60 years on different dance but the same music

This year I will be 60 years old. My love affair with politics began in the early 1960,s. As the wind of change divested the UK of an empire, leaving us to looking vacantly at world maps in school covered in the pink where once the British Empire had stood, we all were aware that a wind of change was reshaping far more than our former colonies. 

After 13 years of Tory post war rule , the 60,s was a Britain with full employment, the beginnings of the consumer culture and a large industrial base that was aging and badly managed. The working class was on the move re shaping both  arts and popular music and sexual liberation was beginning .

The great social revolution of the reforming Labour Government of 1945 until 1950 had been overlayed by 13 years of conservatism out of its depth with social change, industry, foreign affairs, and media. Broke from world war 2  the government ran foul of the US in 1956 with its colonial Suez affair...........Telling everyone that we had never had it so good in 1959 Super mac slid into the teeth of sex, and official secrets scandals..the Profumo affair whereby a government minister, beautiful call girls and soviet spies were linked together seemed to spell the end of conservatism as we know it.

Wilson was dynamic, bright and very populist. To young people concerned with the nuclear bomb and the deteriorating situation in Vietnam..he was an attractive political alternative. The economy seemed good but its underlying problems were showing up in an underlying overseas balance of payments problems.

Wilson's formula would be to harness the heat of the white hot technological revolution . Opening up universities, developing new industries would regenerate the UK. New industries would be grown and welfare measures introduced to provide better services to the less well off were the measure of the day.

The bottom line was the UK was nearly bust, its old industries were fairly clapped out and needed structural change.....but for the moment it was an exhilarating period it seemed as if Britain had been cleaned out over night with a fresh brush. Wilson through the 60,s struggled to make progress with changing Britain. I was one of the generation that in the late 60,s went up to university to study sociology, economics and the really new study of international economics leaving in 1972 to join the spearhead of new social workers attempting to reshape and re engineer the UK.

Like all dreams there was a downside. The economic situation deteriorated as old industries became moribund. It was clear that nationalised industries were looking too old fashioned. Coal, Steel, Railways, Post, Telephones, Cars were all state owned. The Unions were flexing muscles to protect, jobs, wages & conditions. Through the brief  period of a social contract  a new toryism was to arrive thatcher ism.

Already Charles Murray had come up with a new moral panic to explain the decline of Western civilisation..the underclass...Unmarried mothers with children being the public enemy no1 in the new structure.

Politics is very much a Love affair the positives being that we do make positive changes to our world. The downside being that often not as many as we might have liked and we path the way for new ideas to come from another direction.

Last year Milton Friedman died. A Chicago School economist who more than any other individual since adam smith had shaken up economics. Governments he argued were the cause of all our problems. Governments should control only the supply of money and apart from providing negative income tax to those we really either want to work part time  or those we need not to work at all!!! Friedman became a revolutionary for the right. Through the 70's the CIA imposed Friedman through South America. Privatisation of govt and public utilities followed in nation after nation where the US installed right wing near fascist regimes. Did it work...well not very well and god knows how many people were killed in the great experiment.

Friedman became the icon for the right as thatcher ism and reganism led a right wing revolution hell bent on restoring market forces to all services selling off any bit of government that was not screwed down. A boom followed that collapsed in the late 90,s as all speculative booms do!! This set the seen for Labour to return to office showing that the party could actually be more conservative than the conservatives........sustaining consumer spending through tax credits, continuing privatisation of govt services but also properly funding education and health services.

At the same time as the bottom fell out of world trade as  a result of the collapse of the us sub prime market..Milton Friedman recanted............perhaps air travel, railways, public utilities like water, gas, power, railways and even banking might be better in public ownership!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!l

45 years later the political dilemma is still between the view that economies should be market led and thinking that believes all markets need regulation in a wider public context. Never before has the concept of free markets been so lamentable.The multinational corporation of the 60,s have given way to the global corporations of today and given the scale of government  spending where would the free market actually be? Governments "play with devil by the pale moonlight" ..they have to finesse business into supporting their goals to deliver their manifesto commitments but in doing so become illiberal. It will in time become clear that new labours most fatal mistake was to say no to Murdoch...........which resulted him in immediately offering his support to the Tories!!! This shows how Faustian the deal is that government makes with business.

The Tories talk of "broken" Britain, but divided might be a more apposite description. We are divided as to whether we are in organisations or not. There are those who control, serve and work within organisations clutching the safety blankets that organisations provide from day to day living. 

Then there are the rest of us outside the organisations, the young, the old, the sick, disabled, the artistic and eccentric trying to make a living often living on the crumbs from the tables of organisations. The Elite and the non Elite. The problem is the Tories do not recognise the problem at all. They use old world logic of reincentivising work, reducing welfarism without understanding the origins of inequality in the modern state!!!

The challenge to the Labour Party is to understand once and for all that the carnival ride we have been on has been a journey from deregulated market economies to regulated economies to deregulated economies back to regulated economies with larger global companies and galloping inequality as a byproduct. We now need to take serious stock of how we can address this.. and what we aim to achieve and for whom????.

A major calamity or a major opportunity for the left?

It had to happen eventually. We all knew that the blairite/brownite driving force behind new labour would begin to slow stop and that then the   whole "new labour" edifice would crash to the ground as redundant as the Berlin Wall.

Blair and Brown way back in the 90,s had cleverly stolen the centre ground of British politics to a British sort of neo liberalism. They weakened the link with Trade Unions, cosied up to industry and business, centralised control of the party control and re branded labour as "new labour", business friendly conserving the best of our market driven society but offering change to newly aspirant middle class  and upper working class families.

The repackaging worked all too well, and left the Tories chewing on the bones of successive leaders who failed to take the "golden boys" on. They were more Thatcher than Thatcher working families credit fuelled consumer spending, consumer spending drove economic growth, services continued to be privatised and business was even invited into the education systems. The party seemed endless as the rich got even richer and inequality accelerated in New Labour. The neo liberal model seemed solid and even the Iraq war did not knock it off course.

Britain enjoyed its longest period of economic growth. It did not join the Euro and with its special relationship with the US retained a position as the worlds fourth largest economy. Great strides were made addressing poverty, proper funding to the NHS and Education. Could the party last for ever, Brown announced that we had conquered boom and slump economics. But time was running out the banks in pursuit of profit and new markets were dabbling as they always do in riskier and riskier markets. The Thatcherite/Reagan  goal of the property owning democracy was leading them in the US and UK to lending at the margins to those whose lives were turbulent. As big industry looked to globally source and manufacture employment for those at the margins became rocky and they defaulted on mortgage payments. The collapse of the US sub prime market triggered the burst of a speculative bubble that rocketed around the world. Debts racked up in all home lending institutions. A global recession followed and the after shocks can now be seen ripping into Euro land as Spain, Portugal and Greece struggle to keep afloat.

What went wrong. Way back in the late 1960,s two economic approaches faced off  amongst economists. Monetarists led by Milton Friedman believing the sate should restrict its activities to regulating money supply providing the poor with negative income tax, privatising public services and allowing market forces to iron out inequalities and distortions in the market system.

The opponents were Keynesian economists believing governments must plan economic growth and that regulation and state intervention was necessary to ensure the evils of unemployment and political extremism were kept out of nations.

The young "monetarists" were the rebels and they were politically seductive to neo conservatives in the US and UK. The US though the CIA undermined government after government through South America, supported right wing fascist regimes and imposed "monetarism"!!!! Privatising public services, reducing welfare payments and allowing US companies full rein....The results were a depressing failure. South America did not grow it became poorer with deeper problems than before.

Free Market economy facing off those who would plan economic development and regulate business. Who would win? Well actually niether because there are other variables in the model. That is globalisation and monopolies. There is a tendency within the free market towards ever increasing monopolies that distorts the free market........even government spending distorts the market. The result is that the market is not quite as free as we think it is!

Global companies can manipulate government. There is an established pattern that it the upswing of economic growth government deregulates and stimulates corporate growth and profit, then at the apogee there is over speculation, bubbles burst and as business and trade declines government re regulates to encourage better corporate behaviour.

The behaviour of the banks was therefore synonymous with previous collapses of the trade cycle and an earlier intervention by government in the UK and US could have helped limit the serious damage. But government had danced way to close corporate power and totally missed the danger signs.

Everyone knows that profits can also be made by removing costs. If you can externalise costs you increase profits.  The conglomerates and global companies can do this in many ways, pollution, supporting injustice, right wing regimes...in all thgese ways they externalise cots of a product as a cost we all have to pay at later date......................ie climate change

The costs of bailing out banks and financial institutions will be less new housing, less schools, less NHS and a variety of other services plus less spending power in our pockets.

The collapse of the neo classical economic model was completed when even Milton Friedman  its arch architect suggestsed that public utilities such as Banks, Transport, Health, Education, Housing and Transport may not be best served by being in the private sector. There was a case to run them in the interests of the community as whole.

"New Labour" crudely welded together  populist monetarist themes, achieved a great deal and ultimately like Thatcher paid a Sharp price for getting it wrong. What of the future?  Well no one would suggest that we abandon the concept of a mixed economy or suggest a moribund centralised command model for the economy.that failed across eastern Europe. But the concept of an economy in which the government operates to ensure fairness to all by regulating the big corporations and providing good public services is a lot more palatable than the laissez faire models that we have all see,

What will happen in Europe Next?

The UK  is a strange place inwards looking towards  Europe and outwards looking towards the USA at one of the same kind. Never completely approving of either set of allies. This conflicted trading position ,when added to the fact that we stayed well out of Euro, has given the UK good economic growth and better global markets than it's trading neighbors. Being Americanised first we have been saved from most of the grief that European partners had to go through downsizing domestic expectations of what the state could offer in welfare care!


The upside of this Americanisation of the UK has been steady economic growth, higher employment rates , access to global markets and unleashing the power of the individual. The downside has been globalisation, accelerated inequalities and sharper booms and slumps.

With climate change, economic development of underdeveloped nations  and globalisation being high up the international agenda politicians have a US ally in Obama who will be far more pro active than Bush.
Europe now is imploding as Greece,s illness has begins to look terminal. £600 billions of aid to Greece may or may not work and as the German's fall out with the rest of Europe there is a widening terror that domino like Greece's problems may infect both Spain and Portugal. Bitterly the Germans are looking towards the IMF............whose usual medicine spending freezes and privatisation of all public services could drive a coach and eight straight through the principles of the EU!!!


It could well be as some observers hypothesise that some EU leaders will want to accelerate political union to match the already achieved currency and trading union that the EU has already achieved! But of course the UK is less than enthusiastic about  European union.  Back at the dawn of the EU Winston Churchill was enthusiastic  about political union as the solution  for the rest of Europe. not us...Later DeGaulle was determined that political union never included the UK.

Europe has by and largely been excluded from the British General Election with the Conservatives euro scepticism offsetting the  Liberals bounding enthusiasm for Europe. The problem is that whilst the British Public voted slightly more enthusiastically than labour and rejecting entirely the Europe enthusiastic Liberals for the conservatives taking  firm action on the domestic economy, Cameron if leading a weak coalition could be yanked by his hair right into the middle of  the deepening  European crisis. But they have no policy. This could be an interesting time. The deepening crisis may well outstrip the EU,s abilities and resources and there is no saying where this yellow brick road might actually end. "Airstrip 1"?