I have pondering on why the Green New Deal is making more progress in the USA then it has done here.
There is, of course, the AOC factor. This may explain a large part of it.
It's also worth saying given that the US GND is based on the UK version there is no reason for the UK exponents to beat ourselves up.
There are, however, differences. And I think they are worth highlighting.
First, the US GND has captured the imagination of young, main party, politicians. It may have been noticed by young-ish Greens in the UK, but for the equivalent to have happened would have required Momentum to take this issue on. They have not. They have taken on identity politics, renationalisation and some aspects of anti-austerity policy instead. Those may be important. But they do not save the planet.
Second, the US politicians have taken risk. Very few politicians in our major parties do that in the UK. Almost all are followers now, and Brexit has only made that worse.
Third, left of centre economists in the UK do, on the whole, remain wedded to neoliberal ideas. Too many believe monetary policy has a role. Bizarrely, far too many want to give the Bank of England a central role in economic management, when that guarantees policies designed to appease the right and ensures a lack of democratic control. And worse, far too many of them will not accept that MMT accurately describes the money creation process and so liberates government to pursue fiscal policy.
Why full employment is a risk not worth taking to many on the left remains baffling to me. Instead, these supposedly left of centre economists argue about where the value of money is to be explained in MMT as if we were still on the gold standard, money had any intrinsic worth and fiat currencies had not yet been created when we have had them for at least 48 years. This is deeply frustrating.
Fourth, as Brexit shows, somehow we in the UK do not believe that anything really bad, like global warming, can ever happen. That's because we believe that ‘they will sort it out'. Except that ‘they' can't and ‘they' won't unless we act now. And that is just not appreciated as yet.
And of these four, which is the easiest problem to solve? It has to be the third. The outright opposition of left wing economists to taking risk on delivering full employment is to me the most surprising and baffling of the issues in debate in which I am engaged at present. When the stakes are so high, and when everything else has so obviously failed, why are they so wedded to maintaining the neoliberal status quo?
For the sake of the planet it is time to take a risk on fiscal policy, government control of the central bank, spend and tax, full employment, the power of tax to control inflation and the Green New Deal. This is the time for risk-taking. We have no choice.
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[…] hope that a much more radical policy alternative will be put to the conference as a result. For the second time this morning I have to note the curse of supposedly left of centre economists who are actually dedicated to the […]
Our MP is young, black and Conservative ; Eton and Oxford educated and spent ten years as a corporate lawyer with some big city firms. He supported Mrs. May’s deal and took some flak for it from local Leavers. He toes the party line and like his longstanding predecessor won’t engage with me directly never mind I am one of his constituents . My wife grew up poor in Liverpool. When her father ( a prominent union man ) was sick one Christmas she remembers Bessie Braddock – a well-known Liverpool MP in the fifties – coming round to their house with a chicken for the family’s Christmas dinner. Such a basic level of engagement with the people they are meant to serve is unthinkable to our Westminster politicians who see themselves as part of the professional class of bankers, lawyers and techies. Indeed any numbers of them have backgrounds in these areas. So ‘ expertise ‘ that is to say ‘ process ‘ is what they know. This has little or nothing to do with politics, especially radical politics which by its nature is grubby and doesn’t fit with the elevated professional class they belong to. And so we come to Brexit . They are all at sea because it is demanding something they don’t have – real political skill . And courage , a moral virtue . This is the same in the US only more so, but there the tide is turning hence the rise of Sanders and AOC and others. But here – nothing .
As Caroline Lucas says in today’s ‘Guardian’:
‘Parliament must now declare a climate emergency. It must debate climate change regularly. It must develop the laws necessary to implement a Green New Deal and climate-proof every piece of legislation. And the government must ensure climate change is a priority in all departmental and cabinet decision-making. But government and parliament will only act if we tell them to. So talk about climate breakdown — to your friends, your family, your neighbours and your colleagues. Join the school strikes. Join peaceful direct action initiatives like Extinction Rebellion. Write to your MP. Write to your councillors. Write to your banks. This is an emergency. Let’s treat it like one.’
But, as she also reminds us, only forty MPs turned up last week at the debate in the Commons about climate change. I’d asked my MP to attend; I don’t believe he did.
I’ve joined Extinction Rebellion and intend to attend their next demo in Southampton. I’ve bought and read ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ by David Wallace-Wells (something of a disappointment – I’d have preferred a less journalistic approach, but then the man is deputy editor of ‘New York’ magazine). I’ve been aware of climate change since 1962, when I read a French textbook on ‘Le Monde Tropicale’ by Pierre Gourou, who referenced 1930s French climate studies in the Sahel – part of the then French Empire. Even then, there was the hint that these changes were the result of man’s use of fossil fuels, for which the UK had been the pioneer.
How are we to galvanise the adult population of this country – who, without knowing it, are the ‘they’ who must act immediately? Can someone point out that Storm Freya followed the warmest February days ever recorded – and was as much a result of anthropogenic climate change as those days were?
The young know what is happening – what will happen – and are discussing some possible solutions. But by the time they’re adult, it may be too late to act in order to prevent disaster. And those solutions are available at this moment – a carbon tax; the political apparatus to aggressively phase out dirty energy (and do I hear you cry ‘Macron! Les gilets jaunes!’ – he was trying to tax one of the correct dirty fuels, wasn’t he?); a shift in agricultural practices; public investment in green energy and carbon capture.
Will any of these be adopted? I look at today’s politicians, in all countries, and realise that there are few who have either the knowledge, the nerve or the will to grasp the radical solutions.
How do we bring the message to the front of today’s agenda?
By continually shouting it out – as Caroline is
[…] put our old economics behind […]
It may sound simplistic but I suggest the Blair-Mandelson ‘New Labour’ project set progressive thinking back decades. It managed to achieve large majorities on a Tory-lite ticket, akin to Clinton’s triangulation strategy, thus further reinforcing neo-liberalism. Of course, perversely that’s why it was so successful at the time. The chickens had yet to come to roost.
I would also add that US academia appears to be more vibrant and diverse than one might suppose. Although the neo-cons successfully financed the mainstream academic agenda since the 1970s, including of course economics 101, there still seems to be more high profile diversity such as we’ve seen from the University of Missouri—Kansas City. Could a Randall Wray or Stephanie Kelton have emerged from the LSE or Sheffield (for example)? Another example might be the relatively high profile of someone like Richard Wolf, an Ivy League Marxian economist from Yale, Stanford and Harvard! You’re close to the academic world …. why do you think new ideas seem to take longer to blossom here?
Finally there’s the media issue. Although just 6 corporations own/control most of US MSM (https://www.webfx.com/data/the-6-companies-that-own-almost-all-media) there is still more diversity there than here – and an increasingly vibrant independent sector both on-line, broadcast and print. While here the choice is even more limited with disproportionate influence in the hands of Murdoch, Harmsworth, the BBC & ITV. The UK is, and always has been a marketing person’s ‘dream’ economy, with 60+million consumers crammed into a small space, cost-effectively brain-washed (I mean influenced) with good national distribution networks. It’s why multiple retailers and branded goods have been more successful here than in any other comparable marketplace.
It seems to me the socio-economic & political trajectory of the UK has become stultified over the past 40 odd years and it will take a new generation to activate new ideas as the status-quo increasingly fails to resolve the problems affecting their quality of life. I have little faith that the current LP is a change-agent in that respect. Politically only the Green Party and the SNP have the credentials but under FPTP their voice nationally is effectively unheard – especially in view of the issues mentioned above. But as the frog is gradually being cooked change may come from unexpected quarters. As always, hope springs eternal.
Definitely coffee time. Barista!
I suspect that there is a fair amount of uncertainty and fear amongst substantial numbers of MPs. A lot of that is Brexit driven but a lot also fuelled by worries of a teetering old order. The former Labour MPs in TIG, I suspect, are just as concerned about maintaining neoliberalism as they are about Labour’s admittedly shoddy stance and performance over Brexit.
In an ideal system economic and social policies develop with experience and results, and with that it has to be expected to encounter dead ends. Sadly, we don’t get too close to that. What we see is a dogmatic approach where policies are pursued irrespective of results and the only learning and adaptation that occurs is how to more effectively pull the wool over our eyes. How many failed outsourcings and privatisations do there have to be for a change in direction. (On that though it depends of the definition of failure. The services that failed the public did not necessarily fail those taking the rent.)
Unfortunately there is far too much at stake for the tiny minority that control and influence our MPs, by the time minds are changed in a meaningful way, paving the way for the GND, it may be too late for the economy and the climate.
That’s no reason not to try
Indeed
Forgot to mention that it’s taken all this time for a formal MMT Macroeconomics text book to be available. A small but important step in the right direction – (https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/Macroeconomics/?K=9781137610669.
At the book launch even he said that it’s going to take a long time before MMT becomes the accepted macro-economic wisdom. The march of a thousand kms ….. Thank heaven for Caroline’s inspiration and leadership which we should all support and endorse in any way possible at any level.
One last item (promise). As further evidence – if more is needed – of how economically illiterate (corrupt?) the current Tory administration is, Bill’s post this morning spells it out – http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=41710. The government is guilty of criminal neglect of its citizens.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post but ask myself why the Left feels that what it did believe in carries no water anymore with the public?
My view is that the Left believes it was defeated by those ideas you advocate. The voter rejected full employment apparently.
However, if we look back, the issue as Adam Curtis points out was that when the Arab-Israeli war kicked off, the West just happened (under I think immense US pressure considering the UK’s history up to that point with the young Jewish nation) to side with the Israelis even though the West had become dependent on oil being produced by Muslim dominated countries.
So the oil shock that arose from that created immense economic and social turbulence that started to unravel what ever post war gains had been made with regard to social and industrial policy.
And who was there to conveniently offer an answer? Von Hayek. Milton Friedman and others of course. That’s who.
So as I see it, rather than discuss, accept and admit that a geopolitical mistake of huge proportions had been made, the West instead started to blame its predicament on its welfare policies, industrial policies etc.
The West lied to its people. That is what it did and still does. It fucking lied and hides history even to this day under Neo-lib economic dogma.
And the consequences of that are still with us today, in terms of our relationship with the Middle East and issues with the expansion of Israel (and my view is that the West should have been nothing but neutral and supportive of peace between both sides – never mind arming them!!!).
But at home we still feel it today because even the Left does not fully understand the ‘blame games’ of the oil shock period – that looking after people was something a Government could no longer afford to do because those policies were causing inflation – not oil.
The fact that the oil producing nations had ripped up their post war agreement to supply us with cheap oil. And lets be honest – by getting involved in that conflict as we did, we had actually ripped up that agreement too or taken it for granted.
Of course, there were other things happening too – for example why did successive British governments of the 1970’s tolerate financial asset stripping by people like Tiny Rowlands, Jim Slater and James Goldsmith that literally hollowed out our family ran firms and left their workers to be fed by the State in the name of efficiency and making money?
Why could British Government – Left or Right not protect its citizen workers?
Yet we were told that these firms were just inefficient and part of Britain being the sick man of Europe. Our industrial relations were backward and when a bright red headed female minister in the Left Labour party tried to fix things between unions and employers she was ignored. A decision that led right to Margaret Thatcher – a not so bright German hating Neo-liberal extremist matriarch Prime Minister. The first of many to come it seems judging by Mrs May.
No wonder a generation of people who had had children like me were taught that the Government was not there for you. But especially a Left wing Government – who said they cared but where strangely ineffectual or just to timid to really change things.
If the Left really wants to gain traction, it has to go back in history and if not right these wrongs, make sure that the real stories are understood and told. Only then can they begin to see that concepts like full employment were not the problem and rediscover them and take them up with renewed vigour and purpose.
It is not just the Russian Communists who redacted history and its people. So did the West concerning its march towards a Neo-lib nirvana.
All I see in supposedly Left leaning politicians these days is that they are old dinosaurs who think a Marxist revolution is still possible (sorry – no!) and other more recent thickos and Neo-liberal Kool Aid drinkers like Umunna and others who think that the Labour party was created only in a reaction to Thatcher from around 1982 or thereabouts.
And for those of you who think I might be being anti-Semitic and blaming the Jews, I can tell you I am not.
I am condemning the West’s approach to the Arab-Israeli war which was and still is one of the most stupid acts of self harm I’ve ever seen in international relations. The myths and lies it gave birth to continue to exert a strangle hold over progressive thinking. And we all pay the price for it today.
Sorry for the anger.
Anger is permitted here
Anger has to have an outlet
Having an understanding of investing the confirmation bias and the anchoring bias falacys of the brain are at work here. Attributing lots of time and effort to neo liberal theory that is not the right horse for the current course is hard to let go.
May I suggest as a solution that like good investors do with a dearly held share that they imagine that they do not own any stock or in this case theory. Then with that blank canvas assess all stocks and theorys afresh.
This may help those old and in influence to not have the carpet pulled from beneath them but learn to dance on the moving carpet of understanding.
The brain standard misfunction is to retro select from the past what worked seeing only what one wanted to see. The only solution is to write down the reasons for making the decision plus and minuses on paper when you make the choice. Then you can review those facts later.
I like that
You’ll probably shout me down but I seem to remember Rebecca Long Bailey making encouraging noises about Green Policies a short while back. The Labour Party has been banging on about the NHS for all the time that Corbyn has been in charge but all you seem to do is criticise them. I don’t think you would be happy if the Labour Party fully embraced the GND but called it something else. Give some credit where it’s due. As Bill Mitchell wrote today, Austerity has done more damage than Brexit is forecast to do. You don’t win a war with one battle.
Let’s leave Bill aside
I give full credit on the occasions Labour gets things right
As I do all parties
And I reserve the right to criticise
As I do all parties
Is it not the case that some left of center economists and politicians such as John McDonnell follow Marxist theory. Since Marx based his theories on the economy of his time and economic policy was wedded to the gold standard for many years, not only is the basis of their thinking out of date, it is no longer appropriate. This from of thinking and the acceptance of established monetary doctrine – “there is no public money” has become an entrenched belief system which prevents them from seeing the change MMT points out?
Not seeing the wood for the trees seems once again to be an apt description.
Geoff
But where is the new thinking from the Left? I still think that Marxism’s analysis of the faults of capitalism have come to pass. But where to go from there? How to make things better? Certainly not through a revolution of some sort or sitting their waiting for the voter to see the light.
My view is that Labour should be crawling all over this blog and Progressive Pulse for new ideas. But they do not appear to be. Why?
Because they have not gone back in time to slaughter the myths and lies that came about from around the time of the oil shock. It would also help them to see what they are up against too. The consensus in politics seems to be now that unemployment is a natural state of affairs and that nothing can be done about it because Government cannot afford to and when it tried it causes inflation. That alone comes from the oil shock myth of the 1970s. And in doing down Government we are forgetting how to govern.
Added to this we must also talk about the Third Way – the so-called ‘beyond Left & Right’ argument – the apparent depoliticization of politics and the end of the appeal to collective political sentiment under these banners.
The end of the tension between Left and Right is a problem. If managed skillfully this tension can produce workable compromises or at least policies that are inclusive and fairer because it is accepted that the push-pull element in politics has the right to exist and should exist – it is normal.
If modern politicians think that their job is only to agree with each other and then walk off into the sunset holding hands then I want to know whose version of life we will be living with?
It leaves politicians just playing with things at the margins of policy – tinkering – but nothing really changes and it is the progressive side that loses most ground to me as we go on to endure huge changes in capitalism and the needs of the environment that require more robust action very urgently.
This is why we have inaction – because (1) we are still living in the 1970s (anything the Government does will just make things worse) and (2) because even if we wanted to, we can’t because as Chantal Mouffe has pointed out, the Third Way is actually an over optimistic psychology that reinforces confirming consensus (dialogue and deliberation) over challenge and change.
The Third Way is the politics of the culture of contentment writ large. You could also see it getting traction because of the fall of the iron curtain when perhaps societies everywhere thought that one idea and totally trumped another and the argument was over as to what was the best system. And maybe western capitalism was the answer until greed and corruption set in.
But we have now is the formation of a burgeoning mono-culture – there is only one way – privatisation, globalisation, deregulation, bearing down on the worker etc.
The only way to break this impasse is for the answers to be more radical – as has been suggested on this blog and elsewhere.
MMT, GND, UBI – none of these are communist or Marxist ideas but they are truly radical in this time but also just bloody sensible.
And it is the UKIP and potential disaffected nationalists that need these policies the most and I can only see their ranks swelling unless someone grips these ideas hard and takes them forward.
Are any of the Labour Party members here engaging with the policy forum and consultation? I got a email on Feb 25th inviting me to join in.
I looked and couldn’t find much on the Green New Deal, MMT or country by Country reporting. Maybe we should try raising these issues?
Agreed @EAS
“So as I see it, rather than discuss, accept and admit that a geopolitical mistake of huge proportions had been made, the West instead started to blame its predicament on its welfare policies, industrial policies etc.”
@ Geoff
“Since Marx based his theories on the economy of his time and economic policy was wedded to the gold standard for many years, not only is the basis of their thinking out of date, it is no longer appropriate.”
Probably mostly – but not entirely I’d suggest: http://www.progressivepulse.org/economics/does-mmt-trump-marxist-theory
Thank you Peter for your support.
The Left has to unlearn the false narrative of history if it is to be effective in the future. It is a narrative that it did not understand at the time (read Dennis Healey for example about the IMF loan) but has no excuse to ignore and challenge subsequently.
To lose control of one’s history is to give away any hope of control or say of one’s future.
We need a new group of people to begin something from scratch based on what actually happened. Not what the Neo-libs provided.
How much does it cost to create a new political party?
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