The French election is a relief, a source of inspiration, a cause for concern and straightforwardly worrying all at the same time.
It's a relief the Pe Pen clearly has no chance of winning the Presidency.
It's inspirational that the party mould can be broken in France, at least.
It's a cause for concern that the French backed racism and the far right so strongly (although they have done it before).
And it's a worry that the left have failed, again.
Macron is, let's be candid, a bit like Blair. It will end in tears. But he's kept Le Pen at bay.
The concern is that although Melenchon did well in the end, the Socialists as such did not (although they were always hamstring by Hollande) and the day when there is s truly electable left of centre vision seems remote as yet.
The essential fact that society has a choice, between looking out for each other, and acting in bigoted self interest, is still not being laid out plainly enough in front of people. It's the shoice we face, but still it is not possible to persuade people that a vision based on decency, concern, care and interest in the well being of others is the real foundation for a truly radical government capable of delivering for all.
In makes me worry about the state of France. Why is fraternite so hard to sell?
And the UK, because Labour seems utterly unable to elucidate such basic thinking. And I have no idea why it is so hard.
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Perhaps some feel that we do have a responsibility to one another, and that this responsibility is too important to be abdicated to the state.
I hasten to add that I do not hold this view. But I am wary of demonising our opponents. That makes it even harder to convince them.
Will, that is the Friedman view but riven with contradictions -we know from evidence that as the wealthy get wealthier they do NOT give more. After the financial crash, charitable giving from the wealthiest in society (US figures) reduced proportionately more that those on low incomes. We’ve had 40 years of monetarism with the welfare state shrinking and being sold off has there been a scintilla of evidence that personal neighbourliness and mutual support has increased?
The State IS the expression of that mutual support. Don’t forget that Government is also us! The meme of ‘standing on your own two feet’ and the notion of the ‘independent’ individual are also myths that Thatcher propagated, the very person who told us we would get a wealth spreading democracy where 3/4 would own a house and most would be shareholders (its about 19% when I last looked).
it tends to be poorer people that help each other and the idea that this can replace the state cannot stand up.
I appreciate you are not supporting this view but after 40 years we’ve had that experiment and the results are in.
As you always eloquently point out Richard, the left in the UK And beyond have still to make a paradigm change. They certainly have to produce political answers to the many jssues of the 21st century. For me it is not the action of voters voting to the right, it is the inaction of voters who feel their needs, hopes and desires have not been fully articulated in mainstream politics. The Parliamentary Labour Party career politics lacks the passion and conviction needed to do this.
You ask an important question – not just concerning France but also for all other Western democracies. Current trends indicate that the post WW2 Social Democratic model, which promotes fraternité / brotherhood, is becoming less appealing to electorates. This is really one for sociologists to answer because something is happening in society when ‘good’ values are rejected in favour of divisive ones. My amateur simplistic answer is one word: ‘fear’.
Various sectors of society have become afraid of …. foreigners, inadequate wages, wealth depreciation, Islamism, future uncertainty, North Korea, diminished national stature, the price of cappuccinos … you name it. And when ‘fear’ becomes a predominant factor people turn to authoritarian solutions. It’s the classic pathway to fascism. Aided by their friends in the MSM, authoritarian politicians fully understand the tactics required to promulgate this sense of fear. It’s the old divide & rule strategy – bait & switch – call it what you will.
The huge challenge for progressive parties is to defuse the fear (real and imagined) by offering a more secure future that can be both believed in and realised in practical terms. It’s time for an inspirational narrative that can capture the public’s imagination. Because of the devastation after WW2 it was an open goal and the prosprity emanating from reconstruction lasted a generation. That declining prosperity was nipped in the bud via CREDIT – which has fuelled economise ever since.
As had been written many times by infinitely more qualified people than me, we have enterd a major historical transitional period equivalent to the industrial revolution. And with it comes a lot of uncertainty which leads to fear. Which in turn leads to the political trends we’re currently witnessing. What’s bizarre is that anthropologists are ever more convinced that the determining factor in human survival and evolution has been co-operation and not Darwinian individualism.
Et voilà ! C’est tout de ma part. We live in interesting and bewildering times.
Truth be told, France (or the idea of France) has been under siege by free market fundamentalism for some time and there is a creeping neo-liberalism occurring (I would call it ‘neo-necrotism’ – a sort of creeping death of fraternity/society moving through Europe).
It is driven by markets – ramming down people’s throats messages of individual freedom via consumption but also offering the opportunity of individual differentiation from others too, achieved by what one consumes. Increasingly this sort of marketing comes from the US.
Yesterday I was waiting for an ambulance to attend an event I was organising and I could not get over the amount of different vehicles/cars etc., that drove past me – all sort of worn like accessories. There were so many permutations of the same vehicle each expressing the owners lifestyle choices.
I think that the more markets meet personal idealised needs, the more a large amount of people sort self define themselves by new parameters.
Look at why the iPhone is popular. Someone lost one of these yesterday at my event and as I tried to reunite it with its owner – everyone had one – 95%? By having one, everyone might feel equal to everyone else (the iPhones are not cheap are they)? I told everyone I had a windows phone and they treated me as if I had an affliction of some kind!! But having an iPhone as some sort of parameter of some form of social caste for groups of people? My daughter feels as though she is disadvantaged by not having one. As soon as people whipped out their iPhones to see if they had them they all started talking about them and sharing Apps and screensavers and stuff. It was like a iPhone party!
The point is that what brought people together in this case was not ideas or politics but ‘stuff’ – in this case iPhones.
I’m sure the answer for the Left anywhere is to take marketing more seriously and also behavioural economics. Making justified and real demands on people requires a more skilled approach to be found I feel in these two disciplines. Maybe instead of rejecting capitalism outright – if the Left took these two concepts more seriously it would become cleverer at pushing the right buttons with voters?
As for France we have to remember that it is a much bigger country than the UK and its rural life can still be quite hard. France has also used its immigration as a reserve of cheap labour which may have increased inequality.
The Left has always stood for liberty – but how can you argue for liberty when you have terrorists using it to kill people? How can you have credibility when the FN preach being harder on the communities from which the people who are doing the killing originate (which is Hollande’s biggest vulnerability)?
All I’m saying here is that people who live in fear do not think rationally. The growth of the Front Nationale is not based on anything but irrational fear. That is why some times turkeys DO vote for Xmas.
This is maybe why it is hard to push fraternity. Because people are not being rational. We cannot condemn people who live in fear because by doing so (1) we dehumanise them and therefore how can we say that (we) the Left represent them?
And (2) we miss the opportunity to reach them and win them over.
In other words the Left everywhere has to work harder and smarter. Just like the bastard neo-liberals have ben doing for 40+ years.
Mélenchon is a very good independant thinker who goes back to first principles and gives journalists a refreshingly hard time. Possibly that is not to his advantage.
Also he would have started by reforming the Constitution and winding down the ‘Presidential Monarchy’.
This should be meat and drink to the French intellectual tradition but I fear that that tradition has declined considerably. The discussion has become much more similar to Britain’s with a fear of radical change and with more simple solutions put forward. Perhaps that is why his lovely line ‘The rich are living beyond our means’ was not as impactful as it should have been.
I can conclude only that the decades of neoliberalism have made the French, like a lot of the rest of us, frightened. It is true that they have greater job security than either the UK or the rest of Europe but they have 10% unemployment and youth unemployment that is double that. It seems significant numbers are too fearful to let their decisions stray too far from the Devil they know.
I see the Left Рirrespective of vision Рhas repeated the mistake that robbed Jospin of the chance to run for the Presidency in 2002, namely, failure to agree on a single standard-bearer, given that M̩lenchon got 19.6% and Hamon got 6.3%,which combined would have put the single standard-bearer ahead of Macron. The Left fails more by strategic and tactical clumsiness and stupidity than by failure to have a fleshed out stance Рno one could accuse M̩lenchon of lack of clarity.
However, there is a bigger question, contained in your paragraph about society having a choice between two visions.
I’ve contacted you before about this, and with your permission, will rehearse here what I have said to you privately before.
Cameron’s adviser, and spinmeister, Philip Blond – deviser of the vacuous “Big Society” – is on record as saying that “the Banking crisis offers us a chance to sweep away the whole rotten arrangement of postwar politics”.
What this shows is that the Thatcherite and post-Thatcher Tories have reverted to their pre-WW2 mode of total opposition to the mutual society ushered in by Clement Atlee in 1945 – in the teeth of concerted opposition from pre-WW2 mode Tories and their voters – with the intention of sweeping away EVERYTHING that was built to improve the lives of the vast majority of Britons between 1945 and 1979.
If Thatcher could have (and plenty of the Cabinet Papers released in the last two years under the 30-year rule demonstrate the fact) she would have swept away the whole Atlee-arrangement in her first Administration, but she knew it would take a generation – at least – to inure people to her style of doing things, until it appeared “common sense”, while the Atlee-arrangement could be pictured as inefficient, unfair, and even rotten – because it was based on the “unfairness” of the rich having to support the poor, represented as the “hardworking” having to support the “lazy scroungers”.
What this actually was – and is – is a repudiation of the mutuality principle, whereby not only do the strong help the weak, but more importantly, there is both a sharing of burdens, and also a sharing of hope and success.
For the original, 19th century, mutual societies were such things as “burial clubs” and “building societies”, where everyone clubbed together to pay for X’s funeral, knowing when their turn came, the club would do the same for them, Equally, with a building society, X got his or her house built (building societies really DID build in the 19th century) on the understanding that he or she would held someone else get their house later on.
Without this mutuality principle, almost everyone would have had a pauper’s funeral in an unmarked grave, having spent their whole miserable lives in poor quality rented accommodation. It is deeply interesting the Paul Ryan, in attempting to steer Trump’s odious Trumpcare Bill through the House, actually described the mutuality principle – on which even the most capitalist versions of insurance are, of course, based, since insurance cannot otherwise work – as being unfair, showing an astonishing ignorance of this area of the finance industry.
Now the mutuality principle can be expressed in the phrase “I am my brother’s (and sister’s) keeper”, and it seems to me that the Labour Party needs to pick up on this idea, and frame this General Election not in terms of “Labour will do X, Y and Z better than/different from the Tories”, but instead as a stark choice between a society based on the mutuality principle + “I am my brother’s (and sister’s) keeper”, versus a Tory one of “dog eat dog”, and “you only get what you pay for” (all, including the hatred of Atlee’s “rotten” system, gloriously captured in Nicholas Ridley’s view on the Poll Tax: “The Duke will pay the same as the dustman. What could be fairer than that?”) which for the vast majority of people will be nothing, or even less than nothing, because it will come at a cost.
Jeremy Corbyn needs to be told to up his game by presenting this election as a stark choice between the mutuality principle” = “I am my brother’s (and sister’s) keeper” versus “dog eat dog”,and “you only get what you pay for”.
And I believe that IS the real choice. And I also believe that Corbyn has NOTHING to lose – given the dire polling data – from embracing a truly radical approach, even picking up on your view that he should promise to restore ALL the cuts made since May 2010, which can clearly be shown to have been at best counter-productive, and at worse seriously destructive.
I very strongly agree
I hope this might go on Progressive Pulse
Might you send to Sean?
Andrew
you can send to Progressive Pulse either by the form: http://www.progressivepulse.org/contact-us/
or by emailing
progress@progressivepulse.org
I look forward to your submission
Richard, if Sean reads this, and approves, he has my full permission to make what use of it he wishes, with the proviso that he gives its provenance – your Blog and my authorship. Thereafter, ideas have a life of their own – hopefully.
Andrew
I have now published the article at http://www.progressivepulse.org/general-election-2017/the-need-for-mutuality-in-the-economy-and-society-in-general/
I have made some very minor changes and added quite a few links. I hope it is OK.
I do recall that Philip Blond has accused Cameron of actually taking the Tories backwards for some time and I’m not sure mentioning him anymore is worth it.
To me Blond’s ideas were used to give credence and cover to bad and nasty ideas still inherent in the Tory party. Blond and Respublica were genuine but used – simple as that.
The big society was vacuous as an idea because the Tories (not Blond) were also at the time stripping money away from the economy and public services. The sort of society that Blond had envisaged needed lots of financial investment up front for it to work. With this bunch of Tories? No way.
The worst that can be said of Blond is that he has more in common with Anthony Giddens whose 3rd Way diatribe was used by the Blairites to launder Thatcherite thinking.
Blond is an idealist – also a reactionary. But it is the Tories who are responsible – not Blond.
Management guru John Seddon (Vanguard Consulting) can also be seen in that light reacting to the onerous performance management of the Blair government and its management of public services.
Seddon had an acquaintance with Respublica too. Seddon supported the idea of Cameron’s freeing public services from over management by Whitehall and having these services being more responsive to real need.
But if you read Seddon’s blogs and newsletters there is no way he approves of the Tory destruction of the NHS or any other public service and how Whitehall is dealing Universal Credit for example.
Like Blond, Seddon thought he was being taken seriously and wanted to help out of the pure frustration because of stupid management of public services by Whitehall, and like Blond had his ideas used by the Tories as a cover to do darker damage to the public sector (although being a very clever man, Seddon was not used as badly as Blond and I would actually employ him as an action man to improve public services if I was in government. He is an impressive individual whose ideas do work).
Seddon and Blonds’ concepts were used instead by the Tories to cut costs and debase the public sector and our economy.
Remember that the Tories are now masters of fake news.
They wanted a ‘Big Society’ but do everything to make it smaller.
They talk of hard working families but work us over ever harder and harder.
They say one thing and do another. They bend words and concepts to fit into their ideological holes to fool the voter.
Don’t blame Blond. Forget about him – he’s had his moment in the spotlight and he’s done (Seddon is still at it, trying his best to improve services the right way in my view).
It’s Cameron, Osbourne, Maude, Letwin, Crosby and now May and Hammond whose reputations need to be put to the sword by people like you who will be published.
‘’ Cameron’s adviser, and spinmeister, Philip Blond — deviser of the vacuous “Big Society” — is on record as saying that “the Banking crisis offers us a chance to sweep away the whole rotten arrangement of postwar politics”.
What this shows is that the Thatcherite and post-Thatcher Tories have reverted to their pre-WW2 mode of total opposition to the mutual society ushered in by Clement Atlee in 1945 — in the teeth of concerted opposition from pre-WW2 mode Tories and their voters — with the intention of sweeping away EVERYTHING that was built to improve the lives of the vast majority of Britons between 1945 and 1979.’’
In a nutshell.
To answer you question: a mass media almost completely dominated by reactionary propaganda, dumbing down the electorate and politics in general being completely discredited by scandals such as expenses fiddling and election expenses fraud.
macron result is certainly not good. The ex-Goldman Sachs man earned millions from mergers and acquisitions and defines himself as ‘neither left nor Right’-what the hell does that mean. The press call him a ‘progressive’ which is nothing more than a sign that the centre is ‘extreme’ (as Tariq Ali put it).
he is no more ‘progressive’ than the Lib Dems here who supported austerity and were loud advocates for it.
Worse: If we add up the support for the non left candidates we get an 80% roughly who support right wing politics with about 60% supporting a neo-liberal candidate. This is shockingly bad news and more evidence, in my view that neo-liberalism has still got a long way to go and has legs on it -we are maybe a decade or two from its demise.
Whya is this? My own surmise is that around Europe their is a sinkable body of each populace (I’d say maybe 30%) that is doing well to OK under neoliberalsim, combine this with a press that is largely right wing and a corporate captured news media the this 30% extends to those not doing so well but with no narrative to guide them.
I agree with Richard – it will end in tears but those tears will continue to flow as peoples’ lives are turned upside down; parents see their children without future and opportunity; people watch there parents get old and sick and fight for scraps of care from a collapsed care system; and the majority get siphoned to distraction by a rentier land and housing scam that the Left have not challenged vigorously.
Regarding Andrews comment and the historical perspective: I think the evidence points to Monetarism gaining traction under Healy as Chancellor which prepared the ground for Thatcher.
Yes, mass media, dumbing down, advertising, scandals, ubiquitous lying, fraud, spin masters, re-inventions, a technical revolution that has advanced far quicker than an intra-personal one, unchained neoliberalism, unequal resources, an extreme left wing that has really lost the plot in terms of what traditionalists deem appropriate for a healthy society, disaffected people, horrible drugs problems, crime, rising suicide and self harm, everyone questioning authority, a lack of trust in public bodies, media, the me first society in all its forms.
It’s all of the above and much more. It’s a hugely complex set of problems but let me put my head above the parapet and say what no-one wants to hear.
As far as I can see, we are living in a secular world in which there is a massive spiritual hunger that cannot possibly be addressed by politics alone. That is the crux of the problem and it can only be solved by an individual change of heart. However an individual comes to that is their own affair. (To some extent it used to be the job of community and religion) but everyone wants the freedom to plot their own course. That’s fine, but we should remember that we all need a map, especially the young.
Grace -I totally agree and I would say that this spiritual change IS the main issue and one that the most sophisticated econometrics could never capture. As you say, it cannot be forced or imposed in anyway. Like Richard, I am a Quaker and believe that change through freedom and knowledge is direction. The ‘freedom’ of the market turns out, in practice, to be the opposites because it is based on a form of 19th century utilitarianism that advocates a society of individuals pursuing personal gain. We in the 19th Century version 2.0
I suspect and hope I am wrong here, that it will take a colossal crisis and maybe war before this change is possible or at least a gross worsening of things -only then will the IMF/World Bank/ECB realise that t got it wrong.
I agree with both Grace and Simon. Society can only ever be as ‘good’ as the quality of its component parts. Millennia of wisdom (now miraculously and readily available on the Intrnet) provides us with all the self-help guidelines required. But, at some distant point in time, the frontal cortex of the human brain developed exponentially – giving rise to our mistaken idea that we can ‘think’ our way out of the problems we create, ignoring our spiritual heritage. Hence, politics, are only ever Band-Aid. Progressive politics are more effective Band-Aid than regressive, appealing more to our intrinsic nature than to our ego-driven, materialistic desires. But they are still Band-Aid.
As Satish Kumar – founder of the Schumachr College and the Small School – eloquently explained in this 2008 Guardian interview, the realists have failed so why not give the idealists a chance? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2008/jan/16/activists
However, as Simon says, I fear it will take yet another mega-crisis before enough people wake up. And based on historical experience – even that probably won’t be enough. How many more wars, deaths and social destitution does it take? Coincidentally, I’m belatedly reading Anthony Beevor’s gruesome ‘Stalingrad’. You’d have thought that would have been a loud enough wake-up call wouldn’t you?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers, every one
Oh when will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?
In the meantime, we imperfect individuals (i.e. me) seek to mitigate the worst excesses of human nature by advocating and supporting political constructs that are people and not financisally based. It ain’t a walk in the park, that’s for sure.
Looks like there has already been a significant amount of violence in France overnight. No doubt this sort of thing will continue for years now – there is relief that it looks as if Le Penn will not win but the underlying issues will remain and the core problems of neo-liberalism are not being grasped.
Hi Simon,
By the age of 11 or 12, I was quite well versed in unity consciousness. I went to a Catholic school and had quite a sophisticated understanding of what the gospel required of me. I knew then that unless I developed an ‘I-thou’ mentality, I needn’t bother to call myself Christian. But where are people getting their moral compass these days? I am not judging, rather asking an honest question. I am no different from anyone else. I deliberately did not have my son undergo a religious education thinking he should find his own truth, but at the age of 37, he doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to find it. Perhaps I do him an injustice but that’s what I see.
The sad thing is that we have the tools.
In terms of spirituality we are standing on the shoulders of giants. In one sense it has never been easier for people to access the perennial philosophy but there has to be first an admission that whatever we are doing is leading to no-where and secondly a real desire to find peace, which begins in the heart of each and every one of us.
Otherwise, we end up demonising others out there as the root problem when in actuality it always begins and ends with us. The problems seem insurmountable and war is a possibility, especially with Trump in the White House. It’s one that I don’t want to entertain for long. As a woman of faith I always have hope and prayer. There endeth the homily for today.
They are welcome here
The moral compass is in Andrew Dickie’s mutuality above. It may state Christian scripture but I’m sure anthropologists would suggest it is far from unique to Christianity.
I agree with that
And have tried to inculcate that in my children whilst leaving them free to decide on religion
Hi Grace
I have thoroughly enjoyed your contributions here. Should you wish to submit a more detailed post to Progressive Pulse on some of the themes you have touched upon then I’m sure we can fast track it.
you can send to Progressive Pulse either by the form: http://www.progressivepulse.org/contact-us/
or by emailing
progress@progressivepulse.org
Richard is a founding member of Progressive Pulse and we have a very similar ethos
I will be blogging it tomorrow
Hi Sean,
Thank you. I will take a look at the blog and get back to you on that.
Great BBC news at 10 tonight covering this.
Showing, as with Brexit and Trump, Macron has city elite support but La Pen has the provinces.
The markets and the media assume that Macron will win, in the same arogant way they dismissed Brexit and Trump.
Maybe the markets, the big business owned media and the opiniated city elites will be wrong again?
Yes why not a threesome?
Do you really want to wreak that mayhem in France?
My (French) husband queued for over an hour to vote last Sunday. He won’t be going back on the grounds that even if Macron wins, it will only be a case of postponing the inevitable Le Pen win for another few years. in the meantime, the best case scenario will be that nothing changes. I fear he’s right.