching a major crossroads. The electorate needs to wake up, to be woken up, to the dire need to make a choice between acceptance that most lives are being herded towards subservience in thrall to a financial elite and the will to re-assert real representative democracy that serves the interests of the vast majority.
If and when a politician comes along who is prepared to confront our imminent return to feudalism, I don’t much care what party he/she claims to represent because, currently, all our parties toe the neo-liberal line.
Nick, as you might imagine, I rejected the first of your plausible explanations some while ago. I’m in no doubt the second is correct, as you say. There’s one further point I’d add. I suspect that the ideological project has been accelerated because of the extreme uncertainty of what might happen at the next election. Consequently there’s a pretty obvious attempt across all of the policy domains I’ve looked at to push policy so far down the neo-liberal road that if Labour get into power at the next election, or if there’s a Labour/LibDem coalition, it’ll be very difficult to reverse much of what’s been put in place, or repair what’s been destroyed. The privatisation of probation and free school are two examples, but there are many that attract less attention.
An unintended consequence of this demonic rush is that much of the policy being implemented – such as universal credit, or the various changes to immigration policy and practice – have had very little effort put into assessing outcomes and impacts, and, in lots of cases, are actually contradictory. In some ways it reminds me of what happened when the neo-liberal zealots flooded into Russia in the 1990s.
Nick – the populace is in a state of narcolepsy and cannot see that it is sleepwalking into fascism. The systematic and brutal vilification of the poor and ill as well as those in social housing is indicative of this-it is so obvious that these people are taking the rise out of a whole populace feeling safe that they can do this with impunity. It looks like fascism, feels like fascism, stinks like fascism!
Richard,
Did you see this article in the New Yorker?
“The Republicans are still winning”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2013/10/28/131028taco_talk_packer
I guess we have the cowboy plumber theory of government.
The cowboy plumber comes in to fix a small problem, turns it into a major problem and charges a fortune to fix it.
Cowboy policiticans starve and mismanage government, then claim that to be fixed, it needs to be sold off to their friends.
the look over your shoulder, low morale, can I get out? atmosphere is quite common in public service over here too.
“I thought it for [sic] too significant to be lost in the comments section, so reproduce it here to give due prominence to this theory on the Tory tools of government:”
But you were presumably happy for your admission over Centrica’s tax figures to be lost in that comment thread? I infer this as you haven’t published them in a separate blog post which would have given the admission similar visibility as the original post. Would this be a correct inference?
I have made no admission on Centrica
I was absolutely right on Centrica. Read what I said
I said the UK data was unaudited: it was
I said you could not spot the links. You can’t
I never said there weren’t any
I never said it was beyond my wit or anyone else’s with willing to find them
I said they could not be seen
And I said the data should be available and audited
And I have nothing to apologise for in saying so
In fact, what I’m quite clear about is that I was right
And only audited country-by-country reporting will overcome this
As would accounts where consistency is apparent and explained. After all, it is core accounting principle and it was absent here
Which was my point
“I suspect that the ideological project has been accelerated because of the extreme uncertainty of what might happen at the next election.”
The Guardian article quoted Juliet Swann of the Electoral Reform Society in Scotland: “What are they trying to prevent? What terrible thing has happened that they think this will stop from happening in the future? … Why are they trying to fix a hypothetical situation that you can’t give me any examples of?”
My MP, Oliver Letwin, seemed to have provided his answer of in correspondence with me – “On the substance of the Bill, I’m afraid I just disagree with you. there are arguments for and against limits on party political campaign expenditure limits. But, as there are such limits, and as there seems to be a consensus in favour of retaining them, we clearly need to make sure that they are real and enforceable — in which case, we can’t have political parties using other groups to spend the money for them in order to get round the rules.”
But who is spending that money?
Mainly right wing think tanks
Right now we can live with that
“The fabulous four include Capita, Serco, G4S and Atos, which collectively banked £1.05bn in profits globally. The four firms made revenues of £4bn taken from the UK taxpayers’ purse, but only two of them paid corporate tax, forking out just £81m to HMRC last calendar year, said the National Audit Office”
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2013/11/12/nao_report_suppliers/