Analysing The Cameron-Clegg Statement
Friday 21 May 2010 at 03:00 The UK Coalition's Programme for Government is the first Manifesto in democratic British political history published after the voters have had their say. No one is too exercised by this. All understand that it is no mean feat to combine the programmes of two competing parties and then present it as a credible whole.
Yes, of course you can see the joins in places but Cameron and Clegg's two page Foreword to the Programme is an impressive political achievement. This is not the mere cobbling together of a bunch of kleptocrats in the standard European manner but the fusion of two ideologies into a greater whole.
How long it will stick is another matter but the contrast with New Labour's Stalinist imposition of its values on its internal Coalition in 1996 is stark.
We have elsewhere suggested that this very English 'soft' revolution should be seen not as a shift from the Right to the Left (though it has elements of this) but as a shift of power between two very different personality types - from the authoritarian to the libertarian.
This is expressed primarily in terms of radical anti-statism - against big government, centralisation and top-down control - but there is a libertarian wing on the Left, pushed aside by history, that would share this perspective while authoritarian Conservatives are clearly uncomfortable with it.
The code to the nature of the new Coalition lies in its rubric: free, fair and responsible:
- Free - the libertarian impulse that can combine economic libertarians of the Right, social libertarians of the centre and political libertarians of the left
- Fair - that very English sense of fair play that can be coded as both compassionate conservatism and the social liberal, perhaps social democrat, views of a Vince Cable
- Responsible - the implicit duties mantra of the still feudal Tory Right and of those renegades from a failed progressivism like Frank Field and Will Hutton
All these factions (if perhaps with far less enthusiasm on the Social Democrat Centre and Tory Right) can live with a radical model of decentralisation of power and increased individual freedom and responsibility (where you may put your emphasis to taste).
The cheeky use of 'progressive' to describe the Coalition was widely noted in the media and we look at this at the end of our posting but there are some dodgy elements in the Programme (we are looking at the big picture here and not the detail) that we cannot let pass.
The inability to unravel the country from its post-imperial destiny represents the inability of this coalition to detach itself both from the Atlantic project and from 'Ashdownism' i.e. using taxpayers' money to ride around the world quixotically righting wrongs. We have covered this weakness already.
The most interesting aspect of the Programme could easily be missed in the rhetoric. The Coalition has linked power to innovation in a way that we all once thought the prerogative of the intellectual Left, the sort of post-Fordist Marxist crew who gave thinking ballast to Blair before office.
Only, this time around, the politicians have got it more right than the intellectuals of yore but only because the evidence for radical shifts in power is there for all to see in the immensely rapid rise of the internet and of social networks and citizen choice on its back.
The quintessential New Labour use of new technology was the ID card system or the incompetently managed IT spine - major infrastructural projects based on state direction and designed for state purposes. The Coalition Programme is explicit on its stance:
" ... we are both committed to turning old thinking on its head and developing new approaches to government. For years, politicians could argue that because they held all the information, they needed more power. But today, technological innovation has - with astonishing speed - developed the opportunity to spread information and decentralise power in a way we have never seen before."
This is pure libertarian genius. Murdoch's boys will be grinding their teeth. Google kids will be grinning from ear to ear ... they continue:
" ... there has been the assumption that central government can only change people's behaviour through rules and regulations. Our Government will be a much smarter one, shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past and finding intelligent ways to encourage, support and enable people to make better choices for themselves."
Oh dear, probable collapse of stout party. Here we have a perfectly accurate analysis capped with a rather dodgy belief that the new nudge philosophy will achieve what post-socialist state direction could not. The State is dead, long live the State. Spin is dead, long live Spin.
The first page of the Foreward is dynamic but this shift from hard State to soft State then opens the door to two lengthy paragraphs on the background to the Coalition that can only be seen as defensive, even apologetic in tone, a direct appeal to the confused unwashed of the two coalescing parties.
Defensive and claiming to be smarter than their predecessors? I think the public needs to be just a little wary that the text yet represents the reality of consistent, stable Government with a clear understanding of what it is dealing with in terms of national sustainability and the deficit.
The last two sentences of all are an attempt to send so many signals that it is hard for the casual reader to keep up. This Government is apparently radical (the antithesis of the conservative) yet reforming (which is what Peelite Conservatives take pride in).
The two Leaders ditch for ever the notorious Thatcher claim that there is no such thing as society, made in one of her more sub-Stirnerite moments, but then detach the fact of society firmly from its association with the State. The shared continuity from the Thatcher Right is certainly a distaste for socialism.
References to change and progress are back-handed compliments to the dominant rhetoric of the Labour Movement from Wilson to Blair, from Benn to Mandelson. This document is an attempt at an ideological coup d'etat, a libertarian-populist seizure of power after thirty years of authoritarian rule.
To be fair, the balance of unaligned public opinion, certainly in England, is probably with the coup leaders. The latter have captured the State, apparently that it might, as Marx predicted, wither away.
The greatest irony of the soft English revolution of May 2010 is that it may have ushered in the most left-wing Government (as pre-twentieth century observers might see things) in Britain's history. In reality, the State will soon recapture these ideologues - but do enjoy the revolution while it lasts!