Aditya Chakrabortty writes:
For the Azande people of Upper Nile, witchcraft was everywhere. So said the Englishman Edward Evans-Pritchard, who lived among them in the 1920s.
“If blight seizes the ground-nut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game it is witchcraft,” wrote the anthropologist in his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. “If a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband it is witchcraft.”
Anything good, everything bad: all came down to witchcraft.
Magical thinking runs through today’s Westminster too, in the superstitions politicians hold about the economy.
That Britain’s private sector competes, while the public sector’s role is either to cheer it on or to clear up any spills; that a prime minister can chop back the public sector (as David Cameron is managing to do) or grow it (as Labour still dreams of doing), but must never tamper with the workings of the private sector – let alone re-imagine how businesses should serve the society that hosts, protects and subsidises them.
Britons have such talismans as consumer watchdogs and public officials to maintain this artificial divide – because to break it is apparently to endanger economic dynamism.
MPs preach from this itall-encompassing belief system every day, using the dead language of competition and championing business.
You hear it over and over during Labour’s leadership campaign. The frontrunners scrap over who is most pro-business, or who can dream up the biggest spending cuts.
Inevitable, perhaps, coming after an election that was won by the party of austerity.
But from Andy Burnham through to Yvette Cooper, the main candidates are now countering the myth of Labour’s debt with the fantasy of matching Cameron’s cuts – and the public is unlikely to be fooled.
Then there is the really big question of how Britain is to pay its way in the world.
Last week I listened to one of the would-be leaders rhapsodise about how the UK could become a shiny, hi-tech economy, if only it spent more on science.
While they talked, I remembered official statistics showing that while back in 1979, the UK was one of the most research-intensive economies in the world, we have now been comprehensively overtaken by the US, Japan, France and Germany.
The same self-deception goes on when talking about Britain’s manufacturing base. Politicians claim the UK remains an industrial country – but look at manufacturing per head, and the UK ranks well below the rest of the G7, and even such renowned powerhouses as Switzerland and Finland.
Then consider what it is that British manufacturers actually do.
Take the car industry, held up by frontbenchers on all sides as proof that it doesn’t matter that no big British-owned auto firms exist any more – we still make the damned things.
Yet Richard Parry-Jones, until recently chair of the Automotive Council and former senior Ford executive, estimates that just under two out of every three components of cars supposedly made in Britain actually come from abroad.
Seen this way, British carmaking is less world-beating success and more the automotive equivalent of a giant Ikea assembler: sticking together flatpack motors, with most of the parts made elsewhere.
All this is a product of the dismantling of our manufacturing base that Margaret Thatcher began and Tony Blair continued.
British industry is now largely a branch plant for other countries’ multinational firms – everything from Canadian train-maker Bombardier to US-owned carmaker Vauxhall.
Our workforce increasingly competes on price, not skill – and that’s not a competition any western country can win for long.
What about the sectors that were meant to fill in where the rustbelt left off? As the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane shows, finance barely created any new jobs, even during the great boom that ran until 2008.
The creative industries so beloved of Blair have provided small employment in just a handful of cities –computer games in Dundee, media in Manchester, everything else in London.
New Labour’s fallback was the creation of many more public sector jobs and quasi-public sector jobs in the north-east and Wales – which just about worked until this decade of austerity and the culling of the public sector.
What the crash has revealed is a malfunctioning economic model held together by the public sector: creating jobs where the private sector can’t; bailing out the banks when they come knocking; subsiding companies with £93bn a year of grants and tax breaks.
And after the biggest privatisation programme of any rich capitalist country, we have a regime of businesses that rely on subsidy and shelter from competition: foreign train operators that enjoy lovely returns for little cash while getting billions of investment from the public; the energy oligopoly and its confusion pricing; BT charging taxpayers extortionate sums for hooking up the countryside to broadband.
Calling this a competitive, dynamic private sector is the real magical thinking, and in subscribing to it Labour is committing a giant act of self-harm – because it’s the party’s natural supporters who are worst served by it.
After a crash made in London, it’s the capital that has gone roaring ahead – while old Labour heartlands are still wallowing in a slump.
For Labour to fix this with more competition and more attempts to stir private-sector “dynamism” will only yield even more of a shift of the resources to the well-off.
As Manchester University’s centre for research on socio-cultural changes suggests, better to think about recasting the relationship between public and private sector.
Britain’s growth model is exhausted, so let’s focus on making those goods and services we rely on – broadband, trains and buses, care homes – more publicly accountable.
In return for enjoying their privileged role in vital sectors, private businesses in those and other industries should be licensed to live up to their social obligations to both staff and customers: living wages and secure conditions, fair and transparent pricing.
True, it’s hard to imagine that walking new Labour composite CoopBurnDall espousing this – but magical thinking takes a long time to break.
For the Azande people of Upper Nile, witchcraft was everywhere. So said the Englishman Edward Evans-Pritchard, who lived among them in the 1920s.
“If blight seizes the ground-nut crop it is witchcraft; if the bush is vainly scoured for game it is witchcraft,” wrote the anthropologist in his classic Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. “If a wife is sulky and unresponsive to her husband it is witchcraft.”
Anything good, everything bad: all came down to witchcraft.
Magical thinking runs through today’s Westminster too, in the superstitions politicians hold about the economy.
That Britain’s private sector competes, while the public sector’s role is either to cheer it on or to clear up any spills; that a prime minister can chop back the public sector (as David Cameron is managing to do) or grow it (as Labour still dreams of doing), but must never tamper with the workings of the private sector – let alone re-imagine how businesses should serve the society that hosts, protects and subsidises them.
Britons have such talismans as consumer watchdogs and public officials to maintain this artificial divide – because to break it is apparently to endanger economic dynamism.
MPs preach from this itall-encompassing belief system every day, using the dead language of competition and championing business.
You hear it over and over during Labour’s leadership campaign. The frontrunners scrap over who is most pro-business, or who can dream up the biggest spending cuts.
Inevitable, perhaps, coming after an election that was won by the party of austerity.
But from Andy Burnham through to Yvette Cooper, the main candidates are now countering the myth of Labour’s debt with the fantasy of matching Cameron’s cuts – and the public is unlikely to be fooled.
Then there is the really big question of how Britain is to pay its way in the world.
Last week I listened to one of the would-be leaders rhapsodise about how the UK could become a shiny, hi-tech economy, if only it spent more on science.
While they talked, I remembered official statistics showing that while back in 1979, the UK was one of the most research-intensive economies in the world, we have now been comprehensively overtaken by the US, Japan, France and Germany.
The same self-deception goes on when talking about Britain’s manufacturing base. Politicians claim the UK remains an industrial country – but look at manufacturing per head, and the UK ranks well below the rest of the G7, and even such renowned powerhouses as Switzerland and Finland.
Then consider what it is that British manufacturers actually do.
Take the car industry, held up by frontbenchers on all sides as proof that it doesn’t matter that no big British-owned auto firms exist any more – we still make the damned things.
Yet Richard Parry-Jones, until recently chair of the Automotive Council and former senior Ford executive, estimates that just under two out of every three components of cars supposedly made in Britain actually come from abroad.
Seen this way, British carmaking is less world-beating success and more the automotive equivalent of a giant Ikea assembler: sticking together flatpack motors, with most of the parts made elsewhere.
All this is a product of the dismantling of our manufacturing base that Margaret Thatcher began and Tony Blair continued.
British industry is now largely a branch plant for other countries’ multinational firms – everything from Canadian train-maker Bombardier to US-owned carmaker Vauxhall.
Our workforce increasingly competes on price, not skill – and that’s not a competition any western country can win for long.
What about the sectors that were meant to fill in where the rustbelt left off? As the Bank of England’s Andy Haldane shows, finance barely created any new jobs, even during the great boom that ran until 2008.
The creative industries so beloved of Blair have provided small employment in just a handful of cities –computer games in Dundee, media in Manchester, everything else in London.
New Labour’s fallback was the creation of many more public sector jobs and quasi-public sector jobs in the north-east and Wales – which just about worked until this decade of austerity and the culling of the public sector.
What the crash has revealed is a malfunctioning economic model held together by the public sector: creating jobs where the private sector can’t; bailing out the banks when they come knocking; subsiding companies with £93bn a year of grants and tax breaks.
And after the biggest privatisation programme of any rich capitalist country, we have a regime of businesses that rely on subsidy and shelter from competition: foreign train operators that enjoy lovely returns for little cash while getting billions of investment from the public; the energy oligopoly and its confusion pricing; BT charging taxpayers extortionate sums for hooking up the countryside to broadband.
Calling this a competitive, dynamic private sector is the real magical thinking, and in subscribing to it Labour is committing a giant act of self-harm – because it’s the party’s natural supporters who are worst served by it.
After a crash made in London, it’s the capital that has gone roaring ahead – while old Labour heartlands are still wallowing in a slump.
For Labour to fix this with more competition and more attempts to stir private-sector “dynamism” will only yield even more of a shift of the resources to the well-off.
As Manchester University’s centre for research on socio-cultural changes suggests, better to think about recasting the relationship between public and private sector.
Britain’s growth model is exhausted, so let’s focus on making those goods and services we rely on – broadband, trains and buses, care homes – more publicly accountable.
In return for enjoying their privileged role in vital sectors, private businesses in those and other industries should be licensed to live up to their social obligations to both staff and customers: living wages and secure conditions, fair and transparent pricing.
True, it’s hard to imagine that walking new Labour composite CoopBurnDall espousing this – but magical thinking takes a long time to break.
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