Trust Hits the Buffers
One legacy of Thatcher's idea of public interest is an electorate that holds politicians in utter contempt.
At the end of David Hare's play on the disastrous history of Britain's railway privatisation, The Permanent Way, one of the characters comments: "I don't think the English are good at the communal. It's not their gift. For instance, look, they're hopeless at cities. The English idea of paradise is to go away at weekends, keep hounds and live in Bicester. It's as if we don't want fully to commit to the notion of living together."
Hare's script is based on interview material, but perhaps this is also Hare's own conclusion on this "painful parable" of the failure of British government. What reccurs throughout the play - which opened in London last week - is why was privatisation of the railways, that quintessential institution of the "communal" in an urban industrial society, allowed to happen? What was the combination of public apathy, indifference and ignorance that allowed a government to pursue ideology at such a blatant cost, in lives and money, to the public interest?
It's these questions which make Hare's play so powerful; it's not just about railways, but about one of the most vexing political themes of the past two decades: the difficulty of identifying and rallying support to a public interest which overrides private interest; that there are frequently points where a personal sacrifice may reap broader social benefits. Railways versus cars, state education versus private, high levels of taxation to redistribute wealth and support high-quality public services from health to social housing.
David Marquand's Decline of the Public, to be published tomorrow, echoes the themes of Hare's play, tackling that other side of the equation: who are the people and the institutions who interpret and implement the public interest? Clearly not the executives of Railtrack, who toasted their rising share price with champagne while halving their engineering maintenance staff, with entirely predictable results. This kind of "marketisation" of institutions and the entirely false incentives it instills was part of a Kulturkampf unleashed by neo-liberalism on the "public domain", argues Marquand.
Back in 1988, as a lowly researcher for Hugo Young, I listened to Kenneth Baker describing Thatcherism. Using the metaphor of the cartwheel, he claimed power was being pushed to the rim, to the people; he talked of a strong hub and a strong rim but didn't refer to the spokes. Afterwards, Hugo and I reflected on how a wheel could hold together unless it had strong spokes: the Thatcherite model of populism had no place for the mediating institutions in which the public interest could be negotiated (because it is always contested) and fought for. Trade unions, universities, local authorities, public railways: all had to be weakened, privatised or brought under tight central control. This was the populist Kulturkampf and its legacy of politicial disintegration is evident all around us.
What makes Marquand's book so helpful is his historical sweep of how Britain developed the "public domain" in the first place. For example, he nails the popular myth voiced in Hare's play that somehow it's not in our national DNA. On the contrary, we invented the railways and that was symptomatic of a remarkable tradition of British public purpose, evident in the huge range of Victorian institutions from friendly societies, co-ops and trade unions to sewerage systems which set out to moderate the free market capitalism of early industrialisation.
But the key influence in the 20th century was the rise of the professional. It was their expertise - of the civil engineer, the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer - which gave them the authority in the middle decades to define the public interest and preside over the expansion of the welfare state.
These professionals did well out of it. Their numbers increased, but their patronising claim to always "know best" brought us both a self-confident public domain and patronising arrogance; hideous tower blocks, destroyed town centres and a lack of accountability. So when Mrs Thatcher began her onslaught she found fertile territory among a disaffected public; hence the apathy and indifference as the "family silver" was sold off or subjected to market principles of competition and efficiency.
A similar theme crops up in The Permanent Way as the managers took over from the railway engineers, contemptuously accusing them of fiddling away at public expense on fruitless experiments with signalling schemes. But of course the result was that the managers appeared not to have heard of corner gauge cracking until the Hatfield crash left four people dead.
This has not served the public interest well. It's not just railway crashes which have proved that, but also the mountain of paperwork and audit which make the working lives of millions of public servants wretched without having a demonstrably beneficial effect, as was evident in Michael Barber's downbeat assessment last Friday on the progress of public sector reform.
If the pendulum in the 80s had swung against professionals, it has now swung back. Levels of trust, as Marquand points out, are very high in doctors and university professors; abysmally low in politicians. It is the very political establishment which unleashed the Kulturkampf on this country's public institutions which, ironically, is now the object of public contempt.
A widespread mistake has been to interpret this contempt as apathy. Electoral turnout may be in freefall, but on many other measures of civic engagement, Britain scores highly. On Saturday, pensioners were demonstrating against council tax hikes, the most recent in a stream of street protests, many of which have rallied unprecedented numbers, from the Countryside Alliance to the marches against the war with Iraq. There is no shortage of passionate engagement, only of trust in the institutions to channel and articulate it; Marquand calls low voter turnouts evidence of "streetwise disaffection".
Marquand was born in 1934, Hare in 1947: both speak of generations that grew up in that boomtime of the self-confident middle-class, meritocratic professional. They both articulate powerfully, in their respective trades as political theorist and as playwright, what we are in process of losing; Marquand even suggests some starting points - constitutional reform - for reversing the damage. But he sounds gloomy and he fears that the threat posed to democracy of totalitarianism in the 20th century might be replaced in the 21st century by a new and subtle kind of despotism. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville's description of the parent state which aims to keep its citizens in "perpetual childhood": "power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild ... it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing."
The 19th-century Frenchman has provided a chillingly accurate assessment of Blairism. In a reworking of the bread and circus formula, New Labour will tirelessly seek to deliver the electorate better schools, hospitals and a rising standard of living (for the majority), but has no appetite for the debates on how that should be done. To a significant section of public opinion, that's enough - just don't make the mistake of thinking it's called democracy. A point which an increasing number of British voters have been canny enough to spot.
· Decline of the Public by David Marquand is published by Polity Press
Hare's script is based on interview material, but perhaps this is also Hare's own conclusion on this "painful parable" of the failure of British government. What reccurs throughout the play - which opened in London last week - is why was privatisation of the railways, that quintessential institution of the "communal" in an urban industrial society, allowed to happen? What was the combination of public apathy, indifference and ignorance that allowed a government to pursue ideology at such a blatant cost, in lives and money, to the public interest?
It's these questions which make Hare's play so powerful; it's not just about railways, but about one of the most vexing political themes of the past two decades: the difficulty of identifying and rallying support to a public interest which overrides private interest; that there are frequently points where a personal sacrifice may reap broader social benefits. Railways versus cars, state education versus private, high levels of taxation to redistribute wealth and support high-quality public services from health to social housing.
David Marquand's Decline of the Public, to be published tomorrow, echoes the themes of Hare's play, tackling that other side of the equation: who are the people and the institutions who interpret and implement the public interest? Clearly not the executives of Railtrack, who toasted their rising share price with champagne while halving their engineering maintenance staff, with entirely predictable results. This kind of "marketisation" of institutions and the entirely false incentives it instills was part of a Kulturkampf unleashed by neo-liberalism on the "public domain", argues Marquand.
Back in 1988, as a lowly researcher for Hugo Young, I listened to Kenneth Baker describing Thatcherism. Using the metaphor of the cartwheel, he claimed power was being pushed to the rim, to the people; he talked of a strong hub and a strong rim but didn't refer to the spokes. Afterwards, Hugo and I reflected on how a wheel could hold together unless it had strong spokes: the Thatcherite model of populism had no place for the mediating institutions in which the public interest could be negotiated (because it is always contested) and fought for. Trade unions, universities, local authorities, public railways: all had to be weakened, privatised or brought under tight central control. This was the populist Kulturkampf and its legacy of politicial disintegration is evident all around us.
What makes Marquand's book so helpful is his historical sweep of how Britain developed the "public domain" in the first place. For example, he nails the popular myth voiced in Hare's play that somehow it's not in our national DNA. On the contrary, we invented the railways and that was symptomatic of a remarkable tradition of British public purpose, evident in the huge range of Victorian institutions from friendly societies, co-ops and trade unions to sewerage systems which set out to moderate the free market capitalism of early industrialisation.
But the key influence in the 20th century was the rise of the professional. It was their expertise - of the civil engineer, the doctor, the teacher, the lawyer - which gave them the authority in the middle decades to define the public interest and preside over the expansion of the welfare state.
These professionals did well out of it. Their numbers increased, but their patronising claim to always "know best" brought us both a self-confident public domain and patronising arrogance; hideous tower blocks, destroyed town centres and a lack of accountability. So when Mrs Thatcher began her onslaught she found fertile territory among a disaffected public; hence the apathy and indifference as the "family silver" was sold off or subjected to market principles of competition and efficiency.
A similar theme crops up in The Permanent Way as the managers took over from the railway engineers, contemptuously accusing them of fiddling away at public expense on fruitless experiments with signalling schemes. But of course the result was that the managers appeared not to have heard of corner gauge cracking until the Hatfield crash left four people dead.
This has not served the public interest well. It's not just railway crashes which have proved that, but also the mountain of paperwork and audit which make the working lives of millions of public servants wretched without having a demonstrably beneficial effect, as was evident in Michael Barber's downbeat assessment last Friday on the progress of public sector reform.
If the pendulum in the 80s had swung against professionals, it has now swung back. Levels of trust, as Marquand points out, are very high in doctors and university professors; abysmally low in politicians. It is the very political establishment which unleashed the Kulturkampf on this country's public institutions which, ironically, is now the object of public contempt.
A widespread mistake has been to interpret this contempt as apathy. Electoral turnout may be in freefall, but on many other measures of civic engagement, Britain scores highly. On Saturday, pensioners were demonstrating against council tax hikes, the most recent in a stream of street protests, many of which have rallied unprecedented numbers, from the Countryside Alliance to the marches against the war with Iraq. There is no shortage of passionate engagement, only of trust in the institutions to channel and articulate it; Marquand calls low voter turnouts evidence of "streetwise disaffection".
Marquand was born in 1934, Hare in 1947: both speak of generations that grew up in that boomtime of the self-confident middle-class, meritocratic professional. They both articulate powerfully, in their respective trades as political theorist and as playwright, what we are in process of losing; Marquand even suggests some starting points - constitutional reform - for reversing the damage. But he sounds gloomy and he fears that the threat posed to democracy of totalitarianism in the 20th century might be replaced in the 21st century by a new and subtle kind of despotism. He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville's description of the parent state which aims to keep its citizens in "perpetual childhood": "power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild ... it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided that they think of nothing but rejoicing."
The 19th-century Frenchman has provided a chillingly accurate assessment of Blairism. In a reworking of the bread and circus formula, New Labour will tirelessly seek to deliver the electorate better schools, hospitals and a rising standard of living (for the majority), but has no appetite for the debates on how that should be done. To a significant section of public opinion, that's enough - just don't make the mistake of thinking it's called democracy. A point which an increasing number of British voters have been canny enough to spot.
· Decline of the Public by David Marquand is published by Polity Press
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