EcoLogics

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.

Howard Newby is to Higher Education in the early 21st century what Richard Beeching was to our country’s railways in the 1960s.

Earlier this year, Newby tried to close down three departments at Liverpool University (Politics and Communication, Philosophy, and Statistics). He used the excuse of the latest RAE results, claiming that the departments were not doing well enough in terms of their research achievements. Following Newby’s announcement, students and academics across the UK could almost hear the sharpening of knives amongst like–minded vice-chancellors. If Newby could so blithely close down three departments, then surely other neoliberal VCs could do the same.

Alas, staff and students at Liverpool opposed the move with such unexpected vigour that Newby was forced to regroup, and to review his draconian measures. Now EcoLogics understands that Newby has been forced to back down. According to the Times Higher,

In an email to staff, the vice-chancellor, Sir Howard Newby, says that closure will no longer be recommended, provided that the departments show progress.

“As a result of the formal reviews of the eight units of assessment in which the university was in the lowest quartile nationally in the RAE, each affected department has been asked to prepare a recovery plan. These specify clear targets for research output and improving research performance that will be monitored by faculty deans and academic committee,” the message says.

“Provided these plans are accepted by the departments concerned and by academic committee, we will recommend them to senate and the university council. Assuming demonstrable progress is made towards achieving these targets, the option of closure for the School of Politics and Communications studies, the departments of philosophy, and statistics, will not be pursued.”(1)

Staff and students at Liverpool, and in universities up and down the country, have much to celebrate. The students at Liverpool who made their threatened courses count should be particularly commended for having faced down Newby and his knowledge exchangers. They demonstrated to university communities across the country that it is possible to stop the neoliberal juggernaut, provided that you believe strongly enough in the principles of universitas and educere, and are willing to make your views public. Universities in the UK need not go the way of our railroads—and indeed of so many other public services that are now the cosiest of baskets for some of the fattest cats in the land.

It will of course be important to remain vigilant over the coming months and years. While the neoliberalism that is behind the policy of knowledge exchange is now utterly discredited, the social network that promoted Newby and his followers to key positions in places such as Liverpool University will continue to be very keen on privatising higher education in the UK. The absence of anything like a credible discourse will not prevent the people involved from trying more of the same at other institutions.

This week, however, is a time to say a big ‘Hip Hip Hooray’ to and for Philosophy, Politics & Communication Studies, and Statistics at Liverpool University…

References

1) Times Higher Education, ‘Liverpool lifts threat of closure from three departments’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=406558&c=1, accessed May 20, 2009.

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, it was 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 rather quickly with money given as a gift. As noted at the time, Jowell was implicated because she signed the papers of the repayment and allegedly never bothered to ask where the money had come from. Given everything that we now know about Mills and Berlusconi, this makes Hazel Blears look like a paragon of public finance honesty.

Alas, the image below reveals the blithe manner in which Tony Blair, with the active cooperation of the BBC, handled the scandal.

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. And yet the following quote, taken from a Guardian article in 2006, gives the reader a sense of the extent to which the bribe would have been part of a pattern that Tessa Jowell, a die-hard New Labour politician with eyes very wide open, must have been all too aware of:

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(2).

EcoLogics asks: what will the Brown government—or the Cameron government that follows—be doing about this kind of corruption? Corruption that involves not a bath plug or two TVs or indeed state-financed property speculation to the tune of some £46.000 (as in Hazel Blear’s case), 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?

Tessa Jowell—and all those who, like Tony Blair, helped to promote her in New Labour—evidently felt intensely comfortable, if not with the actual bribing, then with the lifestyle and business politics of David Mills. Far from being unique to the Mills-Jowells, this was a lifestyle symbolized by Peter Mandelson’s now infamous statement, ‘We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’(3).

Again, will New Labour do anything about this kind of corruption? EcoLogics very much doubts it.

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) ‘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.

3) ‘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.

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 the scandal with Carter & Carter, Newby moved on to Liverpool University, 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, Higher Education’s Dr Beeching, has been stopped.

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 affecting every aspect of higher education.
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 key 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.

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 by the previous EcoLogics post, the New Labour government now 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 targetted 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 evident 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 continued Blunkett’s assault on our civil liberties even as she has charged an assortment of the most personal of her expenses to the state. Blears, who was herself once a policing minister, has a voting record second to none on the ‘war on terror’. As Communities and Local Government minister she has played an active role in promoting fear (for an interesting take on her specific role, see the post by Craig Murray on her feigned 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 transformed her into something like a professional property speculator 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 the New Labour government’s corruption is that it employs panopticism on others to try to generate as much freedom as possible for themselves. 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 is 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.

…What we’ve found is that since keeping DNA of people who have been arrested … at some time in the future it’s been found that those people do go on to commit further crime or some of the DNA is found at another crime scene
–Vernon Coaker, New Labour Minister for Policing, Crime and Security, speaking on the BBC’s Today programme

This morning we’ve seen BBC newsmaking at its worst and at its best (or at least, at a high level of journalistic competence). Unsurprisingly, the trigger for both situations has been New Labour’s effort to institute one of its most draconian measures, a de facto universal DNA database (let us be very clear that that continues to be the New Labour ideal).

The BBC at its worst: when EcoLogics checked the BBC News online early this morning, this was the headline in response to New Labour efforts to circumvent the European Court of Human Rights:

BBC and New Labour

The government has not said it will ‘wipe the DNA profiles of innocent people’. It has said that it will remove them after 6, or 12 years, depending on the nature of the crime. This is a classic example of bad journalism—journalism that so slavishly sticks to an announcement that it is seriously misleading. A textbook case, if ever there was one, of why objectivity in news reporting is not a matter of simply repeating what somebody else says. While the overall article does make some reference to criticism of the policy, the crucial headline–what many readers will simply glance at—could almost have been written by a New Labour apparatchik. EcoLogics wonders what editorial process led to this representation of events, and at what level of the BBC hierarchy a decision was taken to effectively back the government’s position.

*   *   *

By contrast, there was some good journalism during the Today programme’s (Radio 4) interview with Vernon Coaker (New Labour’s new Tony McNulty), and Shami Chakrabarti.

EcoLogics says the new Tony McNulty, but actually, Coaker is rather easier to interview because he does not seem as cleverly devious as McNulty was when he was the minister of policing (see for example, the EcoLogics post titled McNulty’s Genie). On the contrary, during the interview with John Humphrys, Coaker succeeded in stating the real New Labour position, which is tantamount to getting it seriously wrong for any member of the current government: (as in past transcriptions, EcoLogics tries to include what linguists describe as ‘hesitation phenomena’, i.e. the ah’s and erms of presenters and interviewees)

Humphrys: But if someone’s innocent… how will keeping their DNA database [sic] help you solve crime?
Coaker: Because we know that if somebody is arrested say for a serious and violent offence, then we’ll keep it for 12 years and we know that many of those people will go on to reoffend and…
Humphrys: Hang on! Go on to reoffend? But if they haven’t offended already, if they’re innocent, by definition, they haven’t offended…
Coaker: No, but what I’m saying is that if you keep the DNA of someone who is arrested ah for an offence, a serious and violent offence, or a more minor offence, if you keep that ah, that DNA, you’ve got that intelligence available to you, and what we’ve found is that since keeping ah DNA of ah of people who have been arrested in the fu ah at some time in the future it’s been found that those people do go on to commit further crime or some of the DNA is found at another crime scene [unclear because Humphrys interrupts] … you can use the DNA to match that with the DNA you’ve kept.

Humphrys: But again, you use the expression further crime. We’re talking here about innocent people, and ehem, I can only repeat because I’m deeply puzzled by this, by definition if they’re innocent they haven’t committed a crime, so they can’t commit a further crime…

Coaker realises his mistake and reverts to what was clearly his default position: to establish a link between apprehending criminals, and keeping the DNA database. It is, however, almost too late: the cat has been let out of the bag in the sense that it is clear that the real New Labour position is that everyone is guilty until proven innocent if they are so much as accused of committing a crime by the police. This is, in fact, the logic of a police state. Full stop.

As Humphrys goes on to note,

Humphrys: ‘Right so we’re actually then, we’re making the assumption, aren’t we, that the presumption of innocence doesn’t actually hold… what we’re saying is yeah, you were nicked, ah, you went through the process, you were found not guilty, but actually, the system regards you as being a potential criminal  (rapist, terrorist, whatever it happens to be) because you’ve been arrested in the first place. It doesn’t sound like justice…
Coaker: Well, what what it does is to say that the intelligence that you can gather from people who are arrested means that you have a database with which you can compare DNA samples which are taken from crime scenes, match them, and what that then does is enable you to bring to justice people who would otherwise have got away with the crime and indeed given victims of crime the justice that they seek.

Throughout the interview, Coaker repeats the word ‘intelligence’ over and over again. It’s a matter for speculation whether this, too, is what he was briefed to say, or whether it was simply an unselfconscious reversion to a discourse that reveals, as it does, the extent to which government policy is now indistinct from policing: in effect, New Labour now treats any encounter with the police as an opportunity to ‘gather intelligence’, i.e. spy on people, and keep the information in databases so that it might be deployed ‘as needed’ in future. To anyone who is remotely sceptical about this process, it is clear that, beyond its official use—itself deeply authoritarian—the DNA database must have the role of further criminalising legitimate protest. Who would want to risk having their DNA kept for 6 or 12 years by joining a protest that is policed in the brutal way that the G20 protests were?

*    *    *

Whatever the database’s intended use, there are two inter-related ways in which both Humphrys and Chakrabarti fail to critically engage with Coaker’s problematic intervention. The first is that neither really questions Coaker’s (and of course, New Labour’s) tacit logic that it’s all down to the DNA. No one asks, for example, if it is really as simple as saying that by keeping everyone’s DNA, more crime will be solved. This is an incredibly important point, but which has so far remained uncontested. Its corollary is extraordinarily dangerous: if policing is no more than a matter of DNA-led intelligence, then we arrive at what EcoLogics has described as the Gattaca-ization of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (after the near future scenario conjured by the film Gattaca, which is worth watching).

The second point is that no one really questions (though Chakrabarti does momentarily flag it) Coaker’s assertion that the government has evidence that keeping innocent people’s DNA actually makes a real difference to conviction rates. What exactly is that evidence? And how has it been produced? This is, or must be, the next battleground for all those who wish to show up New Labour’s authoritarianism.

For more on this subject, see EcoLogics’ extended analysis of another BBC Today interview, conducted with Tony McNulty and Lord Justice Stephen Sedley in 2007.

By way of a postscript: how significant, and convenient that Jacqui Smith did not do this interview herself. EcoLogics can well imagine that as the consensus grows that New Labour has become authoritarian, Smith will leave it to other people to defend what must be a policy hatched at the very top of the New Labour party.

Update May 7, 2009, 12.20 BST

It looks like the battle over New Labour ‘evidence’ of the usefulness of the DNA database has already begun: Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist credited with the discoveries that led to the DNA database, is being quoted by the Guardian as saying the following:

Jeffreys dismissed a Home Office prediction that 4,500 fewer crimes will be detected if the proposals go ahead.

“There is an unspoken assumption in here that these thousands of crimes that will not be detected by not having the DNA will remain undetected and that simply isn’t the case. A significant number of these will be detectable through conventional police work, including the obtaining of fresh police DNA samples.”

He demanded that the government release further details of its concerns about poorer detection rates.

“We have been told some very cursory figures. One would like to know a great deal more. Are these serious crimes? Are they a relatively small number of individuals, for example serial burglars? We don’t have that information at all. And we need that information to be able to balance the improved ability to detect these crimes against the right to a private life.”

Anyone who is still not quite sure about the main driving force behind New Labour in the wake of last year’s banking debacle might wish to read George Monbiot’s post, Mandelson’s Fifth Column. In it Monbiot reveals the extent to which Mandelson’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) is acting to further the neoliberal agenda that has always been at the heart of New Labour’s political project.

EcoLogics wishes to highlight one aside in Monbiot’s post, which reminds us of the extent to which Howard Newby’s knowledge exchange is an integral part of New Labour’s agenda. Monbiot notes that a document published by Mandelson’s BERR states that, as of April 2009, all grant applications to UK funding councils must describe the ‘economic impact’ of the research. This is what the document, titled ‘New Industry, New Jobs’, actually says:

‘Stable, ring fenced Government funding and support for our science and research base provides an essential foundation to support economic growth in the short, medium and longer term. We will continue to protect and raise investment in science and research in the years ahead.
3.10 The science base this creates is a key resource for the high-tech companies and start-ups that will grow into the world-beating businesses of the future. Encouraging closer ties between the UK’s growing pool of scientific and engineering researchers and industry and private investors is now key to ensuring that we are able to benefit economically from groundbreaking science.
[...]
3.12 As well as delivering on this and other Innovation Nation commitments:

• we will work with the research funding bodies to create a stronger framework to drive up the economic impact of the research they fund. From April 2009, grant applicants to all Research Councils will have to set out the economic impact of their proposed research;
• the Higher Education Funding Council for England will consult later this year on a new Research Excellence Framework (REF) that will take better account of the impact research makes on the economy. Decisions on the REF will be announced early next year and will create incentives for changed behaviour from that point’

(http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file51023.pdf, p. 14)

EcoLogics wonders what would have happened to the HE sector in the UK if such an economistic discourse had always been used to evaluate research proposals. It goes without saying that there would have been no research in vast swathes of the humanities and the social sciences. But what about ‘blue sky’ research projects in the natural sciences? And what about research whose main function is to critique existing research?

Campaigners at Liverpool University may wish to reflect on the fact that when they oppose Newby’s efforts to impose the New Labour agenda on their university, they effectively oppose New Labour, i.e., the UK government. This point is made to give a sense of the scope of the challenge, but also to suggest that the time is ripe to remind staff and students that Newby, or at least his managerial policies, are an integral part of a party machine that is as discredited as it is corrupt.

By way of a postscript: remember the words that were penned by Gordon Brown back in November 2008, and which said in The Observer that “Today we are seeing not just the collapse of failed institutions but the collapse of a failed laissez-faire dogma. In this first financial crisis of the global age the old free market fundamentalism, no matter how it is dressed up, has been found wanting.” Wanting indeed.

Update 12 May, 2009: George Monbiot has himself now written a post on this subject, noting the extent to which the people heading the research councils are captains of industry. See his post in the Guardian at

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/

‘It was the events of September 11 that marked a turning point in history, where we confront the dangers of the future and assess the choices facing humankind.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the New Labour Party conference, October 2001

‘So winning the battle against international terrorism is to win for the economy too.’
–Tony Blair, in a speech given to the Confederation of British Industry, November 2001

Note: this is the fifth in a series of posts:

New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (I): Introduction
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (II): The policing of ‘views’
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (III): RIPA 2000 and Blair’s Hobbesian Ideal
New Labour’s Spiral of Terror (IV): Blunkett’s Law

Gustavo Leigh claimed personal responsibility for having ordered the air attacks on September 11.  General Leigh was reportedly the first man in the junta-to-be to sign up for the coup that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger hatched in Washington. Faced with an unexpectedly tenacious resistance from Allende and his supporters, Leigh commanded the Fuerza Aerea Chilena (FAC) to bombard Allende’s personal home, as well as the Palacio de la Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace and former mint.  Apparently, it took quite some time to muster and then fly FAC fighter-bombers to Santiago, so it was not until after midday that two British-made Hawker Hunters from the No. 7 squadron bombarded the presidential palace, Allende’s home, and government radio stations with their Hispano Sura R80 rockets.

To any Chilean not under the spell of a far right-wing ideology, the attack would have been the equivalent of hearing that the Air Chief Marshal of the RAF had ordered Typhoon F2’s to bomb 10 Downing Street, the BBC’s Bush House, and Tony Blair’s property on Connaught Square. Images of the Hawker Hunters diving at the Palacio de la Moneda went on to become the symbol of the new junta’s brutality—or if one was sufficiently to the right, the opening act of a new Chile.

In this, the penultimate post in the present series, EcoLogics makes the case that September 11, 1973—the ‘other 9/11’—is a better inaugural date for New Labour’s spiral of terror than is the 9/11 that Tony Blair described as a ‘turning point in history’. The idea is not to deny the historical significance of September 11, 2001—an event whose horrific death toll rightly provoked global outrage, and then also provided the Bush and Blair administrations with pretexts for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  No, the point is to suggest that, given everything that we now know, the original ‘9/11’ was the more important date in so far as September 11, 1973 marked a foundational moment in the emergence of a fundamentalism that haunts us to this day: not Islamist fundamentalism, but the kind of economic fundamentalism that goes by the name of neoliberalism.

*   *   *

Earlier, it was noted that the Chilean coup was hatched by Richard Nixon’s republican government. This is no longer a matter of speculation, and can no longer be dismissed as myth-making by left-wing activists. Documents released by the U.S. government over the last decade have confirmed what the Chileans themselves always knew: that even if there was considerable unhappiness amongst right and centre-right groups with Allende’s policies (how could there not be?!), it took the bullying might of the U.S. government to institute a de facto economic blockade on Chile. It also took the C.I.A. to provide the logistics and the ideological shove necessary to get Chile’s famously professional army to take up arms against its own people. (If in doubt, have a look at the documents provided by the George Washington University’s National Security Archive).

A story that has been told less often is that many of the generals would have refused to join the coup had it not been for the fact that leading figures in Chile’s upper class persuaded them that a plan was at hand that would rescue the ravaged economy. Key members of the group in question came to be known as the Chicago Boys. This was a reference to the fact that they were disciples of two economists at the University of Chicago: Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. The Wikipedia entry on the Chicago Boys provides the official account of how it is that a single foreign university, and indeed a single department within that university acquired so much influence in Chile, and eventually, in many other Latin American countries. What the entry does not explain is that the collaboration between Chile’s Catholic University and the economics department at U Chicago (which enabled the export of Friedman’s discourse) was part of a much broader ideological project—one which allowed powerful cultural institutions in the U.S. to become an integral aspect of the American ‘national security doctrine’ for Latin America. One such institution was the Rockefeller Foundation, which made multi-million dollar donations to the University of Chicago.  From this perspective, the collaboration between the Catholic University and the University of Chicago must be regarded as a form of ideological militancy, as opposed to a purely academic exchange about matters economical.

We will return to this point below. The plan that the Chicago Boys developed eventually came to be known as the ‘Miracle of Chile’, and became a template for similar developments in most other countries across the world. Under Pinochet and his Chicago Boy ministers, Chile abandoned the socialist model begun by Allende and introduced instead a string policies involving the deregulation of markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and the stabilisation of inflation via monetarist instruments. The second story that is not frequently told is that the Chilean Miracle was no more miraculous than New Labour’s more recent ‘miracle’; as noted by this blog in another post, leading economists such as Ricardo Ffrench-Davis have shown that, in fact, the policies eventually led to the collapse and nationalisation of leading Chilean banks by the early 1980s. One passage from Ffrench-Davis’ book almost reads like a description of what has happened this year to the U.S. and the U.K. economies:

‘The problems developing in the productive apparatus were closely linked to the functioning of the financial system and the indiscriminate trade opening. The model conceded a leading role to the financial reform. In fact, the financial system was transformed into the dominant decision-making center in the Chilean economy. In 1982, it became clear that indebtedness of firms and individuals was strangling economic activity and was growing rapidly owing to the prevailing high interest rates, while the revenue of enterprises was declining as a result of the domestic recession. The financial reform and the opening to capital flows constituted at first a determinant factor in the concentration of wealth and in crowing out of productive investment (Agosin 1998). Then, towards the end of the period, it revealed additional vulnerability that it had introduced into the national economy and the distortion of economic development created by the unbridled financierism to which it gave rise.’(1)

These issues did not stop Margaret Thatcher from seeking to emulate neoliberal policies in Britain. In 1980, she sent her trustworthy Cecil Parkinson, then Minister of Trade, to look at and learn from the ‘Chilean experience’. In an interview published in El Mercurio, the leading newspaper in Chile, Parkinson famously noted that the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’ (2).

*   *   *

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Margaret Thatcher’s government went on to impose neoliberal ‘reform’ on the UK, and New Labour completed the process. The UK, like Chile in the 1980s, has now entered what many regard not as an economic recession, but an economic depression: the result here, as in Pinochet’s Chile, of the catastrophic blind spots of Friedman’s neoliberal discourse and ideology, and of the corruption that went, and still goes with it.

The question we must now answer is, how is this process tied to New Labour’s spiral of terror?

The first point that needs to be made is that Friedman’s shock therapy was never a purely economic therapy. Of course, no economic policy ever is: any form of economic policy-making is always social and political in so far as it entails a dynamic of prioritisation (some aspects of a market are valued over others), and in so far as it is always a social group, or a set of social groups’ economic priorities that end up being imposed on other groups. What is clear, however, is that Friedman’s recipe was particularly vitiated in that it was a product of a cold war ideology. In keeping with this ideology, it was first ‘applied’ in a country which was regarded as a test case in the U.S.’s  ‘total war’ against Marxism and socialism. Friedman’s neoliberal model was to be a prophylactic against the ‘contagion’ of Marxism, and of socialism more generally. The model was thus, from the start, at once an economic model, and a model with which to engage in ideological warfare of the kind that is now associated with Bush and Blair’s ‘war on terror’. (By way of an aside, let us not forget that even if in 1973 Blair was only just starting his undergraduate degree at Oxford [a degree in jurisprudence, for which he earned a second class mark], key members of the second Bush administration were junior members of the Nixon administration—and one of them was, of course, Dick Cheney.)

The second point is a somewhat more complex one in so far as it involves not a direct discursive challenge to one or another social order, but a kind of indirect consequence of Friedman’s discourse, and the broader neoliberal ideology. In the introduction of Friedman’s famous book, Capitalism and Freedom (a title that makes clear the political nature of his economic proposals), Friedman famously suggested that

‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

What is striking about this passage is the way in which it seemingly effortlessly establishes a link between neoliberalism and policing. Indeed, and as noted by this blog in earlier posts, interpreted in the way that they were by Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, and now Gordon Brown, these words help to explain not only the war-mongering character of the mentioned governments, but also, why these selfsame governments have fostered the kind of surveillance society we now have: if ‘our freedom’ must be protected from ‘enemies’ ‘outside’, it must also be protected from ‘our fellow citizens’.

A government that is conceived mainly as ‘fostering a competitive economy’—arguably, a codeword for the kind of intervention engaged by Peter Mandelson’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform—and of waging war against enemies ‘within’ and ‘without’, can only ever really end up being a government that is caught in the kind of spiral of terror described in these posts: beyond promoting certain groups’ access to economic wealth, the only social policy is one of policing. Policing in the literal sense of the word, but also, in the broader sense that is commonly described as New Labour’s ‘control freakery’, itself an expression of what EcoLogics has compared to the practices of Amazon.com in the post New Labour’s Amazonia.

Of course, the policing must be justified by repeated invocations of threats ‘outside’ and ‘within’ ‘our gates’. Linked as it is to New Labour’s Hobbesian instincts, and to the kind of actual or virtual corruption symbolised by David Blunkett’s work for Entrust, or Peter Mandelson’s favours to E.ON, this process must result in authoritarianism of the kind that has been promoted in the UK since Mrs Thatcher came to power 30 years ago, and which has worsened since Tony Blair was elected in 1997. Viewed from this perspective, the second 9/11 was not the beginning of the spiral of terror, but something like a perfect pretext for the process analysed in this series of posts.

In next week’s final post, some thoughts on what it would take to stop New Labour’s spiral of terror.

Notes

1) Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 51-52.

2) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.