“This is a great place to really talk about reviving Britain,” the Tory factotum at the door of the Battersea power station remarked, before denying me entry to the Tory party manifesto launch.
“You’re not on the list.”
“Yeah there’s a reason for that — they wouldn’t let me.”
“Well I’m sorry but there is a great demand for seats and …”
“There’s seats at the back — I can see them.”
“Yes but — oh HELLO! How are you? Do come through,” he said to someone behind me, deploying that great British tactic, switching speakers in an instant.
Not for the first time in this jaunt, I reflected on the very different way things are done in the UK, as opposed to the US, my well-known pro-Americanism notwithstanding. There, in a country with three hundred million guns, many of them owned by people who believe Barack Obama to be a communist lizard from Mars, they tend to herd in every blogger with a clipboard.
Here, the principle activity of the press officer appears to be to conceal the campaign from all but the main media outlets. There was a pile of disconsolate wannabees in the foyer, and we reconvened in a cafe bar down the road, past the dog’s home. It was set up for the Spurs-Arsenal game the next day. The owner had no idea what we were talking about.
On TV, the power station looked even more eerie than up close — it’s the four chimneyed-building made famous by being featured on the Pink Floyd album Animals, as the backdrop to a giant inflatable pig.
Next day’s cartoons made predictable use of the imagine — The Guardian‘s Steve Bell featured Dave Cameron as a giant condom floating above the South London wastes — and they must have simply factored it in.
The bizarre site — the station is long disused and gutted, and there’s a glass roof — was used to make some point about what Labour had done to the country over the past “40 years”. Say what? Yes, 40.
“We’ve been treating the people like mugs for 40 years,” Cameron said clearly, and went on to expand on the idea that there had been a fatal divide between the political process and the general public.
Apparently that began with the Heath government, but that was clearly not Cameron’s target. What he really wanted to do was make it clear that his damning injunction included the Thatcher government, and that Cameron was making a decisive move to travel further, faster by throwing Maggie overboard.
The theme of the manifesto was giving power back to the people, the plain blue document had the strange title “an invitation to join the government of Great Britain” the sort of thing that you don’t usually get unless you’re Lord Strathclyde of Caithness. The motif: “Big Society”.
“Big Society” is as close as the Tory party will ever get to chanting “Maggie Maggie Maggie, out out out” — a direct repudiation of her now-notorious remark that “there is no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families”.
That comment was simply Hayekian orthodoxy — that to talk of society as something other than an occasionally useful abstraction was to make a philosophical error. But in the past two decades the observation has become a leitmotif of all that people feel has happened to Britain — a European society with close social bonds (closer than many Americans or Australians would find comfortable) shattered into a more individualist and atomised world, without a substantial increase in equality of opportunity.
Labour’s response to that desocialisation was to overwhelmingly rely on the state to fill the gap, essentially combining the positive aspects — building hospitals, schools, etc — with the repressive extension of surveillance and behavioural manipulation all put together in one take it or leave package.
It’s the hairy-chestedness of this that has opened a gap between Labour and many of its supporters. The process has appeared to float free of social life, as the enforcement of a regime by a foreign power — oriented partly to Washington, partly to Brussels, partly to the city — with its own priorities and agenda.
Three election defeats have convinced the Tories that they cannot respond to this by advancing an implicit idea of “Victorian values” — that left to itself, with a minimal state, people will be industrious, continent and charitable.
Thus the “Big Society” alternative — the argument that the state and the atomising market have failed, and a third force needs to be revived, the power of society to act co-operatively in the maintenance. Cameron began with the injunction “we the people” but the content after that was less American than Bolivia North:
It’s time to say to Labour: it’s not about you, the government … It’s about we, the people. And it’s time to say to those who think it’s all about unchecked individualism: no, it’s not about me, the individual. It’s about we, the people.
“He’s really good,” I said to someone leaning disconsolately in a saucer of tea.
“Are you on drugs?” he said.
“Yes. Well, herbs.”
It was true. I’d been down to Limehouse the day before to pick up some qat, the leafy herbal speed that keeps the whole of Somalia, and now parts of London, rocking along in an AK-47 festooned haze. I’d been to Limehouse because it is vital to see the most deprived and conflicted areas of this country in the throes of great change, and because the actress was in Norway with an ex, and I was looking to get high or get stabbed to take the mind off.
Yes, it’s only Norway. But I have been to Bergen in the spring. It is irresistible, one of the three most beautiful cities in Europe*. By now she will have married a herring farmer**, and be churning butter in a white pinny, in a town above a fjord somewhere. There are worse lives.
There are indeed, and watching David Cameron from a half-opened bar that smells like a Lynxed polyester armpit is one of them. But Cameron was great. If the whole country starts taking qat, he’ll ace it in.
Trouble is, without the aid of a mildly psychotropic stimulant, Cameron’s ideas sound nuts. Not per se. The idea that communities should run their own schools, post offices, pubs that can’t find a private landlord, citizen police forces, etc, is great.
It was great when the New Left thought of it in the ’60s and ’70s as well. But it collapsed then too, at a time when there was a much greater willingness to devote time and energy trying to make it work. The community movement was itself built on the inherently collective nature of the labour and social democratic movement, and aimed to extend their process, and to deal with the bureaucracy and inequality that had developed within them.
Cameron’s proposal comes at a time when levels of trust and co-operation in the UK are at an all-time low. It was the particular genius of Thatcher to convince citizens that they should think of themselves as consumers of a product called “government” created by a supplier elected every five years. Labour never contested that — and simply said that the supplier should do it better, and give more. Now Cameron’s proposal is to solve the social deficit — of education, health, facilities — through the very processes that have collapsed because of an undermining of the social.
Furthermore, there’s no significant money offered to do it. And a crucial element — restructuring other forms of power, chiefly business — is missing. So companies would, of course, be able to run in the same old fashion, the power of property undiminished, the state would be withdrawn, and the “big social” would fill in the cracks.
I’m not actually suggesting that Cameron doesn’t believe that this is a solution to creating a better society. Though there is a measure of cynicism in the way that some older Tories are spruiking ideas alien to them. Ken Clarke, a Thatcher-era type and Tory éminence grise has the air of Lazar Kaganovich (who was helping run the USSR in the ’20s, and lived to see it dissolved in the early ’90s) — an air of someone from a time when the measures had to be taken. Cameron and his Notting Hill clique know that failure to really answer the social demands of Britons in some way would condemn them to a single term, and make Labour the natural party of British government (if in five years time, there is a Britain).
But the notion of a “big society”, standing as a third sector beside market and state, fails to grasp the way in which each are perfused by the other. Market relations are social relations, just as non-market social relations are restructured by market characteristics. State and society boundaries are porous for anything other than a nightwatchman state, and the particular form a market takes is always dictated by the state, enforcing a body of laws.
Indeed, the thinker Cameron most resembles is Marx — not the Marx of the Communist Manifesto or Capital, but of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, the humanist Utopian, positing a “social” standing apart from (and contaminated by) power and money.
“An Invitation to Join The Government of Britain” is the most Rousseauist point that any party calling itself conservative has reached, as far as I’m aware.
This occurred to me as the qat was wearing off, a strange feeling like getting, having and losing a cold in 19 minutes. So it may be unusually morose. However, it seems truer than thinking that Citizen Dave is much good.
In the blogosphere, the jokes had already begun, never a good sign. Lefty comedian Jeremy Hardy informed the world that he had taken out his own appendix, and Thick of It co-creator Armando Iannucci started a boutique law-and-order operation called #twitterforce, deciding new laws by tweet. This one was the most popular:
These are our laws! There has been overwhelming backing for the death penalty for people who clap when a plane lands.
The great problem for Cameron maybe that this clever wheeze will come to seem like nothing other than proof that the boy is not serious enough to run the country — and the preferred result will then become a hung parliament, with Brown staying on and taking Vincent Cable, the Lib-Dem Treasury spokesperson who looks like David Cameron’s housemaster, into government.
The cafe threw us out as soon as they could. It was a low buzz day anyway, and I got on a tube to go home, but with the sudden realisation that I was going to Limehouse to buy more qat. My feets was carrying me. I hoped it was Limehouse, and not Stansted, en route for Oslo Torp.
*Venice and Plovdiv, Bulgaria, since you ask.
**subs: please check what herring are, and how they are made.
My imagination is running wild as to whom the actress might be….
The political analysis is as entertaining as expected. A damnably interesting piece.
With thanks,
I assume there was a theme song for the Tory party manifesto launch. Was it “In the Court of the Crimson King”?
I love you, Guy. Leave the actress in Norway and come to Melbourne.
You’d have to be on hallucinogens permanently to cope with both Cameron and the disorganised mess of a society that his manifesto would create.
got it in one down and out…
Battersea Powerstation for me is its depiction in Children of men
it suits the tories perfectly.
Also in the UK do they have anything resembling the pre-election fiscal outlook?
Or if they get across the line will they just say, shock, horror the deficit is much worse than they thought.