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.

A moral (and strategic) collapse

 

The collective West’s inability to respond to the deepening genocide in Gaza, now replete with mass executions and the deliberate killing of aid workers, is deeply troubling. It betrays a stunning moral degeneration that the British government, supported by His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, cannot even propose stopping arms sales to the Israeli regime.

But this is not just a moral collapse, it is also a political and strategic one. This will not end well. Part of the West’s legitimacy, however much honoured in the breach, relied on projecting ‘soft power’ based on human rights and ‘a rules-based international order’. This is being shredded in real time. It is an insult to our intelligence to insist that Israel is merely trying to release the hostages as it blows up hospitals, universities, and apartment buildings and kills thousands of children.

It is frequently pointed out, with validity, that the US and Britain don’t support Israel because of the malign influence of the Israeli lobby, but because Israel is a strategic ally. It is the ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, in the description of ’80s secretary of state Alexander Haig, and a nuclear armed US surrogate in a vital region of the world. According to current president Joe Biden, if Israel didn’t exist, it would have to be invented by the US. Hence the mind boggling weapons sales (from mainly the US but also Britain and Germany).

But I can’t be the first to notice that unconditional support for Israel as it commits genocide in full view of the world is not a very clever strategy. Long-term, or even short-term, the result will not be a ‘Greater Israel’ but a moral, and subsequently physical, collapse of the Zionist project. Already, the normalisation agreement with Saudi Arabia – the Islamist but pro-Western power in the region – based on erasing Palestine from the map (as Netanyahu showed the UN), has been scuppered because of Gaza.

If Israel is left unhindered, more unbelievable Palestinian suffering will happen. But after that, all bets are off. According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, “the more oppressive the eliminatory policies are (and it’s terrible to say but it’s true) the less they are able to be covered up as a ‘response’ or ‘retaliation’ and the more they are seen as a brutal genocide policy. Thus, it is less likely that the immunity that Israel enjoys today would continue in the future.”

“On the basis of sober professional examination,” he says. “I am stating that we are witnessing the end of the Zionist project, there’s no doubt about it.

In the past, the US was able to see Israel as a strategic ally but one that occasionally needed to be restrained. In 1957, threatening behind the scenes the withdrawal of aid and the imposition of sanctions, the US (in the person of Dwight Eisenhower) persuaded Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula it had occupied during the invasion of Egypt. In 1982, Reagan demanded, and got, a ceasefire after Israel had invaded Lebanon. Both these inhibiting actions were carried out by Republican presidents by the way.

But now, beyond bleating and transparent PR exercises, the US government appears powerless to do anything. Despite the presence of legions of strategists, it seems totally beholden to a regime that traces its ideological lineage back to Benito Mussolini, shoots 5 year old children with sniper bullets, and is unable to see the fatal long-term consequences of its actions.

Even if I was a thoroughly amoral Kissingerian national security strategist, I’d see the looming disaster ahead and rationally take steps to avert it.

But maybe the world isn’t rational anymore.

Drag Me to Hell – Why are we so right-wing?

 

Margaret Thatcher is known for many things – declaring war on trade unions, initiating the mass privatisation of publicly-owned utilities, selling off council houses, deregulating the City of London, cutting taxes on the rich, to name a few. But one thing she is not famous for is being on the Left.

Nonetheless, in 1982, she did something which, in today’s climate, would be seen as left-wing, even ‘far left’. She suspended arms sales to Israel. This was in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which was prompted by the fact that the Palestinian Liberation Organisation had relocated there.

Many civilians were killed and Thatcher’s government took immediate action. An invitation to Israel to attend the British Army Equipment Exhibition was withdrawn and arms sales were stopped. One Foreign Office memo stated, “It would be odd if we were now to conduct bilateral business with the Israelis as though nothing had happened”.

Contrast this with the current British government’s reaction to the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza, which has already killed far more civilians than the Lebanon War did. In fact, the official number of dead – 30,000 – will be swelled by so far unreported deaths – those dying at home and missing because they are buried under rubble.

Atrocities definitely happened in the 1982 war, most famously in refugee camp massacres. But, as far as I’m aware, deaths from malnutrition did not occur, as they are now. Nor were starving people deliberately massacred by the Israel Defense Force.

Nonetheless, this time Britain is definitely conducting business as though nothing had happened. Arms sales continue, and indeed the “defense relationship” and “growing Israel-UK partnership” is celebrated by the IDF.

Virtually the only person in the UK Parliament to object to this state of affairs is a propagator of ‘far left’ ‘socialism’ who has been cast into out darkness on the patently ridiculous grounds that he enabled antisemitism to flourish when he was leader of the Labour party.

I doubt somehow though that Thatcher is turning in her grave.  She regarded her greatest victory as compelling the Labour party to renounce its mixed economy, social democratic ideology in favour of her right-wing, corporate friendly, anti-worker economic world-view. Something Corbyn, all too briefly, reversed.

The Ultimate Compliment

Present leader Sir Keir Starmer is the perfect compliment to Thatcher’s legacy.  Despite being elected on a promise of upholding Corbyn’s economic policy, he has jettisoned every element of it, leaving a husk of Thatcherite nostrums impeccably attuned to the political and economic establishment which has grown to such dominance in her wake.

For example, in throwing overboard a pledge to spend £28 billion a year on green energy projects, Starmer and de facto deputy Rachel Reeves consciously aped the language of the Cameron-Osborne government employed to justify austerity. They accused the government of “maxing out on the nation’s credit card”. The same mind-numbing phrase cropped up in Starmer’s response to the Budget.

Reeves has, in redoubtably conservative fashion, promised to balance the nation’s books, despite, somewhat hilariously, having her own Parliamentary credit card taken away in 2015 for over-spending on expenses.  She has also promised not to reintroduce a cap on bankers’ bonuses abolished by the Conservatives, as this would mar the charm offensive with the City of London that she and Starmer have methodically deployed over the last few years.

A Different Country

The question that should then be asked is how did British politics get so sclerotically right-wing, especially when, in terms of social attitudes, the diametrically opposite trend has occurred?

Last autumn, for example, the researchers behind British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) proclaimed that Britain had undergone “a near revolution” in terms of social attitudes over the last four decades:

One clear theme emerges. On many social issues, such as sexual relations or whether women with young children should go out to work, there has been a long-run secular change trend towards a more liberal climate of opinion. In what might be thought a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms, Britain has increasingly come to believe that what people do in the bedroom, what kinds of family they live in, and how they combine family life and paid work should be up to them. The job of government is to respect and facilitate the decisions they make rather than try and take those decision[s] for them. 

In 1983, half of all respondents said that same sex relationships were “always wrong” compared to just 9% two years ago. Over three quarters of people support a woman’s right to have an abortion, compared to just 37% 40 years ago.

Other seismic changes can be found in attitudes toward premarital sex, having children outside wedlock, and gender roles in the workplace and the home. In 1987, for example, 48% agreed that ‘a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family’. Now only 9% of people do.  Britain “now looks and feels like a different country from 40 years ago”, the BSA says.

These are all welcome changes but in terms of politics, and the attitudes underpinning it, Britain doesn’t “feel like a different country from 40 years ago”. It feels like a worse country.

To go back to the example that introduced this article, in 1982 – when dinosaurian attitudes on social issues held sway – Margaret Thatcher could, with minimal opposition it seems, suspend arms sales to Israel. It is inconceivable that such a policy would be enacted today and if, by some miracle it was, it would be instantly accompanied by howls of antisemitism. 

It may justifiably be pointed out that these changes in social attitudes did not just happen. According to journalist Ian Sinclair, reporting on the BSA survey curiously neglected mentioning the role of “groups like the Women’s Liberation Movement, Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage dealing with violence, threats and abuse in their struggle to win equal rights, changes in the law and shift public opinion.”

But there is no shortage of activist groups – on anti-austerity, public ownership, the rights of disabled claimants, inequality, and corporate taxation for example – trying to shift Britain’s economic policy and politics marginally to the Left. But in this case, barring minor victories on things like the municipalisation of bus services, they have just been banging their heads against a brick wall.

Why is this? Why did activists, admittedly after years of struggle, succeed in prising the door open on gender issues, gay rights, and sexual choice but in terms of politics and economics meet a defiant ‘No Pasaran!” from the elite?

1983 will never die!

I can’t give a definitive answer but one notable feature of British politics over the past four decades has been an innate conservatism in the worst sense of the word. Instead of taking on vested interests, it has opted to protect and preserve them.

In party political terms, we have one side fixated on a perpetual emulation of Thatcher’s epoch-changing 1983 victory facing off against the 1997 Reenactment Society. Rather than changing, as social attitudes obviously have, politics is frozen in aspic, like some endless rerun of Yes Minister (which for those who don’t know was a ‘comedic’ representation of the right-wing Public Choice Theory and obsessed with cutting government waste).

In 2008, our necrophile political system bailed out, with public money, a financial system that had imploded entirely due to its own inner workings. Not only was this an enormous transfer of wealth from poor to rich, it also rescued and further entrenched a sector of the economy that feeds off debt and thus loves conservative economics.  

Finance wants austerity because, as a result, wages are held down and people become even more susceptible to getting into debt and having to make interest payments. For the same reason, it has an aversion to trade unions. Finance is also a prime mover behind the privatisation of public assets, funding the Private Equity groups that often take over public services, like water or health, thus benefitting from the rising user fees that people are compelled to pay to gain access to basic services.

If ‘market failures’ exist and they aren’t being dealt with, you can bet that for some people, invariably extremely well-off, these aren’t failures at all but successes and the source of their wealth.

Hysterical Billionaires

And when the billionaires who run Britain’s mass media organisations ran into some turbulence after revelations of phone hacking, the obedient political class was on hold to limit the fall out. The initial enquiry into unlawful conduct by the newspapers, led by the judge Brian Leveson, was meant to be followed by a second part (‘Leveson 2’) that would have looked into “corporate governance issues”. But this was scrapped by Matt Hancock because of the “significant progress” that had apparently been made.

As a result, rather than clipping their wings, moguls like Rupert Murdoch were emboldened. His News UK launched the right-wing Talk TV station in 2022, emulating the hysterical Fox News in the US despite laws against broadcasting bias in the UK which didn’t seem to make much difference. The fact that Talk TV is soon to become a streaming only service does not denude from its intention to further lock British politics into a right-wing direction.

Its ‘rival’ GB News plays a similar role. The co-owner of the channel is hedge fund billionaire Sir Paul Marshall. In a previous incarnation he funded and edited the 2004 ‘Orange Book’, a collection of free market espousing essays by leading Liberal Democrats which set the tone for their role in the Cameron coalition after 2010.

Marshall, who has been outed for seeming endorsement of far right conspiracy theories, has previously lamented the fact that financiers like him ‘made out like bandits’ as a result of the government’s decade-long Quantitative Easing programme. But despite this honesty, he hasn’t been deterred from putting the money to effective use.

If you create a large coterie of billionaires, as our political system has, you shouldn’t be surprised when they use that enormous wealth to mould public opinion and protect their interests. 

Liberal and progressive opinion in this country has been profoundly shaped by the Whig theory of history, which is convinced that the British story exhibits a steady, if slow, progress towards more liberty and rights. However, the experience of the last 40 years does not bear this out. Progress and reaction can co-exist, each in their own separate sphere of influence. Reality, as opposed to the idealised narrative that exists in our heads, is frequently messy and may point in two contradictory directions at the same time.