This is by every empirical measure imaginable a failing fiscal plan, but Plan B remains firmly off the agenda. And why? Keynesian economics is not policy anathema, but it has become political anathema. Central to the fable being spruiked by Prime Minister David Cameron and the Conservatives is that Labour’s clunky and interventionist approach to economic matters is to blame for the mess that Britain now finds itself in. If the Tories were to take a backward step from their “Plan A”, the economic dogma they’ve peddled since May 2010, they would be letting the Opposition off the hook. They would also be pricking the bubble of fallacious confidence that George Osborne et. al have, in effect, hitched a ride with throughout their war on public spending. It’s easy to forget given all the sanguine polling doing the rounds, but this is a government sustaining itself not through success in matters of policy, actual popularity, or anything resembling hard work, but merely ego: a reserve of confident bloody-mindedness that the market will eventually prove them right and that those on welfare should be punished.

The rigid stance adopted by the government on economic stimulus is particularly galling when one considers some of the moral peccadillos that the Tories apparently feel do warrant some intervention. This is a government that has no qualms about pulling levers and interfering with the market like a bunch of cardboard cut-out social-engineering lefties when doing so will slap and tickle their upper middle-class conservative base. A crusade to cap welfare benefits, directly impacting the lives of some of the nation’s most needy children has in recent days seen support for David Cameron soaring to a 22 month high. Jobs may be disappearing into the ether by the thousand across the country, but as Allegra Stratton alluded to in The Guardian recently, Cameron’s willingness to engage in blinkered market intervention has been plainly evident for some time now:

In a WH Smith not far from Westminster, there are no Terry’s Chocolate Oranges on sale at the till but there’s every other calorie and additive on offer. This stroll to the newsagent counts for political research because if you listened to David Cameron six years ago, flogging cheap chocolate to captive targets was an exemplar of immoral capitalism run amok.

“As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?” Cameron protested. Through the bully’s pulpit of office and opprobrium, he sought to change it.

In America, they would call out such a protest as socialism. In Britain, it would just be an all too typically fluffy intervention into the market on behalf of the morally conservative, rich or powerful, while the brutalisation of the truly needy by the market continues, wholly aided and abetted, in the background.

Responsibility for crime always lies with the criminal. But crime has a context. And we must not shy away from it.

I have said before that there is a major problem in our society with children growing up not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

This is not about poverty, it’s about culture. A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities.

In too many cases, the parents of these children – if they are still around – don’t care where their children are or who they are with; let alone what they are doing.

The potential consequences of neglect and immorality on this scale have been clear for too long, without enough action being taken.

Let’s come back to social theory, Tory style, shortly. But first, let’s survey some of the ‘responses’ to the riots.

What we’ve seen is an orchestrated attempt at the centre of the state to have magistrates ignore sentencing guidelines, resulting in strangely disproportionate sentences like four years for a tasteless drunken Facebook joke, and six months for stealing a bottle of water.

We’ve seen plans to take a huge byte out of Blackberry data, all the better to criminalise texting. We’ve seen murmurings about banning some people from Twitter and Facebook (and on this, see Axel Bruns).

We’ve seen the philosophy of collective punishment come to the fore, with Councils being encouraged to evict the families of rioters from social housing, and cut off their benefits.

We’ve seen what is in effect a lot of dog whistling about “zero tolerance”.

We’ve seen David Cameron racialise crime, at the same time as the media highlights the arrest and sentencing of white kids and black kids with degrees, making all of it seem more like Cameron’s culture of contagion than any other or actual social cause.

And we’ve seen the interpretive battle over the meaning of the disorder won pretty comprehensively by the Tories, with the “sheer criminality” explanation prevailing. That despite the fact that it fails to account for “why here, why now?”.

Owen Hatherley:

Ponder, for a moment, the second-most unequal country in Europe. Its prime minister, who failed to win an outright majority, heads a government whose cabinet contains several millionaires, and embarks upon an ideologically driven economic policy against almost all international and professional advice. It has just faced its largest strikes for decades. Its lawmakers were recently found fiddling their mortgages en masse. Its press was caught phone tapping hundreds of private citizens and politicians, with little hindrance from the police.

Meanwhile, members of that police force had killed a bystander at one protest, and were criticised for violence and intimidation at another. Then, they shot a man, wrongly claimed he’d shot at them first, and young people across the country rioted, setting fire to police cars, attacking police stations, looting high streets and retail parks. After that, courts worked through the night; in Manchester, a mother-of-two got five months for accepting a looted pair of shorts from a friend and a young man got six months for pinching a bottle of water. Finally, these young people’s families started to be issued with eviction orders from their social accommodation; a form of housing which said government had already committed itself to dismantling. The prime minister claimed this would help break up criminal gangs.

Put like that, the UK sounds much like what the rest of the world must surely see us as, by now – akin to some post-Soviet Republic about to undergo a “colour revolution’” maybe, or a Mediterranean ex-dictatorship convulsed by civil unrest. Imagine the fundraisers and the Facebook declarations of solidarity were it so.

Indeed.

Now, Guy Rundle discusses social and economic theory, Tory style:

Homo oeconomicus becomes replaced by homo sociologicus — an understanding of social life and subjectivity that was once the hallmark of the left becomes a set of tools for the right. Industrial capitalism demanded the management of objects — steel from the mills, flowing to factories for cars. Post-industrial capitalism demands the management of subjects — it frankly accepts, whether it will admit it or not, that running Western economies in a neo-liberal fashion involves managing large numbers of people who are surplus to requirements — hence one talks not of “layabouts” but of “welfare dependency”, not of the “feckless” but of the excluded. Hence the sneaky, piecemeal way in which the Cameron government has introduced cuts — as a series of broken promises about what would not be cut, about tuition fees and the like. In adapting the language and techniques of sociology to their cause, they concede a basic and fundamental point to the left,and fight on our terrain.

However, the sociologisation of the Right occurs with one crucial and defining omission — it shears off any critical account of the effects of the market, of social inequality, of commodification, consumerism and advertising, and their effects on social life and subjectivity. Indeed, the whole purpose of adapting sociological thinking on the Right is to find tools to compensate for the corrosive effects of the market — while rendering those effects invisible. In many cases this is not done consciously — it is simply a product of the ideology that is pumped through PPE courses, right-wing think tanks, etc, etc. Thus, the smooth-cheeked Cameroonians emerge knowing that the market may have deleterious effects that must be compensated for in the interests of social management — but will not or cannot concede that the core of the system is doing the social, cultural and psychological damage.

Indeed.

Owen Hatherley’s piece, cited twice above, describes a logic to the evictions. They progress an agenda of clearing potentially desirable property of undesirable citizens. That’s something even Boris Johnson has been critical of.

Similarly, the collective punishment aspect of benefit cuts and evictions for the families of rioters is in a straight line from the philosophy that inspires “income management” in Australia, and Noel Pearson-esque community tribunals to decide which parents are worthy of welfare and which are not.

It masquerades as a philosophy of individual responsibility, but its truth is one of collective exclusion and social control.

NB: Comments should be responsive to this post, please. Earlier discussion of the English riots on LP can be found here.

The begrudging promise of a referendum on the alternative vote or “AV” system of preferential voting reportedly sealed the Coalition deal for David Cameron’s Conservatives with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats in the election aftermath. The referendum, which is to be held on Thursday 5th May 2011 as a kind of royal wedding after-party for psephologists, will cast the two Coalition partners decisively against each other in what looks set to be an intriguing political tussle. From an Australian perspective it is particularly intriguing, because as the anointed international standard-bearers for preferential voting, Westminster-style, it looks like we will be stuck in the crossfire for the duration of the debate!

The first serious volleys were fired late last week, when Nick Clegg and David Cameron set out their opening arguments for voting for and against AV, respectively. David Cameron made special mention of the Australian example several times in his speech launching the “No” campaign. His approach? Never let a good argument get in the way of a good slur:

When it comes to our democracy, Britain shouldn’t have to settle for anyone’s second choice.

And this argument that no one really wants it, it’s as true abroad as it is at home.

Only three countries use AV for national elections: Fiji, Australia and Papua New Guinea.

In Australia, six in ten voters want to return to the system we have – first past the post.

This is both sleight of hand and an egregious slight; playing on the relative size and remoteness of all three countries mentioned, and slimily “hiding” Australia in passing between Fiji and PNG. What really are you saying about Fiji and Papua New Guinea, Prime Minister, by being so careful to mention them first, and last? They are the countries you want people to remember and associate with AV, aren’t they? I’d also be interested in hearing the basis for the “six in ten” figure mentioned. Does anybody seriously believe that there is any realistic popular support whatsoever for a regression back to FPTP in Australia?

The British Prime Minister also takes the time to explain why preferential voting is the reason for the relatively high number of safe seats in Australia (?) and furthermore, why it is to blame for “obliterating minor parties” down under. Evidently nobody told him about the rise and rise of the Greens, or the notable success of independents and minor parties in recent years, in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

He goes on to trash Australia’s electoral system, calling out the fact that it took seventeen days for a government to be formed at the last federal poll, and noting that on voting day ”voters are lectured at polling stations by party apparatchiks with ‘How to Vote’ cards.”. I’m not necessarily a fan of “how-to-vote” shenanigans outside polling booths, but it is a nonsense to describe the process as “lecturing”; in practice, it is little more than froth and colour. It is also disingenuous of Cameron to spin the speed of confirming the last federal election result as indicative of what happens in preferential voting systems generally. September 2010 was hardly exemplary of recent federal election results in Australia – practically all of which were decided with brutal speed and on the night (indeed, called by Antony Green a few hours after the close of polls, quite frequently).

I’d like to think that the Prime Minister isn’t going to take this rubbishing of Australia’s electoral system lying down. She might start by making gentle mention of that most thoroughly democratic of British institutions, the House of Lords.

While the national health service has been spared real cutbacks (though below-trend funding growth is effectively a cut in this area) large parts of the welfare state have been cut.

The government, of course, is presenting the cuts as emergency measures to stabilize the budget, but as Paul Krugman notes, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s taking advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to slash the size of government, particularly the bits that redistribute money to the poor.

Given the extent to which UK and Australian politics cross-fertilizes, it might be worth recalling that not-so-long-ago election campaign rhetoric about “this reckless spending has got to stop” and the plans for a mini-budget had the Coalition won.

It’s unlikely that the Coalition would have attempted anything on quite the scale that their British counterparts have, even with an outright House majority. But, without doubt, they would have tried their level best to use the excuse of curbing Labor’s “reckless spending” to hack into all manner of transfer payments and other expenditure they don’t like.

And if and when the political opportunity arises in the future, it’s exactly what they will do.

It was hardly the first time a Coalition had been formed to implement an austerity agenda. The National Government of the Depression years is one exemplar.

Labour sits on the sidelines, with some doubt that its party processes will enable a left alternative to be considered in its leadership election, and its ability to present a viable opposition somewhat diminished by the wholesale adoption of New Labour themes by Cameron’s Red Tory-ism, to the degree that communitarian project has any substance.

In Australia, too, we have the spectre of public disillusion with the two major parties, but an electoral system which will minimise any expression of a desire for a third alternative, with The Greens effectively relegated to Upper House redoubts.

One of the most interesting reflections on the state of Labour in the UK, in the light of the 2010 poll, is from Jeremy Gilbert, writing in Open Democracy.

Gilbert argues that Labour avoided a wipe out because it showed surprising resilience in constituencies where an activist campaigning base persisted, and in regions where local or regional governments had been able to demonstrate the meaningfulness of social democratic initiatives to everyday lives.

In politics, Gilbert argues, content follows form:

Probably the best term ever coined to describe that strategy was Anthony Barnett’s phrase ‘corporate populism’. New Labour was based on the idea that a new kind of popular politics had to imitate the organisational and communications techniques of corporations, while pursuing a political programme which tried to align the interests of voters with those of actual corporations. When reflecting on this history, it’s striking to consider that New Labour’s full embrace of market liberalism came some time after its adoption of this approach as its own basic organisational mode.

Long before it became clear that New Labour wouldn’t break in any serious way with Thatcherite economics, while Blair still tantalised his supporters with references to Christian Socialism, ethical communitarianism, and the ‘stakeholder society’, the organisational form of New Labour prefigured the models and the value that it would later try to impose on the state, the public sector, and the country at large.

The basic organisational idea of New Labour was that the party membership were the problem and not the solution.

He further argues that the modern culture of expert messaging, organisational centralisation and Spin is broken.

New Labour only ever understood one part of the story about the decline of old political forms. While they may have been right that the 19th / 20th century model of mass political campaigning was reaching its end, they failed to notice the extent to which the coming era would present new opportunities for community-building and for democratic action, and new problems for any attempt to stifle democracy and debate. The success and growing political importance of the blogosphere and of sites like this one is just one sign of this!

A “command-and-control communications strategy” should not drive out political energies, Gilbert contends:

a complete overhaul and reinvention of the Labour Party for the 21st century is the only thing that could achieve this end. In the era of ‘we-think’ and network culture, the collective intelligence of the membership – including the 12,000 who have rushed to join now that the age of New Labour looks likely to have ended – is the greatest possible resource that the otherwise-impoverished party has at its disposal.

In our part of the world, we’ve seen the nexus between the Labor party’s aging and diminished membership and its commanding heights much fractured over recent decades. The Greens, by contrast, have demonstrated what’s possible with an activist and democratised base. But there are limits to the possible success of The Greens, under our antiquated electoral and party systems, and I think every progressive should welcome a democratisation of Australian Labor. It may not occur until the party goes back into opposition, which I hope is a long way away. But it’s a vital precondition for a revival of responsiveness and hope in our democracy, and not just for those on the left.

In the age of Facebook and Twitter, which enable millions of citizens to share ideas, to build campaigns and to communicate across great distances, the idea that a handful of professional politicians touring the TV studios of central London can be an adequate substitute for democratic politics looks clunky and forlorn.

‘Why,’ asked a Labour friend of mine this week, ‘is Britain still run by people from Oxford and Cambridge? When is it going to stop?’

Social mobility in Great Britain is bad, and getting worse. The Economist itself has linked this to a highly differentiated education system. While there is an established negative relationship between social mobility and income inequality, it’s also interesting to look at historical and cultural explanations.

Only 7% of British students attend private schools, and those at the top of the political and social ladders are overwhelmingly drawn from an even smaller set of elite schools and a tiny number of ‘ancient’ universities. Eton, Winchester, Oxford, Cambridge, and all that.

Marxisant claims about the 1688 Glorious Revolution and the Civil Wars aside, England has never really experienced a political upheaval which has implied an overturning of established status traditions. As such, it differs greatly from both societies such as France with its culture of the republican equality of citizens, and somewhat similar cultural modes influenced by the American revolution, and its Antipodean settler offshoots – Australia and New Zealand. Early attempts to establish both a Church and to entrench pseudo-aristocratic status in New South Wales had collapsed as long ago as the 1830s. White Australia, if you like, was born modern.

So, in English culture, we see a more collectivist sociality riven by many fine distinctions of status – manifested by locality, accent, mannerisms, disposition and so much more. The English are a much more tribal people than some other English speaking cultures. The House of Lords may no longer be dominated by hereditary peers, but the sort of social formation which saw them survive long past their use by date endures.

A number of historians, including Martin Wiener, have pointed to an elitism of mediocrity, an overweening concern with status and social distinction as a contributor to British decline. To large degree, the Labour party’s projects of comprehensive education, Wilsonian technocratic modernism and Blairite modernisation were all responses to this.

But, how far do you go with meritocratic education? Educational opportunities for all, though very important for life chances and social mobility are only one piece of the puzzle. It’s the reproduction of status that itself needs to be attacked. In Australia, for instance, a genuine meritocracy would probably imply no private schools at all, no Churchies and Girls Grammars with their blazers and direct routes into the sandstone universities and the professions. Perhaps the failure of both liberal and social democratic efforts to ensure equality through education in Britain was a failure of not going far enough. What’s needed is a separation of educational excellence from social status and its symbols and networks. What’s needed is a distinction between educational excellence and social elites.

NB: Previous LP British election coverage here.

Update: Interesting piece from Seumas Milne.

Guardian live blog with the latest.

It’s the middle of the night, London time, so we’ll probably have to wait for their morning for a lot more detail.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works, to say the least. It seems to me (from this long distance away) that underneath Cameron’s thin veneer the Conservatives retain a very strong core of Europhobic, economically Thatcherite, climate-skeptic hard-right members.

But then, the ALP theoretically contains a core of socially liberal environmentalists, and look at what Rudd’s delivered us so far…

Elsewhere [dk.au]: Will Davies provides some incisive sociological analysis of the result

The full shape of the possible deal with Labour and other parties is revealed in The Guardian‘s article.

It’s significant that while many hours have been consumed by negotiations with the Tories, Clegg and Brown met for only one hour. It’s significant for two reasons: first, it indicates that the Conservatives’ garnering of the greatest number of seats and votes is a powerful argument for them to form a government, and secondly, that the difference between the Conservatives’ position and the Lib Dem’s on not just electoral reform but also a large range of policy areas is much greater than with Labour.

In one sense, either outcome is a win for Labour. But going into opposition might actually be the better medium term result for the governing party. The scope of the task any government will face in restoring public finances will most likely ensure wide unpopularity, particularly if spending cuts are driven through by David Cameron. There’s also the real risk of a double dip recession, with growth almost at a standstill in the last two quarters, and the uncertainty in the Eurozone in the wake of the Greek crisis. Labour might be better off having the chance to elect a new leader through its electoral college processes, rather than the Cabinet anointing David Miliband or another Minister to replace Brown.

On the other hand, while Labour probably has a better chance of overcoming internal opposition to electoral reform than the Tories, a government lacking legitimacy would face hurdles in gaining popular support at a referendum. But the Tories will likely campaign against any referendum whether in or out of government. So the chances of securing the Lib Dems’ holy grail are uncertain in either scenario.

It’s both a diabolical choice and a defining moment for Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems: and for British politics.

NB: Previous LP coverage and discussion of the British election can be found here.

Elsewhere: Jonathan Freedland on Gordon Brown.

Update: Election facts and figures.

Update: Gordon Brown has announced that he will step down.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the UK election here.