Trigger Warning – This book can cause serious damage to your propaganda

 

There is an innocuous-looking paragraph tucked away in John Pring’s marvellous exposé The Department which says so much about how the British political class has carefully nurtured this appalling, though largely unrecognized, scandal over several decades. And how – when faced with incontrovertible and accumulating evidence of the human damage inflicted – it has just doubled down.

On page 51, Pring recalls how in the US in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan imposed a series of cuts to disabled people’s benefits, resulting in a spate of suicides. One woman with arthritis, spinal disease and severe depression, left a note saying, “the message I’m getting is either work or die.” “The Reagan administration”, Pring writes, “reviewed about 1.2 million cases and stopped payment to nearly 500,000 claimants, with 200,000 of those terminations reversed on appeal, until Congress forced a halt to the programme in 1984.”*

This sounds so much like the “slow violence” of British All Work Test/Personal Capability Assessment/Work Capability Assessment programme, even down to the huge number of successful appeals, that it’s quite uncanny. With the exception of course that no-one in authority has had the courage to say stop*.

That failure, as Pring relates, has been responsible for hundreds, possibly thousands, of deaths. These casualties comprise three kinds: people suffering from mental distress who were hounded and threatened with destitution by the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP), those whose real and impairing physical conditions were ignored, and those, such as ex-squaddie David Clapson, who died as a direct result of sanctions.

And it reveals the political/ideological lineage of what has happened over on Airstrip One which all began in 1989 when Thatcher’s social security minister, John Moore, sent a note to chief secretary of the Treasury, John Major, stressing “the need to tackle the rising expenditure on these benefits” with “no choice” but to make “long-term savings”.

But though the policy was shot through with its Reaganite/Thatcherite parentage, it did not loosen its grip when the Tories lost power in 1997. In fact, so keen was Tony Blair to demonstrate that Labour was no longer the party of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson (and heaven forbid Jeremy Corbyn) that he made it a point of pride to extend the policy. It was the Labour party that introduced the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) in 2008 (under Gordon Brown actually) and vied with the Tories in the 2010 election campaign over how quickly existing Incapacity Benefit Claimants could be re-assessed (the promise was 10,000 a week). Of course, it was the Conservatives – in the person of Iain Duncan Smith in particular – who actually perpetrated this, resulting, as Pring documents, in a spike of deaths and suicides at the height of austerity in 2013/14. But the sad and sobering point is the Labour party would have done exactly the same thing.

And is doing now. Rachel ‘tougher on benefits than the Tories’ Reeves has kept Tory plans to further tighten eligibility for sickness benefits, resulting in ‘savings’ of £1.3bn. This further turning of the screw follows the creation of the WCA itself (because previous testing regimes like Peter Lilley’s All Work Test and Tony Blair’s Personal Capability Assessment were still too tied to the pesky opinions of medical professionals), more stringent rules introduced by Labour in 2010, yet further fine-tuning by the Conservatives in 2012, and of course Rishi Sunak’s goodbye present to the sick and disabled.

But still there is the common perception that if you self-diagnose as feeling a bit peaky, you can just saunter in to your local Job Centre and claim benefits. For example, Paul Routledge, chief political correspondent of the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror recently informed his readers that millions who “should and could work” “sign on” for long-term sickness benefits.

Yeah right.

As Pring illuminates, the fact that people “know” this can be attributed to the determined, and astonishingly effective, propaganda campaign enacted from the start of the ’90s that inculcated a fashionable cynicism that most ‘disabled’ people on benefits were, at best, swinging the lead and, at worst, outright frauds.

That this belief is as fresh as ever is illustrated by Sir Kier’s instruction to the Department of Work and Pensions (the Department of the title) to rifle through benefit claimants’ bank accounts to find evidence of fraud. The fact that fraud is miniscule, and for Personal Independence Payments it actually stands at zero, doesn’t make any difference.

But now we are told by Liz Kendall, who lives, by the way, in a Notting Hill mansion and claims thousands in Parliamentary expenses to pay her heating bill, that there a millions of not really ill people on sickness benefit (god knows how they got there), who need a bit for firm encouragement (doubtless through the threat to cut off their only source of income) to join the virtuous ranks of the “economically active”.

This attitude has survived unscathed since it was first fleshed out at the start the century under the previous Labour government. Then, as Pring relates, DWP-linked academics convinced themselves and others that the country was in the dreaded grip of a “malingering epidemic”. A book on the subject, Malingering and Illness Deception, mentioned the word “malingering” more than one thousand times – despite the fact that there was no actual evidence that the thing existed (the excuse being that the research hadn’t been done yet or was too difficult).

In Pring’s words – in an interview about the book – “There is this belief that people are defrauding the system and it is based on nothing whatsoever.”

As five months of a new government committed to ‘change’ have demonstrated, this conviction is as firmly entrenched as ever. Its latest iteration is that after Covid, there are millions vegetating on “long-term sickness” benefit whose purported ailments (or “illness behaviours” as they were termed a few years ago) shouldn’t stop them working. And as compassionate [sic] guardians of the public interest, we are going to flush them out.

The fact that Britain is now, post-Covid, a lot sicker, both mentally and physically, than before is not allowed to seep into the brains of these ideologues. After more than a decade of fiscal austerity combined with stagnating wages – and then topped off with a lockdown that imprisoned people in their homes followed by inflation, high interest rates and a resultant ‘cost of living’ crisis – this shouldn't come as a surprise.

This country was, though no-one in power wants to face it, suffering from falling life expectancy before Covid hit.

In reality, though the absolute numbers of disabled people on out-of-work benefits has risen, the proportion of disabled people on those benefits has dropped slightly.

Possibly if you want to reduce the benefits ‘bill’, you should strive to make society and the economy healthier for the people who make it up. Just as if your aim is to curb the tax credits ‘bill’, you increase wages.

But that kind of thinking would just get in the way of the smooth transmission of the propaganda, wouldn’t it?

At the end of Pring’s book, he evinces the hope that those who suffered because of decades of “dehumanizing bureaucratic neglect, cruelty and violence” can retrospectively receive justice.

But the prerequisite for justice is acknowledgement, recognition, awareness. And I’m sorry to say I can see neither hide nor hair of that.

This is the first part of this review. In the final part, I would examine what this tale of wanton “neglect, cruelty and violence” reveals about the corporatisation of British politics and system’s reliance on an unholy fusion of politics and the media.

 

*As the linked article relates, Reagan’s eventually aborted plan of withdrawing benefits from hundreds of thousands of disabled people was revived by Donald Trump during his first administration. I honestly don’t know whether it was implemented at the time but, given that he’ll be back in office from January, it probably will be.

A Rough Economic History of the Last Century (with a lot left out)

 Reviewing Clara Mattei's The Capital Order (2nd part)

Austerity, as Clara Mattei points out in her book The Capital Order, was the norm in 20th century economic history – “a mainstay of modern capitalism”, as she phrases it. But it wasn’t omnipresent. Perhaps, therefore, if we want to plan a prison break from the shackles of 21st century perma-austerity we should look at the anomalies. 

The first, in terms of chronology, is Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the American response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. All the tenets of austerity were upended. Interest rates were slashed (the opposite of the ‘Dear Money’ policy of the 1920s), massive public spending projects were launched, and trade unions – negating Mattei’s 3rd austerity principle, industrial austerity – were liberated to begin a mass recruiting drive. The results were so positive that Roosevelt’s place as the most revered US President in history remains unshaken despite the principles behind his policies being totally rejected by officialdom. Mass unemployment was countered, and the rudiments of a welfare state laid down. Before 1936 nothing – including old age pensions – existed. Thus, in complete contradiction to today’s economic wisdom, FDR massively ramped up government spending in the midst of an economic downturn. Though it has to be said, economic depression did return in 1938 and was not decisively outrun until the Second World War. 

Hitler and anti-austerity 

If Roosevelt’s was the humanitarian response to the Great Depression, what happened in Europe was the opposite. But Hitler, though his aims were thoroughly malign, also upset the austerity applecart. Specifically, he rejected both (1) fiscal austerity (2) monetary austerity. The Nazis, through public works schemes and rearmament, successfully reduced unemployment in Germany from six million in 1932 to less than one million four years later. As I said in ‘The Nazis and capitalism: the reign of the unorthodox’: 

Nazi economic policy – cutting taxes, spending money and instituting public works schemes – could in fact be described as Keynesian except that it was before Keynes. He most certainly existed at the time but his most important work – The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money – wasn’t published until 1936. As economist Joan Robinson put it, “Hitler had already found how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occurred”. 

In fact, in this case, the people who – in the subtitle of Mattei’s book – ‘paved the way to Fascism’ were not the Nazis but the conventional politicians who preceded them. German Chancellor Heinrich Brüning of the (appropriately named) Centre party cut public spending by 15% in two years in response to economic depression, becoming affectionately known as ‘the hunger Chancellor’ and prompting the Nazis to successfully campaign on an ‘anti-austerity platform’. 

Only in one sense did the Nazis remain faithful to the original Fascist/austerity template. They ruthlessly destroyed independent trade unions and left-wing parties and carried out a programme of privatisation (they called it ‘reprivatisation’) in sectors such as banking, steel, and railways. That is, the Nazis were zealous proponents of (3) industrial austerity. This is not surprising. Hitler was bankrolled by leading German industrialists and the very first thing he did when he got into power – as a junior partner in a coalition with conservatives – was to smash the Left and the trade unions and put the leaders of the movement in concentration camps. 

So despite Mussolini coming into power extolling ‘thrift’ and ‘discipline’ and promising to cut ‘out of control’ public spending (or ‘fiscal lewdness’ as one of his advisers hilariously called it), and Hitler doing the opposite, they had an awful lot in common. They knew that the first and overriding priority of Fascism is to destroy the Left, an endeavour to which they were faultlessly obedient. 

However, despite the ‘austerity trinity’ being transgressed in important ways in the 1930s, the cataclysm was not avoided. The world was still plunged into the most destructive conflict in its history in 1939-45. What would have happened if America had succumbed to Fascism, rather than charting a relatively humanitarian route through the travails of the Great Depression, probably doesn’t bear thinking about. But it is undoubtedly the case that the contradictions of capitalism, playing out in the form of the Great Depression, created convulsions that no amount of deviation from the tenets of orthodox economics could constrain. 

Impure economics 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the ‘pure economic’ austerity medicine of the early 1920s was thoroughly discredited, seen as ‘paving the way’ – to use Mattei’s words – to economic disaster and to Fascism and its attendant horrors. One result was that the stillborn reforms of the immediate post-First War World period in Britain became a reality. A National Health Service was created and a huge programme of public housing was instituted, lasting, in fact, several decades and pursued by governments of both the Left and Right. 

If anyone claimed that, as with today’s deafening chorus, that ‘there’s no money left’, no-one was listening. In a landscape of bombed out cities and massively in debt, the British government nationalised important sectors of the economy (which to be fair doesn’t actually cost anything), abolished the means-tested welfare of the ’30s, introduced free health-care and rebuilt infrastructure. The maxim of the later Keynes* – ‘anything we can actually do we can afford’ – was taken to heart. 

In this endeavour they were helped, as with Roosevelt in America, by a willingness to tax the rich and corporations properly. This was a break with (1) fiscal austerity which holds that only regressive taxes hitting ordinary people, such as VAT, should rise. Taxes affecting investors and ‘wealth creators’ should be minimized. Trade unions were also seen as important social partners, and left free to negotiate the best deal for their members, a refutation of (3) industrial austerity. And real interest rates (interest rates taking account of inflation) were also kept low, contradicting the principle of (2) monetary austerity; a policy known as ‘financial repression’. 

Judged by prevailing notions of monetary wisdom circulating today, one might think that the results would be economically calamitous. But they were anything but. In Britain, the US and Europe, economic growth hit heights not seen before – or since – in thehistory of capitalism. Just by the criteria of performance alone, non-austerity beats austerity hands down. Which does beg the question of why the latter has been so enthusiastically adopted by elites (maybe they’ve got something other than economic performance at the front of their minds)? 

We need to be careful, though, to not succumb to a simplistic view of history and convict the austerity that followed in the 1980s for the crime of brutally slaying the non- or anti-austerity of the post-war period. The Keynesian consensus fell apart all by itself. In 1974, the first real recession of the post-war era struck, ushering in a period known as ‘stagflation’ – economic stagnation (and higher unemployment) combined with inflation. In fact, we’ve been suffering from a similarly malign cocktail in the last few years 

Return to the mumbling twenties 

The 1920s’ style austerity of Thatcher and Reagan was a response to the problems of non-austerity – in particular inflation, control over which was used to justify all manner of brutal policies – but it didn’t cause those problems. In fact, a left-wing alternative to the palpable problems of the 1970s, aside from the convenient myths, did appear. Harold Wilson’s Labour party won the 1974 election on the basis of a programme that aspired to a “fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of poor and wealth in favour of working people”, although that never materialised. The Left alternative in Britain was actually led by dissident government minister Tony Benn (interestingly exactly the same age as Margaret Thatcher) who advocated greater state intervention, economic democracy and action against poverty. But, in a pre-echo of what happened to Jeremy Corbyn just recently, the English Left was outgunned by the English Right. 

A plausible argument can be made that all our economic problems have their roots in the travails of the 1970s which presaged the end of the post-war boom and have never been resolved. Nonetheless those problems sparked a full throated reaction from the powerful in the form of Mattei’s austerity trinity, the ripples from which are still dominating our lives today. 

On both sides of the Atlantic the first years of the 1980s were like a re-run of the early 1920s, only more so. All the elements of Mattei’s three-pronged austerity arsenal were deployed, with particular emphasis on (2) and (3), monetary and industrial austerity. Interest rates rose to above 17% for a prolonged period – in America this was known as the ‘Volcker shock’ after the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker. The result was unemployment and the decimation of industries where trade unions had traditionally been strong. This was seen as a ‘price worth paying’. Especially in Britain, deindustrialization, 4 million strong dole queues, and the dominance of finance followed. 

The conventional wisdom is that the Thatcherite/Reaganite medicine ‘worked’, after which the economy prospered. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, unsurprisingly, mimicked this argument before the 2024 election, saying she wanted to deliver ‘a decade of national renewal’ – like Thatcher. However, barring feeling the effects of an ephemeral world-wide boom in the mid-80s, Thatcher (and Reagan) did very little renewing. Their legacy is tepid economic growth though mushrooming debt, both personal and corporate. 

However, the medicine ‘stuck’ in a way it didn’t 60 years before. For example, the dominance of (1) fiscal austerity can be seen in the fiscal rules that Rachel Reeves is so determined not to contravene. Their precepts – that government debt should not exceed 3% of GDP – have their origin in the preparations for the creation of the euro and are the reason the first austerity variant has been pursued so zealously in Europe as well as in Britain. They also illustrate that the desire of the 1920s’ austerians to spread the gospel – English Treasury officials took the ‘good news’ to India and Brazil for example – remains just as potent though it has been far more successful the second time around. 

The echoes from the ’20s are all around us. Welfare now is highly conditional. Disabled claimants now have to prove their incapacity for work to private companies. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of claimants have diedas a consequence of the Work Capability Assessment. This has a chilling effect on possible strike action and general disobedience to, in the title of Mattei’s book, ‘the capital order’. By contrast, the welfare state rolled out in the aftermath of World War Two and then extended in the decades that followed, though not generous, was not means-tested (in other words it was universal) and came with far less conditionality. 

Since the 1980s, the British elite has also favoured regressive taxes on consumption at the expense of taxes on the wealthy and companies. VAT stood at 8% before Margaret Thatcher came to power. Now it is 21%. Duties on popular ‘vices’ like beer and tobacco – ‘the bad habits of the British people’ as one of Thatcher’s chancellors Nigel Lawson dubbed them – have also been prodigiously and regularly hiked. Corporation tax, meanwhile, has gone in the other direction. In 1981, it reached 51%. It is now 25% though it was as low as 19% a year ago. This mirrors exactly the predilections of the original British and Italian austerians of a century ago. 

Bad austerians 

But though it may seem like we are living permanently amidst the economic presumptions of the 1920s (unknowingly awaiting our Great Depression?), that is not quite accurate. Though few have noticed, our elites have happily transgressed the common sense of the original austerians. One of Mattei’s trinity is (2) Monetary Austerity, which involves hiking interest rates, known a century ago as the policy of ‘Dear Money’. As noted above, in the early 1980s Britain and America experienced Monetary Austerity with a vengeance. 

But the official reaction to the financial crisis of 2008 involved precisely the opposite approach. Interest rates were slashed all over the world – for years in Britain they were lower than at any time in the 400 year history of the Bank of England. Certain reckless people – i.e. banks – needed to be saved and this was no time for dogmatism. Hence we had, not Dear, but Cheap (as chips) money. As American economist Michael Hudson has said a zero interest rate policy “was designed to bail out the banks that were insolvent after 2008 and 2009 … by flooding the economy with credit”. It’s enough to make Ralph Hawtrey or Alberto De Stefano – two stellar cast members of the first austerity tour – turn in their graves. 

Of course, post-Covid interest rates are high (or higher) now. The conviction among the world’s central bankers is that after a decade of rock bottom rates, the economy can now ‘take it’. Whether that’s true is a moot point. There have been contained banking crises and a major part of the economy – private equity – bases its whole businessmodel on being in debt and so is particularly susceptible to high interest rates. 

But the point is no-one wants rates to stay high (Monetary Austerity) because the damage is so palpable. In Britain, house prices have risen by over 1,000% since the early ’80s and, as result, the rise in interest rates has seriously inconvenienced mortgage holders whose mortgages are now so much more expensive. This is a prime reason for the unprecedented collapse in Conservative party support in Britain. Unlike in the 1920s and 1980s, Monetary austerity is impacting people that elites don’t want to alienate. 

By contrast, the thirst among elites for (1) Fiscal Austerity is seemingly unquenchable. In 2010 and again in 2015 George Osborne ordered swingeing cuts to government departments and the dose is likely to be repeated by Rachel Reeves. Revealingly, the only time the British elite lost its yen for spending cuts – when Johnson’s Chancellor Rishi Sunak promised “a decisive end to austerity” in 2020 – the implacably anti-austerity Jeremy Corbyn was still leader of the Labour party (and his successor Sir Kier was making anti-austerity noises). 

The Liz Truss debacle, or ‘bloodless coup’ as one writer has called it, was caused by ‘the markets’ taking fright at not merely tax cuts but two-year subsidies for heating bills based on deficit spending. Thus, (1) fiscal austerity, taking the form of cuts to the Winter Fuel Allowance for example, were effectively ordained by Mattei’s technocrats who essentially run society, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 

Don’t stop shopping 

The mantra of 1920s’ austerity, as Mattei illustrates time and again, was ‘consume less and produce more’. This was achieved, at the expense of inducing a recession, by a careful combination of the austerity trinity – fiscal, monetary, and industrial. And in this mix monetary austerity was absolutely essential.

 In contrast, modern, primarily fiscal, austerity may have the effect of reducing wage levels – we are still in the midst of the biggest stagnation of wages in Britain since Napoleonic times – but the forlorn hope is that people will still consume at the cost of getting more and more in debt, or that their wealth will be boosted by rising house prices. In other words, consumer spending, which accounts for around 2/3rds ofGDP, is now so fundamental to the economy that nobody wants to kill the goose that lays the, admittedly a lot less golden, egg. Aggregate demand, irrelevant to 1920s’ policymakers but crucial to post-war Keynesians, is still important though concocted in a different way. The mantra is now ‘produce more and carry on consuming, somehow’. Some have called this policy – which would have been utterly mystifying to the original austerians – privatised Keynesianism. 

There is another way in which the situation of the 1920s is vastly different from the one we are now faced with. That concerns the capital of Mattei’s ‘capital order’. Capital is money held by those at the top of society who invest it in order to make more money, thus replenishing, or growing, the original stock. This is in contrast to money for consumption which just instantly disappears the moment it is spent. As Mattei relates, the austerians of the 1920s were perpetually anxious about the scarcity of capital, dissipated in the destruction of the Great War. In their minds, other people – the working class conveniently – would have to make sacrifices so that capital could be accumulated. As a famous economist of the age, Arthur Pigou, said in The Times: “The country is in tremendous need for new capital. It is imperative, therefore, that people should save. Cheap money does not encourage them to do this. Dear money does.” 

We are now confronted by the diametrically opposite problem. Rather than scarcity, there is now an abundance, if not a glut, of capital. In 2010, American Private Equity company, Bain Capital, estimated that global capital amounted to a massive $600 trillion, ten times bigger than global GDP, and predicted that figure would rise to $900 trillion by 2020. In the past, and certainly the 1920s, apologists for capitalism always resorted to the defence that the system, whatever its drawbacks and exploitative nature, produced things people needed and added value using the finite and scarce resource of capital. 

But in the 21st century the relationship has been reversed. Rather than capitalism producing things needed by society, society is tasked with generating profit opportunities for the ever-expanding mass of capital. In past decades, and especially so in Mattei’s 1920s, capitalism had to tussle with rivals to establish its dominance. Now it towers over society like some movie monster emerged from the deep. 

This can be seen in the way Britain’s ‘Labour’ government is trying to enlist capital to bolster, and profit from, its investment plans. Private house-builders are to build new homes, banks are to finance the green transition and carbon storage, and pension funds will ‘fire up the UK economy’, by investing in infrastructure. In the past, the state would have taken this role. Not anymore. 

I’ve written before about how we live under a system of ‘bastardised Thatcherism’. Thatcher came to power promising a laissez faire approach and initially ‘failing’ industries were privatised and the money supply controlled through a policy of monetarism. Pretty soon, however, the Conservatives began contracting out state monopolies for the private sector to deliver and presiding over a huge system of subsidies to favoured corporations. 

Likewise, austerity has become tainted. Parts (1) and (2) – fiscal and industrial austerity are as potent as ever. The governing class is addicted to continually paring back state provision, to privatisation, and to finding new ways to stop strikes. But (3) – monetary austerity – ‘the queen of all austerity policies in the UK’ in Mattei’s words, is subject to more inhibitions, with the fear of doing permanent damage to the lifeblood of the economy, consumerism, lurking in the background. But though, just like Thatcherism, austerity has been bastardised, the bastards are sitting secure in the saddle and that was always the point. 

*As Mattei reveals Keynes went through something of an intellectual conversion. In 1920 he was a ‘Dear Money’ man, in fact writing to the Chancellor of Exchequer to urge that interest rates be hiked to a higher level than even the government could get away with. By the 1930s, he was advocating the opposite. Maybe the facts changed.

Expert Fascists: The Untold Story of the Spirit of Our Age

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape,” someone said once. In the case of austerity, the nightmare has lasted for more than a century and the alarm isn’t about to jolt us into reality. “Outside, perhaps, of the less than three booming decades that followed World War II," Clara E Mattei notes soberingly in the introduction of her fine book The Capital Order, “austerity has been a mainstay of modern capitalism”.

Even the words are the same. In 1920, upholding the urgent need for countries to “pay their way” through spending cuts and individual abstinence, Lord Robert Chalmers, former permanent secretary at the Treasury, warned of the necessity of “painful” choices. In 2024, as an autumn budget featuring spending cuts of £1bn per department and tax rises looms, Sir Kier Starmer, PM of something called the ‘Labour’ party, has told us to steel ourselves for the “painful” decisions that must be made.

And just as in the 1920s, the promised sunlit uplands – the better times which this perpetual medicine is supposed to give way to – never appear. We must, says Starmer, “accept short-term pain for long-term good”. But we have been hearing that message for 14 years. Britain has been subject to austerity – of the fiscal kind – since 2010. And we (or the governing classes) are still making the same mistake. Maybe, as Mattei suggests, it’s not a mistake.

The Capital Order is about the origins of the creed of austerity. In the aftermath of the First World War, when the public wanted a “land fit for heroes” and the workers’ movement was on the march after decades of subservience, the wise, grey men in the shadows of power realised that something had to be done. The pressure of “excessive” demands on government had to be eased and workers, who were not only pressing for wage rises but questioning the immutability of the rule of capitalists over industry (‘the capital order’ of the book’s title), needed to know their place again.

Without drastic change and a remoulding of public opinion, the result would be ‘socialism’ or, in the worst nightmare of all, workers’ control and Bolshevism.

In Britain, the spirit of the age was trending in this catastrophic direction. Strikes were rampant and ‘reconstructionists’ from the elite, inspired by what had been possible during the war after laissez-faire had been discarded, were hatching plans for a free national health service and huge house-building programme (financed in part by local councils through non-profit making building guilds). It is fascinating to discover that the bulk of the reforming programme of the Attlee government after the Second World War was actually drafted in 1918-20 before being brutally scotched.

In Italy, as Mattei elucidates, things were even more serious. The workers’ movement was reaching the peak of its power – factories were seized and occupied during the long hot summer of 1920. The government stood by, helpless, and revolution seemed just a matter of time.

But at this point in both countries economists and bankers decisively entered the stage of history. On their advice, politicians implemented ruthless austerity. In Britain, savage spending cuts (the ‘Geddes Axe’) were forced through, and a policy of high interest rates, which caused a recession and mass unemployment, imposed in the face of protests. By 1922, wage levels were a third of what they had been in 1920, and 20% cuts in government spending were forced through. Confronted with the situation, workers went into survival mode and the strike wave evaporated.

The Italian ‘solution’ was even more extreme – Fascism. Mussolini marched on Rome and the supine Parliament granted full powers to his minister of finance, the liberal economist Alberto de Stefani, and his team of mainly non-Fascist advisors.  Free to follow their hearts’ desires, they implemented drastic reductions in welfare spending, abolished short-lived experiments in progressive taxation on the rich and corporations, and privatised state-run enterprises such as telecommunications. Coupled with Mussolini’s brutal physical destruction of the Left and workers’ organizations, the economy was pacified and profit-making made a safe endeavour again – though at the cost of wage levels, which sank like a stone, and political and economic freedom.

I must quibble here with the subtitle of the book – How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. In Italy, they didn’t pave the way to Fascism; they were Fascism.

But regardless, what Mattei has done here is a wonderful example of historical revisionism (which is usually tainted by being associated with holocaust denial). It tells you things you very likely did not know and corrects the oversights of the historical ‘canon’ – a narrative which views the 1920s as a well-meaning period blind to the pain to come as a result of the Great Depression and the “low, dishonest decade” to follow. This book changes the way you view the past and thus the present.

Based on the experience of the last decade or so in Britain and Europe, most people tend to view austerity in terms of budget cuts and (regressive) tax rises. But, as Mattei points out, this is just one prong of the “austerity trinity”.

Fiscal austerity (1) is often accompanied by (2) monetary austerity which entails large rises in interest rates – the cost of holding debt – ostensibly to combat inflation but at the cost of driving the economy into recession. In the 1920s, this was known as the “dear money” policy – “the queen of all austerity policies in Britain” according to Mattei.  Dear Money was inaugurated in 1921 (when interest rates were raised to 7%) and lasted for more than a decade. It was still the official response to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and predictably only made things worse. But the most brutal example of monetary austerity in the West took place at the beginning of the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, when interest rates were hiked to above 17%. The result was recession, mass unemployment (reaching 4 million for a decade in Britain), and the taming of organized labour. Again these results were not an unfortunate mistake. And the lady wasn’t for turning.

The last leg of austerity is (3) industrial austerity, which involves privatisation and crushing organized labour and the right to strike. Both, as Mattei details, were an integral part of Fascist austerity in 1920s’ Italy which literally destroyed (physically) the workers’ movement, enshrining a period of ‘industrial peace’. Industrial austerity was zealously resuscitated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s leading to a world-wide revolution in economic ‘common sense’, shaping the economic landscape we now take for granted. Nowadays in Europe, if you displease the economic overlords of the European Central Bank, you will be compelled to swallow the medicine of both fiscal and industrial austerity – budget cuts, privatisation, and laws against striking.

But if the economic history of the 20^th and 21^st century has, in the main, been one of austerity, the three horsemen of the austerity trinity have not always been paraded at the same time. Depending on the circumstances, different aspects have been stressed while others have been ignored – or in fact seriously transgressed.  This discordant record, dependent on the needs of the time as defined by technocrats shielded from democratic accountability, reveals – as we will see in part two – a lot about our current economic predicament.

The Political Significance of The Beatles

 

What was the political meaning of the Beatles? I realise this is a rather dilatory question to ask of a band that broke up in 1970. But fascination with them endures and the real answer to this question, is, in my opinion, utterly different from the ones that are usually put forward.

On the surface, the political significance of the Beatles is exactly that, superficial. The company they established, Apple, did not embody, in Paul McCartney’s description, “Western communism”, whatever that was supposed to mean. John Lennon’s utopian, anti-materialist song ‘Imagine’ undoubtedly had, and still has, influence but personally I can’t take seriously someone wondering if I’m able to “imagine no possessions” while playing a grand piano in his stately home (and employing a gardener, a cook, and an art advisor).

As political role models, the Beatles were terrible. They moaned about paying too much tax – which Lennon claimed made them “anti-establishment” – and expected the minions they employed to indulge their every wish. In 1969, their press officer, Derek Taylor, was prompted to wonder why on earth he worked for them:

Whatever the motivation the effect is slavery.  Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me ten minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook* look like Jesus.

But despite the egotism, they managed, in their later years, to produce the most innovative, experimental and influential music in pop history, while remaining – to quote a phrase – more popular than Jesus. In April 1966, for example, they recorded this and in the same month this ‘song’. In a two month period spanning December 1966 and January 1967, they produced Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, which no-one, to this day, has come close to imitating. In the summer of 1967, when a normal band would have been promoting their last ground-breaking album, released a few months before, they took a completely different tack. The following year, the sound changed again and again from month to month. In 1969, they could still knock out classic pop songs while increasing disliking each other. And they probably invented heavy metal, either in 1965 or 1968.

In 1967, they were warned by the press that the Maharishi, the Indian meditation teacher under whose spell they were falling, was “commercial”. To which, Lennon replied, “Well, that’s fine because we’re the most commercial band in the world”, or something like that.

And, in terms of sales and merchandise, they certainly were. But judged by the standard of our current definition of “commercial” – following established trends, playing it safe for maximum sales, not upsetting anyone – the Beatles were anything but.  That determination to innovate, to go against the grain, to not give a damn what anyone else thought – while successfully remaining  at least as popular as during Beatlemania in the early sixties  – is what makes the Beatles historically interesting and politically significant. Their last album, Abbey Road, sold more copies in America than Sgt Pepper which, in turn, sold vastly more copies than the early Beatlemania LPs.

Barry Miles, a friend of the band who, as owner of the Indica bookshop in London introduced them to underground books and trends, said something perceptive about them a few years back. “The interesting thing,” he noted, “is that the Beatles were not only the world’s most commercial band but, at that point, [1966] they were also the world’s most experimental band, which was very unusual”.

“Brian Epstein [their manager] was concerned that they were going too far ahead of their fanbase,” he added. “But they were always very sensible, they wanted to bring the fans along with them. They did want to become some wild, avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.”

Back in 2009, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke about the “cult of minimal variation” – the pervasive compulsion to produce cultural products that are almost indistinguishable from those already successful. But, said Fisher, this ignores what people instinctively desire which is “the strange, the unexpected, the weird”.

“These can only be supplied,” he went on, “by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.”

This is precisely what the Beatles, devoted members of the cult of maximum variation, were determined to do, even when it was met with incomprehension or hostility.

To this day, some Beatles fans complain that eight minutes of the White Album is taken up with ‘Revolution No 9’, a non-song consisting of noises and snatches of conversations aimed to paint in sound, in Lennon’s words, “a picture of revolution”.

Whether he succeeded or not (he later thought it was “anti-revolution”), Revolution No 9 became, in author Ian Macdonald’s description, “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact”. The track was “one of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop”. Rather than remaining “the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”

The point is not whether the Beatles experimental work was good or bad (half a century on, I think the jury’s decided that most of it, maybe not ‘Revolution No 9’, was extremely good) but that, in stark contrast to today, they were able to produce it whilst remaining wildly popular. What the Beatles had, in fact, was an out of control popularity, which is why powerful people (like Nixon’s future Vice President Spiro Agnew or the anti-communist John Birch Society) were always trying to ban their songs, often for exceedingly dumb reasons.

Music aside, the Beatles’ influence – popularising meditation, promoting LSD or inspiring Charles Manson – was questionable but it certainly existed as a force and they knew it did. This is why Lennon spent the Beatles’ dying days planting acorns and singing about peace while sitting in bed – because he knew the media would report whatever he did because of who he was.

And there is something inherently subversive about uncontrollable popularity, whether it is used wisely or not. This is while the elites that have power within western societies are fixated on controlling popular opinion. They’ve realised there’s no need to ban radical manifestoes, uncomfortable facts, or avant-garde expression but just make sure that only fringe minorities are exposed to them. Usually this works quite efficiently.

But when elites lose control of the narrative most people consume, that’s when they get desperate. The ‘shock’ 2017 General Election campaign – in which the left-wing, anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn got 41% of the vote in reactionary old England – happened in large part because the broadcast media were suddenly legally obliged to report what the socialist Labour party was actually saying, rather than just amplifying smears from the billionaire-owned right-wing (and liberal) press. Everything that has happened since – the blatant lying, the purges, the establishment arrogation of the liberal media, the mysterious algorithm changes, has been about regaining control.

This multi-fanged operation has undoubtedly been successful, at least temporarily. But the genocide in Gaza has revealed that controlling the narrative is more difficult to sustain in era when people have alternatives to legacy media at their fingertips. And the desire to control popular reaction is leading to outright repression, even in esteemed liberal democracies. Whether this impulse will be ratcheted up is a distinct possibility. The Hague Invasion Act, authorising the US President to invade the Netherlands should the International Criminal Court put any of its citizens on trial was passed in 2002 under George Bush but has now been extended to Israel.

Whether faced with overt authoritarianism or the manipulation of opinion (or, as is likely, a combination of the two), the only ‘cure’ is reform of the media to ensure that diverse opinions reach the mass of people: ‘cure’ in the sense that the patient may die in a nuclear conflagration, or endure the slow death of global warming, if this course is not followed. But because of what it will lead to, it will be fought tooth and nail.

In this future conflict, what the Beatles said politically or explicitly represented is really not interesting at all. It’s a total blind alley. What is interesting is that they were able to experiment and reach hundreds of millions of people directly while remaining beyond the grasp of their detractors and conservatives of all stripes. That is the most precious form of power of all.

 

*Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), a sort of proto-Rupert Murdoch, was the owner of the Daily Express (in addition to being a government minister in Britain in the two world wars) and was famous for sacking journalists whose output was not to his satisfaction.