-Caveat Lector-
>From www.newstatesman.co.uk
Blair revives imperialism
The war over Kosovo (or "conflict" as western politicians insist
on calling it) is beginning to migrate to the inside pages of
the newspapers and to the backs of our minds. This was no doubt
inevitable; the late-20th-century mind has a chronically short
attention span. We have created a desert, called it a
humanitarian intervention, and soon we shall grow bored with it.
Yet the western leaders who have recklessly intervened in the
Balkans will soon face painful choices about the region's
future.
The war was launched on a false assumption: that Slobodan
Milosevic would quickly back down; indeed, that he wished to do
so and merely needed a few bombs as political cover against hard-
line Serbian rivals. When that premise proved unsustainable,
Nato switched to another false assumption: that Milosevic is
personally responsible for the atrocities in Kosovo and that,
once he is removed from power or forced to climb down, everybody
can go home and live happily ever after. The reality is
different. The west has taken responsibility for a region where
the ethnic groups show no signs of co-existing in peace. The
violence is now in Kosovo; it was formerly in Bosnia; it may
next be in Macedonia or Montenegro or even Serbia itself. We may
be bored; but there is not the remotest chance that Serbs,
Albanians, Macedonians, Hungarians and others will grow tired of
their ancient quarrels, any more than have the Catholics and
Protestants of Ulster. The west must therefore do one of two
things: police the region indefinitely, or preside over a series
of partitions and population exchanges. And if humanitarian
intervention is to become the norm, as Tony Blair suggests, the
west is likely to face similar choices in parts of Africa, the
Middle East, the Caucasus, and south Asia. Yet the western
liberal mind will not be comfortable with either alternative.
The first option - policing - means in effect the revival of imperialism, with the
liberal humanitarian's burden replacing the white man's burden. Imperial powers have
always been the most effective at suppression of ethn
ic conflicts, as the British were in India and Africa, the Habsburgs in central
Europe, the Russians in Caucasia. Just as western powers once took peace and
Christianity to savage people, so now (if we accept Mr Blair's l
ogic) they will take peace and western liberal democracy. Just as markets were once
secured for the East India Company, so now they will be secured for Microsoft or
McDonald's, since our belief in the civilising benefits
of western trade and capital is quite as strong as our ancestors'. But imperialism is
not usually a pretty thing. If policing is to be effective in areas of ethnic
division, it must be armed and it must be ruthless. Other
wise, the population will continue to fear the local police and
the ethnically based gangs more than they fear the outside
authorities, so that hatreds continue to build. The security
must also be offered without any fixed time limit; local police
officers will not act against their own ethnic group if they
think they would be left unprotected from revenge a year later.
These lessons, in different ways, can be learnt from both Bosnia
and Ulster.
The second alternative - partition and population exchange - was
most famously adopted by the British in India. It was clumsily
done, with horrific short-term results, yet the Indian
subcontinent, by international standards, has stayed mercifully
free of serious ethnic conflict. Population exchange has
happened in Europe, too, notably between Greece and Turkey in
the 1920s. Though never officially recognised, partition has
been the solution for Cyprus. Yet our minds recoil. Partition
and population exchange legitimise ethnic cleansing; worse, they
encourage it elsewhere and seem to undermine the principles of
tolerance and multiracialism that western societies have
struggled so painfully to establish.
So this is a choice between a rock and a hard place if ever
there was one. No wonder western leaders prefer not to think
about either too much. Is there, to coin a phrase, a third way?
Yes, though not a very glamorous or exciting one. It is simply
to re-state the UN principle that the proper occasion for war is
when international boundaries are breached; to keep out of other
people's internal conflicts, unless there is overwhelming
evidence that we can enforce a solution; to spend on food,
medicine, clothing and shelter what we now spend on bombs and
missiles; to give a warmer welcome to refugees who flee tyranny
or ethnic harassment; and to show our disapproval of odious
regimes by ostracising them and refusing to sell them arms or to
give them trading privileges. That option - which is more or
less what worked for South Africa - has the merit of being both
realistic and humanitarian.
New Labour's secret godfather
Charles Leadbeater discovers that Blair and Brown owe a
surprising debt to a Tory guru of the 1970s, but warns that they
must learn from his failures
He was Margaret Thatcher's Mad Monk, the high priest of the free
market, the first true believer who converted the future prime
minister to radical right-wing ideas. Keith Joseph's wild,
staring eyes made him the perfect target for demonisation by the
left in the 1970s; exorcism seemed more appropriate than debate.
Among the young Labour idealists who heckled him on university
campuses - protesters closed his meetings on four occasions in
1976 alone - there must have been many who are now at the heart
of new Labour. To this day, the mention of Joseph's name
probably makes their stomachs turn. It will disturb them even
more if I suggest that - even though ministers have probably
never read a word he wrote - Joseph was one of new Labour's
intellectual godfathers.
Joseph, who died in 1994, goes unmourned and is hardly
remembered even by his own party. Yet a huge amount of what has
become conventional political wisdom can be traced back to
Joseph's burst of intellectual energy in the mid-1970s, when he
was a lone voice announcing that the Keynesian postwar
settlement was, as he put it, "grinding into a dead end". In
that insight Joseph was well ahead of the pack. It is uncanny
how many of the themes of the new Labour government were
prefigured in his speeches and pamphlets (which are still
available from the Centre for Policy Studies). I do not wish to
overstate the case - Joseph would never have introduced a
minimum wage, the fairness at work proposals or the windfall
tax, for example - but consider the following.
First, Joseph recognised early that macroeconomic stability - "monetary continence" he
called it - was essential for growth and a prerequisite for the supply-side reforms
needed to improve productivity. This is precisely
the formulation now endorsed by Gordon Brown. In a hugely controversial speech in
Preston in 1974 Joseph argued that the use of demand-management to create more jobs
was stoking up inflation and delaying restructuring (a
line now echoed by Gerhard Schroder's advisers in Germany). The speech foreshadowed
the preoccupation that all governments have had ever since with inflation, yet at the
time it won Joseph opprobrium from all quarters (th
ough it was a speech later in the same year, which appeared to suggest that the lower
classes should have fewer children, that finally put paid to his chances of becoming
prime minister).
Joseph never believed that monetarism was a magic cure- all. "Monetary control is a
pre-essential for everything else we need and want to do; an opportunity to tackle the
real problems: labour shortage in one place, unemp
loyed in another; exaggerated expectations, inefficiencies, frictions and
distortions." Again, it could be Brown and Tony Blair arguing for macroeconomic
stability so that they can tackle training, education and investmen
t.
Second, Joseph attacked the "dependency culture" of long-term welfare benefits. In
1972 he said this had helped to create a "cycle of deprivation" in poor families. The
evidence was at best patchy, but the "cycle of depri
vation" mutated in the 1980s into Charles Murray's underclass and from there into new
Labour's advocacy of an active approach to welfare in which rights go with
responsibilities. Joseph told the Oxford Union in 1975: "We
spend more on welfare without achieving well-being while creating dangerous levels of
dependency." The line could have been lifted from a Blair or Brown speech about the
shortcomings of the welfare state.
Third, Joseph recognised that any government was severely circumscribed by the
international economy and that the pace of change was accelerating. Blair warns
European socialist parties to innovate or die: if you try to s
tand still in a world of rapid change, you end up going backwards. Joseph said much
the same. In Stranded on the Middle Ground, a collection of speeches published in
1976, Joseph talked about the Tories' mistakes in power
: "We were motivated by the desire to maintain stability at all costs. But stability
:can be won only by riding the waves, not by drifting with them. Stability entails
:controlling events, not surrendering to them. By sacri
ficing our ideas, our instincts, our better judgements to the quest for stability, we
ended up sacrificing stability to convenience."
Fourth, Joseph championed entrepreneurship, throughout society, to create wealth. He
did not believe in the market as an abstract mechanism that would automatically
reconcile supply and demand. As he put it in Conditions
for Fuller Employment in 1978: "The market creates the framework: but it is people who
act within it. The endless adaptation of production to consumption, of supply to
demand, is not achieved automatically. Resources do n
ot allocate themselves: they have to be organised by people, above all the
entrepreneur." The government's white paper on competitiveness, published in December
when Peter Mandelson was secretary of state for trade and in
dustry, speaks the same language.
Fifth, Joseph understood the limits of free markets in public services, especially
when he was a minister. At health and social security under Ted Heath, Joseph presided
over a larger increase in state spending than Labou
r had managed. Under Thatcher, as a highly interventionist education secretary,
particularly concerned about non-academic children, he started many of the
state-driven changes to schooling that we are still enacting today
: higher standards in reading, writing and maths; local management of schools; changes
:to teachers' employment practices. Further, he resisted the argument for "vouchers"
:touted by his friends on the right. According to A
ndrew Denham, lecturer in politics at Nottingham University (whose biography of
Joseph, written with Mark Garnett, will be published next year), this was not just
because he recognised vouchers would be politically unwork
able: "Joseph also had moral worries about vouchers. He recognised education was not
just a consumer good and that freedom of choice might lead some parents to make
choices that would disadvantage their children. He thoug
ht there was a case for some state paternalism in areas such as education."
Joseph's background may have played a critical role in this. He came from a wealthy,
established and extended Jewish family which, according to Denham, had a strong
tradition of public service and a sense of obligation to
those less fortunate. In practice, if not in theory, Joseph recognised the role of
the state in improving social welfare. He would not, when it came to it, press ahead
with the large-scale privatisation of either health
or education. If the Tory right studied what Joseph did, as well as what he said, they
might not have got themselves into their present mess.
What new Labour ingested from Joseph above all, albeit
unconsciously, was the recognition that the postwar consensus,
and everything that went with it, was gone for ever. In
Monetarism is Not Enough (1976) Joseph warned against "this man-
made chaos, the divorce of work from production, of cost from
benefit, of reward from performance . . . we are moving into the
make-believe economy where we make motor cars that no one wants
and put three men on a train . . . when only one is needed. This
is going through the motions, keeping up appearances, window-
dressing a fraudulent facade."
What are we to make of this unexpected contiguity between
Joseph's writings and new Labour's themes? Many would see it as
further evidence of how much new Labour has "caved in" to the
right. That is far too simplistic. Joseph, like Blair and Brown,
espoused a politics imbued with a strong ethic of responsibility
and public service. He, like them, came from a religious
background. He, like them, saw himself in a tradition of British
radical reformers, who entered politics to challenge the
conventional wisdom of their own parties and above all to
translate ideas into action.
But Joseph is significant not just for his articulation of
themes that still concern politicians 20 years later, but also
for how he failed. He was a politician who took ideas seriously.
That meant he was, as Denham puts it, an intellectual politician
rather than an instinctual one. He appeared so cold, logical,
analytical and detached that he lacked any feeling for those who
lost out from his policies. The politician of ideas became an
ideologue. By the end of Joseph's career, Thatcherism was not an
analysis of society and a set of remedies, but simply whatever
Thatcher did. Joseph stopped asking big questions and instead
became chief defender of the faith. The Joseph of 1974 would
have railed against the monetary incontinence of the Lawson boom
of the late 1980s but instead he passed over such failings
mutely. And the lack of feeling eventually put people off not
just him but Thatcherism as a whole.
Therein perhaps lies another lesson for Blair. A government
needs independent thinkers to challenge them and keep them
honest. Political parties start making mistakes when they are
apparently at their most successful, when their view of the
world goes unchallenged. Joseph was at his most potent as a
voice in the wilderness, in the 1970s. Fifteen years later, at
the height of his power, that capacity for insight had deserted
him.
Most important of all, he was never able to marry his
interventionist reflexes as a minister with his free-market
ideas and rhetoric. Had he been able to do so, he might have
bequeathed a Conservatism capable of blending the best of the
public and the private. The historic failing of Conservatism in
the 1980s and 1990s was that it was incapable of such a
marriage. New Labour's starting point, therefore, was Joseph's
failure. And new Labour's task now is to show how a market
society, which prizes choice, innovation and competition, also
needs strong civic institutions, an effective public sector and
a sense of common purpose.
A<>E<>R
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