It’s a myth that the ‘left behind’ were ignored
writes Clare Foges
She continues: 'The mantra that Brexit is the fault of an establishment that marginalises the poor is a complete distortion of the truth.'
She proceeds to give us an article that delivers a complete distortion of the truth.
It begins:
“Repetition is the mother of conviction. Repeat something often enough and we believe it to be unquestionably true. So it is with the narrative that Brexit is down, in large part, to a high-handed and callous establishment’s neglect of the “left behind”. Those in poor northern constituencies and bleak coastal towns were left trailing in the gold-flecked dust thrown up by the golden chariots that bore the wealthy, the Londoners, the elite onwards — throwing back their heads to laugh heartily and pour some more Bolly down their gullets while failing to give a monkey’s about those in their wake.”
That's caricature, and not the charge. But, as Schopenhauer said, “extremes magnify the truth.” Stating things at extreme makes refutation easier. But even the extreme here contains a large truth. In fact, the truth is much worse. It's not that 'the elite' – I prefer a clear class analysis to such vague terms of 'elite' and 'mass,' 'rich' and 'poor,' 'the people', typical trademark liberal evasion – doesn't 'give a monkey's' about the poor and powerless, they openly loathe them, abuse and bully them. Even under a Labour government we had 'the shop a scrounger' TV and radio commercials, getting people to spy on their neighbours and shop them to the authorities. No, the poor and the unemployed were not ignored, this is all too true.
You can read the rest of the article if you have the stomach, listing all the good things governments did for the poor and the unemployed. Having been involved with these things first hand, having known the people involved in running them and on the receiving end of them, I know for certain it was all a cosmetic exercise to make it look as though governments were doing something. It was no substitute for an effective industrial strategy – which is what I was arguing for, fresh from my economics masters programme – and was designed to avoid having to do something difficult like devise a strategy. Foges then goes on to say it was all hopeless anyway, and revitalising these areas was and is like getting water to flow uphill. As we all knew – the poor and the unemployed, all those who most certainly have been 'left behind' by globalisation were labelled as hopeless and put on a scrap heap.
The article is an op-ed in the Times. Clare Foges is David Cameron's former speechwriter. That should tell you straight away about the apologetics going on here.
I should quote at length from the article, because it is behind a paywall. I don't intend a point by point rebuttal. It is an exercise in apologetics. The 'elite' and the 'establishment' have been caught out big time as serial abusers of the poor and the powerless. They just want to plead not guilty when the pitchforks start ploughing in. But note what Forges is really saying – there is no alternative to global capital and nothing can be done for the victims anyway. I'm sorry, but I'm not prepared to let that apology lie there, because these characters have not left things there but have gone after the poor and the unemployed with a vengeance, blaming them personally for structural and institutional causes they know fine well to exist. These people are cowardly and vindictive and should be called out as such. I wouldn't advocate pitchforks, though. The problem with the vengeance of pitchforks is that people with a grievance can tend to go and impale any available target, the easier the better (don't set me off on Brexit). The problem with 'the system' is that you can't just stick a pitchfork in it to encourage it to perform better. It carries on regardless. So any available persons will have to do. That never ends well.
Foges quotes a 'left-leaning' newspaper that sees the Brexit vote as evidence of a split between “a rapacious elite that has plunged Britain into economic and social crisis on one hand, and a majority that suffers the consequences on the other.” There is a split, then, between an out of touch establishment and those 'left behind' by globalisation.
Foges language is somewhat .. contemptuous and dismissive. 'And so it goes on … We are told endlessly ...” OK, repetition doesn't make a statement true. So avoid the repetitions and actually engage in some analysis. We don't get any analysis, of course. Straight away Foges goes into dismissal.
“We are told that it is a wake-up call to Westminster finally to take seriously the concerns of those in Wakefield and Wigan. Those peddling these lines may feel they are being progressive for empathising with the grievances and anger of the 'left behind', but they are doing our fractured country no favours by inflaming grievance and amplifying anger.'
I'm from St Helens and know Wigan well. I can tell Clare Foges that the concerns of the people in these areas have not been taken seriously by government. I can also say that over the years I have done more than 'peddle lines' but engaged in systematic economic analysis of how we have ended up in this predicament and detailed economic strategies and programmes to overcome this all too predictable situation. (I was doing this in the early to mid 1990s, details below). The country is fractured for structural and institutional reasons, and Clare Foges was complicit with governments who rationalized all these divisions and iniquities. In fact, she remains complicit, blaming those giving voice to legitimate grievance and anger of being responsible for division. I and many more argued the case in the most rational terms going back to the 1980s. We were ignored by governments that had sold the sovereignty of parliament and people out to capital and finance. That's the issue.
“What is irresponsible is the blithe assertion, made over and over again, that the poorest have suffered and the deindustrialised towns have been shuttered not because of globalisation or automation but because those in government sat on their hands.”
Who has said this? Governments haven't “sat on their hands” at all. Governments, so reticent and permissive with respect to transnational finance and corporate power got off their backsides and were very aggressive in putting the poor to work, or putting them through one hopeless and irrelevant welfare to work scheme after another. The charge is not that governments did nothing, but that governments were openly punitive and vindictive against the poor.
Foges is so out of touch – or merely writing to rationalize the couldn't give a monkeys attitude of those with a vested interest in the status quo – that she actually solicits praise for these government schemes.
“Of course there is serious poverty and inequality in our country, but over the past 20 years in particular governments have tried a thousand different policies to reduce them.”
That's a joke, a bitter one, too, as any of the poor and unemployed who have been party to these policies can tell you. They were cosmetic exercises to make it look like governments were doing something when in fact they were doing squat. I argued this at the time. These things were substitute industrial strategies masking government sellouts to international capital and finance. It was a waste of time and money that merely underlined the expense and ineffectiveness of government, precisely what the free market neoliberal right wanted. It was all part of the process in which government and politics was shown to be useless and bureaucratic, bringing about a diminution of the public imagination. I was in the belly of the beast. These are truths that come direct from the war front.
Foges is from the other side:
“There was New Labour's plethora of social programmes, from the national minimum wage to Sure Start. These were followed by the Conservatives' national living wage, the pupil premium for schools in deprived areas and the triple lock on pensions.
When George Osborne was the Chancellor he got more tax out of the rich than any of his predecessors, with the wealthiest 1 per cent paying 27 per cent of all income tax. Overall, the tax burden on the wealthy has trebled since the Seventies – all while the establishment has supposedly been rigging the system against the poorest.”
At which point I have to say that Clare Foges is right. But she is engaged in masking the real truth, the real source of division, inequality, grievance, and anger: it is not that governments rig the system against the poor, but that the system as such is a rigged game. The problems are structural and institutional, which is why all the liberal tinkering over regulations and tax regimes can achieve so much but no more. Anti-government neoliberals will say the same, demanding a free market, free trade regime, the state merely holding the ring. I oppose such a thing politically. But liberalism is a busted flush. I don't waste time with a liberal institutional reformism but instead argue for a root and branch structural transformation. It's not liberalism; it's called socialism.
In a careless passage, Foges admits the truth – there's little a national government can do in the face of international capital. Well, hello, capital doesn't jump at the bidding of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a lesson we ought to have learned the hard with the example of Harold Wilson's Labour governments of the sixties.
“The point is that governments of all colours have tried hard to bring economic life to the 'left behind' towns, but often they are pushing water uphill. The age of heavy industry is over. The jobs have gone overseas.”
Note a logical contradiction there – in one sentence the age of heavy industry is declared over, in the next sentence the industrial jobs are declared to have gone overseas...
“The places are hollowed out. Internet shopping and out-of-town supermarkets have killed their high streets. Ambition is dead. Foreign investment is not flooding in. No sensible government wants simply to pump public money into these places to create Potemkin villages where most people are dependents on the state and no real wealth is created. They want regeneration that is real and sustainable. Achieving that is hard and sometimes, sadly, impossible.”
Sat here, in 2019, having spent a lifetime arguing for social and economic alternatives, and for a genuine regeneration as against the degeneration involved in economic development models of the 1980s and 1990s, I just despair. Foges has just described my own home town. It limps on dependent of government grants, the people dependent on benefits, ambition at all levels disappearing along with all hope of a future somehow better than the present.
I was in the running to have a park named after me a few years ago. It was for unsung heroes who had made some unheralded contribution to society and culture. I lost out to someone who nominated herself and who had done nothing but survive St Helens. She would make no demands on St Helens council, no demands on the people, no demands for money to develop the area. No hope, no ambition, just a bucket of crabs. I have detailed the problem and argued at length as to what can be done to resolve it. It's work I have done for decades. Hard work, painstaking research and analysis. It has made no difference and had no impact. The same old useless lines and apologetics.
I'll put a couple of references here to what I have said and done over the years. For the record I and many others saw these government schemes for what they were from the very first.
(The last parts of this are the most pertinent to the issues raised in this blog)
Having had direct experience of these schemes, and knowing people who have been on the receiving end of them, I can tell her to shove it, it's self-serving nonsense. I don't need to go through and engage in a war of words between political commentators. I don't need that mediation. I can deliver truths straight from the horse. The commentariat are an irrelevance, a feeble joke.
The mess we are in is down to liberals selling out to the global forces of capital – a long line connecting Thatcher to Blair to Cameron. The same in other countries. It's not a pretty sight. In fact, the political and social world has turned very ugly indeed. Liberals can do one of two things. They can clear off in the hope of avoiding pitchforks. Or they can lie through their teeth. The latter comes naturally to them, although it is another form of cowardice.
It’s a myth that the ‘left behind’ were ignored, claims Foges.
Let's first of all note the defence that is launched here against a false position.
No one is claiming that the poor and the unemployed have been 'ignored.' The claim coming from, or on behalf of, the 'left behind,' is not so much that they have been 'ignored' but have had their claims and concerns overriden as they and their communities were 'left behind.'
'Left behind' they most certainly have been. And the response from the liberals of the right and of the left has been that there is no other game in town. To apply the earlier phrase of Margaret Thatcher, 'there is no alternative.'
There are alternatives. I cut my teeth on destroying such 'false fixities' in my history classes. Training historians to see through TINA was the big theme of Liverpool historian Ron Noon and I learned the lessons well.
Liberals of both right and left have been in favour of a globalisation whose principal agents have been transnational forces in economics, finance and communications. It's not that those people and communities on the receiving end of these forces have been 'ignored,' it is that their views have been treated as being of absolutely no account. It doesn't matter what such people say or want, the voices of the powerless have been thoroughly delegitimised.
The spectacle of liberals getting queasy having been caught out by the 'populist' revolt is not edifying. The sight of liberals engaging in lame apologetics is making my stomach turn.
I didn't need to wait for any populist revolt to expose the truth here. I did it emphatically in my economics papers from the University of Keele in 1995. If anyone has the nerve to read their way through all four volumes, they will see that I predicted this current revanchism as a consequence of the globalisation of capitalist relations. And they will see that I, very correctly, identified cultural and ethical relativists as liberals of left. These are not, as they style themselves, opponents of the liberals of the right (the free marketeers and free traders) but their counterparts. Both are privatisers of the public realm, enclosers of the common ground, abstractors from the common good. The liberals of the right and the left are not a genuine right or left – they are two cheeks of the same ignoble backside.
In criticizing globalisation I am well aware of the possible accusation of parochialism, of being anti-global. Not so. The very opposite. I am very much in favour of establishing the local and the global on a continuum. I am against a top-down imposition of the global via forces abstracted from real relations and communities.
Happily, I have said so repeatedly over the years – I have argued strongly in favour of a global civil society against the abstracted globalisation imposed by liberals of right and left.
This is a passage from something I wrote during my years on the environmental campaign trail, and I have been vindicated in every word:
'Like all tyrants who plead necessity, he [Tony Blair] had his own agenda, and he determined to insulate it from political controversy criticism and challenge. In presenting globalisation as an uncontrollable phenomenon, he took it out of the realm of political deliberation and thus denied citizens a voice and a choice. This is revealing. As the global civil society movement pointed out, globalisation in the form of the liberal world order was designed to subvert democracy. And that’s exactly what the architects of globalisation proceeded to do. This was an agenda about promoting the primacy of economics over politics. Globalisation in these terms has capital’s systemic economic determinism in its marrow. So we get the business interests promoting globalisation with a triumphalism that has lost all connection with the facts. In his book Just Capital, Adair Turner asserts that globalisation was making more people richer than ever before, "with better food ... longer lives" and "the freedom of personal mobility to move to new places". Of course, poverty remains the principal spur to mobility. It is also worth pointing out that the numbers of environmental refugees is now approaching the number of refugees from war, quite some achievement given the number of conflicts going on the world. Anthony Giddens and Will Hutton, supposedly on the left of centre in politics, offered a collection, On the Edge, which urged global regulation to address the threat of financial instability, but nevertheless insisted that "the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it... it is a source of global enrichment.
Note the line ‘the absence of alternatives’. There are alternatives, it’s just that the likes of Giddens and Hutton are not prepared to entertain them. They carry on with the naïve belief that the system that is crashing around our ears is reformable. It is now plain where this complacency has ended.'
Peter Critchley, The global civil society movement, Dec 2009
I gathered up these environmental essays and issued them in The Common Ground
The above essay is in vol 1, p. 158
I select Giddens and Hutton here as thinkers from the liberal left. These were people in the 1980s and 1990s seeking to outline an alternative to Thatcher and economic liberalism. They did no such thing. Giddens was the intellectual guru of Tony Blair. And after Blair came Cameron, for whom Clare Foges wrote. Liberal apologists who are the architects of this debacle, still claiming not to be responsible.
No, to be fair, none of these governments did actually 'ignore' the poor and the unemployed. This is true. If only governments and their welfare stasi had have ignored the poor and the unemployed! Instead, they lectured, bullied, slandered, and did everything they could to make their miserable lives even more of a misery. They sold false hopes with training courses, they forced people into a bureaucratic system of 'welfare to work,' filling out endless forms to prove that they were 'actively seeking work.' They put the unemployed on programmes to make it look to the public that their taxes were going somewhere and that everything possible was being done to get people into work. I can give chapter and verse on the miseries of this experience, details so petty and vindictive as to be unbelievable – people forced to sign on on days of family funerals, for God's sake! I know the people who ran these courses. They knew from the inside it was all phony and told me so. A4e. Millions was taken from the government to bully the unemployed, make an example of them to the rest of the country, lest people get Bolshie and form trade unions and demand rights and decent pay and conditions. I know people on the receiving end of these programmes. None of them had any hope that such training would lead anywhere. It's that lack of a sense of the future that people don't understand. You live in an eternal present, a present that is hopeless, miserable, without an end in any sense of the word. The future is abolished, merely becoming a miserable present enlarged without end, without hope, without purpose.
Trying to regenerate these areas is like getting water to run uphill writes Foges.
If you want to know how out of touch these liberals of right and left are, then just ponder the sheer lack of political consciousness in that sentence. Even if she believed that, you would have thought people peddling that line would have phrased it differently. Because that is a line with an ugly history. It is the 'there is no alternative' line again. There is no alternative to globalisation. It involves the same false claims the advocates of the false fixities of TINA always make. But most telling of all it parrots a line that Geoffrey Howe, when Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer, used in the early 1980s. That phrase was used against Liverpool, which was to be subject to 'managed decline.' Liverpool is still with us, it came back, there was an alternative after all. But the people had to fight every inch of the way. People and places were 'left behind,' blamed for their predicament, and all the the real architects of this debacle were concerned most of all to cover their sorry backsides. They are still doing it. These people are politically weak – they collapsed like the cowards they are before the forces of capital and finance - intellectually bankrupt, but most of all morally despicable. All problems begin with cowardice and immorality. The deficient here will always find it easy to ally with money and power. Tony Blair used to talk endlessly about the need to take “tough decisions.” Tony Benn rightly pointed out that none of Blair's decisions were “tough,” it was the easiest thing of all to pick on those who were unable to fight back, the poor and the powerless. That's why bullies and cowards do it. And they cite the necessity of 'there is no alternative,' backed by some bogus science, in their defence. And still they do it.
I still have a paper I delivered at A4E in 2010. I was supposed to be identifying barriers to work to a class of long term unemployed and indicating how these barriers can be broken down. I was talking to a room that contained solicitors, engineers, teachers, project managers, PhD's, mathematicians and such like. Professional people who were highly educated and well qualified. But who were long term unemployed and were being … told … to scale down their expectations. In fact, they were being told to clean toilets and work in call centres. And they were, indeed, applying for such jobs. Many were doing so because they could see no alternative. Others did so because they were forced to in order to claim benefits.
I would write the full story, but feel as though I would be breaking confidences. That's the thing about being 'left behind' by the system, but not 'ignored' by its stooges and minions – the shame and the vulnerability. It's not that your voice is ignored or silenced, but that the poor and the powerless lower their voices, lower their heads, in an attempt to hide away. I can tell people exactly about the poor and the powerless. How raw and real do people want it, the unvarnished, unmediated truth, without political filters?
I should issue that paper. I am still in touch with a couple of people who heard it. But it is raw and painful, no abstract theses drawn from books, just real life experience. And I know from experience that the likes of Clare Foges is talking drivel. Drivel that liberals of right and left lap up to cover their own failures. Populism? The most significant fact in all of this is how long it has taken for certain folk out there to notice how far a lot of folk have been 'left behind,' and in how many areas. Which is to say that certain folk have pushed their own agendas so hard for so long that they have departed from all reality. Reality is now knocking.
I should really issue that talk I gave at Silk House Court Liverpool. It contains a lot of personal details concerning my own history among the ranks of the poor and the powerless bullied and sanctioned by the authorities. It may be the best talk I have ever given. Academics applaud politely, having been bored rigid by some bookish paper I'd just spent an eternity reading. The audience at Silk House Court were clever, talented, hard working people on the receiving end of the system, who were being made to know in no uncertain turns that their views counted for nothing. They were beaten down and without hope. I received the odd cheer, a little banging on desks in support, but in the main knowing nods and tearful expressions acknowledging that their experience was shared and that I was telling a miserable truth known only to those who have lived it from one hopeless day to the next.
Really, I should issue the talk, just remove personal names. It was a little moment of revolt on my part. I would say that it chilled the blood of the bosses at A4E, were it not for the fact that they were a bloodless inhuman crowd of toadstools on the putrefying flesh of capitalism anyway. I was given a list of headings on barriers to work to be eliminated to deliver to the feckless and the workshy, to get them out of their comfort zones on welfare and back to work. I looked at a room of highly educated high achievers on the receiving end of this drivel, then I looked at the lickspittles of money and power, mere time servers milking the misery of the poor as government agents delivering cheap labour, and I told the truth.
Of course, I knew my time was up. There was nothing said. There was nothing to be said. I was right, everyone knew it. The myth of welfare to work programmes had been exposed. It wasn't a myth that was difficult to expose intellectually. It just needed someone who didn't give a damn about the consequences, or could just about afford not to give a damn. That was me. Others had no option but to remain quiet and do as they were ordered. I knew people who had to count their last coins out daily to see what they had to live on for the rest of the week.
I had better stop writing. Because the contempt I have for all involved in overriding the voices of the poor and the powerless is likely to have my blood boiling beyond all safe pressure points.
I've learned this much, people with political axes to grind don't give a damn about contrary voices. And when those voices are those of the poor and the powerless, they don't need to give a damn either. In a world of power politics, with no ethic outside of the struggles of contending parties, the losers don't matter a damn.
And I've learned that it is not revitalising economies and regenerating areas and inspiring those without hope that is like pushing water uphill but thinking that you can do these things through a half-arsed liberal institutional tinkering. As the architects of such cosmetic exercises know fine well. None of them, deliberately, go near the question of restructuring power relations. It's all pretence at the expense of the poor and the powerles.
The welfare to work firm owned by David Cameron’s former families tsar is involved in a “multi-billion-pound scandal” in which public money has been systematically misused, a whistleblower has said.
A4E was rotten to the core.
I said so at the time, I knew its rottenness from within. As did many others. Of course, who really listens to the poor and the powerless?