In my main YouTube video for this morning, I argue that neoliberalism has killed conviction-based politics.
The audio version is here:
This is the transcript:
Politicians need to be people with convictions.
Well, in my opinion, that's the case anyway. But we don't have people like that anymore. What we have are people who believe that politics should be kept out of society. Because their belief is that markets determine how we should allocate resources.
In other words, we should all be going into the marketplace, spending our money, and that, they say, produces an optimal outcome for us all. We should determine everything on the basis of our consumption choices. And this is the theory of neoliberalism. That's what it says we are. It says we're only consumers.
We have no other role in life.
But that's nonsense. Because what we know is that so many of the services on which we rely cannot be consumed through the marketplace. This has been known for centuries.
Try to buy fire insurance - in other words, the insurance that guarantees that a fire brigade will turn up at your house if you happen to have a fire - and you'll find it's virtually impossible to deliver on that basis because it was tried centuries ago because nobody could be sure who they needed to buy from and where the nearest suitable fire station was and on and on, it had to be provided collectively, and this was one of the first discoveries that was made about the need for government to intervene.
Defence is another obvious case in point. You can't consume defence. You have to have it collectively.
And again, this was true of the police. And once upon a time, we thought this was true of things like, well, the Post Office, and that was why the state supplied it from 1840. But apparently not anymore. We haven't even got that far with broadband these days either, which is the modern equivalent.
So, these politicians don't have a conviction as to what they should be doing in government. Their conviction is that government shouldn't be doing something.
And that's wrong. When I say wrong, I mean wrong. Because government has to be involved in making decisions about how resources are allocated to maximise the well-being, in particular, of those who can't participate in the market. Although economists assume everyone has an equal right to participate and those who don't have enough money are, well, actually by default in the political sense of neoliberalism failures - although they don't like to put it that way - the reality is that of course we know people do not have an equal right to participate in the market because they have different levels of wealth, either inherited or generated, they have different levels of ability to take part in the market, and I'm not just talking about intellectual here of course, I'm talking about the physical constraints that they might face as well, whether because of geography or some problem that they might personally have to address, which constrains their ability to earn, or they simply are unable for some other reason - like there are no jobs in their area - to partake in market-based activity.
So, therefore, they are discriminated against if politicians think that only consumption-based activity is permitted to determine their well-being. Well, that's obviously not true. It should be down to politicians to decide how these deficiencies in the market are made good. When we have politicians who think that their only job is to facilitate markets rather than to correct for market failure, we end up with conviction-free politicians.
And the big problem that we face in this country is that's exactly what Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak and their respective party leaderships now all are. They're conviction-free politicians who don't think it's their job to make decisions but who want to hand over all decision-making to markets. And that's a disaster for us all, and most especially those who are dependent upon government to make sure that their well-being is made good and who are being denied that, as is so obvious in so many ways because of the failure of the UK government to support those who are vulnerable.
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Following the PPE scandal, the post office scandal, and others, I think there are many politicians who deserve convictions ?
🙂
I missed that obvious reading…
Hi Richard. The audio file is about Labour’s honeymoon, not about the need to convict them.
Correcting now
Sorry, and thank you
“Politicians need to be people with convictions.” – or perhaps with a good connection to reality?
You provide some good examples of reality (defense – collective, fire – collective, police – collective.. the “etc” has a long tail).
At the risk of repeating – neo-libism is unable to cope with reality because it is based on a utopian fantasy (markets). The current crop of politicos are fantasists & behind them are the con-men and shills. Politicians with convictions? or politicians with convictions grounded in social reality?
The recent blog posts have been very interesting: philisophical investigations along the lines of: what are we really looking at here?
Thanks
When every major party fully accepts the neoliberal ideology that freedom of the individual is paramount; that there is no such thing as society; and that the free market will solve all problems if only the state gets out of the way, then there is little space for any other ideas of beliefs. Despite the UK state spending over £1 trillion each year, taking about 40% of GDP in taxes, and providing public services and public goods that by and large the public want and need, such as health and social security and education and roads and courts and defence, that are not realistically available from any other source. It leads to the imposition of marketised structures on service provision where it makes the outcomes both objectively worse and more expensive.
Agreed
In a sense, they have convictions … Their belief that government should do nothing. Was it Reagan who said the most scary sentence was: “I’m from the government, I’m here to help”.
There’s been some very good points here in recent days. We should include engineering mechanisms to not address market failure, inappropriate/ineffectual regulation and no consequence for the externalities. Engineered conditions for exploitation by a few (including defunding HMRC, environment monitoring, etc). Less a market economy, more a wild West….
But as Mike Parr seems to suggest – they do already have convictions . Convictions that are fuelled by the power of big money – which finances their ‘convictions’. Big finance, big oil, big food, big pharma, big energy, etc etc.
They are convinced that the market is the answer to everything – while at the same time spouting some kind of pretence that they will, if in government, magically mitigate the manifest destruction wrought by 14 years of austerity – without actually investing in the public services, (and in the people keeping those serivces going), which are on the point of collapse.
Their ideology has embedded within it a completely unreal theory about how our society and economy actually works.
The only way they can do that, seems to be to deny their own, and our, humanity – and have no empathy with people in their lived daily experiences.
The notion that the natural state of industrial society is laissez faire and free market, carries an enormous weight of ideology and utopian wish fulfilment.
It is anything but a neutral starting point.
Polanyi’s analysis of the ‘great transformation’ required to reach the present is compelling.
The fundamental contradiction within the la la land of an uninhibited, unregulated, entirely private enterprise small state economy is that it actually requires a huge state apparatus to sustain it.
First, is the law of contract. Mises et al’s utopian thinking was that all freely negotiated contracts will self regulate and be honoured as a ‘gentleman’s word is his bond’.
This fairy story is exactly the opposite of what happened during the 19thC peak of laissez faire, and anyway contradicts the basic principle of unbridled competition. Businessman eats businessman and then us and the planet ….
Second is the concept of absolute private property rights that includes all land, buildings and intellectual rights.
The legal framework that codifies and then enforces these rights requires a very powerful state. Planning anything is impossible in this setting. The whim of owners absolutely excludes all other considerations. Elon Musk eat yer heart out.
Thirdly, there will need to be a strong defence force to protect private property against all incomers, and safeguard the established legal system.
Fourthly. there is absolutely nothing in the concept (it is not a law) of supply and demand that automatically means that all needs, let alone wants, are capable of being satisfied by entrepreneurs and private enterprise. This really is a very extreme ideology.
Therefore the state will need to pickup on all shortfalls.
Even Friedman and Hayek admitted that markets were imperfect.
Only in the wildest dreams of the Trusses of this world does this perfection exist.
Yet these people still have traction !
That the Austrian school of extreme doctrinaire nutjobs have managed to secure a foothold on political thinking at all, and not only in far right groups, is a throw back to the underpinning (and dystopian) versions of social Darwinism that emerged in the 19thC and which were re-energised by Thatcher and Reagan.
We need to reject and destroy this false narrative utterly, or it will annihilate us. That requires that the current hegemony is challenged at every opportunity and well considered political alternatives are proposed.
The failure here is of the militant centrists who believe in nothing much.
IMO, we are traversing a period of political nihilism more dangerous than 20thC fascism.
Your video asking why politicians only talk about ‘working people’ ties in nicely with the concept that the markets, and not politicians, should make all the decisions. Working people are seen, or at least portrayed, as the major participants in the market. Hence the circle is squared. Everything else is extraneous, off balance sheet. And down the rabbit hole we go!
And working people, having only their labour to sell, are an input cost.
On the other hand working people represent the consumer market for goods and services.
Now keeping real wages low, as they have been for 45yrs, so that the artificially created wants that feed GDP growth can only be purchased with credit, so producing an additional profit for the financers, (when credit regulation was removed) then increases the returns on consumerism.
Watching Sunak now – manifesto for neoliberal destruction of what is left of this country – and lie after lie.
Thatcher was perhaps the most famous example of a conviction politician. But many of us didn’t like her convictions which have probably led directly to the state we are in.
Current politicians see citizens as consumers in a multiverse of markets so throw them a few tax cuts to better engage with the market while behind our backs with sleight of hand take away more and nobody will notice as wealth is passed on to the already rich.
Meanwhile, the 5 Giants [want (caused by poverty); ignorance (caused by a lack of education); squalor (caused by poor housing); idleness (caused by a lack of jobs, or the ability to gain employment); disease (caused by inadequate health care provision) – BBC] still stalk the land – though we may frame them differently now – and not one politician has the conviction to address this abject failure of politics to provide fairly for all citizens. Tens of thousands of food banks and giving out millions of food parcels is now considered normal and a symbol of a caring community.
What we need is a caring government.