Stumbling and Mumbling

Blair's failing

Oliver Kamm makes two good points here:

Tony Blair came about because Labour had failed, electorally and philosophically. He has made Labour successful, but been notably poor at expounding his broader achievements.

He's right that Blair has been poor at expounding his achievements. The best measure of this was Labour's support at the 2005 general election. It got 9.6 million votes. That's a loss of 3.9 million since 1997 - equivalent to the entire electorate of Scotland. And it's 1.9 million less than Labour got in 1979. But even Blair's worst critics would have to concede that, Iraq apart, the 1997-2005 government was much less bad than the 1974-79 one.
Oliver's second good point is that Old Labour failed. One of Blair's errors has been to misrepresent this point. He's pretended that New Labour has been a necessary response to new times, globalization and modernity - just as Brown claims to offer a "new leadership for this new time."
But this is false. The real reason why there had to be a "New" Labour is that the old Labour project was a disaster. It was just impossible to provide sustained full employment without creating inflation and a profit squeeze. Labour had therefore to rethink its economic philosophy.
In failing to state this case Blair has given the impression that he has betrayed a noble tradition. In fact, that tradition had to be abandoned. Old-style social democracy was economically infeasible.
In this respect, the idea that New Labour is "all spin and no substance" is 100% wrong. New Labour is a substantive economic programme, with much to be said for it.
I expound on this at great length you know where.
Here, though, I'm harsher on Blair than Oliver. In failing to make this case properly, and in giving free rein to the verminous Alistair Campbell, Blair has degraded political discourse.
It is, surely, a damning indictment of Blair's years in office that he has made it possible for Michael Howard to make a good point.

Error by design

The Public Accounts Committee says £5.8bn was overpaid in tax credits in the first three years of their operation.
This will be interpreted as evidence of the Treasury's bad administration. But this is only part of the story. Over-payments of tax credits are not due merely to incompetent management. They are an essential part of the system.
Tax credits are paid on the basis of a family's past income. This means that if their income rises, the credit will be overpaid, unless the family immediately reports its change of circumstances, which it won't.
In the Treasury's report that advocated the introduction of tax credits, Martin Taylor wrote (pdf):

The tax system works by looking back on the whole year and it could only be made to respond to in-year changes by using estimates of entitlement with adjustments after the end of the year, and support would sometimes have to be claimed back [because it was overpaid in the first place]. (para 3.22)

And because the low-paid often have quite volatile incomes, such changes will be common. Back in 2003, the IFS's Mike Brewer estimated (pdf) that 750,000 families would be overpaid credits because their income rose.
So, what's the solution to this? The Treasury's answer has been to increase the amount of the rise in incomes necessary to trigger a claimback to £25,000; this will cost taxpayers £100m this year. And it's increasd the number of staff working on tax credit compliance, to 1400.
But there is another answer, isn't there?

Power deludes

One of the wisest sayings about power is that of Kenneth Boulding here:

All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

I was reminded of this by Jack Straw's claim that:

The core democratic values of freedom, fairness, tolerance and plurality...define what it means to be British.

As Tim, John and Robbie all point out, this is a remarkable statement from a minister in a government that has created 3000 new criminal offences.
So how could Straw be so stupid as to make it?  Because, as Boulding said, power deludes as well as corrupts. People in power eventually lose - if indeed they ever had it - their sense of self-awareness and self-absurdity. We see this every time a boss spouts managerialist jibber with a straight face, and indeed, pretty much every time any person in authority expects to be taken seriously.
Straw's just conforming to type.

Liam Byrne: racist, idiot?

Liam Byrne's latest "thinking" on immigration here reveals a nasty combination of racism and idiocy.
Start with the racism. He says:

We want a more open debate about what immigration is good for Britain...For lower skilled migration, the debate is about whether we need such migration at all from outside the EU.

Nowhere, however, does he ask: what immigration policy is good for immigrants? It's as if only British people have interests.
Of course, Byrne's view is widely shared. But surely, an essential aspect of being on the "left" - as Byrne claims to be - is that you give greater weight to the interests of the worse off.  So why is Byrne so unconcerned about the very worst off of all - unskilled workers from outside the EU? As Tom says, there's an "astonishing lack of humanity" here.
Now consider the economic illiteracy. He starts correctly; immigration has made us richer. But he doesn't draw the obvious conclusion from this - that immigration is a potential Pareto improvement. It could make us all better off. If you're worried about the impact immigration has on schools in poor areas - as Byrne is - the solution  is not to restrict immigration. It's higher or more progressive taxation (and other measures) to improve poor schools. This would ensure that the benefits of immigration are shared between rich and poor.
His ignorance doesn't stop there. He says:

It is not populist to argue for a tough enforcement of our immigration laws - it is progressive.

What he omits are the costs of such enforcement. These are not only the costs of policing immigration - around £2bn at present but higher for tougher enforcement - but also the costs of removing illegal immigration; the labour shortages we'll get in agriculture, nannying and catering.
I fear, however, that Byrne's stupidity is not so much an individual failing as a problem of the soft left generally. Byrne's worry is that immigration is weakening one of its cherished values - social cohesion and solidarity; a point famously argued by David Goodhart.
But should the left really have this as a value at all? If it were less attached to such a collectivist notion, and more worried about actual individuals - which includes those with dark skin - it would have an immigration policy which was more humane and economically rational.

Brown doesn't get it

Yet again, Brown is calling for a "national purpose":

We know that other countries have a strong sense of national purpose, even a sense of their own destiny. And so should we. And it helps us deal with issues as varied as what Britain does in Europe; to issues of managed migration and how we better integrate ethnic minorities.

I've got three objections to this:
1. It fails to see that the state is not like a private company. Companies have obvious single objectives, but states do not. Nowhere has Brown considered, let alone rebutted, Michael Oakeshott's view that the function of government is to be an umpire adminstering the rules of the game, not the captain inspiring and directing his players. As Oakeshott asked: "We tolerate monomaniacs, it is our habit to do so; but why should we be ruled by them?"
2. It's illiberal. Brown claims that "Britain can lay claim to the idea of liberty." But the point of liberty is that each individual chooses his own purposes, his own life. To disregard these in favour of a national purpose is to misunderstand the very basis of liberty.
3. It's impractical. Brown seems to think a shared national purpose will help defuse Muslim fundamentalism. But will it really? Will we really integrate marginalized Muslims by imposing some spurious invented national purpose upon them? Or wouldn't we integrate them better by showing that people thrive best within liberal diversity rather than struggling under a common yoke?
* Brown's demand that immigrants do community service before being accepted as citizens is too silly to merit comment.

Danielle Lloyd sets immigration policy

Danielle Lloyd is setting immigration policy. She said Shilpa Shetty should "fuck off home", and New Labour is saying the same.
The PM programme today reported  (about 5 mins in) that changes to the highly skilled migrant programme, plus the NHS's prioritising of EU applicants over non-EU ones, is causing Indian doctors to leave. Home Office minister Liam Byrne says: "if people don't meet the mark we will ask them to go home."
So, here we see New Labour's hypocrisy. Whilst bleating about the bullying of Shilpa, they are copying it.
Danielle has the excuse of being a stupid slag. What excuse does New Labour have?

Brown vs Hayek

Yet another complaint I have about Moving Britain Forward is its ignorance of both Hayek and the possibility of government failure. This comes across in a chapter based upon this speech, on the question of what should be the relative roles of market and government provision of public services.
He devotes lots of attention to market failures such as imperfect information and barriers to entry. These failures, he says, justify state provision of health services.
There are two possibilities he doesn’t mention:
1. Markets are not merely technical devices for maximizing welfare, in the Arrow-Debreu sense. Instead, as Hayek emphasized, they are discovery mechanisms (pdf via here), devices for discovering facts that would previously be unknown. This means we simply can’t predict the consequences of introducing markets into public services – because the point of markets is that they find out new things.
2. Governments fail as well as markets. Brown tells us that there’s a risk of abuse of monopoly power in the private. But there’s also this risk in the public sector. This leads to an obvious absurdity. Brown says:

Because the costs of treatment and of drugs are now much higher than ever, and the risks to family finances now much higher than ever…the need for comprehensive insurance cover of healthcare is much stronger than ever.

Brown thinks this is an argument against private insurance. What he fails to say is that the state itself sometimes refuses to pay for costly treatments.
His juxtaposition of failing markets versus perfect state provision is just a fiction; the question is one of imperfect markets versus imperfect governments.
What’s annoying here is that Brown just doesn’t even consider Hayek’s view of markets or the possibility of state failure. He’s as ignorant of Hayek as he is of Oakeshott.
This matters, because Hayek provides probably the strongest arguments of all against Brown’s centralizing tendency.
That Brown fails to even show any awareness of his thinking suggests that he is scared to have his own ideas challenged. As I said, his supposed erudition is merely the search for support for his own prejudices.

 

Brown and the halo effect

There are two other things I don't like about Moving Britain Forward. One is that each chapter is introduced by some pompous bigwig: Trever Phillips, Al Gore, Alan Greenspan, Kofi Annan and the like. It seems Brown needs the endorsement of the supposedly "great and good" to create a halo effect.
Also, there is nothing in the 274 pages of the tome that even looks like a joke or witticism. Brown is hoping that by being boring, people will think he's serious.
These two failings are related. Brown is terrified of letting his thoughts speak for themselves, or his arguments stand on their own merits. So he needs other tricks to persuade the reader, sub-rationally, that he is a credible figure.
He is, of course, right to be terrified. He's an insecure man, with much to be insecure about.
Another thing: one of Brown's endorsees is someone called Lord Ralf Dahrendorf. This is, of course, a solecism. Only younger sons of Dukes or Marquesses prefix their first name with "Lord". Dahrendorf is not one of these. In a book praising the "golden thread" of British history, the error jars.

Brown: cuckoo

Another thing I don’t like about Moving Britain Forward is the occasional lapse into sentimental mush. In endorsing the notion of “liberty as empowerment” – positive liberty – Brown invites us to consider:

the tragic waste throughout our history of the might have been: the great music never composed; the great art never realised; the books never written…

Brown liked this trope so much that he’s repeated it.
The problem is, it’s pish. There’s a natural experiment which suggests that liberty as empowerment doesn’t produce great culture. The Scandinavian nations in the last 50 years have come much closer to Brown’s ideal of empowerment for all than, say, the American south in the first half of the last century. Count Abba as much as you like, which has given us the most great music?
If Billie Holliday had been born in a Brownian utopia, she’d probably have become a diversity awareness trainer.
Like the fella said:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock*.

There is, of course, a case for empowering people and educating them well – I’d back it at least as much as Brown. But let’s not kid ourselves it’s a way to great culture.
* Even this isn’t true. The cuckoo clock seems to have been invented in Augsburg in Germany.

"Moving Britain Forward"

One of the drawbacks of writing a book is that I’ve felt compelled to read Gordon Brown’s recent tome.
And it’s truly execrable. Pretty much everything about it is awful.
Start with the title, Moving Britain Forward.
Sadly, this is not a progress report on his efforts to winch us nearer to Iceland. What he means – and it’s the start and finish of the book – is that he wants us to have a shared national purpose, a mission:

Unlike America and many other countries, we have no constitutional statement or declaration enshrining our objectives as a country; no mission statement defining purpose; and no explicitly stated vision of our future.

But is it the job of government to act like company managers, moving us towards a common goal?
There’s an important tradition which says it isn’t. Countries shouldn’t have shared objectives, and it’s just projective identification to believe otherwise.
Instead, we all have individual goals. It’s the role of government to reduce the conflict between such goals, to set laws so we can live together in liberty. Here’s Michael Oakeshott, in On Being Conservative:

The office of government is not to impose other beliefs and activities upon its subjects, not to tutor or to educate them, not to make them better or happier in another way, not to direct them, to galvanize them into action, to lead them or to coordinate their activities so that no occasion of conflict shall occur; the office of government is merely to rule….The image of the ruler is the umpire whose business is to administer the rules of the game, or the chairman who governs the debate according to known rules but does not himself participate in it.

What irks me about Brown is that he nowhere so much as recognizes this alternative, let alone argues against it.
This is a remarkable omission. Brown is, supposedly, one of our better-read and more cerebral politicians – though this is as much of an accolade as the claim that I’m a better guitarist than Abu Hamza*. And yet he shows no awareness of the most basic political question: what is government for?
Which raises the suspicion that Brown’s reading is not an expression of his curiosity about ideas, but rather the search for support for his own prejudices, a mere confirmation bias.
* But I’m not quite as good as this fella.