Andy Beckett's Blog, page 20
June 24, 2019
The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism
After decades of rightwing dominance, a transatlantic movement of leftwing economists is building a practical alternative to neoliberalism. By Andy Beckett
For almost half a century, something vital has been missing from leftwing politics in western countries. Since the 70s, the left has changed how many people think about prejudice, personal identity and freedom. It has exposed capitalism’s cruelties. It has sometimes won elections, and sometimes governed effectively afterwards. But it has not been able to change fundamentally how wealth and work function in society – or even provide a compelling vision of how that might be done. The left, in short, has not had an economic policy.
Instead, the right has had one. Privatisation, deregulation, lower taxes for business and the rich, more power for employers and shareholders, less power for workers – these interlocking policies have intensified capitalism, and made it ever more ubiquitous. There have been immense efforts to make capitalism appear inevitable; to depict any alternative as impossible.
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June 7, 2019
‘A zombie party’: the deepening crisis of conservatism – podcast
The traditional right is clinging on to power – but its ideas are dead in the water
Continue reading...May 27, 2019
‘A zombie party’: the deepening crisis of conservatism
The traditional right is clinging on to power – but its ideas are dead in the water.
By Andy Beckett
Conservatism is the dominant politics of the modern world. Even when rightwing parties are not in power, conservative ideas and policies set the shape of society and the economy. Ever since the transformative 1980s governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – with their new fusion of disruptive capitalism and social traditionalism – the assumption in Britain, the US and far beyond has been that conservatism is the default setting of democratic politics.
Even when other parties have been in office, leaders such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton have continued with the conservative project of privatising the state and deregulating business. For decades, armies of rightwing activists – with rich financial backers and many allies in the media – have successfully spread and entrenched conservative ideas.
Related: Why copying the populist right isn’t going to save the left
Continue reading...March 10, 2019
We exclude the Labour left from British politics at our peril | Andy Beckett
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership is on borrowed time. That assumption has hung over it throughout his three and a half years in charge. It’s there during every Labour crisis. It’s there before every perilous election – such as the local polls this May. And after every bad or even so-so Labour result the end of Corbyn’s leadership is there in the minds of his many enemies, of many commentators, of many anxious Corbynistas.
When the party is doing better under him, such as during and immediately after the 2017 election, this sense that he is on perpetual probation recedes, but never completely and never for long. In June 2017, two days after Labour had won its largest general election vote since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, the then Labour MP Chris Leslie told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We shouldn’t pretend that this is a famous victory. It is good … but it’s not going to be good enough.” Twenty months later, without waiting to see if his scepticism about Corbynism’s electoral potential was justified, he left the party to co-found the Independent Group.
Related: The wilderness years: how Labour’s left survived to conquer
Related: Poverty and climate more important than Brexit, says Corbyn
Continue reading...November 9, 2018
How to explain Jacob Rees-Mogg? Start with his father's books
William Rees-Mogg wrote the prophetic The Sovereign Individual and had views on capitalism and chaos that have fascinating links to his son’s enthusiasm for Brexit
In the spring of 1997, shortly before Tony Blair took power, William Rees-Mogg, ex-editor of the Times, leading Eurosceptic, pinstriped self-publicist and father of Jacob, published a book that claimed to see the future of the world. The Sovereign Individual: The Coming Economic Revolution and How to Survive and Prosper in It opened with a quote from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia: “The future is disorder.”
For 380 breathless pages, Lord Rees-Mogg and a co-author, James Dale Davidson, an American investment guru and conservative propagandist, predicted that digital technology would make the world hugely more competitive, unequal and unstable. Societies would splinter. Taxes would be evaded. Government would gradually wither away. “By 2010 or thereabouts,” they wrote, welfare states “will simply become unfinanceable”. In such a harsh world, only the most talented, self-reliant, technologically adept person – “the sovereign individual” – would thrive.
In August, Alastair Campbell called The Sovereign Individual 'the most important book you have never heard of'
Unlike his loquacious father, Jacob has the politician’s ability to say as little as possible when necessary
Continue reading...October 15, 2018
The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics – podcast
New Labour’s ‘third way’ promised to end the clash between left and right. But did the fantasy of politics without strife create our age of anger?
Continue reading...September 19, 2018
The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics
New Labour’s ‘third way’ promised to end the clash between left and right. But did the fantasy of politics without strife create our age of anger?
Politics is raw in Britain today. Remainers rage against Brexiters and vice versa. Pensioners are set against millennials; nationalists against immigrants; populists against elites; rural traditionalists against city liberals. Party politics is characterised by contempt and dogma. To his many enemies, Jeremy Corbyn is an extremist and will never be a legitimate national leader. To Corbynistas, his internal critics are bad losers and traitors to Labour. To many non-Tory voters and MPs, Theresa May’s government is an immoral experiment in austerity and pandering to prejudice.
On seemingly every fundamental issue, the country feels even more divided than it did in the turbulent 70s and 80s. There are furious battles over free speech, minority rights, the size of the state, the shape of the economy, social and cultural values, even the truth and selection of relevant political facts. In many other democracies, from the US to Italy to Australia, politics has become just as tribal, fragmented and apparently out of control. Opposing factions no longer seem able to talk to each other, or even to agree on what they might talk about.
Related: Why elections are bad for democracy | David Van Reybrouck
Continue reading...September 6, 2018
Moneyland by Oliver Bullough review – the shadow world of the super-rich
A clever and entertaining exploration of the parallel and poisonous realm of tax havens and shell companies
In our era of oligarchs and gangsters, murdered journalists and outgunned tax inspectors, Putin and Trump, how do you write a critical book about money and power in the world that doesn’t feel utterly futile? It’s a question Oliver Bullough often asks himself. In this volume he lists some of the enterprises that operated in Ukraine during the infamous presidency of Viktor Yanukovych from 2010 to 2014: “his coal mining companies ... which were [for legal purposes] owned in the Caribbean”; a “medicine racket … run out of Cyprus”; an “illegal arms trade traced back to Scotland”; a “market selling knock-off designer goods … legally owned in the Seychelles”. The sheer complexity of corruption under Yanukovych, Bullough writes, “makes me dizzy, like a maths problem too complicated to understand, a sinkhole opening at my feet”. We are only on page nine.
Then there is the problem of overfamiliarity. Tax evasion, illicit financial networks, parasitic elites and many of the other subjects of this ambitious book are not new, Bullough admits: “Wealthy people have always tried to keep their money out of the hands of government.” More recently, the global growth in secrecy and criminality made possible by modern capitalism and the end of Soviet communism have become such mainstream topics that this year they were given their own primetime TV drama, BBC1’s McMafia, which was loosely based on a successful investigative book by Misha Glenny.
You wish he’d written about the offshore manoeuvrings of the many tax-averse mainstream corporations as well
Related: A world of hidden wealth: why we are shining a light offshore
Continue reading...Moneyland by Oliver Bullough review – globe-trotting profile of the offshore economy
In our era of oligarchs and gangsters, murdered journalists and outgunned tax inspectors, Putin and Trump, how do you write a critical book about money and power in the world that doesn’t feel utterly futile? It’s a question Oliver Bullough often asks himself. In this volume he lists some of the enterprises that operated in Ukraine during the infamous presidency of Viktor Yanukovych from 2010 to 2014: “his coal mining companies ... which were [for legal purposes] owned in the Caribbean”; a “medicine racket … run out of Cyprus”; an “illegal arms trade traced back to Scotland”; a “market selling knock-off designer goods … legally owned in the Seychelles”. The sheer complexity of corruption under Yanukovych, Bullough writes, “makes me dizzy, like a maths problem too complicated to understand, a sinkhole opening at my feet”. We are only on page nine.
Then there is the problem of overfamiliarity. Tax evasion, illicit financial networks, parasitic elites and many of the other subjects of this ambitious book are not new, Bullough admits: “Wealthy people have always tried to keep their money out of the hands of government.” More recently, the global growth in secrecy and criminality made possible by modern capitalism and the end of Soviet communism have become such mainstream topics that this year they were given their own primetime TV drama, BBC1’s McMafia, which was loosely based on a successful investigative book by Misha Glenny.
You wish he’d written about the offshore manoeuvrings of the many tax-averse mainstream corporations as well
Related: A world of hidden wealth: why we are shining a light offshore
Continue reading...August 6, 2018
How to Spend It: the shopping list for the 1% – podcast
In an age of astonishing wealth, nothing reveals the lives of the ultra-rich like the FT’s unashamedly ostentatious luxury magazine
Subscribe via Audioboom, iTunes, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, Acast & Sticher and join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter
Continue reading...Andy Beckett's Blog
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