Foching the Tories (more vague musing on how History might help us think about what to do in the present)

This was originally posted on 8 May 2012.  With the Simon Danczuk/Owen Jones row, followed up by Danczuk writing a piece in the Telegraph (yes - a Labour MP writing in the Telegraph) likening the Labour Left to the BNP, I thought I'd move this back to the top.  

[I mentioned recently a blogging crise de confiance.  Who cares what I think?  And what do I know?  Fair questions.  I often blog about things I'm no expert in, like philosophy and politics.  But then again I do care about these issues.  Then I read these blogs in national newspapers here and here and I thought that, whatever I think or write it's no crazier than these opinions (Cameron's government is socialist?  Hard right Tory policies will win Labour voters over by producing social mobility?  Hell, at least I haven't taken the quantities of Class As that would give me those ideas).  So, no I'm not a politician (and could never be) or political theorist but maybe these musings will spark or feed into some better ideas by someone who is.]

A year ago – and more – I penned a piece called ‘So that’s it: we lost?’ at the start of the Coalition’s assault on what is left of the Welfare State, the NHS and so on.  Certainly, the defenders of the State, the Public Sector, the NHS &c., did not give up without a fight.   And they still haven’t.   But we still lost in the end.  The NHS reforms – a charter to sell off what is left of the National Health Service to Cameron’s friends and backers – went through in the end. 

Digression

It’s worth, at this point, contrasting the sheer lack of real achievement, of any dismantling of the results of the Thatcherite attack on the State sector, or even the bulwarking of what remained, by a Labour party with a huge mandate for change – a mandate still reinforced in 2001, when people continued to vote tactically  (in a low turn-out, admittedly) to keep the Tories out – with the revolutionary (or, better, counter-revolutionary) excesses of the current Tory government with (let’s remember) no mandate at all: typically arrogant public school boys who have simply steamed full ahead regardless of pre-election promises, parroting their hollow ideological nonsense about The Market, secure in the knowledge that they are, by virtue of their education, social class and money, bound to be right, whatever anyone else might think.  It’s also worth noting just how small a role has really been played by the Labour Party in opposing Cameron and his millionaire cronies.  No attempt has been made by the Labour Party to challenge the narrative (no surprise there: no attempt was made when they were in power).  All the radical information about the Tory donors and their links with private health care providers etc., has been deployed by political bloggers, web-sites, ‘popular’ resistance movements like 38 Degrees and so on.  Meanwhile, the Labour Party continues to waffle about fiscal responsibility, Blue Labour and the rest.  No change there.

So, in the short term anyway, we have lost: there are no two ways about that.  In late 2010 I mused about how this might look to historians of centuries to come, wondering how it was that the achievements of the war generation, the post-’45 settlement etc could have been thrown away (I continued to ponder that scenario after last summer’s Riots).  But the importance of History – I increasingly think – is in showing that things don’t have to go in a particular way, or lead to a particular outcome.  This is, perhaps, a novel (or at least a minority) view of History.  History has tended to derive its shape from end-points.  In Žižek this is called ‘contingent necessity’: a series of contingent choices and events/results of choices is portrayed, teleologically, as necessary by the end-result.  This is a type of history we must reject.

Rejecting contingent necessity, it seems to me, suggests a way forward and an opportunity to build a socialist/radical Left alternative out of the wreckage of Cameron’s Britain.  What the ConDem wreckers have achieved is the final unpicking of the last of the key co-ordinates of the ’45 Settlement.  Now, this might look like a disaster – and in the short term at least it certainly is.  It will make life much worse for a lot of people while cementing the ‘haves’ in their position of dominance.  But, it seems to me, the sheer extent of Cameron’s success could hand those of us on the Left with a real opportunity – by which I don’t mean a cynical, passive Leninist ‘the worse, the better’ stance. 

It must be responded to in the right fashion, and while the iron is still at least fairly hot.  At the moment, as I see it, the fractured Left (or pseudo-Left) offers us a series of limited options:

1: Accommodation.  The classic New Labour option.  In this view, as always, the Labour Party dances to the Tory/Tory Media tune.  The usual gutless triangulation will lead to an acceptance of the Tory narrative of fiscal irresponsibility, austerity, and a vapid promise simply to manage the situation bequeathed to any future Labour government by Cameron and co, not to make matters any worse.  Mistakes will be admitted, in spite of the deficit lies, the continuing refusal to deal with the bankers, Osborne’s manifest incompetence, the corruption of the government, its dealings with Murdoch, Brooks and the rest, and so on and so forth.  You could say that there was never a better time, while the Murdocracy is in such low esteem with the public, to launch an attack without fear of the Sun’s front page.

2: Nostalgia.  This is classic melancholy in the focussing on something lost.  But that cannot radically challenge the Tory narrative, precisely because of ‘contingent necessity’.  The NHS failed and therefore ‘had to be’ changed’.  Thus anyone holding a simple ‘revivalist’ position will be able to be portrayed as arguing against the lessons of history, the weight of history, or the logic of history.  Variants of the nostalgic revivalist position will be found in old-style Unionism and in the Old Left: the Marxists, the SWP, Old Labour.  None of these will be able to mount an effective challenge.  They are too easily countered – indeed disposed of – by populist right-wing propaganda.  In this sense they are as locked within the Tory narrative as the accommodationists of Blue Labour.   The signifying system of the Tory narrative portray them highly effectively as far-left dinosaurs, the Loony Left, as adherents of systems that ‘history shows’ failed (contingent necessity again), as threatening ordinary, decent people.

3: Oh, and then there’s Occupy.  Not that Occupy sees itself as part of the Left, anyway.  Occupy has nothing to say to anyone about anything.  More to the point it doesn’t want to.  It likes to see itself as above such things: as ‘Punk Politics’, as one can see from Occupy commenters on blogs etc.  It presents itself simply as ‘the young people’ doing something new (regardless of the fact that simple occupation is about as old-style a form of protest as there is).  It has no programme (in the UK anyway).  In the UK it seems largely politically illiterate (for example, one Occupy commenter on a blog-post said Occupy ‘transcended Left and Right’ – how is that even possible?).  It’s not interested in thinking about the crucial terms of the debate.  It has, if anything, allowed itself to be demonised by the media, weakening support for whatever it is that it is trying to do.

What we need to do, counter-intuitively perhaps, is embrace the extent of Cameron’s mandate-less successes and excesses.  The very extent of dismantling the state can be a way of breaking free of the Tory narrative.  It cuts the Left free from the hulk of the ’45 Settlement and its attendant baggage.  It is, I suggest, possible to appropriate and thereby to subvert, the Tory master-narrative.  The post-45 Welfare State failed – but do you know why it failed?  A new narrative could be based on Tory Story, one which can put the neo-liberals on the back foot.  Let us negate the negation.  There are multiple new narratives that can be constructed around the failure of the Welfare State in the face of capitalist assault – which dwell, for example upon the way in which privatisation has not been a success, except in increasing the gap between the wealthy and the poor.  How it shows that private companies driven by the profit motive are not more efficient than state operations (indeed how most privatised areas are still propped up by government subsidy, whereas workers and consumers have lost out – how the old nationalised industries are still nationalised, except – farcically – that the nation that owns them isn’t theUK…). 

Foch 'em!

And there would be many others (here is a nice example).  The point is that the programmes should be to create something new; not simply (or overtly) to preserve or revive.  To quote Beckett (not Brecht: thanks 'James'): Try again; fail again; fail better.  The more the neo-liberals dismantle the post-45 settlement, the more they unpick the coordinates of their own ideology.  (More to the point, perhaps, to adopt an analogy from the historiography of the Carolingian Empire, the more they sell off to their chums, the less booty they have to distribute to their followers…)  We should embrace the space opened up by this in the creation of new radical left-wing ideas, to build a better version of the Welfare State, a more effective one, probably using a different name.  This is where my title comes in with its allusion to Maréchal Ferdinand Foch and his famous ‘toujours l’attaque’ quote: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack."

This might have unexpected results.  It might, if even partially successful, compel the neo-liberals to back-track.  After all they need their ‘other’ – their ‘bloated’, ‘failed’, ‘something for nothing’ post-45 welfare state.  This would be a partial success in itself but it should not be seen as sufficient.  Rather than accepting such a result, the project of a new and better Welfare State 2.0 ought to be pushed and pursued with the support of health and education workers, pushing the Right further into the position of defending what it itself claims to have failed, whilst still maintaining their policies of social division and inequality.  The ground of the debate that is opened up by Cameron’s success should be seized, and this is one way of doing so.  This is the opportunity offered by the debacle of Lansley’s health care Bill.  The question is whether the Left has the political will and imagination to take it.

Directing Anger

Today, for a number of reasons, I have been feeling very angry indeed about the rank, class-based prejudice that infests my own little patch of academe.  It's like a microcosm of Cameron's awful Britain.  But yes a microcosm and we all need to take account of the bigger picture, where mindless upper-class snottiness induces something a little more serious than a bad mood and a bout of foul language on the subject of dishevelled superannuated FBAs.  So for a pinch of reality let's look outside the office window and think about yesterday's welfare debate, when the Oxford-educated (yes, let's not forget that) super-rich made the poor poorer and laughed while they did so.  And since I (and doubtless you too) wish I could write and blog as well as this, I can do no better than point you at this splendid piece by the mighty Plashing Vole, to whom you should all subscribe, here.  Please read.

More trouble...

... at the institution to which we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Bourneville Tech.  We've had reason before to comment adversely on goings on there.  The VC, to whom we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Harry Callaghan, stamped down on students' right to peaceful protest (I must check how that turned out).  This, you may recall, seemed a tad shocking in view of Harry's past as a historian of nineteenth-century British social history and - indeed - a teacher of Marxist approaches.  But then Harry's own web-page makes it clear that he likes to cover up this embarrassing past.  To be fair, he's not the only member of that generation to conceal some pretty vicious, elitist social politics behind a smoke-screen of posturing about subscribing to The Old Left and/or mid-'70s-vintage feminism.

To further erase any suspicion that he might once have earned his crust from the humanities, he's now decided to hack away at Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology, as you can read here (though, no mention is made of archaeology.  Ahem.).  In this Harry is being aided and abetted by his trusty sidekick, the pro-VC and Dean of the College of Arts and Law to whom we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as Maurikios Kopronymos.  Now, I have no particular axe to grind about the departmental independence of classics or ancient history; quite the opposite, in fact.  What I do have a beef with is the possibility of people losing their jobs.  Whatever.  The thing about Maurikios is that ancient history is his own discipline.  He's issued a statement about this which beggars belief.

Thanks to 'JPG', it is here.

Enrollment begins for Bourneville Tech's new MA in
Evolving Recruitment Landscape Archaeology
(Picture and joke stolen from a Facebook friend who had
best remain anonymous)

Have a read of it and see what you think, but - as you do so - remember that we are talking about situation in which people might lose their jobs, people whose work for the institution and the subject might be no less than Maurikios' (never more than a solid assembler of facts).  You can thrill to the use of management-speak, like 'evolving recruitment landscape', gasp at the juxtaposition of 'quality' as a concern, coupled with losing staff and thus the chance of lowering staff-student ratios, swoon at the sheer chutzpah of the reference to the department emerging with 'unprecedented strength' from the situation where actual human beings, who don't work in areas where Maurikios and his chums think they ought to work, lose their job, probably at ages, and in a climate (a 'recruitment landscape', if you will) where finding a new post will not be so easy.  Be amazed at the constant reference to sustainability, when the whole exercise is a contingent response to a particular set of political directives.  Ask yourself how easy it is to rebuild a department having scrapped some of its expertise if and when the political circumstances change again, or to respond to a new situation where the previous reduction to key areas of 'strength' leaves the department with less flexibility to evolve (when the strengths aren't in favour any more).  Remember with awe that this is being championed by someone who actually proclaims himself to be 'an ancient historian with an interest in archaeology' - presumably only in those bits that he thinks show potential for sustainable and unprecedented strength, mind.  And, to top off the 'astonishing' lack of self-awareness, check out the concluding paragraph puffing up his supposed achievements at the institution to which we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer as The University of Warwick.  How his old colleagues must thank him for that.  I don't know why he didn't go the whole hog and just say 'I found it in brick and left it in marble.'

Drink it in.

Harry Callaghan earns (well, pays himself) in excess of £300,000 a year.

A Dark Day for British History

Here you can read about the University of Birmingham obtaining a court injunction criminalising any occupation or sit-in protest anywhere on its 250-acre campus during the next 12 months.  That's right.  A British University has outlawed peaceful protest on its grounds.  Leave aside, for a minute, the general implications of that - there are ample good points made in the article.  What this means is that at a time of unprecedented attacks on Higher Education students are barred by University management from making peaceful protest. 

Consider too, the historical struggle that people had to open up access to higher education in the UK; consider the historical struggles waged to earn British people the right to protest without getting sabred by the yeomanry.  Now consider the fact that the V-C of Birmingham University rose through the ranks as a historian.  I don't know whether he still thinks of himself as an historian; his profile makes scant mention of his historical credentials, except seemingly as a past phase he went through, and the only publications referred to are policy documents and speeches.

Whatever.  Speaking just for myself, if this report is accurate and if Birmingham's V-C is behind his University's legal actions - and it's difficult to believe that, as V-C, he isn't - then I think that, whether or not he does still think of himself as a historian (supremely ironically, one who used to teach Chartism and Marxist theory), his actions ought to shame the British academic historical profession.  In my own view, this would be a disgraceful thing for anyone to do at any time, but it is especially so during this year of all years. This year non-violent protests have occurred through the world and often been violently repressed.  Our governments have mouthed support for these protests and yet here we are, in the Free West, with a seat of learning threatening with the force of the law peaceful student protesters (protesting about issues that affect them, the future of UK Higher Education). 

My own view is that it is especially regrettable that a historian should be behind this - and, I assume, a pretty good historian too since he has a chair in the subject.  As I have argued repeatedly in this blog, there is an ethical demand at the core of historical research and I think it says nothing good when no attempt is made to bear that demand in the present, outside one's research into the safely dead past.  Having a historian behind it sheds a bad light on this affair not just because Birmingham's V-C knows about the events of nineteenth-century British social history, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the rest, but because I assume that he had to engage with the writings by and about those movements in what (as I have argued before) is inevitably a humane, ethical fashion.  That is why, as a professional historian, I feel ashamed that this action should have been taken by a fellow historian.  OK, I can imagine various scenarios in which a threat of legal action might be a useful negotiating point with protesters on campus and it's possible of course that the Guardian article hides some nuance of this sort, but whatever scenario I envisage in a UK university with UK students, all this looks horribly heavy-handed and unnecessary.

So, overall, I say to Birmingham's V-C shame on you.  Shame on you.  Perhaps you have been badly advised.  I hope you can see that this was a mistake, reconsider it and rescind this action as soon as you can.  Sheffield backed down on their similar injunction, after all.

Otherwise, pepper spray, anyone?

Disappointed but not, alas, Surprised. Reflections on The Strike (In which I have a go at the Conservatives, the Labour Party, Jeremy Clarkson and the Unions, so something here for everyone.]

I went on strike last Wednesday (30^th) – so let’s get the obvious gags out of the way first, shall we?  Was anyone able to tell the difference?  (Ho ho!)  That will have brought the capitalist world to its knees! (Ha ha!)  I quipped that I was going to tell the Leverhulme that I had been on strike so they could dock Tom Pickles a day’s pay.  (Hee hee!) 

I’m not normally in favour of strikes by my union (UCU) although that is a locally-ethical or tactical stance rather than a statement of a general principle.  On this occasion, though, I felt that solidarity with other public sector workers was necessary and important. 

More interestingly, perhaps, I went on the march in York.  It was well attended and it got a lot of support, with many cars pipping their horns in support and many bystanders applauding the march as it passed.  I heard of only one shout of ‘get back to work’ – I’m not sure who by, clearly someone in one of those hard-pressed ‘going shopping or otherwise wandering about in York town centre’ jobs.  There were good supportive speeches from private sector workers at the end, striking a further blow against the tactics that the government and its media allies have used.  All that was very encouraging.  Indeed it confirmed what the polls were saying about the strength of support for the strike across the country (even in a Daily Mail poll, amazingly).

All that apart, though, the overwhelming sensation I had with the debate around the strike was of disappointment.   Obviously I’m not surprised by the general unpleasantness of the government’s response.  They could be predicted to get their media friends (unelected people on massive wages, by the way, employing nasty people to intrude into and often wreck people’s lives) to vilify the strikers as lazy and try to foment a rift between the private and public sectors.  It is still disappointing though.  Disappointing too to hear Michael Gove coming out with statements about how this was a time for us all to pull together.  Surely all that ‘we’re all in this together’ stuff must ring hollow even in Tory Central Office’s propaganda department by now, it’s so obviously, transparently untrue – revealed by their blocking of real bank reform, the snivelling refusal to chase down tax-evasion and tax-avoidance by big corporations and the super-rich the grumbling about the 50% tax bracket, the blocking of a Robin Hood Tax, the continuing huge bank bonuses and executive pay-rises, and so on and so forth. 

Disappointing, but not surprising, that so many people appear to have been taken in with this rhetoric.  Yet, as the strike made clear, this was not merely about protecting allegedly gold-plated public-sector pensions; it was about protecting fair pensions for all.  Those comparing the public with the private sector to disparage the former have the telescope the wrong way round.  The issue is not that the public sector have it so good as much as that the private sector have it so bad.  Why do they have it so bad?  Because their bosses have cut back responsible, fair pension provision at the expense of vast executive pay-rises, shareholder bonuses etc.  Want to complain about the inadequacy private sector pensions?  Then get with the movement for taxation and banking reform.  Don’t try and bring the public sector down too.  That is the Conservative magnate class’ classic divide and rule tactic.

Nonetheless, it was not surprising, but still disappointing, to hear Jeremy Clarkson making his usual bullying ‘jokes’ about taking the strikers out and shooting them in front of their families, asking ‘how dare’ they strike with their gilt-edged pensions, etc. 

Let’s get this straight, shall we?  First, Jeremy Clarkson is NOT just an ordinary bloke like you; he went to Repton, the expensive public school; mummy (especially) and daddy bought him his education and his opportunities.  Clarkson is no more than one of those deeply unpleasant public school boys who occasionally make it into the national papers for their University Conservative Association antics, like burning Obama in effigy or making anti-semitic, racist, sexist comments/stunts.  And who, when confronted about their behaviour, retreat into mealy-mouthed claims that it was just a joke, a bit of fun, some banter.  At Poppleton University Department of History we, sadly enough, have more than enough of this sort.  They are rarely very bright.  Here is one of our distinguished old boys…  Clarkson is no different … except that, on the basis of being an independently wealthy, better-than-average, moderately witty car-reviewer (and that’s all he is, remember) he has gained access to an audience of millions.  Three million delusionals have even joined a Facebook group saying he should be Prime Minister.  Second, and related to my last comment, let’s remember that – apart from his inheritance – Clarkson’s wealth comes overwhelmingly from the opportunities afforded him by the publicly-funded BBC and its license-payers.  Third, how dare he set himself up as some sort of working man?  What’s his job?  Messing about with expensive cars at the license-payer’s expense.  Not that, with his inherited wealth, he needs to work at all, mind.  And yet, although he thinks it bad form to discuss his own money, he can go on air and state that he thinks people should be shot for demanding that they get a fair deal.  Fourth, at the front of our march were the reps of the Fire Brigades Union.  It is likely that these were from the very branch that sent the men who cut Clarkson’s friend and coat-holding side-kick Richard ‘the Hamster’ (he’s not even a real hamster) Hammond out of a tree when he drove (at the license-payer’s expense) a super-fast car into it.  Yet, according to Clarkson, these are the people who should be taken out and shot in front of their families. They should indeed - for not leaving Hammond swinging in his tree.  Hey!  It’s just a joke, Jeremy!  Who looked after Hammond afterwards, in emergency and later?  Oh, that’ll be the public sector health service for the most part.  I guess they ought to be shot too, eh, Jeremy?  For not leaving him brain-damaged.  After all, who knew he had a brain to damage?  Just a joke!  And who did all the proceeds from the book sold by Hammond on the back of his heart-warming near-death-crash-and-recovery-experience go?  That’s right, they went to the public sector workers – oh no, my mistake – they went to Hammond and his private-sector publishers, Weidenfeld and Nicholson (as Stewart Lee said; he didn’t even have the decency to publish it through the BBC).

Well, I don’t think Clarkson should be taken out and shot in front of his family; I think his family should be taken out and shot in front of him!  Hey!  It’s just a joke, Jeremy.

So, Clarkson’s irresponsible and unpleasant.  Disappointing but not surprising.  Disappointing, but not surprising, were the responses.  Unison’s predictable threat to sue just plays into his hands.  All those people (Cameron included) who played it down as just a silly joke, or as just ‘winding people up’ – it’s disappointing but not surprising that they don’t understand the power-relations involved in this sort of ‘joke’, and not even a very funny one in any case, let’s be honest.  Was it even a joke?  When rich and powerful people with access to an audience of millions make hateful comments about the people they are exploiting, that is not ‘just the same’ as when members of a Facebook group make equally ill-advised equally (in the abstract) hateful comments about the super-rich who are exploiting them.  When (objectively) the same joke is exchanged between groups of widely different social, cultural, political and economic power, that is not reciprocity.  When used by a member of a group that has the power to use jokes to create attitudes on the back of which real prejudice and violence can ensue, to reinforce the status quo, that is not just the same as when a member of the target of such a jibe makes the same sort of gag back, as resistance, as a defence, as a means of creating solidarity.  So, when a white comedian makes jokes about black people that is not just the same as when a black comedian makes jokes about white people (even if both jokes are ‘objectively’ ill-advised and offensive). 

The power of Grey Skull

Disappointing but not surprising that Tory climate-change-denier and Skeletor-look-alike, James Delingpole just doesn’t get it.  Have a read of Delingpole, if you can stomach it.  Against the evidence of public support such as I witnessed, and against the evidence of the polls, Delingpole constructs his argument about how the Left lost on the basis of an extrapolation from an anecdotal piece of evidence from Jeremy Vine about callers to his radio show.  Callers who, like Delingpole, are missing the point (made above) about having the telescope the wrong way round in comparing private and public sectors; callers who have fallen for Tory divide and rule tactics.  Delingpole, ironically, thinks he is ‘always right’ and writes books about how to win arguments.  Here, incidentally (with thanks to Jonathan Grove), you can see a fine example of Delingpole showing us just how to win an argument.  What, apparently, this involves is spluttering and then retreating into huffing and bluster when someone interrupts your rant with a pertinent question exposing your approach as the nonsense that it is.  Nice work.  Read the puerile description of himself on his blog and his own web-page; this is someone only a year younger than me.  This is the best, apparently, that the Right can do, by way of public intellectuals.  But I digress...

Many would say that this gives Clarkson more space and attention than he deserves, but I think his (and his like’s) role in British culture and ideology is quite important, and there were general points that I wanted to make.  Much more importantly, it was disappointing but, once again, not surprising that the gutless so-called Labour Party was notable by its absence on 30 November.  It failed actively to support the strike; indeed back in June it even condemned it.  That’s right, we have a Labour Party, a Labour Party (in Neil Kinnock accent), that will condemn public-sector workers for taking action to protect their futures (and those of generations to come).  This, as far as I am concerned, completes Ed Milliband’s and Labour’s move into complete political irrelevance.  For the past 15 years under Smith, Blair (unsurprisingly – he was a public school boy with no stake in the state; no privately-educated person can ever really be a socialist any more) and even Brown, the Labour Party has become little more than an excrescence, a cluster of barnacles on the hull of the Tory ideological ship, slowing it down slightly, impeding its performance possibly, but doing little actually to stop its progress.  When ‘Red Ed’ made what I thought was a good speech on the day of action against the cuts, which he did well to support, he was mocked in most of the press (most of the press being Tory-backers after all) and this seems to have spooked him and his advisers completely.  Now they are all so scared of media reaction that they have gone back to gutless Blairite triangulation of policy between what real labour supporters might want, what they think the media will say and what they think the media-influenced public will let them get away with (here is a prime example of this sort of thinking).  During the riots I criticised the poverty of political dialogue in the UK for its condemn:condone manichaeanism.  Here I think it was equally poor, but Milliband should have had the courage to support the action.

The 2010 election showed that the power of the old media is over-estimated. In spite of his slick ‘charm’ and well-managed operation, despite the support of almost all the media and almost complete lack of media support for Labour (even The Guardian supporting the LibDems), despite the bulging Tory election ‘war-chest’, despite Brown’s utter lack of charisma and foolish mistakes, despite the economic crisis and the mileage made out of the deficit myth, despite all this Cameron failed to secure a mandate.  The overwhelming support for the strike, in spite of the Tory media machine’s best efforts, shows that the days of the print media’s dominance of UK politics are over.  Hell, who even buys a newspaper these days?  Newspaper sales are at a critical low.  As a US photo, targeting a Time Magazine cover, which went viral on Facebook says: ‘You know we all have the Internet now, right?’   And yet Labour remain terrified of the 1992 spectre of it being ‘The Sun Wot Won it’ – terrified in spite of public faith in the Murdocracy being at an all-time low.  All of that concern about an over-inflated influence of old media on the 30% of the 60% and fewer who actually vote.  Most non-voters would be Labour voters; they are mostly from the least advantaged classes.  Why don’t they vote?  Because Labour and its policies are irrelevant to them; they don’t see any difference between the two.  And when Milliband fails to support the public-sector, when he fails to promise to end tuition fees – but simply to cut them to a ‘mere’ £6000 a year – when there is something in all seriousness called ‘Blue Labour’, they are absolutely right.  The problem with the calculations of Dan Hodges and his ilk is that, while they may convert some of the voters of Middle England, for each Tory-voter in Surrey converted to Blue Labour, there is another Labour party supporter switched off, who doesn’t turn out to vote or who makes a protest vote for the Greens or (in the past – I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to do it again) the LibDems.  Each Tunbridge Wells conservative persuaded to vote for New/Blue Labour is a step further towards a commitment when in power to pursue policies antithetical to the original ideals of the Labour Party: policies, in other words, acceptable to conservatives.  Another barnacle grown.  And, when that is the case, then of course large numbers of people don’t see a point in making a choice.

This rot goes through Labour from top to bottom.  It was a Labour council that recently used The Cuts as an excuse to close a local library (opened by Mark Twain) that it had been trying to close for years.  Labour have also been putting forward 19-year-old candidates (still, obviously, at University) for Parliament.  Here’s another, put forward as PPC for York Outer when only two years out of his degree, and now York council leader.  Such is Labour’s contempt for the electorate, and especially their own electorate, that people who have never worked are put forward to be the representatives of the working person.  It is symptomatic of the malaise of British politics that the two sides are now made up of essentially the same types of people, people like Blair, with no commitment to a particular political agenda, people who flipped a coin to see which side to support, which side offered them the best chance of advancement.  People barely out of college.  This is usually represented as a good thing, and maybe it is in some ways, but while I can see why an over-privileged Tory brat fresh out of university can work hard to preserve the privileges of class and wealth it is more difficult to see how someone who has done nothing except university politics and maybe an internship or two can really have a stake in left-wing politics.  There was a day when Labour MPs were ex-Union men and the Tories were land-owners and businessmen.  That was when there was a difference between the two parties.  Now they are all from the same, homogeneous mass of young, middle class, frequently Oxbridge-educated interns, PAs and PR-reps.  No wonder no one can tell the difference any more; no wonder that Labour no longer seems to have any connection with radical politics.  All this and Milliband’s statement about fees (fairer – really? – for parents and students, said he: but what about the universities and their traditionally Labour-voting staff?) are what made me recently cancel my Labour Party subs.

My unease at all this was sadly underlined by the speeches that followed the march, which, while quite good and occasionally quite rousing (actually the one made by ‘Isaac’ from ‘York Students Against the Cuts’ was one of the best, which was one of the most encouraging aspects of the day), were disappointing overall.  The UCU rep (from York college) was an embarrassment, reminding me to some extent why I voted against the AUT-NATHE merger.  He had some good points but generally he was one of those lecturers trying to be ‘down with the kids’, discourse peppered with expletives.  As you know, I’m hardly against swearing tout court – far from it – and my weariness of this character wasn’t because there were a lot of small kids in the audience (though that made me uneasy).  It was because, in a public-speaking context with a limited amount of time, a representative of the Universities and Colleges Union ought to be a mite more articulate than that.  Tactically what good does it do when people can point ironically at this as a representative of what the country’s so-called intelligentsia are like?  Or is that just me? 

Apart from that, the speeches all too often drifted back into old-fashioned ‘class war’ cliché.  Of course the Tories have unleashed a war on the poor, while protecting their rich friends.  But it’s not just the working class who are suffering; this, as OWS have put it, is a war of the 1% against the 99% and no old-style class analysis will work on that basis.  More to the point many people who (to sound briefly like a Stalinist) are ‘objectively’ working class (like some of my own family) do not self-identify as such; sometimes (like some of my own family) they even vote Tory as a means of convincing themselves and others of the fact.  Talk of the working-class ‘class war’ alienates them.  This tired old Marxist rhetoric is a tactical mistake for two reasons.  First, it alienates all those people who aren’t, or who don’t think they are, working class and who have been frightened off by years of press scaremongering about this sort of rhetoric.  Second, it allows the right-wing popular media to keep up that scaremongering and present a movement for fairness as another load of out-of-touch (here the press and the Tories will harp back to Arthur Scargill, the Soviet Union etc. etc.) hard-left extremists who want to strip you of your hard-earned cash.  And they will be able to do this at just the point when it is the ideology of capitalism that should be under attack as – obviously – failing.  For years the Left had the examples of the allegedly left-wing regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe thrown at them as examples of ‘how socialism doesn’t work’; now we can see, from the evidence of our own eyes, not by pointing to bogey-men on the other side of an ideological fence, that ideologically-driven, greed-is-good, neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t work either.  This is when their position must be under attack.  This is when their ludicrous defence that the market fails because it wasn’t neo-liberal enough must be exposed for what it is.  What it is the structurally identical argument to that made, back in the day, by those who said that the USSR failed for not being communist enough.  Disappointing …

It is time for a different sort of radical politics with a different vocabulary.  The old party politics of Westminster are out of touch with what we might loosely call real politics – real politics of whatever political tint.  Take the Occupy movement, sure, and take the anti-war and anti-Cuts protests: these showed people on the streets together whose ‘party politics’ were diverse.  The same is true, in a different part of the political landscape, with the Countryside Alliance marches from back in the day and even, I suspect, the EDL and their opponents.  Part of the attraction of the EDL to some people (who would I suspect otherwise be Labour supporters) is the fact that, in a confusing time of economic and social uncertainty, there seems to be no party representing them, reassuring them, redirecting their anger towards the people it ought to be directed towards rather than at the Muslim scapegoat.  We return to Labour’s political irrelevance but it is clear from their failure to win a majority in spite of the best situation for their party in years, that the Conservative Party is viewed as almost as irrelevant.  Its subservience to people whose wealth lies beyond the imagination of most people cannot help but make it so, now.

A new radical politics, a new alternative to neo-liberal conservatism, does not mean either a return to old-style class-war rhetoric or continuing subservience to principle-lite Blairite power-seeking calculation and triangulation.  It ought to make use of the one universal that can bring people together, their shared humanity.  Avoiding confrontational polarities of the old sort, such a vocabulary can be contingent, ethical and politically committed.  Not ‘Us’ against ‘You’ or ‘Us’ against ‘Them’, but ‘why don’t YOU want to be with US?’  Because the ultimate ‘human’, ethical demand, the ultimate demand of the Strike, and of the Public Sector workers last Wednesday, is a simple universalising tautology: FAIR IS FAIR.

History and Rioting (The Inevitable 'Riots' Blog Post): Part 2

Living in Interesting Times
"May you live in interesting times" runs the Chinese curse (allegedly). Those of us in the UK (and in many other countries to an even greater extent) are getting to know exactly what that means at the moment. Sometimes I wonder whether people can ever really experience the making of history (a complex theoretical issue which I won't go into) but up until about a fortnight ago I was wondering whether, if things in the UK went on as they were, whether we might be experiencing the making of an historical conundrum, the sort of thing that will give rise to endless exam questions in future decades and centuries, all boiling down essentially to one question: 'how the hell did that happen?'  I was taken back to this pondering in the letter by David Parker to the Guardian, linked to in Part 1 of these thoughts. 

My thinking went along these sorts of lines.  Imagine that we were historians working at some point in the future and read this narrative:  Once upon a time, there was a huge economic crisis caused by the irresponsible actions of the super-wealthy elite.  A government attempted to right the situation and in fact it was handling the situation reasonably effectively.  However, it had done other ill-advised things, such as getting involved in expensive and unpopular wars, and handled many other issues very badly and it, and especially its leader, were widely disliked.  So people believed that its economic record was very bad and it was overthrown and replaced by another ministry led by a shiny-faced young aristocrat who played well on his dour old opponent's failure to get within waving distance of charisma.  This new government, however, was based upon a very slender and tenuous control of the political core of the country.  Yet, to the surprise of many of those who had backed it, once in power it launched a series of repressive measures, taking rights and resources away from the people, especially the poor - reducing their ability to find work, to acquire education, to subsist in times of necessity, and many other things besides.  They were supported in this by other ministers who had hitherto based their status on advocating quite the opposite point of view.  And so far from doing anything to restrain the super-wealthy aristocracy, they even mooted the cutting of their taxes.  In the middle of all this, they decided to hold a marriage for a prince and princess at huge cost to the tax-payers.

If the next part of the narrative went 'and so it was that the people rose in revolution and herded the unpopular aristocracy and their government off to the guillotine', no one, I think, would be very surprised - whatever you might think of the rights and wrongs of political violence (to which, as you know, I am opposed).  Up until very recently the conundrum seemed to me to be why, in early twenty-first-century Britain, nothing happened at all.  People swallowed the myth of the deficit, and of the Labour Party's economic mishandling of some of the elements that produced the crisis (sure it made mistakes, but ones that most other governments were making at the same time; mistakes that only emerged with hindsight, and as we now know, re. Coulson, the NotW, etc., saying that you'd have done things differently with hindsight forgives all).  Peaceful protests were slapped down with heavy-handed policing.  Very minor disturbances (occupying Selfridges or wherever) were reported as terrible anarchist outrages, and people actually believed this.  A government with no popular mandate carried out extreme ideologically-driven slash and burn policies, some at least of which were not even in their manifesto, supported by a minority party that had gone to the electorate espousing entirely antithetical ideas.  And - so it seemed - got away with it, as people swallowed their nonsensical stories. The people seemed to have been lulled into a kind of political coma.  Why had people sat idly by as the last traces of a welfare state, created on a wave of popular idealism after a huge costly war, were dismantled around them? This seemed to be the making of a knotty historical problem - a really counter-intuitive development that bucked any attempt a historian might have made to predict what happened next.  Why, in comparative terms, did this happen in twenty-first-century democratic Britain, with an educated electorate and mass-communication, when similar actions had toppled governments and, indeed, heads in earlier autocratic regimes with largely illiterate populaces living in small-scale communities?  Interesting indeed.

Then the riots happened.  And of course it is too simple to say that it is all down to The Cuts, just as it is too simple to lump together all the actions in all the different towns and either say that they were all political or that they were all criminal.  But there is no getting away from the fact that there were no riots like this under thirteen years of Labour government (whatever the latter may not have done actively to ameliorate the situation it inherited) and indeed none since the last Conservative administration, particularly the last one to launch cuts and attacks on the public sphere like this.  To say 'ah, but it was just that all these problems were stoked up by labour and just happened to break out now' won't cut it.

There are issues of course that need to be teased apart, of which the following are just a few:

• The initial causes of the violence in north London
• Subsequent violence, looting and so on
• The role of gangs in the background to the riots and in the activities afterwards
• The specifics of the different communities in the towns involved

Now, even this very short list ought to make it clear that no catch-all explanation is going to work. It also brings out one feature of discussions in the past week that has really concerned me and that is the sheer poverty of vocabulary in British political discourse. We are given two choices: either we condemn, or we condone the violence. These events brought out, as such things are wont to, the best and worst in human beings. In the best, we saw the father of one of the boys pointlessly killed trying to defend their property speak with great compassion and humanity; in the worst we saw an already assaulted East Asian visiting student helped up, only to be cynically robbed of his possessions. Extreme events have a tendency to produce the best and the worst. Great heroism took place during the London Blitz; so did considerably less heroic actions. When I wrote a book about warfare I commented that battles, concentrations of extreme emotions, produce great acts of self-scrifice and heroism, and of cowardice and cruelty.

Yet, the BBC (at its very worst here) and other media appear to have gone down the same route as it did with the - as everyone can now surely see - massively-exaggerated cases of window-breaking etc during the anti-Cuts protests: 'But surely you, X, must condemn this violence?' 'Well, I think it's a complex issue that cannot be judged so simply...'  'Aha, so you condone this sort of violence!'  This simple binary choice won't suffice.  People did do many things that must very obviously be condemned; they did many other things that are - I would say - deeply regrettable, not least because they hurt their own community more than anyone else's, and they did things (like stealing ice-cream cones) that frankly I don't give a monkey's cuss about, one way or the other.  I would not have a problem with the trashing or looting of multi-national companies' property were it not  for the fact that the costs of such actions won't be borne by the directors and principal shareholders but by the shop-staff and other workers at the lowest level.  The problem with the vocabulary of condemnation, when applied in blanket form as - naturally - the government wants it applied, is that it reduces the issue to the simple blaming of individuals without further analysis.

One doesn't have to look far for analogies.  Take the Metropolitan Police.  What events of the past few years have shown is that while the Met is very effective at blowing the heads off unarmed Brazilian electricians and at valiantly herding largely unthreatening middle-class school-children and young adults into cul-de-sacs and hemming them in there for hours (provided enough warning is given for them to get sufficiently tooled up and mob-handed), when a spontaneous outburst of serious public disturbance occurs it is - shall we say? - considerably less effective in 'defending the public'.  Does this mean I have no sympathy for the bobbies who find themselves in the front line faced by angry mobs, in the course of doing a job that is difficult and in its basic, founding principles entirely commendable?  Of course it doesn't.  But nor does it mean that I can condone white-washing or - and this is the important bit - dumping all the blame for the killing of Ian Tomlinson just onto the individual officer that carried out the actual actions that ended up killing him (any more than I 'condone' his action).  The problem goes, and the analysis has to go, further than that.  You do see, I hope, the analogy.  It's not direct or equivalent but it is about the similar problems that occur when you are simply given the choice between blanket condemnation or condoning of all the actions of individuals or even organisations, when it might be structures and context that need attention.  Historians are supposed to be able to look at the complex mix of individuals, motives, structures and contexts in the analysis of events.  Not that this means - as I have suggested before - that they should not pass moral judgement (or, perhaps better, at least present their account in such a way as to reveal a moral compass as well as the complexities).  In some ways this is an interesting contemporary case-study.

In some superficial ways our hitherto evidently aberrant historical narrative has returned to form.  We have had our 'peasants revolt' and the aftermath has been entirely in the usual mold.  Judges across the land have competed, so it seems, for the 'Judge Jeffreys Memorial Award' for absurdly harsh sentencing.  Plenty have compared the sentences dished out to rioters with the (lack of) sentences handed down to fraudulent, corrupt MPs, and the size of the sums of money illegally obtained in both cases.  The hypocrisy has been astonishing.  For trying to start a riot (on Facebook) - a riot that didn't happen - two lads get 4 years in jail.  Cameron divested himself of the cliche about justice needing to be seen to be done, while not heeding the first part of the phrase - that justice needs to be done.  This is not justice.   My new favourite historian can be seen as inciting murderous vigilante violence on his Torygraph blog, and nothing happens at all.  Inciting riotous violence - bad: inciting murderous repressive violence - good.  I suspect (indeed I hope) that the way the narrative does seem to have jolted back to some sort of historically 'normal' course (after all even Nick Clegg, in a show of political clairvoyance and perception that he has subsequently lost, it seems, predicted the riots himself, well over a year ago) suggests that this 'story' has some way to run yet.

I have wanted to break these thoughts up into more manageable chunks.  In the next I want to explore some of the issues involved in this violence from a historical perspective.

Stefan Collini on the Government's HE White Paper

This is a masterly piece of analysis that exposes the malignant heart of the government's attack on Univerity education.  It shows it for what it  - like the rest of this government's policies - really is, an ideologically-driven attack on public services that will not actually save money.  On the basis of Collini's article, in terms of governmental financial loss or gain, the government might just as well given every university a 10% rise in funding.  Please get a coffee, take half an hour and read - and then relay to all the ill-informed folk spouting things about how the country can't afford education etc.

The real tragedy, though, is that universities - especially university management - have been entirely complicit in this disgusting process.  See previous posts - less in-depth and less well-written than Collini's - here under the search labels 'the state we're in', 'AHRC', and 'The Big Society'.

AHRC and the Big Society: An appeal for a big push

You might have been following my intermittent reports on the campaign to get the AHRC to drop its repeated mention of 'The Big Society' (a vacuous notion dreamt up by David Cameron as a smoke screen for the Tories' final assault on the 1945 settlement).  If not, you can find them via the blogging labels 'AHRC' and 'The Big Society'. The real bottom-line, though, is not party-political, as has been made clear from the start.  The same problems would have attended the AHRC's adoption of 'The Third Way' or any of New Labour's equally vapid slogans. 

To recap: initially, this blew up as a result of a claim in an article in The Observer that the AHRC had been forced by government to accede to prioritising research on the Big Society in return for a certain exemption from The Cuts.  Prominent historians, notably professor Peter Mandler (Cambridge) and Colin Jones, the president of the RHS, weighed in against this.  The AHRC issued a fairly unconvincing and grammatically dubious 'refutation' (sic) of this claim, whereupon the suspicion emerged pretty quickly (largely on the basis of the AHRC's own statements) that what had actually happened was that the AHRC had shifted and renamed its priorities to include The Big Society itself, presumably to make itself less susceptible to the cuts.  Which of these versions of events is the accurate one has not, to my knowledge, ever been definitively established.

Be that as it may, the phrase 'The Big Society' remains in the AHRC's delivery plan, producing a petition with thousands of signatures, and an open letter supported by over 30 learned societies (not, at that point at least, including the Royal Historical Society).  I have not been able to find out whether the RHS' stance has changed.  A current statement by the Society simply says it maintains a 'watching brief', by which phrase I understand 'sitting on the fence until it is clear which way it ought to jump 'for the good of history': a prize example, if true, if the dynamics of HE politics, as I have discussed before.  Never mind.  Whatever the RHS' position, Peter Mandler, to his credit, has continued to snap around Rick Rylance's (the Head of the AHRC) heels, like a little cultural historical terrier, and Rylance and the head of the BA have not managed to issue any sort of convincing response, either to that or to the campaign mentioned above, spearheaded by philosophers James Ladyman and Thom Brooks.

To me, it seemed that by sitting tight, Rylance was going to weather this storm.  However, the tempo has changed, with Labour's shadow education minister, Gareth Thomas, weighing in, and doubts having been expressed by David Willetts himself (here, as a piece in the Higher suggested, the recent vote of no confidence in Willetts, rather than his policies, might turn out to be counter-productive).

Now, on Thom Brooks' blog, which I have recommended before, I read the following extracts from an article in the Guardian:

"[. . .] Rylance agreed with critics that the big society was "a government policy" but said that it included "a range of activities" from health to the arts which left room for many different projects and angles for research.

"People have said this is about promoting the big society. It is categorically not about that. It is indicating an area of research which will fund individuals who may well come up and be critical of it. We don't forecast outcomes of these things," Rylance said.

However Rylance said that removing all six references to the big society from the AHRC's strategy would have to involve a renegotiation with government."

It might be that, like mine, your eyebrows were immediately raised by the last statement.  If, as has been maintained all along, the AHRC weren't brow-beaten into including a priority on The Big Society, why should the term's removal require 'renegotiation' with the government?  Or, at least, why should any such 'renegotiation' be problematic?

Rylance might be on the ropes, which would make it timely to launch a big push to put an end to this once and for all.  With that in mind, I reproduce, with permission, an e-mail by Thom Brooks and urge all British historians to support these efforts according to their position vis-a-vis the AHRC.  It'd also be nice if the RHS would abandon its 'watching brief' and make a formal, public statement against the AHRC's adoption of party political slogans.  Thanks. 

Dear friends and colleagues,

My thanks again for your support in the campaign to persuade the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to remove the "Big Society" from its current delivery plan. Please take a moment to read this important message.

We have widespread support for our campaign. Our petitions have attracted over 4,000 signatures from across disciplines and political divisions. Signatories include Fellows of the British Academy and Royal Society. More than 30 learned societies agreed a joint statement in support of the petition. Hundreds of emails and letters of support have been sent to Rick Rylance, the AHRC CEO. The UCU has supported our campaign and the Rt Hon David Willetts (Minister of State for Universities and Science) has recently remarked on the "hazard" of including political campaign slogans in research council delivery plans. The support has been truly unprecedented and the issue has received much media coverage. This includes new articles published in the Guardian yesterday: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/19/academics-quit-over-big-society  This has encouraged the Shadow Universities minister, Gareth Thomas MP, to write to Willetts to demand action: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jun/20/labour-steps-into-big-society-row?CMP=twt_fd

The AHRC response has been disappointing. They continue to reject calls for this brief, but important, change to the AHRC Delivery Plan. We argue a point of principle, not politics: political campaign slogans have no place in research council delivery plans for strategic funding priorities. Period. I believe we are now at a critical moment and I request your help:

1. AHRC PEER REVIEW COLLEGE MEMBERS

I am a member of the AHRC Peer Review College. If you are also a member, then please contact me ASAP by THURSDAY MORNING, 24th JUNE to confirm whether you are willing to join me with many others and resign on MONDAY, 27th JUNE if no action is taken on amending the AHRC Delivery Plan. I will offer a press release later this week. Resignation is surely a last resort, but I believe that all avenues have been explored without success. While I hope we need not act on our threat, it is clear that we must now come together and show the strength of our support for our principled position. I hope all AHRC Peer Review College members will accept this call -- and please circulate this message to anyone on the College.

2. NON-MEMBERS

Please write to the AHRC and voice your continued support for our campaign. The AHRC appears to believe our opposition is fading: in fact, it is growing and recent publicity in the Guardian confirms this. Contact information includes the AHRC CEO Professor Rick Rylance (r.rylance@ahrc.ac.uk) and AHRC Chairman Professor Sir Alan Wilson (executive@ahrc.ac.uk).

3. FOR EVERYONE

Please write to David Willetts and voice your support. You might use the following template:

david@davidwilletts.co.uk

Dear Rt Hon Willetts,

I want to share my support for the campaign to remove the "Big Society" from the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Delivery Plan. This is a position of principle, not politics: political campaign slogans should have no place in research council delivery plans. This position is endorsed by over 4,000 academics and 30+ learned societies as well as the UCU. Petitions (see http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/thebigsociety/) have drawn support from across disciplines and political divides. Please communicate to the AHRC the importance of taking action and removing this campaign slogan immediately.

Yours sincerely,

[Name]

I believe that the momentum is on our side and positive action likely, but only if we act together and we act fast. I hope I can look forward to your support one last time. We are very close to achieving our goal and defending an important principle.

Warmest wishes,

Thom

Where is the RHS? Humanities learned societies take a stand against the AHRC and The Big Society (with one rather notable exception...).

I reproduce, below, an e-mail sent around by James Ladyman, one of those spearheading the attack on the AHRC's craven peddling of Cameron's vacuous Big Society idea.  It is very good and I urge you to support it and the petitions referred to.  As Prof. Ladyman says at the end: "If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards."

"The number of learned societies who have signed the statement printed in THE, The Observer and sent directly to Rick Rylance (Chief Executive), Sir Alan Wilson (President AHRC), and Shearer West (Director of Research AHRC) stands at 32. Here is the list:

Architectural Humanities Research Group
Association for Legal and Social Philosophy
Association of University Departments of Theology and Religious Studies
Association of University Professors and Heads of French
Association of Social Anthropology
Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy
British Philosophical Association
British Association for American Studies
British Association for Jewish Studies
British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies
British Association for Study of Religions
British International Studies Association
British Society for 18th-century studies
British Society for the History of Science
British Society of Aesthetics
British Sociological Association
Council of University Classics Departments
Economic History Society
English Goethe Society
Marx and Philosophy Society
Modern Humanities Research Association
National Association for Music in Higher Education
National Association of Writers in Education
Political Studies Association Media and Politics Specialist group
Royal Musical Association
The British Society for Ethical Theory
The Council of the British Association for Korean Studies
The Philological Society
The Society for French Studies
The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies
The Social History Society
The UK and Ireland Association for Political Thought
The UK Sartre Society

This represents a very wide range of disciplines. I have received no response whatsoever from the AHRC officers. The number of other learned societies whose membership disapprove of the AHRC in respect of this matter but whose leaders were unwilling to take a public stance on the matter is probably even higher. That the AHRC officers have chosen to ignore our collective correspondence is symptomatic, but is nonetheless even more deplorable than the first order matter. The AHRC leadership are arrogantly ignoring their 'stakeholders' despite their endless waffle about consultation and engagement with us.

There is a piece by Rick Rylance in THE here:

It is astonishing in its sophistry. He says that funding research into something is not the same as promoting it. Imagine a science research council saying 'we are not promoting creation science just funding research into it'. Imagine the AHRC saying we are not promoting revisionist history of the holocaust just funding research into it. These are extreme examples but the point stands. Declaring 'the Big Society' one of two top priorities is clearly promoting the idea.

It gets worse when Rylance quotes Nick Clegg as follows: "we've been using different words for a long time and actually mean the same thing: 'Liberalism'; 'Big Society'; 'Empowerment'; 'Responsibility'. It means the same thing."

Have you got that?: these words all mean the same thing. Presumably, ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery too.

Rylance repeatedly claims that the AHRC is not explicitly endorsing particular policies or decisions but we have never claimed it did. The point is that political slogans of any stripe have no place in research plans produced by the research councils. Note also that Rylance refers to working with 'other government departments' thereby forgetting that the AHRC is not a government department but is rather supposed to be one step further removed from government like HEFCE etc.

I think we have no choice but publically to call for Rylance's resignation and to petition the Minister and the relevant parliamentary committee, MPs and Lords to press the government on this matter.

There is another petition here that I urge you all to sign and to spread the word about among your colleagues:

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/bigsociety/

If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards. The academic world has been watching this story unfold and I have received correspondence from all over the world about it. This is fight for the heart and soul of academia. Words matter, ideas matter and reason matters, and defending clarity of thought and expression and the political independence of research is our true strategic priority. Please consult with your colleagues and let me know what you think our next steps should be.

Take care

James

Professor James Ladyman
Head of Department
Department of Philosophy
University of Bristol"

Now, you may or may not have noticed (as I had not until today) one rather glaring omission from the list of learned societies and that (in spite of the presence of other history societies on the roster) is The Royal Historical Society.  This is particularly disappointing since Professor Colin Jones, president of the society, was one of the first to come out and criticise the idea.  So what is going on?  Has the RHS just been accidentally left off Prof. Ladyman's list?  Is there just some sort of oversight?  Were the RHS just not told about this?  Or has it just been spectacularly slow off the mark given the presence of senior historians in the Observer article that sparked the whole affair?  Does the RHS consider its job done once some headlines and quotes have been garnered?  Is it bottling out again, like it did with Impact?  Does it think that it, or that 'History', can work with, or spin, 'The Big Society' to its own interest, and so damn the rest of the Humanities?  "This could work for us; we could get money out of this." Or "This is not the time for history to suggest that it has no input into the Big Society project"? (The 'cells' at work again.)  I think we deserve to be told and, if there isn't a decent explanation forthcoming for the society's absence from this roll-call of protesting bodies, then maybe (just maybe) Rick Rylance isn't the only one who should be reconsidering his position.

I repeat: "If we do not take a stand on this matter we will be betraying academic integrity, freedom and standards."

The State We're In (Part 2)

I’m acutely conscious that these observations on the state of British Higher Education, ‘as it appears to me’ from my not-very-exalted position, may represent no more than ‘stating the bleedin’ obvious’. Nonetheless I’m persevering partly to put my own thoughts in order and partly because the reflection involved even in stating the bleedin’ obvious is sometimes worthwhile. Part 1 suggested that the principal problem facing us has been the division of the HE sector into competing ‘cells’. With this situation in place, governments of both major political parties (neither has a spotless record in this regard) have, by appealing to local advantage, demonstrably been able to force through whatever cock-eyed policy initiatives they have wanted.

The general dynamic was set out in Part 1. As a practical case study, let’s take the obvious example of how it is, as I called it in Part 1, 'fundamentally antithetical to the furtherance of any real educational ideal' – Impact. There’s no need to waste words on what a profoundly stupid, half-baked idea this is (let’s remember, too, for the sake of balance, that it was a typical New Labour idea). Other people have done it far better than I could (Simon Blackburn, my favourite current British philosopher of the analytic tradition, waxes lyrical here and here). I was (and am) strongly opposed to the nature of this scheme; I’m not opposed to a requirement that publicly-funded research be made publicly available or accessible, but that is a quite different matter. When it was first proposed I circulated some reasons why I was opposed to it around my department. Such feedback I got was generally supportive, my colleagues being sound folk on the whole, but what disappointed me was a response from a colleague for whom I have enormous respect as a historian and as a human being, to the effect that ‘this would be good for us’.

This is absolutely symptomatic of the dynamic I set out in Part 1. It became perceived that we could improve our RAE/REF standing through the Impact Agenda. So, no matter what the general principles of the business might have been, no matter whether a general front for the good of the discipline might have been desirable, if it worked for us we’d support it, and damn any other history departments that didn’t fit the bill as well. And even individuals of profound intelligence, decency and humanity got ensnared in this way of thinking. At a lower level, damn your colleagues who don’t work on British history, for whom Impact projects are that much more difficult to devise (the cells have cells within ‘em). It only takes a certain number of cells to think like this for the measure to get implemented, just as it only takes a certain number of individuals within each cell to persuade the cell to support it. There comes a tipping point. At the institutional level it comes where the institution decides that something ‘won’t go away’ (Classic Gutless Staff-Meeting Pseudo-Arguments no.94) and had better implement some initiatives to make sure that next time, at least, it does OK in this category. On an individual basis it comes in what I call, in my vernacular, the ‘What the f*ck’ moment: the moment where the individual thinks ‘Ah, what the f*ck; I suppose I’d better see what I can do for my CV’ … Because once the policy is implemented it will quickly appear among the criteria for promotion etc. Indeed institutions start appointing whole offices of new administrative staff to oversee and implement Impact projects …

The problem went further, though, than the splintering of any general front presented by History. At the next level up, History perceived, on balance, that it could live with Impact, so damn the rest of the Humanities. Things may have changed. The open letter published in the Higher about the AHRC and The Big Society was signed by 26 learned societies. But there was no sign of this with Impact. The RHS decided that 15% of the REF was OK ‘because this was no time for the Humanities to suggest they had no wider relevance’. No matter that no consultation between the RHS and the other learned bodies of the humanities seems to have taken place. No matter that the disciplines most widely held to be ‘relevant to wider society’, the hard sciences, spelled out very vocally indeed their opposition to Impact. No matter that our sister disciplines in the modern languages, philosophy, literature and so on would all find it extremely difficult to work with the Impact agenda. This, too, was very disappointing. The whole business graphically illustrates how the possibility of any sort of unified front is shattered by the way that the sector is divided along all sorts of axes into all sorts of contingently-existing cells all now perceiving themselves as in competition with each other. If the AHRC refuses to budge of the issue of The Big Society within its funding priorities, it will not be long before we hear that, because ‘it won’t go away’, there are various things ‘that we already do’ that ‘can easily be put under that heading’. Mark my words. You heard it here first. Those 26 learned societies will start thinking about the possibilities for their own cell. Already, as this item reports, various VCs, vice-masters, etc, are queuing up to talk about the positives of The Big Society and how it includes what universities already do. This is how it starts, working to the Führer…

Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I can’t help feeling that, thirty years ago, this situation would have caused academics to look somewhat askance. Indeed, in David Lodge’s novels written at that sort of time, initiatives like this appear as obviously satirical exaggerations. How did we get into this mess? The problem surely came with the introduction of the Thatcherite mantras of choice and competition. The clever move here was that choice and competition came alongside auditing and transparency. Now, there is surely no sustainable argument against the viewpoint that recipients of public money should have to prove that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing with that money, that they are doing their jobs to a level and consistency that justifies their receipt of public money, and that therefore public money is not being wasted. That seems unobjectionable to me. I’ve said it before and it has not made me popular, but I’ll say it again: no one deserves a publicly-funded salary just for being clever (let alone, as sometimes still seems to be the case, for having been thought to have been clever when they were 25). If you want to draw a professorial salary but don’t want to (or can’t) do what the job – as currently set up – requires of you, whether you like it or (like most us) not, then the solution is to find a private benefactor.

The trick, though, was then to put the results of these fundamentally unobjectionable audits, especially of research, into numerical form and thence into league tables. This was where the mantras of choice and competition reared their ugly head. Competition is supposed to be good for quality, and transparency about the results good for the sacred cow of ‘choice’. Neither element of the equation stands up to very close scrutiny. Here is Stephen Fry pouring scorn on the idea that having a greater range of choice necessarily is a good thing in terms of quality. That was about 20 years ago, but this neo-liberal idea has got no less ludicrous or - alas - current in the interim.  Little more needs to be said really. Which is best: a choice of a million kinds of crap or a choice of five quality products…? Whether or not choice, competition and the league tables held essential to the maintenance of the first two actually raise quality seems to me to be very much a moot point. What the process seems to me – empirically – to do is simply to generate the production of the right sorts of thing that yield the right sorts of numerical data to improve one’s score.

Anyone familiar with the history of GCSE/A-levels over the last 25 years will know how this works. In an effort, allegedly, to raise standards by introducing choice and competition, school league tables of GCSE/A-level performance, school-by-school, were produced. To improve their scores, schools demanded transparency (rightly) over the marking of the exams. Eventually this became so algorithmic that teachers could drill their students about how to get the best marks by the simple production of formulae. Numerical data can then be produced, marks obtained, etc, etc., and league tables published. But as anyone who has had to teach the sorry products of this system will attest, all this transparency, competition, choice and league tables has produced anything but raised quality.(1)

The RAE/REF has gone much the same way. For most of the process, departments and institutions spend their whole time trying to get clues about what counts and for how much, and how they can best maximise their scores. Many years ago, David Cannadine (or ‘Sir’ David Cannadine, as he likes to be known) said in his inaugural lecture at London that the process mistook productivity for creativity and it’s – fundamentally – still the case. Sometimes it seems every bit as algorithmic in its procedures as the A-levels (according to what I have heard from actual RAE panel members). If it’s not, it’s the pretty arbitrary (or at best subjective) awarding of a score from 1 to 4 by someone whose own research one might or might not personally have any regard for. The only way to stop it being arbitrary/subjective would be to make it entirely algorithmic, something that may well come if people demand transparency about the scores and procedures, thus far withheld from us. It’s also moved the whole issue away from the actual production of quality scholarship and into not entirely related areas, notably, of course, the sphere of getting money (grants). A million-pound grant to publish a list of everyone called Bert in seventeenth-century Rutland? Brilliant! A ground-breaking monograph on a major issue of European history? Meh - well, it’s not A MILLION POUNDS, now is it?

Whilst we’re on the subject of the RAE/REF, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that this now utterly pointless exercise is still ploughing ahead. I say utterly pointless because there’s no longer any real reward for participation by the Arts and Humanities subjects. Their HEFCE grant – the distribution of which was the avowed aim of the RAE/REF – has been cut by 100% (if I am wrong about this, please let me know: this is the most recent piece I could find, and it doesn’t reassure me; I think I read that it might have been a 'mere' 80%). So why are we still bothering? I’ll tell you why. It’s because our universities actually want us to go through these hoops just for the sake of the precious (meaningless) league tables in which they want to do better vis-à-vis everyone else, and probably because individual panel members think it will help them and their careers – vis-à-vis everyone else. If the Arts and Humanities panels, from their chairs down, had anything about them, they’d resign en masse and screw the whole sorry business. But we can’t expect that.  Here we go again, working to the Führer …(2)  You have to admit that getting the cells to wield the stick themselves even after the carrot has been removed represents an astonishing achievement in the comparative history of the state.  It also shows how The Big State can loom very effectively behind a facade of 'small government' (as in the early Roman Empire, I suppose).

So, all the RAE/REF league tables do is generate specific forms of numbers, with little or no actual relation to quality. But if the RAE/REF is bad, then may I introduce you to the National Student Survey? Here is the absolute ultimate in the generation of meaningless numerical data that can be analysed pseudo-statistically and arranged in league tables. For non-UK readers, the aim of the game is to get the students to rate their student experience over a series of headings. An average is then taken and - hey presto! – you end up Nth out of 196 (or whatever) in the league table. The institutions then go out of their way to try and find ways of generating better figures. But the whole exercise is a sham. It is based upon some serious category errors. Number one: it assumes that our students are our ‘consumers’, which – let’s be crystal clear about this – they are not. A friend of mine is fond of saying that the process is like trying to assess the quality of local bakers by asking for feedback from their cakes. The ‘consumer’ of our ‘products’ is society in general – employers, etc. Second category error: it assumes that the student is in a position to judge the quality of the product. The NSS provides none of the ‘grade descriptors’ we academics have to work with. The students have no criteria according to which they can judge their libraries – have they used every university library, or even a reasonable sample? And (at least in newer universities like mine) the poor old libraries always come in for a kicking in the NSS, presumably because they don’t have every book easily available at any time. After my own department didn't do too well in the first NSS it became clear in consultation with the student body, that we probably scored badly on ‘feedback’ because our students – bless ‘em – didn’t (for example) actually even realise that comments on procedural essays counted as feedback. All this leaves aside the fact that good institutions can get penalised for having good, critical students. Many of ours have friends at Oxford and Cambridge and so, because they see that their libraries are many, many times better than our (by comparison with other 1960s foundations) actually rather good library, they rate it as (say) 3 out of 5.

This is only the pinnacle of the problem of feedback, which we are now forced to spend so much time dealing with. Now, feedback can be useful. Let me make that clear. If my students tell me I talk too much in seminars, or I speak too fast in lectures, or I have too many PowerPoint slides with too much info on them, then that is useful for me and I can try to do something about it. If, on the other hand, little Johnny Frithfroth-Smythe (Year 1) tells me I should have had less social history and more politics in my lectures, or adopted a more thematic approach, my immediate response is – pretty much – f*ck you, you arrogant little turd! What does a first-/second-/third-year undergraduate student know about how to organise a course? Now it might well be that students just don't have the vocabulary to express what they mean to say, and that what little Johnny meant was 'I am, myself, more interested in political history and I was disappointed that there wasn't more'.  Fair enough, but too bad.  It's still for me, not them, to decide, and their lack of a useful vocabulary only underlines the problem with feedback-driven HE.(3)  What we are trying to produce – after three years – is someone who just might have some understanding of history and how it works; who might be ready to go on to be trained about how to do research and design a history course. If they already knew this in year 1 there’d be no point in them doing the degree, now would there?

This dimension of the ‘customer’ image is a third category error. If I go into my local Curry’s and buy a DVD-player, then I have some (admittedly vague) idea of what a DVD player should do/be expected to do, and if it doesn’t do it, or do it to what I think is a sufficient level compared with what I had to pay, I can go back and complain. To pursue the (rather forced) analogy, what we are trying to do is produce someone who, after three years, might have enough of an inkling about the subject that they can go on to be trained in what a DVD does or can be expected to do. Wringing our hands about what students think of a first-year course’s content or structure or methodology is akin to the Curry’s staff wringing their hands and being all apologetic when I bring my DVD-player back and complain volubly that it won’t make toast - rather than showing me the door in short order, which would be the sane 'business world' response to this level of 'customer feedback'.(4)

The fact that institutions expect us to wring our hands in precisely this way is what leads to all the expectations laid upon the eventual NSS league table – a student is in no position to judge his/her degree, given they have nothing to compare it with – and the students’ expectations that they, the customers, are always right. But the league table and its absolutely meaningless data leads to the employment of central admin offices and to people having to waste time ensuring the ‘enhancement of the student experience’. I have a friend who has been saddled with this in his department. I can only assume that he is paying some sort of enormous karmic debt.

So what do we have at the end of the day? Universities so obsessed with league tables, RAE, NSS, and combined tables (of equally meaningless numbers), like the various ‘quality’ newspapers’ ‘University of the Year’ tables, that they set up offices to manage these figures and get the academic staff to spend their time on ensuring higher scores (I can, for example, think of one university in the north of England that has recently decided that its history department comes low in the number of grants applied for, regardless of whether or not this might actually help them produce good history of a sort they are interested in).

What this in turn appears to have led to is the idea that institutions are like businesses in competition with each other and that 'business model' has produced the most regrettable fissure of all within the HE sector, the confrontation between ‘staff’ and ‘managers’, which is what I want to state the bleedin’ obvious about next time.

Notes:

1. The situation, by the way, is far worse in disciplines other than history; I know that modern language departments can habitually fail a dozen or so of a first-year intake that had to achieve an A or B A-level grade to get on the course. I have heard similar stories from science departments about the gulf between A-level and the standard necessary for undergraduate first-year success. We complain that history students have little or no idea about what is required of them when they arrive at university but failing five percent of an intake with As or Bs at A-level is a pretty unlikely outcome.

2.  If you think all this is just sour grapes on my part, here is my RAE 2008 submission (you'll probably have to select me from the drop-down dialogue box), which is probably as good as anyone's in the UK.

3.  Again, to evade accusations of 'sour grapes', I should say that I do very well in feedback responses, with results in the general 'how well did you think your tutor did' area invariably in the 90-100% bracket.  I don't have any on-line resource to point you at but there is a Facebook 'appreciation society' if you can really be bothered to look.

4. Aside – a colleague recently had student feedback suggesting that the same seminar should have been run at two different times each week so that students could go to the one that was most convenient to them that week.  I kid you not.  That, it seems to me, is not an issue of the student not having the right vocabulary to hand but a graphic index of the 'consumer mentality'.