Stumbling and Mumbling

New Labour vs the BNP: where's the politics?

Having failed to get the verdict it wanted in the BNP case - pesky juries - New Labour wants to change the law. In this, we see two of its less pleasant features.
One is its illiberalism:

Chancellor Mr Brown said: "Any preaching of religious or racial hatred will offend mainstream opinion in this country."

Tim calls this right - offending "mainstream opinion" (by which Brown means "opinions like mine") is no reason whatever to make something a crime.
Put it this way. In The God Delusion (ch9), Richard Dawkins likens religious education to child abuse. Is there really a clear difference between that and Griffin's description of Islam as a "wicked religion"? Any law against religious hatred would surely forbid both.
The second unpleasant feature of New Labour is that it favours management over politics. It thinks problems should be managed away, not debated. So it thinks it can combat the BNP with the law, not politics.
In a better world, it would fight the BNP by showing that it is a vicious gutter party, which no respectable person could support. Instead, New Labour panders to its nasty illiberal racism, by denouncing the veil and by pretending that the Stupid Party isn't tough enough on immigration.
What's more, a decent governing party would not have tolerated the vast chasm between the ruling class and the indigenous working class. The BNP is exploiting an alienation that New Labour's centralist managerialism encouraged.
Let's then be clear. The BNP is a party that's nasty, vicious and small. New Labour is nasty, vicious - and big.

New Labour's ignorance of history

Martin Narey accuses David Blunkett of lacking historical awareness. Speaking of the 2002 Lincoln prison riot, he says:

It was the only big crisis in prisons with which David had to deal, notorious escapes also being a thing of the past. Had David possessed a real grasp of history, that good fortune would have been uppermost in his mind.

However, Blunkett is not the only New Labour figure who diesn't grasp history. In 2001, Blair said:

I stand as New Labour, seeking for the first time in a century of British politics to marry together a well-run economy and a just and fair society.

This is, of course, the purest gibber. Few Labour members believe Lord Salisbury created a just and fair society. And marrying equality and efficiency was precisely what the post-1945 Labour government tried to do, as Jim Tomlinson showed in this book.
Such ignorance is not merely idiosyncratic to Blair and Blunkett. It's an institutional failing, which underpins New Labour. Since it's inception, its "narrative" has been that globalization and social and technical change have created a new world, which it, alone, is equipped to understand and manage.  We got a view of this in one of Blair's speeches on foreign policy back in May:

The rule book of international politics has been torn up. Interdependence - the fact of a crisis somewhere becoming a crisis everywhere - makes a mockery of traditional views of national interest.

But the premise is years old. Here's David Marquand:

'New, new, new' Tony Blair told a meeting of European socialist leaders in a characteristic outburst shortly after entering office, 'everything is new.' This is the [New Labour] myth in a nutshell. The world is new, the past has no echoes, modernity is unproblematic, the path to the future is linear. There is one modern condition, which all rational people would embrace if they knew what it was.

And the past has no lessons to teach us about our modern condition. So why should Blunkett, or any other New Labour figure, have a grasp of history?

Jack Straw, idiot

Jack Straw is an idiot. That's the construal I put on his call for Muslim women not to wear veils. He gives two reasons, both bad.

I felt uncomfortable about talking to someone "face-to-face" who I could not see....So many of the judgments we all make about other people come from seeing their faces.

Well, how did David Blunkett manage? How does Straw cope with that ringy thing we call the telephone? If he's uncomfortable talking to many of his constituents, isn't he in the wrong job?

Wearing the full veil was bound to make better, positive relations between the two communities more difficult. It was such a visible statement of separation and of difference.

This is an argument for asking Jews to remove their yarmulkes, or Sikhs their turbans, or chavs their Burberry caps. So why didn't he pick on these? Why not go the full distance and ask that everyone wear identical suits, Chairman Mao-style?
All this matters in two ways.
First, Muslim women are - remember - Straw's employers. A man has no business telling his employers what to wear.
Second, multiculturalism should be synonymous with freedom - the freedom to wear what you want and believe what you want, however foolish.
Another thing: Labour Humanists point out that the veil is sometimes forced upon Muslim women. Insofar as this is true, it's a legitimate objection. However, Straw doesn't make this objection  - if anything, he dismisses it.

John Reid: racist or moron?

Is John Reid a moron or a racist? I ask because of this:

We joined this party because we wanted to see a more equal and just society, where people are no longer held back by the accident of birth...
I'm putting fairness at the heart of everything we're doing in the Home Office.
That's why I favour tighter immigration controls.

Does the man not see the obvious contradiction here?
The fact is that being born in a poor country is a terrible accident of birth - far worse than most able-bodied Brits suffer. And if you stop such people entering rich countries, you are holding them back by an accident of birth.
There might be a case for limiting immigration. But it ain't based upon fairness. Unless, that is, you think fairness doesn't apply to foreigners.

Miliband's managerialism

My fellow Corpuscle David Miliband betrays his managerialist ideology:

We have to work harder at creating a culture of shared values which can balance the beliefs of each with the good of all....Britain needs to develop a learning culture built around the idea of a personalised curriculum designed to discover individual talent.

This is managerialist in at least three ways.
1. The presumption that governments have the power to create culture, that governments can do anything if only they work hard enough.
2. The failure to describe precise mechanisms. How exactly do you create a shared culture? You can't do so merely by exposing people to the same teachers and friends. If you could, David's culture and mine would be much more similar than they are.
3. The under-valuing of traditional professional skills. If you want to improve education, why not hire good teachers and give them the autonomy to pursue professional standards? Why drone on about culture?
The tragedy here is that David probably doesn't realize just how ideological, how contestable, his rhetoric actually is.

Status vs productivity

New Labour's reactionary economic illiteracy has infected even Ruth Kelly. Here's the Guardian:

The former journalist, who rose to the cabinet last year while raising four children, has promised to create more high-status jobs for women who want to work part-time....
[She says:] "Just because a woman decides to trade down her hours, doesn't mean she should trade down her status."

Let's savour the stupidity of this.
First, note that Ms Kelly uses the phrase "high-status" rather than "high productivity" - a peculiarly odd  locution for an economist. It seems she wants inequality for the sake of it.
Second, there's the paradox of a "champion of equality" (para 14 here) obsessing about status. The joke palls, though, when we remember that there's good evidence - much of it from within Whitehall (pdf) - that social inequality (if not income inequality) can be fatal.
Third, there's no recognition of the fact that there are good economic reasons (I'll ignore the bad ones) why high-wage jobs should be full-time. The way to earn high wages is to have skills that are in high demand and short supply. This means employers will want your services over long hours - it's why people at Goldman Sachs get phone calls at 5am in the morning even when they're on holiday.
If a full-timer can be replaced by two part-timers, it can only be because the full-timer's skills are so abundant that it's possible to find two people with similar skills - in which case pay will be low. Many high-productivity jobs, then, must be full-time.
What's happened here is that Ms Kelly has succumbed to several features of New Labour ideology:
1. There are no trade-offs. You can combine high wages and short hours, even though commonsense economics says you often can't.
2. There's an unquestioned acceptance of workplace hierarchies, regardless of their efficiency - remember, it's "high status", not "high productivity". All that matters is that everyone has a chance of climbing these hierarchies - including those unwilling to put in the hours. The idea that the Labour party should aim at reducing status inequalities has been forgotten.
3. People should want to climb the greasy pole, and to dominate others, so the demand for status should be pandered to. 
The tragedy here is that we're seeing not just the decline of a once-decent party, but of a decent person.

Ideological divides

Blair says:

There is no fundamental ideological divide in the Labour party for the first time in 100 years of history.

If this is true - and Blair and the truth have only a nodding acquaintanceship - it's a terrible indictment. There damned well should be ideological divides within the party. I can think of at least six possible divisions:
1. Liberty vs paternalism. Are people irrational, so that they do things - like smoking and eating junk food - that are bad for them? If so, should the state intervene? Or is liberty valuable in itself, even if it leads many people to make bad choices?
2. Hierarchy vs democracy. What's the right way to control organizations like government agencies or companies? Should they be hierarchies or co-operatives? State-owned or private? Profit-oriented or not for profit?
3. Equality of outcome vs equality of opportunity. Does inequality of income matter, as long as everyone has opportunities to get a high income?
4. How far do market forces work? Can public services really be reformed to create the incentive structure in which market forces will improve efficiency? Might the introduction of the profit motive crowd out other motives, such as altruism or professional standards?
5. How much does economic growth matter? There's obviously a trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection, and possibly between growth and redistribution. How much of a priority should growth be?
6. How much can government know? Many  New Labour interventions assume that government can know a lot. For example, it claims to know enough about the low-wage labour market to set the minimum wage at a level that doesn't destroy many jobs. And its tax credit system assumes that governments can know enough to distribute to people in light of their changing circumstances, and  enough about responses to incentives to set withdrawal rates at levels that don't much reduce work incentives.
But do governments really have this much knowledge? Or would "information-light" redistribution - such as a basic income - be better?
Any group of intelligent people on the left or centre should be divided on these questions . Heck, I'm divided on some of them myself. When Blair boasts that there are no ideological divides in the party, he's therefore confessing to something utterly deplorable - that he's taken politics out of the Labour party.

Modernity versus professionalism

There's a connection between two of New Labour's latest idiocies - the child database and Blair's proposal to "intervene" to prevent children growing up to be trouble-makers.
Both show a blind faith in technology over professionalism, for "modernity" over tradition, for managerialism over true expertise, and for statism over liberty.
Take the child database. It's New Labour's response to the murder of Victoria Climbie. But Victoria was not killed because the state didn't have a database. Social workers and doctors knew where she was, and just failed to do their jobs properly.
Rather than ensure that social workers achieve basic professional competence (which most do) New Labour thinks modern technology can be a magic wand.
Or take Blair's latest idea for controlling trouble-makers.
There is a simple, traditional answer to the problem of crime. It's to raise the costs of doing crime. And one way to do this is to increase the probability of being caught - to ensure the police do the job they have traditionally done.
Rather than use this trusted method, and to develop the police's professional competence, Blair seems to believe the social sciences have progressed to a level at which behaviour can be accurately predicted and controlled years in advance.
In both cases, there's a bias towards new, untested modern methods over traditional thinking. There's a lack of confidence that the professionalism of police and social workers can be developed. And there's a leap towards illiberalism.
But then, if our behaviour is determined by our upbringing, freedom is just a fiction anyway, isn't it?

Politicizing crime

I've been trying to work out what it is that I dislike most about Ruth Kelly's speech on "multicultualism."  I've narrowed it down to seven things.
1. Imprecision. What precisely does she mean by integration, cohesion, and multiculturalism? Put it this way. There have always been many Englands; this was a standard trope of Orwell and Priestley. Even white Britain has been multicultural. Just look at Old Firm Derbies, or the north-south divide, or rural-urban divisions. Why then, is integration and multiculturalism a peculiarly political problem now?
2. Tired managerialism. Take this:

The context of today's society arguably poses some of the most complex questions we have ever faced as a nation. Patterns of immigration to Britain are becoming more complex. Our new residents are not the Windrush generation. They are more diverse, coming from countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, from South Africa to Somalia.

This is just boilerplate managerialism. We face unprecedented challenges and complexity. Earlier generations therefore have nothing to teach us. Yada yada.
3. The absence of historical perspective. But they do. Back in the early 1980s, the sons of the Windrush generation were unintegrated and alienated from white society; they were out of work and harrassed by the police. Have we nothing to learn from the issues raised by the Scarman report?
This sums up Kelly's ignorance:

There are white Britons who do not feel comfortable with change. They see the shops and restaurants in their town centres changing. They see their neighbourhoods becoming more diverse....The issues become a catalyst for a debate about who we are and what we are as a country. About what it means to live in a town where the faces you see on the way to the supermarket have changed and may be constantly changing.

Sorry, what year is it? Surely, today, no-one feels uncomfortable about seeing black and Asian faces (which is what she means.) Ms Kelly seems trapped in a Love Thy Neighbour timewarp where Jack Smethurst - the staunch socialist and unionist, remember - raged about nig-nogs and darkies.
4. The unbounded faith in government.

It is clear that we need a controlled, well managed system of immigration that has clear rules and integrity.

What she fails to say is that the Home Office, by Reid's own admission, just doesn't have the ability to manage immigration.
5. The absence of economics. You'd never guess Ms Kelly was an economist. There's no hint at the basic fact of economics - that if you want to change people's behaviour, you've got to change the costs and benefits they face. Even more surprisingly, Ms Kelly never raises the question of urban regeneration. 
6. The politicization of character. Why is it a political problem if people want to live near others of similar ethnic background? We've had Chinatowns in major cities for decades. And just look at Belgrave Road in Leicester, or Stamford Hill in London. What's the problem?
7. The politicization of crime. The questions I've asked all have a common answer, of course. It's the elephant in the room that Ms Kelly contrives to avoid.
Let's be blunt. The subtext of her speech comes straight from the Daily Express: "'aaargh. Darkies want to blow us up."
Even if we grant that this is the case, it doesn't follow that there's a political problem requiring commissions, strategies and "debate." There's just a criminal problem requiring good policing. If we pretend terrorism is a political problem, then the terrorists have won.

A heriditary ruling class

If anyone's stupid enough to still think New Labour is on the side of the working class, they need only read this contemptible call from Byers to abolish inheritance tax.
I've dealt with the better points he makes - "double taxation", "ordinary people" - in this reply to Matthew Elliott and James Frayne; his sillier arguments are well fisked here.
However, there's a huge difference between Byers and Elliott and Frayne. The latter want to abolish IHT as part of a wider campaign to cut tax. Byers, apparently, wants no such thing. He wants high taxes for ordinary hard-working people, whilst rich inheritees pay nothing.
Why might this be? Here's a theory - Byers wants to entrench the privileges of the managerialist class.
The centrepiece of New Labour ideology is the belief that there's a managerialist elite which has the judgment to understand the uniqueness of the new, modern world, and the leadership to face up to its challenges.   
Now, these managerialists, as I've said, are utterly different from technocrats. Anyone from any class can be a technocrat, as long as they've got the hard-earned skills. But to be a managerialist requires a particular character: the self-confidence to spout management-speak without feeling stupid; "judgment"; "communication skills"; "leadership."
These characteristics, as understood by managerialists, are euphemisms for coming from the right class; they call it "being a team player."
The characteristics (I can't call them "qualities") for being one of the managerialist elite are therefore heriditary. So, if our rulers are to hand down their power to their children, why shouldn't they also hand down their money?
Byers is not the first New Labour figure to want to encourage a heriditary ruling class. Back in 1996, Mandelson and Liddle wrote, in The Blair Revolution (p140):

Private schools should be encouraged to twin with state schools in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in Britain. The purpose would be to encourage a two-way traffic between the two systems. The state school might initially make use of some private school facilities - for games, music or drama for example. The private school could use its association with the school and neighbourhood to give its pupils much-needed contact with the real world, to develop leadership skills [my emphasis]...

Here we have New Labour's vision. "Leadership" is something that only comes from the sons of the rich. The ruling class should be heriditary. The rest of us should be heavily taxed to pay for the privilege of being led by this class.