What does David Cameron have in common with the Kaczyński twins?

Updated June 3, 2009

Where was David Cameron on the weekend of May 30-31st? You probably wouldn’t have found out by scanning the UK’s press headlines on the Sunday morning because the event he attended seems to have been the object of a news blackout—then again, perhaps the UK’s political editors joined the millions who headed for the beach during what proved to be an extraordinarily hot weekend. Whatever the case, here’s a clue as to Cameron’s whereabouts: he was meeting with the Kaczyński twins.

The Kaczyński twins are the leaders of the hard-right Polish Law and Justice Party. One of the twins, Lech, is the current president of Poland. The other, Jaroslaw, was the prime minister until the current PM, Donald Tusk, defeated him in the 2007 general elections. Imagine that… it’s like saying that if the U.S. had a prime minister, George W. Bush would have been president, and his brother Jeb would have been prime minister. If that doesn’t make you shudder, the following will: according to Wikipedia, Europe’s most notorious twins are in favour of

–allowing the president the right to pass laws by decree (when prompted to do so by the Cabinet), a reduction of the number of members of the Sejm and Senat, and removal of constitutional bodies overseeing the media and monetary policy

–strengthening restrictions on abortion, which is already illegal in Poland except in extraordinary circumstances. They also oppose same-sex marriages or any other form of legal recognition of homosexual couples. Jarosław Kaczyński has been quoted as saying that homosexuals should not be teachers, but that homosexuals would not be persecuted. He has also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

–in 2005, the Kaczyński-led government engaged in an action that reminds EcoLogics of New Labour’s transformation of the old Department of Education into two new departments: Children, Schools and Families, and Innovation, Universities and Skills. The Polish government at the time closed down the Office of Government Representative for the Equal Status of Women and Men (Biuro pełnomocnika rządu ds. równego statusu kobiet i mężczyzn), and replaced it with the newly created Department of Women, Family and Counteracting Discrimination of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (Departament Kobiet, Rodziny i Przeciwdziałania Dyskryminacji MPiPS). What may have appeared to be a purely semantic change, or indeed an improvement from the point of view of social justice, actually masked a profound change in policy towards the right.

Back to David Cameron: Cameron travelled to Poland during the weekend in question to meet with the members of the Law and Justice Party, as well as other parties far to the right of the European parliament. Why was he doing this? A couple of years ago, Cameron decided to ditch his alliance with the centre-right parties in Germany and France in favour of a deal with parties such as Law and Justice.

Apparently the move is a result of Cameron’s wheeling and dealing at the height of the last Conservative Party leadership battle. Fearful that he might lose the contest, he agreed to withdraw his MEPs from the centre-right EPP-ED grouping in the European parliament (1). In that context, the Kaczyński twins’ policies must have appeared to offer a solution to Cameron’s typically New Tory dilemma: on the one hand, he needed, and still needs to hold on to a ‘base’ that is almost rabidly right-wing, especially but not only where European policies are concerned. On the other hand, he needed, and still needs to avoid an association with the kind of Old Tory public service slash ‘n burn techniques if he is to get a substantial number of New Labour votes. Could it be that Cameron can do this by embracing the Kaczyński twins’ ultra-nationalist policies as well as their enthusiasm for a safety net for the poor, and free health services provided by the state?

The funny thing is that Merkel and Sarkosy already stood for right-wing versions of the latter policies (safety nets, free health services). We must thus deduce that Cameron remains happy to take his party further—much further—to the right in his quest to appease Tory Eurosceptics.

In this context, hands up how many people in the UK think that Cameron is a real alternative to New Labour’s authoritarianism. Or, put more sharply, hands up how many people think that Cameron is a New Labour wolf in Kaczyński clothing…or is it a Kaczyński wolf in New Labour clothing? Either way, the slogan ‘Law and Justice’ really does sum it up.

Update June 3, 2009: The Guardian has published an excellent article whose title says it all:
‘Anti-gay, climate change deniers: meet David Cameron’s new friends’

References

1) ‘Exist stage right: the pledge to quit big party alliance that haunts David Cameron’, in Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/29/david-cameron-european-parliament-epp-ed, accessed May 30, 2009.

THIS POST HAS BEEN CENSORED

This post was removed from the public domain by WordPress following a complaint presented by the University of Liverpool’s legal department. The complainant argued that the comparison which the post established was false, and so defamatory. The comparison in question established a continuity between the threatened closure of several departments at Liverpool University, and the closure of railway lines during the 1960s.

EcoLogics rejects the Liverpool University complaint, and stands by what was posted. By definition, a comparison involves the establishment of an analogy: x is like y. This means that comparisons are, by their very nature, a matter of interpretation, as opposed to being simply ‘true’ or ‘false’. If someone can be accused of defamation merely by comparing two things, then from a critical linguistic perspective, any and all representations—which are themselves intrinsically a matter of comparison or metaphor— may be subjected to censorship.

Although there has been no official legal pronouncement on the matter, WordPress policy is apparently to remove posts at the request of solicitors (EcoLogics disputes the validity of this policy, which has grave consequences for the freedom of speech). In the case of this post, the complaint involved the title, hence my decision to remove the entire post.

Readers interested in this matter may wish to know that most of the original post appears at this new address, which many students used to reach EcoLogics at the height of a period when Newby threatened to close several departments at the University of Liverpool.

Michael Martin has resigned. Will Tessa Jowell resign now too?

It’s being described as a historic event, and so it is: for the first time in 300 years, a Speaker of the House of Commons has been forced to resign. Even as we digest these news, we hear that Douglas Hogg, the Tory who made his political name by denying the reality of BSE (remember ‘Is British beef safe? Yes it is’), will be bowing out at the next election.

It says a lot about British politics that Hogg has been forced to depart not for what he did (or rather, didn’t do) about BSE, but for what he did with his moat (he had it dredged, and passed the £2000+ bill on to the state).  Probably the big mistake was to call it a ‘moat’, rather than, say, a trench designed to stop medieval or indeed modern terrorists.

But it also says a lot that, on the day that Michael Martin has been forced to resign for aiding and abetting these and many other Westminster peccadilloes, some news of corruption on an altogether grander scale may well slip under the media radar.

We were reminded of the corruption in question when a court in Milan confirmed today that David Mills acted ‘as a false witness … to allow Silvio Berlusconi and his Fininvest group impunity from charges’ during trials in the late 1990s, in which Berlusconi was accused of tax fraud in the purchase of film rights in the US by his Mediaset television empire. Berlusconi paid Mills £430.000 for the favour (1).

Mills is, of course, married to Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister. At the time that the allegations first emerged in 2006, Jowell denied that she had any knowledge of the bribe. But a week or so before the couple separated, the media alleged that Mills had remortgaged one of the couple’s family homes in 2000, and had paid the bulk of the £408,000 loan off with money given as a gift. As noted by the media at the time, Jowell was alleged to have been implicated because she signed the papers of the repayment and allegedly never bothered to ask where the money had come from. According to the BBC,

“Mr Mills denied that the money came from Mr Berlusconi, saying it was from another client. Both he and Ms Jowell have denied any wrongdoing. [...] Ms Jowell was drawn into the affair after it emerged that she had co-signed a £408,000 loan taken out against the value of their house, which was paid off just weeks later, apparently using the Italian money. [...] She said it was not “unusual, improper or illegal” for her to take out a mortgage with her husband, and categorically denied that the money had come from Mr Berlusconi. [...] The ministerial code says gifts to ministers or their families should be notified to the permanent secretary – senior civil servant – in their department”(2).

Alas, the image below reveals the remarkable manner in which Tony Blair, apparently with the cooperation of the BBC, handled the scandal (image taken from the same BBC article quote above).

How Blair and Jowell managed the scandal

Blair’s well-known fondness for holidaying in Berlusconi’s villa doesn’t seem to have affected his capacity to make an impartial judgment about his minister—nor should it, of course. And yet the following quote, taken from a Guardian article in 2006, gives the reader a sense of the extent to which the bribe appears to have been part of a pattern. Was Tessa Jowell, a die-hard New Labour politician with eyes very wide open, unaware of this pattern?

The allegations against Mr Mills in Italy today date back to the early 1980s. An Oxford-educated barrister, he had started working as a solicitor and become an expert in offshore tax-avoidance schemes. He supplied his services in various guises: initially his own firm, Mackenzie Mills, then as head of the British branch of a Milan law firm, Carnelutti, and then, over a crucial period, as director of a company called CMM Corporate Services (Carnelutti Mackenzie Mills), which – on Mr Berlusconi’s behalf – handled the legal affairs of several offshore companies. CMM acted as company secretary to 17 of them. Mr Mills has told Italian magistrates that the summary sheet of each would be marked “very discreet”.

He had, in essence, to devise a miasma of offshore companies which, although part of Mr Berlusconi’s empire and its parent company, Fininvest, would hide Mr Berlusconi’s ownership. (At one stage, Mr Mills himself became beneficial owner of one TV channel, through a company, Horizon, registered in the British Virgin Islands.) This kind of service was his speciality – for a clutch of smaller businessmen, and for many Italian clients, including the designer Valentino(3).

EcoLogics asks: what will the Brown government—or the Cameron government that follows—be doing about this kind of practice? We appear to be talking about corruption that involves not a bath plug or two TVs or indeed state-financed property speculation, but the kind of corruption that has arguably allowed a proto-fascist politician to achieve the degree of power that he currently has in Italy.

Is New Labour, in Peter Mandelson’s memorable language, still intensely relaxed, if not with bribing (no minister could ever feel relaxed with that) then apparently with the lifestyle and business politics of David Mills? (EcoLogics refers to Peter Mandelson’s now infamous statement, ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’)(4).

References

1) ‘Silvio Berlusconi faces calls to resign over David Mills trial’, in Daily Telegraph, May 19, 2009,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5350720/Silvio-Berlusconi-faces-calls-to-resign-over-David-Mills-trial.html, accessed May 19, 2009.

2) ‘Blair Clears Jowell of Wrongdoing’, in BBC News Online, 2 March 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4761194.stm, accessed May 19, 2009.

3) ‘Ministers, moguls and murky deals—the curious world of David Mills’, in Guardian, March 4, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2006/mar/04/uk.italy1, accessed May 19, 2009.

4) ‘Blair taxed about the filthy rich’, in Guardian Letters section, January 12, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jan/12/tonyblair.labour, accessed May 19, 2009.

New Labour’s Assault on Higher Education: the end of ‘universitas’ and ‘educere’

Please note: an aspect of this post has been censored. Following a complaint presented by the legal department of the University of Liverpool, WordPress removed this post from the public domain. The legal department in question argued that a passage in the post concerning the private training firm, Carter & Carter, was defamatory. Although there has been no official legal pronouncement on the matter, WordPress policy is apparently to remove posts at the request of solicitors.

EcoLogics categorically rejects any such claim, and disputes the validity of the WordPress policy, which has grave consequences for the freedom of speech. I have decided to re-publish the rest of the post, with the censored passage marked out as ‘CENSORED’. Anyone interested in finding out what information has been censored may wish to visit this website’s digitized image of an article in Private Eye issue 1185.

Posted 14 May 2009; updated 8 December 2009: New Labour’s Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance (scroll down to see update)

This week George Monbiot posted a warning in the Guardian about a dynamic that some academics have been denouncing for years. Monbiot revealed the extent to which research in British universities is being co-opted by private corporations, with the active support of the New Labour government via the research councils.

While the research councils are playing an important role in this process, there are other ways and levels in which the cancer of neoliberalism is spreading throughout the sector.

EcoLogics posted an article about this phenomenon back in August 2007 (The UWE Experiment) which revealed the leading role that one vice-chancellor and university—Howard Newby at the University of the West of England—took in promoting the neoliberalisation of British higher education, from within. Following [THIS PART OF THE POST HAS BEEN CENSORED], a university that was formerly led by Drummond Bone, who himself played an important role in the Council of Industry and Higher Education (CIHE). At Liverpool Newby attempted to close down the departments of philosophy, politics, and communication studies, arguing that they were failing to perform to the standards expected of a Russell Group university. This blogger joins all those who believe that Newby’s decision to target the mentioned areas had rather more to do with Newby’s efforts to silence opposition to his neoliberal project.

CIHE describes its mission in terms of ‘a high level partnership between leading people from a wide range of businesses, universities and colleges. The Council leads in developing an agreed agenda on the learning issues at higher education level that affect our international competitiveness, social cohesion and individual development’(1). The last two aspects of the aims are arguably an example of the kind of ‘humbug’ described by Monbiot when he assessed New Labour’s claim that the Haldane Principle still holds(2). For a real sense of CIHE’s agenda, readers might wish to recall its chief executive’s words in a Times Higher article in the summer of 2007: in the article, Richard Brown threatened that if universities did not embrace New Labour’s ‘skills revolution’ (the turn towards teaching, learning and researching so-called ‘economically valuable skills’) ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’(3).

In fact, New Labour’s ‘cultural’ revolution for higher education (as the Times described it) was and remains what EcoLogics has described as the skillification of higher education. Skillification refers to the process whereby universities are forced to go down the road of the kind of vocationalisation that is part and parcel of the changes denounced by Monbiot. In effect, anything in higher education that is not regarded as being ‘economically valuable’ is left to wither on the vine of business-led funding (be it teaching, or research). If this process has been a long time in the making, under New Labour it has taken such a radical turn that the policy now arguably entails the elimination of the difference between higher education and further education. In this context, full universities are being encouraged to teach the kind of courses that were once only offered by further education colleges, even as those institutions (FE colleges) are being given a chance to become institutions of higher education. The door has even been opened for private institutions to set up universities (for more on this process, see EcoLogics’ ‘Unlocking the Business of Higher Education‘).

If this process has had its advocates within some universities, it has also been powerfully imposed by the leading government agencies in charge of regulating higher education. Newby himself became an agent of this policy during his tenure at HEFCE, but skillification was transformed into the official New Labour dogma by way of two key reviews: the Leitch Review of Skills, which covered all of the different educational levels but, remarkably, was led by one of the UK’s finance and insurance barons (Sandy Leitch, of the disgraced Lloyds TSB jefatura); and the Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, which was led by Richard Lambert, the man who is now the head of the CBI, the Confederation of Business Industry.

This pincer movement from above and from within some institutions in the sector has been bad enough. However, if the movement has prospered, it is for reasons that go beyond these forms of political agency. It is clear that, even if many leading figures in higher education still defend the principle of higher education’s autonomy, they adopt stances that, in one way or another, make them accessories to New Labour’s backdoor (or is it now a police-style dawn raid via the front door) imposition of a neoliberal model. Ecologics has in mind, for example, the remarkable outbursts of Lord May, the president of the Royal Society, and Lord Krebs, the principal of Jesus College Oxford, who recently accused Greenpeace of being hijacked by a ‘political agenda’(4).

EcoLogics is not a great admirer of Greenpeace, but this attack was a bit like saying that the Royal Society and Jesus College have been hijacked by an educational agenda. First, only a die-hard positivist can claim that environmental activism should be ‘free of politics’. Second, at a time when New Labour has implicitly politicised just about every sphere of British social life along neoliberal lines—the politics of claiming that a fictional ‘free market’ is king in every social sphere—it is hardly surprising that a growing number of non-government organisations are having to fight back in ways that seem, and increasingly are, explicitly ‘Political’ (with a capital P). Third, at least one of the critics (Krebs) has played a role in government that closely aligns him with New Labour’s pro-GM foods stance, itself very much a function of a neoliberal ideology that prioritises technological innovation and the resulting business opportunities over fundamental issues of democratic accountability. It is no secret that New Labour has used every trick in the political book to impose GM foods on a public that is quite rightly sceptical about the foods’ real value. Krebs’ infamous suggestion during his time in the government Food Standards Agency, that organic foods have no demonstrated health value, was itself a textbook example of a narrowly positivist mentality. Krebs’ point, taken in and of itself, might be logical, but it could only be made by overlooking the much broader politics of organic foods. Paradoxically, what was made to look like a scientific, non-political, and non-partisan intervention was arguably the most political, and partisan stance of all.

The above is a long way of saying that part of the reason why New Labour’s ‘skills revolution’ is prevailing in HE is that many academics within the field are still trying to adhere to a naive understanding of their own work in academia. Nicholas Maxwell, an emeritus reader in the philosophy of science at UCL, hinted at this problem when he suggested that

“I think scientists themselves are partly to blame for the current situation. They take for granted a defective view of science which holds that the content of science is made up of just theory and evidence. If government tried to interfere with this, there would be an uproar. This view places aims of scientific research outside the intellectual domain of science, so that when government interferes with aims, there is no uproar.

A more adequate view of science would recognise that the intellectual content of science is made up of three domains: theory, evidence and aims – the latter making highly problematic assumptions about metaphysics, values and use, and thus requiring sustained scientific discussion, by scientists and non-scientists alike. If such a view prevailed among scientists, there would be outrage at the influence government, industry and defence at present quietly exert over choice of research aims”(5).

Alas, these and other critiques may be a case of too little, too late. The New Labour fox is in the academic coop, and what is required now is nothing less than a full-scale mobilisation of academics and students against New Labour’s neoliberalisation of higher education. Contrary to the logic of arguments such as those propounded by May and Krebs vis-a-vis environmental activism, such a mobilization must be a political one in two ways: it must be political with a small ‘p’ in that it must defend the policy that higher education can and should remain relatively autonomous from government and from business (EcoLogics refers to the concept of relative autonomy developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron). But if, as now seems crystal clear, that policy can only be defended by engaging in politics with a capital ‘P’, then academics and students must be prepared to engage in very public protest, and to make it clear to both New Labour and the New Conservatives (who have styled themselves in the image of Tony Blair) that academia can vote in the hundreds of thousands against any party that tries to further undermine the autonomy of higher education in the UK.

One place to start might be a letter-writing campaign to the local MP. Famously busy and overworked lecturers who are loathe to actually print, and mail a letter might bear in mind that MP’s now have their own websites. But in the end, the most active opposition to the process will almost certainly have to apply rather more direct forms of political pressure. Here we have much to learn from the students at Liverpool, who used Facebook and other media to mobilise against Newby. Indeed, perhaps the first test of the kind of mobilization that is required will take place at Liverpool University this June, when that university’s senate decides whether to accept Howard Newby’s plans to impose New Labour’s ‘cultural revolution’ on the institution. In Liverpool as in many other universities, students and lecturers may discover that the battle must start by demystifying managerial directives that appear to be justified by the latest RAE.

As EcoLogics has noted in other posts, the stakes could not be higher for the sector. Until the time of New Labour, the predominant model for universities was premised on the twin concepts of ‘universitas’—a ‘whole’ education, one which is not simply driven by New Labour’s consequentialist ethics—and ‘educat’ or ‘educere’—the Latin roots for the word education, which refer to a process of ‘leading out’: leading out of prejudice, and today we might add, of social deprivation and explicitly ideological relationships. While New Labour might wink and nod in the direction of these values, there can be little doubt that the real logic of their reforms is to reproduce from within universities the boundaries and ideology of the UK’s private corporate sector—in particular, those associated with New Labour’s ‘darling donors’ such as Capita or Bridgepoint Capital. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that the wealth gap in the UK has worsened under New Labour, to the point that we now have inequality at levels not seen under Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher or Major(6). Nor is it a coincidence that New Labour appears to have jettisoned the very word ‘education’ in favour of ‘skills’: there is, for example, no longer a Department of Education in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Increasingly, all that matters is business: not just ‘business in general’, but increasingly, the business, in the narrowest, neoliberal sense of the term, of higher education.

Anything less than a categorical rejection of this process will continue to open the door, if only by degrees, to further inequality, and to the kind of process that is today leading to the closure of the departments of politics, philosophy and statistics at Liverpool. The process started at UWE, and has continued in Liverpool; what institution, whose course and whose job will it be tomorrow?

Update: For news of the outcome of the attempted closure of departments at Liverpool, see Howard Newby at Liverpool University.

UPDATE 8 DECEMBER 2009: New Labour’s ‘Independent’ Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance

If you have any doubts as to the politics of New Labour’s supposedly Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance, have a look at the people that New Labour has chosen for the panel. Mandelson, Brown and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura have done their best to try to bring to the foreground the academic credentials of the different members, and indeed some do have impressive credentials relating to HE. However, with two exceptions, all of the members have developed their careers either in big business—in particular, in those sectors that have to do with heavy industry and finance—or in institutions devoted to the neoliberal ‘reform’ of education.

Here are the people, and a selection of their credentials:

1) Lord John Browne, the chair, was the BP Group Chief Executive between 1995 and 2007. This means that an oilman is chairing the review of our higher education funding—to be sure, it will not just be a review of its funding, because of course the funding affects every aspect of higher education—not least, if and when the funding is controlled by businesses.
2) Sir Michael Barber, ‘head of McKinsey’s Global Education Practice and Founder of the Education Delivery Institute in Washington, D.C. which advises governments in the US on implementation of reform in higher education and school systems. He works on major challenges of performance, organisation and reform in government and the public services, especially education, around the world’.
3) Diane Coyle, ‘runs the consultancy Enlightenment Economics’, ‘specialises in competition analysis and the economics of new technologies and globalisation, including extensive work on the impacts of mobile telephony in developing countries. Is ‘also a member of the advisory board of ING Direct UK and of the stakeholder advisory panel of EDF Energy’.
4) Professor David Eastwood is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Birmingham and was previously Chief Executive at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). This is the only dedicated academic and professor in the group, and one of just two people who appears to be less beholden to big business (though he was a member of the board of the Sainsbury’s Laboratories). If, however, Eastwood was chosen to succeed Howard Newby at HEFCE, it must be because New Labour regarded him as a safe pair of hands, and certainly we have not seen a volte face in the knowledge exchange steam train during Eastwood’s tenure. To his credit, Eastwood explains rather quaintly as part of his CV that he ‘is married with three children. He enjoys music, politics, walking, sport and good wine; and includes writing on football amongst his extensive list of publications’. He is also the only member with a background in the humanities.
5) Julia King is Vice-Chancellor of Aston University; however, she spent many years as a manager/engineer at Rolls Royce, and still works for the New Labour government: she is a member of the ‘Management Board of the Department for Business Innovation & Skills, the Committee on Climate Change, and the National Security Forum. She has also been an adviser to the Ministry of Defence as Chair of the Defence Scientific Advisory Council’.
6) Peter Sands is Group Chief Executive of Standard Chartered. ‘Before his appointment as Group Chief Executive he was responsible for Finance, Strategy, Risk and Technology and Operations. Prior to this, Peter was a Director with worldwide consultants McKinsey & Co.’ ‘Peter had been with McKinsey since 1988 where he worked extensively in the banking and technology sectors in a wide range of international markets.’
7) Rajay Naik is a UK Board Member of the Big Lottery Fund (BIG). He is also a Commissioner of the Standing Commission on Carers. He is also described as a ‘renowned expert on policy and programs relating to young people currently supporting their engagement within local government.’ This is the other member who does not appear to be tied to industry. EcoLogics is not sure that his credentials are any more suited for the job at hand than are those of the big businessmen and women; how remarkable, though, that whereas the rest of the members are listed in alphabetical order (Browne, the chair, excepted), Naik is at the bottom of the list. Why is this? And will New Labour address this issue? (current as of 8 December)

Aside from the ties of these people to big business, it’s worth noting that the American global consultancy firm McKinsey will apparently have a role in shaping the UK’s higher education (2 of the 7 members work or have worked for McKinsey). Indeed, it’s striking to note how many of the members (4) have CV’s that feature strong ties of one sort another to U.S. institutions. One wonders if the UK’s higher education sector is yet another ‘market’ to be penetrated by U.S. corporations keen to sell what McKinsey describes as ‘content’ to UK customers.

Whatever the case, no prizes for predicting the kinds of recommendations that this group will make. On the contrary, the suspicion has to be that the word ‘Independent’ which is so conspicuously at the front of the title (is any review supposed to be ‘Dependent’?) is a rather crude attempt to dissimulate the agenda that has clearly informed the selection of the panel, and which will determine its deliberations. This explains why I have removed the question mark from the original title of this post. Does this seem too pessimistic? Ask lecturers, researchers and students at UWE and Liverpool.

Notes

1) http://www.cihe-uk.com/aboutus.php, accessed May 14, 2009.

2) http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/, accessed May 14, 2009.

3) ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209662&sectioncode=26, accessed May 14, 2009.

4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/13/green-movement-hijacked-politics, accessed May 13, 2009.

5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/13/letters, accessed May 13, 2009.

6) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/may/07/inequality-poverty-labour, accessed May 13, 2009.

Westminster’s Corruption and the Asymmetry of Panopticism

In a post published in 2007, EcoLogics noted that panopticism involves a form of power that is embodied in a ‘principle of construction’ proposed in the late 18th century by Jeremy Bentham. Bentham, a philosopher and social reformer, conceived a radically new way of keeping persons of ‘any kind of description’ ‘under inspection’. The ‘Panopticon’, to be used in ‘prisons, houses of industry, work-houses, poor-houses, lazarettos, manufactories, hospitals, mad-houses and schools’, was to be a building in the form of a ring with a watchtower in its centre. The ring was to be divided into cells which extended across the entire width of the building; the cells were to have windows at either end. A guard, or as Bentham called him, an ‘inspector’ would be located in the tower, and would maintain the cells under surveillance. While the guard might not be able to watch all of the cells all the time, his eye should be attracted to any activity thanks to the backlighting of each cell. This principle would still apply at night thanks to the use of specially designed lamps with reflectors.

Bentham shows how carefully he had thought through the psychology of the design when he says that

‘To save the troublesome exertion of voice that might otherwise be necessary, and to prevent one prisoner from knowing that the inspector was occupied by another prisoner at a distance, a small tin tube might reach from each cell to the inspector’s lodge, passing across the area, and so in at the side of the correspondent window of the lodge. By means of this implement, the slightest whisper of the one might be heard by the other, especially if he had proper notice to apply his ear to the tube.’(1)

Key to the idea of the Panopticon was the use of an asymmetrical form of visibility—observing without being observed, but also (not) observing whilst being thought to observe. As noted famously by Michel Foucault, the effect of the Panopticon was

‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.’(2)

*    *    *

Now that the scandal of Westminster’s expense-charging schemes has erupted, it is interesting to note the extent of the panoptical asymmetry of our times.  New Labour, with David Blunkett, Jacqui Smith and Hazel Blears fronting the process, has arguably done more than any other party in recent British history to introduce panoptical systems designed to police, at a distance, virtually any and every aspect of our lives. As noted in other posts, the New Labour government now arguably treats us as de facto criminals-in-the-making. On the basis of this Hobbesian logic, party leaders like Charles Clarke argue that it is necessary to introduce all manner of systems in which to engage in general, and targeted surveillance: EcoLogics has in mind systems such as the DNA database, a digital ID card, and RIPA 2000 more generally.

Yet even as such systems have been overtly or covertly introduced, leading members of New Labour have been busy engaging in private practices that make it starkly apparent that they themselves do not feel, or thus far have not felt under, panoptical surveillance. Blunkett felt able, despite the very real possibility of a conflict of interest, to join Entrust, a company that sells the kind of digital systems required to spy on people by means of the ID cards he was pushing as Home Office Secretary. Jacqui Smith has arguably continued Blunkett’s assault on our civil liberties even as she has charged some of the most personal of her expenses to the state. Blears, who was herself once a policing minister, has a voting record apparently second to none on the ‘war on terror’. As Communities and Local Government minister she has arguably played an active role in promoting the kind of culture of fear that has emerged following the 9/11 attack (for an interesting take on her specific role, see the post by Craig Murray on Blears’ alleged ignorance about events in Uzbekistan). Yet even as she has been adopting this hard right-wing stance, we now know that she has been engaging in activities that have allowed her to profit from property speculation, apparently at the expense of the state.

One can choose to regard the co-incidence of the two sets of events as just that—as no more than coincidence. Then again, one can regard them as being a matter of a systemic logic: the structural nature of what might be described as the New Labour government’s creeping culture of corruption is that it employs panopticism on others even as the trappings of state work to ensure the privacy required for ministers and lower ranking politicians to engage in the kind of activities that have been denounced by The Telegraph. This is not so much a matter of personal ‘design’ (though in some cases there has clearly been an intent to deceive), as it is of a social logic that is at least as old as Bentham’s proposal. People—not least, journalists—cowering at the thought of somehow being accused or ‘found out’ by a panoptical security apparatus are rather less likely to investigate the corruption of a government. In this as in so many other spheres, it seems likely that the real targets of panopticism are not so much the mythical ‘average man or woman on the street’, let alone the criminals with the knowledge to circumvent the surveillance, as individuals or social groups who feel aggrieved enough to contemplate engaging in one or another form of political activism.

From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that Downing Street sicked the anti-terror police on Damian Green and his mole in the name of ‘national security’: for New Labour, national security may be precisely a matter of the kind of the panoptical system that is now collapsing around the party. The state—which is to say the state as New Labour requires it—is in danger of being fatally undermined in so far as it is now the politicians that are feeling watched. However momentarily, the asymmetry has been inverted, and it is now ‘the people’, via the less than disinterested press, that are doing the watching.

Note, though, that in the process, panopticism itself becomes more and more ingrained, rather than becoming the subject of more intense scrutiny in its own right. Until the latter happens, things can only get worse for us all. Alas, this is potentially a never-ending spiral of surveillance, whereby increasingly, being a part of a state is a matter of becoming a member of that increasingly universal category, Homo panopticans: even as we are all watched, we are all encouraged to become ‘watchers’. The  watchtower is now truly within.

Notes

1) J. Bentham, ‘Panopticon; or the Inspection-House’ in The Panopticon Writings, Ed. By Miran Bozovic (London, 1995), and reproduced in http://www.cartome.org/panopticon2.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.
2) emphasis added. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (NY: Vintage Books 1995) p. 196. For a longer quotation, see http://www.cartome.org/foucault.htm, accessed September 4, 2007.