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????.
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