INTRODUCTION

At the time of writing this Introduction, in January 1989, Britain has suffered almost ten years of authoritarian Conservative government For most of that period the opposition has been demoralised and divided between competing parties. At no point have the Labour Party or the opposition parties collectively appeared as a credible alternative government. The Conservatives have not been able to secure majority support either at the polls or for many of their policies: they obtained about 43 per cent of the popular vote at the last general election, and their policies of continued privatisation and of reducing both taxes and social-service provision have become increasingly unpopular. Yet despite these problems the state of their opponents is such that the Conservative position appears to be remarkably secure.Mrs Thatcher’s domination of the British political scene, her open break with what had been regarded as a post-war consensus on many matters of social and economic policy, and the manifest weakness of her opponents have provoked a number of reactions from the left of British politics. This book adds to that number but it also does something different It casts a critical eye over the quality of some of those antagonistic reactions.At the most general level there have been moves to redefine socialism in such a way as to take account of the force of at least some of the claims of the new right We are told that British socialism has been too state-centred, too committed to bureau­cratic provision of essential goods and services and to central planning of the economy. Instead we are presented with a socialism that is less centred on the state, placing greater stress on the role of the market and less (or none at all) on that of social

planning, that is more committed to the pursuit of liberty (with equality being interpreted as a means towards its maximisation) and to the expansion of democracy. There is indeed much that needs rethinking in the most influential traditions of British socialism but the more widely canvassed of the recent crop of alternatives leave a great deal to be desired.Three chapters direcdy address the shortcomings of these new revisionisms while the others consider issues relating more to a number of specific policy areas. In Chapter 1 Barry Hindess examines a new twist that Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, and others have given to the traditional claim of Labour Party revisionism that socialism is basically about equality. That idea has a long history in Labour politics in Britain. It was a central plank in the armoury of Crosland and his allies in the ideological battles of the 50s and 60s, and it has continued to play an important part in Labour Party debates, especially on matters of social policy. The new twist is to suggest that socialism is indeed about equality, but only because equality is itself a means towards a more fundamental goal, namely, ‘the creation of a genuinely free society* (Hattersley, 1987: xv).What are the implications of this attempt to appropriate for socialism one of the key slogans of the right? It is more than a little misleading to treat the concerns and objectives of political movements or the content of political programmes as if they could be reduced to some central organising principle. Socialists have indeed been concerned with the effects of certain gross inequalities, but they have always been concerned with much else besides. If the idea that socialism is about equality presents too narrow a view of socialist concerns, the idea that it is really about liberty simplifies things even further. It obscures important political issues concerning the power and significance of corporate actors in the modern world, and it provides only limited purchase on the question of what to do about the problems posed by the rise of big government.If the appeal to liberty appropriates one slogan of the right, then talk of market socialism appropriates another. Jim Tomlinson begins his chapter with an important distinction between ‘socialism with markets* and ‘market socialism*. The idea of socialism with markets is simply that markets have a role to play in the pursuit of socialist objectives. Few socialists now would dispute

INTRODUCTION that idea. There is, of course, room for discussion as to what precisely the role of markets might be. Market socialism on the other hand offers a redefinition of socialism in which an ideal­isation of the market shares central place with the idea of worker co-operatives. It represents a market society without capitalists. The new right celebration of the market derives from two rather different lines of argument, most clearly represented in Hayek’s account of freedom and economic rationality and Schumpeter’s account of the market as providing the conditions of entre­preneurial activity and therefore of economic innovation. Market socialism is not much more than a socialist gloss on these views. We can acknowledge the importance of markets without going along with those idealisations. Tomlinson concludes by sketching two promising lines of socialist inquiry. One concerns the internal regimes of economic enterprises, raising questions both of the quality and character of management and of industrial democracy. The other concerns the variety of regulatory regimes by means of which public authorities may intervene in markets or modify their workings without necessarily displacing markets with something else.Chapter 3, ‘Monetary Policy and International Finance', takes up a different set of economic concerns. For much of the post-war period the left in Britain has been committed to a notion of economic policy in which the adoption of Keynesian and other techniques of economic management was thought to depend on the maintenance of national economic autonomy. In the debates over Britain’s membership of the Common Market it was often said that membership would be an obstacle to the pursuit of socialist policies by a Labour government. M ultinational corporations were another set of obstacles, and it was sometimes suggested that they conspired together to the detriment of British economic interests. The concern with monetary policy exhibited by the Labour government of the late 1970s was widely regarded as indicating a shift to the right, a precursor of the rabidly monetarist policies of the incoming Conservative governmentGrahame Thompson's examination of the development of the international financial system demonstrates the naivity and inappropriateness of many of these positions. The breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and subsequent developments in the international financial regime brought about fundamental

changes in the place of monetary questions in national economic management It would be a mistake to attribute those changes simply to the influence of monetarist economic theory. Thompson shows that there are real problems with what he calls the ‘protectionist temptation’, still popular with many on the left, and that much of the pessimism over the prospects for domestic economic management stem from misleading perceptions of the character of international financial flows and of the activities of multinational corporations.The subsequent chapters turn from the economy to other issues. One of the most striking policy initiatives to follow from the pro-market ideology of the present Government has been its re­organisation of secondary education. This involves a combination of centralisation - in the development of a national curriculum and a national regime of individual testing, and decentralisation - involving moves to dismantle the long-standing system of the man­agement of schools by local education authorities and a corresponding weakening of the pattern of centralised bargaining between representatives of the teachers and their employers. The provision for schools to opt out of local education authority con­trol and related changes to the financing of schools are expected by their supporters to lead to something approaching a market in education. Parents will be free to choose where to educate their children and schools will be forced to compete for their support.Jack Demaine’s chapter carefully delineates the likely effects of these changes. For all the rhetoric of parental choice the options available to most parents will be extremely limited. The Conservative reforms entail the réintroduction of selection, this time by governing bodies of the more successful schools rather than by local education authorities. Selection will be on the basis of a combination of the child's ability to pass exams and of its parents’ ability to pay. The educational prospects for those without those advantages and for the schools they will have to attend are not good. Despite these and other objectionable consequences, there is no prospect of any future government simply reversing these changes. Popular dissatisfaction with public provision in this area may not have taken the form suggested by right-wing propagandists but it was not without foundation. The need for substantial reform of secondary education and for the greater involvement of parents in the management and organisation of its

INTRODUCTION provision was widely recognised before the 1988 Act. Demaine concludes his chapter by outlining some of the issues that Labour will have to confront in developing its policies for education and he suggests alternative mechanisms for increasing parental involvementSecondary education is but one area of public service provision that has been subjected to attack from the right In ‘Privatisation and the Welfare State* (Chapter 5) Elim Papadakis warns that the achievements of the right are by no means as great as their rhetoric might seem to suggest He indicates that a number of changes in the 1980s reflect longer term trends that were at work well before the Conservative victory in 1979. His chapter provides a critical survey of the major academic responses to the Conservative attacks on the welfare state. These range from a pragmatic acceptance of significant features of the new arrangements, through defensive proposals to adapt the Keynesian welfare state to changed conditions, to what might seem to be more radical alternatives, including proposals for démocratisation and a generally reduced role for the state as direct provider of services. There is something to be said for each of these responses but there are also real problems with them. The last in particular involves one of the redefinitions of socialism noted earlier in terms of démocra­tisation and civil society. Crucial issues here are taken up at length by Paul Hirst in the concluding chapter.Issues of a very different order are raised by Julian Clarke and Juliet Cook in their discussion of racism. It is sometimes suggested that the new-right ideologues have given a new veneer of respectability to their racism by dressing it up in the language of culture and the nation. In fact, those elements have been current in British political discussion for well over a century. The idea that the new right poses a distinctively new problem in respect of racism involves an all-too-complacent reading of recent British history. The record of debates over immigration control reveals an aspect of the post-war consensus that is rarely acknowledged by those who deplore its passing in other policy areas. The final section of their chapter addresses some of the problems involved in combating racism as an institutional phenomenon in British society and a pervasive feature of our political culture.The book concludes with Paul Hirst’s examination of the new socialist republicanism. This is a reformulation of socialist

objectives in terms of democracy, civil society, and an active citizenry. At one point in The State and Revolution Lenin describes parliamentary democracy as providing ‘the best possible shell for capitalism’ (Lenin, 1964: 393). The new republicanism now presents democracy, understood somewhat differently, as performing a similar role for socialism. The left has always been critical of the formalism of economic liberalism. Its accounts of liberty and the market are only distantly related to the workings of complex modern societies, and they have little practical guidance to offer in the pursuit of substantive policy objectives. Unfortunately, the recent advocacy of an active, democratic citizenship involves a similar political formalism of the left It, too, finds difficulty in addressing the substantive policy issues confronting Britain and other modem societies, and its account of democratic politics is far removed from the real problems posed by the modes of mass participation in representative government characteristic of the modern west.There is a further issue to be noted here. In the British context the new socialist republicanism can be regarded as a leftish current in a growing stream of public opinion. Other currents include the abortive challenge of the Social Democratic Party in the early 1980s to break the mould of British politics, recurrent movements for electoral reform , and the package of proposals for constitutional and electoral change advocated in Charter 88. What these currents share is a desire to transform the British system of government, to ensure a parliament that is broadly representative of the British people, to bring its formally unlimited sovereignty under control, and to develop a more consultative and participatory system of power and authority in British government. This stream is still being resisted by the leadership of the Labour Party but it has significant support elsewhere. The need for reform is widely acknowledged but, as with the case of secondary education noted previously, there is less agreement on the precise changes that might be desirable. Unfortunately, as Hirst reminds us in the closing sections of his chapter, arguments for political reform have extremely limited purchase in electoral terms, and they are likely to continue to do so in the absence of political and governmental crisis. The Tories must still be defeated at the polls, and that must be done on other grounds.