We must answer the siege guns of the right

How should the left respond to this right wing revolution?

Disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality

SUCH was the certain fate predicted by Edmund Burke, the original Liberal Conservative, for societies that destroyed the institutions and architecture of their “State”.  Although Burke had in mind conservation of a very different state in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, his descendants in the “Old Whig” Party that governs today might do well to heed his counsel as they set about shrinking to the point of destruction our own modern state.

The Labour Party’s traditional conception of the state stems more from the Revolutionaries than from their critic, Burke. In that tradition, the state is the administrative embodiment of our collective responsibility for each other and for our world. It is guardian and protector, expressing in its delivery of public goods such as schools, hospitals, public transport, welfare and environmental protection our noblest values of solidarity, collectivism and reciprocity. Arguably, this vision and version of the state was the dominant political paradigm of the West for much of the two centuries that followed 1789, culminating here in the great social democratic creation of a post-war welfare state.

Today, however, the notion of the State conjures up a very different set of images and impacts for people in Britain. Because, for many in our modern society, the living associations of the state – fuelled by the pernicious lies in The Daily Mail and fellow propagandists – are with inefficiency, intrusion, interference and indifference. The state is seen not as a collective means to deliver, nor even as a safety net to catch us when we fall, but as a stifling force, curtailing the freedom and the potential of the all-important individual in our contemporary (anti-) society.

Now the Lib-Con coalition is harnessing the current antipathy to politicians and “the state” (capitalising, too, on our economic circumstances), to bring about an anti-state revolution. The left’s response to this revolutionary agenda – how we rethink and reassert the crucial role of the state in delivering a good society – is a defining moment in the conflict between the competing visions of the rampant individualism and free-market philosophy of the Right and the collectivist values and aspirations of the Left. The fields of battle sites are as they have long been – health, education, welfare and equality. And the modern-day weapons being employed by the right to advance their campaign are being rolled into sight: The Academies Bill, Welfare “Reform”, and the Health Care White Paper – these are the siege guns of the right-wing revolution that is now underway.

Those, meanwhile, who imagine that devolution insulates Wales against such batteries should think again. The Assembly is certainly keeping a flame of progress alive – exposing the Con-Dem budget, protecting education and science spending in contrast to Westminster’s slashing, supporting industry and jobs in Wales in the teeth of the laissez faire economic liberalism – all bear testament to the yawning gap in priorities and values that is now opening rapidly between Wales and Westminster.

However, the budgetary obstacles to such interventionist resistance will grow ever greater, beginning with the Comprehensive Spending Review in October, when the true scale of the Government’s ambition to shrink the state will be revealed. And one wonders how long the Lib-Cons will be content to suffer such “insurrection” on their border without offering the rope they think might hang us: greater fiscal and political autonomy, with “English votes only for English issues” at Westminster and delighted denial of any collective responsibility for fair funding for Wales.

And if that weren’t enough to convince us that Wales should care about the emergent agenda in England, there’s the fact that these Liberal-Con “reforms” point the way to the platform that would be occupied by the Welsh Liberals and Tories if they were able to command support in next year’s election.

Lastly, and most importantly, is the fact that we are part of the United Kingdom, that the grave mistakes being made over the border will be paid for by fellow Britons, whose fate we should be anything but indifferent to. Changes to the health and education system of the country that is our nearest and most vital neighbour should always concern us: when, as present, they constitute a right –wing coup d’etat, radical, progressive Wales has a duty to engage and to oppose.

So where precisely might the danger emerge? The Academies Bill, being debated this week, provides for the establishment of a new class of academy and free schools, beyond the control of local authorities. These schools will be “free” to set their own curriculum, “free” to determine the pay, condition and quality of their teachers, “free” to drain money, pupils and parents from the surrounding network of (presumably unfree’) neighbouring schools – and “free”, surely, to find ways to select their intake and to genetically engineer their pupil cohort.

Local authorities, whose task for the last 60 years has been to try and ensure some equity in the provision of education within their boundaries, will be cut out of the loop. Without the “stifling” stranglehold of these bureaucrats, the role of  sharing resources and responsibilities equally between schools and communities will fall vacant, leaving the ‘strongest’ schools – with the poshest catchment areas and the biggest surpluses – to Hoover up pupils and payments. It amounts to the dismantling of state schooling in Britain,  curbing our ambitions to provide excellent, free education for all of our children through public funds with public accountability and equity. It will deepen divisions between schools and communities and copper fasten the two-tier system that has only slowly, and still incompletely, been broken by the comprehensive reforms of past Labour Governments.

What about the plans for our state health system, the NHS? As the safety net of local and national governance provided by the Primary Care Trusts and their overarching Strategic Health Authorities, is cut away, hospitals and ill-defined “consortia” of GPs will float free of each other and of any meaningful notion of national or collective standards and control. Yes, there will still be national clinical standards and a new monitor to check that outcomes are improving -  but the underpinning philosophy is about reducing state control, and with it public accountability and public responsibility. Spoken only sotto voce – in the sinister clauses suggesting schools can be run for profit, and consortia commission care from “any willing provider” – is the reality, of course, that these measures are a privateers charter, and that these  ”public goods”, our schools and hospitals, will soon be mostly in private hands.

In this I speak from experience. I’ve worked for one of the companies that will be rubbing its hands with glee at the thought of stepping into the shoes vacated by the state – helping clinicians, who have no skills or interest in commissioning, to structure and deliver local health services. The individuals in these companies who will do the work may well bring different and valuable skills to bear and will often support and share the public service ethos of the NHS. But they and their companies will always, ultimately, be responsible to their shareholders – not their patients, nor the state. Just as it is a myth that  privateers will deliver services with greater efficiency, so too it is fantasy that such a stealthily privatised, disaggregated Health Service can ever be National as it was intended. And, having undermined one of the founding principles of the NHS – that it be an universal, equitable, National service – how long before another is ploughed under, and it ceases to be free at the point of need?

Of course, it is legitimate to ask what Labour was doing when it opened the door to such reforms with our own Academies and the incursion of private providers into the NHS. The blunt answer, in my view, is that we were sleeping on watch. It was a mistake and it’s time to wake up, acknowledge the mistakes, and pledge must not repeat them. Though the intention may have been radically different – Labour’s Academies were designed to inject much needed human and financial capital into failing schools in some of our most troubled communities, and the nature of private involvement in the NHS, through PFI and provider contract, fell far short of Tory plans to privatise – we let the genie out and we failed to think what the Tories might command it to do once they got their hand on the lamp.

Although many in Labour understood that the public provision and protection of collective and universal services is part of the essential glue of a good society, we were seduced by the promise that there was a Third Way: that public services could be sharpened and individuals’ experiences improved, through judicious injections of private know-how and can-do, without fatally undermining the essentially public nature of such provisions. Perhaps, if we had remained in power, we might have been able to keep the more destructive aspects of private capital and free market methods at bay.  But I doubt it, in the long run, and I am certain that we failed to think through the consequences of the Tories being able to pick up where we left off and to subvert our own actions and twist our own words as cover for their ideological ends.

So where does that leave us? Labour cannot let guilt or amnesia get in the way of our duty now. Nor should we waste much time trying to tortuously explain away the nuances between our public/private split and that envisaged by the current government.  Our immediate duty is to defend the jobs of people working in vital public services who are about to be sacrificed on the altar of Tory ideology.

Thereafter, our task is to construct a compelling and contemporary vision and language for the state – not one that defends bad services just because they are public services, nor one which entirely eschews the power of competition as a spur to delivery, but one which recognises, nonetheless, that collective provision and solidarity require compromises on the part of the individual. We should not transpose, unthinkingly, the language and the models of competition and consumption to the provision of public services. With qualification and regulation, the means of the market can be brought to bear – but their limits must be both understood and exposed. And in applying them, we must always remember to protect the greater good: of building and nurturing a society where people trust and support one another – attributes that are reflected in the ethos and actuality of collectively (tax) funded public services.

To make that case – again – is no easy task in our selfish society, but it is our job to make it. Our job to define the intangible values of public provision and state ownership, values that can counted in social cohesion and mutual responsibility more easily than they can ever be on a management consultant’s spreadsheet. As Keynes, who seems to loom large over so much of our modern politics, said:

Once we allow ourselves to be disobedient to the test of an accountant’s profit, we have begun to change our civilisation

I don’t pretend to know exactly how this new civilisation might look, but I do know that it cannot be built through the small-government, free-market madness of the current lot – even with the phony veneer of Cameron’s “Big Society” rhetoric. Smash the state and all that will be left is rubble, with the 1,000 flowers of entrepreneurialism and self help the Tories fondly imagine springing up just weeds and dust. No, the answer must be more support, more of the state – but smarter:  more local, more open and inclusive, more powerful and more accountable. Devolution in Wales points the way, but we need to go further and to imagine the next phase of the enabling state, with proper powers for a revitalised and properly financed local government.  Democracy not demagoguery, councillors not charities, local authority not laissez-faire, public gain not private greed…some of the keystones of a new beginning. We need to build on them.