EcoLogics

And so we come full circle. Last night, in a speech delivered as part of the Scott Society’s Hugo Young Lectures (yet more evidence of the Guardian’s swerve to the right?), Cameron finally came out and showed his true colours, his truly blue face: what we need, he said, is less government, and more ‘social entrepreneurs’, i.e. replacing the tattered remains of the welfare state with a neo-Victorian form of philanthropy.

I will return to this suggestion below. First, a very brief history of David ‘Janus’ Cameron’s progressivism. The Janus in question is not the god of transitions, symbolised in Roman mythology by way of gates and doorways. Instead, the appellation refers to the modern interpretation of the myth, which is to say someone who puts on a mask that is appropriate to whatever context s/he wishes to manipulate.

When the media limelight has been shining on him, Cameron has been a paragon of conservative moderation, almost to the point of a centre ‘left’ liberalism. Cameron has, in this sense, worked very hard to persuade us that he is a TeePee Tory, i.e. a Tory Progressive intent on transforming the Conservative Party from the defender of class-bound privilege into something akin to a ‘broad tent’ party, what this blog describes ironically as the PPP: the People’s Progressive Party. It has often been noted that Cameron has stolen Blair’s clothing, and so he has, in the sense that it was Blair who came up with the idea of taking the ‘old’ Labour Party quite far to the political right while protesting loudly about the need for more social justice. But whereas Blair and the rest of the New Labour nomenklatura really did force Labour to swing to the right, Cameron has only paid lip service to liberalism, engaging in backroom deals which, if anything, will push Britain in the direction of a greater authoritarianism than even Blair or Brown have managed.

A case in point, Cameron’s stance on homophobia. In early July, Cameron made headlines when he announced that he was officially ashamed of the Tories’ infamous Section 28, a part of a Local Government Act passed by the Tories in 1988, which stated that a local authority ‘shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

But just two months earlier, the Westminister commentariat chose to look the other way when, during an unseasonably warm weekend at the very end of May, Cameron flew out to Poland on a semi-secret mission. Having ditched his party’s old alliance on the European scene with the centre-right parties of Merkel and Sarkosy, Cameron went to Poland to seal a new pact with a rag-tag of ultra-nationalist parties, known as the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR). The deal was apparently a payment in kind, agreed in the last Tory leadership contest, during which Cameron bought the votes of the farther-right in the party by promising to axe the alliance with ‘federalist’ centre-right European parties.

The result of this deal with the Tory devils is that Cameron now leads an agglomeration of right, and far-right groups, some of which are explicitly homophobic: take for example the Kaczyński twins, 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. Amongst other authoritarian policies, the Law and Justice Party advocates 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, however, also stated that “The affirmation of homosexuality will lead to the downfall of civilization. We can’t agree to it”.

Another member of the same party, Michal Kaminski, is now the formal leader of the ECR. For those who haven’t heard about him, Kaminiski was recently denounced for his neo-Nazi past by the not exactly progressive David Miliband. As if this were not bad enough, the ECR group also includes Latvia’s ‘For Fatherland and Freedom Party’, which helps to organise the annual celebrations in that country of the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS. So in addition to homophobics, Cameron appears to have allied himself with Nazi sympathizers.

The contradiction between Cameron’s perorations about Section 28, and his alliance with the mentioned parties cannot be spin-doctored away. No truly progressive or liberal politician would ever countenance establishing an alliance with the likes of the Polish Law and Justice Party, let alone the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party. We have to conclude that the real Cameron—i.e. the social formation that he really represents—is anything but progressive. On the contrary, his claims to liberalism are no more (and no less) than PR fodder for all those who don’t follow politics closely, and who may be conned into thinking that Cameron is what he has worked very hard to make himself appear to be. Of course, any politician must always be something of a chamaeleon, but in this lizard’s case, it is the iridophores—the layer of cells that reflect blue incident light—that predominate.

Alas, until last night, conservatives with a capital or small ‘c’ might well have dismissed this critique as the figment of a left-wing imagination. But during the speech given in the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron began to lose the face that he has managed to show the mainstream media, and which the media have so happily agreed to show to their audiences. As he turned to look at the people who attended the Hugo Young Lecture, Cameron’s audience will have seen the monstrous visage not so much of Margaret Thatcher, but of a youthful, 21st century British equivalent of Ronald Reagan, the true modern father of Tory slash ‘n burn policies—the same policies that have made the United States what it is today. Cameron spoke of paradox in his speech, but the real paradox is that, just when the United States is waking up to the terrible legacy of Reaganite neoliberalism, England, Wales and Northern Ireland are about to re-elect a party that not only was the chief accomplice of Reaganism between 1980 and 1997, but is now set to take this complicity even further to the right.

Cameron’s big idea is that, instead of ‘big government’, we need ‘big society’. (How does a politician change the size of a society!?) ‘The era of big government’, he said in the speech, ‘has run its course. Poverty and inequality have got worse, despite Labour’s massive expansion of the state. We need new answers now, and they will only come from a bigger society, not bigger government.’ At the heart of his proposal is the idea of using ‘social entrepreneurs’.

In case you don’t know what this term means, it’s the buzz word for people who have made careers out of engaging in philanthropic activities that blur the line between charity, and business. Cameron singled out one such entrepreneur in his speech: Debbie Scott, the head of Tomorrow’s People. If you visit their website, you will find the philosophy of social entrepreneurship clearly stated from the very beginning: ‘We help break the cycle of unemployment so that people can take positive control of their lives and build a brighter future’–and in the same breath, ‘We also save employers time and money by finding them the right people for the right jobs.’

Ah, so that’s what it’s about—how clever! Social entrepreneurs make their careers by taking over the roles traditionally accorded to the welfare state, and turning them into charitable or so-called ‘social’ enterprises. Put simply, there’s money to be made from poverty.

To the right-wing New Labourites that Cameron is out to seduce, this may sound like a good idea. But it is only good if you fail to consider two problems. First, unlike state entities, such charities are under no obligation to provide universal coverage for their services. They help whomever they choose to help. They are no different, in this sense, from traditional philanthropies of the kind that were the only palliative during the Victorian era. From this perspective, Cameron is inviting us to return to a Victorian form of social justice, where the disadvantaged are helped only if someone takes pity.

The second problem is that, despite Cameron’s efforts to portray New Labour as the party of big government, what he is proposing is exactly what New Labout itself has been doing for the better part of 12 years. Far from simply expanding the state, New Labour has been pouring money into corporate welfarism. It has outsourced more and more state roles to darling donors such as Capita and the failed Carter & Carter, companies which might well describe themselves as being run by ‘social entrepreneurs’. Sandy Leitch’s Review of Skills was coached precisely in the terms of social entrepreneurship, and it its most recent proposals, New Labour is saying that it will even pay private hospitals to get treatment for patients—perhaps even private doctors might now be called social entrepreneurs!

So no, New Labour has not so much expanded the state, as used more and more state money to fill the coffers of private organisations run by social parasites that long ago figured out that there was lots of money to be made by criticising the welfare state, and then fulfilling some of its vital functions for profit—or at least, for personal career or political gain.

The one thing that has slightly—ever so slightly—mitigated New Labour’s hell-for-leather push to privatise has been the fact that the party still depends on the unions for votes, and crucially, for money. In this, the blog’s penultimate post, EcoLogics asks readers thinking of voting for Cameron’s ‘TeePee’ Conservatives: what will mitigate the policies of the party of privilege, and indeed, the party which has seen fit to join up with the likes of Michal Kaminski?

Update 30 November 2009

See ‘Britain faces return to Victorian levels of poverty‘ in The Independent

In the wake of the news about Alan Johnson’s decision to promote xenophobia in the UK, EcoLogics suggests that the neo-Nazis have much to learn from the New Labour politicians. The trick, Nick, is to appeal to ‘common sense’, and to an apparent ‘common ground’, one that makes ‘us’ the normal, the victims, and ‘them’ the abnormal, the perpetrators: say, as Jack Straw did, that you find it difficult to talk to women who are wearing a veil; or say, like Johnson has just done, that ‘There are communities which have been disproportionately affected by immigration, where people have legitimate concerns about the strain that the growth in the local population has placed on jobs and services’.

And New Labour claims to be outraged over the rise of the BNP? As noted by this blog in earlier posts, the rise of neo-Nazi politics in the UK is clearly linked to the racism and xenophobia of New Labour itself.