Ill Fares The Land

In George Orwell's 1984, Winston is given a book:

'[It] fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.'

Last night I finished reading exactly such a book, Ill Fares The Land by Tony Judt. It challenges the largely unspoken assumptions that have dominated economic policy in the Western world since the 1980s. The book brought some thoughts that have been nagging at me into focus. So rather than getting a reasonable amount of sleep last night, I wrote a political diatribe. It isn't polished or structured, but it's a sincere response to that remarkable book.


Why have we stopped imagining any alternative to free market capitalism? This is a question I've long wondered about, now re-awoken in my head. The simplistic communism/unfettered free-market capitalism diochotomy is frankly stupid. Surely humanity can manage more sophisticated thinking? Why haven't the interdependencies between markets and governments been acknowledged and studied?

How did the economic growth become an end in itself rather than a means to an end?

Have we forgotten the original purpose of government and the public sector?

Why are we as a society willing to tolerate huge and growing inequalities? High unemployment? Social exclusion and poverty? All in the name of economic growth and the ubiquitous totem of efficiency.

Why do we now value efficiency above everything else, without even knowing what it means?

Why can't the wealthiest countries in the world afford basic public services any more?

The coalition government are trying to dismantle the state, whilst telling us that we don't need it. If that is indeed the case, why has it persisted in being useful for hundreds of years? Why did our estimation of its value suddenly plummet in the 1980s?

Where has our faith in markets come from? Unregulated markets are as unsuccessful as over-regulated ones, just in a different way. Monopolistic exploitation vs so-called inefficiency - which do you prefer?

Economics has become akin to a religious mystery, with a priesthood of bankers telling us its too complex for us to understand or be included in. That's a lie. The basis of economics, the laws of supply and demand and the concept of markets, are very simple. Deceptively so, as they fail to reflect the ways that human beings, and the institutions and markets in which they interact, actually behave. I remember being taught about models of long term economic growth about six years ago and realising, with some amazement, that none of them stood up to scrutiny. They all made assumptions that are utterly ridiculous - infinite capital, for example. Yet we continue to put our faith in these models, because no-one has stood up and said, 'BUT THAT'S JUST NOT TRUE!' No-one does that because they're afraid of being told, 'Oh, you just aren't clever enough to understand.' (I tried to discredit these models in an undergraduate essay, but that was never going to shake the world to its foundations.)

The goal of a government should not be to promote economic growth above all else. Governments exist to protect their citizens, to create an environment of fairness, justice and equity for all. We are not dismissive of governments because these concepts are no longer relevant in the twenty-first century, but because governments appear to have lost faith in them. All debates on fairness are framed in purely economic terms, as if the only freedom anyone needs is the ability to make as much money as they can.

Public sector workers are increasingly being demonised as meddling, obstructive bureaucrats. At times I have felt guilty that I am paid by the public purse, because my job isn't absolutely essential to the continued functioning of the UK. Now I think, why the hell should I apologise? I do my job to make the world a better place, insofar as I can. The aim of it is to improve life in Cambridgeshire, by planning for the population's future needs now. Why are workers in the private sector being painted as morally superior, for working merely to enrich themselves and the shareholders in their companies? What is wasteful about working to improve the environment and people's lives? How did we as a society get to the point where a public servant is a drain on the country rather than an asset to it?

Why does this feel like a radical thing to question? Because at the moment it is. We have a cabinet minister who fears 'cigar chomping commies', a Prime Minister who thinks the state should retract and let mythical communities provide their own public services. The NHS and education systems are about to be dismantled. Government support in every single sector of society that you can imagine is being scaled back or withdrawn. The overriding goal of this government is to cut public spending, whatever the human cost.

At the moment, I think people feel a mixture of three emotions about this:

1. Ignorance ('none of this will effect me')
   
   
2. Vague satisfaction ('ha, those wasteful bureaucrats deserve a bit of a shock; after the recession we've had in the private sector, it's their turn to feel some pain')
   
   
3. Vague fear & unsettlement ('there are a lot of changes happening suddenly, I don't remember voting for this')

To 1, oh yes it will.

To 2, when the private sector suffers, private sector employees feel it. When the public sector suffers, everyone feels it. Because everyone uses public services, however much they unknowingly take them for granted.

To 3, now you're actually thinking.

I refuse to apologise for so-called bureaucratic wastefulness any longer. Why is it so much more reprehensible for the public sector to allegedly waste a little than the private sector to waste a lot? Which is better value to society - thousands of people employed doing so-called 'bureaucratic non-jobs' or a vast handout to a bank? The former do not meet economic definitions of efficiency, and their value cannot necessarily be quantified. But that does not mean that they're valueless and less justifiable than bailing out a huge private bank, which will then confirm its commitment to inequality by paying billions in bonuses whilst refusing to lend to small businesses.

The public sector has been on the defensive for thirty years, since it became the norm to measure success in purely economic terms. That is a stupid, wrong-headed way to assess whether services like a rail network, health centre, or environmental protection agency are operating well. We must learn to measure beyond money. There are many things too important to try and quantify so simplistically; health, education, and the environment, for example.

I do not think that the public sector is perfect and the private sector evil, just because I refute the notion that the public sector is always wrong. We need a more intelligent and nuanced view of both sectors, and of their interdependence.

Tony Judt ends with an entreaty that if you agree with him that something has gone very wrong with how we are governed, do something about it. He doesn't specify what, because that's a much harder question. Nonetheless, I feel galvanised and somehow vindicated. It's very frustrating to disagree with so many government policies, dissecting each into tiny pieces so as to describe how they are goes wrong. All current policies start from flawed economic and political assumptions, assumptions that have become so widely accepted since the 1980s that we have almost forgotten how to contradict them. We criticise high train fares, fear the threat of unemployment, feel vaguely guilty about our inefficiencies, and aspire vaguely to wealth as it is is supposed to make us happy. So little in culture or media contradicts this.

My generation needs to read Ill Fares The Land, it's well worth losing sleep over. We need to be reminded that a better world is possible, and that better is not a synonym for richer.

There is no profit in trying to build utopia. Attempting to make the world better for people requires thinking beyond market transactions, it demands imagination of a kind that modern life seems to suppress. The UK is at a turning point, with an anti-government government telling us to go away and govern ourselves. Perhaps this is a chance for our imaginations to awaken, for us to recognise what we really want from the state, and most importantly for us to challenge the notion that human beings exist to produce products and services more efficiently. That is what our economy and our political system are based on.

Does anyone really believe that to be true? Do you?