Governing the ungovernable: the crisis of liberalism
“Ungovernable”: that is the word making the rounds again in British policy circles. Last time we heard it frequently was in the 1970s at the end of the Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan government. Nothing seemed to be working in Britain: the policy promises were not delivering, trade unions were out in force, inflation was up, productivity down and there were rumours of vigilante groups in the Cotswolds.
This sort of mood usually takes hold when those in authority despair that their theories are not succeeding, when the promises of plenty fail to materialise and when pessimism begins to feed its own tail in a downward vortex.
Everyone has their solution to reverse things in these circumstances, the favourite one being to replace the man or woman at the top and everything will come right. It looks as though, having had six PMs in the last decade, we are sliding and slithering into that “cure” again.
Of course,it did not work and will not work — although the Thatcher “strong woman” phase seemed for a time the right response. But however much talk there was then, or is now, of resets or new dawns or priority missions, it will do no good, and some harm, because there are several much deeper driving forces at work, powerful undercurrents, both national and international. Until they are fully understood and countered, they will sweep us further on downwards.
At root, the crisis of our times lies not in any one new theory but in all tendencies to cling exclusively to this model or that doctrine too obsessively, too rigorously and too intolerantly. It is, in short, a crisis of ideology — a crisis of liberalism itself. The words are those of Adrian Wooldridge: a Doctor of Philosophy (Balliol and All Souls), from his latest book Centrists of the World, Unite! (Penguin, £25, published in the USA as The Revolutionary Center).
Wooldridge reminds us that at the heart of liberal philosophy is, or ought to be, the warning precept that too much concentration of power is poisonous and deeply dangerous. It always leads, unless tempered by balance and judgement, to the violent overthrow of democracy. Caesarism, we used to call it.
All eras of economic turmoil have their ground-breaking and pioneering books, lifting the curtain on what is really happening. I would put Wooldridge’s volume right into that class for our time. Leaping out of it come four of the most powerful reasons why shuffling prime ministers solves nothing.
First: the electorate is far more informed (maybe for better, may be worse) but in a hundred times greater quantities than ever before in history. Every grievance can now be turbocharged and/or distorted. In the UK alone there are an estimated 86 million devices, not counting wired-up telephones. This quite simply means that everything can be and is challenged, delayed or rejected. The microchip shapes our global society, even when a tiny handful of complainants, or just one individual, lies across every attempt to move forward.
The impact of this huge revolution, on local, regional, national and international relationships, is even now massively underestimated in political and media circles. The online world not only fragments unity of opinion and consensus but also, like some heavy two-edged sword, can unite sentiment against any and every proposition or project.
Second: in this digitally frenzied and hyper-connected world, the root causes of problems lie more often than not, well outside the reach of national governments. Since press coverage, with one or two brave exceptions, keeps this aspect of international governance, or lack of it at the moment, well obscured, and since ignorance becomes bliss, our rage, manufactured or genuine, is naturally turned against the nearest targets here at home.
Whether it is security and safety, the cost of living, funding shortages all round, trade and employment, local government (and those potholes), interest rates and the bond market, or our chimerical energy independence, the blame turns on local and familiar figures, above all the Prime Minister.
Even the most delicate and constitutional issues turn out to be only partly under our control. So the populist instinct, egged on by popular press demands, is: “Turn on the nearest target and have a go!”
Third: probably most important of all, multilateral agencies and respected fora in which global decisions can be reached, frameworks designed and rules must be re-established. Trusted and respected multilateral bodies must be rebuilt, as they were by the visionaries of the Western powers after 1945.
Yet all the postwar institutions are now in deep trouble. They are the rule-makers and the referees and they must have respect and some trust if their writ is to run. Obviously, we need a new Bretton Woods to shape the financial regulation of an entirely different world from eighty years ago. We plainly need new trade rules in a far more complicated trade and investment world of supply chains, new maritime controls, overhauled international courts, new insurance protection and so on.
Where are they — today’s equivalents of these visionaries, — Truman, Marshall, Keynes, Dexter White for example — supported by a dazzling cast of American and British economists and financiers? National plans and solutions are two a penny. But missing is the other half of the story: the global framework, the new international organisations, the shield under which our own reforms become possible and relevant. And where are the new levels of cooperation to assert some control of AI, of super-intelligent machines that think for themselves and have their own agendas?
All this is ignored or barely reported or discussed in the media or the public policy debate. The Spirit of 1945 is plainly needed all over again, but in even more ambitious forms.
Without that, we can carry on attacking all the nearest targets, but we remain the plaything of past economic fantasy theories, swept along in a rudderless craft — a world without rules, without referees, without restraints. Amidst many uncertainties, one thing that can be said with absolute certainty – that such a world, without the handrails of accepted standards, is fatal to the prospects of a nation like Great Britain.
To those who shake their heads and say that the required degree of cooperation is politically impossible today, the answer is: “Not so.” Political parties may be harder than ever to get together, but as Wooldridge argues, the centrists in all parties can and must cooperate. The middle ground may sound a quagmire to party warriors from the old ideological wars. But the new common ground (a very different thing) undoubtedly lies ahead. The late Sir Keith Joseph, with whom I worked, but did not always agree, nonetheless had a steadfast vision of the common ground a decade or so ahead. And he was correct. Parties came and went, but the common aim of better balance between the dominant and heavily state-owned public sector and private enterprise, between public needs and private funds, eventually began to emerge in the decades that followed, along with ideas of much wider ownership of assets, by both employees and the general public (along with far higher degrees of basic financial literacy).
Looked at from the viewpoint of party politicians, struggling under the old ideological rules to keep their supporters somewhere in the spectrum, the need to keep the balance provides the only way forward. It is the centrists in every party, new and old, who should acquire the basic skills of democrats, of reaching out to other centrists, whilst retaining the support and confidence of their existing followers.
This is the political pathway and style of cooperation in the internet age and beyond. It avoids the traumas of party “betrayal”, which the press loves to play up, but unites the search for common ground. The barrier, of course, is the old Left-Right battle that grew out of Marx-Leninism versus laissez-faire capitalism and led to unstable ideological stalemate.
The moderating instincts of balanced international liberalism ought to be the ones driving global financial stability and restoring free trade, which Trumpism has plunged into turmoil. They ought also to be the ones opening the gates to closer cooperation, rather than a stand-off between private funding and public needs in almost every sphere of public policy. This approach should be seen in the same light as Private Finance Initiative (PFI), now rebranded as Public-Private Partnerships. These were accepted by both major parties at the end of the last century and have been copied in at least eight other advanced nations.
Coming slowly along behind is an even bolder non-ideological advance – the successful marriage of popular capitalism and democracy which has not yet taken place on anything like a large enough scale, although a lot further in the USA than the UK.
Perhaps we remain so stuck with “Left” and “Right” concepts simply because we lack, or have not yet found, the words to describe the new order of things. Perhaps the very words capitalism and socialism are just too loaded and shuttered to allow new and freer thought. One attempt from the American side is “information capitalism”. Getting there, but it does not quite do.
Maybe the new American language currently struggling, so we hear, to be freshly chronicled and codified, will throw something up. If the British, despite their wonderful inheritance of the world’s greatest vocabulary, have lost the will then other brilliant minds must push ahead with the new task. Perhaps AI will give a helping hand.
With the binding force of the English language still dominating global trade, and holding together a still growing Commonwealth (much the largest world network), maybe a new vehicle of thought, action and hope is about to be born.
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