A new progressive Agenda

Political parties are strange compromises. Few of us agree with every stance taken by our chosen party, but so long as there is nothing glaringly unsupportable we accept that. It would be impractical – at least with current technology – for each possible combination of stances on issue to be represented by its own party, for then we’d have as many parties as there are people.

Over time, existing parties try to scramble together a coalition of voters to support an evolving cocktail of policies. Existing parties have great advantages over upstarts so there is some systemic inertia. But as major trends take effect and as existing parties respond in different ways, the landscape can alter.

What is the ideal number of credible parties in a democracy? In the Netherlands there are about ten, and the result is an ever-changing mix of coalitions and platforms that arguably reduces the influence of individual voters. But too few is just as dangerous as too many, especially when barriers to entry are largest. The two parties in the US continue to dominate despite appalling mismanagement of both for many years, with the results of the broken congress and warped debate that we now witness. As in so many matters, Germany seems to have it about right: counting CDU and CSU together, there are five credible parties plus something emerging on the far right. That plurality seems to enable enough shifting of alliances within broad enough platforms for democracy to be effective.

The times when the party landscape changes are usually both interesting and dangerous. In the UK, there were only two credible parties until about 1900, one slightly more progressive than the other but both reflecting the interests of very narrow electorate of the time. Then with wider emancipation and better education came the rise of Labour as the vehicle for the working class. The Liberal party evolved into something trying to tack between Labour and the Conservatives, and finally made it to coalition in 2010, a decision that resulted in electoral disaster in 2015.

The Economist wrote an essay about the decline of left-wing parties across Europe since about 1980. They put this down to several things, including the discrediting of communism, but also a sense that what these movements had been fighting for had been largely achieved, at least in Western Europe.

I dispute this claim. True, basic welfare has advanced since 100 years ago thanks to the progressive movements, but a lot remains to do be done, and economically things have swung back against working classes even as social progress has continued to advance. Full employment is no longer sustainable across much of Europe, while inequality becomes ever greater and security ever weaker. In the US, even basic goals such as fair holidays, equal pay or minimal maternity benefits remain out of reach.

A problem is that demographic trends have dispersed the working class constituency. Even one generation ago, most families had incomes based on work at a single firm with regular hours and often a trade union, or a pension from such a firm. So it made sense for progressive parties to focus on getting firms to offer fair terms and governments to enforce this and provide safety nets when that did not work. Hence the trade unions took an outsize role in politics, especially funding. Meanwhile, most families voted as a bloc and used class as a marker.

This has all changed. Family ties are fewer and class more fluid. Unions are often discredited and in any case are set up to fight for maintaining status for a diminishing minority rather than a broad coalition, so have become an inappropriate lead vehicle.

Blair and Clinton, to their credit, saw this looming problem. Their solution was to try to move closer to the centre by embracing free market logic, at least enough to avoid big business being antagonistic and to attract some business dollars. They succeeded in maintaining power, and used it to pursue a strong progressive social agenda and to make incremental gains in areas like health or education. But they allowed inequality to become entrenched, and they also took a safe, traditional line in foreign policy, and were careful to be sufficiently populist on things like immigration.

But there was a cost to their pragmatism. The market orthodoxy became stronger and its fundamental flaws were not addressed by new thinking. Meanwhile, the coalition of voters became strained by the wider scope of policy. In the UK, when power was lost so was discipline. The Scottish nationalists outflanked Labour on one side, and Jeremy Corbyn’s old-fashioned socialism is the result. In the US, The Democrats are holding together, at least compared to their rivals, but Bernie Sanders has exposed some cracks.

Meanwhile, the scope for a truly progressive agenda is out there, if only parties can free themselves from old dogmas and fear of donors. Justin Trudeau has shown the way in Canada, while some of the Sanders agenda shows that there is a pent-up demand for new thinking even in the US.

For me, the heart of this agenda must be about youth, optimism and technology. Current dominant thinking suggests that because pensioners vote and young people don’t, policies must favour the old. I am not so sure – what most old people want to most, as long as they are secure, is for a better world for their kids and grandkids. They would vote for youth if they thought it was credible.

So how about this for a manifesto? On education: pre-school for all, affordable college, smarter use of technology, more vocational and more choice. On cities: better mass transit and other infrastructure for clean livability, more housing so affordable. On economics: maximize competition, smart regulation of partial markets, progressive but not vindictive taxes, carbon and Tobin taxes, incentive to work, promote trade, help with transitions and mobility. On social issues: better childcare, flexible careers, higher mobility including immigrants, personal freedoms, transparency of information. In foreign policy: as ethical and multi-cultural as pragmatism and voter acceptability allows.

This is close to how Trudeau won power in Canada. To be fair, it is also close to the platform of the liberals in the UK so it does not win votes automatically. But I think it is sellable, since few young people would disagree with any of it, while enough older ones could be persuaded by the future-orientation.

What stops this emerging across Europe? We have to look at entrenched interest groups and public hot buttons. The interest group that is most challenged is the trade unions, especially teachers. This is the one to face head on, as a declining and discredited force. Sanders shows that funding is not an insuperable barrier in today’s connected world. Other groups should either be encouraged by the agenda or at least mollified.

The public hot buttons are harder, because progressive politicians have been weak at promoting multilateralism in recent years. People under forty are blind to prejudice and have a global outlook, so the constituency is there, but it is too easy for newspapers and bigots to promote scare stories of immigration and supra-national bodies. Winning this part of argument would take time. It is a shame that so few are trying to take such positions just now.

I’m probably just dreaming here. Many of us could just put together a list of everything we believe and hope that some party coalesces around those beliefs. Fair enough. But I do wonder if there is a rare opportunity coming up for a political realignment, and such things do require some courage. While so few care to promote openness and unions retain influence while clinging to outdated logic, there is a risk that any opportunity could be squandered. The alternative realignments, around protectionism, nationalism and continued greed, are not likely to take humanity very far forward.

Cracks in the Edifice of Economic Orthodoxy

It has been very interesting reading The Economist over the last year or two. The magazine is unashamedly pro-market, indeed it was founded upon such principles 175 years ago. Yet it is also honest, analytical and self-critical, to its eternal credit. What has been happening lately is these two pillars have been pulling in opposite directions. The pro-market consensus that became accepted orthodoxy during the Reagan years has been shown to have flaws, which The Economist has usually been honest enough to expose.

The victory of pro-market ideas had itself been stunning. In the sixties and seventies the trade unions had abused their power, and the fatal flaws of communism as it had been practiced in the USSR became apparent. This created space for a popular crusade based on individualism and challenge to welfare. Reagan and Thatcher grabbed the space with enthusiasm and took into further. It became acceptable not just to punish the weak, but also to reward the successful exorbitantly, indeed the concept of performance related pay became accepted as a necessary price for success, even as levels of greed among executives and, even more, their bankers and advisors, became ever more mindboggling. Progressive taxes were slashed, and all state services branded somehow inefficient.

There was more. Trade was promoted as a universally good thing. Regulation was challenged as damaging. Free movement of people was also promoted, this one sotto voce since immigration never sat well with the public consensus behind the orthodox policies. The financial sector even managed to create new sectors from pensions and student loans, their greed not satiated by other boons from deregulation and globalisation.

The political victory of this orthodoxy was akin to a revolution. In the US and UK, Clinton and Blair led notionally progressive parties that accepted the orthodoxy in full. Communism collapsed in Russia, and morphed in China towards something close to the same orthodoxy, now an uncomfortable poster-child for that mantra. As The Economist highlighted last week, in Europe the left is still in retreat and lacks compelling ideas, tied as it remains to trade union funding.

But slowly cracks began to appear. At first these were ignored as teething troubles or poor execution or inevitable costs to set against greater benefits. But the cracks have become wider, and The Economist has bravely been ready to expose them, albeit cautiously.

The main thing they have had to acknowledge is the results. Since the orthodoxy took hold, median real incomes in Western societies have stalled. The financial crisis was an embarrassing breakdown of rampant deregulation. And those societies that have embraced globalisation and small government the most have built up unsustainable debts. Less noticed, growth per capita has actually been slower in the US than in Europe during this period; despite the trumpeting that the US is stronger, it is only immigration that has fed what growth there has been.

As these fissures have become too large to gloss over, The Economist has been reduced to defending some key principles while accepting flaws in others. It has been a good debate, and promises to remain compelling reading for some time. Of course, I have the blessing of being able to enjoy the debate from a position of some financial security, and others, for example Port Talbot steelworkers, would prefer more urgency and action than debate.

Performance related pay is one area of renewed scrutiny. Enron went some way towards exposing the greed and the risks behind the model, where managers, far from incentivised to find sustainable growth, warp the model for their own ends. What is less written about is how such abuse is often fed by advisors and bankers, especially when it involves fees from financial engineering, debt management and M&A. There was always a flaw in claiming that low paid workers needed the threat of redundancy to work hard, while managers needed ever greater rewards to remain motivated.

Last week The Economist mounted a sound defence of shareholder value, the guiding principle behind this movement, but accepted that execution had been flawed and that some regulation was required to rein in excess. I agree that shareholder capitalism is a wonderful thing, and also that it can be improved by giving better information and power to shareholders. But, in the meantime, why not restore some progressive taxes and crack down on offshore finance too?

Another Economist article a few weeks ago bemoaned the increasing concentration in US industries and argued for more competition. As a consumer I agree – things like hygiene products have obviously rigged markets here. The entire market-based ethos requires intense competition to work, so it was interesting to read Zero to One by Peter Thiel arguing that the only businesses worth developing are those where some sort of monopoly can be engineered. Financial markets require high returns, so should we be surprised if businesses try to lobby to inhibit competition?

The Economist argues for some further break up of regulation, notably in intellectual property. Certainly, lobbying has led to congress promoting the wrong form of regulation. Incentives to innovate are important, and we should celebrate firms like Google, though even here the story of American exceptionalism and a small state is somewhat thin, given that it is the military that developed the uniqueness of many of its global leaders.

But the real problem comes from impure markets, such as healthcare. Here, even with privatisation, government continues to play a role, and consumer information at the point of sale is limited. There are many such sectors, and there require new thinking, for the orthodox model creates undeserved wealth while nationalisation creates inefficiency. The answer lies in finding the right balance of regulation – which in the case of the US is more not less, and determined by experts not biddable politicians.

One of the more interesting debates is about trade. The Economist has always lauded trade, and in my opinion with good reason. This week, they made a further defence, against mounting rejection on all sides of the US election. But again they have been forced to recognise that their analysis was shallow. True, new benefits are large, and we should not forget that without trade we would have a lot less choice and higher prices in many sectors. But the losers from trade are many and the economic and social impact on the losers severe. You only have to visit a former coal-mining or ship-building town in the UK to observe this.

The Economist now says that trade should still be promoted, but more should be done to soften the blow for the losers. This argument becomes even stronger when held against another article in the same episode about the Belgian town of Vilvoorde. Here, the Renault factory closed down twenty years ago, and since then the town has become a feeding ground for would-be Jihadists.

Other tenets of economic orthodoxy have been challenged too. The austerity policies promoted after the crisis by many governments are now questioned as being too protective of established wealth. Calls to reducing welfare payments have now been balanced, even to the extent of guaranteeing minimum family incomes, recognising that full employment is no longer attainable and that many have little chance of finding well-paid work. Minimum wages have been cautiously accepted as sound, and there have even been muted calls for stronger unions – seemingly part of the fault for the Euro crisis lay with German unions not demanding high enough wage increases! I have yet to read of The Economist advocating a Tobin tax, but perhaps that will be next.

It is good to see this greedy and heartless edifice crumbling at last, though the damage that has been done is irreparable. What would be really sad is if the thoughtful analysis of The Economist is drowned out by populism. Shareholder value, trade and even small government have merit, and immigration has huge benefits, but politics is dictating that these good things may be sacrificed. Instead, progressive taxation, Keynesian government intervention on infrastructure and fairness for losers would be a better mantra, and perhaps there is scope within the political spectrum for such a platform to emerge before it is too late.

On Hollywood Movies

I have always had a strangely limited relationship with movies. Like so much, it starts with childhood. Mum did not have a long attention span, didn’t like spending money and did not find it easy to challenge her assumptions. The only movie I remember being taken to see in the cinema was “The Sound of Music”. In those days, TV was at the centre of family life, but there was only a choice between two or three channels. Whenever one choice was a movie, Mum would intone “I don’t like films” and any unwatchable rubbish on another channel was thereby selected. If we watched any movies at all, they were conservative ones, usually featuring a virginal Julie Andrews or some similar creation by Walt Disney.

Somehow the behaviour initiated by Mum has stayed with me as a life long habit, even though I don’t share any of her reasons to avoid movies. There is no topic for which my knowledge is weaker. Whenever anyone refers to a movie, I am usually the only one in the room who has never seen it and fails to understand the nuance. At a recent choir rehearsal, the director made a point about Star Wars, checking first that everyone had seen the movie to avoid spoiling for anyone. Of course, everyone else had seen the movie. Not only had I not seen it, I had no interest in seeing it, so told him he could not spoil it for me. The lady standing next to me uttered, “You really are from another planet”. I don’t think I was supposed to hear her, but I did and I am grateful, because the remark made me think. We all have ways that are different to others, and it is good to know what they are so we can understand them and respond. If you put 100 adults from developed countries into a room, I would be the one who had spent the lowest proportion of my life watching movies. If you ever play Trivial Pursuit against me, always select the entertainment category as my Achilles heel.

Sometimes I see this strange quirk as a regret, and sometimes an opportunity. My social assets are plainly diminished by the cultural void of my lack of movie experience. Probably my intellectual assets are too, though maybe if I had seen more movies I would have had less time to do other things like read or sing or walk. Many people have dreams about what they’ll do when they retire, and one of mine is to catch up on all those great movies that I missed. I am not sure whether the dream makes any sense, since movies tend to date badly like so much else. But on balance this feels like an opportunity.

Anyway, now I am sort of retired and am time rich, and I am blessed to live in an age where some gadget on the TV means I can watch movies all day at home if I want to, so it is time to start acting on the dream. This year my new year’s resolution was to watch a couple of movies per month.

I have made a bad start. I have the time, but habits do not change easily and I seem to find other things to do when I might choose to find a movie. Once or twice, I have sat in front of the TV only to find that the brilliant gadget is not working that day because of poor internet connectivity or something. But mainly, I think the trouble is that my standards for what makes a worthwhile movie to watch are not easy to meet.

I like movies that are about realistic people doing realistic things. Is this too much to ask? It does seem to be nowadays. In my life, I have never seen a gun used, and I’ve only once been in a fight, in as far as I got annoyed with someone and grabbed his collar. Am I that unusual in this? Yet violence seems to be central to almost all movies. Then I struggle to see the point of movies about aliens or superheroes, and why have animation and computer graphics become so popular, when portrayal of humanity is all about acting? Historical movies are fine, so long as there is lesson or relevance to today, so, sorry, endless costume dramas don’t quite cut it. War is OK as a subject, so long as it doesn’t degenerate into superhero territory or glorifying violence.

What does this list say about me? I don’t know, really. Last year my family and I sat down at home to watch a movie, since we try to find things to do together. The family chose Kingsman. I lasted about twenty minutes before I found that I had to just leave the room. There was nothing but mindless violence and foul language. The movie just made me angry.

Luckily, the last couple of weeks have made me feel better. At home, I watched Four Lions, Philomena and Carol. Thanks to Iberian airlines and two long haul flights I have added Brooklyn, Spotlight and The Danish Girl. Six lovely movies have restored my faith in the medium and reignited the dream.

I sort of don’t understand why anyone would want to watch the more popular fare. I suppose there is some escapism and some relaxation to it – we are not always in a mood to be challenged or depressed. I suppose I am lucky not to have so stressful a life that I need a fix of unreality all that often.

And none of the six movies I watched were in the least depressing. True, there were serious subjects and the need to engage the brain. A full range of human emotion was on view, including sadness. But each was ultimately uplifting, much more than a burst of Star Wars in my opinion.

Four Lions should be required viewing for all American kids, to balance the manufactured face of Jihad peddled by the mainstream. Philomena was a wonderful story of forgiveness and hope. Carol and the Danish Girl both helped to understand the historical context of sexual tolerance. Brooklyn had the simplest of simple stories, but still said a lot about loyalty and dilemmas of emigration. Spotlight made me wonder why such journalism is so out of fashion, if we exclude the marvellous crusading by The Guardian and a few others. All of them made me think, and to challenge lazy assumptions about the world, and to come away with an enhanced belief in the miracle that is humanity.

All these movies are educational as well as entertaining, helping society to face dilemmas and find a way forward. There is a long history of such movies, on subjects such as civil rights, female emancipation, complex sexuality, or even awareness of nutrition (Super Size Me). Movies have power. I sometimes link my extreme naivety in dealing with girls in my teens and early twenties to the absence of movies in my upbringing.

So don’t mainstream movies represent a terrible lost opportunity? Of course the main purpose is commercial and entertainment, and I am not one of those who find conspiracy theories behind the way the movie industry chooses subjects. Executives have to look at potential audiences, their likelihood of visiting a cinema, costs and risks. They may have become lazy in their extreme focus on a single, young, American, male, escape-seeking demographic for almost all movies, but such laziness does not imply any conspiracy, indeed rather the opposite, it may represent lost opportunities for the parts of the industry.

But, conspiracy or no, the lost opportunity is more than missed chances to challenge and educate. The problem is that the weight of movies of certain types perpetuates false and dangerous conceptions in the minds of Americans. Is it any wonder that mainstream America thinks in binary terms of good or evil, friend or enemy, that naïve valour will win out in happy endings, that women are secondary, or that guns and violence are valuable. Mainstream movies avoid the leading edge – as an example nowadays you might see a female or black hero, but so far not a Moslem one.

I guess it was ever thus and there is little that can be done, and I guess I am hardly the one to pontificate on a subject about which I know so little. But perhaps part of my rejection of mainstream movies is about some anger at their damaging effects on society, and perhaps others might feel the same, and collectively with advances in technology something can change for the better. I will not hold my breath. And until then, my search for movies to catch up on will continue to feel like looking for a needle in a haystack.