Life's Not Fair

The government's reliance on the concept of fairness is something I've been curious about. Since they talk it up so much, it would seem logical that there are some arguments, or even policies, to make the cuts seem fair. These haven't been easy to find, though, so I was pleased that Nick Clegg had apparently seen fit to explain by way of an article in the Guardian.

When I started reading this piece, I was expecting to be annoyed. I anticipated that Clegg would make some moderately specious arguments, based on carefully chosen statistics. I intended to refute these arguments. But as I read on, all I could think was, he's not even trying. The last three paragraphs of the article don't even have anything to do with fairness or inequality; they're merely a defence of the Liberal Democrats decision to pal around with Tories.

Mr. Clegg, I'm not just angry, I'm also disappointed. Let us examine what is being said here.

Clegg begins by drawing a line between 'old progressives' and 'new progressives'. He doesn't bother to define progressive, but one can only assume that he means someone who promotes progress and improvement. The old progressives, it seems, happen to be concentrated in the Labour party. They believe that the more the government spends, the more progress will be made.

This is dismissed as, 'clearly nonsense'. Yes, it is simplistic and I doubt anyone would disagree. In fact, I doubt Labour would disagree. Clegg then makes the jump to paying off the deficit more quickly being progressive in and of itself, making no mention of any possible implications that this might have. Paying off the deficit is being carefully partitioned away from cuts to public services. The former can be painted as an economic imperative; the latter scares people. Discussing one without the other is dishonesty by omission. Clegg's justification for deficit panic is the risk of higher interest rates on mortgages, more debt servicing, and a greater burden for taxpayers. Frankly I'm getting tired of these three excuses. There are a multitude of assumptions under there, the most significant of which is that austerity won't cause the same chaos here as Ireland is currently enjoying.

Clegg doesn't go into this. Instead, he proceeds to say that lifting people out of poverty isn't progressive. I am not exaggerating. Quote:

Old progressives see a fair society as one in which households with incomes currently less than 60% of the median were to be, in Labour's telling verb, "lifted" out of poverty. The weakness of this approach is that significant resources end up being devoted to altering the financial position of these households by fairly small amounts – just enough, in many cases, to get them above the line. But poverty plus a pound does not represent fairness.

Mr. Clegg is saying that putting significant resources into making a lot of people's quality of life better is wrong. How can you counter that sort of breath-taking arrogance? What is unfair about helping people to move above the poverty line? The whole idea of a poverty line is that below it quality of life is inadequate and basic needs cannot be met. I'm sure the people helped by the state to heat their homes, pay their rent, and clothe their children didn't stop to think, 'Gosh, how unfair it is that the state is helping me! Damn their unprogressiveness!'

After conceding that poverty is a perhaps little bit about money, Clegg makes the connection with quality of public services. These would be the same public services from which the government is chiselling around £80 billion of savings over the coming years. Will this increase the quality of services to the poor? Do I need to answer that?

The three areas of public spending identified as progressive, and therefore worthy of protection, are early years, schools and the NHS. That's it. From this we can infer that there's nothing fair about protecting people from crime, so cut the police. Or from injustice, so cut the courts and legal aid. Providing welfare payments for the disabled, sick and elderly isn't progressive at all, so they can all be reduced. There is apparently no fairness in allowing people a half-decent home, so cutting the housing budget by half is no problem. Higher education isn't progressive, so universities can be encouraged to raise their fees in order to make up funding cuts. Caring for vulnerable children isn't progressive, neither is protecting the environment, nor responding to fires, providing transport, community centres, flood defences, job centres, libraries, trading standards, and so on.

The title of the article implies that the government is concerned about inequality persisting down the generations, yet no examples are provided of ways in which entrenched poverty will be tackled. This argument that cuts won't be made to the NHS, schools or early years is the only one tried. Quite apart from the fact that close examination of the CSR undermines it, all that the government are doing here is freezing spend at the level of the previous regime. This is supposedly progressive, although increasing the level of state funding to that level during the Labour years wasn't.

Faced with this slight difficulty in his public services argument, Clegg veers off into social mobility. New progressives want to remove the barriers to social mobility. That's entirely laudable, but what is the government doing about these barriers? Apparently just the Pupil Premium, which will be paid for through reductions elsewhere in the education budget. It's yet to become clear how it will work, but importantly it is for school children. The social mobility of everyone older is left unmentioned.

Turning now to tax, Mr. Clegg states:

New progressives want to reshape the tax base fundamentally, towards greater taxation of unearned wealth and pollution, rather than of people.

How nice. I presume a carbon tax is forthcoming? A land tax, perhaps? Extra tax on second homes? Clegg must surely working on those? Very quietly, though, as all he mentions are the changes to income tax and capital gains tax. I don't disagree that those changes seem seem to benefit those on lowest incomes most, as the IFS analysis showed. What goes unmentioned is the most regressive tax of all, VAT, being raised to 20% next year. There is also no reference to the purpose of most tax: to redistribute money. Wanting to move away from taxing people implies that this is no longer an aim of the government. Why not? Are we back to the Victorian notion that every individual is responsible for their own level of wealth, and if they can't earn enough to feed and clothe themselves they don't deserve help? How is that in any way consistent with social mobility?

The article then ends with an extraordinary three paragraphs that read as an attempt to justify the Liberal Democrats sell-out to the Conservatives. According to Nick Clegg, coalition governments are inherently progressive, whatever they do. Why? Because of pluralism. What might look like a calculated assault on public services, a callous betrayal of the vulnerable, and an extremely risky economic gamble is in fact a beautiful example of pluralism and compromise. So Mr. Clegg tells us.

I for one am not remotely convinced.

Reading between the lines, these so-called new progressives seem to think that a smaller state is inherently fairer. That giving people fair life chances means leaving the worst off to help themselves if they can. That markets will sort out poverty without the state bothering to get involved. All of this is in my view incorrect. Greater state intervention doesn't automatically reduce poverty and inequality unless it's done carefully, but without it inequalities just deepen and persist.

I don't know what the new progressives believe, but just look at who they are. Nick Clegg and at least another 17 of the 29 who comprise the coalition cabinet are millionaires; 23 if you believe The Daily Mail. George Osborne, a chancellor who takes pride in personifying the cuts, has an inherited trust fund and personal wealth of around four million pounds. 20 of the 29 cabinet members went to Oxford or Cambridge. 25 are male, 28 are white. Other than the royal family, can you think of any group in this country less qualified to lecture about fairness?

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?