Living in the Past – The Prison of Political Time Lags

Back in the 1960s, J.B. Priestley noted the widely unappreciated feature of time lags in society. There is an unerring tendency, he observed, to associate any era with “its newest and more original ideas”. But this is a mistake.  Very likely, only a few pioneers actually held these notions, while ordinary people – and self-styled intellectuals – remained steeped in mentalities that simply regurgitated insights from decades or even centuries before.

“It is precisely the ‘hard-headed and realistic’ who all too often exist in cages made out of largely discredited hypotheses,” said Priestley. “We must expect time lags of various lengths.”

Priestley was writing about scientific ideas, specifically concepts of time. Einstein, for example, started publishing about relativity at the start of the last century but, to all intents and purposes, for decades afterwards most people lived by intuitive notions of Newtonian physics. In all likelihood they still do.

But the concept of time lags can equally well be applied to politics. In fact paradoxically – as British politics now demonstrates – political cultures can become more ensconced in the past as the real past recedes into the distance.

The Brexit Right personifies this shying away from the painful realities of the present in favour of the (fictional) comforts of the past. In this dreamscape, the Second World War – in which Britain “stood alone” (not counting the Empire of course) safeguarding freedom against a totalitarian threat from Europe – is the rock around which everything else is arranged. It’s no accident that Nigel Farage urged everyone to see Dunkirk.

Less appreciated is that liberal and centrists are equally affected by nostalgia. But in this case the time frame is different. The defining period is the post-1992 era of the single market, ‘social Europe’ and the Blair-led Labour governments. This is seen as a time of expanding public spending, worker protections and a liberal attitude to social policy. Blotted out are the decidedly illiberal stances of both Labour and the EU to ‘illegal’ immigrants, sadistic policies towards the unemployed and the disabled and the imposition of austerity and privatisation.

Sometimes the two meet in a kind of paroxysm of denial. The Tories will, for example, regularly engage in the time-honoured trick of attacking the BBC for being biased and left-wing, prompting it to become even more accommodating to the Right in its news coverage. Liberal and centrists will impulsively leap to the BBC’s defence as a paragon of balanced reporting and civilised values.

The last time the BBC could be described as left-wing whilst maintaining a straight face was in the 1980s before Thatcher-appointee Marmaduke Hussey sacked Director-General Alastair Milne (Seamus’s father) in 1987. Even then, that reputation relied on little more than isolated outbursts of independence from government, which proved unacceptable. But the current surreal dance between conservatives and liberals manages to entirely erase the events of the intervening period. The appointment of the neoliberal John Birt as director-general, minute control over editorial content, outsourcing of programme-making, concerted moves towards more business-friendly coverage, reliance on establishment figures to interpret wars and financial crises, the courting of hard-right figures like Andrew Neil to anchor political reporting,  all that – the last 30 years in other words – simply doesn’t exist.

“The calendar is lying when it reads the present time”. It’s not 2022 at all, it’s still 1985.

However, it’s in the current post-Corbyn period that the wish to live in the past is being taken to new heights of absurdity. We are blessed with a Conservative government, still mesmerized by Thatcher’s epoch-changing landslide of 1983, ‘opposed’ in Parliament by the 1997 Re-enactment Society.

Thus we have the spectacle of Sir Keith Stalin calling for a “windfall tax” on oil and gas companies while Alexander Boris de Pfeffel ‘Pass the Port’ Johnson protests this would result in higher prices. They’re showing nothing but repeats on TV these days aren’t they?

There was such a thing a Windfall Tax, introduced by Tony Blair in 1997 to allegedly compensate the public for the fact that utilities such as gas and electricity were undervalued when privatised and the floated companies, like British Gas, were making “excess” profits. But that was more than three decades ago! The current excess profits of all participants – and they certainly are excessive, British Gas profits have nearly doubled in the past year – do not result from any initial undervaluation in the era of Roland Rat but from the way the system is set up to work. This is a natural monopoly, dominated by big energy supply corporations and a plethora of distribution companies with a business model that doesn’t work anymore, taking advantage of captive consumers whose freedom to choose between them is entirely hollow. The resultant profits are simply a form of disguised taxation. Except that the proceeds go to shareholders, not the government.

A windfall tax is an anachronistic and patently inadequate response to a crisis that calls for public ownership. But public ownership of utilities is one of the “sacred cows of Corbynism” ripe for slaughtering. It’s a dilemma for these ‘modernizers’ I know.

We live in a time of urgent problems. The climate emergency, capitalist failure, falling living standards, declining life expectancy, and food and fuel poverty all call for clear thinking, compassion and a willingness to discard the shibboleths of our Thatcherite political economy. In spite of this, or probably because of it, our politics is entrenching itself in the past.

How long will our political time lag last? Perhaps until it’s too late.