Heresy of the week: Never mind UKIP, it’s young voters Conservatives should watch out for

One reason for UKIP’s success is that the party has a particular appeal to older people – who are more likely to turn up at the polling station than younger voters. Thus, on the face of it, this is one more reason why the Conservative Party should pay particular attention to the grey vote.

But here’s the thing. While older people are more likely to vote at elections, they’re also more likely to die between elections. A party that fails to appeal to younger people is itself doomed to die out.

Of course, as the years go by, younger people become older people – and there’s a complacent assumption that as they do so they’ll become more conservative too. But will they? It isn’t the mere passage of time that changes a person’s political outlook, but the taking-up of opportunities and the taking-on of responsibilities. 

That’s why we should be deeply concerned that for the generation that came of age around the year 2000 – the so-called ‘millennials’ or ‘generation Y’ – opportunities are hard to find and responsibilities are being delayed. 

Writing from a US perspective, Derek Thompson sets out the situation in a piece for the Atlantic: 

• “Generation Y is the most educated in American history, but its education came at a price. Average debt for graduates of public universities doubled between 1996 and 2006. Students chose to take it on because they expected to find a job that paid it off; instead, they found themselves stranded in the worst economy in 80 years. Young people who skipped college altogether have faced something worse: depressed wages in a global economy that finds it easier than ever to replace jobs with technology or to move them overseas.
• “Finding a good job as a young adult has always been a game of chance. But more and more, the rules have changed: Heads, you lose; tails, you're disqualified. The unemployment rate for young people scraped 18 percent in 2010, and in the past five years, real wages have fallen for millennials – and only for millennials.”

Saddled with student debt and facing poor prospects, millennials have responded by practicing a kind of personal austerity:

• “...Americans ages 21-34 bought only 27 percent of the new vehicles sold in the United States in 2010, compared with 38 percent in 1985; from 2008 to '11, only half as many young Americans as a decade earlier acquired their first mortgage. Having been rejected by the economy, millennials are in turn rejecting cars and houses – the pillars of the modern consumer economy.”

This isn’t just about consumerism, but family life too:

• “More than one in five Americans ages 18-34 told Pew Research Center pollsters last year that they've postponed having a baby "because of the bad economy." The same proportion said they were holding off marriage until the economy recovered.”

In fact, rather than progressing to the next stage of life, many young adults seem to be going backwards:

• “More than a third of 25- to 29-year-olds had moved back in with their parents. Millennials have been scorned as perma-children, forever postponing adulthood, or labeled with that most un-American of character flaws: helplessness.”

It’s all very easy to be scornful of these “perma-children”, but after the wages of the young have been taxed to pay the unfunded pensions and benefits of the retired, taxed again to service public sector debt their parents voted for and further reduced by student loan repayments their parents never had to make, that doesn’t leave much over for a deposit on some monstrously over-priced one-bedroom flat.

Moreover, the very policies that might give young people a fighting chance – such as building more houses, means-testing pensioner benefits to reduce the deficit and transferring resources from healthcare to education – would be politically impossible. Even if the Conservative Party were brave enough to act in the long-term interests of the country, UKIP would swoop in to feast on the immediate anger of older voters.

Thus millions of younger people will be left to fester in resentment and dependency – and which party do you think will benefit most from that?

Tags: Intergenerational justice, consumerism, family life, UKIP, Conservative, Labour, student loans, property prices, debt

Drone warfare isn’t very nice, but that’s mainly because of the warfare not the drones

The American sociologist Amitai Etzioni was once a familiar name in British politics, thanks to his status as an academic guru to Tony Blair.

Etzioni’s key idea was ‘communitarianism’ – a non-socialist alternative to the individualism of the 1980s. As such it was seized upon by New Labour as an all-purpose intellectual gap-filler. It was – and is – an interesting idea, but upon winning power, Tony Blair pursued it with all the attention to detail and unwavering commitment shown by David Cameron in implementing the Big Society.

In an op-ed for UPI, Etzioni writes on a completely different subject (though one still connected with Tony Blair) – America’s military actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan/Pakistan. His focus is on the use of unmanned aircraft, known as drones, to target and destroy the enemy – which, in the US, is a matter of increasing controversy:

• “Attacking drones, the most effective counter-terrorism tool the United States has found thus far, is a new cause celebre among progressive public intellectuals and major segments of the media…
• “One argument that is repeated again and again is that killing terrorists with drones generates resentment from Pakistan to Yemen.”

Etzioni is less than impressed:

• “Their arguments would deserve more of a hearing if, instead of declaring their contentions as fact, they instead coughed up some evidence to support their claims.”
• “One may at first consider it obvious that, when American drones kill terrorists who are members of a tribe or family, other members will resent the United States. And hence if the United States would stop targeting people from the skies, that resentment would abet and ultimately vanish.
• “In reality, ample evidence shows that large parts of the population of several Muslim countries resent the United States for numerous and profound reasons, unrelated to drone attacks.”

Indeed, there appears to be no clear correlation between anti-American sentiment and the use of drones:

• “These feelings, data show, are rampant in countries in which no drones attacks have occurred, were common in those countries in which the drones have been employed well before any attacks took place, and continue unabated, even when drone attacks are greatly scaled back.”

In any case, what’s the alternative? Conventional air strikes? Boots on the ground? Are these forms of military actions more or less likely to stir-up local anger?

• “If the United States couldn't draw on drones in Yemen and the other new theaters of the counterterrorism campaign, the nation might well have been forced to rely more on conventional troops, a choice that would greatly increase our casualties as well as the resentment by the locals, who particularly object to the presence of foreign troops.”

Perhaps, the only real alternative is complete disengagement – to leave countries like Yemen and Pakistan entirely to their own devices and to concentrate our efforts on protecting the home front against terrorism. Certainly, this would be a far more important and meaningful debate.

Tags: Drone warfare, military intervention, anti-Americanism, evidence-based policy, Amitai Etzioni

Stimulus versus austerity: What if both sides are wrong?

Larry Elliot is the economics editor of the Guardian, but don’t let that put you off. Unlike the Labour frontbench, there are some parts of the British centre-left still capable of original thought on the economy.

It is, for instance, refreshing to see someone look beyond the frustratingly restricted debate between ‘Keynesian’ supporters of stimulus and ‘monetarist’ supporters of austerity: 

• “Whatever ideological differences they might have, Keynesians and monetarists share a faith that all it takes is time and the right policies to bring back the good times. What unites them is the belief that the tough time the world has been going through since the summer of 2007 is an aberration.
• “But what if it isn't? What if – in the memorable phrase of Tony Crosland when the wheels came off the economy in the mid-1970s – the party's over? What if the 25% share of the vote taken by Ukip at last week's local elections is not just a here today, gone tomorrow protest, but a sign of the political disaffection to come?”

Some good questions, there – but it would be career suicide for any mainstream politician to even hint at the possibility that low growth may be here to stay. The pretense must be maintained at all times that growth is like a tiger in a cage, ready to spring forth the moment someone finds the right key.

But perhaps the reason why the beast seems so still is because it’s dead – or, at least, not at all well. 

Larry Elliot considers three arguments to the contrary. First up is the observation that recovery is already underway:

• “It is certainly true that western economies – the eurozone apart – are enjoying some growth. It is also true that the emergency policy actions of late 2008 and early 2009 prevented a severe recession from turning into a rerun of the 1930s. But five years on these emergency measures are still in place… We have become hooked on stimulus and this is not a healthy sign.”

Elliot goes on to deal with comparison to the 1970s, when what appeared to be terminal economic decline was dispelled by the optimism of the 80s:

• “An alternative history of the past 40 years goes as follows. The growth pessimists were broadly right, but what they did not anticipate is that the west would find new, ingenious and often dangerous ways of keeping the show on the road: financial de-regulation, personal debt, globalisation, exploiting the environment. There are still a few tricks policymakers can turn, such as shale gas and quantitative easing, but essentially these are just new versions of the old tricks. The game is up.”

The final counter-argument is that a new wave of technological innovation will rescue us, which, of course, it might. Then again, it might not – it’s very difficult to predict an economic future based on things that haven’t been invented yet.

For all of these reasons, we need to question the lazy assumption, shared by left and right alike, that economic growth is just waiting to be ‘unlocked’. If this shared assumption is indeed wrong, then neither side in the current economic debate is right.

But might one of them be less wrong than the other?

The policy of ‘expansionary austerity’ – as pursued by George Osborne – may not produce much in the way of expansion, but the austerity part might at least better prepare us for a future in which we have no choice but to live within our means.

Tags: Keynesianism, monetarism, stimulus, austerity, economic growth

America versus China in the 21st century – bet on the eagle, not the dragon

Which country do you think this is about: 

• “Fitch Ratings has just downgraded [its] debt, warning that credit has jumped from 125pc to 200pc of GDP over the last four years, with mounting reliance on shadow banking that lets banks circumvent loan-to-deposit curbs. This is why George Soros has been warning that there could be a ‘run’ on [its] state banking system akin to the Lehman bust.”

It sounds like it could be just about any debt-laden nation in the western world, but, as you will have guessed the country in question, is China.

Indeed, given the following fact, it could only be China:

• “Total credit has jumped from $9 trillion to $23 trillion in four years, an increase equal to the entire US banking system.”

These extracts come from another eye-opening piece by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the Daily Telegraph, which serves as a corrective to the idea that China is destined to overtake America in the course of the current century.

As things stand, China is already halfway there:

• “As of last year US GDP was roughly $15.7 trillion, compared to $8 trillion for China on a nominal exchange rate basis, the measure that matters for gauging economic power.”

With four Chinese citizens for every American and a substantially higher rate of economic growth, can it really be that long before the People’s Republic takes the number one spot?

It can when you consider what lies behind China’s ‘growth miracle’:

• “[A World Bank / Chinese Development Research Council report has] warned that China’s 30-year miracle is nearing exhaustion. The low-hanging fruit of state-driven industrialisation and reliance on cheap exports has already been picked. Stagnation looms unless Beijing embraces the free market and relaxes its suffocating grip over the economy. ‘Innovation at the technology frontier is quite different in nature from catching up technologically. It is not something that can be achieved through government planning,’ it said.”

China’s economic boom has also come at the expense of its environment. The Financial Times reports that “air pollution might have caused about 1.2m premature deaths in China in 2010 alone” and that “Beijing has registered a 60 per cent rise in lung cancer cases in the past decade.”

While lax pollution controls are killing China’s people, its draconian one child policy is preventing many more from being born. The country is firmly established on a demographic trajectory that, in the absence of mass immigration, is certain to result in severe labour shortages in coming decades.

• “The work force began to contract in absolute numbers last year, falling by 3.5 million. The International Monetary Fund says it will now go into "precipitous" decline, and much earlier than thought.
• “If you are wondering why police are still seizing pregnant women in Chinese cities and delivering them to clinics for forced abortions when they cannot pay the fine for breaching the one-child policy, you are not alone.”

This is not a good position from which to challenge America’s still overwhelming strengths:

• “On almost every key measure, including the fertility rate and high science, there is no credible challenger. Core US defence spending is still greater than that of the next 10 countries combined...
• “America has managed its dominance in such a way that it has not brought about a containment alliance against it by threatened powers, and that is no small achievement. Like Wagner's music, US diplomacy is better than it seems.”

So, it looks like we may be in for a second ‘American century’ after all – which, given the alternatives, may not be such a bad thing.

Tags: China, America, debt, growth, environmental capital, demographics

The main problem with our banks is that they don’t have enough money (of their own)

There are many euphemisms for debt – like ‘credit’, ‘finance’ and, for all you Gordon Brown fans out there, ‘investment’.  In certain business circles, however, the term of choice is ‘leverage’.

To be fair, it isn’t an entirely meaningless word, evoking, as it does, the use of debt to minimise the equity portion of a money making venture and thereby maximising any return on capital. 

In a hugely informative piece for the London Review of Books, Donald Mackenzie explains the  principle of leverage in terms of the equity you might have in a house or flat. For any given increase in the property’s value,  the lower your equity, the higher the return:

• “Being in the equivalent of that position as a senior banker can be very attractive when your performance is judged – as, alarmingly, it still is – by your bank’s return on equity. The easiest way to boost that return is to ‘lever up’, as people in finance put it: to increase the ratio of the bank’s debt to the equity it holds.”

But there’s a catch:

• “...the magic of leverage works both ways. If you have only 5 per cent equity in your flat, even a small decline in house prices – anything more than 5 per cent – plunges you into negative equity.”

And that, following the credit crunch, is what happened to so many of our banks. The value of the loans they’d made declined by more than the value of their equity:

• “Between June 2007 and June 2009, the first phase of the global banking crisis, the aggregate market value of the assets of the UK’s big banks fell... by 5.3 per cent. That was enough to push Lloyds and RBS over the brink and take Barclays uncomfortably close to it.”

Donald Mackenzie tells us that, just prior to the crisis, RBS’s equity levels were at 4.5%, while Lloyds’ were at 3.3% – not enough to weather the storm and avoid the bail-out.  Once upon a time it would be have been a different story:

• “The UK’s banking system a hundred years ago would have been shaken but could have survived: the financial historian David Sheppard has calculated that the system’s average level of equity in 1908 was 11.2 per cent.”

Who was responsible for the erosion of this vital safeguard? Well, the bankers, most obviously – but then bankers are prone to doing all sorts of silly things and it is the job of governments to impose sensible limits, which they failed to do. 

In fact, the state has made things worse. For instance, by being ready and willing to bail out those who lend to banks (depositors), but not those who own them (shareholders), governments have distorted the relative costs of debt and equity. To compound this effect, corporate interest repayments are typically tax deductible, unlike dividend payments.

Then there was the farce of an 1988 Basel Accord on Capital Adequacy, which tried to set out a minimum capital requirement for banks. As Mackenzie describes at some length, the loopholes were of staggering dimensions. For instance, certain investments were deemed to be so safe that no capital was required to match them. It tells you all you need to know that these ‘zero-rated’ investments included Greek government bonds.

Today, it makes sense to get equity levels back up to where they should be – but where is the capital going to come from? Well, there is one rather tempting potential source:

• “Banks continually leak money, especially via bonuses to staff and dividends to shareholders… the dividends paid out by US banks in 2007 and 2008 amounted to around half the bailout funds they needed just a few months later... If profitable banks replaced cash bonuses and dividends with new shares they would, over a period of a decade or so, bolster their equity levels considerably.”

Of course, this would mean forcing bankers to tie up their bonuses in the shares of the banks they work for – which, if nothing else, would give them a long-term stake in the stability of the banking system.

Tags: Banks, debt, capital requirements, regulation, bonuses

Heresy of the week: The rich keep getting richer because the state keeps giving them money

In the run-up to the financial crisis of 2008, the rich got a whole lot richer. But they must have taken a hit in the years since, right?

Not in America, they haven’t. Writing for Business Insider, Henry Blodget tells it like it is: 

• “In case you were hoping that America's three-decade-long trend toward extreme wealth inequality was starting to reverse itself, Pew has some bad news for you. Nothing has changed. The rich are still getting richer... and everyone else is still getting hosed.
• “The richest 7% of American households – 8 million with more than $836,000 in net worth – did quite well from 2009 to 2011. Their average net worth rose from $2.5 million to $3.2 million, a 28% jump.
• “The other 93% of American households, meanwhile, lost out. Their average net worth dropped from a measly $140,000 to $134,000.”

As a result the share of the nation’s wealth owned by the richest 7% has increased from 56% to 63%.

How can this be happening? And under that nice Mr Obama too!

• “The source of this relative wealth bonanza for the richest households, not surprisingly, is the stock market. America's richest households own most of the stocks in this country. The stock market has more than doubled since the 2009 lows and is hitting new highs.”

But why are shares doing so well when the economy is doing so badly? As we’ve noted before on the Deep End, quantitative easing is driving demand for stocks and securities – and, therefore, pushing up their prices. And that’s not the only way in which governments are effectively giving money to the rich.

Consider the case of Apple – one of the biggest and richest companies on the planet – which is borrowing $17 billion to buy back its own shares when it’s sitting on savings of $145 billion. ‘Buttonwood’, of the Economist, asks and answers the obvious question – “why doesn't [Apple] just use its cash to do the same thing?”:

• “First, because a lot of that cash is overseas, and bringing it back to America would incur a tax charge. Second, because interest rates are low and debt interest is tax-deductible, making this look a great arbitrage.”

Good for Apple, not so good for the ordinary American taxpayer:

• “Apple's money will still sit overseas and not be invested at home to create jobs. Apple's tax bill will fall, as it offsets the interest payments against its profits. The buy-back will probably push up the share price in the short term… boosting the value of executive options; profits from those options will probably be taxed at the long-term capital gains tax rate of 15%, lower than the rate many workers pay.” 

And that’s not the end of the bonanza. Apple’s bond issue will generate lots of lovely fees for Wall Street bankers – “the same bankers taxpayers helped support five years ago.”

So, whether in term of QE or a distorted corporate tax system, the state is merrily shoveling cash into the gaping maws of the wealthy.

It’s time to do something about this blatant injustice, but what?

Well, our elected governments could borrow even more money and shovel it down some other throats in the hope of evening things up. This is Labour’s solution. It won’t work and will make the state even more dependent on the money men than it is now.

Instead, we need tax reform that advantages real wealth creation, not accountancy tricks; and, if we must have quantitative easing, let it be in a form that puts money in the hands of ordinary people, not just the rich.

Tags: Taxation, inequality, wealth, debt, finance, quantitative easing

Tattoos, racism and modernist architecture

The very term ‘modernist architecture’ evokes a sense of inevitability – as if architectural modernism is a simple fact of modern life. But as recently as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, modernism was just one of many competing architectural styles.

In a fascinating article for Resilience, Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros explain how the modernist style came to dominate the built environment:

• “...this radically novel form language became unexpectedly popular and entirely displaced its contemporary competitors, many of which are largely forgotten today... innovative architectural form languages that... included Jugendstil, Secession, Art Nouveau, Stile Liberty, Edwardian, and Art-and-Crafts as well as the early F. L. Wright.”

The key to modernism’s triumph was its unique compatibility with the technologies of mass production:

• “It employed the repetitive production of standardized machine components, conceived in the most limited sense (eliminating complex artifacts, tools and utensils, and complex architectural components). It was an extreme strategy to exploit economies of scale and quantity to achieve efficiencies. Those industrial parts — blank flat sheets, razor-straight line cuts, simple unadorned squares, cubes, and cylinders — were standardized to allow for easy and low-cost assembly.”

And yet there was much more to modernism’s dominance than mere economics. The expulsion of all other styles from the theory and practice of mainstream architecture was an ideological project. Modernism was pursued as a deliberate break with tradition – and one of the key theorists of this rupture was the Austrian writer and architect Adolf Loos:

• “...Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one; the cultural superiority of ‘modern man’, by which he meant Northern European males.”

Loos readily admitted that modern methods had left us unable to produce “authentic ornamental detail.” But he went on to argue that this was not something worth having, the proof being that ornament was something that “any Negro” (his words) could obtain.

For Loos, ornament was ‘primitive’, while the plain, repetitive, geometrical uniformity of modernism was ‘advanced’ because only the latest technology could produce it. Far from being a regrettable by-product of our methods of production, modernism’s bleak aesthetic was to be celebrated as the embodiment of the age:

• “Indeed, the continued use of ornament was, for Loos, a “crime.” The “Papuan,” he argued, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man [sic]. As part of his primitive practices, the Papuan tattooed himself. Likewise, Loos went on, “the modern man who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” Therefore, he reasoned, those who still used ornament were on the same low level as criminals, and Papuans.”

Charming fellow.

Fast forward a hundred years, and the cities that modernism made are all around us. Yet though the buildings are, for the most part, devoid of ornamentation, many of the people who live in them are not. In fact, with, every passing year, it seems as if more and more of them sport the tattoos that Loos so despised.

Instead of ornamenting his buildings, modern man now ornaments his skin instead. 

Tags: Architecture, modernism, racism, tradition

Texas shows that fiscal conservatism is a (lone star) state of mind

Back in February, the Deep End featured a post entitled Sweden: Beacon of the right. Today, we look to a rather more obvious source of inspiration: the Lone Star State of Texas.

Writing for the Dallas Morning News, Erica Grieder contends that talk of a ‘Texas miracle’ is no exaggeration:

• “Between 2001 and 2011, according to the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Texas’ GDP grew from about $763 billion (in current dollars) to about $1.3 trillion. Per capita personal income has grown, too, from about $29,000 in 2002 (in current dollars) to about $41,500 in 2012. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics documents a similar trajectory. The population is growing steadily and so is the workforce. Texas’ unemployment rate has been lower than the national average every month for more than six years.”

Furthermore, this isn’t just due to the geological accident of rich resource endowment. In the past, one could have dismissed Texas as “a resource colony — America’s leading provider of cotton and cattle, soldiers and oil”, but no longer. 21st century Texas is a dynamic knowledge-based economy, capable of creating large numbers of well-paid jobs.

All of which is bit embarrassing for American liberals. After all, how can a state that elects governors like George W Bush and Rick Perry, be doing so well? Surely, there’s much less to the Texas miracle than meets the eye. 

Erica Grieder decided to find out for herself, and has a book out on the subject Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas. This is what she concluded:

• “With the humility common to most Texans I decided to write a book about why Texas is the way it is and whether it’s working. Here’s what I came to think: Republicans are right to defend the Texas model. The data is pretty hard to deny; either the model’s been working, or it’s a hell of a coincidence. Democrats, however, are right to say that the Texas model could use some tweaks.”

We’ll come on to these tweaks in a bit; but, first, what is the Texas model?

• “...low taxes, low services... 
• “Today’s Texas has the nation’s fourth-lowest tax burden per capita. It also has the third-lowest rate of government spending per capita. When Texans want to get something done, they often turn to the private sector for an assist. Dallas’ new Klyde Warren Park is a good example; the majority of funding came from private donors, although the city, state and federal governments chipped in nearly $50 million among them.”

That’s all pretty straightforward, but success – a young and growing population in a skills-hungry economy – is presenting new demands:

• “...we have 26 million people living in a state built for fewer, and jostling with more and more truck traffic on the increasingly congested highways.
• “The Texas Miracle is real. The result is that Texas is evolving. So if we want to keep this man-made miracle going, Texas needs to invest in what Joaquín Castro, the freshman U.S. representative from San Antonio, has summarized as the ‘infrastructure of opportunity’: schools, water, roads and — well, let’s start with those.”

But there’s a big difference between state-led investment in the ‘infrastructure of opportunity’ and the public sector feather-bedding that is bankrupting other parts of the United States. Even if up-and-coming Democrats like Joaquín Castro succeed in winning Texas back from Republican rule, Grieder is convinced that the state will “remain on the fiscally conservative side of the spectrum”:

• “Texas has really never had a problem with wanton spending, and no one, on either side of the aisle, seriously questions the value of fiscal discipline. As long as we have to have a government, and we do, it might as well be a mature and responsible one: responsive to current events, but with one eye on a far-off horizon.”

Fiscal conservatism is sometimes dismissed as a hard-hearted ideology of the hard right, but actually it is something much wider and deeper than that. Texas shows that it is a state of mind, embracing values of self-reliance, but also a shared and selfless loyalty to a culture conscious not only of its past and present, but its future too. 

To borrow and spend without thought of repayment represents the opposite state of mind, one which, implicitly or explicitly, gives up on the future. More than a matter of fiscal irresponsibility, it is an act of cultural suicide.

Tags: Texas, fiscal conservatism, economic growth, Joaquin Castro

The Marxist revival that never happened

Isn’t about time that major awards – like the Oscars and the Emmys – were opened up to a public vote? 

The answer to that, of course, is no – for the very good reason that the public can’t be trusted. For instance, if the Brits (awards for popular music artists, m'lud) were to go fully democratic, then we could expect the most popular boy band of the moment (currently One Direction) to win in every category including best female solo artist.

Prospect magazine’s ‘world thinkers poll’, provides another object lesson in the perils of the public vote. With the lads of One Direction having been cruelly excluded from the short list, the way was left open for the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins to top the poll. To add insult to impiety, the celebrity Marxist Slavoj Zizek came sixth – a remarkable result for an unrepentant exponent of a discredited ideology.

However, as Walter Lacquer reminds us in the National Interest, it could be worse. Among certain academics – with more taxpayers’ money than sense – Marx is certainly back in vogue. But as to any danger of this revolutionary fervour spreading from the chattering classes to the workers, the chances are on the slim side:

• “Consider the agenda at a recent… meeting at the University of Washington. One has to doubt whether these followers of Marx are on the right track when the papers under discussion contain titles such as ‘Reconsidering Impossible Totalities: Marxist Deployments of the Sublime,’ ‘A Few Thoughts on the Academic Poet as Hobo-Tourist,’ ‘Reading Hip-Hop at the Intersection of Culture and Capitalism,’ ‘Annals of Sexual States’ and ‘The Political Economy of Stranger Intimacy.’”
• “One wonders what Marx’s reaction would be if he sat at his desk in the British Museum’s Reading Room and contemplated such discussions at a gathering dedicated to rethinking his ideas.”

To be fair, the bearded one did have some eccentric notions of his own (other than actual Marxism). For instance, Lacquer tells us that he was convinced that Lord Palmerston was a secret Russian agent.

Still, if Marx is at all relevant to the 21st century it isn’t because of some intellectually-diverting read-across to literary criticism or peace studies, but because of the recent near collapse of international finance. We should be therefore be thankful that the finest minds of the extreme left are more interested in their silly academic word games than in exploiting the current weakness of capitalism.

But that leaves some unanswered questions about the Marxist revival, such as it is:

• “If this perceived Marx renaissance has little to do with the actual teachings of Marx, with which the poststructuralists, postmodernists and gender scholars seem only vaguely familiar, how does one explain the renaissance, however modest it may be and however restricted to elite Western universities that have little connection to today’s industrial working class?”

Lacquer’s theory is that the academic Marxism of our time isn't about economics at all, but serves instead as a totem pole for the humanities department to dance around:

• “‘Marx’ has become something like a shortcut or a symbol indicating a predilection for radical change in a wide variety of fields loosely called ‘cultural studies.’ It has little or nothing to do with what Marxism was really all about.”

Which, when you think about it, is just as well.

Tags: Marxism, academia, Slavoj Zizek, Richard Dawkins, capitalism

If UKIP isn’t libertarian – and it really isn’t – then what does it stand for?

On what principle should one name a political party?

In the good old days, the main parties were named after various gangs of misbehaving celts (i.e. the Tories and Whigs). This was all a bit too silly for the high-minded Victorians, who opted for ideological labels instead (the Conservatives and Liberals). Moving into the 20th century, British communists and fascists followed suit, though British socialists and social democrats named themselves after the working class they claimed to represent – becoming the Labour Party.

In more recent decades, party labels have tended to focus on issues rather than ideologies – most notably in the case of the Green Party and the United Kingdom Independence Party. In an age that generally frowns upon ideology, but embraces single issue politics, issue-based names have enabled small parties to establish an electoral niche.

However such niches can be limiting. The Green Party, generally identified with environmental issues, has been unable to, er, capitalise on capitalism’s wider discontents. UKIP, too, were limited to their own Eurosceptic niche – doing well in European elections, but otherwise confined to the sidelines.

Last week was proof that UKIP has broken free. They have done so because they have established a relevance across a wide range of issues, not just Europe. But is there a coherent set of ideas that links these policy positions together? Some within UKIP, including Nigel Farage, claim that theirs is a libertarian party.

This, as you may have noticed, is nonsense. A halt to immigration, opposition to same sex marriage and a highly restrictive approach to planning policy may be good or bad things depending on your point of view; but one thing they are not is libertarian.

So what is UKIP all about, then? One of the best answers to that question can be found in a perceptive piece for Prospect by Max Wind-Cowie, which appeared before last week's election results:

• "It’s clear that UKIP’s appeal stretches far beyond blue-rinse golfers still mourning Thatcher’s exit from Number 10. And their second most successful media performer, deputy leader Paul Nuttall, provided some insight as to why white working-class voters might look to the party when he was interviewed on the Today programme earlier in the week. Discussing immigration, Nuttall couched his critique of the British establishment’s open-doors prejudices in language that specifically targeted the voters Labour has lost... This wasn’t some blunt, borderline xenophobic attack. It was empathy and nostalgia.
• "This sense—that UKIP actually cares about the fate of the white working class and their kids—provides UKIP with its magnetic pull on voters that Labour has long considered its property."

Spot-on. But, having exposed the liberal left's betrayal of 'labour', Wind-Cowie then goes on to broaden his analysis – putting a name to the ideology that might increasingly come to define UKIP:

• "The reason UKIP is a genuine threat to the political establishment, rather than merely to the Conservative party, can be found in its accidental post-liberalism. This emerging school of political thought and practice—which seeks to challenge the assumptions and excesses of both social and economic liberalism—has found something of a testing ground in UKIP."

The operative word here is "accidental", it may be that UKIP's top brass like nothing more that to discuss the finer points of post-liberalism over a pint and packet of pork scratchings, but one doubts it. Rather, the party is haphazardly feeling its way to policy positions that resonate with ordinary working people.

Thus last week, we saw Nigel Farage effectively junk UKIP's commitment to a flat tax – the sort of thing that appeals to the libertarian right, but not to those who aren't rich enough to profit from such a proposal. It was a key moment, emblematic of the fact that there is a whole swathe of middle England who find themselves cut off from the supposed benefits of economic and social liberalism.

Of course, if the Conservative Party did what it says on the tin, then it might be bes-placed to respond to the growing disenchantment with the liberal 'consensus'. Last week was certainly a wake-up call:

• "All three main parties have important lessons to learn from UKIP’s success. A failure to grasp the post-liberal nettle and to confront the profoundly unfair impact of cold-blooded meritocracy could well lead to their slow marginalisation.This doesn’t mean just imitating their policies (which often smack of illiberalism rather than post-liberalism) but it does mean adapting rhetoric and proposals to demonstrate some understanding for the people they are elected to serve."

Whether the Conservative Party chooses to respond remains to be seen. But if we don't, it won't be for lack of a clear warning.

Tags: UKIP, post-liberalism. immigration, flat tax, libertarianism, conservatism