Politics UK – Page 20 – thinking liberal

Economics for the Many: Labour’s challenge to the orthodoxy part 1

In my last post I referred to a new book, Economics for the Many, a collection of essays edited by Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. I am very interested in any new thinking coming from the left because I spy the possibility of a coalition between liberals and socialists – whether inside Labour or between Labour and another party or parties – since the right seem to have run out of ideas and started allying themselves with toxic nostalgists. So I bought the book. My first idea was to read it all and produce a single review article. No doubt I would have come up with something along the lines of this rather dismissive review by the FT’s Chris Giles. But the interest is likely to come from some of the details rather than the general thrust, so my plan is write a series of articles as I read it, a few chapters at a time. This is the first.

Introduction – John McDonnell

In my last post I was somewhat dismissive of Mr McDonnell as a Leninist more interested in candyfloss policies than promoting serious policy debate. Be that as it may, Mr McDonnell is keen to portray a picture of a ferment of new thinking on the left, which will produce a radical new orthodoxy, much as Margaret Thatcher ushered in 40 years ago. This collection of essays is part of the evidence, and his introduction sets out an overview..

As such it doesn’t tell us very much. Some of the familiar left wing narrative pops up. Those two abstract nouns, neoliberalism and austerity, play star roles as the villains. The first as a process of alienation of economic management from human values, the second being ideologically motivated cuts that have left tragic consequences. These let to the “social murder” of Grenfell Tower, for example.

But is it candyfloss? Is it designed to give the impression of intellectual movement just to provide cover for a power grab? I have two concerns. Are they coherent? And in particular, do they point to a radical decentralisation of power, or in fact the a Chinese style centralisation, guided by a political commissariat? And secondly, are they actually workable? Do they form a credible basis for reforms in our economic management?

1. Democratising Economics in a Post-truth World – Antonia Jennings

This isn’t a promising start. The basic thesis is sound enough. There is widespread ignorance about economics, and bafflement at the way it is talked about. I think it is a bit worse than Antonia Jennings, a member of the political think tank/charity ecosystem, suggests. Many of that minority who think they have a strong grasp of the subject actually don’t. This allows politicians to build up myths not based on sound economics. The austerity policies of the 2010 government is, of course, used as the primary example. The Brexit campaign of 2016 is used as another.

Her solutions, though, don’t measure up to the task. She suggests a number of nice ideas: improve education at schools and universities, bring more women into the profession, change the way economics is presented. But these feel hopelessly inadequate.

The first problem is that economics rests on a number of insights that are profoundly counter-intuitive. One is that an economy as a whole has to be managed quite differently from a household budget – the idea of living within your means works out in a very different way. Another is the idea of comparative advantage – which means that trade should benefit everybody. Alas these ideas are not only counter-intuitive, they have layers of understanding, which even trained economists argue over. Many, for example, have not got beyond the basic idea of “trade is good” to understand how a changing world might affect the benefits of trade. This will take much more than a bit extra schooling and more user-friendly language to fix, surely?

The second is the sheer political imperative to frame an easily digestible narrative. Austerity illustrates this. There is a perfectly economically literate case to be made for this policy – many economically literate politicians and civil servants, amongst others, supported it. The government did not attempt to make that case in public because the level of political debate did not permit it. The counter-narrative from the left that austerity was unnecessary and therefore an ideological attack on public servants and poor people is just as illiterate, and framed from the same political necessity. In fact there is a very challenging debate to be had on the subject with well-made arguments on both sides. What is rather depressing about the whole episode is that so few people are or were interested in having that argument out. It is too politically important for that.

Political polarisation is no doubt a strong factor here. It is much more effective to shout down and demonise your opponent than start a reasoned debate. Labour is part of the problem, or, more generously, a victim. What is the answer? I am tempted to say that it is greater political pluralism based on electoral reform – though that has brought its own problems elsewhere in the world.

So yes to reforming the economics discipline. But expectations on the political impact of this need to be moderated. The problem is more deep-seated.

In fact I suspect this chapter is more about maintaining that sense of outrage at neoliberalism and austerity, with the suggestion that both are founded on economic ignorance. A rather bitter piece of candyfloss.

2. Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule in Context – Simon Wren-Lewis

Simon Wren-Lewis is an academic macroeconomist, who has advised the Labour leadership on its economic policies. He writes lucidly and is perhaps an example of what Ms Jennings is looking for in clearer economic discourse. His topic is the Fiscal Credibility Rule (FCR), an operating principle for tax and spending policy that was adopted by the Labour leadership before the 2017 general election to show that it could be trusted with the government finances.

He starts with an elegant description of macroeconomic policy before the crash. He then moves into criticism of the 2010 coalition government’s austerity policy, which he says strangled economic growth. This story is central to Labour’s narrative, and you cannot expect a balanced discussion of this in a book like this, published on the party’s behalf. Mr Wren-Lewis, anyway, has taken sides, in an example of something that Ms Jennings might have commented on but didn’t: academic economists take sides in policy debates rather than trying to tease out the disputed issues and resolve them. I’m not sure how much this tendency is due to the politically charged nature of the discipline, and how much this goes on generally in academia. It is tempting to rise to the challenge, but this is the wrong place to do it. His is a perfectly respectable academic argument that I happen to disagree with. But it matters more in understanding the past than in working out what to do in the future.

The feature of the FCR that Mr Wren-Lewis thinks is most innovative is the idea that when interest rates are near zero, the government should use fiscal policy to help restore aggregate demand back to the point when interest rates start to rise again. The article then takes a rather puzzling turn. He talks about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT – SW-L shows a real weakness for TLAs). This is an idea that has growing currency on the left, which suggests that the regulation of demand should principally carried out by fiscal policy, and not the manipulation of interest rates by a central bank. If that is the case then the FCR is a bit of a miserable compromise. He leaves it unclear as what he really thinks.

Another interesting point is thrown in as an aside: Labour’s fiscal rule does not include borrowing for investment. This would be a radical departure for the British Treasury, who like to manage government borrowing as a whole, whether it is driven by investment or not. Many academic economists, such as Joe Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate often quoted by writers on the left, think that this is critical. If you read their critique of the 2010 coalition government closely, you will see that they don’t particularly criticise the aspects of austerity that made Labour supporters most angry – benefit cuts and reductions to the government payroll – but focus on the slashing of investment. An interesting debate is glossed over here: if fiscal policy is to be the main instrument for managing the business cycle, what balance should be taken by capital spending, and what by revenue deficits? I can see arguments on both sides, but it isn’t talked about enough.

For what it is worth, I agree with the central premise of MMT (which Mr Wren-Lewis points out is old-fashioned Keynesianism) – which is that fiscal policy should take up a full role in managing the business cycle, relegating central banks to support. But that invites a whole series of difficult questions, of which the role of capital spending is just one. A more important one is how do you tell when the economy is overheating, and so fiscal policy should be tightened? Mr Wren-Lewis simply suggests inflation – but in the modern economy inflation is no longer a reliable signal: dangerous imbalances in the financial system can build up instead. And there is an even bigger question: MMT in its simplest form implies a massive concentration of political power at the centre. For Leninists that is a good thing; liberals worry that this simply leads to incompetence and corruption.

But Labour aren’t going there yet. The FCR is actually rather a modest proposal, and sensible enough as far as it goes. But there is a much bigger debate to be had about how to manage the macroeconomy.

So a rather disappointing start, but many of the more interesting chapters were always going to be later on.

Will Labour’s Leninists thwart its liberals? Electoral reform is the test

The leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, closed a successful party conference last Wednesday. The reshaping of the party in the last three years under his leadership is second only to Brexit in transforming the British political landscape, and may even come to overshadow it. This achievement stands in stark contrast to the fate of mainstream socialist and social democratic parties elsewhere in Europe. Mr Corbyn has repeatedly been underestimated by his critics, including me. And the conference seemed to put behind the party the bitter conflicts that arose during this transformation, in order to take on tired neoliberal orthodoxy that still dominates British government. Will it work?

The first challenge to this is whether the party can break through scepticism among the public at large, fuelled by unsympathetic coverage in the media, and stoked up by their Conservative opponents. A lot of wealthy people are worried by the thought of a Labour government, and so there will be plenty of money behind such schemes to derail the party. As the Brexit referendum campaign (to say nothing of Donald Trump in the US) shows, political campaigning is not restrained by thoughts of truth or fairness. But I want to consider a second challenge: which is whether Labour will actually come up with a convincing package of policies that will transform the country for the better, or whether hopeful signs will be stymied by Labour’s internal politics.

I was put in mind of this by an article in the Guardian by John Harris. He welcomes the radicalism of ideas coming out of the Labour movement, which include such liberal ideas as the decentralisation of power, including local government and worker cooperatives. I have ordered a recently published book, Economics for the Many, a series of essays edited by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, to get a better understanding of this new thinking, and I will report back on that when I have read it. But Mr Harris is worried that this radicalism will by stymied by nostalgic conservatives that want to turn the clock back to the 1970s. There are plenty of these in the Labour movement (such as former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott), but I don’t think these are much of an organised threat. And neither are the centrists associated with the now dated New Labour project of the 1990s, still strong in the parliamentary party. Instead I see the key battle as being between two groups that I will call “liberals” and “Leninists”. These groups don’t self-identify as such; instead I am using my own labels, much as the left uses the term “neoliberal” for critics on the right, though I aim for more precision.

Firstly, it is worth remembering what unites these groups. They both want to make society economically fairer, with a better distribution of wealth and the eradication of poverty. There is no reason to doubt their honesty about this, but there is a fundamental divide as to how to go about it. The liberals have a deep-seated belief in democracy and persuasion, and a distrust of dictatorship; they also think that centralisation of power is part of the problem. They think that the party should develop a policy programme based on radical devolution through a process of internal consultation within the party, and then persuading the electorate as a whole. The detail and content of the policies are everything, and they want to engage as many people as possible in the debate.

For Leninists it is the seizure of power itself that is the key thing, first within the party, and then in the country. And once that power has been seized, they want as few restraints on executive power as possible, so that radical policies can be enacted from the top down. Centralised power is the solution, stupid, not the problem. Leninists don’t care much for the content of particular policies, beyond as a means to rally supporters. They are supremely pragmatic in their bid for power, forming alliances with liberals and others on the journey, only to ditch them when not required. The model, of course, is Vladimir Lenin in revolutionary Russia a century ago. His ruthless focus on power meant that he easily outlasted more romantic socialists, who expected power to emanate from the workers upwards. A more modern hero is Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who accepted a democratic veneer only so far as necessary to keep his Bolivarian socialist project on the rails. Labour’s Leninists are not openly undemocratic, but they have some worrying heroes.

An example of what I mean is Mr McDonnell, the leading Leninist, and his suggestion that large companies put aside 10% of their shares for the benefit of workers. This sounds all very good and liberal, until you look at it a little more closely. In fact control of the shares would rest with central government; after that the details melt away. The party’s shadow business secretary, Rebecca Long Bailey, sometimes talked of as a future leader, was easily skewered by a BBC journalist when pressed to explain the policy on Radio 4 the morning after. The policy is candy floss: designed to give a sweet sensation on contact, but which quickly melts to nothing.

In this picture the Leninists are slowly consolidating their control over the party machinery. Mr Corbyn, while lacking the ruthless streak that characterises Leninists, seems happy to go along with this. By instinct, however, most Labour members are liberals. The Leninists need the liberals as allies, but they also want to stymie any policies that might dilute their hold on power. Am I imagining all this? Well it is a huge over-simplification, but it may have some value in predicting what happens next. Let’s consider how this dynamic might play out on a couple of defining issues.

The first is Brexit. The liberals hate Brexit and want to mobilise the party to stop it. They therefore threw their weight behind the idea of a new referendum, with the possibility of stopping the process. The Leninists don’t like this idea. They don’t care that much about the issue itself, though they instinctively bridle against the restraints that the EU places on member states, for example over state aid to businesses. But they worry that taking such a clear stand against Brexit will cut them off from a working class vote that would otherwise be quite easy to mobilise against the Conservatives. I personally have a great deal of sympathy with this position. Brexit exposed a fault line in British society and real political leadership will be needed to heal it. The Leninists successfully stopped a motion going to conference that explicitly commits Labour to a further referendum. But enough movement was made in that direction, especially with statements from the (liberal) Keir Starmer, for liberals to declare victory (take this remarkable piece from the Guardian’s Zoe Williams). That seems very naive, though Theresa May’s government may yet give them an opening if she persists in pushing her Chequers or bust strategy. The Leninists must find a working alternative to no-deal to fall back on, at least in principle – even if they think that no-deal would give them a political opportunity – or they are in danger of presenting the public with a choice between no-deal and no-Brexit, which is the liberal game plan.

The second issue is electoral reform: and in particular the greater use of proportional representation. This is popular with liberals, and stands well with their ideal of a pluralistic democracy – in place of the take-it-or-leave it politics of the current system, where political elites have too much say. But it is anathema to Leninists. Their political ideal is a one-party state (preferably because electors persistently back the party in a free choice, rather than actually banning the opposition). They like the idea of large, broad church political parties, united by a tribal hatred of each other. It offers them the best chance of seizing power. And they love control by elites, as long they are the elite. It’s not that Leninists are anti-democratic: they crave the affirmation that winning elections gives them: but they are inclined to see opponents as cheats, class enemies and fundamentally illegitimate. They will not be encouraged by the fate of traditional socialist parties in proportional systems elsewhere in Europe. If the Leninists hold sway, Labour will make no serious commitment to electoral reform. Somehow it will never work its way up the priority list.

In my view the Leninists hold the upper hand. And I think that is bad because their solutions, involving highly concentrated political power, are doomed to failure. They are trying to take a short cut to solve problems that can only be solved through a tough democratic process, with the substantial devolution of political power. Perhaps I will be proved wrong, and the Leninists will find the party turning against them, and the Labour Party adopting genuinely liberal policies. I will know that day has arrived when party adopts serious electoral reform, at least to local government, in their party platform. Don’t bet on it.

The dust starts to settle from Salzburg: the tension over Brexit mounts

After the spectacular breakdown between Britain and the remaining EU countries at the summit in Salzburg last week, what is the state of Brexit? The chatter in the media, mainstream or otherwise, is either hopelessly partisan, or hopelessly superficial (the BBC is taking mediocrity in political analysis to new heights). Before taking the plunge on this I wanted some of the dust to settle, and also to see what the more reliable commentators had to say.

For me, these commentators write for the Financial Times. Easily the best on Brexit is legal correspondent David Allen Green. His take on the summit is that the British Prime Minister Theresa May badly misjudged the mood on the EU side, leading to the breakdown. But he still expects the all-important exit deal to be done allowing the transitional deal to come into play on 30 March 2019, while the details of the longer term relationship are hammered out in time for the transitional period’s end on 31 December 2020. For an alternative view I went to Wolfgang Munchau. I don’t particularly like him as he is prone to getting a bit worked up, but at least he is free of that awful British superficiality of understanding when it comes to the EU. He suggests that it is the EU side that has misjudged things: they think that a no-deal situation would be so painful for Britain that it will buckle before it is too late – underestimating the political difficulties for Mrs May, even if that is what she really thinks. So he thinks that the no-deal situation on 29 March 2019 is all too likely.

Before trying to make sense of this, it is worth highlighting a couple of other things that are emerging from the wreckage. The first is the idea that Brexit can be halted and made to go away. So far talk of this has been confined to ardent Remainers on the margins of British politics. But for the first time at Salzburg some European leaders spoke publicly about the possibility. Idle talk, perhaps – it is nowhere near the official EU position. But perhaps it explains why some EU leaders are unsympathetic to Mrs May’s compromise idea. Meanwhile British commentators are in two camps. One side says that there is growing momentum for a further referendum with reversing Brexit as an option. The other says that not only would this be a logistical nightmare, but there isn’t the political will to do it where it matters: in the House of Commons. Labour’s fudged conference motion to be debated today gives succour to both lines of argument.

Another thing worth mentioning is rising talk of the “Canada option” in British political circles. This refers to the comprehensive trade deal the EU has struck with Canada, which some think is a model that the UK should follow. The idea is not that this would be in place for 30 March 2019, but that it could be negotiated in time for 2021, when the transition period ends. This has the advantage of being completely consistent with the EU negotiating position, and being acceptable to the troublemakers in Britain’s Conservative Party (and the hard Brexiteers in Labour too). It has one overwhelming snag, beyond requiring the dismantling of many manufacturing supply chains and the clogging of ports, which hard Brexiteers have never much worried about. It is inconsistent with the stated aim of an open border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Which means, under the current EU offer, a sort of customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Most Britons couldn’t care less about this – but it is an existential issue for the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), on which Mrs May’s government depends, as well as old-fashioned Conservatives, of which there may be a few left.

So it keeps coming back to Ireland. Here I think there are a couple of issues that don’t get talked about enough. The first is that Brexit, especially a hard one, could lead to moves to unify Ireland. This possibility was left in the Good Friday Agreement, but only if most Northern Irish people agreed. Within the EU there was little prospect of that, even as the relative proportion of Catholics is rising (it is said that the UK’s more generous welfare state is at the heart of this). But at least one poll showed that this changes in the event of Brexit. Idle speculation? Perhaps: the DUP don’t seem to be overly worried about it. But serious political miscalculations happen. A messy Brexit might be resolved by Irish unity – do the DUP really want to risk this?

The other issue is the impact that a hard Brexit, and worse still a no-deal, would have on the Irish Republic: it could be catastrophic, as so much of its trade is either with Britain or through it. Mr Munchau admits that the impact of a no-deal would affect Britain more than its EU partners, but says that the latter’s pain theshold is lower. So he advises the British government to hold firm. I’m not so sure about this as a generality (to judge from the way Russian sanctions have been applied, in spite how much they hurt some EU members), but Ireland is surely a weak link. And since Ireland is at the heart of the most awkward negotiating issue, this matters a lot, and gives strength to Mr Munchau’s analysis.

And then into this brew we must add the state of British politics. If the EU does bend, and Mrs May is able to put something like her current proposals (referred to as “Chequers” after the place where it was forged with her cabinet) to parliament. Will she have a majority and what happens if she doesn’t? The current suggestion is that there will be a sizeable Tory rebellion amongst Brexit hardliners, and Labour will vote it down, which makes Mrs May position look hopeless. But what then? Labour hopes for a General Election: but Mrs May is unlikely to concede it with her party in such disarray. She may then try to resolve the impasse with some form of referendum. If she is cunning, this will simply be between her deal and a no-deal, with no option to remain. Labour is badly split on the latter. Whether there is a Commons majority for an option to remain is questionable.

But the possibility may be enough to make hard Brexiteers, both Tory and Labour, think twice. The cleverer amongst them have already realised that Mrs May’s compromise is a sensible staging post to where the want to go. Once the country gets past 29 March, the Remain coalition will start to wilt as there would be no easy way back in. And there is enough ambiguity in the SNP position for them to be persuaded to sit on their hands. A majority for the compromise position may yet be conjured up. If Mrs May was a more skilful politician I would say that with more confidence.

So my prediction is this: Mrs May will stand firm and the EU will start to bend, though it may take until December. Some kind of deal will be negotiated, which still leaves many issues about 2021 unresolved, but which will be enough to get to avoid the cliff edge on 29 March 2019. She will then succeed in getting this through parliament. Ultimately Britain will get a camouflaged Turkey-style deal, with a customs union of sorts in goods and no freedom of movement. So much the same as I was predicting before.

What could change it? If EU governments start to club together to offer the UK a way out of Brexit, that could just change the political dynamics in Britain. Or if a political miscalculation leads to a new General Election, and hence a two month stasis in the negotiating process, then that do raises the odds of a no-deal, whoever wins. So the tension mounts.

Lib Dem economic policy takes a step leftwards

Last Monday the Liberal Democrats passed a policy paper on economic reforms, Good Jobs, Better Businesses, Stronger Communities. This covers economic policy outside fiscal and tax reform, and fits in with the party leadership’s wish to address the challenges of what is often called the fourth industrial revolution. Does it measure up to the challenge?

Sometimes it is hard not to agree with fellow Lib Dem blogger David Boyle that liberals don’t take economic policy seriously enough. There was little excitement about this motion, or another two which tackled taxation. I only attended two of the three debates myself and spoke in neither. But the party leader Vince Cable takes economics seriously (he was a professional economist after all), and the party does find itself well-provided with official policy, even if most of its members might struggle to know what it is. The party should be doing more to promote internal debate.

The Good Jobs motion, and the paper behind it, demonstrate one of the problems. They are very densely packed with ideas and policies. So much so that they are hard to read and harder to condense into something clear and ringing. There seem to be two problems here. First the scope was probably too large. You could easily produce a worthwhile motion on workplace rights, for example, rather than tucking it away in this much bigger motion. And then there is the desire to establish consensus. This boils down to including something for everybody: I’ll let your hobbyhorse through if you’ll do the same for mine. How much this dynamic came from the policy working group itself, and how much from outsiders I don’t know. It must be admitted that there are some advantages to this approach. The Labour manifesto last year seems to have been produced by a similar process, and it collected together enough hobbyhorses to make it a good tool for roping in disparate groups of special interests. I remember one online commenter disparaging the Lib Dem manifesto because, unlike Labour’s, it had no policy on puppy farms. It was an electoral success, notwithstanding major holes in, for example, university finance. Secondly, if your party actually does get into government, it helps to have a bank of small-ish policy ideas ready. This gives ministers something to do, and helps them set their own agenda, rather than being swept along by their departments and issues of the moment. So the policy paper should do valuable work, even if it failed to the party at large on fire.

My main beef is that it pays homage to the idea that the country has a serious productivity problem, and that this is something politicians should worry about. But this is such a consensus view that I guess they had little choice. I don’t particularly object to the polices that this gives rise to. Indeed many of its ideas would no doubt dent measured productivity in the short term (more regulation, tougher environmental focus, and so on), so it is probably politically wise to have some policies specifically focused on raising productivity. Labour does something similar.

So what, for me, are the key issues? The first is that too much money in the economy is being either retained by businesses, or distributed to shareholders, or paid to senior employees. Quite apart from the corrosive effect this has on people’s sense of fairness, too much of this money is idle, causing a phenomenon called secular stagnation. One of the symptoms is low interest rates and too much private debt. This tendency started in the 1980s and technological changes aren’t making it any easier. In order to address this, broadly two sorts of reform are suggested. First there is attacking monopoly capitalism. This is David Boyle’s big theme: he wants to rescue the old liberal concept of free trade as a liberator, after it has been hijacked by neoliberals to mean staying out big business’s way. The second is to redress the balance of power between workers and bosses. I think this latter is probably more important – I am less convinced than David that modern monopoly capitalism is quite as harmful as it was in old economy days of oil, phones and steel – though I do think he is onto something over excessive protections for intellectual property. The Lib Dem paper embraces both approaches, though not intellectual property, which requires a policy paper all to itself. It opens the door to supporting unions. Having heard a very sensible presentation by a representative of the union Prospect at the party conference, I am changing my mind about the role of trade unions. One of my formative political beliefs (from the 1970s) was that unions were a baleful influence on the economy. But empowering unions sounds much more likely to redress the palpable power imbalabce than more shared ownership of businesses, a typical Lib Dem suggestion (though not advocated as radically as the left are starting to).

The second issue is that the economy needs to be pushed towards environmental sustainability. Not only does this mean unlocking renewable energy and leaving coal and oil buried in the ground, but it also means producing and consuming less stuff. The sustainable economy will be based on services, not manufacturing. This needs a change of mindset, and the policy paper does give it a big shove in the right direction.

A third issue is getting a more even geographical spread of economic success. It is a pity that economists are not giving this more thought. Certain economic processes seem to benefit from accelerating returns – returns that rise with concentration. The idea of accelerating returns sounds good, but it isn’t, because it leads to success being concentrated, and increases inequality (unlike the alternative concept of diminishing returns, the more conventional assumption in economic modelling). This seems to be because of network effects among personal relationships, that work better in geographical proximity. This is not particularly well understood, but needs to be. I am convinced that government structure is part of the story. More devolved political power helps – but exactly how and why is less clear. The policy paper duly pushes for this, both in government and in the purchasing of public agencies. That is helpful. But whether more devolved government will help Boston, Margate or Merthyr Tydfil enough is doubtless open to scepticism. The centralised political culture runs deep in Britain.

And a fourth issue is human fulfilment. We have reached the point in our economic evolution when economists need to consider this explicitly, rather than simply trying to give people more money to spend. This fits in with worker empowerment, but there needs to be more. The paper’s advocacy of lifelong education and individual learning accounts is helpful here. But I want to see the greater availability of counselling for people between jobs, or unsatisfied with their jobs, as a part of this. Simply giving people spending power is not enough, and can be dehumanising – one of the reasons that I am suspicious of universal basic income, a very fashionable idea on the left that the Lib Dems are sensibly steering clear of.

So, overall, this policy paper fits well enough with the economic agenda that I support. But standing back it leads me to a striking thought. There is a growing overlap between current liberal thinking and new socialist thinking (which isn’t just a throwback to the 1970s as its opponents claim), and a step away from the neoliberal thinking that still dominates the centre-right. Perhaps there will be enough common ground for a future coalition, once Labour sees beyond its internal struggles and overcomes its more extreme tribalism. Alas that day is some way off. But a coalition with Conservatives once the Brexit hoo ha has settled looks even less wise than it was in 2010.

Vince Cable sets a bold course for the Liberal Democrats

In one episode of the masterly political comedy Yes Minister, the knowing civil servant advised his naive minster on the art of public presentation. It depends on how radical you are. The more radical that you want to be, the more sober the presentation needed to be, to reassure the wary. A contentless speech, on the other hand, needed to as glitzy as possible. On that basis the British Liberal Democrats’ leader Vince Cable’s speech yesterday to his party must have been radical indeed. Its presentation was as dull as ditch water, fluffing its one joke (something about erotic spasms). Its content was another matter.

Most commentators, inside and outside the party, have been unable to see past the superficial. They complained that it was dull, and lacked radical new ideas. They assumed that his appeal to reasonable, moderate voters, put off by the extremism of other parties, meant that his ideas were would be wishy-washy, and duly saw that both in what he said, and in the series of policy resolutions passed by the conference. But I have been listening to leader’s speeches for nearly 30 years. I’m tired of the presentational tricks, the crowd-pleasing jokes, the radical-sounding policy ideas that lead nowhere, and the personal stories injected by professional speechwriters to establish “authenticity”. What I actually heard was a series of direct answers to the hard political questions that the party faces; he never lost my attention. My first thought, as we got up to applaud it, was that it was the best leaders’ speech I had ever heard.

So what are these hard questions? The first was what actually do we say if the party succeeds in its quest to secure a referendum on the Brexit proposal, with an option to stay in the EU. This is something that most advocates of a referendum say little about. Vince recognises that most people that support Brexit have a real grievance, having been left out of whatever economic advance the country has made over the last generation. That needed to be addressed through public investment, and for public resources to reflect population increases more readily. He also recognised that the party needed to push for reform of the European Union itself. This is something most Remainers are silent about.

But this only poses deeper questions about what is wrong with Britain, that go far beyond Brexit. Vince took this on too. Part of his answer was a familiar liberal one: better education services, with a lifelong remit; he mentioned further education colleges in particular as a neglected sector that needed attention. He also supported Education spokesperson Layla Moran’s ideas for changes to schools. These are a little too crowd-pleasing for me (replacing Ofsted and reducing primary testing) but are generally going in the right direction. But he also had ideas, indeed firm policies, on the economy, often a Lib Dem weakness. He recognised the biggest problem: that too much money is being hoarded by the well-off. He wants to tackle this by taxing it harder. This is quite brave, since there is likely to be collateral damage amongst a swathe of older people (like me) who have made money from owning homes, and who (unlike me) want to pass on much of this wealth to their children (I don’t have any). This is surely part of the answer, but also I think it means being braver on government debt. But he hinted at this too – by loosening government rules on borrowing to invest, locally and nationally. My criticism in my previous post that the Lib Dems are weak on economic policy is being addressed.

He also wants to start thinking about how the impact of increased automation will affect our lives, and how public policy needs to change to reflect it. This will doubtless lead to a focus on empowering workers, as well as re-focusing regulation of digital platforms. Deputy Leader, and likely successor to Vince, Jo Swinson also talked about this.

But, of course, developing a policy platform that is relevant and radical is only part of the problem. The are small signs that the party’s fortunes are improving at the expense of Britain’s big parties, but far short of what is needed to turn the party into a major political force. The party isn’t speaking to the vast majority of the public, and media gives it little attention, almost none of it sympathetic. Amongst those who have some awareness of the party, it is considered to be well-meaning but ineffectual. It is unfashionable to support the party, and many people who might be supporters resort to sneering at it. There needs some kind of seismic shift, both in gathering supporters and, critically, money. Vince has launched a series of ideas for party reform in an attempt to do just that. I did not attend any of the consultations on these reforms, but I understand that attendees were giving them a sympathetic hearing, but were worried about some aspects, notably that the free supporters’ scheme might be subject to entryism. Many of the older hands are very sceptical, though. They way in which the leadership is trying to push the reforms through has ruffled quite a few feathers.

But the party doesn’t belong to these old hands, who include long time members like me, and more recent ones who joined in the 2000s, who consider themselves to be radical liberals. The party’s membership has exploded since 2015. The recent publicity of Vince’s reforms have drawn in thousands more. Nearly every other speaker claimed that it was their first time speaking at conference. By and large these were persuaded by the leadership line. A strong move by the old lags to derail a motion on immigration, recommending substantial reforms to Britain’s current system, but falling far short of making the country truly open, was easily defeated. The complainers were passionate, angry and numerous, but oddly unspecific. Against this most people were persuaded that the policy was a step in the right direction.

But the opportunity is palpable. The Conservatives are skewered by Brexit, as well tied to an outdated economic orthodoxy. Labour is riven by internecine struggles that are relegating many of its ablest people to the sidelines. Too many of its supporters indulge in tribal abuse as an alternative to building broad support for a radical policy programme. Its leader is failing to convince much of the public. A bit like the Lib Dems, he is seen as well-intentioned but ineffectual.

And meanwhile Brexit is hurtling towards us. Personally I still think that the Prime Minister Theresa May will succeed in getting a compromise deal with the EU through, allowing an exit from the union in March next year. The Lib Dems owe it to their supporters to try their damnedest to stop her. But its leader is looking at what the party has to do beyond that. That encourages me.

Is Vince Cable’s plan for the Lib Dems a gamble too far?

Last Friday the leader of the British Liberal Democrats, Vince Cable, launched his plan for remaking his party into a broader liberal movement. Having been away, my reaction to this event has been slow. But before we launch into the party conference next weekend, here are my first thoughts.

Vince’s main idea is to create a supporters’ scheme which costs nothing to join. To give people extra incentive to sign up to this (and be bombarded with requests for help and donations, etc.) he suggests that these registered supporters have a vote to help choose party leaders – and a suggestion that non-MPs may be allowed to stand for the leadership. He also wants to make it easier for new members to become candidates for parliament – currently they must have a full year of membership. Vince said that the party needed to open itself up to become a movement for political moderation.

First reactions in my Facebook feed were very negative. If there’s one thing that annoys the more vocal people in this community it is referring to Lib Dems as “moderates”, or worse, aiming at the political centre. The party has being going through difficult times after its support collapsed in 2010 when it joined the Conservatives in coalition government. What has kept those of us who remain going, and motivated those who have joined since, is passion for its liberal and internationalist values, not moderation, and not being Mr In-Between. But political leaders know that they must do more than merely represent their supporters; they must broaden their movement’s appeal to people who do not currently support it actively. There are many people out there who are appalled by the idealistic extremism that is infecting both Labour and the Conservatives. Doubtless the use of the word “moderate” was based on at least some market research, though the party cannot afford much.

Apart from suspicion of the word “moderate”, members are wary of involving large numbers of newcomers with little experience or stake in the party. The Labour Party were the first down this route, when they opened up their leadership contest in 2015 to the public for just a £3 fee. In one sense this was enormously successful: hundreds of thousands were drawn in, and many became full-fledged members. The party how has about 600,000 members when the next three in size (the Conservatives, the Scottish Nationalists and the Lib Dems) have not much more than 100,000 each. But this influx of members helped a manifestly unsuitable candidate (Jeremy Corbyn) become elected to the leadership, and has been exploited to drive the party to left. I need to be careful here. Mr Corbyn has been badly underestimated by mainstream politicians and media, and the lurch to the left has involved some welcome fresh thinking. It may not turn out as bad as many outsiders, including me, are predicting. But what is unquestionable is that the process has been very uncomfortable for many of the people who had devoted their lives to the party before the influx changed things. And that’s what many Lib Dems fear will happen to their party if these changes actually succeed in drawing lots of new new people in. It’s all very well saying that these new supporters should share the party’s current values, but how do you ensure that this is the case?

What gives weight to this is the thought that the party might be able to draw in defectors from other parties, including MPs and big-hitters. Unhelpfully, former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair piped up on Friday too, expressing his fears over the turn that politics in Britain has taken. People won’t be slow to make the connection that “moderates” and “centre ground” include people like him. And to many of us, it is people like him who got the country into this mess in the first place, by pushing a series of ideas (often referred to as “neoliberalism”) that have created a whole class of left-behind people that are stoking up the anger.

But the party’s position is quite desperate, if it wants to live up to its ambitions to make it to the political big time (i.e. achieve power), rather than being an ideological fringe, like the Green Party. It is stuck at between 5-10% in national opinion polls (though at the upper end of the range at the moment) and has too few MPs (at 12) to have serious political clout. Andrew Rawnsley sums this up very well. And yet, as Mr Rawnsley also points out, the opportunity is palpable. The ideological fringes in both the major parties are making the running. And there are examples of successful mass movements led from the centre (he points to Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau in Canada, whose party has been advising Mr Cable). If the Lib Dems can’t do this all by themselves, it is hard to see it working without them. The party has nearly as many members as the Conservatives, and the organisational nous and cooperative culture that a brand new party would lack (one reason that the party has seen off Britain’s most successful new party of recent times: Ukip).

There are moments in life when you have to be courageous, and take big risks in order to get what you want. This is one such moment for the Lib Dems. All the risks pointed out by the plan’s critics have a basis in fact – but they can all be managed. The plan is not nearly enough by itself, but the point is to capitalise on opportunities as they arise. As such I am giving my support to it, though I have reservations about some of the plan. The secret weapon of liberalism is that it can be ideological and moderate at the same time, because it celebrates inclusion. Inclusion is what political moderation is all about.

To me, though, there remains a hole at the heart of this exercise, which will also afflict any new parties created out of fragments of Labour and the Conservatives. We know what they stand against, but what’s the plan? How do they propose to help the left-behind, and start to heal the rifts that are all too apparent in our not-so United Kingdom? At the heart of this has to be a new approach to economics. At the moment Labour understands this better than the Lib Dems, but they are ruining their good ideas by proposing to over-centralise power and supporting the deep conservatism of trade unions. But at least they realise that the cosy consensus that dominates the centre of British political establishment has to be challenged. And that is radical rather than moderate. Once liberals start to champion an agenda for radical economic reform, everything is possible.

Boris Johnson raises the spectre of Islamophobia

I was going to observe a dignified silence over British MP Boris Johnson’s latest stunt. His aim was to gain attention and notoriety, and I didn’t think he deserved any help from me. But with a week gone and the story still being run prominently by BBC Radio 4, my silence must be broken.

The stunt was Mr Johnson’s regular column in the Daily Telegraph, published last Monday. I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to. Nobody disputes three salient facts. First that its subject was the banning of face-covering garments in public places, recently enacted by other European countries, such as Denmark. Second that Mr Johnson said that such bans should not be enacted here, based on good liberal logic. And third Mr Johnson expressed his dislike of such garments as worn by some Muslim women (the niqab, the face covering with a slit for the yes, and the burqa, a total body covering) by making two derogatory comparisons. Unlike the BBC, who do so at every possible opportunity, I will not repeat these here.

Deliberately or not, this was a very clever piece of work. The first fact allows Mr Johnson to claim that the article is part of an ongoing and legitimate political debate, and the second that his views on the subject are liberal. But the third picks up on public hostility to women who wear the burqa or niqab. It was what attracted all the attention, drawing condemnation from Muslim members of the Conservative Party, and admiration from those with less liberal views, and those who think Muslims have no place in this country. The timing was impeccable. The BBC had just given wall-to-wall coverage to the Labour Party’s troubles with antisemitism, so they could hardly downplay coverage of the story without being accused of bias. And, comfortably into August, there has not been much competing news; even the drought was abated by some welcome rain. Also Mr Johnson was on holiday, so he could evade interviews. As a politician that loves attention, things could hardly have gone better.

Could it damage him politically? That’s hard to see. His liberal comments allow him to maintain injured innocence; the people who are condemning him were by and large hostile to him anyway. Brexit supporters have stuck with him. And large parts of the white British middle and working classes are hostile to Islam, and his derogatory comments resonated well. This is especially true of Conservative grassroots members, who most suspect are the main audience he had in mind. Mr Johnson surely wants to take over from Theresa May as party leader and Prime Minister. That ultimately depends on a vote by party members, should Mrs May step down or be forced out (not to be taken for granted). He is maintaining his already high standing with the grassroots. His main difficulty is his weak standing with MPs, who must pick the top two candidates for the membership vote. But his charisma far outshines potential rivals (except Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose standing among MPs must surely be even weaker) and he may yet be able to pick a path through that minefield.

The context is very depressing. Islamophobia is rife in Britain, as it is in most of Europe. Even respectable people can be heard saying that Islam is a repressive ideology, and alien to traditional British or European culture. Many people are open about this in a way that they are furtive about antisemitism – a bit like antisemitism in the 1930s. This is a remarkable turn of events. The British Empire included many Muslim subjects, who were recruited into the armed forces (especially in India) as they were considered to be good soldiers. These were then brought over to Europe to defend the homeland in both world wars. I remember my cousin, a senior colonial administrator in British Sudan, speaking warmly of Muslims.

It is not all that hard to see how the modern hostility came about, though. Militant Islamic terrorism, especially after the 9/11 attacks, is one reason. Muslims may regard these groups as nutters on the fringe of their society, but Islam is central to their identity, and they comprise a large part of what ordinary British people know about Muslims. And, over the last 50 years, there have been high levels of immigration from Muslim countries, especially Pakistan and Bangladesh. Many people feel threatened by immigration, which becomes a scapegoat for modern ills generally. Many of these Muslim groups are conservative and have made little attempt to integrate. People find women dressed in the niqab or burqa, though rare, especially provocative. I have to confess that I’m not comfortable with them either – it seems insulting somehow. The real problem with Mr Johnson’s comments is that they will invite even more people to abuse these women in public. Indeed that seems to be exactly what has happened. Since the Brexit rebellion, hostility to all groups of immigrants has risen, and this has broken out into public abuse more often. It is why we all have to be careful in what we say.

Meanwhile most Muslims are good, law-abiding citizens, and harmonious integration proceeds apace. The fears of Islamophobes are fantasies. And yet it is these good citizens that will suffer the most. Mr Johnson well knows this (his family has Turkish roots after all), but he is happy to exploit anti-Muslim prejudice.

There are parallels with antisemitism. Just antisemitism disguises itself as perfectly legitimate criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, so Islamophobia masquerades as criticism of extremist terrorists, or conservative social customs, such as the niqab. Legitimate topics for political debate get subtly subverted. Mr Johnson’s subversion was particularly subtle – he just poked a bit of fun. Unfortunately this makes these legitimate topics harder to discuss.

So the anti-liberal backlash continues. I still believe that it will peak in Britain and other countries, and then turn. Partly this will be because the anti-liberals will be unable to deliver anything of actual value. But also I hope that liberals will buck up their ideas about how to help, and appeal to, left-behind people and places. Meanwhile we must call out prejudice when we see it.

Amid the noise about no-deal, a blind Brexit is being put in place

The quality of political debate in Britain is hitting new lows. The politicians are not interested in helping us understand what is going on, just in promoting some half-true story or other. ‘Twas ever thus. What has changed is that challenge from journalists and commentators is weaker. Most media are promoting their own agendas. The BBC tries to be better, but it just presents one fiction, compares it to the alternative fiction being offered, and retires. Few are interested in talking about what is really happening.

The current talk about a “no deal” Brexit is a case in point. On the one hand, business groups are worrying that this will lead to an Armageddon on the day after exit, at the end of March next year. This is pounced on with glee by Remain supporters as a sort of “told-you-so”. Government ministers simultaneously try to say that it just won’t happen, that it is the fault of EU intransigence, and that anyway no deal is better than a bad deal. Brexiteers, like the Conservative Ian Duncan Smith last weekend, just talk about something else completely. What are we to make of this all?

First of all, we have to be clear about what a no-deal Brexit actually is. We are not talking about the choice between the Single Market or WTO terms or something in between. This is what IDS, William Rees-Mogg and others change the subject to when pressed on the topic. What is meant by no-deal is, well, no deal. No trading protocols, no divorce bill, no transition period, no mutual recognition of citizens’ rights, no common VAT infrastructure, no mutual recognition of standards. Just a vacuum in place of 40 years of accumulated law and regulation.

And that could be Armageddon. There would be queues at ports, empty shelves in shops, hospitals running out of medicines, layoffs in all kinds of businesses, holidays cancelled and even planes grounded at airports. Things would start to settle down in due course, but with Britain in the weakest possible bargaining position, it is very hard to see how most people aren’t going to be made worse off. It is no wonder that Brexiteers don’t want to talk about it. They are prone to suggesting that threatening a no-deal will improve Britain’s bargaining position in the exit negotiation – a bit like threatening to walk away from a house purchase when you are making yourself homeless.

In fact, if the pro Brexit politicians were interested in intelligent engagement they could make two points. The first is that a no-deal is not in fact all that likely, because the deal is quite close to being done. The main sticking point is trying to find a form of words that will cover the EU’s demands on the Irish border. The British government thinks that the current draft is politically suicidal, because it opens the possibility of Northern Ireland having some form of semi-detached status, with a strong boundary between it and the rest of the UK. Although most British people are quite chilled by that prospect, it would have devastating political consequences in the province. But a no-deal would almost as devastating for Ireland as it would be for Britain, so there is sure to be some flexibility on this. Indeed, there are already some signs of movement from the European Commission. The rest can be fudged, even if it does open up the prospect of another no-deal cliff edge when the transitional period comes to an end, on 31 December 2020. This is what the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is calling a “blind Brexit”: one where the longer term relationship is unresolved. This is exactly what the UK and EU negotiators are planning.

The second point to make is that we will know if there is likely to be a no-deal later this year – probably October. After that it becomes too late for the deal to tidied up and ratified by all the bodies required to do this, for such a complex treaty, in both Britain, the EU institutions and in other EU countries. That gives perhaps five months to prepare for that cliff edge. Temporary stop-gaps can be put together for the most urgent issues: citizens’ rights, air traffic, and so on. I can’t see that a lot of supply chains or border facilities will be sorted out by then – the infrastructure can take years to build – so there will still be chaos at the borders and some lay-offs. But we should avoid Armageddon.

And the rest is theatre. Remainers want to build up a sense of crisis so that people seriously start to rethink the whole foolish enterprise and call it off before it is too late. They know that once we get beyond exit day it will be much, much harder to get the UK back into the EU. The government thinks it is wise to keep its head down to preserve unity within the Conservative Party and to keep the Democratic Unionists of Northern Ireland on board. The Brexiteer politicians (the clever ones) have probably decided that this battle is done and are getting on with the next one: which is the shape of the world on 1 January 2021. Their main concern is that any deal done on Ireland does not lock out their preferred solution, which, for now, is some sort of Canada trade deal.

Admittedly this is quite delicate. A Canada deal looks incompatible with on open Irish border, which, with Republican terrorists still active and Loyalist groups ready to retaliate, could restart an escalation of violence. But the thing is to fudge it for now and hope that the passage of time will make the problem easier to solve. Under the transitional arrangements there would be an open border until 31 December 2020.

Theresa May’s government has played a weak hand quite well. At the cost of making any progress on other burning political issues, including the ones that led to the referendum backlash, she’s winning on executing Brexit. She is better off without Boris Johnson and David Davis, the two ministers who resigned in a huff. It would have been better to have negotiated a deal on citizens’ rights separately, and put it to bed ages ago; that would make no-deal less scary. The EU side was dead set against this – but it would have been a bonus to their own citizens, so they might have given way. Mrs May made no serious effort (or any effort at all so far as I know) to do this.

So the good news is that Brexit Armageddon is very unlikely. The bad news is that the Brexit roadshow will keep on running after 29 March 2019. I read one article recently which looked forward to the day when we could move on from Brexit to sorting out Britain’s many other problems. Alas that day is still years away.

Labour’s antisemitism row – what are the messages for the wider world?

I haven’t commented yet on the struggles of the British Labour Party with antisemitism. It is a battle between two tribes: Labour’s left and the mainstream Jewish community, and it is very hard for outsiders like me to make much sense of it. And yet it is an important issue and there are implications for us all.

Of the two tribes my sympathies are much more with the Jewish community. Their case was nicely put by Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland. The Holocaust remains historically recent, and it followed a creeping growth in antisemitism in European and American society that was widely tolerated, just as some Jews worry is happening now. Sensitivity is understandable.

The hard left, from which the Labour leadership is now drawn, does not seem to understand that sensitivity. They can’t utter the word “antisemitism” without quickly adding “all forms of racism”. I am reminded of Tony Blair and Jack Straw, who couldn’t say “human rights” without tagging on the word “responsibilities”. The corrosiveness of that practice is easy to see – it suggested that even basic rights are conditional. The whole idea of the post war notion of human rights is that they are unconditional, and therefore harder for the powerful to undermine. But what’s wrong with the “and all forms of racism” tag when placed alongside “antisemitism”? One issue (to the ultra-sensitive) is that it suggests that those making the accusations of antisemitism may be themselves racist. It also suggests that there is nothing different or special about antisemitism to other forms of racism.

But that isn’t true on at least two counts. The first is that most racism in the developed world is directed by the politically strong against groups that are physically and culturally distinct. But Jewish people are present in all levels of society, including what Labour call “the few”, and many, if not most, Jews are highly assimilated into British society. Antisemitism thus depends on making distinctions that are even more arbitrary than other forms of racism, and the invention of conspiracy theories. Directing hatred against a group who are very much part of the mainstream is particularly insidious. It promotes the idea that institutions have been infiltrated and therefore cannot be trusted. And that encourages people to undermine those institutions, such as the rule of law, designed to protect the weak against the powerful. This may not make it worse than other forms of racism, but it makes it particularly difficult to fight.

The second difference is the state of Israel, a Jewish homeland that most mainstream Jews defend on some or other level. Much of the feeling on the hard left is based on a vehement hatred of that country. That has complex roots; it starts with anti-Americanism, and draws strength from pro-Palestine Arab and Muslim activists, who ally with the hard left, and who see no reason to hide their antisemitism. This has become part of the hard left counterculture, along with support for the socialist regimes in Venezuela and Cuba, and apologism for Russia.

It doesn’t help is that defenders of the Israeli government often charge critics with antisemitism unfairly. There is much that it is fair to criticise the Israeli government for, especially now that the current regime is happy to push on the boundaries of racism itself. This is at the heart of the recent controversy in the Labour Party, when the party adopted an internationally recognised definition of antisemitism, but could not accept some of the examples given in the protocol in relation to criticism of Israel. As Mr Freedland says, though, the problem isn’t in the precise detail of this, but in the lack of engagement with Jewish groups before they adopted the policy. Some kind of open discussion on how to criticise the Israeli government without tripping into antisemitism would have been wise. But openness is not something the hard left values.

What are the wider lessons? Firstly it shows a lack of political judgement on the part of the Labour leadership, and the party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, in particular. He likes to say that he is for dialogue with groups with unsavoury views (such as the IRA or Hamas) in the name of promoting peace. And yet he seems very selective in the sort of groups that he actually engages with, and it is very hard to see how the cause of peace is being helped. This does pose questions about his fitness to be Prime Minister.

The second wider issue is that the rest of us, who are neither Jews, nor of the hard left, need to redouble our guard against antisemitism. Jews are being made to feel uncomfortable in our midst. The hard left is only part of the problem; unfortunately many Muslims from Africa and the Middle East are importing antisemitism along with other racial stereotypes. They haven’t understood the implications. People from other minority racial and cultural groups should aspire to what Jewish people have achieved. But if antisemitism persists they will never be safe, even after they have achieved recognition and assimilation. So we must engage with all of society to help stamp out the conspiracy theories and prejudices that lie behind antisemitism, and in this way help the battle against Islamophobia and other insidious forms of racism that on the rise again.

And how do we react to Israel? With a great deal of care. My worry is that the current government of Israel is playing a dangerous game. It is supporting populist regimes in places like Hungary, and promoting an Islamophobic agenda. Still, there are plenty of worse things going on in the world. Consider the Syrian civil war and the actions of Iran and Russia. Look at China’s oppression of the Uighur and other non-Han peoples in Xingjiang. And the attack on Rohingya people in Myanmar. And the threats against Israel from neighbours and elsewhere are real enough too. It isn’t hard to why many Jewish people feel that criticising Israel often tips over into antisemitism, even if I think that too many of them are too uncritical.

The deeper message is this: antisemitism is like the gas that kills the canary in a coal mine. It is a warning of worse to come. But fight it on the basis of tolerance and inclusion (and not on the basis of Jewish exceptionalism), and we will be fighting the whole evil of racism.

Child Maintenance: an epic failure that should be a lesson to government

Last week The Economist published a short article about the failure of Britain’s reform of child maintenance collection. The article highlights the human consequences but does to point to any wider lessons. And yet our political class needs to see what was wrong-headed about the idea, or else we are destined to keep repeating the mistake.

The original reform was in 1993, when the Child Support Agency (CSA) was set up. The problem it was designed to solve was that of absent parents (usually fathers of course) not contributing to the maintenance of their children. The idea was to replace a haphazard and costly system enforced by family courts with a centrally enforced system run by the new agency. Single parents lost the right to chase ex-partners through the courts for arrears; the agency would do that. But the CSA soon became overwhelmed, and it was closed in 2012 with arrears then amounting to £3.7bn. A new agency, the Child Maintenance Service, then took over. They are now close to writing off nearly £2bn. In many cases no serious effort has been made to collect the arrears at all. Apparently the new agency doesn’t even try unless it is provided with information by the partner to whom the money is owed – a tall order for often very stretched people. The government’s legal obligation to collect has been tossed into the bin, to the benefit of shirking parents, who may only have had to shrug off a standard letter or two, if that.

This is often what happens to attempts to reform public services. Reformers see a messy system involving a lot wasted or duplicated effort, and dream of something much simpler and more rational. They hope to achieve greater effectiveness at a lower cost. But the reform involves sweeping away the human efforts of, and information possessed by, many thousands of people and replacing them with a void. Failure is nearly inevitable.

This is just one example. Right now we are witnessing the slowly unfolding calamity of Britain’s Universal Credit (UC) system. Even now, many people assume that is simply a good idea delayed by cack-handed implementation. They can’t see that the whole idea is deeply flawed. The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government of 2010 to 2015 seemed particularly vulnerable to this sort of mistake, with not just UC, but a misguided set of reforms to the National Health Service, the trashing of the probation services, and a deeply flawed idea of “payment by results” for outsourcing public services. The Prime Minister of the time, David Cameron, seems to have been particularly susceptible to such half-baked schemes (most notoriously “the Big Society”), and, to be honest, his coalition partner Nick Clegg, wasn’t really any better. They were both products of a political system that did not value true administrative experience.

The previous Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown do not have such a dire record, though Mr Blair was as susceptible to the same sort lightweight thinking – for example launching the ill-directed Academies reforms of schools. Instead Labour liked to smother its reforms in layers of bureaucracy and masses of meaningless verbiage that had the effect of reserving things to an elite class of bureaucratic waffle-merchants. (You will sense some bitter memories coming through here: I bumped into this as a school governor, as well as my interest in the NHS in the vain hope of getting a job there). The Labour government’s flagship identity card system was heading the same way as UC before the Coalition sensibly killed it. The problem was similar: excessive centralisation of decision-making in Whitehall, with political leaders too easily seduced by lightweight ideas from political think tanks, made flesh by armies of overpaid consultants. Implementation was always somebody else’s problem. Ministers and consultants alike would move on to their next job before the consequences became apparent.

And it’s not just in Westminster where such disasters occur. The Scottish Government under the SNP has been trying to centralise local services and wipe out the human interfaces by which such services work. The reforms to the Scots police services were the most notorious. Northern Ireland has its own example of astonishing incompetence with renewable energy schemes, and doubtless there are examples in Wales too. The problem infects the entire British political class. I can’t see much sign of this changing. Instead I see hopes (as usual) being placed in new technology. But Artificial intelligence and machine learning will not solve the core problem that centralised institutions do not understand the problems they are trying to solve because too much of it is outside their remit.

So what direction should we be taking? Services should be drawn around the needs of individual people, allowing solutions to be tailored that will actually solve problems rather than perpetuate them. That means drawing together services related to physical health, mental health, education, social services, policing, justice, housing, benefits and so on. And that means two things in particular: empowered intermediation, and decentralised authority. In turn these almost certainly mean devolved political accountability.

By empowered intermediation I mean capable professionals meeting with services users (physically and not through IT interfaces), establishing their needs and making arrangements with the necessary service agencies to take things forward. There are plenty of examples of such intermediaries: social workers, teachers, and general practitioners. But the tendency is to disempower them, and to replace them with less skilled people with narrower briefs. The hollowing out of probation services is a particularly dire example of this. The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), responsible for both UC and the child maintenance fiasco, is no so far down this culture of de-skilling that it probably needs to be abolished.

The need for decentralised authority is easier to see perhaps. In order for service providers to respond to the generalist intermediaries, they need the power to adapt flexibly. That is impossible in highly centralised administrative silos, which pin managers down to tight procedures and inflexible budgets.

That this leads to the need for greater devolved political accountability is also an obvious step. Attempts to make decentralised agencies accountable through the use of Key Performance Indicators, and the like are clearly a mistake. It is much easier to game the indicator that solve the underlying problem, which often makes things worse in the short term. This is where political accountability for the overall results should come in. But there is a trap here. It is tempting for politicians to think that political reform is the key step, and not the much harder job of re-engineering of public services into models that interact positively with users and collaborate productively. In fact devolved political administrations can get trapped in their own conservativism and become captured by local vested interests. British devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland cannot be seen as an outstanding success.

And yet the failure of our public services is becoming more apparent. For now “austerity” gets the blame. I live in hope that people will start to understand that the issue is much deeper.