Towards The Post-Liberal Future

That was the title of last Friday’s superb Blue Labour Midlands Seminar at the University of Nottingham’s Centre of Theology and Philosophy.

Who still talks about Blue Labour? Well, as we shall see, the Pope does, for a start. As do a number of young, and I mean very young, highly committed, highly organised Evangelical Protestants within the London Labour Party. Well worth watching.

The Centre’s Director, Professor John Milbank, opened the day with a tour de force entitled The Blue Labour Dream. The complete text is to be circulated, and will appear here when it is. At times, I stopped taking notes, because I just wanted to listen. I was not the only one.

(Poor, mad, old Oliver Kamm, whom you thought was dead, tried to discourage a far more important person from attending by peddling his fantasies about John; that august figure rightly did not even bother to reply, and was very much in attendance. That is how poor, mad, old Oliver Kamm, whom you thought was dead, fills up his time, when he is not joining Dan Hodges and Damian Thompson among the sad, psychotic stalkers of Owen Jones.)

John pointed out that Blue Labour had be the crucial factor in the emergence of One Nation Labour, which is the new post-liberal politics in the United Kingdom, rejecting economic contract between strangers, and individual entitlement from the bureaucratic machine, in favour of a reciprocity very much in keeping with the neo-Maussian agenda on the French Left.

This recalls the Ancient and Medieval concept of friendship, and it recognises that all human beings are workers, since all human society and culture derives from induction into inherited ways by means of continual submission to leadership, very much in line with and from Burke. Formation and virtue are the conditions for democracy: Aristotelian phranesis; moral art and tact.

There is a drift from the view that all things bad must be illegal, to the view that all things legal must be valuable, to the view that things are only permissible if they have a specific legal authorisation. We see this drift in the debate around the definition of marriage, in the debate around surveillance, and in the indictments of military commanders.

“Post” is not “pre”. Liberalism is not all bad. But it does have inherent problems. “Liberal” is not “optimistic”. It assumes self-interest, greed and egotism. In and from Grotius, Hobbes and Locke, it is secular and materialistic.

In and from Adam Smith, it has specifically theological roots in Calvinism and Jansenism, so that there is no link between the Renaissance and liberalism, but rather the doctrine of total depravity’s requirement that Providence must manipulate even vice, that being the origin of Smith's “hidden hand”. Both the hedonistic and the Puritan streams feed into the Conservative Party, an altogether liberal and Liberal affair.

The Romantic liberalism of Rousseau is Hobbes inverted, so that the isolated individual is good, but rivalry and comparison lead to vice. This leads to a scepticism about the role of corporate bodies below the level of the State, which alone is seen as above faction and section.

But the truth is that both the State and the market erode trust, an erosion which further serves both the market and the State. That in turn has eroded local government, eroded voluntary organisations, and led to mass immigration without integration, as recently described by David Goodhart (who was surprised at how young I was, not something that had happened to me in a very long time).

The New Left espoused, not solidarity, but emancipation, on the assumption that any overlooked category could not share the norm. But this misreads hierarchy, as Marx himself understood in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. It also misreads the variety of talents.

It has been an endless factor in the rise of neoliberalism, which is all about individual desire, so that associational relationships are seen as bound to be perverted, necessitating the market or the State instead. Contrast this with Orwell’s trust in common decency: a genuine Socialism, including the very strong mechanisms that we do not have for the control of transgression.

The belief that the market can never be rendered benign expresses the liberal belief in the priority of evil, and Ed Miliband is rightly abandoning it in favour of predistribution, the insistence that people be paid enough in the first place, which contains stronger incentives to work, whereas neoliberal policies only create benefit dependency.

There are hard economic questions to be asked and answered. Liberalism is subject to its own law of diminishing returns, as we see from the money markets. Money is essentially a public good, and while some oppressions were removed initially, in the long run there has been too much erosion of trust and reciprocity. Inventiveness, entrepreneurship and freedom are in fact inhibited, not least by the transition from small business to big business, with its fear of innovation.

Anglo-Saxon capitalism is essentially passive, the willed stockpiling of mere means. This leads to stasis, and to a cycle of debt. There is a lack of money grounded in reality, and a lack of a disinterested legal system. By comparison, at least until they began to adopt the Anglo-Saxon model and to a considerable extent even now, the German and Italian systems remain in continuity with the Medieval affirmation of the relative primacy of labour with respect to capital.

We need a sharing of risks: between employers and employees, between landlords and tenants, between shareholders (who would therefore need to be prepared to do a lot more) and directors, and so on. We need a rewriting of company law, with profit-sharing and a Statement of Social Value made conditions of trading at all. We need a Public Interest Trust to replace the patenting system. We need vocational training, designed and delivered by trade and professional bodies. And we need a contributory welfare system, but with a broad definition of contribution which includes socially valuable work such as bringing up children or caring for the elderly, but which would preclude any need for means testing.

This is Civil Economy Socialism, a reinvention of the Socialist and co-operative tradition. It is not possible in one country alone, due to the likelihood of undercutting. But we have the advantage of London as a vortex, and as the potential hub of the Commonwealth, the Francophonie and Europe as an expanding zone of fair trade and legal guarantee which had abandoned neoliberalism in favour of the cancellation of internal and external debts, in favour of the funding of its own scientific leadership, and in favour of a network of reciprocal agreements enshrining mutually beneficial protectionism. Potentially, this would be a global nucleus.

Britain was not born out of rupture with the past. Rather, ours is a slow-burning genius, always Christian, always Nordic, in line with the fact that the best of France and of the United States derives from the integration of the pre-Revolutionary (and also, in France, Counter-Revolutionary) heritage, never based on a single ethnicity, and never subject to the controls the absence of which makes the wider world marvel that we are still so rude in debate: Polizei, legal formalism, “civil politeness”.

Britain is like Spain, always made up of several national groups, with that condition later expanded first transatlantically and then globally. Empire is always supposed to be about to end, but it never quite does. For example, look at the trend towards the underwriting of foreign businesses by British law.

The British Isles, as such, have been an economic, social, cultural and political entity since as long ago as the Early Middle Ages. Unlike the United States, we are not ourselves without our maritime destiny. The Celtic countries are more outward-looking even than England, and it would be a denial of their own essential character for them to retreat, as they would and must outside the Union, into the futile liberal internationalism of the Irish Republic.

The morning session that I attended was entitled Blue Labour and One Nation Labour. Maurice Glasman referred to “the almost metaphysical inability of One Nation Labour to mean anything”, and likened it to a baby in an incubator, having a lot of problems growing. But he soon picked up.

We need to engage forces that we have previously tried to dominate, such as faith. In a House of Lords debate on alternatives to usury, Justin Welby had offered the use of “sixteen thousand branches” before asking, “But where is Labour? Where are the unions?” The Pope speaks of the economics of the Common Good. We need to engage the unions and business, as well as with regional and city power, especially in the North East and in the North West. We need to be wary of seeing our aim as just the reconstitution of a single, uniform State.

Jon Cruddas and those around him are working on the theme of Earning and Belonging, aimed at those excluded or estranged, and developing human scale, local institutions that can confront both the market and the State, thereby putting the “body” into “body politic”. The Big Society’s failure was not merely a failure of communication, but a failure of vision itself. It was unable to confront market power. We must guard against any corresponding inability to confront State power.

Dan Leighton said that some things about New Labour had been good. A dynamic economy had made it possible for the State to deliver fairness, statistically measured. But the whole thing had been dominated by the logic of finance capital, with administrative and bureaucratic domination in the distribution of the golden egg thus laid. Beyond that, we need to generate value through reciprocity and relationships, through virtue, through agency and action such as community organising, and through the plural pursuit of what matters to people.

Regional banks are a test issue. A test of alliances with and between the vocations and employers. A test of our ability to progress from desire to practical realisation. A test of commitment to vocation, virtue and value; to relationships, reciprocity and responsibility. Is this nostalgia? Why not? The theory of innovation is rooted in the capacity of traditions to conserve value in order to generate innovation.

Stephen Beer identified One Nation Labour as the answer to questions that are still being worked out. He saw our tradition as going back to the last great Chartist event, and the birth of British Christian Socialism in the encounter between Charles Kingsley and F D Maurice, at Kennington Park on 10^th April 1848. There has always been a tension, but a highly creative tension, between Kingsley’s Nonconformist Radicalism and Maurice’s Anglican paternalism.

“One Nation Labour” sounds altruistic in the way that “the stakeholder society” did. Jon Cruddas’s “inclusion of all, recognition of the work and contribution of each” holds out real hope. But there is a danger of defaulting to the definition, “whatever Labour would do in government”. The One Nation society must be the ultimate aspiration: dispersed power, greater accountability, and new local institutions owned by their users, embedding them and making them resistant to abolition.

The Common Good is better conceived as something that happens incidentally when we do the right thing. The common life is for living, rather than for trying overly hard to define. But we do still need One Nation economic policies: the Living Wage, the manifest need for which cries out to be related to deficits and to low growth; education; the Jobs Guarantee; practical new ideas for financial working; the running of the City for the benefit of the whole nation.

Maurice agreed that 1848 had been the birth of Blue Labour, since it had been rejected both by Marxists and by liberals, since the French Catholic workers had marched under overtly Catholic banners against the rising capitalism and its anti-traditional and anti-family effects, and since it had even reached South London. Southwark (a much larger area than today’s, although of course including it) was the City’s first ever colony, required to pay taxes but denied any representation. That is why there are still so many prisons in South London, which is always a sign.

As to Anglican paternalism and Congregationalist Radicalism, in this as in so many other things Methodism has never been able to decide whether it was Anglican or Congregational, with huge and ongoing ramifications.

An enormously important present project is the Banks of England, to be named after their respective riverbanks, and to be embedded on them due to the presence of the local churches and unions in their governance. Never again will the Northern Counties Permanent Building Society become Northern Rock, demutualise, go bust, and leave Newcastle United so pointedly sponsored by Wonga instead, with only the Muslim players objecting. That was New Labour at its all-too-typical worst, maximising return to the point at which the asset itself was destroyed. We need the Banks of England, and we need a Treasury-led National State Investment Bank.

Maurice also proposed, and as with his banking proposal made it clear that he was being listened to at Labour’s very highest levels: vocational colleges in place of half of the universities, having caused consternation, he told us, by suggesting that those colleges would be the appropriate institutions for Law and Medicine; and worker participation in corporate governance, with a third of seats.

The power of the North and of much of the South, such as Dover where had been doing a great deal of work in the last year, had been decimated, and this had exposed the limitations of material redistribution. Public sector employment in the North East was now at a level comparable to that in the old East Germany, but to what avail? The SNP offered a place-based power and renewal, like Blue Labour. But Labour seems to be responding with fear. Outside Blue Labour, no one was reimagining England, which calls for the reconstitution of the historic counties and parishes, since those resonate, unlike regions.

However, since the regions are there and are quite useful in a strictly Utilitarian way, five major projects are being developed, relating to maritime powers in the North East, to the railways and the food supply in the North West, to the gas supply and a local sense of ownership over it in the South West, to Cambridge Park in the South East, and to the Birmingham universities and light engineering in the Midlands. Watch those spaces. And watch the space above the shale gas, to the extraction of which the communities living there are suddenly a lot less hostile if they are offered the chance to own the land.

The afternoon session that I attended was entitled How does Catholic Social Teaching speak to Blue Labour? Professor Adrian Pabst began by saying that it was hard to imagine post-liberal politics without Catholic Social Teaching, which has always rejected all the dualisms in favour the mediated radical centre: the proper centre ground that is not centrist, managerial or nihilist.

In policy terms, the Living Wage comes directly from Catholic Social Teaching, and specifically from Monsignor John Ryan in 1906. Catholic Social Teaching rejects debt as an absolute given, instead recognising that debt is parasitical on assets as evil is parasitical on good, that all resources have intrinsic worth, that debt is to be restricted or foregone in order to distribute resources more fairly, and that inflation punishes savers.

Thus, it breaks out of the perverse incentivisation of individual self-interest, instead upholding the intrinsic value of virtuous behaviour as virtuous in itself, while also presenting it as better both for oneself and for everyone else, with the reward of it by the State setting an example to society as a whole.

Kevin Meagher began by describing Catholic Social Teaching as so intuitive to him that he found it hard to analyse. It was just how he thought, and had done ever since he first saw Jesus Christ as a working-class lad from a provincial town with a stepfather in the building trade. It had led him inexorably to Labour, but Labour did not own it, was hugely challenged by it, and, as with so many other things, ignored the bits that it did not like.

Love of God and love of other people were exemplified in Kevin’s own parish, with its anti-BNP campaigning, its branch of the Stop the War Coalition (says a former Special Adviser to Shaun Woodward), its food bank and its credit union. They were exemplified by Cardinal Turkson’s Durham call, which I attended, for a new Bretton Woods. At root are the solidarity, equality and dignity of the human person. Many of Catholic Social Teaching’s ideas are now mainstream, while many others are now more unpopular than ever.

We are experiencing the end of the State spending that was paid for only by a financial sector that was overheated in any case. The group of the electorate to the left of Labour is bigger than ever. Within his own family, Kevin was aware of individuals equally engaged in pro-life work and in work with and for asylum seekers, both of which are equally expressions Catholic Social Teaching, and both of which are equally unpopular.

Labour has been over-timid because of the 1980s, and has surrendered to free capital, leaving the way open to predator capitalism; again, note that these are the words of a man who was at the heart of the New Labour Establishment. But the void is a challenge and an opportunity. Catholic Social Teaching offers something coherent. It talks back into the Labour Party from half-outside. In that as in so much else, it is like Blue Labour.

Maurice Glasman displayed, to warm applause, the medal with which the Pope had recently presented him for his services to Catholic Social Teaching. An American in Rome had accused him of “Caaahhmunism” and been taken on by the splendidly named Cardinal Marx, leading the Holy Father to inform Maurice, in the presence of all concerned, that “Siamo con te”, “We are with you”. So there. At least American Catholics have a bit of an excuse, even if not much of one. It is British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander Catholics who have that mentality who are genuinely baffling. Mercifully, there are almost none of them, although the ones that there are make an awful lot of noise.

1945 had given us nationalised industries, but without worker representation. It had given us the further deregulation of finance. It had failed to build worker or user representation into the Welfare State. Catholic Social Teaching is a challenge to all of that. It holds that “the old is the new”, and the things oldest in it are the things most shockingly new today. It is “a gift to the world”, and political struggle based on it is therefore acceptable, because political struggle is part of the world. It insists upon both the reality of vice and the possibility of virtue, each and both of which are nowhere more evident than in capitalism. It talks of “the structures of sin”, understanding that instrumentalism and domination are built into the system.

For Labour and for Blue Labour, Catholic Social Teaching’s concept of capital and labour is vital. Small-l labour has its own theory and tradition of political economy, and capital is wicked when it is detached from that. Marxism, including “State capitalist” attempts at Socialism, is materialist, and rejects the Common Good between capital and labour. For Labour and for Blue Labour, Catholic Social Teaching’s critique of usury as slavery is vital. Last year, five million people took out loans begging at 4,500 per cent interest. Labour and Blue Labour propose an interest cap, and alternative sources of finance.

Catholic Social Teaching emphasises a balance of interests. Catholic Social Teaching emphasises the importance of vocation: apprenticeship, which is precisely induction into a tradition; and the priority of that vocational tradition over an individual career, working instead in relationships with one’s peers and with the past. Catholic Social Teaching emphasises the importance of place, of where we live and of its intuitions. That is where we must build institutions offering alternatives to usury: a bank in every church.

In Catholic Social Teaching, responsibility cannot be contracted out, relationships are therefore central, and reciprocity is necessary. “It just gets richer and better,” said Maurice. “This is the alternative political economy.” The closest approximation to it was in post-War West Germany, which lasted better than the parallel developments in the United Kingdom.

John Milbank asked why anyone should listen to the Catholic Church. He answered that She offered the most sophisticated articulation of views common to Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, a certain Dutch Reformed tradition, what would now be seen as the Leftist side of John Wesley’s Toryism (his support for resistance to turnpike takes and so on), and the contributions of Anglicans from RH Tawney, to JH Ludlow, to the Oxford Movement and the Guild of Saint Matthew, the first modern Socialist organisation in the United Kingdom.

Tony Blair had had a false vision and false version of the Third Way. It is not really about compromise between capitalism and State Socialism, both of which are top-down rationalisms that ignore the human person. Catholic Social Teaching is the real opposite pole. The other two are just variations on liberalism. Liberals defined Socialism, and in the terms that they did so even Marx is not unambiguously left-wing. Against all of that, we must retrieve a lost Medieval communitarianism in and for a more democratic age.

Before 1848, Socialism was less statist and more mutualist, rejecting economism, and wanting to abolish contract and money. That is still there in Marx. After 1890, it went to the opposite extreme. But market exchange is a site of solidarity, justice, and interpersonal negotiation, as understood in the forgotten Neapolitan traditions, which ethicise the economic contract itself. That is far more realistic, since an economic contract only ever occurs in a social context.

Maurice added that the very phrase Urbi et Orbi affirms that the local is the global: we find the universal through the interrogation of the particular. Progressive liberals want to be both the referee and the player. They want to dominate, not to negotiate. But the impact of Britain’s usury crisis has changed everything.

In his remark closing the conference, Maurice Glasman spoke of two central themes over the past year.

First, in political economy, a reappraisal of the legacies of 1945, 1964 and 1997, and a recognition of Catholic Social Teaching as the organising principle of what comes next. Jon Cruddas’s Policy Review is making huge progress on place, on vocation, on the balance of interests, and on reciprocity and responsibility both in welfare and in the economy. When Ed Miliband asked Jon Cruddas to head the Policy Review, then he knew what he was going to get. And secondly, a reorientation towards the Common Good; towards an Aristotelian framework and pre-1945 traditions.

We need love, loyalty and leadership. For many people, there is no love in the system. They feel unloved and unable to love. Without loyalty, fidelity and faithfulness, there is no relationship. We need to develop leaders at a time when the question is being asked, whether or not the working-class is best represented by the trade union Left. Leaders from within communities must, by definition, have followers within those communities.

One-to-one conversations are central. There must be a culture of agreement and disagreement, as taught by Arnie Graf, but long before him by Ezekiel to the old bones. The Labour Party used to walk, but it decided that it wanted to be on Disability Living Allowance instead.

Ask people what they care about it, and what is important to them. At Number One, overwhelmingly, is family: care for parents; concern for children, about drink and drugs, for the cultivation of their moral character; worry about how to keep marriages and relationships together.

People care about where they live. That seems countercultural, but it is not. They feel that it is being degraded, from their shopping environments to the breakdown in civility. People care about work and wages. They want “good work”, “meaningful work”, “decent work”. They feel that they are being paid unfairly, and that benefits are unfair, with enormous ramifications for the debates around unemployment and immigration.

People hate debt, and that links into everything else. When they speak, they are not normally making an argument. They are telling a story. This is particularly true of debt, There was a tripling of family debt between 1997 and 2010, and that is combined with the deficit. But as a Labour Party, we are still unable to say out loud what went wrong under New Labour That is waht makes us Blue: things cannot “only get better”; they can always go either way.

We have to meet people where they are. They are pro-immigrant, but anti-immigration. They are pro-business, but anti-bank. They are pro-worker, but anti-union. They see government as capable of standing up to the market, but not of reforming the State. Among Conservative voters, Jon Cruddas is 35 per cent more popular than any other Labour politician.

On alternative banking systems, the churches have strong leadership but not much local organisation, while Labour has the reverse. There are two sides to credit-worthiness: credit, but also worthiness. Waiving planning permission to move in elderly parents or to build extensions in which to house them would embody the Blue Labour motto, “Helping You To Help Your Mum.”